Child maltreatment (CM) is highly prevalent and one of the most injurious conditions that children may experience. Because it is often-clandestine, it is difficult to assure that existing prevention and treatment mechanisms reach those in need. CM’s consequences may take a long time to be recognized and expressed. We discuss the need to increase public health actions when the person reaches adulthood to mitigate the consequences of CM.

‘Disappearing’ people as an act of torture has an ordinary language meaning, such that the United Nations could describe it and various torture treatment centres that address it as torture. The present United States policy of separating families into different prisons at its border with Mexico results in many such disappearances, and therefore is torture of both children and the families they are separated from. This article follows the United Nations description.

Frequently, community based strategies include engagement with local faith leaders. However, there have been few systematic attempts to document how faith leaders themselves define their roles in these initiatives. This study examined local faith leaders and their spouses, in flood affected areas of Malawi, who had been oriented to child protection issues through World Vision workshops aimed explicitly at relating protection concerns to religious teachings.

This chapter draws from George Monbiot’s (2017) thoughts on the political power of storytelling. He emphasizes that stories function as schema through which people organize information and develop a sense of order and purpose. It is a mistake, he warns, to try to rely on data to challenging a misleading story since ‘[t]he only thing that can displace a story is a story’ (Monbiot, 2017, p 3). In short, information is not sufficient to challenge disinformation: we must also supply a meaningful framework in which that information makes sense.