The profile and progress of neglected and abused children in long-term foster care

Abstract

Objectives

This study compared the profile of neglected and abused children in the Australian foster care system as well as differences between maltreatment types in relation to parental contact, reunification and psychosocial progress in care.

Method

The case files of 235 children entering foster care were examined and their social workers were administered standardised questionnaires at the point of intake. All measures were repeated for those remaining in care 1 year and then again 2 years later.

Results

Neglected children were younger than non-neglected children, more likely to have a physical or mental disability, more likely to experience multiple forms of maltreatment and less likely to pose conduct problems for carers. Neglected children were more likely than non-neglected children to experience a decline in parental contact over time, and were less likely to be reunified with their families of origin. There was minimal difference between neglected and non-neglected in their psychosocial progress while in care. Aboriginal children were more likely to be reunified than non-Aboriginal children when neglect was attributable to transient factors (parental incapacity) but the reverse was true for non-neglected children.

Conclusions

The fact that neglected children more often require a second form of maltreatment before being removed from home suggests that children's services workers are less inclined to remove children for neglect than for other forms of maltreatment. As a consequence, those neglected children who are in care tend to come from more dysfunctional families than non-neglected children do, as evidenced by the relatively poorer parental contact and reunification results of neglected children.

Practice implications

Neglected children differ systematically from non-neglected children and suffer relative disadvantage in relation to multiple forms of maltreatment, parental contact, and reunification. The fact that declines in parental contact among neglected children in care occurred only when indirect contact was provided suggests that, wherever possible, care plans should include face-to-face visits and overnight stays rather than being restricted to less direct forms of contact. The difference in the success of reunification according to type of neglect (chronic or transient) also suggests that parental intervention programs need to focus their efforts on chronic factors rather than transient parental factors.

Introduction

Relatively little is known about the experiences of foster children according to the reasons for which they entered care. However, there is every reason to suspect that these experiences may well differ, if only because of differences in the profile of children experiencing the different forms of maltreatment. Around the world, physical abuse is more likely to be experienced by boys, for example (AIHW, 2005, Sobsey et al., 1997, Thompson et al., 2004), while sexual abuse is much more likely to be perpetrated against girls (Carmody and Carrington, 2000, Cook et al., 2001), and neglect is more prevalent in young children (AIHW, 2005, USDHHS, 2005). In spite of such potentially important individual differences, much of the available research collapses across maltreatment type for the purpose of statistical analysis (cf. Baird and Wagner, 2000, Cicchetti, 1994, English and Graham, 2000). As Garland, Landsverk, Hough, and Ellis-MacLeod (1996) have found, however, maltreatment types differ in their pattern of mental health service, which may suggest that maltreatment types differ in their level of psychosocial adjustment while in care. In their study, Garland et al. (1996) extracted information from case files and interviewed the caregivers of nearly 700 foster children and found that children in care for reasons of sexual or physical abuse were much more likely to receive mental health services than were neglected children even after controlling for level of emotional disturbance. The authors speculated that this finding could be due to differences in the behavioral expression of emotional disorder, with physically and sexually abused children being more prone to aggressive outbursts than neglected children. The present study sought to clarify the relationship between maltreatment type and emotional and behavioral disorder over time in care.

In addition to psychosocial functioning, the present study also examined the relationship between type of maltreatment and family functioning, as reflected in patterns of parental visiting and family reunification. Whereas Courtney (1994), and Courtney and Wong (1996) have found that, overall, children placed for reasons of neglect are more likely to be reunified than children placed because of abuse, a logistic regression study by Davis, Landsverk, Newton, and Ganger (1996) reported that children in care because of sexual abuse were 2.5 times more likely to be reunified than children in care for other forms of maltreatment, including neglect. This same study also found that the single best predictor of reunification was maternal visiting. Visited children were roughly 10 times more likely to be reunified than non-visited children. Adding to the confusion, Courtney and Wong's (1996) hazard function analysis of over eight-and-a-half thousand children in substitute care, found that the outcome of reunification was closely associated with race and ethnicity, such that African-American children were significantly less likely to be reunified than other ethnic groups, including Caucasian and Latino populations. More recent data from the U.S. Multistate Foster Care Data Archive (cf. Wulczyn, Hislop, & Goerge, 2001) confirm that Caucasian children are more likely to be reunited, while African-American children more likely to be adopted. African Americans were also more likely still to be in care 10 years after their initial placement (Wulczyn, 2004). In the Australian context, not only are Indigenous children grossly over-represented in child protection notifications and substantiations, but there are also differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians according to type of maltreatment. Specifically, and depending on jurisdiction, Aboriginal children in Australia are between 2 and 10 times more likely to be the subjects of substantiated notifications, and the proportion of those substantiations attributable to neglect is around 50% higher than that of non-indigenous children in the nation as a whole (AIHW, 2005). In view of differences in the mix of ethnicity and maltreatment type between Australian and U.S. children, it is unclear whether there would be any association between neglect and reunification in an Australian population and, even if so, whether that association would be positive or negative.

In summary, then, the present study sought to profile neglected and non-neglected children on intake to foster care and to track the children's progress over time. In particular, the study sought to establish whether the psychosocial progress, parental contact, and/or reunification outcomes of neglected and non-neglected children differ and, if so, how these factors are related to individual differences at intake.