Twice the Harm: Children, Domestic Violence, and Abuse

In this episode of One in Ten, host Teresa Huizar talks with Dr. Rebecca Rebbe, an assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill School of Social Work, to delve into the complex intersection of child abuse and domestic violence. The discussion covers the co-occurrence of these issues, especially affecting very young children, and addresses concerns about overexposure to foster care. They examine the challenges of identifying and managing cases involving domestic violence, neglect, substance abuse, and mental illness. Dr. Rebbe elaborates on her research using data from California's child welfare system to shed light on safety assessments, substantiation rates, and the implications for out-of-home placements. The episode highlights the importance of tailored interventions, multidisciplinary collaboration, and the need for improved data to better understand and address these multifaceted cases. 

Time Stamps:

00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview 

00:18 Guest Introduction: Dr. Rebecca Rebbe 

01:45 Research Background and Initial Findings 

04:16 Understanding Domestic Violence Exposure 

05:21 Research Questions and Methodology 

07:11 Failure to Protect: A Controversial Paradigm 

11:52 Prevalence and Impact of Domestic Violence in CPS Cases 

20:34 Co-occurring Issues and Case Complexity 

22:47 Reporting and Substantiation Challenges 

32:45 Policy Implications and Future Research 

38:33 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Teresa Huizar: Hi, I'm Teresa Huizar, your host of one in 10. In today's episode, Twice the Harm: Children, Domestic Violence, and Abuse. I speak with Dr. Rebecca Rebbe, assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill School of Social Work. Now, there is no surprise to child abuse professionals that there's huge co-occurrence between domestic violence and child abuse. 

But what do we really know beyond that? Once we begin to peel back the layers of these complex cases? As you will hear too often, these very sad cases involve our very littlest ones. In fact, 66% of children in the research we explore are too young even to go to kindergarten.  How can we keep them safe while also not doing things that are harmful? 

Like overexposing them to foster care, which we know has its own issues, and how do we tailor treatment and support to the reality of these complex cases, which not only involve abuse or neglect and domestic violence, but also the cocktail of serious mental illness and too often substance abuse as well.  

Most importantly, how can we intervene in a way that stops. Is cycle of violence so that both the moms, and yes, it really is mainly moms who've experienced the domestic violence and the children who've been exposed to it so that they can move from danger and fear to safety and thriving. I know you'll find this conversation as interesting as I did. 

Please take a listen.  

Hi Rebecca. Welcome to one in 10.  

Rebecca Rebbe: Thanks, Teresa, for having me. Pleasure to be here.  

TH: So I'm wondering, how did you come to his work really sort of investigating the intersection between children exposed to domestic violence and CPS reports and investigations and actions.  

RR: Yeah, so I think there's, there's two primary drivers for, for this research topic.   one is that there were some questions in LA County about how many kids were being,  placed in foster care or having cases open due to domestic violence. And, and this is generally something we don't have a lot of information about. There's generally not great data about domestic violence 'cause that's not something cap regularly captured in, in data. 

But we had done a paper previous to this, that was supported by the Blue Shield Foundation of California. And we had looked at hotline reports, of domestic violence, and we had used a, a Structured Decision-Making tool, which is a, a, a tool that hotline workers use when they're assessing calls that are coming in, and there was a binary indicator on that about  . So folks were, again, asking these questions and, and brought it to us about, you know, could we take this another step further to understand how many cases and were being opened and how many,  kids were being placed in foster care due to domestic violence. So, we were able to do that. And we, I would also say we were fortunate because, I'm, I'm part of the Children's Data Network,  and so we have linkages of child welfare data from California with some other. Data sets. And because those, those kinds of agreements were already in place, we were able to kind of jump into the data fairly quickly. 

So again, I think it was, there were some questions from the field that were being asked.   we had some prior experience, so that kinda led us there. And then I think the second piece is that, I have a background as a social worker working in a public child welfare agency. So I worked for six years for a, a state child welfare agency. 

And from that practice experience, I know how challenging and complex these cases with domestic violence and, and child maltreatment concerns can be. And also kind of knew that there weren't a lot of good data or answers about these cases. And so lending that lens to wanting to, to try to understand that, that this problem a little bit better, so hopefully we can improve practice.  

