Military Child Advocacy Programs--Victims of Neglect

Each military service has established its own child advocacy program without any overall guidance from the Department of Defense (DOD). As a result, child advocacy programs for military families have inconsistent policies.

In addition, the services' programs receive no direct funding and, at most installations, suffer from a lack of adequate staff. Military child advocacy programs are usually staffed by individuals who have been assigned child advocacy responsibilities as a collateral duty. Also, the child maltreatment reporting systems currently maintained by the individual military services are inconsistent and ineffective for managing maltreatment cases. All of the military installations visited had efforts underway to deal with child maltreatment. Improving the child advocacy programs at the installation level will require DOD to place greater priority on and direct more resources to these programs. The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect has told DOD that it would seriously consider providing funds to help establish a small centralized child advocacy group that could perform activities to improve the child advocacy programs.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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