Child abuse is an issue that I hold close to my heart. I have been a counselor for the YMCA for the past couple of years. I tutor as well as mentor kids that are low academic and come from low income families. A lot of these children witness abuse or are abused themselves. As a counselor I am not allowed to do anything but provide a safe and happy place for these kids to come. I have always wanted to be more involved and provide the help these kids deserve but my job limits me. I started thinking about other ways our YMCA program could help; which is why I chose this as my research topic. My main concern is the effects abuse has on a child and what implications they will face later in life. I want to see what successful programs are doing and how they support abused children. I also want to figure out if sending kids to these programs will prevent emotional, social, and academic damage that comes from abuse. I value having a safe home and family to come to and I would assume that most people who have a supportive family value this as well. These kids don't have any family members to go to, let alone have a safe home. Everyone should have a safe, supportive and uplifting community to fall back on. Creating a program that would be geared toward abuse prevention would give abused children the support they don't receive. 

To start my research I realized that I needed better background knowledge of child abuse. An informative article named "Child Abuse Statistics" listed numerous statistics about child abuse and got rid of my biased opinions. The first section of statistics describes how many children are abused annually, the number of times Protective Services was used annually, and gave percentages about what happens to children who are abused. For example, 30% of abused children will later abuse their own children (Child Abuse Statistics). The next section shows the percentages for different types of child abuse; the most common one was neglect at 78.5% (Child Abuse Statistics). The final section breaks down the perpetrator demographics by age, race and relationship. The most common perpetrator was a white father who is 20 to 29 years old (Child Abuse Statistics). There were no values present in this article but instead clear information about what is going on in child abuse. The audience can determine their values and if the statistics threaten their values after reading. There is not one specific person who was responsible for these statistics, however there are many different sources that contributed. The sources include Children's Bureau, National Children's Alliance, and Child Help. All of these sources are creditable sources, .gov and .org, and are all non-profits focused on reducing child abuse.

My next source, School Based Prevention Programs, evaluates prevention programs and picks out the key aspects of what makes a successful program. They stated that effective abuse prevention programs have active participation, a wide variety of activities, build self-esteem in order to effectively use protective skills, encourage parents to participate, and have evaluation studies (Brassard M. & Fiorvanti C.). Next they evaluate the effectiveness of four different prevention programs; Stay Safe, The Body Safety Training Program, Safe Child Program and Talking about Touching. They break-down each program and describe their goals and methods of the program and then explain the pros and cons. After they review the programs there is a conclusion about how prevention programs have been extremely effective in increasing student knowledge and protective behaviors. They chose the programs to evaluate by searching certain terms such as "school", "prevention", "child abuse", etc. They searched for these words in numerous data bases. Therefore selecting the programs was not biased, however it may have been exclusive. All of the programs had issues but none of them were labeled as bad or unsuccessful. The audience loses some information when not every side is addressed. Another topic that could be biased is when the authors choose what elements make a successful program because it is there opinion. Both authors have worked in education and are psychologists; therefore their opinions are valuable. 

My last source, Promising Practices for Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect is a combination of my first two sources. It includes statistics and methods on how to prevent child abuse. The key aspect that sets this source apart from the other is that is addresses the cost of child abuse to individuals and society. It mentions the negative outcomes that abused children will experience. This includes lack of physical and mental health, lack of cognitive development, lower academic achievement, and an unhealthy development of social behavior. All of these negative outcomes will hinder children from forming healthy relationships ("Promising Practices for Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect."). The consequences for society include monetary and non-monetary costs. These costs cover hospitalizations for injuries, mental health services, law enforcement, special education services, etc. These costs add up to around $100 billion annually ("Promising Practices for Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect."). This information can help motivate people to step up and try to eliminate child abuse. Although this source is informational, I would use the facts to draw emotions. I would use this information to set up a scene of a child who is abused and what long term effects they will have and how the cost related to child abuse will continue to increase if we don't make an effort to end child abuse. This source was strictly informative therefore no values were included besides wanted to end child abuse. This source should be credible because they did a lot of research and have lots of different studies referenced throughout the article. However, they could be using certain parts from different readings to help their article make a case; this could be biased as well. They author choose what sources to use and what sources to leave out and this could leave the audience ill-informed. 

My research question is not controversial but could be looked at in many different ways. That may become an issue when I start to write my final paper with twelve sources.  I may need to make more of an argument like "Can we prevent child abuse?" so that I can find more agreements and disagreements. I am going to keep on researching evaluations on different programs and see what is effective and what I not and see if I can find some controversy there. I will be able to find numerous sources that fall under the method category. Where I need to improve on my research is finding argumentative sources. I can accomplish this but it may result in me changing my research question to something more specific. 

My opinion about child abuse did not change as I did more research but my questions and the information I was seeking went in a different direction. In the beginning, I was planning on researching prevention programs only but I found that by doing that it limited what I could write about. I change my research question to "Can we prevent child abuse?" and that widened the door for my research. By doing this I started finding controversial information about Child Protective Services and how prevention should be everyone's responsibility; this created an argument for me. I do feel more qualified to write about child abuse after researching more. I have experienced people I know being abused but having more information from multiple perspectives has given me well-rounded knowledge to make my argument. My main argument is that everyone should feel responsible to prevent and stop abuse, not just a social worker. This makes me qualified because I fall under my main audience, every day people.

