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	Child Safety Assessment	Child Welfare Risk Assessment
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2003	2000
Originator	Child protective services practice; codified in CPS guidance and Structured Decision Making	Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner & the actuarial child-welfare risk tradition (Children's Research Center)
Type	Structured determination of whether a child faces immediate serious danger	Estimation of the likelihood of future child maltreatment to guide service decisions
Seminal source	Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2018). Child Protective Services: A Guide for Caseworkers. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children's Bureau.	Baird, C., & Wagner, D. (2000). The relative validity of actuarial- and consensus-based risk assessment systems. Children and Youth Services Review, 22(11–12), 839–871.
Aliases	Safety Assessment (Child Welfare), Present Danger Assessment, Child Protective Services Safety Assessment, Safety Determination	Child Protective Services Risk Assessment, Family Risk Assessment, Actuarial Risk Assessment (Child Welfare), Risk of Future Maltreatment Assessment
Related	4	4
Summary	Child safety assessment is the structured process child protective services uses to decide whether a child faces immediate, serious danger and, if so, what must be done right now to protect them. Unlike risk assessment, which estimates the probability of future maltreatment, safety assessment focuses on the present: it identifies active safety threats, weighs them against the child's vulnerability and the caregivers' capacity to protect, and reaches a safe-or-unsafe determination that, when unsafe, triggers an immediate safety plan up to and including removal.	Child welfare risk assessment estimates the likelihood that a child will be maltreated in the future, in order to guide decisions about case opening, service intensity, and ongoing monitoring. Actuarial systems — the most validated form, advanced by Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner, and colleagues — score a small set of empirically weighted case characteristics into a risk level that statistically predicts future maltreatment, and have been shown to outperform consensus-based clinical judgment in reliability and predictive validity. Risk assessment is distinct from, and complementary to, the safety assessment that addresses immediate danger.