Community Readiness for Child Maltreatment Prevention: The Challenge of a Brief Assessment

In this paper, we address the assessment of community readiness (CR) for the prevention of child maltreatment in the context of a community survey. A mail survey was administered to 222 service providers and 54 supervisors and managers from 35 different organizations serving children and their families in four Canadian communities. Eleven items from the short version of the Readiness Assessment for the Prevention of Child Maltreatment (RAP-CM) were used, in combination with questions assessing knowledge of family support programs offered in the community and a measure of inter-agency collaboration. Findings show that a consistent and valid indicator of "Lack of knowledge of the environment" can be derived from the RAP-CM items and used for screening key informants. Overall, CR appears mixed in the communities studied, the weakest dimensions of which are the will to address the problem and the dynamism of informal social resources. Leadership emerges as a major gap that needs to be addressed.