PLAN ELEMENTS: EVIDENCE-BASED STRATEGIES
Child abuse prevention programs can reduce the need for child welfare involvement and intervention by supporting and strengthening families. Choosing and implementing evidence-based practices that suit the needs of the families and communities you serve can inform your review of critical data, and define priority areas of action for aligning, pooling, and directing efforts and resources toward the achievement of prevention goals.
Resources for Evidenced-Based Strategies
Click the links below to investigate data for specific California counties.
Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect: A Technical Package for Policy, Norm, and Programmatic Activities
From the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Presents strategies that focus on preventing child abuse and neglect from happening in the first place as well as approaches to lessen the immediate and long-term harms of child abuse and neglect. The strategies are based on the best available evidence to help prevent child abuse and neglect:
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- Strengthening economic supports to families
- Changing social norms to support parents and positive parenting
- Providing quality care and education early in life
- Enhancing parenting skills to promote healthy child development
- Intervening to lessen harms and prevent future risk
Roadmap for Resilience: The California Surgeon General’s Report on Adverse Childhood experiences, Toxic Stress, and Health
From the Office of the California Surgeon General, 2020
Adverse Childhood Experiences and toxic stress comprise preventable root causes of some of the most intractable health and social challenges facing California. As California’s first-ever Surgeon General, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris has set a goal to cut Adverse Childhood Experiences and toxic stress in half in one generation. This report highlights evidence-based and promising practices that can be applied at county and community levels to break the inter-generational cycle of adversity, including a section on Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Prevention Strategies in Social Services.
Strategies to Prevent and Mitigate Childhood Adversity: A Literature Review
This literature review analysis focuses primarily on two questions:
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- What is the state of the evidence on interventions to prevent and mitigate childhood adversity among children 0 to 5 years of age in the clinical setting or with a clinical-community linkage?
- How should impact be measured effectively and responsibly given the scale of childhood adversity, the fact that outcomes accrue over a longer term, and real-world constraints
Evidence-Based Practice for Child Abuse Prevention
From the Child Welfare Information Gateway
The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) of 2018 calls for a greater emphasis on States providing child maltreatment prevention services that are rooted in promising, supported, or well-supported practices. This list of resources describe a broad array of child maltreatment prevention programs and strategies supported by scientific research that may be useful to states as they implement the FFPSA.