In the context of high-conflict separations, forensic evaluations concerning children and parental capacity play a decisive role in shaping decisions that directly impact their lives.

For this reason, the issue of professional competence cannot be considered secondary.

Assessing a child within complex family dynamics requires:
– highly specialized training
– specific expertise in child development
– the ability to distinguish between conflict and dysfunctional dynamics
– the use of validated tools and reliable methodologies

In such contexts, underlying conditions may emerge that go far beyond the surface of parental conflict and require a proper clinical and specialized assessment.

In the absence of these prerequisites, the risk is concrete:
insufficiently grounded evaluations may influence decisions that directly affect the health, development, and overall well-being of children.

Several international contributions have highlighted how, in high-conflict contexts, systematic errors in interpreting family dynamics may occur, with significant consequences for child protection.

This is also a matter of professional responsibility:
where adequate expertise or rigorous approaches are lacking, forms of professional mismanagement may arise.

This is not merely about questioning the role of the forensic expert,
but about critically examining the adequacy of the evaluation model itself.

International reports – including the United Nations observations on Switzerland (2021) – have highlighted a shortage of adequately trained specialists in the field of child and adolescent mental health.

In this context, child custody evaluations are, in practice, often conducted by forensic psychology professionals who may not always have specialized training in developmental age or in clinical-diagnostic assessment.

In high-conflict situations, a predominantly forensic approach may therefore fail to capture the full complexity of a child’s needs, particularly when underlying issues require a clinical and health-based evaluation.

There is a concrete risk that such assessments rely primarily on subjective experiences, narratives, and interpretations, rather than on objective and verifiable clinical data.

This raises a broader concern:
when signs related to a child’s health and development are present, greater involvement of medical and specialized expertise becomes essential to ensure a comprehensive, rigorous, and protection-oriented assessment.

In other words, there is a need to bring the focus back, where appropriate, to the domain of mental health and clinical evaluation, as a fundamental basis for decisions concerning children.

📍 Palace of Justice, Lugano, Canton Ticino (Switzerland)

References:

• Report of the Blue-Ribbon Commission on Forensic Custody Evaluations, delivered to Governor Kathy Hochul, December 2021
• Committee on the Rights of the Child – Concluding observations on Switzerland, October 22, 2021