Committee for Children Blog

Advocating for Child Safety for Nearly Forty Years

advocacy, SEL, policy, children, school funding, social emotional learning, child safety

Since our inception nearly forty years ago, we at Committee for Children have stood for the principle that the best way to address child sexual abuse is to prevent it from happening in the first place. We transform this into practice through not just the materials that we develop but also our advocacy efforts for child safety. We continuously look for ways to support, expand, and applaud law and policy that prioritize evidence-informed prevention strategies to ensure our children are kept safe, and we’ve been working on key recent and ongoing actions.

On the state level

In Washington State, we advocated in service of HB 1539, a variation on Erin’s Law. In model form, this law requires all public schools to implement a prevention-oriented child sexual abuse program. Our version of this recently passed law (HB 1539) calls for the state to coordinate a child sexual abuse prevention program for grades K-12. It also calls upon the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction to receive advice and comments from expert stakeholders in the field, and Committee for Children was specifically asked to share our expert input.

On the federal level

As members of the National Child Abuse Coalition, we are working toward reauthorizing the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA).

Other Actions

We are also calling for inquiry and explanation as to why the National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP), under the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, was summarily canceled for “convenience of government.” NREPP is one of the best resources for finding and selecting an evidence-based program.

Lastly, we’re working with Congress to find funds (approximately $1 million) for research and evaluation of child sexual abuse prevention programs. We must continuously expand our knowledge of which prevention strategies work best and why and how they do.

In addition to these actions, we’re pleased to announce that Committee for Children’s bill tracking page is revived and live! We track bills across all states and the District of Columbia that fall within one of our priority areas: child sexual abuse protection and prevention, social-emotional learning, and bullying prevention.

Please contact us via the form below if we missed a bill or should reconsider a position!

To complement our bill tracking, we’re developing our “action alerts” tool as well, which will provide you a quick and easy way to contact your lawmakers and share your thoughts on these bills. There might even be opportunities for us to work with you on more robust policy campaigns going forward.

Please contact us via the form below if we can help you with legislation in your state!

We look forward to supporting you in these endeavors so that we can all work together to protect our children and child safety.


Learn about our new initiative, the Hot Chocolate Talk, which demonstrate to parents what to say and do to protect kids from predators.


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