Evaluating child protection

The label of child abuse covers a wide variety of symptoms, behaviours and contexts. Child abuse cases are the products of complex processes of identification, confirmation and disposal rather than being self evident in the child's presenting condition. For those involved in child abuse work who are in desperate need of the research tools to help them make sense of this situation, David Thorpe's book will be invaluable. It describes a project which was used in the design of a computerized child protection information system. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of 325…