RISK ASSESSMENT IN CHILD PROTECTION. THE RISK ASSESSMENT SCALE (RAS)

Abstract

The assessment of the risk factors in child protection became more and more important in the last decades. And more and more care-workers, care-providers and specialists complain that the traditional methods do not correspond any longer to their expectations and do not permit an exhaustive, dynamic and relevant expertise.
The social protection itself became a field increasingly complex and suffering rapid changes, mostly due to a modern social life and to new life surroundings and axiological and motivational values. This evolution implies rapid re-structuring of the child care system, in order to adapt the care-taking actions (programmes, interventions, projects) to the rapidly changing realities of different social-areas (milieus) .
The traditional assessment is mostly based on qualitative analyses and descriptive statements. The lack of objective criteria and evaluation scales (inventories) explicitly developed for estimating the child care specific domains remains an impediment for a precise, rigorous and implicitly effective assessment of the risk factors and generally of the intrinsic dynamic of the child protection phenomenon and its specificity.
The paper presents some alternatives to the traditional assessment methods, whose implementation might help to gain more accuracy and efficiency in designing and implementing different child-care interventions and middle and long term care strategies.
There is also presented the newly developed “Risk-Assessment-Scale†(RAS), based on an originally designed software and build up in order to assure a more precise, accurate, objective investigation of the risk factors acting differently in the so-called vulnerable social milieus.