Abstract
<p style="text-align:justify">Child maltreatment is a serious problem, worldwide. Children and young people who have experienced maltreatment face multiple physical and mental health challenges which hinder their success at school and these adverse experiences makes them more challenging to teach than their non-maltreated peers. Increasingly, teachers are considered as an important part of the wider the child protection workforce as they are well-placed to intervene and prevent further harm. To fulfil this role effectively, teachers require requisite training beginning in initial teacher education programs. This paper is a protocol for a systematic scoping review that asks: “What is known about preservice/initial teacher education for child protection?” Systematic scoping reviews are worthwhile and necessary in fields where research is diverse and needing of synthesis to identify strengths in the body of evidence and identify gaps to set new research directions. We will draw on Askey and O’Malley’s six-stage scoping review methodology to assess the scope, range, and nature of research activity on this topic. We will add an innovative seventh stage involving a commitment to disseminating and applying knowledge generated from the review. The research question has been established, and key terms defined (Stage 1). The search strategy has been devised, and searches have been run (Stage 2). Round 1 screening of titles and abstracts is completed and full text screening is currently in progress (Stage 3). To our knowledge this is the first attempt to systematically map the empirical literature on child protection in pre-service teacher education. When completed, this systematic scoping review will offer a comprehensive, transparent, and replicable way to assess the full scope of empirical research on this important topic of utmost educational relevance.</p>
Highlights
Maltreatment of children by their parents, caregivers, and others in positions of trust and authority is a ubiquitous public health and social welfare problem, worldwide (Pinhiero, 2006)
The adverse educational effects of child maltreatment are well established. These effects can be different for maltreatment subtypes, and are generally more severe for multi-type maltreatment based on the concept of cumulative harm in which maltreatment effects are amplified in circumstances that are chronic, recurrent, and prolonged (Bromfield, Gillingham, & Higgins, 2007; Johnson-Reid, Kohl, & Drake, 2012)
The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) (2006) used the term child protection to refer to “preventing and responding to violence, exploitation and abuse against children”‡. Elaborating on what such measures or responses might be, an international consortium of children’s welfare agencies, including Child Hope, National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children (UK), Save the Children, and World Vision among others described child protection as “philosophies, policies, standards, guidelines and procedures to protect children from both intentional and unintentional harm” (Consortium for Street Children, 2005). Integrating and adapting these definitions, we developed the following for the purpose of this review: Child protection is defined as those measures including philosophies, policies, standards, guidelines and procedures taken by professionals to act directly as a barrier between children and significant harm
Summary
Maltreatment of children by their parents, caregivers, and others in positions of trust and authority is a ubiquitous public health and social welfare problem, worldwide (Pinhiero, 2006). The adverse educational effects of child maltreatment are well established. The consequences of child maltreatment manifest most clearly in children’s impaired academic functioning, mental health, and behavioural problems (Maguire, Williams, Naughton, Cowley, Tempest, Mann, Teague, & Kemp, 2015; Trickett & McBride-Chang, 1995; Veltman & Browne, 2001). Longterm effects of child maltreatment extend to negative effects on mental health, physical health, violence, and criminal behaviour (Gilbert et al, 2009; Herrenkohl, Hong, Klika, Herrenkohl, & Russo, 2013) and the costs of addressing these effects present a major economic challenge to societies globally (Fang, Brown, Florence, & Mercy, 2012; Fang, Fry, Finkelhor, Chen, Lannen, & Dunne, 2015)
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