Network News
'Pinwheels for Prevention' on Old Main lawn, April 27
Apr 21, 2017With April being National Child Abuse Awareness month, all Penn State students, faculty and staff are invited to stop by the Old Main lawn at 12:15 p.m. on April 27 and help the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network plant a pinwheel garden. The Pinwheels for Prevention Campaign is the national platform of Prevent Child Abuse America that began in 2008 and has firmly established the pinwheel as the new symbol of child abuse prevention. The pinwheel stands for the carefree childhood we want for all children and is a call to neighbors, community members and leaders to play a role in protecting and nurturing our youngest citizens. Prevent Child Abuse America's ultimate goal is for abuse and neglect to never occur and to share the message that "Prevention is Possible."
Determining if abusive head trauma could be abuse
Apr 20, 2017As part of a larger Penn State project and NIH grant, Penn State Children’s Hospital’s Dr. Kent Hymel discusses a clinical trial to test a tool doctors can use to objectively determine if pediatric patients who are admitted to the hospital with head trauma should be evaluated for abuse.
Penn State gets $7.7 million grant to "raise the bar" on child abuse-related research
Apr 19, 2017By Charles Thompson | cthompson@pennlive.com Penn State officials committed to taking a leading edge position in the fight against child abuse in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. On Tuesday, the university announced that its efforts in that regard have received a significant recognition - and a financial boost - from a national partner. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, awarded Penn State a $7.7 million grant to help create a new Center for Healthy Children. The Center is to be focused on "raising the bar for research" on all forms of child abuse in the hopes of eventually pointing to a better set of responses, treatments and long-term outcomes for victims. NIH leaders said the goal of the five-year grant is to address a problem that has long vexed those in the child welfare field: Why are some abuse victims able to rise above their early adversity and thrive as adults, while others suffer from long-term physical and emotional problems? Are there treatment or other response keys that are important factors? Certainly, political and program leaders have advanced all kinds of policy solutions. But, Dr. Valerie Maholmes of the NICHD told PennLive Tuesday, researchers have to catch up. Maholmes, chief of the institute's Pediatric Trauma and Critical Illness Branch, said one of its primary priorities is taking this vastly understudied area of child development to another level, hopefully to create better responses that more consistently leads victimized kids to positive outcomes. The grant itself represented a positive outcome for Penn State, which President Eric Barron has committed an additional $3.4 million in university funding in support of the center, which will be based in State College. There, the NIH selection - following a competitive, peer-reviewed process - was celebrated in part as another example of the university forging a better path in the wake of Sandusky's arrest and conviction as a serial child molester. Sandusky was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing 10 different boys between 1994 and 2008, and a subsequent civil mediation process led by Penn State has suggested that he molested 32 boys in all, dating to the 1970s. Penn State, shortly after Sandusky's conviction, committed resources to a cluster hiring of faculty members to attack child abuse-related issues. To date, it has hired nine faculty members across the colleges of Health and Human Development, Education, Nursing, Liberal Arts and Medicine, established a minor in child maltreatment and advocacy studies, and launched an annual conference to children and family issues. The university also maintains a $12 million endowment - it's slice of the $60 million fine originally levied by the NCAA in 2012 - to help sustain those programs. Now, said Jennie Noll, a professor of human development and family studies and director of the university's existing Child Maltreatment Solutions Network, Penn State has a chance to match an enhanced research potentional to its existing education and outreach efforts. "This is the payoff of that (initial) investment," Noll said. "If that investment hadn't been real, then this wouldn't have happened." There are two principal projects to be fully-funded by the federal grant: A longitudinal study tracking progress of 1,200 Pennsylvania youth in the child welfare system, and measuring their outcomes against the services they received and how they were delivered. A national test of a new diagnostic tool for children with severe head injuries designed to help doctors differentiate between potential abuse cases and accidental injuries. To be tested at eight pediatric intensive care units across the country, the goal is to help reduce the number of missed diagnoses in either direction. A third leg of the new grant, Noll said, will be shorter term demonstration projects aimed at helping front-line child welfare workers better make the case at the federal and state levels for funding and other high-need resources. That could be especially important in a state like Pennsylvania, she noted, where the General Assembly dramatically enhanced child protection laws after the Sandusky scandal, but has largely left local agencies scrambling to catch up to the new demands for service. After the first five years, Maholmes said, Penn State will have the opportunity to compete for a second round of funding. The problems of child abuse, unfortunately, are pretty well-defined. According to NIH data, each year more than 2 million children are subjected to physical, emotional or sexual abuse or neglect. About 1,500 of those children die in the average year, a number similar to the mortality rates from pediatric cancers. Treatment and placement of the survivors exceeds $120 billion. Now Penn State, which so unintentionally shined such a bright light on aspects of those problems across Pennsylvania, gets to become a major player in the national effort to combat it.