TH: I always love it when someone's experience prior professional experience really informs the research that they're doing as a part of this. Just so that we're level setting for our listeners who by and large are all child abuse professionals, but in different roles. 

 So when we're talking about children exposed to domestic violence, what exactly do we mean by that? Exposed in what way?  

RR: Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it can mean a whole lot of different things, and again, I think that this is one of those limitations or, or challenges with our data is that,  that we, we don't have a good sense of that because the variables that we have are very limited. 

But in general, I think that, you know, at least when these cases come to the concern of child Protective Services, that there is kind of co-occurring concerns about children being injured or having their safety impacted by either domestic violence that is happening in front of them and they're actively being exposed to that violence or that the   that's occurring is impacting the parenting and posing a potential safety concern for the children.   

TH: So when you're thinking about the study that you just did, which sort of, as you say, built on some prior research, what were the specific research questions that you were trying to answer with this one?   

RR: Yeah, so I think our, our specific research questions were, you know, how many, just kind of getting that, that sense of how many kids are, is this a concern for. We focused on this study on investigations, so, 'cause the previous study had focused on hotlines. We wanted to only look at cases where there were investigations and then we were, were interested really, the, the, I think the key piece for, for this study was, how many CPS investigators when they were doing their assessments identified that domestic violence was a safety concern for the kids. So that's a particular, that's a specific way of answering that we, that, that we looked at based on the data here. But then, so we wanted to look at, for, for those cases where the CPS investigator did identify a safety concern related to domestic violence: what did those cases look like? Were they different than, than cases that didn't have those safety concerns? We were also interested in what if there were any co-occurring safety concerns. So what were the other major issues that were going on? And then we were, were interested in like what were those case outcomes? 

So were cases, were these investigations resulting in case openings? So continuing on through, for services with court involvement or in foster care placements for, for any of the kids involved.   

TH: So in a minute, I wanna get a little more into this, but one of the key things you were also looking at, I know, was to what extent there were sort of failure to protect concerns in, in the mix here. 

And I'm thinking in some states that that framework is more familiar than others. So before we really get much further in the conversation, I'd like you to just explain to me and to our listeners. You know, what do we mean when we're talking about a, a parent in these cases, a non-offending caregiver, right? 

Who might be indicated for failure to protect? And then after that we'll talk a little bit about what the concerns are with that as an approach.   

RR: Yeah. So I think that, at least the way that I can think of it or conceptualize it, is if there is a parent who is not either willing or able to protect a child from harm by another person. 

So in the domestic violence kind of scenario, we often think of this as like the non-offending parent or the parent who is experiencing domestic violence and if they are not able to ensure that the offending caregiver is not harming the child. So. In some ways it could also be thought of as like not removing the child from a domestic violence situation or whatnot.  

TH: So the underlying idea is that the caregiver has some ability to protect the child from witnessing the domestic violence or accidentally being injured as a part of it or something else. And they don't take the actions necessary to do that, or in some cases, separate from the abuser, which seems to be how it's, you know, often used in those places as well. 

And can you talk a little bit, because this kind of ties to your later findings about why researchers and practitioners are now, I think, more concerned about this sort of failure to protect paradigm.  

RR: Mm-hmm.  Well, I think that there's concerns in terms of that a parent is found responsible for failure to protecting the child, that they're being held responsible for somebody else's actions, and that they are kind of essentially being blamed for both what is happening but is being done by another person if they're experiencing the violence, that they're also being held responsible for that violence happening to them as well. And so there's concerns that that's not necessarily a productive burden for parents who are experiencing that kind of violence happening to them.  

TH: It seemed to me that there were kind of two, well, probably more than two, maybe three or four concerns about this. One is it's sort of a blame the victim paradigm, and so just sort of like at a basic human level, what's the fairness of that? I think the second thing that the paper pointed out, which I thought was really interesting and good, is that the nature of domestic violence itself is that it's coercive. 

And so you're applying a paradigm that rests on a foundation of. Believing that someone who is being abused, some can somehow escape that coercion or it's as though they're not being coerced when in fact that's the fundamental issue in domestic violence. Then it seems to me that the third piece of that was around and maybe has more serious implications for the children than people's feelings about all of that is that it also can result in separation from that non-offending caregiver. And I assume that that is really why this became kind of a central issue in the paper is because the way in which there were concerns that this could drive foster care placement. Would you say that's fair? 

