PROMOTING SAFE AND STABLE FAMILIES
What it is: The Promoting Safe and Stable Families
(PSSF) program funds community-based services that prevent child abuse and neglect through
parenting-education, family strengthening services for troubled families, adoption services,
and other preventive programs. It is authorized through Title IV-B, subpart 2 of the Social
Security Act. PSSF was reauthorized in September 2006 as part of the Child and Family
Services Improvement Act with an additional $40 million per year in mandatory funding.
How it works: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provides grants
to states to help operate these services for families at risk or in crisis. States create
five-year plans describing how they will use the funding.
Why it's important: Children who survive abuse or neglect carry the emotional scars
for life. Most will not go on to commit crimes. However, being abused or neglected sharply
increases the risk that they will. The best available research indicates that, based on
confirmed cases of abuse or neglect in just one year, an additional 35,000 violent criminals
and over 250 murderers will emerge as adults who would never have become violent criminals
if not for the abuse and neglect they endured as children.
Fortunately, quality programs really work to prevent abuse and neglect. For example, one
evidence-based voluntary in-home parent coaching program, the Nurse Family Partnership,
randomly assigned at-risk pregnant women to receive in-home visits by nurses starting before
the birth of the first child and continuing until the child was age two. Rigorous research,
originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that
in-home parent coaching services can cut abuse and neglect among at-risk children in half. In
addition, children of mothers who received the coaching had 60% fewer arrests by age 15 than
the children of mothers who were not coached.
Overwhelming unmet need: Each year, more than 1,400 children die from abuse or
neglect in America. Forty percent of these children are less than one year old. Each year,
an estimated 2.7 million children are abused or neglected, including 900,000 cases that are
actually investigated and verified by an overburdened child protection system. Services are
so under-funded that half of all abuse and neglect reports cannot even be investigated, and
of the cases confirmed, only about half the children receive any help.
Fiscally responsible: Prevent Child Abuse America estimates that child abuse and
neglect cost Americans $94 billion a year. Researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of
Minneapolis concluded that NFP produced an average of five dollars in savings for every
dollar invested and produced more than $28,000 in net savings for every high-risk family
enrolled in the program. A Washington State analysis also produced similar results, even
when accounting only for savings from reduced crime.
Funding level: Promoting Safe and Stable Families received $454 million in
funding in Fiscal Year 2007. The Administration is proposing the same funding level for
FY08 - a cut in services to kids/families when inflation is considered. Fight Crime: Invest
in Kids urges Congress to fund PSSF at its authorized level of $545 million.
For more information, please contact Miriam Rollin at (202) 776-0027
ext. 143 or miriam@fightcrime.org
1212 New York Ave. NW, Suite 300