Tarrant County has more reported child abuse cases than any other county in Texas, according to a report published in 2015. That is not a statistic to brag about, but rather, should stir us to empathy and anger. How can we change this reality? How can we help heal the hurting? How can we better educate parents? How can we stop abusers from victimizing others?
The Center for the Prevention of Child Maltreatment was founded in 2014 to find answers to these very problem — and is the focus of our January Non-Profit Profile.
The center innovatively uses risk terrain modeling, a criminology risk analysis program, to predict specific areas where child maltreatment will occur and leverages the use of consumer analytics to effectively target appropriate resources based on demographic profiling.
Dr. Daley, the co-founder and executive director, is heading up several coordinating initiatives at the center including a city wide collaborative for safe infant sleep, early detection of child maltreatment training, foster and adoption family recruitment, and a survivor resiliency social media campaign.
Child maltreatment includes all forms of physical and emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect, and exploitation that results in actual or potential harm to the child’s health, development, or dignity. The youngest children, age zero to three, are the most vulnerable. The center is working to make North Texas one of the safest places to raise a child. Its goals include:
- Identifying children at risk prior to injury.
- Defining practical, actionable protective factors.
- Narrowing the target population to optimize utilization of prevention resources.
- Encouraging voluntary community participation in prevention.
- Collaborating with the regional service provider community.
- Educating medical providers, first responders, and the community on early recognition of child maltreatment.
While the center is more of a research firm, it does have a free online early detection of child maltreatment available at its website, as well as safe infant sleep materials that the collaborating hospitals are using. It is also developing a maltreatment survivor social media support community called Survivors Like Me, you can follow on Facebook.
You can volunteer at Cook Children’s by contacting Volunteer Services here. Donations are accepted through the Foundation’s webpage. To follow The Center for the Prevention of Child Maltreatment on Facebook, click here.
