Lessons for Child Protection Moving Forward: How to Keep From Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Abstract

The Gary B. Melton Visiting Professorship was created to honor and celebrate the legacy of Dr. Melton and to encourage scholars and advocates to continue to build on his impressive body of interdisciplinary work on children’s rights, global approach to child health and well-being, and social frameworks of family and community. A collaboration of the Haruv Institute and the Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Colorado, the Melton Lecture was designed to be interdisciplinary, with the inaugural professorship and lecture given by a pediatrician and an anthropologist. This set of award recipients encompassed Gary Melton’s concerns from the individual and family to the larger context of culture and community. In this inaugural Melton Lecture, we take as our starting point Gary Melton’s quote, “Child abuse is wrong….” On this, we all can agree. Agreement lessens in response to the second part of the quote, “…the nation’s lack of an effective response to it is also wrong….” Indeed, the field continues to grapple with long-standing issues on how to ensure an effective response to child abuse. We use this lecture to consider how to move toward an effective response without simply rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship.

“How About Being Trustworthy Rather Than Asking Families to Trust?”: A Prerequisite for Child Protection Authorities Partnering with Indigenous Communities

“…The obduracy of child protection authorities cannot be divorced from their history. Swain and Hillel (2010) have provided broad ranging accounts of the deep-rooted colonial practice of removing children from families judged to be unsuitable or dangerous or culturally unacceptable: a cultural narrative that prevails to this day as a well-trodden, morally justifiable path (Broadhurst & Mason, 2013;Chase & Ullrich, 2022;Krugman and Korbin, 2023). Institutional path dependency has kept alive the link of child removal to protection of the child, despite evidence to the contrary.…”