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Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Proposed Comprehensive Plan for Fiscal Year 1998 Child Abuse and Neglect and Dependency Courts Safe Kids/Safe Streets: Community Approaches to Reducing Abuse and Neglect and Preventing Delinquency Reports of child victimization, abuse, and neglect in the United States continue to be alarming. For example, in 1996 alone, an estimated 3.1 million children were reported to public welfare agencies for abuse or neglect. Nearly 1 million of those children were substantiated as victims. Usually, abuse is inflicted by someone the child knows, frequently a family member. Numerous studies cite the connection between abuse or neglect of a child and later development of violent and delinquent behavior. Acknowledging this correlation and the need to both improve system response and foster strong, nurturing families, several OJP offices and bureaus joined in FY 1996 to develop a coordinated program response. The resulting initiative, a 5-½ year demonstration program designed to foster coordinated community responses to child abuse and neglect, was titled Safe Kids/Safe Streets: Community Approaches to Reducing Abuse and Neglect and Preventing Delinquency. (An accompanying evaluation program, Evaluation of the Safe Kids/Safe Streets Program, was also developed.) The purpose of the Safe Kids/Safe Streets program is to break the cycle of early childhood victimization and later juvenile or adult criminality and to reduce child and adolescent abuse and neglect and resulting child fatalities. It strives to do this by providing fiscal and technical support for efforts to restructure and strengthen state and local criminal and juvenile justice systems to be more comprehensive and proactive in helping children and adolescents and their families. The program also has as a goal to implement or strengthen coordinated management of abuse and neglect cases by improving the policy and practice of the criminal and juvenile justice systems and the child welfare, family services, and related systems. These goals require communities to develop, implement, and/or expand cross-agency strategies. OJJDP, the administering agency for the Safe Kids/Safe Streets program, awarded competitive cooperative agreements in FY 1997 to five demonstration sites and to a national evaluator. Funds are provided by OJJDP, OVC, and VAWGO. Recipients of the awards are the National Children's Advocacy Center, Huntsville, Alabama; the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; Heart of America United Way of Kansas City, Missouri; Toledo Hospital Children's Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio; and the Community Network for Children, Youth and Family Services of Chittenden County, Vermont. The national evaluator is Westat, Inc. of Rockville, Maryland. Four of the five funded demonstration sites are in the process of developing implementation plans. The fifth is in the initial stages of implementing its plans to improve the coordination of prevention, intervention, and treatment services and to improve cross-agency coordination. The national evaluator has begun the process of assessing site needs and developing measurement variables. Each award has been made under a 5-½ year project period. In FY 1998, Safe Kids/Safe Streets grantees will continue to implement their plans. Continuation awards will be made to each of the current demonstration sites. No additional applications will be solicited in FY 1998. National Evaluation of the Safe Kids/Safe Streets Program To evaluate the Safe Kids/Safe Streets grant program, OJJDP competitively awarded a grant to Westat, Inc. in FY 1997. The purpose of the evaluation is to document and explain the process of community mobilization, planning, and collaboration that has taken place before and during the Safe Kids/Safe Streets awards; to inform program staff of performance levels on an ongoing basis; and to determine the effectiveness of the implemented programs in achieving the goals of the Safe Kids/Safe Streets program. The initial 18-month grant will begin a process evaluation and determine the feasibility of an impact evaluation. If it is determined that an impact evaluation is feasible, additional funds may be awarded to implement such an evaluation in FY 1998. The goals for Phase I of the Evaluation of the Safe Kids/Safe Streets program are: (1) to understand the process of implementation of the Safe Kids/Safe Streets program in order to strengthen and refine the program for future replication; (2) to identify factors that contribute to or impede the successful implementation of the program; (3) to help develop or improve the capability and utility of local data systems that track at-risk youth, including victims of child neglect or abuse; (4) to build an understanding of the general effectiveness of the Safe Kids/Safe Streets program approach and its program components; and (5) to help develop the capacity of Safe Kids/Safe Streets sites to evaluate what works in their communities. The objectives of this initial phase of the evaluation are to develop a detailed design, including data collection instruments, for a process evaluation of the Safe Kids/Safe Streets program for implementation in collaboration with all sites; develop templates for capturing the data necessary for the national process evaluation and to make those templates available for implementation at the sites; and provide evaluation training and technical assistance for, and to collaborate with, grantees at each of the sites in implementing a process evaluation of the development and implementation of each Safe Kids/Safe Streets program site. This evaluation will be implemented by the current grantee, Westat, Inc. No additional applications will be solicited in FY 1998. Secondary Analysis of Childhood Victimization In FY 1997, OJJDP awarded a 2-year grant to the University at Albany, State University of New York, to support secondary analysis of data that were collected on 1,200 individuals as part of a National Institute of Justice research project that began in 1986. The data set includes extensive information on psychiatric, cognitive, intellectual, social, and behavioral functioning. It also contains information on documented and self-reported criminal and runaway behavior in a large sample of unsubstantiated cases of early childhood physical and sexual abuse and neglect and matched controls. The data base includes information from archival juvenile court and probation department records and law enforcement records and interview information on a range of topics, including psychiatric assessment, intelligence, and reading ability. The initial set of secondary analyses, during the first year of the OJJDP award, focused on childhood victimization as a precursor to running away and subsequent delinquency. Initial research questions focused on whether running away puts a child at increased risk for becoming a violent offender and repeat violent offender as a juvenile, and whether abused and neglected children who run away are at greater risk than children who have not been abused. In FY 1998, the research will look at several other outcomes such as out-of-home placements and drug use by children who run away. Gender differences will also be explored. This research will also explore the differential impact of childhood victimization by race/ethnicity. This project is being conducted by Cathy Spatz Widom, principal researcher, under a grant to the University at Albany, State University of New York. No additional applications will be solicited in FY 1998. Evaluation of Nurse Home Visitation in Weed and Seed Sites OJJDP will administer the evaluation program of Nurse Home Visitation programs in six Weed and Seed sites across the nation with FY 1997 funds transferred to OJJDP from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Six Weed and Seed sites, one of which is also a SafeFutures site, are providing nurse home visitation services. These sites have been designated for evaluation in order to determine the impact of the specific program model of nurse home visitation implemented within normal operating environments in communities. Nurse home visitation has been found to be effective in reducing welfare dependency, increasing employment, decreasing or delaying repeat childbearing, reducing the incidence of child maltreatment, and reducing crime and delinquency within the context of randomized clinical trials. OJJDP is considering supplementing this evaluation in FY 1998 to enhance data collection and analysis. The project would be implemented by the University of Colorado Prevention Research Center. No additional applications would be solicited in FY 1998.
Shay Bilchik, Administrator
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