a regional child protection agency’s contracted relation-
ship with specific consultants/evaluators, or through an
ex parte motion by the attorney for the child. Ex parte
motions are those that occur in front of the judge with-
out the knowledge of the other parties to
the case. They preserve attorney–client privilege until
the report is introduced into evidence. Motions may or
may not be requested in this private fashion. The use of
exparte motions gives the attorney the option of quash-
ing results unfavorable to the client’s case. The disad-
vantage is the difficulty of retaining attorney–client
confidentiality and protecting the evaluation results
under the attorney work product rule because of the
eventual need for the evaluator to contact multiple par-
ties to conduct a thorough evaluation that would typify
most referral questions in care and protection matters.
Referral questions cover a range of topics. The
evaluator might be asked to assess the child’s psycho-
logical well-being in the aftermath of maltreatment or
threats of maltreatment, to determine what services
should be offered to the child and/or the caregiver to
promote child well-being and safety, the amenability
of the caregiver to interventions designed to reduce
the risk of harm to the child, the psychological impact
on the child of a return to the custody of the caregiver,
the psychological impact on the child of permanent
substitute care or parental rights termination, and the
child’s attachment to substitute caregivers.Ethical Standards and
Guidelines for Practice
Psychologists and other mental health professionals
seek the relevant education, professional training,
postdoctoral training, and continuing education. They
turn to ethical standards and principles to guide their
practice. Professional organizations develop guidelines
for practice. Guidelines have been written specifically
for the subspecialty of forensic assessment and consul-
tation in care and protection matters. Guidelines rele-
vant to cultural competence are particularly important
because of the broad diversity of families that come to
the attention of the care and protection system.
Advocacy organizations for child welfare sometimes
develop their own suggested practice guidelines.Child Maltreatment
Legal definitions of child maltreatment are drawn from
statutes, child protective service regulations, and caselaw. Social science definitions and nosologies of child
maltreatment may not be fully consistent with the legal
standards because of differing classification schemes
and thresholds for maltreatment. Research on the etiol-
ogy and impact of child maltreatment is complicated by
differences in the definitions of maltreatment, differing
standards for quantifying the scope and impact of mal-
treatment, and differing classification and diagnostic
schemes. Theories of child maltreatment are drawn
from sociobiology, the emerging field of genetics and
human behavior, the psychology of human attachment,
and the psychology of the inner life of the individual.
Such theories may also take into account violence in
the individual and society, parental attribution style,
parental intellectual and social support resources, the
impact of mental illness and substance abuse on parent-
ing, intergenerational transmission or desistance of
child maltreatment (i.e., whether parents who were vic-
timized by child abuse become abusers or set about
making sure they do not become abusers), social isola-
tion, youthful parenting, and macrosocial issues such as
neighborhood quality or the stress of parental impover-
ishment. Scholars are careful to point out that parents
may parent competently even when they face multiple
challenges. Parental factors such as mental illness,
parental substance abuse, or intellectual limitations
must be linked directly to the maltreatment to be con-
sidered legally relevant. Parental violence and neglect
involve multiple complex factors that result in child
maltreatment by some but not all parents. Research
usefully illustrates the features that are common in
cases of child maltreatment, but none of the features or
combinations of features is isomorphic with maltreat-
ment per se. Although much is known about the factors
that predict child maltreatment, the relative weight of
individual factors is less clear. Cumulative risk and
chronicity of risk are not well researched, in part
because of the inherent ethical and methodological
challenges of conducting relevant empirical research in
applied settings.Parenting and
Child Development
Theories of parenting and child development provide
a framework for considering multiple styles of parent-
ing, multiple forms of family structure, and child
development trajectories. Theory serves as an organiz-
ing framework for understanding the inner life of
individuals, family dynamics, the social biological794 ———Termination of Parental RightsT-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:44 PM Page 794