RR: I think that's fair, yeah. And I think the other piece to also kind of highlight is domestic violence can be lethal, and so it's a very dangerous and concerning form of violence and so there's some unpredictability and it's just very dangerous, so, which makes it also much more complex.   

TH: You know, I appreciated you say that, and also the paper itself pointing out that what we know from the literature now is that the point of leaving an abuser is often the most dangerous and, and potentially lethal moment for both the survivor and the children. 

And so, You know, I think our knowledge and understanding about the complexity of that, you know, is ever evolving and makes that calculation, I think particularly challenging for folks who are, sadly the victims of domestic violence and also trying to contend with parenting their children as well and protecting them. 

So let's talk then a little bit about how common domestic violence is in these cases that wind up not only being reported to CPS but ultimately investigated. And I noted in the discussion section that you were indicating and that your co-authors in the literature that, you know, we think overall there are estimates that what 16% or something of cases might have this as a feature, but your findings perhaps because of, this is not just reports, but investigations were significantly lower, but can you talk a little bit about how common you did find it overall in the cases you looked at.   

RR: So yeah, our findings are definitely, our numbers are a lot lower. And again, I think that it's how we are measuring the domestic violence or, you know, being present in a case, and that's super important. 

So I think we, we found about about 6% of investigations had the investigator identified domestic violence as a safety threat for that case. And that's, again, it's quite a bit lower than about, we had about 20% in. That were identified in the hotline in hotlines when, in our previous study. So it's, I think overall, how, how common is domestic violence in cases? 

It's hard to say, because again, the data is challenging and 'cause it's not identified consistently. And I will also say that like lots of things in child welfare, these concepts have different definitions and mean different things to different people. So what domestic violence means to me and when I might indicate that on a form might be different than you or someone else and whatnot. 

So I think, you know, those are some of those challenges because domestic violence can look very different across different families. But so we found that it was about 6%  of investigations had an indication of a safe   being a safety concern.   

TH: Was that at the point, just sort of timewise that you were looking at? When you were looking at whether it was present in the investigation, were you looking at it at the point, the investigation initiated, or over the course of that investigation?  

RR: Yeah. Great question. And so again, I think this is one of those challenges where you're trying to be, as you know, one of the challenges in these data is being consistent so that you can follow things. We used the, it was the safety SDM or the Structured Decision-Making tool, and I think it was within a few days after the face-to-face that the investigator had with the family, and we chose that one because it was completed the most consistently. So, yeah.  

TH: Oh, that makes total sense. But it's just to say that one of the reasons that whether it's domestic violence or any other element that you're looking for, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It means at the point of time this form was being filled out, this was what was pressing on the mind and identified as a safety concern by the caseworker at that moment in time. Right? Like at a single point.  

RR: Correct. And I would say that again, we also chose this time point because. At that, the investigator would've probably talked to quite a few people, you know, by this point. And looked at the hotline. So they wouldn't be, it wouldn't be just like in a guess, right?

Or an initial assessment or just a copy of, yeah, what they got from the hotline. It was consistently filled out or? Did we probably miss some cases where there   was a concern? Absolutely. Assume so. How would we know? Yeah, right. How would we know? And again, these numbers are definitely a lot lower than the hotline indicator, but again, I think that at the same time, I do feel a little bit more confident in it because I think that the investigator would've had a lot more information than say the hotline worker has regarding whether how valid the concern was.  

TH: Well, I also think just the safety assessment itself, like one of the things that, and you've used this language, I think in a very good and precise way. 

 It's part of the safety assessment was determining to what impact it was impacting the safety of the children. Right, because that's what CPS is about. And so it's not to say there wasn't any other domestic violence, but it's the question about whether children's safety was impacted by whatever was happening in the home. 

RR: Absolutely. Yeah. So there, there could be DV in the home that was not impacting the kids. And so that would not necessarily lead to or in the past, past or sporadic enough that it wasn't a concern to the caseworker or whatever.  

TH: Yeah, exactly. All right. Now let's talk a little bit about what percentage of cases that were substantiated had this feature of children being exposed to domestic violence in them 'cause I thought that was a more concerning, you know, number.  

RR: Yeah. Yeah, so we found that, sorry.

TH: No, it's fine. There was a whole chart with lots of numbers on it. I get there. There's a lot of numbers. About 63%, right?  

