In U.S. Fiscal Year 2017, states responded to 2.4 million calls reporting child abuse or neglect, spanning from inadequate supervision to severe physical maltreatment (U.S. Children’s Bureau, 2017). Since the mid-1990s, child welfare reformers have increasingly acknowledged that such a volume of reports warrants a wider, more flexible range of interventions than the standard fact-finding investigation. Today, the majority of states offer at least two distinct responses to child maltreatment reports through an approach known as Differential Response (DR). Despite the rapid proliferation of DR over the past two decades, critics have charged that it does not keep children as safe as traditional one-track systems, and some states have discontinued their pilot programs after mixed results. This report takes a systematic review approach to identify and assess the most rigorous published studies examining DR’s impact on child maltreatment recidivism. The balance of evidence supports the claim that DR, and in particular the Alternative Response (AR) track, has kept children equally as safe, or safer, than their counterparts served by the traditional investigative response. Qualitative research has also revealed that caregivers receive the Alternative Response intervention more positively than the traditional investigation. The report identifies key differences in jurisdictions’ implementation of DR that have led to varying levels of success and offers policy and practice recommendations based on state and county practices that have yielded the best outcomes. Disparate research methodologies also contributed to different findings on child safety outcomes. The report recommends more consistent analytic strategies to make state DR evaluations comparable to one another and to build a stronger national consensus on the efficacy of the approach

"Differential response has emerged as part of a larger movement in child welfare that emphasizes family-focused, strengths-based approaches to supporting child and family well-being. Over the past 18 years, many child welfare administrators and others interested in the delivery of child welfare services have become increasingly concerned that an investigative response to child maltreatment reports was inflexible and adversarial and did not provide sufficient services to meet family needs ... A central tenet of differential response is that many children and families brought to the attention of child protective services (CPS) can be better served using a supportive and collaborative approach that is free of the constraints and stigma of an investigation ... Therefore, many state and local child protective services systems have been redesigned to include a differential response approach ... This literature review presents a brief history and description of the practices that define differential response, as well as findings from several evaluation studies."--Page 1.

Differential response is an approach to child protection, it was implemented in early 2007 in Nevada and was phased in over a three year period. Differential response generally divides reports of child abuse/neglect into two groups, investigative and assessment. Investigations occur when children are at immediate risk, while assessment focuses more on prevention and the family as a whole. This report provides an assessment of differential response as implemented in Nevada.

Each year, child protective services receive reports of child abuse and neglect involving six million children, and many more go unreported. The long-term human and fiscal consequences of child abuse and neglect are not relegated to the victims themselves-they also impact their families, future relationships, and society. In 1993, the National Research Council (NRC) issued the report, Under-standing Child Abuse and Neglect, which provided an overview of the research on child abuse and neglect. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research updates the 1993 report and provides new recommendations to respond to this public health challenge. According to this report, while there has been great progress in child abuse and neglect research, a coordinated, national research infrastructure with high-level federal support needs to be established and implemented immediately. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research recommends an actionable framework to guide and support future child abuse and neglect research. This report calls for a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to child abuse and neglect research that examines factors related to both children and adults across physical, mental, and behavioral health domains-including those in child welfare, economic support, criminal justice, education, and health care systems-and assesses the needs of a variety of subpopulations. It should also clarify the causal pathways related to child abuse and neglect and, more importantly, assess efforts to interrupt these pathways. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research identifies four areas to look to in developing a coordinated research enterprise: a national strategic plan, a national surveillance system, a new generation of researchers, and changes in the federal and state programmatic and policy response.

This Handbook examines core questions still remaining in the field of child maltreatment. It addresses major challenges in child maltreatment work, starting with the question of what child abuse and neglect is exactly. It then goes on to examine why maltreatment occurs and what its consequences are. Next, it turns to prevention, treatment and intervention, as well as legal perspectives. The book studies the issue from the perspective of the broader international and cross-cultural human experience. Its aim is to review what is known, but even more importantly, to examine what remains to be known to make progress in helping abused children, their families, and their communities.

This book addresses evaluations for child protection, one of the most delicate legal arenas in which forensic mental examiners play a part. The evaluations are highly specialized, requiring child clinical specialization, a knowledge of the legal and social context, and a thorough understanding of the professional and ethical guidelines for child protection evaluations. This volume provides that context, and presents established empirical foundations from the behavioral, social, and medical sciences. Finally, the book provides a detailed "how-to" for practitioners, including information on data collection, interpretation, report writing and expert testimony.