Thumbnail Image
Item

The Power of Prevention: Building Community Capacity to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse

; 
Sommerfeld, Jeni
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
Child sexual abuse has been established as a significant problem in the United States with over 44,000 cases reported annually (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023). We lack agreement on how to address the problem, as approaches vary with scarce evidence, the individual level focus dominates, and systems are not well coordinated or integrated. Overall, we lack a unified solution that focuses on root causes and prevention to adequately address this pressing issue. Several key federal laws provide a prevention framework including the Child Abuse Protection and Enforcement Act of 2000 and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. In particular, the federal version of Erin’s Law, called the Child Sexual Abuse Awareness and Prevention Act, provides federal funding for educational programs about sexual abuse. However, prevention approaches have focused narrowly on educating children and have not fully leveraged opportunities to create societal prevention infrastructure and enlist the larger community in preventing abuse. This presentation aims to (1) highlight the Children’s Trust Fund of Missouri’s efforts to address the underfunded, under-researched challenge of preventing child sexual abuse, (2) share the results of these innovative efforts over the past five years, which have included testing new ideas, building partnerships, and generating evidence to inform what effective prevention can look like, and (3) spark new thinking and inspire fresh directions in practice, policy, and research for building a more coordinated, impactful, and sustainable approach to preventing child sexual abuse.
Description
Date
2025-08
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Center for Published Partnerships and Research, University of Kansas
Collections
Center for Public Partnerships & Research Scholarly Works
Show all metadata
Files
Thumbnail Image
PCAA 2025 CSAP Presentation.pdf
Adobe PDF, 2.86 MB
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Child sexual abuse prevention, Collaborative approach, Multi-tiered strategies, Evaluation
Citation
Barton, J., & Sommerfeld, J. (2025, August 12-14). The power of prevention: Building community capacity to prevent child sexual abuse [Conference presentation]. 2025 Prevent Child Abuse America National Conference, Portland, OR, United States. https://hdl.handle.net/1808/36301
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/36301
DOI
Embedded videos