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Journal Issue: Preventing Child Maltreatment Volume 19 Number 2 Fall 2009

Creating Community Responsibility for Child Protection: Possibilities and Challenges
Authors: Deborah A. Daro Kenneth A. Dodge

How Can Community Be Used to Prevent Child Abuse?

A large body of theory and empirical research suggests that intervention at the neighborhood level is likely to prevent child maltreatment within families. The two components of intervention that appear to be most promising are social capital development and community coordination of individualized services. Social disorganization theory suggests that child abuse can be reduced by building social capital within communities—by creating an environment of mutual reciprocity in which residents are collectively engaged in supporting each other and in protecting children. Research regarding the capacity and quality of service delivery systems in communities with high rates of maltreatment underscores the importance of strengthening a community’s service infrastructure by expanding capacity, improving coordination, and streamlining service delivery.

Addressing social dilemmas through a combination of grassroots community action and coordinated professional individualized services is long-standing practice in both social work and public health.19 At the turn of the twentieth century, settlement house workers engaged immigrant communities to address collective inequalities such as labor conditions and educational opportunities as well as personal challenges such as caring for an infant and ensuring child safety.20 Less known but equally important were African American club women’s organizations that focused on building supportive communities for migrants from the South relocating to northern urban areas.21 More recently, urban renewal and efforts to reduce the adverse impacts of concentrated poverty have embraced community change initiatives designed both to improve context and to empower residents to use collective action to achieve common goals.22 Although these efforts have often had disappointing results,23 the power of community and context to change within-family behaviors and to enhance the benefits of individualized interventions continues to advance in many areas, including obesity, violence prevention, child welfare, and youth development.24

Community strategies to prevent child abuse and promote child protection have focused on creating supportive residential communities whose residents share a belief in collective responsibility to protect children from harm and on expanding the range of services and instrumental supports directly available to parents.25 Both elements—individual responsibility and a strong formal service infrastructure—are important. The challenge, however, is how to develop a community strategy that strikes the appropriate balance between individual responsibility and public investment.

In framing its recommendations for fostering community efforts to prevent child abuse, the U.S. Advisory Board noted that these two capacity-building strategies—a focus on community norms and a focus on coordinated, individualized service development—are not mutually exclusive and can evolve in mutually beneficial ways. For example, expanding services may begin by establishing community-based service centers, with multiple providers sharing a common facility (for example, neighborhood service hubs located in schools and community organizations such as New Jersey’s Family Success Centers).26 Not only do such centers offer residents a communal place to get services, they also draw together a diverse set of providers. As a result, families have access to a more comprehensive array of interventions that can simultaneously address multiple risk factors.27 Building and sustaining a network of service providers in a system of care requires participants to engage in a set of shared activities that can include establishing a common service philosophy, developing a shared assessment tool, or forming interdisciplinary teams to assess families and outline effective service plans.28 This type of joint casework and system planning creates a more coordinated and integrated service response and effectively engages both public and private agencies. As residents or program participants become engaged in the service planning process, they can empower themselves to assume ownership of the process and make personal investments in their community. Although this chain of events begins with the goal of enhancing services, it can also, with careful implementation and planning, enhance social investments and neighborliness.

Similarly, community change efforts may begin by focusing on social networks and building social capital and, in the process, expand service availability. For example, local residents and key stakeholders might be invited to participate in a community planning initiative that asks them to identify core concerns and to make a plan for resolving key issues. Implementing such plans often requires substantial residential investment. Such investment might involve supporting the reallocation of existing public resources or the development of new service options for all or a subset of local residents. In other cases, it might involve forming cooperatives to care for each other through existing community organizations or establishing new organizational entities. In such cases, service expansion both provides a tangible resource for the community and draws residents together in collective actions to achieve a shared common good. These dual functions are particularly evident when services include a parent-participation component, as is common in many early education programs, such as Head Start, or use a range of community-based institutions or organizations to create a context in which families can gather and build connections.29

Where one starts in this process is less important than recognizing that efforts to build social capital and expand service availability can be mutually reinforcing and equally important. Focusing too heavily on community capacity-building and normative change can leave families without the context and types of institutional supports essential for addressing complex social and personal needs. Focusing too heavily on system reform and service development may sustain an unproductive reliance on formal services. More important, changing only service capacity misses an opportunity to create the sense of mutual reciprocity needed for sustainable change and continuous support.