Grant creates first national center for child maltreatment studies at Penn State
Apr 18, 2017Roughly 2 million children experience maltreatment each year in the United States and face the possibility of a lifetime of mental, emotional, behavioral and physical health difficulties. With more than $124 billion spent in the U.S. on child maltreatment-related costs, the importance of mitigating damaging outcomes for victims cannot be overstated. There is a critical need for new research to identify health and developmental solutions, mobilize public investment in child maltreatment prevention and treatment, accelerate science to practice, and spark dynamic system-wide change. Recognizing this importance, The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the NICHD, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently completed a competitive process to fund for the first time ever, an academic institution to function as a “Capstone.” Penn State has been selected based on scientific merit to establish the Center for Healthy Children. The award of $7.7 million will support the center as a national resource for child maltreatment research and training. To further this effort, Penn State has committed $3.4 million in funds, to total more than $11 million. “Maltreatment is a critical issue requiring tangible solutions. There needs to be a heightened focus on raising the bar for research in this area so we can develop specific ways to prevent maltreatment and promote health and well-being for survivors,” said Jennie Noll, the principal investigator of the NIH award, professor of human development and family studies in Penn State's College of Health and Human Development, and director of the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network, a unit of Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute. “We don't yet have a comprehensive understanding of exactly why maltreatment leads to such dire consequences for some, while others may exhibit remarkable resilience. This is why it is vitally important that we identify the mechanisms involved in these health disparities." The knowledge generated by this research will allow scientists, in conjunction with advocates and practitioners, to develop and implement novel, targeted and optimized interventions that will maximize the ability to impact lives and have relevance nationwide and throughout the world. This grant is a direct outgrowth of an initial investment Penn State made in 2012 to create and support a network of researchers who have since come together at the University to solve the complex problem of child maltreatment. Through this investment, the network hired nine faculty members across five colleges, each working from distinct, yet complementary, angles in a highly unique trans-disciplinary effort. “We recruited the best and the brightest researchers to Penn State to create a network and we continue our commitment to work on this critical issue by contributing $3.4 million in support of the new NIH center,” said Penn State President Eric J. Barron. “The expertise, passion and dedication of our researchers are unparalleled and this grant exemplifies our strength in successful interdisciplinary collaborations, with leading experts from across the University.” The grant was established to fund cutting-edge research that focuses on child maltreatment and offers practical suggestions for preventative measures and legislative recommendations that can spur legislative action. In one of the research projects, Noll and her team will invite approximately 1,200 children aged 8-13 from around the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to participate in a study focused on eradicating health disparities for children who have experienced the child welfare system. This large cohort study led by Christine Heim, professor of bio-behavioral health at Penn State, will include health screenings, monitoring and education in the areas of emotional and behavioral well-being as well as physical health. Another research project supported by the grant will be led by Dr. Kent P. Hymel, a child abuse pediatrician at Penn State Children’s Hospital. Eight pediatric intensive care units from across the country will participate in a randomized clinical trial designed to assess the impact of a novel, highly sensitive, screening tool for pediatric abusive head trauma. More than 1,500 U.S. children die annually from child abuse, a number similar to the mortality rate from all forms of pediatric cancer combined. Approximately 40 percent