Staying ahead of child abuse An evaluation of preventive efforts

Many efforts have been made to prevent the occurrence or recurrence of child abuse. However, these preventive efforts have not yet resulted in a decrease of child abuse over time. Furthermore, review studies on the effectiveness of preventive interventions for child abuse showed only limited overall effects of the currently available interventions. The important question arising from this state of affairs is: what can be done to strengthen preventive efforts to stay ahead of child abuse? Seeking an answer to this question was the aim of the present dissertation. Specifically, the studies of this dissertation are focused on: identifying individual components of parent training programs (Chapter 2), home visiting programs (Chapter 3), and school-based prevention programs (Chapter 4 and 5) that are effective in preventing or reducing (the risk of) child abuse; examining current child abuse detection and reporting behavior of healthcare and education professionals and identifying potential improvements that may lead to better child abuse detection and reporting (Chapter 6); and exploring the potential of administrative child welfare data in evaluating the long-term benefits of preventive early childhood interventions (Chapter 7).