Safety assessment in child welfare: A comparison of instruments

This review aimed to compare child safety assessment instruments, which are used by child welfare professionals to determine whether a child is in immediate danger, and subsequently, whether immediate action is required to stop or prevent serious harm to the child. We searched electronic databases for articles discussing child safety assessment in the broadest possible sense, after which child safety assessment instruments were identified by searching the full-text of relevant articles. In total, the search yielded 11 child safety assessment instruments that met the inclusion criteria. Six of these instruments were developed independently and thus included in the comparison, whereas the other five were variations of the Structured Decision Making model. The results of the comparison revealed a number of immediate child safety aspects that are measured in most safety assessment instruments, such as sexual abuse, neglect, physical abuse, domestic violence, refusing access to the child by caregivers, a caregiver’s substance abuse impairing capacity to supervise, protect, or care for the child, and describing and/or acting towards the child in a predominantly negative manner. This implies that these aspects may be content-valid even though the quality of the included instruments needs to be evaluated further. Remarkable was that most instruments and manuals do not define “immediate”, even though this aspect is central to (immediate) child safety which these instruments aim to assess. Further research on safety assessment instruments is essential, as most instruments are only practice-based. The next important step is to develop practice and evidence-based instruments.