New Zealand Social Work Tactic Hits Shore, Makes Waves

Can a social work technique developed by a tribal culture in New Zealand help victims of child abuse and juvenile offenders in the United States?

A growing number of child protection specialists and youth workers believe it can. The technique — called family group decision-making, family group conferencing or a half-dozen other combinations of similar words is being used daily by child welfare agencies, schools, police departments, juvenile courts and probation offices across the U.S.

Derived from Maori concepts of community and conflict resolution, family group decision-making (FGDM) brings parents who have been accused of child abuse or neglect together with relatives and close friends to develop a plan to keep children safe.
In juvenile offender cases, the victim also participates in the conference.

Among reasons for the technique’s appeal in the United States is its inherent cultural sensitivity. It was first developed in New Zealand in the mid ‘80s to try to stem the flow of Maori children into institutional care. As in New Zealand, minority children in the U.S. are disproportionately represented in out-of-home care; some minority groups see this technique as a way to incorporate their own cultures’ methods of handling child abuse into the child protection system.

The technique also fits with the recent move toward a more strengths-based, family-centered, child-focused approach to working with families. “It’s very consistent with the other philosophical shifts occurring in child welfare,” says Lisa Merkel-Holguin, manager of the American Humane Association’s new National Center on Family Group Decision-Making. “It meshes quite well with the child welfare reform movement, which seeks to have families and agencies and communities share the responsibility for protecting children.”

Although concerns are being raised in the United States about the lack of a research basis for the technique and its appropriateness in certain cases, evidence of its appeal now stretches from the West Coast, where it first took root, to the East. “It’s grown exponentially in the last four years,” says Merkel-Holguin, who tracks the technique’s spread by placing pushpins on a giant map on her Denver office wall. Among the hotbeds of activity:

• Oregon developed its own version of the technique, which it calls “family unity meetings,” in the late ‘80s, even before news of New Zealand’s practice hit the U.S. In 1997, the Oregon Legislature mandated its consideration in every child abuse case in which out-of-home placement was a possibility. Last year, Oregon convened family unity meetings in 40 percent of its new child abuse and neglect cases (for a total of 4,089 meetings, more than any other state.)
• Child protection workers in more than half the states have received training in FGDM, and many states have launched formal pilot projects. Both the Kellogg Foundation’s “Families for Kids” and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation’s “Community Partnership for Protecting Children” initiatives are promoting family conferencing at their sites.
• Indian tribes in both the U.S. and Canada are embracing the technique, which they say reflects ancient Indian ways of resolving family difficulties.
• Here in Santa Clara County, Calif., the technique has been used in several hundred child protection cases since 1996. Because one-third of the county’s residents are foreign-born, the county’s child welfare agency offers family conferences in six languages. Other county agencies here are now using the technique to help clients with mental disabilities, youths with school behavior problems, elderly people who were being abused or neglected by their caregivers, and welfare recipients who are moving into the job market. “Our political leaders are delighted that something that makes such good sense could be implemented into social policy,” says Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Len Edwards, who has been instrumental in inciting interest in the technique.
• Almost 5,000 police, school officials and youth workers across the U.S. have been trained in the Wagga Wagga model of family conferencing, named after the Australian police jurisdiction in which it was developed. Its use is being promoted by the nascent restorative justice movement, which sees it as a way of repairing the harm an offense does to the victim, the offender and the community.

Philosophical Origins

Family group decision-making reflects the underlying belief that most families have the best interests of their children at heart, as well as the inherent capacity to resolve abuse and neglect issues with support from friends, relatives and clergy.

“Those of us in the helping professions are often seduced into believing that we can become experts on someone else’s family,” says Jim Nice, a former Oregon child protective services worker who now travels around the country promoting FGDM. “By virtue of membership in a particular family, family members have a rich knowledge of their family’s history that outsiders may never know. That knowledge and wisdom about themselves is one of the strengths of families.”

FGDM gives families the power to decide how to keep their children safe. But social workers facilitate the process, and at the end of it they must either approve the family’s plan or send it back to the drawing boards. (Some jurisdictions require court approval, too.)

No one tracks how many family plans are rejected, but anecdotal evidence suggests most are approved. Family members are often tougher on parents than an agency-generated service agreement would be, Merkel-Holguin says.

