Enhancing Collaborative Practice between Domestic Violence Staff and Child Protective Services Staff.

Child Protective Services (CPS) and domestic violence centers are two institutions dedicated to ensuring the safety of families. Child maltreatment and domestic violence often occur within the same families, thus CPS and domestic violence centers share many mutual clients. Despite their shared goals, CPS and domestic violence centers have different service philosophies and procedures that can come into conflict when working with families who are involved with CPS and also receiving domestic violence services. This new brief describes the lessons learned from the first year of a pilot initiative in Texas that aims to increase collaboration to better serve families called Project S.A.F.E. (Author abstract)