Child sexual abuse: Case handling through public social agencies in the Southeast of the USA

This paper reports data from a regionwide survey of child sexual abuse case handling in the Southeast. Public social agency workers do not generally provide nor view the provision of treatment services as being primarily their responsibility. While about 70% of the workers (N = 1,045) had performed initial intervention and diagnostic tasks, only 46.1% had performed treatment tasks. Ten percent of the workers felt initial intervention tasks were more appropriate to some other professional community resource; 16.3% made this judgment for diagnostic tasks. On the other hand, 55.1% delegated the responsibility for the provision of treatment services. More importantly, the workers' perception of task performance responsibility was not appreciably influenced by the notion of being provided adequate training to perform treatment services.