Disruption Through Reimagining Training of Professionals Working in Child Abuse and Neglect
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Disruption Through Reimagining Training of Professionals Working in Child Abuse and Neglect Desmond K. Runyan 1,2 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Actually ending the abuse and neglect of children will require doing something other than continuing the current approaches to child protection. This commentary addresses suggestios made in 3 papers submitted as part of a competition to garner proposals for disrupting the current system for better outcomes. Three papers were submitted suggesting changes to the current training of child protection professionals. A fourth paper was submitted directly to the journal addressing preparation of social work students in the area of prevention. While each paper proposs doing business differently in training, the question arises "Can training lead to enough disruption to move us toward ending child maltreatment in our lifetimes. Keywords Training . Disruption . Primary prevention . Child abuse . Child neglect
Statistically, any individual child is likely safer from abuse or neglect today than at any previous time in 7500 generations of human history. Using the metric of incidence rates, progress toward ending child physical and sexual abuse has dramatically improved in the USA in a remarkably short time (Finkelhor et al. 2018). With international public and professional attention to programs addressing child abuse, the rest of the globe is coming on board as well (Dubowitz et al. 2018). On the scale of generations, the world is just four generations removed from the first efforts to legislate prohibitions against child labor (Paul 2017) and just two generations from the beginnings of widespread professional recognition and legislative responses to the problem of child abuse (ten Bensel et al. 1997). Within the last generation, we have seen a dramatic reduction in reports of child physical and sexual abuse in the USA, along with striking reductions in teen pregnancy and domestic
* Desmond K. Runyan [email protected]
1
Kempe Center, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, USA
2
Departments of Social Medicine and Pediatrics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 4301 Fearrington Post, Pittsboro, NC, USA
International Journal on Child Maltreatment: Research, Policy and Practice
violence (Runyan et al. 2020). Similar reductions may be occurring in other wealthy nations (Degli Esposti et al. 2019). Nevertheless, the global population of children has grown exponentially, and thus, the burden of children abused or neglected has grown. The world’s population was only an estimated 170 million in the year 1. A.D. (Worldometer 2020) grew to 1.15 billion children in 1962, and totals 1.9 billion today (Gapminder 2020). Child survival has risen to nearly 95% compared with a historical estimate of only 50% (Roser 2019). The rates of child abuse appear to be highest in low- and middle-income countries where recognition of the problem has been lower (Tran et al. 2017; Hillis et al. 2016; Runyan et al. 2010). Despite evidence of reductions in rates of
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