Youth mental health problems are a major and growing global challenge. Although effective interventions exist for many common mental health problems, population-level improvements have been limited. This paradox highlights that intervention effectiveness alone is likely insufficient to generate meaningful public health impact. Interventions must also reach young people, be adopted by services and practitioners, be delivered with quality, and be sustained over time. Drawing on implementation science, we argue that youth mental health research should ask not only “Does this intervention work?” but also “Can this intervention generate population-level impact?”. We illustrate how impact considerations can be embedded throughout the intervention lifecycle. First, we discuss designing for reach and adoption, using single-session interventions as an example of scalable approaches aligned with real-world patterns of service use. Second, we highlight the importance of evaluating effectiveness under routine conditions, drawing on a trial of a modular treatment in outpatient child and adolescent clinics as an example of generating externally valid evidence. Third, we emphasise the need to study implementation and sustainment, using examples from national mental health programmes and implementation research initiatives. To reduce the burden of youth mental health problems, implementation, reach, and sustainment must be treated as core objectives if our work is to have population-level impact.
The main goal of our research is to examine the rising incidence of rape and indecent assault against minors despite strengthened legal measures and prevention efforts. It aims to identify and analyze the key contributing factors—such as family instability, inappropriate relationships, household alcoholism, unsupervised internet use, and inadequate child supervision—that place children, particularly those aged 8–17, at heightened risk. The research seeks to assess the effectiveness of current prevention and protection strategies and highlight the need for improved implementation, professional capacity, and societal commitment to safeguarding children's rights. Ultimately, it strives to inform more effective, evidence-based interventions to reduce and prevent sexual violence against minors. The number of rapes and indecent assaults on minors has increased annually, with an average of 320 cases registered per year, although a slight decrease is projected for 2024. Despite strengthened legal measures and the efforts of NGOs, the incidence of child rape has continued to rise by 14.2–22.8 percent each year, and many cases remain hidden behind statistics on births and abortions. Key contributing factors include family instability, inappropriate relationships, household alcoholism, unsupervised internet use, and inadequate child supervision, with most victims aged 8–17 and the majority of perpetrators being adults with lower educational attainment. Effective prevention and response require not only robust laws but also coordinated implementation, professional capacity, and a societal commitment to upholding children's rights and protection.
Introduction Physical education (PE) offers opportunities for psychological learning, but evidence of benefit depends on the outcome, design, and instructional context. Methods This systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis included 74 reports from 70 trial families of primary-school PE interventions. Four databases covered English-language reports published from January 2000 through 31 May 2026. Randomized and nonrandomized controlled studies were distinguished from uncontrolled pre -post and short-term within-child designs. Multilevel models addressed dependent effects, with trial-family CR2 inference. Results Source-informed controlled analyses contained five core social-emotional effects from three families (g = 0.947, 95% CI [−0.774, 2.667]; Holm-adjusted p = 0.424) and 13 adjacent psychological effects from five families (g = 0.215, 95% CI [−0.386, 0.817]; Holm-adjusted p = 0.424). Model-based prediction intervals were [−2.387, 4.280] and [−1.368, 1.799], respectively. The broader controlled analysis, requiring additional variance or clustering assumptions, included 126 effects from 28 families and yielded g = 0.381, 95% CI [0.135, 0.627]. Discussion The broader and combined source-informed estimates were similar (g = 0.381 and 0.421, respectively), although the latter was less precise; because the analyses overlap, they do not provide independent confirmation of benefit. The primary estimates remain too uncertain to define a dependable average benefit, rather than demonstrating that benefits are absent. Positive broader evidence warrants attention alongside substantial heterogeneity, source-reporting limitations, and an inconclusive exploratory small-study diagnostic. Future trials should align psychological targets, instructional content, implementation measures, and validated outcomes, and report allocation-aware uncertainty.
Abstract Both research and child protection practice are still far away from having uniform definitions of violence against children. The different disciplines involved in the sectors of national child protection systems rely on separate discourses and terms; definitions are sometimes rather general or implicit, and operationalizations of important elements are rare. The various terms in use – child maltreatment, child abuse and neglect, child endangerment, children at risk, children in need, etc. – speak of the variety, not only of concepts, but also of practices. With respect to the latter, definitional issues are also issues of the scope and thresholds of intervention. This chapter provides an overview of major terms and definitional approaches to violence against children and identifies eminent differences between them. Findings from several studies on the Swiss child protection system, including the first multi-sectorial national survey on agency responses to child maltreatment, illustrate how professionals use definitions and the consequences of having multiple definitional concepts for documenting reported cases. We conclude by advocating for a consensus-based interdisciplinary process of developing shared definitions of violence against children.
This study reports on 82 unduplicated cases of violence against women and children after the Great East Japan Disaster of March 2011. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire from informants who worked with the disaster-affected populations. In addition to domestic violence, reported cases involved sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact, including quid pro quo assault perpetrated by nonintimates. Perpetrators often exploited a sense of fear, helplessness, and powerlessness and used threats to force compliance with sexual demands in exchange for life-sustaining resources. Findings point to the urgent need to develop measures to prevent and respond to postdisaster gender-based violence.
