There is a significant and growing body of research documenting the poor quality of undergraduate and graduate training of professionals in the criminal justice, child protection, medical, and mental health fields on child abuse. Unless this training is received on the job, many of these professionals may go their entire careers lacking the necessary skills to investigate, prosecute, treat, or otherwise respond to the needs of child abuse victims or offenders. For example, one study finds that even experienced professionals in the field are “uninformed or misinformed” about basic literature on child sexual abuse that is relevant to their work.
The Center for Child Advocacy Studies (“C-CAST”) is a program of the Zero Abuse Project (ZAP) that works in partnership with community colleges, universities, medical schools, law schools, seminaries, and other institutions of higher education throughout the United States to fully pre- pare future child protection professionals to adequately recognize, report, and respond to child maltreatment.
With limited federal and private funding, this coalition has implemented undergraduate and graduate reforms in seventy three institutions of higher education in twenty states, developed state of the art training facilities ideal for experiential learning, and published five studies supporting the reform model. Working with a number of universities, ZAP has also developed an approval process to maintain the integrity of programs providing child abuse training. This approval process assesses whether a child advocacy studies (“CAST”) program reflects the core competencies recommended by the Academy on Violence and Abuse.
This article begins by detailing literature supporting the need to re- form child protection professionals’ undergraduate and graduate training. The article then analyzes the work of C-CAST and its university and college partners in implementing child protection curricula. Next, this article discusses the research on the efficacy of the CAST model, and outlines the successful strategy employed in Mississippi for CAST’s rapid and widespread dissemination. The article concludes by suggesting states should look to replicate Mississippi’s model, which would result in a massive change in higher education in the United States—by fundamentally improving the response to child abuse in every community across the nation.