About Us
The Child Maltreatment Policy Resource Center was founded and is operated by the Institute for Human Services (IHS) in Columbus, Ohio.
The Center’s leaders, staff members, and contributors have advanced professional degrees in psychology, social work, child development, public administration, law, medicine, and public policy. Together they have many decades of experience in policy analysis and development, direct practice, academic education, research, and in-service training in the child maltreatment and child protection fields.
The Center is built on principles of intellectual integrity, moral courage, and collaboration to help us create and sustain a solid, ethical foundation for our collective work with vulnerable children and their families.
Our Mission
The Child Maltreatment Policy Resource Center promotes safety, justice, and permanent families for children of all ages who have experienced, or who are at high risk of abuse and neglect.
The Center was created as a think tank to drive proactive change in both public policy and direct practice in the child maltreatment and child protection fields. We do this by identifying and analyzing the most pressing problems and dilemmas confronting the field and applying the best available evidence to help resolve them.
Our products include policy white papers, issues in brief, practice guidance, education, and training opportunities for policymakers and practitioners in the professions responsible for serving maltreated children and their families – social work, psychology, medicine, law, law enforcement, and education.
Our Audience
Since our purpose is to effect change in the child maltreatment practice field, our intended audience consists of “early adopters,” so named by Everett Rogers in his work, Diffusion of Innovations (1962).
Early adopters recognize the need for change and improvement, and they embrace change opportunities. They are generally leaders who are comfortable with new ideas and are motivated to commit energy to starting and sustaining change initiatives.
Our target audience also includes critical thinkers who understand the complexity of the work they do and the challenges they are likely to encounter as they work. Their goal is not just to “do something.” It is to do the “right thing.”
Anyone involved in serving abused and neglected children and their families can be an early adopter, including direct practitioners, supervisors, managers and executives, academics, researchers, policymakers, caregivers, and citizen advocates.
While early adopters bring commitment and motivation to their work, they can’t be effective without accurate, solid, unbiased, and empirically supported information to guide their activities.
The Center endeavors to provide this guidance to underpin strategic system change.
Promoting Best Practices Through Best Available Evidence
The child maltreatment field uses the term “best practices” to reflect a commitment to providing the most effective services possible to children and their families.
The term itself reminds us there are both more effective and less effective helping practices, and that some poorly conceived practices may be profoundly harmful to the people they are supposed to help.
The right decisions for any family must always be individualized within the broader family and environmental context, and they should be made by well-educated and competent professionals who understand each family’s unique situation and needs, in collaboration with family members.
However, universal principles of best practice do exist. They are derived from decades of empirical research, logic, and practice wisdom in multiple professional disciplines. The combined data from all of these sources is called “best available evidence.” Ethically and practically, this body of information should always guide and shape our responses to child abuse and neglect.
The hallmark of the Child Maltreatment Policy Resource Center is our transparency about the best available evidence underpinning our work. We articulate the sources, strengths, and limitations of the evidence we use; we point out flaws in the evidence and logic underpinning poor and ineffective practices; and we identify gaps in knowledge that make defining best practices far more challenging.
