Child maltreatment: the collaboration of child welfare, mental health, and judicial system.

The alliance of child welfare, mental health, and legal systems has received little empirical attention, despite the magnitude of its impact on children and families. We examined the congruence of child protection agencies legal positions, court clinic recommendations, and judicial dispositions in a sample of 59 contested child maltreatment cases. Placement recommendations/decisions among all three systems were highly correlated, although the relationship was not so strong as to undermine the independence of any one system. Where there was disagreement between successive evaluations, it was in the direction of enhancing family integrity and parental access rights. We advanced three hypotheses to account for our findings: (a) changes in successive recommendations reflect the increasing sophistication of the assessment process; (b) changes reflect increasing distance from the family's ecology and are therefore increasingly ill informed; and (c) the changes are purely probabilistic, reflecting a drift toward the societal status quo.

Maternal compliance to court-ordered assessment in cases of child maltreatment.

Parental compliance to court-ordered assessment was examined in 82 mothers whose children had been removed from the home due to child maltreatment. Compliant (n = 52) and Noncompliant (n = 30) mothers were compared on parental and psychosocial risk factors previously documented in child maltreatment research. The results indicate that noncompliant mothers tend to be younger, lead more transient lifestyles, show a greater degree of antisocial behavior, and experience more violence in their spousal relationships. The implications of these data for clinical and legal involvement with these families is discussed.