The Defending Childhood Demonstration Project

In this podcast, Center for Court Innovation researchers Rachel Swaner, Lama Ayoub, and Elise Jensen discuss their National Institute of Justice funded report on the United States Department of Justice's Defending Childhood Demonstration Program. The program, which began in 2010, funded eight pilot sites across the country to address children's exposure to violence. The Center produced a series of reports on six of the eight sites, as well as a report that condenses lessons learned across the sites. 

The following is a transcript of the podcast:

Robert V. WOLF:
Hi, I'm Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I have the privilege of speaking with three colleagues of mine from the Center for Court Innovation who have been involved as they often are with an important long-term research project. In this instance, I'm referring to the research they've recently completed on the Defending Childhood Demonstration program, part of the Department of Justice fund to Defending Childhood Initiative. The demonstration program involved eight sites in the U.S. that, since 2010, have planned and carried out some really interesting work designed to address children's exposure to violence. They have just released a new report which distills some lessons learned from six of the eight demonstration sites. The report, which was funded by the National Institute of Justice is called Protect, Heal, Thrive. With me today to talk about that report and to explain a little bit about what they did on the report and just what a researcher does are Rachel Swaner, Lama Ayoub, and Elise Jensen. Thanks so much for joining me.

Rachel SWANER:
Thanks for having us.

Elise JENSEN:
Thanks.

SWANER: 
It's great to be here.

WOLF: 
And let me just say, the fourth author, Michael Rempel, our Director of Research, wasn't able to join us today. So why don't we start just talking a little bit about the initiative in general. Elise, could you give a little background about what the Defending Childhood Initiative is all about?

JENSEN: 
Sure, it's a national initiative that aims to prevent children's exposure to violence, to mitigate the negative impact of such exposure when it does occur, and to develop knowledge and spread awareness about children's exposure to violence.

WOLF: 
So when you say exposure to violence, what kind of violence are you referring to?

JENSEN: 
In 2009, there was a national survey of children's exposure to violence and it found that 60% of children were exposed to violence in the past year, either directly or indirectly. So at the beginning of the initiative, we did a community survey and found similar results of children's exposure to violence. There are various types of violence. In the larger urban communities, the respondents on our survey had said that gang violence and violent crime in general were big problems. In some of our more rural sites, we saw issues such as bullying, relationship violence, child abuse, and neglect as big problems. And then in our tribal sites, historical trauma, especially, was another thing that children were dealing with.

WOLF: 
Do you want to just run down where the six sites are that created their own demonstration programs?

JENSEN: 
Sure, we have Cuyahoga county in Cleveland, Ohio, there's Shelby county in Memphis, Tennessee, Grand Forks county in North Dakota, Boston, Massachusetts, and our two tribal sites were the Rosebud Sioux reservation in Rosebud, South Dakota and Rocky boys in Montana.

WOLF: 
So why don't you guys say a little bit about the work that went into this report and it's really multiple, it's a series of evaluations, both individual and looking at all the sites.

SWANER:
This is Rachel. So we focused on two things. We did a process evaluation and an outcome evaluation. Today we're going to talk just about the process evaluation. There were three components or ways that we collected data at the different sites. The first was we visited each site multiple times and conducted interviews with all the different stakeholders and people who implemented the programming. So for instance, at one site, if they had different treatment programs, we interviewed the people who administered the treatment programs. If they had people doing prevention programming, we interviewed them to learn about the challenges, the barriers to implementation, as well as why people were succeeding or why people were dropping out, just from start to finish what it takes to start one of these big initiatives.

So we did those interviews and then the second component was every three months we collected quarterly implementation reports from the sites that had them fill out quantitative outputs of the program such as number of young people served, number of families reached, number of times one of their public service announcements aired, and how many people they believe that it reached, number of flyers distributed, number of community events held and the attendance so those types of outputs of the program. And then the final component of the process evaluation was just collecting different materials that were produced by the program. Some of things were such as brochures and looking at the different language that they used and other things were more program infrastructure related, so staff resumes, job postings, how they talked about their program, internally and externally organization charts, just to really understand what it takes to implement something like this.

