Reasonable suspicion in reporting child maltreatment: a survey among German healthcare professionals.

ABSTRACT:

Background

With regular contacts to the general child population, healthcare professionals could play an important role in the detection of child maltreatment. However, a majority of child maltreatment cases go unnoticed by the healthcare system. Child protection legislations usually offer terms like "reasonable suspicion" to corner a threshold that warrants reporting to child protection services (CPS) is defined as. The indistinct legal terminology leads to marked differences in the interpretation of this threshold. Therefore, we aimed to systematically assess the understanding of reasonable suspicion and subsequent handling of cases in the German context.

Methods

A cross-sectional online survey was conducted among 2485 physicians and psychotherapists working with children

SUBMITTER: Berthold O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8204433 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature