Child Maltreatment Risk Assessments

Book excerpt: Conduct targeted and focused evaluations of child abuse and neglect! Child Maltreatment Risk Assessments: An Evaluation Guide is a professional practice manual designed to assist clinicians in conducting forensic risk assessment in child maltreatment cases. The authors—each with an extensive background in forensic child abuse evaluation—present up-to-date research findings and provide practical, fact-based information on key issues. The book is an essential reference source on procedural issues, treatment options, and risk management strategies necessary to make high-quality, ethical evaluations. Child maltreatment risk assessments are complex, specialized evaluations with the potential for permanent legal termination of all parent-child contact on one hand, and the possibility of injury and even death on the other. Because of the weighty nature of these issues, the legal standards imposed on individual states to justify intervention is great, and evaluators must be well versed in the most current material available. Child Maltreatment Risk Assessments provides up-to-date information on the effects of maltreatment, empirically based risk factors for child abuse and neglect, specialized assessment techniques and interventions,and professional practice issues. The book emphasizes the importance of individual and cultural differences. Child Maltreatment Risk Assessments also includes a step-by-step guide to conducting and writing quality evaluations, including: components of an evaluation report forensic versus clinical evaluations methods of assessment assessment domains and much more! Child Maltreatment Risk Assessments: An Evaluation Guide is an invaluable tool for clinicians, lawyers and judges, human service agency personnel, and others involved in child maltreatment cases as well as students who represent the next generation of clinicians working in child abuse prevention and treatment.