Tonino Esposito

Université de Montréal | UdeM · School of Social Work

Background: The longitudinal trajectory of Indigenous children within child protection (CP) services, including their recurrent involvement, has yet to be documented. Objectives: 1) To document whether First Nations children were at increased risk of a first recurrence of post-investigation CP services compared to children from the majority grou...

The Oxford Handbook of Family Policy Over the Life Course examines how countries devised measures for child protection outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UNCRC highlights the importance of protecting children from a range of human rights violations. In response, countries respond differently to human r...

Child maltreatment (CM) in one generation can predict CM in the next generation, a concept known as intergenerational continuity. Yet, the form taken by the intergenerational continuity of CM remains unclear and fathers are mostly absent from this literature. This longitudinal study aimed to document patterns of intergenerational continuity of subs...

The goal of this study, the first of its kind in Canada, was to estimate the child lifetime prevalence of child protection involvement in Quebec. Using administrative and population data spanning 17 years, we performed a survival analysis of initial incidents of child protection reports, confirmed reports, confirmation of a child’s security or deve...

Background /Purpose: This paper explores the use of social geographic data and multilevel latent modeling to make initial predictions on geographic variation in child protection involvement for reasons of neglect, resulting in novel findings regarding the relationship between poverty and neglect in low-density geographies in the province of Quebec,...

The Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS) is the only source of nationally aggregated information on investigated child maltreatment in Canada. This paper presents major findings from the most recent cycle of the study, the CIS-2019. Multi-staged sampling was used to select a representative sample of child welfare agenc...

Background In the United States, Black children spend more time in out-of-home placement than other children and are less likely to experience family reunification following involvement with child welfare services. Within Canada, very few studies have examined Black children's exits from the child welfare system and factors influencing their servic...

Background While family reunification following out-of-home placement is a goal of child protection policy, complex family needs may not be met at the point that child protection systems reunify families. Permanency legislation creating maximum placement timeframes prompts questions regarding what families need to be supported in stably reunifying...

Placement instability negatively impacts the lives of youth placed in out-of-home care, and research on the topic indicates that it is related to negative long-term outcomes for youth in care. This study uses information gathered from two waves of interviews conducted with a representative sample of 1136 Quebec youths who were first met at around 1...

Cross-sector collaborations are increasingly being relied upon to improve accessibility of prevention and support services for marginalized communities reported to the child protection system. However, little is known about the feasibility, implementation, and impact of such collaborations. This study begins to address this gap by describing the ch...

Studies in several jurisdictions have found that families become recurrently involved with child protection systems most frequently for reasons of neglect. Child protection involvement for reasons of neglect is shown to correlate with various socioeconomic vulnerabilities. Objective This study, the largest of its kind in Canada, examines when and...

The Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS) derives annual estimates of child maltreatment (CM) based on cases of CM reported to child welfare agencies in the fourth quarter (October, November, December) of the year the CIS is conducted. The present study investigates seasonal patterns of CM investigations and examines po...

In many North American jurisdictions, socioeconomically vulnerable families are more likely to be involved with child protection systems and experience ongoing challenges. The current public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic is having a disproportionate impact on these families via unemployment, “essential” work, isolation, and closures of c...

Background Black-White disparities in child welfare involvement have been well-documented in the United States, but there is a significant knowledge gap in Ontario about how and when these disparities emerge. Objective This paper compares incidence data on Black and White families investigated by Ontario’s child welfare system over a 20-year perio...

Empirical research is needed to better understand the overrepresentation faced by Black children receiving child protection services in Canada. This article examines rates of disparity using secondary longitudinal clinical-administrative data provided by a child protection agency in Quebec for a subsample of Black, White, and other visible minority...

Child maltreatment is a major public health issue, affecting over 200,000 children in Canada every year. Yet child welfare services are being offered to families with limited evidence of service effectiveness. The transition to evidence-based decision making requires a significant investment of resources and time to better understand the service tr...

Background: Child sexual abuse (CSA) rates have been declining since the 1990s (Dunne et al., 2003; Finkelhor & Jones, 2004, 2012; Jones et al., 2001). Discrepancies in contexts and measures complicate comparing CSA rates across jurisdictions and studies, and there is limited literature about trends in CSA in Canada. Objective: Using data from t...

