Abstract
not on my watch, these are children not lab rats
These are the words of the Social Development Minister Anne Tolley in New Zealand, who halted an experiment by her department which would have seen 60,000 children monitored for 2 years to test the effectiveness of an abuse prediction tool being implemented by social services.
This generally led to good press about the decision to ‘protect’ the children involved, but I want to suggest that this is symptomatic of a particularly problematic version of research exceptionalism – which holds that research is somehow inherently morally problematic.
The research proposed to include 60,000 children born this year in an ‘observational study’ to test the accuracy of a new predictive risk modelling tool. Ordinary interventions would be used if the children were felt to be at risk; what was proposed was simply comparing the outcomes to the predictions of the new modelling tool. As such, the research does not impose any additional risks on the children involved; at worst it fails to prevent some preventable harms.
However, unless the tool is verified to work we cannot know that whether it is effective at detecting or preventing children from being at risk; implementing such a scheme without such evidence would be deeply irresponsible. Furthermore, we would have no idea about the rates of false positives and over intervention that this tool might induce. Hence, doing the research would not be failing to prevent harm because at this point we are in equipoise and do not know whether the predictive model will actually minimize harm.
Research by itself is not morally problematic, and we should not treat it as such. Implementing policies without an evidence base is, however, morally problematic. In the rush to prevent the children being ‘lab rats’, the government has ended up gambling with their welfare on an uncertain tool without any way of telling whether or not it is working.
In this issue
Jay Marlowe and Martin Tolich discuss how we ought to reimagine community-based research in terms of regulation, David Dittrich considers the ethical issues in researching malicious activity in social networks such as Facebook, and the final article looks at collaborative research, this time in a developing world context.