Sexual abuse of children is a growing public health issue, with a substantial proportion of such abuse carried out by other children and young people. Schools and teachers are uniquely placed to prevent and intervene against harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) among children and young people. Yet, for schools to safeguard effectively, they are reliant…

Signs of Safety is a strengths-based approach to work with children and families where there are concerns about abuse or neglect. Signs of Safety is widely used in the UK and internationally, and there is a growing range of empirical research exploring its use within statutory children's social work. However, there is little research exploring…

Research increasingly points to the importance of developing integrated efforts to address crossover youth's educational outcomes (Herz et al., 2012; Leone & Weinberg, 2012); however, there is a gap between research and practice, particularly because coordinating interdisciplinary work is challenging among public child-serving agencies (Chuang…

Research highlights the importance of comprehensive, integrated approaches to improve the educational outcomes of crossover youth (youth involved in both child welfare and juvenile justice systems). One such approach is multisystem collaboration among professionals working in the education, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems. The lack of…

This paper examines the role of interprofessional collaboration in the identification and reporting of a child in need. Such collaboration is especially important in the context of the global pandemic caused by the novel Coronavirus disease of 2019, known as COVID-19. The child protection system must have the capacity and resources to respond to…

This article reports on research conducted in New Zealand that deals with early childhood education (ECE) centre working relationships with external organisations, including agencies, social services, and other education providers. The goal of the research was to identify the types of current collaboration, the nature of these relationships, and…

This short article offers a lawyer's perspective on working with immigrant youth, with three goals in mind. The first is to outline key features of the legal landscape immigrant children navigate in the United States, in order to provide contextual information of practical value in serving the young client/patient. The second goal is to use that…

Building professional relationships and collaboration are key components to providing effective quality services to infants, toddlers and families involved in the child welfare system. However, it seems many programs and systems continue to work independently of each other, perhaps to the detriment of our most vulnerable children and families.…

Families are diverse, and so are children's needs. For children in the child welfare system, there are many layers of regulations that serve to protect the family and child. These regulations can be challenging to navigate when a child is referred to early intervention services. The authors describe how their coordination team collaborated with…

The Safe Babies Court Team™ (SBCT) is a community engagement and systems-change approach focused on improving how courts, child welfare agencies, and related child-serving organizations work together, share information, and expedite services for young children in the child welfare system. Ten sites across four states received technical assistance…

Structural racism in the United States through federal and state legislation and public policies has systematically disadvantaged families of color leading to societal inequities and generations of families living in poverty. Further, racist ideas have led to the exclusion of families of color from systems of support that could prevent involvement…

There is a range of theoretical approaches which may inform the interface between child protection and adult mental health services. These theoretical perspectives tend to be focused on either child protection or mental health with no agreed integrating framework. The interface continues to be identified, in research, case management reviews and…

The Baby Leadership Learning Collaborative (Baby LLC) initiative is a leadership group committed to bridging relationships across service sectors to promote infant-early childhood mental health and to break the multigenerational cycle of risk often associated with early adversity and trauma. Baby LLC has guided an early relational health focus…

Cross-system collaborations are central to the provision of services for young children with disabilities who have experienced abuse. While multiple position papers and policy briefs emphasize and encourage these cross-system collaborations between the Early Intervention and Child Welfare systems, very limited empirical research has examined these…

This article is a critique of David Stoesz' descriptions of organizational issues in child welfare, and more specifically, the relationships between the U.S. Children's Bureau and the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute. The focus is on Stoesz perspectives and assessments of sub-entities (cartels) that are currently influencing funding and…