Definitions & Key Concepts
Words like violence, prevention, safety, and wellbeing can mean different things in different settings. Clear definitions help us communicate what we are working toward, what we study, and what we mean when we talk about preventing childhood violence.
Our definitions reflect research, lived experience, community knowledge, and what we continue to learn through our work. They may evolve as that learning continues.
Understanding Childhood Violence
Understanding Prevention and Wellbeing
Approaches That Guide Our Work
Why Our Definition Matters
How we define childhood violence shapes how we approach its prevention.
A definition focused only on individual acts of abuse can direct attention primarily toward identifying harm and responding after it occurs. Those responses are essential. CSAW also asks what can be changed before violence occurs.
That means studying the conditions surrounding children, youth, families, schools, organizations, and communities. Relationships, belonging, connection, agency, resources, institutional practices, community environments, policies, and systems can all shape experiences of safety and wellbeing.
This broader view helps us ask a different kind of prevention question:
What conditions can we deliberately strengthen so that childhood violence becomes less likely and safety and wellbeing become more likely?
That question connects how we define the problem with what CSAW exists to learn and do.
Childhood Violence
At CSAW, we use childhood violence to describe experiences of violence and harm occurring from birth through age 25.
This age range recognizes that development continues through adolescence and into young adulthood. It also allows us to consider experiences across an important developmental period rather than drawing a sharp boundary between adolescence and adulthood.
Childhood violence includes:
- Neglect
- Physical abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Exposure to intimate partner violence, including seeing or hearing violence between caregivers or other people in the home
- Identity-based violence
Our understanding of childhood violence is intentionally broader than child abuse and neglect. Violence can occur within families and relationships, but young people also experience harm in schools, organizations, institutions, communities, public spaces, and other environments that shape their lives.
For CSAW, understanding childhood violence therefore requires looking not only at individual experiences of harm, but also at the relationships, environments, institutions, and systems that influence whether young people experience safety, belonging, connection, agency, and wellbeing. Our work is grounded in the belief that childhood violence is shaped by conditions throughout communities—not only within children's homes.
Identity-Based Violence
Identity-based violence includes bullying, harassment, discrimination, and other forms of harm directed toward a person because of their actual or perceived identity or membership in a group.
Among the many forms of identity-based violence experienced by Oregon youth, CSAW prioritizes understanding and preventing harm related to:
- Race
- Ethnicity
- Color
- Gender identity and gender expression
- National origin
- Religion
- Ability or disability
- Sexual orientation
Including identity-based violence in our definition matters because experiences of childhood safety and wellbeing are connected to belonging, equity, and the social and institutional conditions young people encounter. CSAW's work recognizes that childhood violence intersects with marginalization, racism, socioeconomic conditions, and other inequities.
Neglect
Neglect occurs when a child's basic physical, emotional, educational, or developmental needs are not adequately met in ways that cause harm or create a significant risk of harm.
Neglect can involve inadequate access to food, shelter, supervision, medical care, emotional support, or other essential needs. Understanding neglect also requires attention to the circumstances surrounding families. Poverty or a lack of resources should not automatically be equated with neglect.
For CSAW, preventing neglect includes examining the supports, relationships, and community conditions that help caregivers and young people thrive.
Primary Prevention
Primary prevention focuses on preventing violence before it occurs by strengthening the conditions that support safety and wellbeing.
Rather than waiting until harm has happened, primary prevention asks what can be changed in relationships, organizations, communities, policies, and systems to make violence less likely.
At CSAW, this includes learning how belonging, connection, agency, supportive environments, and equitable access to resources can contribute to childhood safety and wellbeing.
Theory of Change
A theory of change describes how and why particular activities or changes are expected to contribute to a desired outcome.
It makes the connections between a goal, the conditions that need to change, the actions intended to support those changes, and the evidence used to understand progress.
In prevention work, a theory of change helps partners clarify their assumptions, learn from what happens, and adapt their approaches over time.
Accessibility
Accessibility means designing information, environments, activities, and opportunities so that people with different abilities and access needs can participate meaningfully.
Accessibility can involve physical spaces, digital content, communication formats, language access, scheduling, and other aspects of participation.
In CSAW's work, attention to accessibility helps identify and reduce barriers to participation in research, learning, and community collaboration.
Cultural Humility
Cultural humility is an ongoing practice of self-reflection, learning, and recognizing how our experiences, assumptions, and positions of power shape our interactions with others.
It involves approaching people and communities with curiosity and respect, recognizing that no one can become an expert in another person's lived experience.
Cultural humility supports partnerships in which community knowledge is valued and people have meaningful opportunities to shape decisions that affect them.
Trauma-Informed Practices
Trauma-informed practices recognize that experiences of trauma can influence how people feel, learn, build relationships, and interact with organizations and systems.
These practices seek to create environments that support physical and emotional safety, trust, choice, collaboration, and empowerment while reducing the risk of retraumatization.
For CSAW, trauma-informed approaches can inform how schools, organizations, and communities create supportive conditions for children, young people, families, and the people who work alongside them.
