[Secondary traumatization while under care of child protective services]

Quality management is in everybody's mouth. Actually there is only few evaluation research in child protection, and almost no evaluated practice. The paper takes a perspective of "errors", not of "effectiveness". It roughly assesses the frequency of secondary traumas maltreated children experience when they are in care of the helping system. Examples and statistics from the "Vienna Child Protection Center" are used. The client's risk of experiencing a secondary trauma is about 1:3. In about 10% of all cases, the traumas are important and enduring; they range from psychotic episode to massive suicidality and long-lasting feelings of guilt and anxiety. Comparatively, the risk of being traumatized by psychotherapy is about 1:6. Psychotherapy leads to important and positive changes in about one third of all clients; similar effectiveness is attributed to those helping maltreated children. Causes of secondary traumas are: Helpers act too quickly in the heat of affect; they lack specialized knowledge (e.g. self-experience, crisis management); they seldom consult with neutral experts; they have few insight in the effects of their ideological and ethical back-ground; they deal with clients in a distrust enhancing way. On the structural level, I discuss sensationalism and scandalism of massmedia; bureaucratic procedures and their slowness, unaccessibility, inconsistency and indifference to the single case; policy of damage control when errors of the helping system become public; parallelism of decreasing financial/personal support and increasing numbers of customers; badly organized practice in criminal justice. The paper ends by demanding (more) quality circles and supervision.