of child maltreatment deaths result from abusive head trauma. For the first time in any clinical setting, physicians will apply a recently validated screening tool to guide their decisions to launch or forgo child abuse evaluations in their young, acutely head-injured patients. By improving the accuracy of these difficult clinical decisions, implementing the screening tool could substantially reduce cases of missed or misdiagnosed abusive head trauma, unnecessary abuse evaluations, abusive re-injury and death. The overarching goal of the center is to translate research into solutions that can enhance how the child welfare system supports families. Moreover, the center grant also supports a team, led by Max Crowley, assistant professor of human development and family studies at Penn State, who will translate knowledge generated by the center's researchers into policy briefs and messages that will resonate with policy makers regarding the fiscal costs of maltreatment and its consequences, to implore larger public investment in prevention and treatment. In a unique partnership between children and youth organizations and University researchers, this team will work in conjunction with Pennsylvania’s child welfare system to address pressing questions that are important to frontline social workers and administrators. “It is an incredible honor to be selected by the NIH as an organization that has the capabilities to make a tangible impact on the lives of children,” said Noll. “I’m inspired to be working with this incredibly talented group of world-renowned researchers as we forge this vital path ahead.” In addition to the new support from the NIH and continued support from the University, the center will be given dedicated space provided by the College of Health and Human Development on Penn State’s University Park campus. Researchers working with Noll on this project include Max Crowley, assistant professor of human development and family studies; Christine Heim, professor of biobehavioral health; Kent Hymel, child abuse pediatrician; Diana Fishbein, professor of human development and family studies and director of the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Center; Sarah Font, assistant professor of sociology; Sheridan Miyamoto, assistant professor of nursing; Chad Shenk, assistant professor of human development and family studies; Idan Shalev, assistant professor of biobehavioral health; Hannah Schreirer, assistant professor of biobehavioral health; Emma Rose, research assistant professor, Prevention Research Center; Vernon Chinchilli, Distinguished Professor of Public Health Sciences; Mark Dias, associate professor of neurosurgery; and Ming Wang, assistant professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics.
Promoting child well-being to be topic of 2017 de Lissovoy Lecture
Apr 17, 2017An expert in analyzing and defining child well-being, Janet Rosenzweig, executive director of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, will present "Is It Well With The Children?" in which she will outline her findings on preventing maltreatment and promoting well-being. Rosenzweig is the 2017 College of Health and Human Development Distinguished Alumni Speaker, presenter for the sixth annual de Lissovoy Lecture, and speaker for the fifth annual Child Maltreatment Solutions Network Awareness event. Her talk will take place at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 27 in the HUB-Robeson Center Freeman Auditorium on the University Park campus. The event is free and open to the public. A reception will be held before the lecture in the HUB Gallery. During the talk, Rosenzweig will discuss her work as vice president for research and programs at Prevent Child Abuse America, where she led the strategic initiative to develop a methodology to assess child well-being across the social ecology. “I’m going to address how we assess child well-being,” Rosenzweig said. “Too many people rely on systems such as the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. Reports of maltreatment don’t tell us everything. They are not accurate measures of actual incidence and prevalence of maltreatment." To assess child well-being, Rosenzweig recommends looking at these reports, but also evaluating other factors. “In addition to these reports, we should take into account other national studies, including the National Incidence Studies mandated by the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act,” Rosenzweig said. “But we need to take a much broader