Child Maltreatment Turns 20 Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Child Maltreatment (CM) turns 20 this year. The last 20 years have seen excellent progress regarding our understanding of the scope, causes, and consequences of maltreatment and in prevention, intervention, and policy efforts to combat the problem. Important work has been conducted to understand the nature of victimization (Finkelhor, Ormrod, & Turner, 2007; Finkelhor, Ormrod, Turner, & Holt, 2009) and the impact of early maltreatment on neurobiological development in young children (Shonkoff, Boyce, & McEwen, 2009). Longitudinal studies have documented the long-term impacts of maltreatment on a range of social, psychological, and behavioral outcomes (Widom, 1999; Widom, Schuck, & White, 2006; Wilson & Widom, 2011), and we are beginning to understand how maltreatment and other early adverse experiences can impact physical health outcomes (Bentley & Widom, 2009; Norman et al., 2012). Strong evidence-based practices have been identified to treat child trauma, improve parenting skills, address sexual behavior problems among youth, and improve the development of youth in foster care. Many evidencebased programs are being broadly disseminated, and some large-scale field trials have shown impacts on important maltreatment outcomes, such as recidivism (Chaffin, Hecht, Bard, Silovsky, & Beasley, 2012). We are also learning how to help governments and communities successfully adopt and implement evidence-based practices (Brown et al., 2014; Glisson, Dukes, & Green, 2006). A recent federal policy initial initiative provided 1.5 billion dollars for evidence-based early childhood programs to prevent maltreatment and promote children’s physical, social, and emotional health (http://mchb.hrsa.gov/ programs/homevisiting/). Rates of maltreatment are on the decline (Finkelhor, Shattuck, Turner, & Hamby, 2014). Clearly, we headed in the right direction and making a difference. Yet, there is much, much more to do. CM was conceived as the official journal of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children to provide its members with an outlet for in-depth rigorous empirical research and keep them informed on the latest findings relevant to their work. In the inaugural issue, Chaffin and Reid (1996) articulated a number of goals for CM that would serve as guiding principles. These goals include (1) taking a rigorous data-based approach to understanding a broad range of issues related to child maltreatment, (2) encouraging interdisciplinary responses to maltreatment including interdisciplinary research, (3) attending to issues of culture and diversity in the study of maltreatment, and (4) looking at the big picture of child maltreatment research to develop a vision for advancing prevention and intervention efforts. Although the field has advanced a great deal over the past 20 years, these goals remain highly relevant and will continue to serve as guiding principles for CM. Since its inception, CM has achieved great prominence in the field. Its impact factor has risen steadily over the years to 2.71 in 2013, making CM the second most cited journal in two categories, Social Work and Family Studies according to the 2013 Journal Citation Reports published by Thomson Reuters. This is a strong indicator that researchers and practitioners are turning to CM to inform and guide their work. Continuing the excellence of CM will require a focus on innovative but rigorous research that is appropriately contextualized and relevant to real-world problems. Accomplishing this in the field of child maltreatment requires a multidisciplinary perspective, one that includes scholars from social work, psychology, psychiatry, public health, neuroscience, law and law enforcement, medicine, nursing, economics, and other disciplines. CM does well in this regard already but can do better. Feiring and Zielinski’s (2011) analysis showed that, initially, authorship of CM publications early on came mostly from the field of Psychology but that over time, authors from Social Work and Public Health have made steady gains. My hope is that this trend continues, and we see even greater diversity in CM’s authorship over the next several years. A top priority for CM will be maintaining its focus on publishing highly rigorous research. Generally, rigorous research is defined as work that is theoretically based and uses study designs that maximize the confidence that the observed effects were due to the hypothesized causes. This is also known as internal validity and will continue to be of utmost importance for guiding publication decisions in CM. However, it is also critical to attend to external validity or the extent to which research findings are generalizable to real-world settings.