The serious consequences associated with child abuse and neglect have been well documented in research. In order to protect a child from harm, social service workers have the difficult task of deciding how to best intervene. For this study, data were collected by Cathy Spatz Widom (1994) with support from the National Institute of Justice to examine the extent to which family disorganization moderates the effect of social service placement on juvenile and adult arrests. The data contained 749 substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect and were used to test hypotheses relating to two measures of family disorganization: family separation and family moves. In addition, dependent variables for the study were binary measures of arrest. Overall, the results indicate that the effect of placement on criminality may depend on the presence of family disorganization measured by recent family separation and frequent family moves. It was also found that the overall pattern of effects differed for males and females. An example of this difference is youths whose families experienced a recent separation, such as divorce or death in the family were found to be at a greater risk of adult arrest if they were removed from the home, whereas placement had different effects for males and females when the family experienced frequent moves. References