perspective, assessing what we’re doing in the community to keep kids healthy and families strong, and evaluate threats and protective factors across the social ecology, including parent-child relationships, community support and public policy." The topic is an important one, Rosenzweig said, because new science is clearly demonstrating the long-term effects of being exposed to trauma early in life, including potentially compromising physical and emotional well-being later on. “It’s urgent to support families before a crisis occurs, before families need Child Protective Services and other public services,” she said. “We need to work upstream.” Rosenzweig said Penn State recognizes the need for communication, advocacy and clinical skills to make a change. “Supporting families and communities take more than one discipline. Penn State gets that,” she said. Rosenzweig, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, holds a bachelor of science degree in individual and family studies and a master of science degree in health education from Penn State. She earned certification as a sex educator and in 1978 brought that perspective to one of the first child sexual abuse programs in the country located in East Tennessee. Rosenzweig managed child-welfare programs in Tennessee and Texas before moving to New Jersey in 1984. She earned a doctoral degree in social work from Rutgers University, was the first social-work doctoral candidate to take a minor at Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics, and focused on public policy research in child protection. She served in the policy research unit of the New Jersey Department of Human Services, founded one of the first County Commissions on Child Abuse in New Jersey, and served for nine years as the cabinet-level Mercer County Director of Human Services. Rosenzweig also served as executive director of Prevent Child Abuse - New Jersey from 2001 to 2007. She earned a Master of Public Administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 2008, and then joined the faculty of Montclair State University as a visiting associate professor of child advocacy. Author of The "Sex-Wise Parent: The Parent's Guide Protecting Your Child, Strengthening Your Family, and Talking to Kids about Sex, Abuse, and Bullying," Rosenzweig presents workshops to parent and professional groups promoting the ideal that parents must be the primary sex educators of their children, learning how to support their children's overall sexual health and safety in the home, school and community. Rosenzweig has held teaching appointments at Rider University, The College of New Jersey, Rutgers University, and Temple University. She has also held progressively responsible positions in the non-profit and public human services sector. She returned to Penn State multiple times in 2012 and 2013 to conduct workshops for faculty, staff, students and families and helped to write and is featured in the University's required online training program in sexual-abuse prevention. About the sponsors The de Lissovoy Lecture is presented by an alumnus of the Department of Human Development and Family Studies about his/her experiences working in the child-welfare system and promoting the protection of children from abuse and neglect. In 2009, the Vladimir de Lissovoy Program Support Endowment for the Protection of Children in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies was created by the de Lissovoy family to honor Val de Lissovoy (1918-2009), who served as a faculty member in the department for more than 20 years and worked tirelessly throughout his life to help abused and neglected children and their families. The Health and Human Development Distinguished Alumni Speaker Series was established by the Board of Directors of the HHD Alumni Society in order to feature prominent graduates of the college who are leaders in their fields. The board's mission is to facilitate and promote the participation of alumni in activities that support the college's pursuit of excellence. The Child Maltreatment Solutions Network is dedicated to the prevention, detection and treatment of child maltreatment and trauma. The Network provides opportunities and support for collaborative and translational science in order to address the complex problems of child maltreatment. Its work ranges from research on child maltreatment and clinical treatments that foster child health, creating interdisciplinary education and experiences for students, and to public policy that promotes child safety and well-being.
