Beginning with the current issue,
Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review is devoting two special issues (Volume 12, Issues 1 & 2, 2009) to research themes and developments in the area of children’s exposure to violence. These issues come 6 years after the journal’s special issues in 2003 reviewing and setting the agenda for research on children’s exposure to domestic violence, community violence, war, and terrorism. The articles featured in the 2003 issues represented a distillation of a federally sponsored 3-day conference held in 2002 on children exposed to violence where prevalence, consequences, services, and interventions were discussed (Feerick and Prinz
2003a; Prinz and Feerick
2003a). The papers presented at the 2002 conference underscored the need for systematic study of child violence exposure. The conference planners put forward recommendations for an agenda for research, policy, and practice to find effective ways to prevent violence and ultimately eliminate children’s exposure to violence. Some of the recommendations, outlined in the 2003 special issues (Feerick and Prinz
2003b; Prinz and Feerick
2003b), included:
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the need to utilize the best models, methods, and instruments to study exposure to violence
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the need to study the ecological context within which the child develops; the types of violence that occurs in these contexts and how these experiences with and exposure to these types of violence affect child and family functioning
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more research on early intervention and prevention for children at risk for later problems due to exposure to domestic and other forms of violence
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the need for research that takes on a developmental perspective and that elucidates the short- and long-term outcomes of children at different ages and stages of development
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more extensive data on the prevalence of types of violence—how often it occurs, where it occurs, and who is at greatest risk for experiencing these types of violence
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identify factors of resilience as well as risk to understand the roles of schools, communities, and families in ameliorating or exacerbating the effects of violence exposure.
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