Progress of 500 Referrals From the Child Protection Response System to the Criminal Court

• NCJ Number: 174244
• Journal: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology Volume: 31 Issue: 2 Dated: August 1998 Pages: 182-195
• Author(s): M Hood; C Boltje
• Date Published: 1998
• Length: 14 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

A total of 500 cases of suspected child abuse in the State of South Australia were followed from the initial report to a child welfare system through the intervention process to criminal prosecution.

Abstract

The sample came from the Child Protection Services, a unit based in a pediatric hospital in the State of South Australia, and its links to the wider child abuse reporting and intervention system are described in this paper. The study shows that only 27.4 percent of the cases substantiated at the welfare/health level were prosecuted in criminal courts, and only 17 percent of these resulted in a conviction; half of the convictions involved guilty pleas. The explanations of these findings are discussed, including the links to the characteristics of the children, the accused, and the professional and legal systems. The authors suggest that the decision not to prosecute a substantiated abuse case was not due to a lack of belief by criminal justice professionals that the abuse occurred. Knowing the difficulty of achieving a conviction without a guilty plea, choices are made at every level of the system not to proceed further in criminal case processing. These choices are made by the victim and family, by professionals within the welfare/health system, by police, and by prosecutors. Choices not to proceed generally result from an assessment that the requirements of legal prosecution cannot be met, rather than any uncertainty about whether the abuse occurred. Factors that weaken chances of conviction in child abuse cases are the age and developmental ability of the child victims, the credibility of a child's word against an adult's, children's ambivalence in providing evidence against family members, the lack of concrete physical evidence, and fear of the court process by the victims and families. Most of these factors are not easily changed. Given this circumstance, the authors suggest alternatives for managing child abuse cases to facilitate positive outcomes. 2 tables and 17 references