WOLF:
Wow, that's a lot of information that you guys had to process. So I imagine with such a diverse range, going from Boston, big metropolitan area to Indian reservation, to rural county, there's quite a range of programming that emerged. Lama, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the kinds of programming that these sites developed. What are some of the ideas that emerged?

Lama AYOUB:
In our report, we categorized the wide variety of approaches that the sites took under eight different strategies. Those strategies were prevention, screening and assessment, case management, treatment and healing, community awareness and education, professional training, and last the system infrastructure change. I'm just going to give you a couple highlights. Grand Forks in North Dakota implemented universal prevention in all schools. That included 18 city schools and six rural schools. Prevention programming was provided to kids of all ages, so in every single grade, and it covered topics like bullying, dating violence, positive relationships, and social, emotional health.

Another great example is Cuyahoga county. They took a completely different approach and implemented county-wide universal screening and assessment. They developed a universal screening tool that was used in two primary agencies and over the course of two years, they screened 16,000 children for exposure to violence and children would then be referred to a county-wide central intake and assessment and then they would get treatment planning based on that assessment. Another really interesting example is a community awareness campaign that was done in Boston. So Boston had a youth-led production of a web series called The Halls. You can actually find it online at thehallsboston.com and it's framed as a television show. It was released week by week, like a TV series and it was the story of three young men struggling with issues around violence, masculinity, fatherhood, and it was advertised throughout the city of Boston and nationally.

WOLF:
And were there any highlights from the tribal sites you wanted to mention?

AYOUB:
The two tribal sites, Rocky boys reservation in Montana and the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota took a slightly different approach. They were really focused on incorporating their tradition and culture as a protective factor for children. At both of the sites, they invested a lot of resources in case management and advocacy. Rocky boy, for example, they hired several domestic violence and sexual assault advocates, as well as child advocates. And those advocates worked with adults and youth who were exposed to violence, but also did things like summer youth camps and community awareness events.

WOLF:
Rachel, was there something you wanted to add to that?

SWANER:
On the Rosebud, one of the ways that they were bringing culture back as a form of prevention in, if a child had been exposed to violence, connecting them one, with some more traditional treatment and therapy, as well as connecting them with some community validated approaches to treating trauma, such as equine therapy and cultural ceremonies such as smudging and sweat lodges to wipe away the trauma.

WOLF:
Interesting. Sounds like very, very innovative approaches, dealing with different aspects of the problem from community education to assessment and prevention. How do you know what was effective or the impact that these programs had?

SWANER:
So we were tasked with doing a process evaluation and an outcome evaluation. As part of the process evaluation, we were tasked with documenting how implementation went at each site. What were some of the barriers to implementation? What were some of the challenges? How they overcame those challenges. And that was part of the report that we just released. That covers all of the different sites that were in the evaluation and the lessons learned from that. In addition to that, we were asked to do an outcome evaluation. So what were the positive or negative changes because of all of this program that was implemented across the country? So the reports that were just released are about the process evaluation, and we will have an outcome evaluation coming out later in the year.

WOLF:
And let me just ask another question about the various programming, some of what Lama just described. Were these all original, never done before approaches, or were they adapting things perhaps that existed?

SWANER:
Lama talked a little bit about the Grand Forks universal prevention programming and what happened there was for each grade level, a different prevention programming was chosen. And those programs were most likely evidence based or promising program, meaning these programs existed and there had been research done on these programs that showed that they had some positive impacts on those who went through the program. So most of the sites chose for their prevention programming as well as for their treatment and healing programming, programs that already existed in some capacity that had some research behind them.

WOLF:
From all the work you've done, and this is a really incredible report, is there anything you could share, maybe Rachel, just sort of few lessons that have emerged so far?

