Addressing child and youth maltreatment in the UK

In 2012 the Foundation worked with Child and Family Training and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation to organise a national conference entitled ‘Eradicating Child Maltreatment’. The national and international presentations were subsequently gathered into a text edited by Arnon Bentovim and Jenny Gray, and published in 2015 by Jessica Kingsley as a book entitled: Eradicating Child Maltreatment Evidence-Based Approaches to Prevention and Intervention Across Services.

Examining whether it is possible to eradicate child maltreatment, this book draws on on global research and evidence-based practice across health, social welfare and education. It describes a range of current approaches to prevention and early intervention and presents the case for a public health approach to overcoming child maltreatment. Further information is available here.

As a result a series of practitioner guides focusing on parenting, direct work with children and young people and the family were developed.

Modules from all the practitioner guides can be used in different combinations to meet the identified needs of the children, parents and caregivers and the family. See The Child & Training website for further information.

At a subsequent Parliamentary Briefing in February 2013 the question of how to eradicate child maltreatment was addressed.

We concluded that we need:

• good quality health, care and social systems to eradicate poverty, war and hunger;
• evidence based approaches to help develop universal and targeted ways of working to prevent the development of abusive parenting and its negative impact on children;
• and to apply this prevention approach to co-ordinate work between professionals to combat particular forms of abuse;
• extensive training in the recognition and response to child maltreatment, and assessment, analysis and decision making at the earlier and later stages of intervention using a multi-level approach.

Eradicating Child Maltreatment Evidence-Based Approaches to Prevention and Intervention Across Services

November 2014

The papers presented at the Conference on Eradicating Child Maltreatment in November 2012 and sponsored by the Foundation, have now been published as a book which can be purchased here.