During the last several decades our understanding of child maltreatment
has deepened. Early research focused on exploring its epidemiology,
combined with trying to understand the nature of the maltreating parent
and effects on the developing child. In the 1990s, the field began to
understand maltreatment in the context of family systems and the role of
parent-child relationships in the development of psychopathology. We
also increased our understanding of the links between maltreatment,
trauma, and mental health. Interventions were developed that targeted
the quality of the parent-child relationship (e.g., CPP), decreasing
trauma symptoms (e.g., TF-CBT, AF-CBT), and supporting children's
placements outside the home (e.g., Early Intervention Foster Care).
Other interventions, originally developed to reduce children's
disruptive behaviour in family settings were successfully applied to
maltreated children (e.g., PCIT, TripleP, Incredible Years). In the past
decade, scholars have conducted studies of these treatment's efficacy in
randomized control trials and their effectiveness in different
populations of children. We have, as a community of scholars and
practitioners, collected considerable empirical support for a number of
well-established and well-used interventions. As we move forward,
disseminating these empirically supported treatments (ESTs) to the
community of mental health providers, it is important to identify their
core components (i.e., what makes these treatments effective) so that we
may guard them from inevitable adaptation and preserve their future
effectiveness. It is also important to understand the limitations of
these interventions (i.e., the conditions in which these interventions
may not be effective), so that we can provide the best possible care to
children in need of mental health services. Currently, public policy has
begun mandating provision of ESTs, although agencies do not have staff
trained to effectively provide these treatments, nor have clinical and
social work programs developed curricula for training. There is a need
for a central source of information for students and practitioners who
are seeking effective interventions to address problems associated with
child maltreatment. They need to understand how these ESTs are provided
and to whom, why they are effective, and when they are contra-indicated.
The objective of this edited book will be to meet this need by providing
an overview of the research describing the effects of child maltreatment
on mental health and social-emotional development, an overview of the
empirical literature on core components of effective treatments and
barriers to treatment success, descriptions of selected interventions
with strong research foundations (including a description of the process
of treatment, a case study or description of the empirical foundation of
its use with maltreated children, a conceptual discussion of possible
core components, and a discussion of possible limitations), and a review
of difficulties with dissemination and implementation. Each of these
chapters describing an EST will be written by one of the scholars
associated with training or researching the effectiveness of that EST.
We plan a summative chapter that weaves together different authors'
beliefs about what makes their treatment effective, describing their
thoughts about the direction of future research, training, and
implementation.
