Formal university-child welfare partnerships offer a unique opportunity to begin to fill the gaps in the child welfare knowledge base and link child welfare services to the realities of practice. With resources from a knowledge mobilization grant, a formal partnership was developed between the University of Toronto, clinicians, policy analysts, and researchers from child welfare agencies across...

BACKGROUND Across the developing world, countries are increasingly adopting the integrated community case management of childhood illnesses (iCCM) strategy in efforts to reduce child mortality. This intervention's effectiveness is dependent on community adoption and changes in care-seeking practices. We assessed the implementation process of a theory-driven community dialogue (CD) intervention ...

Parental divorce is known to be associated with poor child health in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the great diversity in social and cultural practices, including marital ones, across the subcontinent likely yields substantial variation in the prevalence of divorce, which in turn could moderate its consequences for children. In this paper, we use Demographic and Health Survey data from 31 Africa...

Traditionally, the American child welfare system intervenes in cases of evident and severe maltreatment. Families in need of help, but who have not reached a crisis, are excluded from typical services. Some suggest that if these families were served, few would be rereferred to the child welfare system. California's Differential Response (DR) has three tracks, of which ''Track 1'' targets famili...

A central issue in the development of family law and child protection in this country has been the right of the state to intervene in family life. The reporting laws, which were developed in the 1960s, made it mandatory for any citizen, including professionals, to report child abuse (physical and sexual) to the authorities. These laws have fundamentally altered the relationship between the clin...

With the shrinking funds for child welfare allocated primarily to investigation and foster care, prevention and treatment services for child maltreatment (CM) are increasingly nonexistent, inaccessible, or inappropriate. Prior research on helpseeking and service utilization has given scant attention to maltreating and at-risk families, who pose special challenges for service delivery for severa...

Katie D. Rosanbalm, Ph.D., is a research scholar with the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. Dr. Rosanbalm is trained as a child clinical and quantitative psychologist. Her work focuses on child maltreatment prevention and early parenting. Her projects have included the development of a standardized universal risk screening and referral process for low-income pregnant women,...