Suchergebnisse

In his essay that appeared in this Journal (Egypt and European Supremacy: A Bibliographic Essay), Kwame Nantambu attempts to use the extant archaeological record to support an Afrocentrist—actually and more accurately, an Egypt-centric—view of human history. In fact, however, while the archaeological record clearly indicates the great sophistication of ancient Egyptian culture, it does not buttress the claim that ancient Egypt was the proximate or even the ultimate source of human civilization.

Children exposed to parental opioid use disorder are at an elevated risk of maltreatment. We study whether parents' access to medication-assisted opioid treatment programs (OTPs) affects the well-being of their children. An administrative decision to lift a moratorium on access to these programs in Indiana created the opportunity for this study. We show that after a county opened an OTP, methadone dispensing increased and emergency department visits related to opioid overdose decreased there, offering evidence of the success of these programs. We also show that the opening of these OTPs did not have significant effects on reports of child maltreatment, but that out-of-home foster care placements were reduced by 22 percent. Our findings are consistent with past research showing that child welfare cases involving parental substance use tend to be complex and tend to have longer times to parent/child reunification than child welfare cases in which substance use is not present. We argue that expanding access to opioid treatment programs may help reduce foster care placements.

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a serious public health problem that increases risk for physical and mental health problems across the life course. Young adolescents are responsible for a substantial portion of CSA offending, yet to our knowledge, no validated prevention programs that target CSA perpetration by youth exist. Most existing efforts to address CSA rely on reactive criminal justice policies or programs that teach children to protect themselves; neither approach is well validated. Given the high rates of desistance from sexual offending following a youth's first CSA-related adjudication, it seems plausible that many youth could be prevented from engaging in their first offense. The goal of this article is to examine how school-based universal prevention programs might be used to prevent CSA perpetrated by adolescents. We review the literature on risk and protective factors for CSA perpetration and identify several promising factors to target in an intervention. We also summarize the literature on programs that have been effective at preventing adolescent dating violence and other serious problem behaviors. Finally, we describe a new CSA prevention program under development and early evaluation and make recommendations for program design characteristics, including unambiguous messaging, parental involvement, multisession dosage, skills practice, and bystander considerations.