Reducing the Risk of Child Maltreatment: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The future of prevention efforts is embedded in a complex web of interacting policy and practices playing out at national and state political levels far removed from focused discussions about prevention of child maltreatment. Decisions about the future of health care, family leave policies to care for ill children or maternity/paternity leave, access to child care and early childhood education, and social service spending policies will have immense impact on the community and family environments in which children are raised and upon which they depend. While adequately addressing these core social issues will not prevent child maltreatment across the board, removing these social supports will surely increase the pressures on families in ways that facilitate maltreatment. On a more focused level, there is much work left to be done in spreading and taking to scale what we already know works, those highest rated evidence based interventions designed to reduce the risk of abuse and neglect. We can also expect some current promising practices to be elevated to higher levels of evidence once they have been properly studied and released through the peer review literature, adding to the menu of quality programs for communities to choose from. But more evidence based practices are of little value if they are not available for those who need them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)