Child Maltreatment 

Overview 

Children thrive in safe, supportive and nurturing families and communities.  Far too many children in North Carolina are experiencing dangerous and damaging childhoods instead.  Action for Children works to promote understanding of the scope of child abuse and neglect and supports policies that will strengthen families so that all children grow up in safe, permanent families.

Did you know?  Every year, hundreds of youth age out of foster care without anyone to help them successfully transition to adulthood.

Main Areas of Work in Child Maltreatment

• Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention: Action for Children works in partnership with other organizations to ensure that all children grow up in safe, permanent families.
• Improving the Child Welfare System: Action for Children supports efforts to improve the child welfare system's ability to protect children, support families and reduce the risk of future harm. This includes improved data collection, incidence of abuse and neglect and outcomes for youth in foster care.
• Youth In Transition to Adulthood: Action for Children works to ensure that youth aging out of the foster care system have access to appropriate services and supports necessary to successfully transition into adulthood (i.e. health care coverage, housing, etc.).

Examples of Recent Child Maltreatment Policy Successes Include:

• Ensuring earlier and more thorough detection of child abuse by requiring hospitals and physicians to report incidents of non-accidental trauma injuries in children to law enforcement officials (Child Fatality Task Force);
  
• Ensuring abusers are held accountable by increasing the criminal penalty for misdemeanor child abuse and amending the felony child abuse criminal offense (Child Fatality Task Force);
  
• Saving the lives of hundreds of children with the founding of the North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force.  Since the founding of the Task Force, the child death rate has dropped more than 20%;
• Passage of the Safe Haven Law,increasing the likelihood that ill-prepared new mothers will leave their newborns in safe places; and
  
• Increasing national awareness of the greater likelihood of child abuse homicides in military families.

Signature Child Maltreatment Publication

More Than Safe: Achieving Positive Outcomes for Foster Youth concentrates on outcomes for children who have been involved in the system.  Specifically, the report focuses on children in N.C. Division of Social Services (DSS) custody by assessing stability in out-of-home placements, length of time in care and transitions when aging out of the foster care system.  The report examines outcomes in these areas by age, race and ethnicity.  The report also highlights promising practices being used in North Carolina to achieve the goals of safety and permanency.  Finally, the report provides recommendations on other successful strategies for achieving not only safety and permanence, but positive long-term results for all children involved in child protective services.

Click for all Child Maltreatment Publications