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Reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among German healthcare professionals

BACKGROUND: With regular contacts to the general child population, healthcare professionals could play an important role in the detection of child maltreatment. However, a majority of child maltreatment cases go unnoticed by the healthcare system. Child protection legislations usually offer terms li...

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Autores principales: Berthold, Oliver, Jud, Andreas, Jarczok, Marion, Fegert, Jörg M., Clemens, Vera
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8204433/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34127044
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13034-021-00381-7
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author Berthold, Oliver
Jud, Andreas
Jarczok, Marion
Fegert, Jörg M.
Clemens, Vera
author_facet Berthold, Oliver
Jud, Andreas
Jarczok, Marion
Fegert, Jörg M.
Clemens, Vera
author_sort Berthold, Oliver
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: With regular contacts to the general child population, healthcare professionals could play an important role in the detection of child maltreatment. However, a majority of child maltreatment cases go unnoticed by the healthcare system. Child protection legislations usually offer terms like “reasonable suspicion” to corner a threshold that warrants reporting to child protection services (CPS) is defined as. The indistinct legal terminology leads to marked differences in the interpretation of this threshold. Therefore, we aimed to systematically assess the understanding of reasonable suspicion and subsequent handling of cases in the German context. METHODS: A cross-sectional online survey was conducted among 2485 physicians and psychotherapists working with children and adolescents. Field access was gained by German professional associations. Via case vignettes, predictors of thresholds for reporting were assessed. RESULTS: The probability of a report to CPS increased positively with the degree of suspicion for maltreatment. However, even if participants were certain that child maltreatment occurred, 20% did not chose to report to CPS. Training in child protection lowered the professionals’ threshold for reasonable suspicion; experience with child protection cases and good knowledge of the legal framework increased the likelihood to report an alleged situation of child maltreatment to CPS. CONCLUSION: Our data show that a significant proportion of health care professionals are uncertain about estimating reasonable suspicion and on how to proceed when there are strong indications for child maltreatment Therefore, data point towards the relevance of training in child protection among healthcare professionals in order to improve detection and adequate handling of cases of child maltreatment. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13034-021-00381-7.
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spelling pubmed-82044332021-06-16 Reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among German healthcare professionals Berthold, Oliver Jud, Andreas Jarczok, Marion Fegert, Jörg M. Clemens, Vera Child Adolesc Psychiatry Ment Health Research Article BACKGROUND: With regular contacts to the general child population, healthcare professionals could play an important role in the detection of child maltreatment. However, a majority of child maltreatment cases go unnoticed by the healthcare system. Child protection legislations usually offer terms like “reasonable suspicion” to corner a threshold that warrants reporting to child protection services (CPS) is defined as. The indistinct legal terminology leads to marked differences in the interpretation of this threshold. Therefore, we aimed to systematically assess the understanding of reasonable suspicion and subsequent handling of cases in the German context. METHODS: A cross-sectional online survey was conducted among 2485 physicians and psychotherapists working with children and adolescents. Field access was gained by German professional associations. Via case vignettes, predictors of thresholds for reporting were assessed. RESULTS: The probability of a report to CPS increased positively with the degree of suspicion for maltreatment. However, even if participants were certain that child maltreatment occurred, 20% did not chose to report to CPS. Training in child protection lowered the professionals’ threshold for reasonable suspicion; experience with child protection cases and good knowledge of the legal framework increased the likelihood to report an alleged situation of child maltreatment to CPS. CONCLUSION: Our data show that a significant proportion of health care professionals are uncertain about estimating reasonable suspicion and on how to proceed when there are strong indications for child maltreatment Therefore, data point towards the relevance of training in child protection among healthcare professionals in order to improve detection and adequate handling of cases of child maltreatment. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13034-021-00381-7. BioMed Central 2021-06-14 /pmc/articles/PMC8204433/ /pubmed/34127044 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13034-021-00381-7 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Berthold, Oliver
Jud, Andreas
Jarczok, Marion
Fegert, Jörg M.
Clemens, Vera
Reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among German healthcare professionals
title Reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among German healthcare professionals
title_full Reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among German healthcare professionals
title_fullStr Reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among German healthcare professionals
title_full_unstemmed Reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among German healthcare professionals
title_short Reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among German healthcare professionals
title_sort reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among german healthcare professionals
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8204433/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34127044
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13034-021-00381-7
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