Doctor’s model IDs child abuse areas

FORT WORTH, TEXAS » A Texas doctor believes a modeling system that’s successfully identified neighborhoods, streets and even specific businesses where shootings and other crimes are likely to occur can help stop child abuse and neglect before it happens.

Dyann Daley started a nonprofit this summer to help communities create maps that can zero in on areas as small as a few city blocks where such maltreatment is likeliest to happen, helping prevent it before it starts and allowing advocacy groups to better focus their limited resources.

“This approach is really focused on prevention,” said Daley, a pediatric anesthesiologist. “Because if you know where something is going to happen, then you can do something to stop it.”

Unlike the common hot spot mapping approach, which identifies high-frequency areas of child abuse and neglect based on cases that have already happened, Daley’s risk terrain modeling approach identifies other factors that indicate an area is fertile ground for abuse so that efforts can be made to head it off. Such prevention can not only save lives, it can help at-risk children avoid the often lifelong harmful effects of maltreatment, including a likelihood of alcohol and drug abuse, depression and anxiety, and risk of aggressive or criminal behavior.

“Hot spots tell you where past crimes have occurred, but don’t explain why,” said Joel Caplan, one of two Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice professors who created risk terrain modeling . He said hot spot mapping also assumes that crimes will continue to occur in the same location.

Risk terrain modeling was initially used to understand why shootings were happening time and again at certain locations. Caplan said it has since been used in variety of areas, including traffic planning and suicides, but that Daley’s work is the first he knows of to apply it to child maltreatment.

The modeling has helped police departments across the country identify areas to target and what strategies to use to reduce certain crimes.

LM OTERO — AP Becky Biser of the Tarrant Baptist Association shows a map indicating where research is predicting that there’s a high risk of child abuse and neglect in Fort Worth, Texas.