Saturday, 15 January 2005 - 8:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Foster Care and Adoption

The Prevalence and Predictive Power of Conditions Enabling Reunification Bypass in a CPS-Involved Sample

Purpose The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) defined a set of parental characteristics which allow child welfare agencies to bypass the provision of reunification services to certain parents, and allowed states to define additional “aggravated circumstances” as they saw fit. Neither the number nor the type of circumstance is limited by the federal legislation, and there are no reporting requirements in the law. Bypass conditions are assumed to be rare, and to identify parents so dangerous and inadequate that efforts to reunify are not merited. Yet it is not known how prevalent these conditions are in the characteristics of parents involved with the child welfare system, nor whether these conditions in fact identify parents who will be unable to benefit from services. The purpose of this study is to identify the prevalence of reunification bypass conditions in a sample of CPS-involved families, and determine whether these conditions are predictive of failure to benefit from services and/or future dangerousness on the part of parents.

Data and Methods This study is a secondary data analysis of Dataset #84 on Risk Assessment Models held at the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University. The dataset consists of data on 1400 families in four sites who were investigated by CPS but whose children were not removed, and includes outcome information over an 18-month follow-up period. The prevalence of bypass conditions in case characteristics is assessed. The ability of these conditions to predict parental negative outcomes such as lack of cooperation with services, lack of satisfactory progress with services, refusal to accept services, subsequent substantiated referral, and subsequent removal of child is explored with multivariate logistic regression. Other parental characteristics identified through prior research or theory as associated with outcomes are included in the model.

Findings While some bypass conditions were rare in this sample, others were found with relative frequency. Overall, 11% of the sample had at least one condition enabling reunification bypass in family circumstances. In the multivariate analyses, presence of a bypass condition was associated with most negative outcomes; however, most families with a bypass condition did not experience a negative outcome.

Implications Findings from this study suggest parental characteristics that enable bypass are neither as rare nor as predictive of dangerousness as drafters of the policy might have believed. Although presence of a condition increases the likelihood of a negative outcome, the possibility for families who could benefit from services to be denied them appears substantial. There may be a need to restrict eligibility for reunification bypass to parents with only the most egregious conditions, or require that more than one condition exist in parental circumstances in order for reunification bypass to be invoked.

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