Preventing child abuse and neglect: programmatic interventions

The majority of prevention efforts offer services to individual parents, families, or children with the goal of altering those behaviors and attitudes that contribute to risk. Evaluations of these efforts offer preliminary guidelines for shaping programs and systems and for articulating those critical issues in need of further study. This article identifies what we know about the efficacy of prevention, highlights those elements of prevention programming that suggest the most promise, and summarizes the critical outstanding research questions surrounding the proliferation and improvement of prevention programs.