The emotional consequences of viewing or hearing violent acts may be severe and long lasting. Children who witness violence often experience many of the same symptoms and lasting effects as children who are direct victims of violence. The continuum of prevention, intervention, and accountability demands thinking across disciplines and considering the ways in which each profession has an obligation to participate at every stage in the process. Committed to common goals, equipped with knowledge, and keeping the voices of children at the forefront, policymakers and practitioners need to find a way to organize the complex information and the range of available strategies for action. One way to do this it to think about a continuum of prevention, intervention, and accountability.
Prevention means, quite simply, stopping children s exposure to violence before it happens.
Intervention means improving the current system of services for children or creating new approaches so that the service system is responsive to the complexity of children s lives and is rooted in and defined by communities. Specifically, intervention must be seamless, flexible, collaborative across professional disciplines, oriented to the long term, and sensitive to cultural differences and children s developmental stages. Achieving these improvements to the service system will mean addressing issues of turf and prejudice, enhancing interdisciplinary communication, and improving training. It means regarding crimes against children as among the most serious of all offenses. It means taking steps to reform criminal statutes, courtroom environments and procedures, and law enforcement and prosecutorial techniques to ensure that children are not retraumatized by the legal process and that perpetrators are brought to justice.