Agent-based modeling and simulation of child maltreatment and child maltreatment prevention

Abstract

This paper presents an agent-based model that simulates the dynamics of child maltreatment and child maltreatment prevention. The developed model follows the principles of complex systems science and explicitly models a community and its families with multi-level factors across the social ecology. Each agent includes behavioral/cognitive modeling to account for the behavioral/cognitive process of child maltreatment. Simulation of child maltreatment prevention is also supported to evaluate the impacts of different prevention/intervention strategies. We describe the model and show experiment results to evaluate and demonstrate the agent-based model.