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.

The picture on this page shows how the CHAMP Center and Network are designed to discover causes, build tools from these discoveries, test these tools, and disseminate our discoveries and innovations, while continually learning along the way. There are four interacting parts to our work.

1. Discover the Causes 2. Produce Tools 3. Test Tools 4. Spread the Knowledge and Tools