This sidebar accompanies the article, "Linking Child Protection and Women's Safety," which originally appeared in the July-August 1997 Children's Advocate newsmagazine, published by Action Alliance for Children.

Massachusetts: A Pioneer

By Claudia Miller

The 1989 death of a child who was being monitored by child welfare workers in Massachusetts was the impetus that led to the Domestic Violence Program there. Linda Spears, now child-protection director for the Child Welfare League of America, was then working at the Massachusetts Department of Social Services (DSS) at the time and was one of the founders.

The program's goal was to increase the ability of child welfare workers to recognize domestic violence in their cases, decrease the length of time a case stays open, reduce out-of-home placements, and increase the level of cooperation between battered women's services and child protection workers.The Domestic Violence Program developed training and protocols to help DSS workers identify and intervene in child protection cases that involve domestic violence. It hired Lonna Davis, a domestic violence specialist, to consult with DSS workers when they were "stuck," says Spears.

In some cases, for example, a child welfare worker had established a good relationship with the mother and then suddenly the mother refused to meet with DSS or didn't return phone calls. The caseworker would report that the mother seems to care for the kids, but is unable to maintain good contact with DSS. She would then have to decide whether to remove the children from the home. Davis found that most of the women in such cases were involved in abusive relationships, Spears said. When the batterer was home, the mother was skittish and wouldn't talk to the caseworker, but when the abuser left, she would cooperate. "[The problem] wasn't the caseworker's attitude, it was truly a lack of skill," Spears said. "The one thing caseworkers knew is that if you got the family to work well with you, that was a good sign and if they didn't work well, that was a bad sign."

The domestic violence specialists who work in Massachusetts DSS consulted on 4,000 cases in 1995. The program costs the state $1.1 million annually, of which 40 percent is state-funded and 60 percent is federally funded through the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act. Reports show that in 1994, caseworkers found domestic violence to be an issue in 48 percent of their cases (higher than in previous years); cases were closed more quickly (the average length was 1.84 years and 1.73 years in two pilot sites, compared to an average of 2.68 years statewide); and there were fewer out-of-home placements (11.6 and12.8 percent in the pilot sites compared to 15.2 percent statewide).

The Massachusetts Coalition for Battered Women's Services recently received a federal grant to continue to integrate services for battered women and their children. Nalina Narain, director of the children and adolescent department at the coalition, says the projects include training programs and job-shadowing so that DSS workers can understand what shelter workers go through and vice versa.

Beverly Amazeen, program manager in a pilot project in Framingham, describes a recent case in which a family benefited from the close relationship between child-welfare workers and battered-women's advocates. A woman was being beaten so badly that she was sometimes knocked unconscious. Her children witnessed the beatings and tried to protect their mother from their father. A team of child welfare workers agreed that there was reason to fear for the children and mother's safety. They called battered women's advocates and came up with a strategy to convince the father to leave the home so that the mother and children could remain together. "In the past, this kind of partnership would have been difficult. But we were able to get the father to leave and seek treatment. In this case, it was good to have the power of the state agency: we were able to take the situation out of the mother's hands and say to the father, 'we need you to leave the home.'"