Preventive Intervention: A Key Strategy for Addressing Child Welfare Disparities and Disproportionality for African American Families

Abstract

In recent years, there have been multiple strategies proffered to address the issue of racial disparities across US service sectors, including policies and practices to decrease the overrepresentation of African American children in the child welfare system. One important strategy is to implement preventive interventions as a component of child welfare service delivery, in order to promote a more equitable service landscape for African American children and families at risk for maltreatment and child welfare service system involvement. Building on principles from the field of prevention science, this chapter summarizes preventive interventions that have been found to benefit African American families at risk for child maltreatment. As such, programs are described that prevent maltreatment at three levels: (1) primary prevention, which includes interventions designed to affect entire populations or vulnerable sub-groups of a population to prevent the onset of maltreatment; (2) secondary prevention, which entails interventions targeted to individuals who are at risk for maltreatment; and (3) tertiary prevention, which involves interventions intended for individuals with current or historical experiences of maltreatment, with the aim of preventing the recurrence and negative consequences of maltreatment. Also included is an exploration of evidence-based prevention programs that explicitly address race/ethnicity, targeting African American families specifically. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the practice and research implications of the evidence on maltreatment prevention and African American families.