Emerging Practices in the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect

The Office on Child Abuse and Neglect (OCAN) initiated the Emerging Practices in the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect project in FY 2001 to harvest new information on programs and initiatives operating around the country for the prevention of child maltreatment, and to disseminate that information to the professional community. Under the guidance of an Advisory Group of experts in the field of child abuse prevention, including both practitioners and researchers, OCAN and Caliber Associates developed and implemented a program nomination strategy to learn more about current effective and innovative prevention programs. Nominations of programs and initiatives were accepted from across the field from June through August 2002. The pool of submitted nominations was peer reviewed by members of the Advisory Group in October and November 2002.

A report on the Emerging Practices project was released in April 2003. The report begins with an overview of maltreatment, which briefly describes existing national models of prevention, and is followed by the results of the nomination process for effective and innovative child maltreatment prevention programs. The report concludes with a discussion of the limits of existing knowledge about the effectiveness of prevention, the need to expand efforts to understand the performance and impact of prevention programs, and observations about this process and recommendations for next steps. The report is posted at the National Clearinghouse for Child Abuse and Neglect's Prevention Month 2003 web site and can be reached through the following link:

http://www.calib.com/nccanch/prevention/emerging/index.cfm