What is CARA?

An acronym for Child Abuse Risk Assessment, CARA is a learning environment which may be used by child protection investigators as well as caseworkers and followup workers, to think about the complexity of the factors related to the immediate safety and future risk of children. It both parallels and complements the Illinois CERAP (Child Endangerment Risk Assessment Protocol). Just as the CERAP "is not unique to just one stage of the case" and is "a 'life of the case' protocol," so too CARA is meant to be used at various points in time to think about the role and significance of factors at and beyond the stage of initial assessment. However, while CERAP prescribes the factors that must be taken into account in making an assessment, CARA describes by means of a variety of cases, how to think about such factors and their interactions.

Learning to think about child abuse in terms of factors necessary to consider in assessment, helps to structure our understanding. This explains why assessment factors are often organized as checklists in risk assessment instruments. However, this structured understanding of, and approach to assessment emphasizes the identification of factors in every case, thereby encouraging a uniform expectation about them and their significance.

Child abuse, where no two cases are exactly alike and therefore defies a standardized response, is an example of a complex and ill-structured field of knowledge and practice. Persons and family dynamics encountered in every investigation process differ, and in the light of those differences, the factors that are important to consider in assessing risk of abuse (such as Substance Abuse, Mental Illness, Availability of Social Support, Domestic Violence, Disability of Parent or Child etc.) assume varying shades of meaning and significance.CARA is a case-based environment, designed on the principles of Cognitive Flexibility Theory (Spiro, Vispoel, Schmitz, Samarapungavan, & Boerger, 1987), a theory of learning suited to understanding complex, ill-structured domains.

CARA consists of 10 cases, based on real-life cases investigated by child protection agencies. While many of these cases feature the same assessment factors, the focus is on drawing attention to their many facets by presenting them in the context of different cases. The structured understanding of child abuse afforded by the knowledge of what assessment factors are important, is made fluid by revealing the varying relevance of the factors and the need to think about them flexibly, and as being shaped in their significance by co-occurring factors.