“Social workers are amazed at the plans the families develop,” she says. “They may not be the kind of plans the social workers would have suggested, but they are incredibly resourceful and creative about how to keep kids safe in a nurturing environment.” And the families are monitoring compliance with the plan very strictly. “This is a radical departure from the way things have always been done in child welfare. The families, not the social workers, are the drivers of the decisions and the plan.”

Unproven?

That’s exactly what worries some critics of FGDM. “I think it’s dangerous,” says William L. Pierce, president of the National Council for Adoption. Pierce was one of only a few dissenters on the value of FGDM during two years of recently concluded meetings of a federal advisory group on child welfare practices.

“I don’t think that when one is discussing child abuse and neglect that amateurs should engage in fact-finding,” he says. “We know from experience that most of the perpetrators are family members. How can one hope to have any sort of objective analysis, treatment or evaluation by family members of each other?”

Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard University law professor who is the author of the forthcoming book, “Nobody’s Children,” says she’s “all for the idea of reaching out to the family to see if they have good ideas and solutions.” But she has concerns about FGDM. “What I’m against is using this in the kind of serious cases that I believe now dominate the CPS caseload,” she says. “If social workers are approving most of the family plans, I find it very troubling, because it says to me that what FGDM is about is a near total delegation of decision-making by the state to the family.”

Ted Keys, who supervises family-based services for Oregon’s child protection agency, counters that serving the “best interests of the child” and ensuring his safety are the central goals of FGDM. “Our primary responsibility as an agency is still to assess and reduce risk for the child, not to collaborate with parents,” he says. “I feel it’s a safe process, because it brings more people to the table who care about the kids.”

Another concern of critics, including Bartholet, is the model’s appropriateness in child abuse cases that also involve adult abuse victims. Many advocates for battered women don’t like the idea of inviting a violent spouse to participate in a family conference. As a result, some jurisdictions won’t use the technique in such cases.
However, the Canadian province of Newfoundland/Labrador has used family conferencing in tough domestic violence cases with positive results, says Gale Burford, who along with Joan Pennell, has researched FGDM in Canada. Among the keys to success in these kinds of cases, Burford says, are preparing family members adequately, being honest about family violence issues, and ensuring support for the victims both during and after the conference.

The overriding worry of critics is that the technique is simply one more social work fad and that it won’t stand up to scrutiny. “This service is being widely touted as effective and widely adopted without a shred of scientifically reputable evidence that this intervention actually works,” says Richard J. Gelles, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania. “This is an echo of what happened with Intensive Family Preservation Services. No less than the National Academy of Sciences has stated that the case for Intensive Family Preservation Services had yet to be made and it would be advisable to implement such services with considerable caution. I believe the same caution applies to what is called family conferencing.”

Seeking Evidence

Proponents admit that research on long-term effectiveness is lacking. But Judge Edwards, who supervises the Santa Clara County Superior Court’s dependency division, counters that “nothing that’s done in social welfare has any research behind it. It’s all anecdotal.

“If people who have been doing this work for 20 or 30 years haven’t got a better sense of what’s going to work by now, they haven’t been paying any attention. It’s a common sense approach, much like mediation, which we also use. We’re trying to bring more resources to the table to solve problems that involve the safety, care and rearing of children. To the extent that people believe that handing out notes about where services are, or judges making orders in court, are more effective, somebody’s fooling somebody.”

A couple of problems bedevil the research on FGDM. One is model drift. Most jurisdictions have adapted the original FGDM models, so it won’t be easy to generalize from the results of a study of one model to another. (This was a problem with family preservation services as well.)

In addition, there’s no consensus on how the effectiveness of FGDM should be measured. Some say it should be family satisfaction. Others say it should be a decline in re-referrals for abuse and neglect. Others say it should be a reduction in out-of-home placements.

Studies by Burford and Pennell involving 32 Canadian families found that most families felt they were “better off” as a result of FGDM. Most families also showed decreases in substantiated reports of child abuse and neglect, compared with a comparison group of similar families who did not take part in a family conference.
But Burford, now a social work professor at the University of Vermont, thinks future research should look at broader measures. “You’ve got to ask the family what a positive outcome is,” he says. “Whether or not people are safe is the most obvious measure of success. Second to that we have to begin to think about well-being. Are kids who had been abused moving ahead with their lives? What kind of parents are they themselves going to be? Those are absolutely harder outcomes to measure because they require longitudinal studies.”

