This week, we continued our tradition of planting a pinwheel garden at the Brown School. Blue pinwheels were introduced as the national symbol for child abuse prevention in 2008.
Child maltreatment (including emotional, physical, sexual abuse and neglect) is highly prevalent in the US (Finkelhor et al., 2015; US DHHS, 2025) and globally (Stoltenbourgh et al., 2015). Child maltreatment is also multi-determined and shares a number of risk factors with other forms of violence ( https://vetoviolence.cdc.gov/apps/connecting-the-dots/content/discover-connections). Whether measuring maltreatment with official reports (Gnanamanickam et al., 2022; Jonson-Reid et al., 2012) or self-report (Latham et al., 2021; VanBerkel et al., 2018), research finds that maltreatment may lead to serious challenges over the life course and across domains such as economic productivity, health, mental health and educational attainment. Sadly, based on the most recent data (2022), about 5 children die each day of child abuse or neglect in the US (USDHHS, 2025).
Unfortunately, in the US, we continue to underfund early intervention and prevention research and implementation of programming across promising areas like economic supports for families; evidence-based parenting interventions, adult mental health and substance use treatment; quality childcare; evidence-based child health and mental health intervention, etc. Instead, we choose to pay for long-term costs associated with downstream negative outcomes. US cost estimates are as high as $2 trillion based on a single 2015 cohort of children with official investigated maltreatment reports including child fatalities (See Peterson et al., 2018). Surely we can do better!
Want to learn more?
Missouri Network Against Child Abuse https://mo-naca.org/ & Prevent Child Abuse America https://preventchildabuse.org/
Please also check out the important research of our multidisciplinary group of CICM scholars that ranges from primary prevention to intervention and practice to policy!