Alexandra Abbatiello

Outcomes: Children, youth, families, child welfare representatives and other child and family service partners participate as team members with shared community responsibility to achieve and maintain the following:  Safety from abuse and neglect.  Enduring and certain permanence and timely achievement of stability, supports and lifelong connections.  Enhancement of the family’s ability to meet their child/youth’s wellbeing, including physical, emotional, behavioral and educational needs.  Support families within their own homes and communities through comprehensive and accessible services that build on strengths and address individual trauma, needs and concerns.  Strengthened families that successfully sustain positive changes that lead to safe, nurturing and healthy environments.  Skilled and responsive child welfare professionals, who perform with a shared sense of accountability for assuring child-centered, family-focused policy, best practice and positive outcomes

Act

Something that is done to harm or cause potential harm to a child.

Adult

An individual 18 years of age or older

Allegedly

Represented as existing or as being as described but not so proved; supposedly

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/alleged

Bodily injury

Impairment of physical condition, or substantial pain

Child

An individual under 18 years of age

Child abuse

The term “child abuse” shall mean intentionally, knowingly or recklessly doing any of the following:

For fiscal year (FY) 2011, States reported that 676,569 children were victims of child abuse or neglect (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2012). While physical injuries may or may not be immediately visible, abuse and neglect can have consequences for children, families, and society that last lifetimes, if not generations.