Child Protection

Human trafficking, particularly sex trafficking, has become a point of emphasis in the child welfare field due to the high risk of exploitation for children and youth involved with child welfare. The resources provided by Child Welfare Information Gateway will help professionals to better understand the interplay of child welfare and human trafficking and develop comprehensive responses that assist victims and potential victims.

Get a detailed overview of unregulated transfers of custody, covering risk of harm, screening, ICPC violations, and more.

Listen to this podcast to learn how family poverty can increase the likelihood of child maltreatment. Public assistance agencies administer the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program to provide financial support and employment assistance to low-income families. To reduce a family's risk of maltreatment and involvement in the child welfare system, child maltreatment prevention programs are being offered to TANF families.

Community-based child abuse and neglect prevention efforts often offer resources and supports to strengthen and stabilize families. In some states, these efforts are not managed through the child welfare system. Listen to 'Prevention: Delivering Services Through Education'  and learn how the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services manages its network of Family Support Centers through its Office of Child Development and Early Learning.

 Understanding how adverse childhood experiences, trauma, brain development, and resilience intersect is important to the health outcomes of children and families. Listen to this podcast to and learn about the protective factors framework and how Prevent Child Abuse Iowa serves as a community-based effort to promote and build understanding, trauma-informed communities.

By effectively partnering with organizations that support families, child welfare agencies can empower a system of services that improve prevention outcomes. But effective community collaboration requires that the type and level of services are available to meet the specific needs of the families within the community.

Protective factors are conditions or attributes in individuals, families, communities, or the larger society that, when present, can mitigate or eliminate risk and can increase health and well-being. Protective factors come in the forms of resources, supports, or coping strategies that allow parents to parent effectively, even under stress.

Protective factors are conditions or attributes in individuals, families, communities, or the larger society that, when present, can mitigate or eliminate risk and can increase health and well-being. Protective factors come in the forms of resources, supports, or coping strategies that allow parents to parent effectively, even under stress. Listen to this podcast to learn more about the protective factors.

When a state agency team began reworking its child safety assessment, it found that two pages of questions were dedicated to risk factors, while only two questions focused on protective factors. The team realized this was a problem—they were asking families about everything that was going wrong and almost nothing about what they were doing well, potentially skewing caseworkers' perceptions of the families they were working to support. To address the issue, the team worked on revising and reframing the assessment questions to focus more on protective factors.

Child welfare agencies can use data exploration—coupled with family engagement—to better understand protective capacities among families they serve and identify areas where more supports are needed.

Available on CapLEARN; registration required.
Provides a broad overview of the Child Welfare Response to Child and Youth Sex Trafficking learning curriculum and explores how the curriculum could be integrated into agency training programs.

Available on CAPLearn; registration required.
Parts 1, 2, and 3 offers best practices information on responding to sex trafficking of children and youth in child welfare, and building knowledge on the special needs of trafficking victims and youth at risk of becoming victims.

Research shows that children exposed to domestic violence are at increased risk of being abused or neglected. This manual discusses the intersection of child maltreatment and domestic violence with a focus on child protection practice.

Explore Child Welfare Information Gateway's Library and discover more resources about human trafficking and assessment tools.

Child welfare agencies can be more effective in their prevention efforts when they better understand the context, scope, and risks of human trafficking among youth in their care.