| Timely and accurate reporting of suspected child abuse and neglect is essential to protect victimized children; however, there are barriers to such reporting. The importance of barriers may be based on organizational theories that suggest structure has an impact on behavior independent of individual factors and on identity theory which suggests individual factors sensitize people to different aspects of environments. The purpose of this study was to understand the extent to which school social workers' demographics and knowledge of child abuse reporting requirements (individual factors) and type of school governance (an organizational factor) predict perceived importance of administrative, evidentiary, and consequential barriers to reporting. One hundred sixty people out of a random sample of 300 school social workers responded to a mail survey using an instrument developed for this study. Results of t-tests, correlation analyses, and hierarchical multiple regression demonstrated that as years of experience increased, the importance of all types of barriers decreased; racial/ethnic minority social workers rated the importance of all types of barriers higher than nonminority social workers; and after controlling for years of experience and race/ethnicity, type of school governance did not significantly predict importance of barriers. Comments indicated that lack of faith in Child Protective Services (CPS) investigations was another major barrier to reporting. In order to promote positive social change school districts need to support young, minority social workers and encourage them to report child abuse and neglect. In addition, social workers and CPS need to develop better collaborative processes in order to increase confidence in and effectiveness of investigations. |
