Advances in Child Abuse Prevention Knowledge: The Perspective of New Leadership

This book addresses new avenues in child abuse prevention research that will expand our capacity to protect children. These new avenues result from the emergence of new research methods made possible through technologic advances, an understanding of the benefits of cross-disciplinary research and learning and the entrance of many young scholars in the field. The book explores what these avenues produce in terms of clarifying the complex problems that continue to limit our progress in addressing child maltreatment and promoting optimal child development. Specifically, the book showcases individual contributions from emerging scholars and show how these scholars use the frameworks and advanced methods to shape their work, apply their findings and define their learning communities. The book highlights the benefits of creating explicit and extended opportunities for researchers to network across disciplines and areas of interest.

The primary authors are young scholars from universities across the U.S. who have worked together as Fellows of the Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being – seeking innovations to prevent child abuse. Through this program, the Fellows have engaged in a robust self-generating learning network designed to create the type of ongoing professional linkages and decision-making style that fosters an interdisciplinary and team planning approach to research design and policy formation.

Deborah Daro is a Senior Fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. She has played a key role in the development and assessment of evidence-based home visitation programs for the past 30 years and has worked with Federal administrators and Congressional leaders in crafting guidelines for Federal Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Program (MIECHV) passed as part of the Affordable Care Act of 2010. She is considered one of the nation’s leading experts in the area of child abuse prevention and served on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Child Maltreatment Research, Policy and Practice for the Next Decade. With over 30 years of experience in evaluating child abuse treatment and prevention programs and child welfare reform efforts, Dr. Daro’s research and writing have focused on developing reform strategies that embed individualized, targeted prevention efforts within more universal efforts to alter normative standards and community context. She also is examining strategies to create more effective partnerships among public child welfare agencies, community-based prevention efforts and informal support systems. In 2004, Dr. Daro received the Anne Cohn Donnelly Child Abuse Prevention Leadership Award from Prevent Child Abuse America in recognition of her success in translating research finding into measureable improvements in service delivery and public policy reforms. She has served as President of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children and as Treasurer and Executive Council member of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. Dr. Daro holds a Ph.D. in Social Welfare and a Masters degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley.

Anne Cohn Donnelly is a Senior Lecturer in Social Enterprise at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She has taught nonprofit management with a focus on board governance in the school’s Executive Education courses as well as its graduate programs. She established the school’s Board Fellows Program and served as its founding Academic Director. Dr. Donnelly was the Executive Director of Prevent Child Abuse America (formerly the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse) from the fall of 1980 though the summer of 1997. She has received numerous distinctions from her peers for her work including the Vincent de Francis Award, the Brandt Steele Award, the International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect Distinguished Service Award, the Outstanding Professional Award from the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, and award bearing her name from Prevent Child Abuse America. Dr. Donnelly received a B.A. degree in sociology from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in Medical Sociology from Tufts University and both the M.P.H. and D.P.H. degrees in health administration and planning from the University of California (Berkeley) School of Public Health.

Lee Ann Huang is a Researcher at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, where her work focuses primarily on evaluating and managing child abuse and neglect prevention initiatives. She has expertise in qualitative research methods that focus on implementation and process components, such as site visits, in-person and telephone interviews and focus groups. Ms. Huang is also adept at utilizing various quantitative methods and statistical tools to determine program impacts. Ms. Huang is currently the Project Director for Chapin Hall’s work on the MIECHV Technical Assistance Coordinating Center. She also manages the Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being, an initiative of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Ms. Huang has a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in social work from Texas Christian University.