The CHAMP Center & Network
Developing and Implementing Personalized Child and Adolescent Maltreatment Prevention (CHAMP) with Causal and Predictive Science
Maltreatment exposure, such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, and neglect, can have devastating effects on children’s development and their mental and physical health, potentially stealing their chance at a happy and healthy future.
The CHAMP Center and Network aim to discover how to prevent maltreatment and its shattering consequences, develop tools to enable this prevention, and share this knowledge and these tools wherever they are needed.
We aim to achieve our key goal through a unique approach to discovery, tool development, and dissemination, grounded in understanding causes and applying this understanding. A cause is something that, if changed by intervention, would prevent an outcome of concern. Conversely, an intervention trying to change something that is not a cause cannot prevent the outcome. Therefore, before applying any intervention or tool to prevent maltreatment or its consequences, we must ensure it targets their causes. This is the CHAMP Center and Network way.
It is difficult to know what causes maltreatment or the factors that contribute to its consequences. This requires specialized scientific methods that have rarely been applied for our goal. We also understand that getting it right will be hard and take time. That is why the CHAMP Center and CHAMP Network are designed to do our work in ways that allow us to learn continually, so that the knowledge and tools we produce will continually improve.
Our Approach
Diagram: The different components of our approach and how they fit together. Notice how these components interact with each other, allowing us to learn and improve continually.
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We begin with large datasets containing many thousands of variables for thousands of children and families. We use advanced Causal Data Science techniques to analyze these data. While these methods are just starting to be used to uncover causes of maltreatment and its effects, they have already shown success in tackling various health issues by helping us understand how to prevent risks. Here, we apply these techniques to pinpoint the factors that most significantly influence maltreatment and its outcomes, enabling us to identify the best strategies to prevent them.
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Our discoveries create models for various maltreatment exposures, such as sexual abuse, and their effects, like Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as well as other causes behind them. Our goal is to use these discoveries to help providers working with children and families understand what actions to take to prevent the risks these children and families face. We develop Decision Support Tools based on these models for these providers. These tools guide providers in knowing what information to collect from children and families. The tools then calculate risk for specific maltreatment exposures and outcomes based on the child's and family's assessment data, identifying the causes of these risks, and recommending interventions to address those causes and reduce the risks. Our work in building these tools involves close collaboration with providers, agency administrators, and family members so that the tools reflect the realities faced by families and providers, producing meaningful results.
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Even though our models are developed using the most advanced causal methods and our tools are created with high-quality technology and careful input from stakeholders, they must be tested in real-world settings before they are widely adopted. To conduct this testing, we are partnering with several agencies that provide care to children and families who have been maltreated or are at risk of such exposure to evaluate the safety, usefulness, and effectiveness of our developed tools. These programs are designated as CHAMP Best Practice Laboratories, and we will use their results to refine our discoveries and tools. In the picture below, this learning is represented by two arrows labeled “Improve.” When the results of applying the tools fall short of expectations, it prompts us to consider what we may have missed, whether in discovering the causes or in developing the tools, so we can enhance them. We are establishing several Best Practice Prevention Laboratories within frontline child welfare prevention programs, where Decision Support Tools can be tested for safety and effectiveness in settings similar to those in which they will be disseminated.
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When the tools are tested and show that they can be safely used in the field and effectively reduce the risk of maltreatment and its consequences, we will work to widely disseminate them so that children and families for whom the tools are designed to reduce their risk can benefit from them. We will also make the knowledge we gain about the causes of maltreatment and their related outcomes broadly available by publishing our findings in professional journals and for public audiences.
Our Launch
In September 2023, the CHAMP Center was funded with a grant to New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine in partnership with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Health Informatics and the NYU Silver School of Social Work and McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research - from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). This funding is part of NICHD’s Capstone initiative to fund national centers of research excellence on child maltreatment. Other Capstone centers are based at Washington University, Penn State University, and the University of Rochester.
The CHAMP Network was also funded in September, 2023 with a grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) as a new National Child Traumatic Stress Network center (NCTSN). This funding was awarded to the NYU Silver School of Social Work in partnership with NYU Grossman School of Medicine, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, and community agencies: Forestdale (Queens, NY), the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, Manhattan, Bronx, and Staten Island, NY, and SCO Family of Services, Brooklyn, NY.
In the News
Key Partners
The CHAMP Center is funded by a Capstone initiative grant provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
The CHAMP Network is funded by by the Sustance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).