The Maltreated Child

A comprehensive guide to empirically supported approaches for child protection cases The Wiley Handbook of What Works in Child Maltreatment offers clinicians, psychologists, psychiatrists and other professionals an evidence-based approach to best professional practice when working in the area of child protection proceedings and the provision of assessment and intervention services in order to maximize the well-being of young people. It brings together a wealth of knowledge from expert researchers and practitioners, who provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary work informing theory, assessment, service provision, rehabilitation and therapeutic interventions for children and families undergoing care proceedings. Coverage includes theoretical perspectives, insights on the prevalence and effects of child neglect and abuse, assessment, children’s services, and interventions with children, victims and families.

This Handbook examines core questions still remaining in the field of child maltreatment. It addresses major challenges in child maltreatment work, starting with the question of what child abuse and neglect is exactly. It then goes on to examine why maltreatment occurs and what its consequences are. Next, it turns to prevention, treatment and intervention, as well as legal perspectives. The book studies the issue from the perspective of the broader international and cross-cultural human experience. Its aim is to review what is known, but even more importantly, to examine what remains to be known to make progress in helping abused children, their families, and their communities.

Child Maltreatment, Third Edition, by Cindy Miller-Perrin and Robin Perrin, is a thoroughly updated new edition of the first textbook for undergraduate students and beginning graduate students in this field. The text is designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to child maltreatment by disseminating current knowledge about the various types of violence against children. By helping students understand more fully the etiology, prevalence, treatment, policy issues, and prevention of child maltreatment, the authors hope to further our understanding of how to treat child maltreatment victims and how to prevent future child maltreatment.

Child maltreatment has enormous costs, both at the individual and the societal level. Today, thanks to increased knowledge and awareness, we are better equipped than ever to prevent the trauma of child abuse and to intervene to help maltreated children. Yet, fundamental questions remain. How and why does normal development go awry in maltreated children? Why are some children more affected than others, and what are the processes that promote or undermine resilience? How can clinicians and child protection professionals help neglected and abused children and their families in the most timely and effective manner? This book explains and summarises the science of developmental psychopathology for clinicians and other professionals who work with maltreated children and those at risk. The authors focus particularly on how maltreatment differentially affects children at key stages of their lives, ranging from infancy to early adulthood, so that clinicians can be aware of age specific vulnerabilities. This handy guide encourages its readers to look beyond immediate presenting problems to better understand the needs and experiences of their young clients.

This volume provides an overview of the research describing the effects of child maltreatment on mental health, cognitive and social-emotional development. It offers descriptions of selected empirically based treatments (EBTs) written by scholars associated with its development, training, or research on its effectiveness. Each contributor presents the theoretical foundation of the EBT and evidence of its efficacy, describes the treatment process and illustrates this process with a case study of its use with a maltreated child, and discusses possible limitations. Following the chapters describing the interventions, the editors address key issues of the dissemination and implementation of these EBTs. They describe the strategies the selected interventions have used to ensure treatment fidelity in training and dissemination from the perspective of implementation science’s core components of implementation. The challenges of implementing EBTs, and the difficulty of fitting protocol to the reality of clinical practice in community mental health settings are also discussed. This volume offers a central source of information for students and practitioners who are seeking effective interventions to address problems associated with child maltreatment.

Each year, child protective services receive reports of child abuse and neglect involving six million children, and many more go unreported. The long-term human and fiscal consequences of child abuse and neglect are not relegated to the victims themselves -- they also impact their families, future relationships, and society. In 1993, the National Research Council (NRC) issued the report, Under-standing Child Abuse and Neglect, which provided an overview of the research on child abuse and neglect. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research updates the 1993 report and provides new recommendations to respond to this public health challenge. According to this report, while there has been great progress in child abuse and neglect research, a coordinated, national research infrastructure with high-level federal support needs to be established and implemented immediately. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research recommends an actionable framework to guide and support future child abuse and neglect research. This report calls for a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to child abuse and neglect research that examines factors related to both children and adults across physical, mental, and behavioral health domains--including those in child welfare, economic support, criminal justice, education, and health care systems--and assesses the needs of a variety of subpopulations. It should also clarify the causal pathways related to child abuse and neglect and, more importantly, assess efforts to interrupt these pathways. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research identifies four areas to look to in developing a coordinated research enterprise: a national strategic plan, a national surveillance system, a new generation of researchers, and changes in the federal and state programmatic and policy response.