REVIEW Community sidelined: The loss of community focus in differential response Ashleigh Delaye | Vandna Sinha McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Correspondence Vandna Sinha, Centre for Research on Children and Families, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2A7. Email: vandna.sinha@mcgill.ca Abstract Differential response (DR) first emerged as one component of a child welfare paradigm that emphasized the need to engage communities in supporting families and children. However, the role of community in differential response has received little attention in recent literature. We examine the intellectual history of these ideas, tracing changes in the framing of community engagement in relation to DR over time. We find that attention to community has been sidelined by an increasingly narrow definition of DR that focuses on the existence of an alternative approach to engaging with screened in families, rather than the building of community support networks. There is currently no clear and explicit theoretical framework connecting community engagement to DR. We find that the absence of such a framework has given rise to a series of conceptual debates about the definition and purpose of DR. The development of a literature that elucidates the topic of community engagement in DR may serve to resolve some of these debates. KEYWORDS child protection, child welfare, community, differential response, Waldfogel 1 | INTRODUCTION Differential response (DR) has been widely adopted and studied in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Britain, and in the United States (Conley, 2007; Dumbrill, 2006; Gilbert et al., 2009; Hughes, Rycus, Saunders‐Adams, Hughes, & Hughes, 2013). It is an approach to child welfare that distinguishes between cases of suspected child maltreat- ment that present low‐ or moderate‐risk of harm and those that pres- ent high‐risk factors. By differentiating between these types of cases, lower‐risk and moderate‐risk families can be streamed to an alternative, non‐investigative service track (Trocmé, Knott, & Knoke, 2003; Conley & Duerr Berrick, 2010, p. 282). The goal in responding to these families is not to substantiate reports of maltreatment but to ascertain how family life can be improved by services that family members can access in their immediate surroundings. In contrast, high‐risk cases are streamed to traditional child welfare services involving investigation‐oriented interventions aimed at protecting children from harm. In a traditional child welfare approach, child maltreatment reports that do not meet the threshold for intervention are screened out with- out referral to services that the family can voluntarily access (Gilbert et al., 2009). Cases that remain open for ongoing services typically involve physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional or psychological abuse, and neglect—especially deprivation, failure to seek medical care for a child, or child abandonment (Fuller, 2014; Gilbert et al., 2009; Mathews & Kenny, 2008; Swift, 2011). In these cases, child welfare interventions can include placing the child in out‐of‐home care or allowing the child to stay in the home while the family receives inten- sive services (Fuller, 2014; Waldfogel, 2009b). The principles tied to the DR approach at its inception were that low‐ to moderate‐risk fam- ilies—perhaps those for whom poverty, addictions, unemployment or underemployment, lack of child care, or other family stressors are pri- mary concerns—can benefit from more supportive, assessment‐based responses that are tailored to the needs of the family and are accessi- ble to families in their communities (Waldfogel, 2009a). Although there is evidence that the subject of community, central to DR at inception, is integrated into DR programming on the ground, a review of the American literature—which is the focus of this paper— reveals that recent DR literature has focused largely on operations and implementation from an agency perspective. Some of key debates in this context include ongoing discussion about whether DR ade- quately protects the safety of children (English, Wingard, Marshall, Orme, & Orme, 2000; Loman & Siegel, 2013, 2015; Winokur, Ellis, Drury, & Rogers, 2015), the cost of DR programs compared to DOI: 10.1111/cfs.12351 1338 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Child & Family Social Work. 2017;22:1338–1347. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cfs