Clinical family assessments for the Children's Court of Victoria: Building the evidence base in court child protection matters

Within the last decade, numerous attempts have been made to improve child protection services in Australia. One of these is a recent inquiry into the Victorian child protection system that recommends, among other changes, that the Children's Court Clinic of Victoria serving the Children's Court of Victoria be abolished. This recommendation, as the inquiry admits, lacks empirical evidence and is instead based on anecdotal claims and submissions about the clinic's inability to provide independent, high quality, evidence to the court. As a response to the general shortage of empirically-driven practice in children's courts, the aim of the current paper is to address the need for systematic evidence about court outcomes. In doing so, we present analyses of 138 clinic assessments and court decisions in statutory child protection proceedings in Victoria and suggest how research about actual outcomes can be used to inform the best practice in court-based child protection. This is the first set of analyses of data belonging to the children's court, using information from the court and the clinic electronic databases.