RR: Something close to two thirds, I think.  Sorry, let me make sure that I get this correct. 

Yes. Of the cases that had indicated as a safety concern. 63% of them had an allegation, substantiate or indicated, which was much higher than cases that did not have domestic violence indicated as a safety concern, which was at lowered about 20%.   

TH: What should you draw from that because that's not an insignificant gap?  

RR: It's not, I think the main thing is that I do think that, that it is when you're identifying it as an active safety threat.   

TH: Substantiating the allegation would make sense, would be the next step.  

RR: I will also say that there's an interesting piece of substantiations. There's lots of debate of whether that's a, how valid that is of an indicator or whatnot. 

In California that is fairly significant in that there has to be a substantiation for cases to continue. So if to open a case. There has to be some sort of substantiation, and that's not the case in all states, including the one I practiced in where Substantiations and case openings were separate. So that also could be an indicator of if they wanted to provide services they needed to substantiate so that they could do that. 

TH: Well, and that answers what would've been my next question, which is I noticed that the case opening rate really closely mirrored this substantiation rate, and you're saying that this is why, that if they wanted to provide services at all, it needed to be substantiated in order to open the case.  

RR: Yes, that is my understanding of how things work in California. 

TH: Now let's talk about placement outside the home for a moment, because I think that's another thing that we're always concerned about placements outside the home. And while we know that there's some percentage of cases in which that's gonna be a necessity because kids can't safely be in it, we also know it causes trauma to kids. 

You know, that sort of family separation. So. What did you find in your study about the co-occurrence between children who've been exposed to domestic violence and their likelihood to be an out-of-home placement?   

RR: Yeah, so we found that of the investigations with DV indicated as a safety concern that about 30% that had at least one child placed out of the home within 60 days. 

So I think that is. Well, it's hard to know exactly, you know, is that the right? I think folks will often wanna ask, is that the right number? Is that the right removal rate? Is it higher or lower? Hard to say, because again, it's hard to know exactly what's going on with these cases. But I think, at least for some folks, that I think that numbers is probably lower than they, they might have expected, or at least that was some of the impetus for this paper, that there was concerns that it was higher.  

TH: Yeah, it's interesting you say that because that was also one of the things that I wondered about is whether people had initially thought they would have a much higher rate of replacement, and in fact, I. As you say, without getting into a lot of qualitative information and case notes about the seriousness of what kids had witnessed or experienced or whatever, with this, it would be hard to determine whether 30% is the quote unquote right number or not, but at any rate, it didn't seem to be driving an exorbitant rate of out-of-home placement, even though 30% is certainly not an insignificant number. 

How did that compare to out-of-home placement for cases that did not have? 

RR: Yes, so it was definitely a lot higher. So it was 8.7% of cases that did not have domestic violence indicated as a safety concern resulted in an out-of-home placement. So, again, similar to Substantiations or in case openings, much higher than when it was indicated, but again, I think, you know, to your point, maybe not as high as folks had thought it had been.  

TH: One of the things I was struck by in the paper as well is you talked about the age of children who were involved in these cases, where kids had been exposed to domestic violence and how that compared to the general sort of CPS population. And in your paper, you noted, I think about a little over a quarter were infants, 40% were between one and four years of age. 

I mean, if you add that up, you know. Two thirds of the cases involve these very, very young children, and I wondered to what degree that also influences that 30%. Do you know what I mean? And why it’s even as high as it is.  

RR: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we saw that in our regression models when we're including a lot of different variables in there those kids, if there was an investigation that had an infant on the case, that was, increase the likelihood of both placements and, and case openings. 

Which also makes sense in terms of the vulnerability of infants and young children when they're not as able to, one, protect themselves, but then also express to others, what they may be seeing or what safety concerns they may have for themselves.  

TH: I mean, I think that most people who've been in the child abuse field very long have had a case where a caregiver was holding an infant in arms and was being abused and what can happen in those situations where a child is easily injured or involving toddlers who, you know, with older children, they'll tend to flee to their bedrooms or get in a closet or leave the house and go to a neighbor's or whatever. But if you're a tiny little one, you can't do any of those things. 

 And so I think that it makes sense to me that caseworkers would have a, you know, be much more alarmed about very, very young children being exposed to domestic violence, perhaps in terms of an immediate safety risk than older children.   

RR: Yes, absolutely. I think it's.  You know, folks who have worked in the field have seen it and it, it's definitely something that, that rings true in terms of the safety and vulnerability. 

And I think, you know, like the, also the statistics support when we're talking about fatal maltreatment. The younger children are the most likely to experience fatal maltreatment.   

TH: So now let's talk about who did the reporting, because that was one of the things that, to be honest, I was a little surprised. 

I dunno if I assumed that more neighbors were hearing this and calling it in, or concerned grandmas or what. But in this, you just had an overwhelming number of law enforcement.  

RR: Mm-hmm.  Yeah. And I will say that is consistent with our previous study on the CPS reports at the hotline level. I think my interpretation of that is that law enforcement's probably the most likely to see it, right? So they're the folks who are being called out to respond to concerns of, to domestic violence in homes and whatnot. And I, I think that there's also an element of, because how, again, how we're measuring domestic violence as being a present safety concern for kids by the investigator. 

I think that. Reports that come from law enforcement who may be reporting an active situation as opposed to a neighbor or a teacher who might be reporting it more retrospectively, that leads credence or credibility to those concerns. And so that could lead to the investigator identifying it as an active concern. 

I would also say that there may also be, if the domestic violence is getting to a point that the police need to be called as well, also might be an indicator that the  DV is more severe or more concerning, or more of a safety threat than DV that is being reported by a neighbor or a teacher who.   and it, if it hasn't gone to the law enforcement stage 

TH: I think you raise a really good point, which is if something is happening that is serious enough that a neighbor might call, they're calling 9 1 1 and that's gonna get a police response, and then the police are gonna be the one who reports it. 

I also think that another factor in this, because this was looking at substantiated cases too, is that we know from other literature that CPS, that law enforcement reports are more likely to be substantiated than those by. Other mandated reporters, other entities, that kind of thing. So that also may play some role here, but I think it's right that you can imagine police have responded to a call. 

They're out in a house; they're a bunch of kids. There's a concern in what they're seeing. You know, they're gonna call that in and that's gonna start this ball rolling. When you think about the co-occurrence between this though and other forms of maltreatment. You know.  I have to say I was not surprised that general neglect popped as high as it did, I think.  

It seems like we see this from lots of different points. Usually, I'm talking to a researcher about neglect, and they start talking about domestic violence. Now I'm talking to you about domestic violence and we're gonna start talking about neglect because these things seem to be intertwined in the way that they are. 

That wasn't the only thing that was of concern that was co-occurring, but can you talk a little bit about this sort of complex relationship between. Kids who are exposed to domestic violence and general neglect and other co-occurring risks that are in the home.   

RR: Yeah. So, neglect is a challenge, and I know you've talked about the challenges of neglect on other episodes on this podcast, and I've written about the challenges of neglect in other papers and hard,  because again, it's similar to, it's hard to know what folks mean by neglect or what it could be, including I think for some cases,  neglect, especially general neglect in California. So,  California's weird in that they have a severe neglect category. 

But I think.  For general neglect, I think that it sometimes turns into a little bit of a catchall for things aren't going well. We have concerns, we're not entirely sure. It's not quite physical abuse, it's not quite emotional abuse. It's, we'll say it's neglect and carry on.   and again, I think it, the challenge is that can encompass lots of different things and it can be hard to disentangle what does this mean? And in a lot of cases, I do think that neglect means domestic violence, not always. But it, I think it also sometimes means substance use concerns and mental health concerns. And so it, it's hard when we talk about neglect 'cause it's hard to know exactly what we're talking about.  

TH: I also think, you know, to your point, the lack of specificity also means a lack of specificity in effective program responses. If we're using neglect as a catchall, like what would you say is a great evidence-based intervention for general neglect in quotes. Right. Can you even think of one? You know? 

So I think that this. Without turning this conversation into a completely different one. It's like one of those things that I think is something that requires a little more focus and investigation and talking and policy making around, you know, is that as a category, something that may have outlived its usefulness in, it's in being characterized in such a broad way. 

I have to say I was a little surprised by the current co-occurrence numbers with child sexual abuse being so low.  Because many of the listeners work predominantly in child sexual abuse or severe meaning criminal physical abuse. And I can't say that we have any lack of cases of domestic violence. So I just, I'm curious. 

