In this week’s webinar Andrew Campbell envisions cross-disciplinary cooperation among child protection, domestic violence and animal welfare programs.
Many public agencies do take on major challenges, as these creative state and local responses to COVID-19 demonstrate.
But program integration on this scale is especially difficult due to the complexity of blending different operations, each with its unique universe of laws, regulations, stakeholders and funding streams.
In child protection specifically, innovation is also frequently stymied by opposition from parents’ advocates on the right and community advocates on the left, who each believe that child welfare agencies represent government interference with “their” children. This ownership language reveals that children are regarded as property.
Before we can succeed at building a coordinated multi-agency response to child maltreatment, we will have to take children’s legal and civil rights as seriously as those of adults.