Prevent Child Abuse & End Deaths from Abuse and Neglect

Abuse and neglect take a long-term physical and emotional toll on individual children, their families, and the communities in which they live. It costs more than $124 billion each year. In 2014, there were 702,000 confirmed victims of child abuse and neglect.

Every Child Matters recommends nurse-family partnerships (home visiting) as an effective, proven way to reduce child abuse and neglect.

Hundreds, even thousands, of American children’s lives can be saved each year by protecting those at highest risk for death due to abuse and neglect.  That’s why Every Child Matters helped create and lead the National Coalition to End Child Abuse Deaths, which mobilized public support for passage of the Protect Our Kids Act of 2012. Signed into law at the end of 2013, that legislation authorized creation of the national Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse Deaths and Neglect Fatalities.

The Commission’s final report, released in March, 2016, recommends a public health approach that engages community agencies to identify the best strategies to keep children safe. The recommendations are a mandate for the federal government – as well as for state, local and tribal governments – to devote necessary resources and facilitate change that could save the four to eight children who die each day from abuse and neglect. Every Child Matters urges Congress and the Executive Branch to give the report their prompt and serious attention, and to act accordingly to save children’s lives.

You can read the Commission’s report here. To learn more, please visit our post entitled Save Children’s Lives Now for further details.

Gun Safety

If there were a disease epidemic killing thousands of children across the country every year, and if we knew how to prevent it, we would not hesitate to act decisively and boldly to save our kids. Yet every day children and young adults are gunned down in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods.

We know that common-sense policies like universal background checks, assault weapon bans, and proper gun storage laws could prevent these tragedies. It is time to put an end to America’s gun violence epidemic.