What Are Adverse Childhood Experiences?

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Care deprivation is a process rather than a sudden event.

Legal thresholds for intervention can miss years of weakening care and support networks.

Opportunities exist to strengthen families before crisis.

This is Part I of a three-part series based on recent research by sociologist Tatevik Karapetyan, which focuses on reframing the idea of care deprivation within a family setting. Based on cases from the FAR Child Protection Center in Armenia, it identifies and names specific challenges that often go unseen and advocates for the identification of a variety of specific challenges and for earlier intervention.

“Could we have helped this child earlier?”

When you work with children and families in crisis, this painful question can linger even after successful interventions. Child protection systems are designed to respond when problems arise, such as neglect, inadequate parental care, or family crisis. At that point, social workers, courts, schools, or other institutions intervene.

However, in many cases we see at the FAR Child Protection Center in Armenia, the difficulties that brought the children to our door may have been developing for years. New research tries to reframe care deprivation in families as a process that develops over time. This may sound obvious to many onlookers, but there is a difference between that school of thought and the current definition of care deprivation, which is seen in the eyes of child protection systems as a status that........

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