I don't know that there's an answer to this question about why it seemed to be as low as it was at, I don't know what, less than 2% or something for child sexual abuse, but it did make me wonder about that.   

RR: Yeah. Um. I don't have an answer. My, my suspicion might be that the young age, you know?  And so that these are more, yeah, these, I think that might be more of the, the explanation.  But hard to, hard to say. Yeah. 

TH: Yeah. Well I think it's a good one. 'cause you, the kids are not very verbal at that point. You know, at the point that we're looking at the population that we're talking about. 

 And so, you know, most CSA comes forward by kids who are school age or certainly verbal. So it's a good point about just the way that. That skews affecting that. One of the things I was really struck by because I liked the table that you had, which listed all the elements sort of in this safety. Tell me what the name of the tool was again? 

RR: The Structured Decision-Making tool. SDM. 

TH: Thank you. The Structured Decision-Making tool, and what I was struck by overall wasn't just the way in which this population compared to.  The cases that don't on any individual item, but when I look down that chart across every single item that you look at,  the kids who are exposed to domestic violence have an increased, those cases have increased risk compared to those that don't have it on every single element. 

RR: Mm-hmm.  Yeah. I think that chart was. It it, I think that's the most fascinating chart and I think it, it, at least for me, the thing that strikes me is that when we talk about these CPS investigations with domestic violence, these are complex cases because it's not just domestic violence that's the issue, that there's a lot of other things that are often going on, so, you know. 

30% that involved concerns of substance use by parents. 14% involving mental health concerns of the parents. So these are complex issues, and so when you, and when you talk about substance use and domestic violence together, both impacting parenting, those are hard cases and complex cases to disentangle and to figure out services and safety and et cetera.  

TH: When I was looking down that chart, one of the things that I was thinking would be interesting to know is how many of those items tend to load on any given case? To what extent do what percentage of cases have two of those, three of those, four of those, five of those in whatever mix. It would just be so interesting to look at that. 

RR: I believe we did look at that at some point during the writing of the paper and decided to go with this one just for simplicity's sake. But. I think you're right that there's more work to be done to, you know. Those out and understand, especially some of those cases that are highly complex and there's a lot of those different pieces going on.  

TH: You know, the other thing is it's not just that there was more of things or there would be more likely, and sometimes it was five times as much. Six times as likely. Seven times as likely, eight times as likely. I mean, these are not small differences, and one of the things that makes me think of is to what extent from a policy perspective, we're allocating resources at a scale that deals with the complexity of the difference. You know what I mean? There's, we don't wanna say that any case is like the usual CPS case, but to some extent there are some cases that follow a relatively typical pattern. And a relatively typical array of interventions can be offered that are likely to be successful, and many of those have a lot of evidence behind them. 

So we have a good reason to think that if the parent completes them, they're on a path to success. Here you were talking about something with so much complexity and so much additional really risk that safety risk that's attached to it. That I think it's, you know, in the discussion section of the paper, it talked about that a little bit, and I'm wondering what you see as implications for policy and practice of your paper.  

RR: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I think there's a few, I, I do think that the, the complexity of these cases. It is a huge piece and understanding that, you know, this paper talked about cases with DV, but really, it's not just DV for a lot of these families in a lot of these cases. And so I think, and I think we, there's a tendency to sometimes do that when we talk about cases with certain issues or concerns and think that. 

It's a sole issue that families and are facing when often it's complex like this. So I think that when we think about, and I think in tandem with the fact that these, a lot of these kids were so young, is that there's a lot of, um.  There's a need for intense services for these families, you know, and so we, we talk a little bit in, in the discussion section about some, different programs that some jurisdictions ha have tried out. 

I do think that when these cases go to court and, and go through that process, that can be a very overwhelming and challenging experience for families. And so I think that some of the programs that are.  Specifically tailored to either young children or focused on a specific issue and then have a lot of like high touch wraparound can be helpful while also realizing that it's also asking a lot of families to be involved. 

But I, I think that thinking creatively about multidisciplinary teams and working across, you know, lots of collaboration is needed for these kinds of cases. Which require a lot more funding and a high and well-trained workforce.  

TH: When you were talking, I was also thinking about, and I was glad you pointed out some cases of sort of positive variance, some examples that might be working well, other places there was a safe babies and court or something, which sounded like sort of a court ordered sequence of events or sequence of interventions as a part of it. I don't know those programs, but I appreciated the fact that. By including them. There's something that people can look at as possible examples of things to try.

