Apr 11 A Community Call to Action: Proactive Strategies to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect

Apr 11h in Bold Voices by

 (April 11, 2025)

This month is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, which is an important time to highlight strategies that prevent child abuse and neglect. Not only this April, but all year long, it’s essential share effective strategies to better support families, and prevent child abuse and neglect.

One of the most crucial ways that we can help children thrive is to support families before they reach a crisis. Too often, intervention occurs only after the abuse transpires. We need to be more proactive and focus on prevention, versus being reactive and responding to abuse after it has happened. Prevention can involve providing families with basic support and resources. These may include things like:

  • Access to high-quality childcare and early education
  • Evidenced-based home visiting
  • Evidenced-based parenting programs
  • Mental health and well-being
  • Support programs for new parents
  • Out-of-school time (OST) programs
  • Financial support and resources
  • Community-based support and activities

Allegheny County is “resource rich” and offers a lot of support to children and families, but resources are often underutilized for a variety of reasons. One of the main reasons is lack of awareness. Here is your opportunity to do your part during Child Abuse Prevention month this year. Familiarize yourself with some of what Allegheny County has to offer so you can share with anyone that may need some support:

One of our big focus areas at AFC is Reimagining Child Welfare: Prevention and Intervention. A lot of our advocacy in this space lies in prevention to reduce risk factors associated with child abuse and neglect. We are also honored to be one of the CBOs selected to co-facilitate a process to End the Need for Group Placement with Office of Children, Youth and Families in Allegheny County. The goal of this work is to end the need for group placement but ultimately it will likely lead to a reduction in child abuse as well.

At AFC we know that high-quality out-of-school time programs are crucial to a child’s ability to grow, thrive, and succeed. To strengthen early learning and out-of-school time programs, we work closely with Allegheny County’s Department of Children’s Initiatives. Child nutrition is another policy area that AFC focuses on. AFC leads the WIC nutrition subgroup for Thriving PA, a statewide prenatal-to-three campaign. During the pandemic, we used our expertise in child nutrition and transportation to work with partners to deliver meals to children and families who could not access food. Youth mental health is an area that AFC is heavily involved in. Our recently published report, Bridging the Gap for Youth Mental Health, highlights promising practices across the region along with gaps in mental health supports. We recently convened a mental health policy roundtable so that we can begin to tackle the recommendations from this report to increase access to mental health for youth. AFC also does a lot of work in evidence-based home visiting and is a part of a statewide campaign, Childhood Begins at Home.