The research gap is slowly beginning to close. Santa Clara County is two years into a three-year evaluation project, with $400,000 in funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, of costs and benefits of FGDM, as well as outcomes for 200 families who take part in conferences (compared with 200 county families that do not). The evaluation is being conducted by Walter R. McDonald and Associates, Inc., a Sacramento, Calif.-based consulting firm specializing in youth and family services. Elsewhere, research on participants’ satisfaction, out-of-home placement rates and improvement in interfamilial communications is under way.

One thing already clear to nearly everyone who practices FGDM is that it isn’t cheap. “Social workers in New Zealand and in Washington state, where it’s done well, spend about 30 hours preparing for a conference,” says Merkel-Holguin. “This is a very time and labor-intensive approach, so communities are going to need to find fiscal resources to take it to scale.

“Some communities are hoping that one of the outcomes will be to reduce foster care costs. That is a possibility. But we advise states not to view this as a cost-saving mechanism.”

Juvenile Justice Role

FGDM is also finding adherents in the juvenile justice system, though the system’s fragmentation makes it hard to document. The police officers who developed the Wagga Wagga model have traveled to the U.S. four times to train school officials and juvenile and probation officers. And RealJustice, a restorative justice advocacy group in Bethlehem, Pa., has trained almost 5,000 youth workers in the technique. RealJustice says FGDM works well as a court diversion program.

“At its core, this is a communitarian model that brings together people who were affected by a specific incident and lets them reflect on the harm that has been done,” says Bob Costello, a coordinator for RealJustice. “One of the problems with our legal system is that we protect people from the true consequences of their behavior. This process is intentionally emotional. It seeks to repair the harm, rather than inflict more harm. The victim’s needs are met. The needs of the greater community are met. And the needs of the offender are being met.”

Schools and police and probation departments in Minnesota and Vermont use FGDM regularly, Costello says. For instance, Woodbury, Minn., an affluent suburb of St. Paul, began holding what it calls “community conferences” four years ago for juvenile offenders in cases ranging from burglaries to assaults. The department now convenes about 50 community conferences a year.

“With regards to recidivism, we think that with community conferencing we’re doing better than the courts,” says David Hines, the department’s community justice officer.

Hines says 85 percent of victims and 87 percent of offenders report a high satisfaction rate. More victims (95 percent) than offenders (80 percent) say they would use it again rather than go to court. “The feeling among offenders is that it’s actually harder than going to court because they have to face their victim,” Hines says.
Until August, there was little contact between the child welfare and the juvenile justice arms of the FGDM movement. That changed with the first joint national meeting at the University of Vermont School of Social Work of more than 300 practitioners from the various branches of the movement.

Says researcher Burford, one of the co-sponsors: “Many questions have yet to be resolved, including how best to keep people safe in situations where violence has occurred, and the implications of mainstreaming what is essentially an ‘empowerment’ model. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the conference will come from the fact that representatives from child welfare, youth corrections, police, adult corrections, victim’s advocates, women’s and other groups had a chance to discuss key issues, compare assumptions and explore differences with each other.”

Resources

Patricia Evans
Family Conference Institute
Santa Clara County Social Services Agency
1725 Technology Dr.
San Jose, CA 95110
(408) 441-5159
E-mail: FamConf@cws.co.SantaClara.CA.US

Lisa Merkel-Holguin
National Center on Family Group Decision Making
American Humane Association
P.O. Box 3597
Englewood, CO 80155-3597
(303) 792-9900
E-mail: lmerkel@americanhumane.org
www.americanhumane.org

Bob Costello
RealJustice
P.O. Box 229
Bethlehem, PA 18016-0229
(610) 807-9221
E-mail: usa@realjustice.org
www.realjustice.org

Sidebar:

New Zealand Social Work Tactic Hits Shore, Makes Waves: Up Close and Very Personal: A Seat at a Family Conference

Shirk, Martha. "New Zealand Social Work Tactic Hits Shore, Makes Waves." Youth Today, October 1999, p. 1.

©2000 Youth Today. Reprinted with permission from Youth Today. All rights reserved.