Alleviation of Child Abuse

Over the last decades, the formulation and implementation of various strategic approaches have not diminished the prevalence of child abuse in American society. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, protective service agencies dealt with three million referrals and found instances of child abuse and neglect among 826,000 children in 1999. Even the slight decrease in the reported rate of child abuse from 13 per 1,000 children in 1998 to 11.8 per 1000 children in 1999 was not a significantly positive result. This statistic did not take into account the fact that child abuse generates long-term effects that will not only adversely affect children, but also future generations of adults and society (cited in Reynolds and Robertson 3). Due to the complexity of the problem of child abuse, its alleviation requires a multi-pronged approach that addresses the needs and challenges confronted by families (both general and at-risk), professionals, policymakers and society in general. Only by adopting multiple perspectives and a comprehensive stance, which acknowledge the "psychosocial, medical and legal aspects" (Theodore and Runyan 168), can this problem be overcome. Therefore, in the remainder of this paper, diverse strategies targeted at the aforementioned groupsùfamilies, professionals, policymakers and societyùwill be described and discussed.

In alleviating child abuse at the familial level, Bethea highli

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on plans, with the guidance and assistance of professionals. Consisting of three distinct phases, family members and professionals first meet to describe the problem of child abuse in the family and exchange information with one another. During the second phase, family members, along with a selected number of professionals (in conformity to the wishes of the family members) make decisions about dealing with the child abuse. The outcome of the decision-making process should be a detailed description of specific goals and tasks, along with ways of evaluating progress made in achieving the goals. In the final phase, participants provide an evaluation of the process that is helpful in enabling researchers to assess the effectiveness of the model (Sieppert, Hudson and Unrau 382-3). In their study, Sieppert et al. conducted family conferences with 23 families over a ten-month period. A significant majority of the participants (85 percent) asserted that they had the freedom to express their perspectives and over 75 percent stated that they played integral roles in the decision-making process. Almost three-fourth of the respondents were also satisfied with the plans made during the conference (388). According to Hughes, this co
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Approximate Word count = 3101
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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