Child welfare & family services

The most-studied predictive risk score in child welfare — and evidence that the human override layer is where equity was won or lost.

A child-welfare risk tool that flagged thousands of children at extreme risk while missing actual fatalities — discontinued in 2017.

An AFST-derived screening tool that Oregon shelved in 2022 amid equity concerns — a rare pre-crisis discontinuation.

A council's vendor-built family-profiling pilot, run without telling the families, quietly scrapped in 2019 after data-quality problems meant it surfaced few genuinely new cases.

A predictive model scores every newborn in the county to offer prevention services, not investigations — benevolent intent riding on a maltreatment-removal prediction, delivered by mandated reporters behind a deliberate firewall.

An independently-trialed, race-excluded child-welfare screening score that a rigorous evaluation found sped decisions but barely changed outcomes — because workers heeded only the extremes.

A child-welfare risk tool whose Florida success was the vendor's own claim — endorsed by a federal commission and copied across states years before an independent evaluation found it changed nothing.

Dutch police risk-profiling that scored children under 12 — including those recorded only as victims — from up to twelve years of police records; the government's own pilot evaluation found no well-functioning instrument in any of its four regions.

A population-scale police-and-council database whose child-exploitation risk models were quietly switched off as 'not fit for operational use' — leaving auditors unable to find the code, the variables, or any record of why.

A national predictive-risk score that ranks children for early-help outreach from data families gave to receive benefits — its operational accuracy never published, its independent bias audit never disclosed.

A proprietary child-abuse risk model that a 95.6% false-positive rate stopped in retrospective testing — shelved before it ever scored a live case.

A government-funded evidence centre built child-welfare prediction models, pre-registered a success bar, missed it on every model, and published the failure — the rare case where the evidence gate fired before deployment.

A national child-maltreatment risk model a minister stopped before it ever ran — among the Atlas's never-deployed tools, the one halted by an accountable authority rather than by a test result.

A whole-population child-vulnerability model halted in development and never run — undone not by its accuracy but by legal basis, legitimacy, and an unrelated data breach.