Family Partner - Co-development, Implementation and Evaluation of a Child Maltreatment Prevention Intervention

Each year, millions of European children are subjected to abuse in their homes, threatening their health, dignity, trust, and freedom. Once abuse has occurred, it is difficult to repair the damage, making prevention all the more important to protect vulnerable children from harm. Child protection services play a crucial role in preventing child abuse. However, the Norwegian child welfare system has been criticized for not working systematically enough on prevention and for not employing evidence-based measures of sufficient scale and intensity. In the "Family Partner" project, researchers, in collaboration with three municipal child welfare services and SOS Children's Villages, have developed a new intervention called Family Partner. The key components of the intervention—home visits, parenting guidance, and service coordination—have proven effective in other programs for vulnerable families but have yet to be systematically adapted and tested in a Norwegian context. The intervention was piloted in three municipalities with the aim of improving children's well-being, enhancing parents' skills, and preventing abuse in vulnerable families. The target group was families with children aged 0-12 who were already receiving support from child protection services. The intervention was delivered by a family partner who provided close follow-up, parenting guidance, and coordinated services through home visits. Family Partner was trialed at the front line as a pilot for a larger impact study, and the intervention's effectiveness was evaluated using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In the "Family Partner" project, several partners from research, civil society, and local government have come together to develop and test the intervention within child protection services. By doing so, we aim to maximize the chances of success by basing the program on knowledge, experiences, and the needs of child welfare services and vulnerable families. The goal of the project is to provide child protection services with an intervention that is both locally adapted and research-based, contributing to the prevention of abuse and ensuring that children in vulnerable families grow up in safe environments. The knowledge generated by this project will be relevant to municipal child protection and health services, user organizations, researchers, and, most importantly, vulnerable families and children. In a systematic review of various interventions aimed at reducing child abuse, including home visiting programs, parenting courses, and video-based guidance, which focused on improving parenting practices and children's behavior, we found that many interventions yielded positive outcomes, particularly in terms of improved parental behavior and reduced problematic child behavior. However, only a small proportion of studies reported a direct reduction in child abuse. Future studies should place greater emphasis on investigating direct effects on children to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of these interventions. The study highlights the challenges of conducting experimental research within child protection services. Through interviews with staff and leaders, researchers identified four key challenges: ethical concerns around how families are recruited into the study, difficulties in allocating resources fairly to families in different groups, the emotional strain on those responsible for informing families of their group assignments, and the risk of cross-contamination between groups. Addressing these challenges requires careful study design, close collaboration, and frequent communication with practitioners in the field. Web: https://www.oslomet.no/en/research/research-projects/family-partner

FAMPART seeks to improve the services directed at the most vulnerable group in society; children growing up at risk of maltreatment. Maltreatment threatens a child’s health, dignity and trust, and can cause fatal injury, adverse health outcomes and reduced life chances. Child Welfare Services need more evidence-informed practices to prevent child maltreatment, and provide follow-up to at-risk families with complex needs. FAMPART will develop, implement and evaluate a new intervention for the Norwegian Child Welfare Services, improve services for vulnerable children, promote agency and trust in welfare services, improve children´s life chances, and prevent child maltreatment. The Family Partner intervention will be developed to prevent child maltreatment through: 1) home visitation and intensive follow up, 2) parental training, and 3) coordination of welfare services. The intervention remains to be systematically adapted to and tested in a Norwegian context. FAMPART is a challenging and complex undertaking in public innovation, where the co-development, adaptation, implementation and evaluation of an intervention involves several collaborators; an international research team, two municipalities, SOS Children’s Villages, user representatives and national and municipal stakeholders. FAMPART will 1) Co-develop the Family Partner intervention manual and adapt it for the Child Welfare Services with collaborators, 2) Monitor and facilitate the implementation of the Family Partner intervention in two municipalities, 3) Evaluate the municipal implementation and trial design, regarding adaptability, acceptability, feasibility, and costs, 4) Prepare an Expansion of the Family Partner intervention in the municipal services, and examine the feasibility for a multi-site Randomised Controlled Trial, and 5) Disseminate findings to the practice field, wider public and the academic milieu.