In Canada, the responsibility for protecting and supporting children at risk of abuse and neglect falls under the jurisdiction of Provinces and Territories and Indigenous child welfare organizations. These services have been shaped by their roots in late nineteenth century child saving movements and colonial assimilationism of Indigenous communitie...

Short-term placements outside the family home are one of the strategies that child protection services use to ensure the safety of vulnerable children. While several studies that have specifically examined short-term placements report that the majority of children placed will experience at least one short-term placement prior to family reunificatio...

Objectives: While sexual abuse during childhood is a known risk factor of adult physical and mental health problems, little is known about the relationship between CPA services and healthcare use for these problems. This study aimed to assess whether sexually abused youth seek more medical services than their peers in the general population and whe...

A large majority of children who are placed outside the family home experience temporary placements (between 1 to 60 days) at some point in time. Yet, information on the use of temporary placements remains fragmentary, with only occasional indirect references. This scant information does, however, suggests a particular link between physical abuse a...

Objectives: The Quebec Youth Protection Act was amended in 2007. The main goal of this reform was to improve placement stability for children who are removed from their home for their protection. Among several legal provisions introduced was the establishment of maximum age-specific durations of out-of-home care, after which a plan must be establis...

Formal university–child welfare partnerships offer a unique opportunity to begin to fill the gaps in the child welfare knowledge base and link child welfare services to the realities of practice. With resources from a knowledge mobilization grant, a formal partnership was developed between the University of Toronto, clinicians, policy analysts, and...

Socio-environmental factors such as poverty, psychosocial services, and social services spending all could influence the challenges faced by vulnerable families. This paper examines the extent to which socioeconomic vulnerability, psychosocial service consultations, and preventative social services spending impacts the reunification for children pl...

This paper examines the long-term placement trajectories of youth aged 10 to 17 years at initial investigation, with attention to the comparative trajectories of youth served for sexual abuse gender differences, and the mediating effects of behavioral difficulties experienced post investigation. This analysis draws administrative data on all youth...

When compared to children from the general population, sexually abused children receive more medical services, both for physical and mental health problems. However, possible differences between sexually abused boys and girls remain unknown. The lack of control group in studies that find gender differences also prevents from determining if the diff...

This paper examines the extent to which regional variations in poverty and health and social services spending impact the risk of placement, after controlling for individual-level risk factors and regional latent differences in delivery of child protection services. Clinical administrative child protection data were merged with income and health an...

There is a surprising dearth of information about the services provided to the children and families being reported to Canadian child welfare authorities, little research on the efficacy of child welfare services in Canada, and limited evidence of new policies and programs designed to address these changes. This paper reports on a research capacity...

Child protection is one of the fastest growing service sectors in Canada, yet we know surprisingly little about the effectiveness of these services. This article presents a provincial university-agency knowledge partnership aimed to better understand the dynamics of child protection services. For exemplary purposes, the results of a service outcome...

Gestion fondée sur les indicateurs de suivi clinique

Les trajectoires de placement des enfants en protection de la jeunesse au Québec

This commentary is on the original article by Berg et al. on pages 564–570 in this issue.

Objectives: This province-wide analysis examined factors most associated with changing out-of-home placements for 15,518 youth aged 10 to 17 at initial placement. This analysis allows the stability of residential and family foster care to be more precisely examined. Methods: This analysis draws clinical administrative data from all of Quebec's chil...

This study contributes to the growing child protection placement literature by providing the first Canadian provincial longitudinal study examining when and for whom initial out-of-home placement is most likely to occur. Anonymized clinical-administrative child protection data were merged with the 2006 Canadian Census data for the province of Québe...

Background and Purpose: Many studies in the US report a significant disproportional representation of African American and Native American children placed in out-of-home care. In Canada, there is a history of reported disproportionality of Aboriginal children admitted in out-of-home care following a maltreatment investigation. This study explores d...

Objective: Although there is growing evidence that the emotional dimensions of child maltreatment are particularly damaging, the feasibility and appropriateness of including emotional maltreatment (EM) in child welfare statutes continues to be questioned. Unlike physical and sexual abuse where investigations focus on discreet incidents of maltreat...

Résumé La protection de l’enfance est l’un des secteurs de services qui se développent le plus rapidement au Canada. Cependant, nous en savons étonnamment peu sur l’efficacité des services offerts aux enfants maltraités et négligés. Cet article examine de nouveaux modèles de mobilisation des connaissances conçus pour soutenir l’utilisation plus sys...