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Last week, Youth Services Insider profiled some of the state ballot initiatives up for voters to directly decide on Election Day. Here is a quick update on what happened with those initiatives, along with results from a few local measures.

For the past three decades I have been involved in the development of family resource centers, community-based facilities that serve as a gateway to critical supports and services for families. They existed long before I began that work, and our social work profession was founded on the back of settlement houses that were part of a broader reform movement starting with Jane Addams in 1889.

“Your father is as worthless as your mother.” Those words – said by a caseworker to a 13-year-old child whose parents were addicted to heroin – jumped out at me as I read the case file.

Upon hearing the term “human trafficking,” most Americans envision foreign nationals who have been smuggled into the United States to engage in sex work within our borders. While this situation is common and grave, it is important for Americans to know that the trafficking of American citizens is on the rise right here at home.

Lisa Mayrose knew Florida’s Department of Children & Families needed to overhaul how it investigated phone calls reporting beaten and neglected children. “We had a rash of child deaths,” Mayrose, the regional managing director of the department in Tampa, said in an interview with The Imprint.

Los Angeles County struggles to strike the right balance between human judgment and increasingly sophisticated predictive tools when determining the risk that a child will be abused.   On weekdays, calls to Los Angeles County’s child abuse hotline reach their peak between 2 p.m.

By Sheena Vasani  In her quest to achieve some semblance of justice in the world and in her own life, abuse survivor Rachael Kay Albers angrily sought refuge in feminism. Until one day, she noticed an irony: In her aggressive approach to fighting for a more humane world, she was becoming like her abuser.

By Beth Cortez-Neavel Texas is taking serious steps toward using predictive data analytics, or “big data,” to prevent child deaths due to abuse and neglect. Not only are state officials finally catching on that child maltreatment is a public health issue, there are three new state-led efforts to curtail child deaths and maltreatment by using data to pinpoint specific warning signs at different community levels.

By Sarah Thomas In 2014, Los Angeles County’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Child Protection issued a scathing report that pointed out that the social workers investigating emergency cases of child abuse and neglect were often the least experienced.