Research Initiatives
At Traverse Bay Children’s Advocacy Center (TBCAC), we strive to make all of our prevention initiatives child centered, survivor informed, community based, inclusive, as well as trauma and evidence-informed.* Our goal is to address the underlying systems and social norms that allow Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) to happen in our society. To that end, we try to design and evaluate all of our prevention work through an iterative process of research and discovery, planning with community voice, design and implimentation, and then evaluation, iteration and redesign. We have learned that developing an evaluation design at the same time as planning for an initiative is more effective than designing the initiative and then retrofitting the evaluation plan.
* We try to adhere to the Australian Institute of Family Studies definition of evidence informed practice which can be found here.
We try to go upstream, focusing our work on changing social norms at the community and societal levels of the Center for Disease Control, or CDC’s social-ecological model of violence prevention.**
** The CDC uses this four-level model to better understand the various factors that put people at risk for violence and how to protect people from experiencing or perpetrating violence. The overlapping rings show how each factors at different levels influence each other. Read more about the model here.
You can learn more about our individual primary prevention initiatives by reading our executive summaries below. Each of these executive summaries is a snapshot of works in progress. We will update this website as we are able.
Child safety survey (2020)
To learn more about our regional Child Safety Survey, click the button below.
Advertising for social change
To learn more about our work with creative advertising students in the College of Communication s Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University, click the button below.
Community reading circles
To learn more about our Community Reading Circles using the young adult novel “Fighting Words,” click the button below.