Exposure to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV): Maltreatment Typology or Risk Factor?

Purpose:  The objective of this study is to explore how the child welfare system responds to investigations involving situations where children are exposed to intimate partner violence.

Background:  There is some debate in the child welfare literature about how best to respond to situations involving IPV. Children exposed to IPV can be at risk for internalizing and externalizing behaviours, including depression, anxiety, aggression, and attachment difficulties.  Some jurisdictions consider child exposure to IPV to be a form of maltreatment, requiring a child protection response (ex. Ontario, Minnesota, New York).   IPV can either be included as its own maltreatment category or subsumed under the category of neglect.  There is evidence that treating exposure to IPV as a form of maltreatment can result in further victimization of the caregiver experiencing IPV and intrusive child welfare interventions that might not be as effective as community-based support services.  The province of Ontario, Canada, through its child protection guidelines, characterizes exposure to IPV as a form of maltreatment requiring a child protection response.  This paper uses representative provincial data to examine whether workers interpret IPV as an incident of maltreatment or risk of maltreatment.

Methods:  The study conducted bivariate and multivariate analyses with the 2013 Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (OIS-2013).  This representative, large scale study collects data through a multi-stage sampling design incorporating annualization and regionalization weights to obtain annual incidence estimates of all investigations in the Ontario child welfare system.

Results:  Of an estimated 125,281 investigations in 2013, 22% were for possible risk of future maltreatment and 78% were for a maltreatment incident.  Of all maltreatment investigations, almost half are for exposure to IPV.  CHAID analyses indicate that, when there is no injury to the child, the primary deciding factor of whether a case receives a risk investigation or a maltreatment investigation is whether the primary caregiver is a victim of IPV, wherein the case almost always receives a maltreatment investigation.  Bivariate comparisons of investigations where the primary caregiver is a victim of IPV show little significant difference in parental and child risk factors between risk investigations and maltreatment investigations, and no significant difference in organizational or worker characteristics.  Notably, risk and maltreatment investigations where the primary caregiver is a victim of IPV are opened for ongoing child protection services at similar rates (42.6% of risk investigations and 39.9% of maltreatment investigations).

Conclusions and Implications:  The lack of clinical distinction between risk and maltreatment investigations for IPV exposure suggests that the child protection guidelines used in Ontario are resulting in exposure to IPV cases being treated as maltreatment incidents when the caregiver and child risk factors suggest the cases are more similar to risk investigations.  The findings support the argument that children’s exposure to IPV should not necessarily be treated as a form of maltreatment in and of itself, but that it could be incorporated into existing maltreatment typologies, such as neglect.