This report highlights a study that documented that almost two-thirds of young adults had encountered “some kind of dating violence” as teens in Orange County. These incidents include psychological and cyber abuse, stalking, and physical and sexual violence.

The purpose of the loveisrespect.org website (originally named the National Dating Abuse Helpline) is to involve and inform youth in the prevention and ending of abusive relationships. The website offers the Huddle Up for Healthy Relationships Materials Toolkit to support and recognize Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month in 2019. Print and interactive versions of the toolkit include resources such as banners, rip cards and pledge cards that can support greater public awareness of teen dating violence.

This special collection from the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence offers a variety of resources and approaches to prevent and respond to teen dating violence. These resources include fact sheets, best practices and programs, laws and legislation, and contact information for referral organizations. This menu is targeted for multiple audiences – young people, parents and caregivers, bystanders, men and boys, representatives from pregnancy prevention programs, teachers and school-based professionals, health care professionals, and domestic and sexual violence service providers.

This Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides a snapshot of the data related to opioid-involved overdose deaths. One key finding, among many other trends this infographic identifies, is that there were 70,237 drug overdose deaths in 2017, of which 67.8 percent involved opioids. This represents a 10.4 percent increase over 2016.

This newly released report from the Community Action Partnership, representing over 1,000 Community Action Agencies (CAA) nationwide, presents a broad landscape of the activities and impact of CAAs. It identifies several “spotlight stories” to reflect on initiatives undertaken relative to job creation and job training, asset building, supports for health and well-being, community development, and services to strengthen children and families. The emphasis is on community-wide solutions that are designed and implemented to address challenges that low-income families face.

Having unemployed parents in early and late childhood creates long-lasting negative impacts on people’s quality of life. This study uses qualitative interviews on well-being and three decades of German panel data to conclude that having unemployed parents in childhood (0-5 years old) and adolescence (11-15 years old) creates a modest but psychologically and economically significant impact on reported well-being later in life. However, effects vary by gender, and some children with unemployed parents experience positive consequences like higher parental investment. Overall, though, stressors and burdens of responsibility on children of unemployed parents provide another reason to focus on lowering barriers to employment for job-seeking adults.

In this Brookings Paper on Economic Activity, the authors focus on children within the safety net programs of Medicaid, EITC, CTC, SNAP, and TANF, and how federal money has shifted over time to currently benefit families with earnings above the poverty line. Because much research has been done on the substantial and lasting effects of poverty on child development and later well-being, current social net programs may be negatively affecting the poorest children. Over the past twenty years, funds allocated toward children have mostly remained the same, as have the number of children in poverty, but social program benefits have been shifting to benefit those at or above the poverty line more than those below it. While the authors do not discuss many policy implications, they emphasize the harm that cuts to these programs may do and promote adaptable reforms that quickly supplement income during recessionary times.

Studying large public social programs can be a challenge for social scientists. Recent technological developments have allowed researchers to use big data — data sets that combine survey and administrative data — to examine how social programs work and how they affect their participants. One method by which researchers accomplish this is “text mining,” a process of finding patterns from large amounts of unstructured text data. In this report from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, researchers explore how text mining contributed to a better understanding of the behavior of families in the foster care system and the role of the courts on reunification.