13 Child maltreatment in Canada in the time of COVID-19: Experiences of child protection teams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were many fears regarding the effect on children’s wellbeing – specifically with regards to increased exposure to violence and potential for abuse and neglect within their homes. Early experiences of child protect teams (CPT) in the literature from one Canadian tertiary care center revealed a number of adaptations in their child abuse programs such as a move toward virtual assessments. Objectives Our descriptive study seeks to understand the perspectives, practices, and experiences of child protection teams in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic with regards to: clinical practice, interactions with child welfare organizations and the justice system, team modes of operating and medical education. These lessons can be applied to child maltreatment and neglect clinical practice in the event of future pandemics, natural disasters, and to provide care to rural areas of Canada. Design/Methods Using a web-based, bilingual, mixed methods survey, we asked both quantitative and open-ended qualitative questions to members of CPTs across Canada. Thematic analysis was completed on qualitative responses. We received a total of 11 responses. Results Respondents unanimously reported a decrease in referrals during the COVID-19 pandemic. 64% endorsed the use of new virtual tools. Virtual tools were used to collaborate amongst members of the CPT as well as with external partners (such as child welfare and justice system). Interestingly, there was minimal adaptation of these tools in patient-facing contexts. 57% of respondents foresee these tools to continue being used in a post-COVID-19 context, and 71% see relevance of these tools for use in rural contexts. Respondents reported that virtual clinical discussions changed the way medical education and case discussion in child maltreatment was delivered. Conclusion These findings describe not only the adaptation of child protection teams to the pandemic, but also robust changes to clinical practice, interactions with partner organizations and the justice system, team modes of operating and medical education in child maltreatment and neglect in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".