Pictures in the classroom: can teachers and mental health professionals identify maltreated children's drawings?

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether teachers and mental health professionals are able to identify drawings produced by maltreated children, at a level greater than chance, when these drawings are presented to them at the same time as drawings created by non-maltreated matched control children. In a relatively small study, a group of 33 mental health practitioners (MHPs) and a group of 10 teachers were shown sets of drawings and asked whether they could identify the maltreated children's drawings. It was found that there was no significant difference between mental health practitioner and teacher groups in identifying child maltreatment from Favourite Kind of Day Drawings (FKDs) (Manning, 1987) and Kinetic Family Drawings (KFD) (Burns and Kaufman, 1970). The results also point to the KFD as a more reliable drawing technique, but only when it is known that maltreatment is definitely present, and in a situation with no a priori knowledge it should not be used for the identification of maltreatment. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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