Rethinking the Paradigm for Child Protection

Mounting pressures on the nation's system for helping children who are abused and neglected have prompted new efforts to reform the child protective services (CPS) system to better protect children's safety.As this article explains, current reform efforts are focusing on the "front end" of the system, in which reports of abuse and neglect are screened and investigated, and caseworkers recommend whether and when to close a case, provide in-home services, or remove a child from a home.This article discusses the problems of the CPS system that are currently receiving attention, and it closely examines one proposal for reform-the community-based partnership for child protection.This approach emphasizes targeting investigations by CPS toward only high-risk families, building collaborative community networks that can serve lower-risk families, and providing a differentiated response to both high-and low-risk families that is tailored to each family's situation.Early experiences implementing these ideas in Missouri, Florida, and Iowa illustrate the promise and challenges of reform.T he child protective services (CPS) system is a relatively young arm of government, initiated in the 1960s and 1970s to receive and investigate reports of child abuse and neglect.The system has grown rapidly: In 1967, fewer than 10,000 reports of abuse and neglect were made to child protective services, 1 but by the mid-1990s, more than 3 million reports were being made each year. 2,3though CPS has been vested with a great deal of authority to carry out its protective mandate, its ability to protect children from abuse or neglect at the hands of their parents is limited.No one can judge with perfect foresight which children are at genuine risk of abuse or neglect.Moreover, as more and more reports of children at risk pour into the system, the system's capacity to respond effectively to the reports it receives has been strained.At the same time, because other parts of the child and family services system have been cut back, referrals to CPS have increasingly been used to obtain needed services for families, even if those families do not need the scrutiny that CPS provides.The wide range of cases flooding the CPS system, and the problems the authoritative system has in responding to the varied needs of families,