Child Welfare最新文献

This article reviews significant research findings regarding child maltreatment fatalities over the last thirty years. Notably, the article focuses on several important subsets of children who die from maltreatment, including young children, children reported to child protective services, and children who live in families with poor parental attachment, mental illness, substance abuse, and domestic violence. The article then sets forth three proposals for broadening the United States' approach to child protection and reducing child maltreatment fatalities.

In this article we examine risk factors for severe and fatal child maltreatment. These factors emerge from studies based on different data sources, including official child maltreatment data, emergency department and hospitalization data, death certificates, and data from child death review teams. The empirical literature reflects a growing effort to overcome the measurement uncertainties of any one individual data system. After review and reflection upon what is known, we consider how integrating this information can advance efforts to protect children, providing examples where the use and linkage of multiple sources of data may enhance surveillance, improve front-end decisionmaking, and support cost-effective research and evaluation.

This study presents preliminary outcomes for a problem-solving court improvement model, the Miami Child Well-Being Court (Miami-CWBC), which makes evidence-based clinical intervention and integration of the treating clinician's ongoing assessment and perspective central in the dependency court process. Records were reviewed for children adjudicated for maltreatment that completed treatment. Several promising findings suggest that this approach can help jurisdictions improve the lives of young children and their families' capacity to care for them.

In 2006, the Wisconsin Children's Trust Fund launched a pilot initiative called "Community Response," a program targeted to families reported for maltreatment but not served by child protective services due to insufficient child safety concerns. This article presents general information on the program, including the variation in models used by sites across the state, information on the families that were served by the program, and lessons learned from the experience that may guide practical decisions around the implementation of similar models elsewhere.

This study examined the trajectory of cognitive development over the first five years of adoptive placement among children adopted from foster care and how pre-adoption risk factors relate to this development. Overall, children's cognitive scores increased significantly, with the most rapid improvement occurring in the first year post-placement. By five years post-placement, children's mean cognitive and achievement scores were in the average range. Adoption is a positive intervention for children's cognitive development.

This article presents substantiation assessment criteria as an evidentiary framework for evaluating contested substantiation of child maltreatment in child protection practice. To accomplish this purpose, the article discusses contested substantiation and judicial outcomes in contested cases as a means of underscoring the criteria's evidentiary relevance. The article presents conceptually and empirically driven substantiation assessment criteria and highlights their relevance for guiding substantiation decisions, evidentiary hearings, and future research in contested substantiation of child maltreatment.

Child maltreatment prevention is traditionally conceptualized as a social services and criminal justice issue. Although these responses are critical and important, alone they are insufficient to prevent the problem. A public health approach is essential to realizing the prevention of child abuse and neglect. This paper discusses the public health model and social-ecology framework as ways to understand and address child maltreatment prevention and discusses the critical role health departments can have in preventing abuse and neglect. Information from an environmental scan of state public health departments is provided to increase understanding of the context in which state public health departments operate. Finally, an example from North Carolina provides a practical look at one state's effort to create a cross-sector system of prevention that promotes safe, stable, and nurturing relationships and environments for children and families.

This article presents a high-level overview of the complex issues, opportunities, and challenges involved in improving child safety and preventing child maltreatment fatalities. It emphasizes that improving measurement and classification is critical to understanding and preventing child maltreatment fatalities. It also stresses the need to reframe child maltreatment interventions from a public health perspective. The article draws on the lessons learned from state-of-the-art safety engineering innovations, research, and other expert recommendations presented in this special issue that can inform future policy and practice direction in this important area.