In the race to dominate the child abuse prediction market, the world’s largest data analytics firm has its eye on what it calls “perpetrator” networks.
SAS, with a global workforce of 14,000 and $3.16 billion in revenue in 2015, delivered Florida’s Department of Children and Families a lengthy technical report in August of last year. The report claimed that the firm had developed the strongest child abuse prediction algorithm to date by focusing on the many adults in a child’s life who could be a threat.
By mining these perpetrator networks, SAS says it was able to predict which adults were destined to become what it calls “chronic perpetrators.”
The firm found that 42 percent of the 291,499 adults in its study group who had one report for child maltreatment would be reported again by the end of the eight-to-ten-year follow-up period. Roughly 10 percent fell into what the SAS researchers call the “chronic maltreatment group,” those who had five or more maltreatment reports in the study period.
SAS says this development warrants “a radically different approach to child welfare;” one that flips the focus from a child’s risk of being abused to the adults in a child’s life who present the greatest threat.
“This involves advocating policy and practice changes at the national level, as well as legislative changes at the state and local level, and to change some practices to focus on the adults around the children from re-perpetrating rather than forming policies and practices strictly based on protecting current children from relatively imminent maltreatment,” the report reads.
[For more of this story, written by Daniel Heimpel, go to http://www.socialjusticesoluti...dicting-child-abuse/]
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