What are some of the barriers and challenges in preventing child abuse in our communities? How can we reframe these challenges as opportunities?

Access:

Research shows that underserved and impoverished populations are more likely to reach out to the medical and faith communities than to social service or mental health providers. The lesson for those in the field of child abuse prevention is to reach out to these community medical professionals and faith-based leaders for partnership to offer support and provide specialized training. These people serve as the gatekeepers to our most underserved—and in some cases, most vulnerable—families (Neighbors and Taylor, 1985).

What can you do?    

It is our role to meet families where the need is, which may mean changing the way we reach out and the approaches we take to child abuse prevention practices. For example, parent trainings programs can assist by not only addressing parenting issues, but also advocating on behalf of clients to help meet their basic needs. This could include making referrals for housing assistance, locating and accessing food pantries, etc. 

Lack of Evaluation:

Only in recent years have we begun to see significant evaluation of child abuse prevention programs such as parent training. The outcomes generally gauge immediate results and often lack a long-term evaluation of consequences and results. This field is in the exploratory phase of research, and with the hope of greater implementation of parent training programs and more specialized program evaluation in the near future, this field will be in a better position to produce best practices approaches.

What can you do? 

If you have a program designed to prevent child abuse and neglect, we encourage the development and implementation of a thorough and comprehensive evaluation. Although long-term evaluation demands time, resources, and effort, when successfully completed, the results can be used to improve the program, serve as evidence of the program’s effectiveness when requesting funding, and even inform the future work in the field of child abuse prevention and intervention.

Disconnect:

Feedback from professionals in the field, such as Heather Risser, Ph.D., suggest a disconnect between our systems and institutions, resulting in a lack of communication, training, and screening processes. Perhaps building stronger and more structured connections and partnerships among systems and institutions—including, but not limited to, health, government, faith, education, and social services—could lead to better screening and preventative programming, intervention, and an overall reduction in child abuse and neglect.

What can you do?

Make building and maintaining cross-systems partnerships at the local, state, and even federal level a priority. These partnerships can open new doors for the agency and most importantly, networking with other community resources can help to meet the needs of families to prevent child abuse and neglect.

Changing Beliefs:

Research findings show that enhancing parenting skills, increasing knowledge of child development, and overall child abuse prevention is possible through parent training programs; however, changing attitudes, beliefs, and social norms is far more challenging. This requires addressing and possibly confronting what different people believe defines or makes a family, as well as the roles of parents and children—each concepts that have been learned and passed down for generations, or sometimes ingrained in cultural practices or traditions. How we can change attitudes and beliefs is a complex and multi-layered challenge faced by all of us as professionals. There is still much to learn and more research is needed to provide comprehensive recommendations for this issue, but we know that it must be examined with care and sensitivity as we move forward in the field of child abuse prevention research.

What can you do?

Be open to learning. Don’t make assumptions about your clients, but rather, try to learn from them about their beliefs and experiences. When you are developing programming, incorporate the unique circumstances of that culture’s youth, families, and communities, capitalizing on the strengths of their culture while addressing the particular challenges they face. Address the risk and causal factors that affect the broader community, and include community members when planning and implementing violence prevention programs (Children’s Safety Network National Injury and Violence Prevention Resource Center, 1999).