The use of Expert Reports as evidence in Child Protection Decision-Making

Judicial decision-making regarding child protection (CP) is a difficult task with potential severe consequences. Psychological expertise plays an essential role herein. Norway has received criticism from the European Court of Human Rights for its decisions. The reasoning in judgments has been criticized for not demonstrating a fair balance between the interests of parents and children and not being based on a sufficient factual basis, including an updated expert opinion. We will 1) compare the use of experts in Norway, Sweden, Germany and England by studying legal source material, as well as examine and compare the court's use of expert reports before/after the introduction of standard mandates 2) develop and test an interview for use by experts in conversation with children, as well as analyzing expert reports with a view to quality etc., and 3) comparing Norwegian and Swedish legal decisions in child welfare cases to identify how they justify the assessment of the child's best interests and the parents' rights, including the use of the expert assessments. An important result of the studies will be that we achieve more equal practice across experts' mandates, approaches, and conclusions for the betterment of children and their guardians. We are an interdisciplinary team of psychologists and lawyers with competency in clinical, forensic, and developmental psychology, procedural and child protection law. From October 2024, a sociologist with specialty in evidence assessment and evidence theory will join our group. The first year has been used for applications to various agencies in order to carry out the various studies. All approvals are now available, and we have obtained 300 expert reports, court decisions related to these cases, contributed to form standard mandates in child protection cases and coordinated with our German colleagues. We have coded and quality assured all the expert reports, presented the first results from these at an international and a national conference, and are now writing up three scientific contributions from this material. In addition, we have started the development of the child interview. In terms of dissemination, we have held a conference for practitioners, bureaucrats, and researchers, as well as participated in the annual international conference of psychology and law (The American Psychology-Law Society (ap-ls.org)with a lecture based on material from the project. Finally, we have created a website with information about the project, and UiO has published a podcast where the project and key issues are discussed (https://www.uio.no/om/aktuelt/universitetsplassen/podkast/ ).

Criticism towards the Norwegian CPS practice has been put forward by the ECtHR that criticised Norwegian courts for focusing solely on the child’s rights instead of combining these with the rights of the parents. The criticism also concerned insufficient evidence, including the lack of updated expert reports where the parents’ life situation had changed. Also the Norwegian Government expressed a need to improve the formal framework around expert reports, specifically that the lack of standardized procedures and uniform approaches may affect the legal security of the parties and result in less equal and fair decisions. The variation amongst mandates and the random interviewing practice amongst experts in CPS cases may affect legal decision-making, why it is an urgent need to provide scientific evidence on how expert reports are used in CPS cases, and develop uniformed procedures. We will study how four parties to the ECHR use experts in CPS cases, and examine if standardized mandates affect the Norwegian legal decisions. We will make qualitative and quantitative comparisons of the Norwegian and Swedish judgements to explore how authorities evaluate and justify the child’s best interest and the rights of the parents in CPS proceedings, including what mandates, approach and theoretical foundation the experts apply when providing the Courts with their reports. To secure the opinion of the child in an interview, we will develop a digital approach to assist experts and test the effects of this intervention in a quasi-experimental design. For these purposes we will use a large-scale register data of more than 700 experts´reports per year, compare ad hoc vs. standard mandates in terms of the precision to the CWA of the experts´ evaluations, testing a child friendly App interview, and integrate archive data from the Norwegian and Swedish Courts and Norwegian CWS boards to examine complex pathways of and compare the judicial decision-making process in Norway vs Sweden.