SWANER:
The report actually outlines a bunch of the common themes and lessons learned across the sites, as well as provides 58 recommendations for different players who are implementing a large scale community-wide initiative. So not just initiative for children's exposure to violence, but any large inter-agency collaborative that involves the criminal justice players, public health, social services, education. So we have provided 58 recommendations for other jurisdictions interested in implementing programming like this for funders of similar programming, for technical assistance providers ,for researchers. So I would definitely recommend reading those, or let me just give you a couple of highlights.

So Lama discussed the Grand Forks model of universal prevention. So some of the lessons that we learned there was that if you're implementing universal prevention programming over many years, some of the students are going to start exposed to some of the same concepts over and over again. And so learning how to make adaptations that are unique to your community was really important. But balancing those multi-year efforts, you have to be sure that you are still maintaining your program fidelity to the original model that has shown to have some effectiveness.

One of the other things is when you're implementing universal prevention programming you want to be mindful that students aren't being exposed to conflicting messages. So some programs around children's exposure to violence, for instance, around bullying, wants to keep the person who's being bullied and the perpetrator separate. And the message is to separate them to resolve the problem. Whereas other prevention programs such as restorative justice programs emphasize bringing those two groups together. So if you have a restorative justice programming, as well as a bullying prevention programming, sometimes there might be conflicting messages. So being mindful of the different messages that you're giving over the course of many years, as you adapt the programming to fit your community.

Lama also mentioned this universal screening that was done in Cuyahoga county. So some of the lessons that we learned there are figuring out what works for your community in terms of setting a screening threshold of what screens somebody for as being exposed to violence and displaying trauma symptoms that would lead them to be moved on in the continuum of care to a fuller assessment, and then perhaps to be connected with a treatment program. And then all the sites also implemented the community awareness and education programming that made people more aware of what violence is, who to call if they suspect somebody's been exposed to violence. And when you have an increase in awareness, you might flood those new systems that you've put in place. So you want to be mindful of your own capacity to just serve the people and sometimes if you see that increase, it doesn't mean your program isn't working because now more people are aware and are willing to report.

AYOUB:
I have something to add, this is Lama. Another important lesson learned from these sites was their use of collaborative bodies. At each of the sites, they brought together a diverse array of stakeholders interested in children's exposure to violence and that cut across silos. So they had domestic violence agencies and agencies that work with child abuse and schools involved, all kinds of players, especially players that maybe didn't interact with each other on a regular basis. And they brought these players together to create a collaborative body at each site that worked on the planning and implementation of the initiative.

In general, the members of the collaborative body were really excited about being involved, but there are some important considerations when you bring together players like this, especially in big urban areas where there's already a lot going on. With large scale initiatives like this, it's possible that some collaborative body members may experience what we're calling collaborative fatigue, that they're involved with many different initiatives or many different citywide programs and their commitment to this one might wane over time. In those types of situations, it's possible that some collaborative bodies can be folded into existing initiatives or existing efforts that are going on. They actually did this at Rocky boy's reservation in Montana. The collaborative body there ended up being folded into to their existing wellness coalition, because a lot of the same folks we're meeting for both initiatives.

WOLF:
Excellent. I hope those are takeaways people can use, but people should definitely come to our website, www.courtinnovation.org to get their own copy of the report. So I want to thank you all and I want to remind our listeners that the report is available online and there'll be some more reports. And in addition to that, my colleague, Avni Majithia-Sejpal is planning to interview practitioners from two of the locations that you mentioned, which will be the Cuyahoga county site and the Grand Forks North Dakota site. So stay tuned for those in the coming weeks. Once again, let me thank Rachel Swaner, Lama Ayoub, and Elise Jensen for taking the time to talk with me.

AYOUB:
Thank you.

JENSEN:
Thanks.

WOLF:
I'm Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To listen to more podcasts, please visit our website www.courtinnovation.org or download our podcast from iTunes or your favorite podcasting app. And thanks for listening.