It has been my privilege to serve as Div. 37 Section on Child Maltreatment’s president these past two years. The section has accomplished so much, and it has been my honor to work with such a dedicated group of board members and active section members! Thanks to the hard work of our membership chairs, we have a new system for coordinating and tracking members and have reconnected with several members who had lost touch with the section. In response to a member survey that indicated a desire for more networking opportunities, we coordinated social hours for professionals working in child maltreatment at several professional conferences, including the Society for Research in Child Development, the American Psychology-Law Society, and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. (This was, of course, back when we were traveling to conferences.) Our members-at-large are working on ideas for more continuing education for members, and we are in the process of updating our postdoc guide and other website curriculum materials. In the last newsletter, we shared an article that Kristin Valentino, Kimberly Renk, and I co-wrote about COVID and child maltreatment. As numbers are peaking again, this remains a concern. The systemic racism embedded in this country has contributed to many of the economic and health disparities highlighted in the pandemic. We encourage our members to continue to confront systemic racism in academia and child welfare.
This is an important time for leadership in the Section on Child Maltreatment. We are currently accepting nominations for our next president-elect. We hope you consider joining our Executive Committee in this leadership position. Please nominate colleagues or self-nominate! To submit a nomination, please include a copy of your CV and a brief candidate statement indicating why you would like to serve in this position. The candidate statement will be included in the ballots that are sent out at the time of the election. Nominations are due by Dec. 3, 2020, to Stephanie Block. Please reach out to me with any questions about the position.
I’m pleased to announce that the section will now offer a new mid-career award! This award recognizes outstanding work by midcareer professionals within the field of child maltreatment. In order to recognize the wide variety of work being done to help alleviate and address the problem of childhood maltreatment, applicants of the award can demonstrate excellence in a number of areas, including teaching, research, policy, or clinical practice. Look for details about how to apply this spring.
I’d like to acknowledge our outgoing board members for their service and dedication to the section. Jennie Noll (past-president), Collen Cullinan (program chair), and Alex Busito (student representative) will be leaving the section board, but we hope they will stay involved in the coming years. We thank them for their outstanding service! I’m thrilled to welcome Karen Appleyard Carmody as our new president as of this January. Karen serves as the director of early childhood prevention programs at the Center for Child and Family Health. She is a licensed psychologist and assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine. I am excited to continue to work with her in my role as past-president! Karen has a background in working to bridge science to effective policy and practice, and we are already collaborating on ideas for the section.
As the year winds down, I want to express my sincere gratitude to Div. 37 for their continued support of the section. It has been my honor to sit on the Div. 37 Executive Committee and to work with all of you. Thank you for your continued commitment to collaborating with your counterparts on the section board so that we could share administrative services, convention programming, and benefit from your wisdom and knowledge. The section could not do our work on behalf of children and families without the support of the division.
It has been my pleasure,
Steph