Noll's research on childhood sex abuse featured on CBS News
Apr 6, 2017By Shanika Gunaratna, CBS News For countless victims, the experience of sexual abuse during the formative years of childhood never fades away. Studies show that such abuse casts a shadow over children’s physical and mental health for decades, increasing an individual’s risk of anxiety and depression, eating disorders, self-inflicted harm, violence, and more. Now, researchers who’ve carefully tracked a small cohort of child sex abuse survivors over three decades say they’ve observed another phenomenon: that child sex abuse accelerates the timeline of puberty in adolescent girls. The Pennsylvania State University researchers shared their findings in the Journal of Adolescent Health. How could sex abuse possibly change a child’s physical development? In non-abused children, physical, developmental and psychosocial development tend to occur on a similar timeline — meaning that children generally develop the psychological capacity to navigate the changes that happen their bodies during puberty. But high-stress experiences like sexual abuse disrupt those developmental timelines, the Penn State researchers said. The abuse can trigger increased levels of stress hormones; specifically, the stress can lead to heightened activity in the “hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal” (HPA) axis, which can then jump-start puberty ahead of schedule, the researchers said. “At some point, the body can’t regulate stress hormones efficiently,” lead researcher Jennie Noll told CBS News. Noll, a professor at Penn State, teaches human development and family studies. Early puberty can have long-term health consequences. It’s been linked to a higher risk of certain cancers, like ovarian and breast cancer, due to prolonged exposure to estrogen. Early puberty is also associated with higher rates of depression, substance abuse, fertility problems, sexual risk-taking, and teenage pregnancy. Researchers say girls who develop early can face sexual expectations they aren’t emotionally prepared to navigate. The study, which began in 1987, tracked a sample of 80 girls who had experienced sexual abuse and were referred by child protective services. Working closely with nurses and protective services, researchers amassed data about the group over a span of 30 years. The girls in the sample had all experienced abuse at the hands of family members, and the average length of that abuse was two years. The cases were “not atypical of a lot of sexual abuse that we see reported to protective service agencies around the country,” Noll said. The girls were tracked from pre-puberty to full maturity. Researchers leaned on a system called Tanner staging, which doctors use to track breast and pubic hair growth as markers for girls’ development. Noll called it the “gold standard” to measure puberty. The findings were stark: girls who had experienced sexual abuse in childhood were eight months earlier in breast development and 12 months early in pubic hair growth. Those results held steady when researchers controlled for a range of risk factors associated with abuse, such as the absence of a biological father, obesity, and poverty. Ryan Fields, associate director at Johns Hopkins University’s Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, called the research “fascinating.” “This study joins the body of research that really shows how experiencing child sexual abuse increases one’s risk for mental health and behavioral health problems across the life course — beyond the immediate pain or injury associated with the event,” said Fields, who was not involved in the study. Other researchers first noted the link between child sex abuse and earlier puberty in 1988. But the Penn State researchers say this study is the most conclusive and precise look at the subject to date, thanks in part to their use of the Tanner framework for measuring puberty. It’s difficult to establish how many children suffer sexual abuse, but research by the Crimes Against Children Research Center estimates 1 in 5 girls are victimized at some point, as are 1 in 20 boys. That research suggests children are most vulnerable to sexual abuse between the ages of 7 and 13. In 2009, the World Health Organization identified child sex abuse as one of the leading preventable risk factors that contribute to the worldwide burden of disease. “Many argue that this is one of the most stressful conditions a child can endure in our society — in a non-war-torn society,” Noll said. But survivors of child sexual abuse often demonstrate deep resilience over the course of their lives. “The resilience of survivors of child sexual abuse can’t get lost,” Fields said. “Many youth who experience child sexual abuse fully recover from that experience.” The study is continuing; the researchers will continue to monitor the group of women as they age, paying particular attention to cancer rates over time. For Noll, the 30-year study demonstrates what can happen when academics partner closely with those on the front lines, like nurses and child welfare workers. One of their goals is to develop laws that are more attuned to how sexual abuse actually reverberates in victims’ lives in the long term. “We want to... [provide] actual empirical data to point to that shows that when child abuse sexual abuse is not prevented and treated, these children are much worse off down the road — both psychosocially and physically.” To view original article, go to CBS News.
Reforms and efforts focused on fighting child abuse, instituting best practices
Mar 27, 2017Since 2011, Penn State has enacted a multitude of reforms focused on fighting child abuse, sexual misconduct, and unethical actions, and has introduced best practices in governance, management and compliance.