I also remember in the discussion section that you guys identified that sort of what hasn't worked well and that there's some evidence that when there are these complex situations, trying to just sort of like treat everything at once. You know, to your point is overwhelming and there's not good evidence that's terribly effective. 

RR: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think I can remember when I first started as an ongoing worker, and it's like, what services do you want, you know, the court to order. And it’s a, it can be a hard thing for, for caseworkers to kind of figure out,  it's, and for families to figure out and whatnot. So I think, you know, a main point there is to be very specific and, and make sure that the services are in line with what the family's needs. 

But I think that it also takes a little bit. Extra time in, in sitting with the family and, and understanding what their needs are, what they think would be beneficial, and being, and taking that into consideration so that it's not just a boilerplate,  this is what we had everybody do because, again, it probably won't, it probably won't work then. 

That's not effective and not the purpose of.  

TH: Well, you know, I think that because, because these are complex and because quite frankly a lot of what has occurred in these cases is like general family breakdown. General family dysfunction. Like lots of things are compounding each other and going wrong. 

You're trying to pick something that can also deal with safety first, of course. But beyond that, what would feel like a win? What would feel like success to the family? Because I think that I can imagine for the non-offending caregiver especially, you are both literally and emotionally beaten down by this entire process. 

So what gives you a sense of self-efficacy? What gives you the sense that something can get better, I think is also an important piece of the equation in all of this.   

RR: And I'll also say that, you know, the other thing that makes domestic violence cases particularly complex is that there's usually more than one court system that's involved, right? 

So you have the family court involved in addition to the child welfare dependency court. And so I think that just highlights the importance of having,  and maybe even the criminal court, the importance of having that collaboration. Among all the parties involved in and service providers, including the  DV advocates and attorneys and,  service providers. 

So I, I do think that it, it, it requires high, a lot of communication, a lot of collaboration, team meetings, et cetera, that this isn't a, these aren't simple cases. And so just having send them to one service that's gonna fix it all. I think, as you said, that these are. There's a lot going on for these families and so there in turn, that requires a lot of services and, and coordination.  

TH: Well, I appreciate you saying that and it's music to our ears because so many of our listeners are children's advocacy centers who coordinate multidisciplinary teamwork and you know, are just huge supporters and fans of that kind of communication and collaboration. Where does your research take you next? 

What are you working on that you're excited about right now?   

RR: Yeah, great question. Well, there's lots of things. I think that there's definitely some paths regarding domestic violence that would like to continue on. There's other pieces of some other populations, in terms of, you know, populations where it's kind of just unknown of what their experiences with CPS are. 

And then again, also looking at some community level predictors of CPS involvement.  

TH: Oh, that's interesting.  Well, we'll look forward to seeing those publications when they're all out and about. Is there anything else that I should have asked you and didn't or anything else that you wanted to make sure that we talked about today? 

RR: You know, one thing I will highlight, I don't get to say this very often, but this paper was published open access. So it is open. It is out there for everyone to use and to pull off the internet for free, which is great. I think the other thing that I think is important to say, and I think I've alluded to it a little bit, but just how.  

I do think that domestic violence is a very important and critical issue and that we really don't have good data. And so, you know, we were lucky in that we had access to some data in California to allow us to, to look at this data. But you know, when you look at like NCANS, which is the national dataset, states use the, there is a DV indicator in there, but it's used very, very infrequently. 

So, or at least not consistently across states, across years. So. I think that's been a real impediment to our understanding of these kinds of cases, which is a disservice because I think we need to know more about them. So I think we've been very fortunate that we've had the cooperation at the Children's State Network with the state and county who want these kinds of data-driven answers and analyses. And so I think if, if more states and jurisdictions were open to to, to building those kinds of research partnerships, these kinds of data analysis would happen more often.   

TH: Well, I'm hopeful that after this podcast year, somebody will reach out to you from another state that's willing to take this on. 'cause I agree with you. You know, we're all about, learning more from research, so appreciate you coming on and sharing your knowledge and hope to have you back some time when you've published something else on this topic.   

RR: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.  

TH: Thanks for listening to one in 10. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague and check out our video episodes. YouTube at NCA for CACs. For more information on this or any of our other episodes, please visit our podcast website at oneintenpodcast.org.