Creating a safe space for children

Improving the way people parent might seem an impossible challenge, given the competing views about what constitutes good parenting - can we influence a behavior that is rooted in upbringing and culture, affected by stress, and occurs mainly in private? Triple P – Positive Parenting Program works to educate parents on how to improve their parenting skills.

In the debate over how to reduce sexual assault on university campuses, proposing self-defense classes for women is controversial. But, according to new landmark Canadian research, it works.

Girls Court brings an all-hands-on-deck approach to the lives of vulnerable girls, linking them to social service agencies, providing informal Saturday sessions on everything from body image to legal jargon, and offering a team of adults in whom they can develop trust.

Children coming from abusive households are often reluctant to discuss their past experiences. A Mexican foundation is using animated characters to help abused and ill children speak about their lives.

Domestic abuse of the staff in the households of the 1% is often overlooked or ignored. But foreign missions in the US that abuse their domestic staff are finally being held accountable.

A national survey showed that few college students intervene when witnessing a sexual assault. The school with the highest rate of student intervention was Dartmouth College, where students receive bystander prevention training.

Children who have been through traumatic experiences have trouble opening up to people. A virtual program in Mexico City created by psychotherapists uses animated characters to get children to explain their thoughts.

2014 was a year marked nationwide by activism and unprecedented federal attention to the issue of campus sexual assault. The University of Texas system is putting $1.7 million into a comprehensive, multi-year effort to combat sexual assault on campus.

Child First is a program in Connecticut, where staff members deliver home-based parent guidance and child-parent psychotherapy to help prevent the detrimental physical and mental effects of toxic stress on children. The engagement is guided by an evidence-based methodology called Child-Parent Psychotherapy, which is grounded in collaborative problem solving.

More women are being incarcerated around the United States and that has spurred more institutions to create prison nurseries, which allow women to be with their newborns. It's not a new idea, but it's finding support among prison advocates as well as budget hawks because research shows nurseries can lower recidivism rates among mothers. The idea of children in prison remains controversial however.