Abuse accelerates puberty in children
Mar 16, 2017While it has long been known that maltreatment can affect a child’s psychological development, new Penn State research indicates that the stress of abuse can impact the physical growth and maturation of adolescents as well. Jennie Noll, director of the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network and professor of human development and family studies, and Idan Shalev, assistant professor of biobehavioral health, found that young girls who are exposed to childhood sexual abuse are likely to physically mature and hit puberty at rates 8 to twelve months earlier than their non-abused peers. Their results were published recently in the Journal of Adolescent Health. “Though a year’s difference may seem trivial in the grand scheme of a life, this accelerated maturation has been linked to concerning consequences, including behavioral and mental health problems and reproductive cancers,” said Noll. The body is timed so that physical and developmental changes occur in tandem, assuring that as a child physically changes, they have adequate psychological growth to cope with mature contexts. “High-stress situations, such as childhood sexual abuse, can lead to increased stress hormones that jump-start puberty ahead of its standard biological timeline,” Noll explained. “When physical maturation surpasses psychosocial growth in this way, the mismatch in timing is known as maladaptation.” In the past, there have been studies loosely linking sexual abuse to maladaptation and accelerated maturation, but the longitudinal work completed by Noll and her team has been the most conclusive and in-depth to date, beginning in 1987 and following subjects throughout each stage of puberty. Controlling for race, ethnicity, family makeup, obesity, socioeconomic status and nonsexual traumatic experiences, the researchers compared the pubescent trajectories of 84 females with a sexual abuse history and 89 of their non-abused counterparts. Working closely with nurses and Child Protective Services, the subjects were tracked from pre-puberty to full maturity based on a system known as Tanner staging. Tanner staging is a numeric index of ratings that corresponds with the physical progression of puberty. The study’s researchers focused on breast and pubic hair development as two separate mile markers for pubescent change. Subjects were placed somewhere from one (prepubescent) to five (full maturity) on the Tanner index and their Tanner number and age were mapped out and recorded over time. “We found that young women with sexual abuse histories were far more likely to transition into higher puberty stages an entire year before their non-abused counterparts when it came to pubic hair growth, and a full 8 months earlier in regards to breast development,” Noll stated. “Due to increased exposure to estrogens over a longer period of time, premature physical development such as this has been linked to breast and ovarian cancers. Additionally, early puberty is seen as a potential contributor to increased rates of depression, substance abuse, sexual risk taking and teenage pregnancy.” The researchers believe they were able to accurately rule out other variables that may have aided in accelerated puberty, pinpointing child sexual abuse and the stress hormones associated with it as a cause for early maturation in young girls. Their findings add to the body of work highlighting the role of stress in puberty, and it is the hope that the research will lead to increased preventative care and psychosocial aid to young women facing the effects of early maturation. Funding for this project was partially provided by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. The Child Maltreatment Solutions Network is part of Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute.
Child Welfare Workers Loan Forgiveness Act
Jan 31, 2017State Senator Stewart J. Greenleaf (R-Montgomery/Bucks) is reintroducing Senate Bill 65, the Child Welfare Workers Loan Forgiveness Act, establishing a loan forgiveness program for members of the child welfare workforce who have qualified outstanding loan balances and have at least an undergraduate degree. Read about the bill here.
Children’s Health Exposure Analysis Resource
Jan 18, 2017A wide variety of environmental exposures affect a child’s health and well-being. To promote the broadest possible assessment of these environmental effects on children’s health, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) created The Children’s Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) — a new, comprehensive set of resources to enable NIH-funded pediatric researchers access to laboratory analyses of environmental exposures at no cost. CHEAR can provide a wide range of services, including: Expert consultation on exposure analysis, study design, and data analysis and interpretation Analysis of biological samples for biological, psychosocial, chemical, and physical exposures using state-of-the-art techniques A data repository and associated data science tools Statistical and data analytical services including support for meta analyses Development and dissemination of new statistical methods and informatics tools Support for pilot and feasibility studies. Please visit http://chearprogram.org to learn more about the eligibility criteria and application process. We welcome you to share this website with your colleagues who may also be eligible. We hope you are as excited as we are about this opportunity! Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.