ON PROTECTING KIDS

Symposium

Location:
Brooklyn Law School
250 Joralemon Street
Brooklyn, NY

RSVP ONLINE by April 10, 2012.

About the Symposium
In recent years, it has become clear that child maltreatment is strongly linked to identifiable risk factors such as poverty and stress. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control thus has defined child maltreatment as an important public health problem and has an ongoing program of epidemiological research underway. Thus far, the child protection system has failed to respond to this new, epidemiological understanding of maltreatment: it has not developed evidence-based treatments or even standardized diagnostic procedures; it has woefully neglected prevention, the key to most successful public health campaigns.

Equally important, both federal law and local practice reflect an acute care treatment paradigm that aims at rapid cure and exit, while all the evidence suggests that child maltreatment for both the maltreating parent and the victimized child is a chronic condition that requires long-term support and services. A new approach, reliant on a public health model, is urgently needed.

This symposium brings together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of legal, medical, and social-science experts on child protection to chart the steps that policy makers need to undertake.