Center Initiatives and Priorities
Behavioral Health
Disaster Research Project
Child and Adolescent Trauma Treatment Institute
Comprehensive Assessment and Training Services Project
It is the strong conviction of this committee that the nation has not capitalized sufficiently on the knowledge that has been gained from nearly half a century of considerable public investment in research on children…. In many cases we have barely begun to use our growing research capabilities to help children and families negotiate the changing demands and possibilities of life in the 21 st century.
--From Neurons to Neighborhoods
National Research Council
Institute of Medicine
The Center for the Study of Violence Against Children (CSVAC) is dedicated to the enhancement of the health and well-being of children and their families through research, service and dissemination of information about child abuse and trauma.
The Center’s primary mission is to develop, assimilate, and disseminate knowledge and best practices that will contribute to reducing and ending violence against children and the effects of that violence across the life cycle. The Center’s dissemination of evidence-based knowledge extends to organizations, systems of protection and care, as well as individual provider level interventions. The Center’s research and dissemination activities will contribute to the understanding of child victimization and its effects across the life cycle. An additional purpose for the Center is to inform federal, state and regional policies in regard to child maltreatment and trauma effects across the life cycle.
This translational research center combines clinical practice, research, and training on child and family violence. The center completes a translational research agenda by: (1) using clinical practice with children and families experiencing violence to generate research questions regarding assessment and interventions to improve safety and health/mental health; (2) conducting funded research with children and family members experiencing violence and related problems; (3) disseminating research to clinical and social service practice communities; (4) disseminating findings to the broader scientific community; and (5) consulting, advising, and collaborating with federal and state agencies and policy makers.
Representative Center Activities
Background
Violence against children is germinal to a wide range of behavioral, psychological, social, and health related problems at every level of society. Children are exposed to violence in many different ways, including maltreatment by caregivers, criminal victimization by strangers, exposure to natural and human-generated disasters, and wartime brutalization. Violent behavior is diverse, and can take the forms of damaging physical, sexual, and emotional aggression, all of which are potentiated by contextual factors such as chronic poverty, neglect, and criminality. Human 
violence against children is generated from parents and caregivers, peers, neighborhoods, institutions, nation-states, and terrorist groups. Children who are at the highest risk of severe victimization are simultaneously exposed to many different types of violence, and usually experience violence as a chronic condition of growing up. Of particular concern is the growing phenomenon of child victims who themselves become perpetrators of violent acts, such as children who subsequently physically abuse their partners and children, bullied children who perpetrate school shootings, and wartime refugee children who are recruited and trained as brutal child soldiers. Additionally, violence against children is often influenced and even caused by other significant social problems, such as substance misuse, racism, and poverty. Despite intensive scientific and political attention to these problems, progress in understanding and effectively addressing violence against children has been profoundly limited.
Requirements for effective science and practice
Research on violence against children requires systematic approaches and multiple methods for organizing, testing, and contributing to the necessary knowledge base, and this can only be accomplished through the coordinated contributions of multiple academic disciplines and professions. For example, different types of violence against children require sophisticated contextual and transactional models in order to understand causal processes, moderating and mediating processes, mechanisms of action, and importantly, the immediate and long-term consequences of violence against children. Along with this multidisciplinary requirement, productive research investigations will examine the many types of institutions and systems that impact children, especially those that can significantly ameliorate or worsen children’s outcomes. To make significant contributions to practice, researchers must also be able to translate such knowledge into technologies that can be used by professionals, clinics, community organizations, and governments. However, before dissemination can be successful, these technologies must be refined and tested for safety, feasibility and effectiveness.
CSVAC Approach
The Center is a coordinated partnership between the UK College of Social Work and the UK College of Medicine-Department of Psychiatry, and employs scientists and clinicians who are actively engaged in a wide range of basic and applied research investigations, program development and evaluation, clinical technology design, implementation, testing, dissemination, and public policy consultation. It is philosophically grounded in its commitment to the “clinical scientist” model that is the basis for translational research, and is driven by the commitment that research and clinical programming should result in demonstrably effective outcomes for children. Its location in the flagship university of the Commonwealth of Kentucky and its long term collaborations with the executive and judicial branches of government have resulted in important public policy outcomes that have flowed from the Center’s research, clinical and educational activities.
The Center’s programs engage a wide range of initiatives that are guided by a set of conceptual and methodological specifications that reflect the essential requirements for effective science and practice. These guiding principles capture the essence of the Center’s work and are described in detail below.
