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Contemporary approaches to child protection have significant limitations and unintended consequences for children, parents, families, and communities. Statutory services struggle to engage with families who need support, to address the broader safety needs of children across the community, and to drive a culture of prevention of all forms of child maltreatment. There is a significant gap between prevalence, and cases of child maltreatment that come to the attention of statutory child protection authorities. Also, child protection services typically are not oriented or equipped to deal with non-familial abuse or harm to which children are exposed (such as extra-familial child sexual abuse, including in youth-serving organizations, harmful behavior from peers, and online grooming/abuse). In response, many now call for a new prevention-focused approach that draws on the learnings from public health. In this chapter, we examine public health approaches to preventing maltreatment and increasing safety and wellbeing for children and young people. We identify six core components of effective public health approaches. Population-wide prevention strategies to address known risks, using evidence-based interventions, leveraging existing universal service delivery platforms as the springboard for additional targeted services, can facilitate and improve child outcomes.

This chapter explores the experience of Tusla in introducing a commissioning framework for children and families in Ireland. The study focused on the pre-implementation phase aimed at building the foundations for the long-term sustainability of the agency’s commissioning approach. It includes reflections on the perceived expectations, the capacity of stakeholders to engage and potential challenges to embedding a commissioning framework among organisations delivering services for children and families. The chapter examines Tusla’s adoption of a partnership model to engage with external organisations as well as the internal restructuring and capacity-building activities undertaken within the agency. The authors also reflect on the value of the methodological approach and the role of the agency–researcher team partnership in generating useful research findings.

The well-being of children in informal kinship care and their caregivers is a growing concern globally. This study explored the lived experiences of 23 kin caregivers raising children left behind in rural Northeast China while their migrant parents worked and lived in cities. The findings show that the expected authority and responsibility caregivers carry sometimes conflict with their social role of being children's grandparents. Caregivers' feelings about and understandings of these roles are shaped through their social interactions in local communities. In view of their situation and caregivers' self-conscious attitudes towards utilizing local resources, future formal service provision and social support should take caregivers' viewpoints into account. These views are embedded in and shaped by their rural living context and relationships with community members who influence caregivers' perceptions and child rearing practices.

This chapter critiques historical and contemporary child protection approaches that are viewed as replicating the colonialist practices of child removal and destruction of families/parenting and communities. Using Australia and Canada as examples, it focuses upon three different sources of the disadvantage and distress that Indigenous communities typically experience: the impacts of Colonisation; intergenerational trauma; and the ongoing social, economic, legal and political inequalities that stem from deep-seated inequity. Public health approaches that are culturally safe and non-stigmatising, community controlled and which embrace early intervention and prevention are needed. Principles are provided for system reforms and innovations in policy and practice. The chapter promotes understanding of the complexity that exists, and why the solutions must be multi-level, and multi-facetted in order to turn around the over-representation of Western viewpoints that drives child protection and the resultant gross over-representation of Indigenous children in these systems. This chapter highlights that despite the scope and scale of issues being faced, Indigenous communities nonetheless have well-developed and resilient informal helping and relational networks that can facilitate healing approaches. Examples are given of community initiatives, strategies, programs and services that herald positive processes and outcomes for Indigenous children, families and communities.

This volume provides readers around the globe with a focused and comprehensive examination of how to prevent and respond to child maltreatment using evidence-informed public health approaches and programs that meet the needs of vulnerable children, and struggling families and communities. It outlines the system failures of contemporary forensically-driven child protection practice. Detailed guidance is provided about how to re-think earlier intervention strategies, and establish stronger and more effective programs and services that prevent maltreatment at the population level. Service user and stakeholder perspectives, particularly from marginalized groups including Indigenous peoples, highlight how public health approaches can better support families and keep children safe. Case studies from different countries grapple with the fraught nature of large system change and the various strategies needed to effect multi-level reforms. Presenting the reader with an array of innovative services used in different institutional and community context, this volume confronts the complex challenges found in implementing successful prevention programs that are aligned with diverse cultural and political environments and community expectations.

Much of the discourse regarding social care practice focuses on the differences between the various professions, practice fields, geographical, and organizational contexts involved in the provision of social care. This study surveyed Australian social care practitioners’ (N = 438) perceptions of influence on their practice and what similarities and differences existed in these perceptions. Eighteen influential factors were identified with minimal differences across the participants’ profession, practice field, organizational sector, or geographical context. These findings suggest that a common ground of experience exists that can be used as a basis for critical discussions and interdisciplinary practice and, thereby, provide a foundation for more consistent and integrated service delivery and outcomes.