Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

In fiscal year 2003, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) closed nearly 6,000 child welfare investigations with a disposition of “Unable To Locate / Family Moved,” indicating that the family under investigation moved from their reported address and could not be located to investigate the allegations of abuse or neglect. As a result, the children in these families are at significant risk of continued abuse as their whereabouts are unknown and allegations of maltreatment cannot be investigated. When a family moves in order to avoid a child welfare investigation, caseworkers have limited resources to locate these families, and available resources must be used to investigate allegations in families whose whereabouts are known. To address this issue, one county in Texas obtained grant funding to hire a Private Investigator to locate families who moved in order to avoid investigation. The purpose of this presentation is to describe this innovative strategy to locate families who are intentionally avoiding the child welfare system, and to present the results of the evaluation of this program.

Method

The evaluation of this program involved two aspects: 1) to determine the effectiveness of the program in locating families that moved to avoid a child welfare investigation, and 2) to determine the effectiveness of the program in locating families that were in need of intervention as indicated by the presence of abuse/neglect or high risk characteristics. To evaluate these program objectives, data were collected on three indicators: 1) rate of success, 2) presence of abuse/neglect, and 3) presence of risk factors associated with abuse/neglect. All data was collected by the researcher from the DFPS reporting system.

Results

During the grant period, 170 cases were referred to the Private Investigator for services. Of these cases, 89 were found by the Private Investigator for a success rate of 52.4%. Of the 89 cases found by the Private Investigator, 22 (24.7%) were given a disposition of Reason To Believe, indicating the presence of abuse or neglect within the family. In 58 of these cases, risk factors associated with abuse and neglect were present and additional services were required. 5 of these cases involved abuse that was severe enough to warrant removal of the children and placement into foster care.

Implications

The findings of this evaluation suggest that DFPS lacks sufficient resources to locate families who are avoiding investigation. In each of the cases located by the Private Investigator, the child welfare workers had exhausted all of their efforts to locate the families, given the resources available to them and workload demands. The Private Investigator was able to locate these families through additional field hours and resources unavailable to DFPS staff. These results can be used to demonstrate the need for additional staff and resources within the agency. Additionally, the results of this evaluation can be used by other child welfare agencies to pursue funding to replicate this program based on the program's success in locating families avoiding the child welfare system.