Preventing Child Abuse Is a Multi-Faceted Challenge

Is there a way to prevent child abuse and neglect by creating a community-wide, coordinated approach that supports families and their children? To explore this question, The Duke Endowment designed a multi-million dollar project that included two pilot programs in Durham, North Carolina, and Greenville, South Carolina.

Insights

Strategies Show Promise for Preventing Abuse and Neglect

While coordinating a multitude of service providers, parents, neighbors and policymakers within a community is a monumental task, the good news is that initial positive outcomes occurred in both sites. In fact, several strategies within both projects show particular promise in preventing abuse and neglect and may be replicable in other areas or within other programs:

• Developing a common understanding across key public agencies regarding the appropriate response to parents facing challenges in caring for their children
• Engaging the faith community in meeting the child protection challenge within their congregations and the broader community
• Constructing early intervention systems to reach all newborns and their parents.
• Involving first responders (fire and police departments) in identifying families in need and connecting them to support
• Using existing community organizations and volunteers to create resource centers for families
• Mobilizing a pool of engaged volunteers to support families and raise public awareness around child protection

Five other key insights grew from these two projects.

1. Focusing on just one end of the spectrum won't work. Community-wide interventions that create safety for children will likely require a dual focus on changing the social/community environment and providing direct support to parents and their families. What we have gleaned so far from our two distinct grantee programs is that a focus on either end of the spectrum is not enough. Preventing child abuse within a community will take a concerted effort to create change at the policy, agency, community and personal levels.
2. Sticking to stated objectives in evaluating outcomes can be a tough call, but a necessary one. While there is a case to be made that any improvement in a parent's ability is a positive step toward preventing child abuse, The Duke Endowment has a responsibility to strictly adhere to a pre-defined, quantitative evaluation and outcomes in its demonstration projects. By doing so, the Endowment can collect and share hard data and clear findings about programs that can then be replicated in other communities. Without a clear understanding of how outcomes are achieved, it becomes much harder to replicate success.
3. Sharpening the focus is critical. In the life-cycle of community change projects, there is an important and necessary phase of experimentation using a wide variety of strategies. As data becomes available, however, greater focus should be imposed to maximize impact and enhance learning. Likewise, a great deal of attention to detail is required to obtain quality data that will lead to proof of effectiveness or the need to change a program and move on.
4. Broader indicators would have been better. In our evaluation, The Duke Endowment focused on changes in the numbers of reports of child abuse and neglect as the primary factor for determining success. In retrospect, our initiative would have been better served by including a broader collection of data closely related to child abuse, such as child development, immunization, "medical homes," school readiness and others.
5. Test key assumptions. Demonstration projects such as the two in this initiative can benefit from a small-scale test of key intervention assumptions before launching a large-scale comparative study. All parties should make sure the tactics planned for use will actually be practical, feasible and effective in a "real world" setting before widening to a full-fledged randomized trial. The Duke Endowment will incorporate this lesson learned into future grantmaking efforts.

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