Beyond the Courtroom Door: Exploring the Feasibility of Child Protection Mediation in Ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, the Irish child protection and welfare system has witnessed an unprecedented level of increase in legislative and policy development. However, one area that remains relatively unexplored in Ireland is the use of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, such as mediation, in child protection proceedings. By contrast, in other jurisdictions, such as in the United States of America and Canada, the incorporation of mediation within the child protection system has increasingly been advocated as a genuine alternative to wholly adversarial proceedings. Child protection mediation can provide parties with the opportunity to improve family communication, reduce high levels of conflict, avoid excessive litigation and reach a personalised agreement in the best interests of the child. Unfortunately, in Ireland, child protection mediation has not heretofore been fully explored or researched and a determination of its value in the protection of child safety and welfare has not been reached. Therefore, building on existing research regarding alternative dispute resolution processes, this thesis set out to explore the feasibility of child protection mediation in Ireland and the extent to which is could aid child safety and welfare. The research adopted a triangulated research methodology approach through the use of surveys, semi-structured interviews and structured observations. The thesis analysed data from three research phases: Phase 1 examined child protection mediation with national stakeholders and the Irish judiciary; Phase 2 examined systems operating in certain jurisdictions of the United States of America and Canada, in which child protection mediation is increasingly recognised as an invaluable mechanism; and Phase 3 determined the extent to which alternative dispute resolution mechanisms are currently being used in child welfare and protection disputes in Ireland. The key finding from the study was that the implementation of child protection mediation in Ireland could aid child welfare and improve the quality of decision-making in child protection cases. However, this thesis is not advocating that child protection mediation should be used in all child protection cases and, therefore, it should not be seen as a panacea. Rather, this thesis presents the reasoned, evidence-based argument for considering the use of mediation, in certain aspects of child protection proceedings.
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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 | 0.045 | 0.072 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".