Toolkit on Mapping Legal, Health and Social Services Responses to Child Maltreatment

There is widespread agreement that in order to make progress on child maltreatment it is important for policy-makers to have information on its scope and characteristics, often referred to by the public health term “epidemiology”. Researchers around the world have typically responded to this need using community surveys to count the prevalence of child maltreatment in the general population. Hundreds of such studies have been done in dozens of countries and other jurisdictions.

The goal of this toolkit is to provide researchers with more information on methodological strategies and considerations when conducting agency studies on child maltreatment to increase the use and success of this kind of research in countries and jurisdictions around the globe. Such research may then lead to more structured agency data collection systems to inform practice in the area of child maltreatment.