Arizona organizations team up to take on state’s child neglect, prevention issues

PHOENIX — Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy and the Arizona Department of Child Safety will be teaming up on a three-year project for research and analysis on neglect assessment and prevention policies for Arizona children.

Despite the progress made over the years on the number of Arizona children entering the foster care system, there are still more than 18,000 children in the system.

The first project the group put together is a paper that provides the base of the goals at hand, titled: The ‘Neglect of Neglect’: Exploring the less-visible side of Child Maltreatment.

“We thank ACF for the funding and are excited to be working with DCS in finding ways to reduce the neglect of children in Arizona,” Thom Reilly, director of Morrison Institute, said in a press release. “The commitment by all concerned to address this nuanced and complex matter is matched only by the determination to achieve measurable and lasting progress.”

The recently founded in 2014 Arizona Department of Child Safety has new leadership working to address problematic issues such as the prolonged backlog of investigative and foster care cases. The project plans to better understand the situations in families that create these cases of child neglect, and then plan to identify the programs in place for child neglect prevention that succeed.

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