Mieko Yoshihama, Tomoko Yunomae, Azumi Tsuge et al.
This factsheet presents key findings from the first-ever Humanitarian Violence Against Children and Youth Survey conducted in refugee settlements across Uganda.
Children learn language in social environments shaped by interactions with caregivers and other adults. Prior research suggests that even brief familiarity with a social partner can facilitate some types of learning, but it remains unclear whether short-term familiarity influences children's word learning. Across two studies, we examined whether short-term familiarity with an experimenter affected children's performance on a novel-label generalization task. In Study 1, younger children (22–37 months) were taught and tested by an experimenter with whom they had completed a 10-min interactive free-play session or a different unfamiliar experimenter. Children performed similarly in the familiar and unfamiliar conditions, and a Bayes-factor analysis provided moderate evidence favoring no difference between conditions. In Study 2, older children (49–69 months) completed blocked training-testing with both familiar and unfamiliar experimenters and a resource-allocation measure of social preference. Children showed a social preference for the familiar experimenter, but their generalization performance did not differ significantly between experimenters; the Bayesian evidence regarding a familiarity effect was inconclusive, although it favored no difference. Together, these findings suggest that brief familiarity can shape children's expressed social preference without producing a corresponding measurable advantage on a structured word-generalization task with equivalent linguistic input.
Jina Ahn, Erica A. Cartmill, Catherine M. Sandhofer
Medication has a limited but meaningful role in the lives of some autistic individuals – not to alter who they are, but to address specific symptoms that interfere with their capacity to engage with the world, form connections, and live according to their own values and goals. As a child neurologist who has spent over a decade building clinical and research programs at the intersection of child neurology, neurogenetics, and autism, I have come to understand that the question of whether to use medication is rarely about the autism itself. It is about sleep that never comes, or anxiety so consuming it prevents a child from crossing the threshold of a classroom, or seizures that interrupt the fragile thread of attention during a conversation. It is also, and this is too often overlooked, about physical health across the lifespan: the gastrointestinal symptoms that go untreated for years, the pain that cannot be communicated but shapes behavior, the cardiovascular and metabolic conditions that emerge in adulthood with insufficient medical attention. This chapter offers a clinician&s;s perspective on the current pharmacological landscape in autism, grounded in the neurodiversity-affirming principle that our goal is never to suppress or change the autistic individual, but to remove specific barriers that stand between them and the social connection, independence, and well-being that this book is dedicated to building. It argues further that this goal must explicitly include individuals with profound autism – those with significant intellectual disability and complex support needs – whose voices have been underrepresented in research while their pharmacological burden has frequently been among the highest. Drawing on a recent comprehensive review of novel therapeutics in autism spectrum disorder published in Neurotherapeutics (Kevelson et al., 2026 ), this chapter situates medication within the larger framework of care described throughout this volume.
The main purpose of this study was to conduct an investigation on the level (extent) of violence against children in school, on types of violence and on the relationship between violence and demographic characteristics of children (gender, residence and age). This study focused on a sample group of 618 children, respectively students of grades 10 to 12 of higher secondary schools in Prishtina, Kosovo. With this sample group a structured questionnaire applied, which was composed of four (4) questions for each of the following types of violence: violence against the property of children and school property, psychological violence, physical violence and sexual violence. Results of this study have shown that approximately 87% of children have experienced, at least, once one type of violence throughout their education. Among these types of violence, violence against the property of children and against school property has been reported the most (73.6%), which is followed by psychological violence (69.3%), then physical violence (47.5%) and sexual violence (22.1%). Data have shown that in the level of reliability α = 0.5, gender as a demographic factor has appeared to be more influential in the prevalence of some types of violence (violence against property, psychological violence and physical violence), residence has appeared to be influential when speaking about physical violence only, while age has been shown to be an influential factor in the prevalence of violence against children in school.
Purpose This study examined the relationships between aerobic fitness, behavioral self-regulation, and mathematics performance in primary school students, and evaluated the effect of a 10-month school-based Physical activity intervention on self-regulation. Methods The Active School study was a ten-month cluster-randomized controlled trial. The sample consisted of 435 students (9–10–years old) in five intervention schools and four control schools. Teachers assessed students’ self-regulation using the Child Behavior Rating Scale (CBRS), at pre- and post-intervention. Aerobic fitness was assessed with a 10-minute interval running test, and mathematical achievement was determined using Norwegian national standardized tests in mathematics. Results Partial correlations indicated that aerobic fitness was significantly correlated with self-regulation ( r = 0.22, p < .001) and with mathematics scores ( r = 0.17, p < 0.01). Linear mixed models showed that self-regulation was consistently positively associated with mathematics performance (B = 0.54, (95%) CI [0.44, 0.64], p < 0.001). Aerobic fitness was positively associated with mathematics performance in partially adjusted models (B = 0.15, (95%) CI [0.006, 0.23], p < 0.001) but this association was no longer significant after adjusting for gender (B = −3.69, (95%) CI [−5.47, −1.19], p < 0.001). No significant improvements in students’ behavioral self-regulation compared to the control group were observed. Conclusion The findings suggest that while cognitive-behavioral processes strongly drive academic performance, standard school-based physical activity programs may lack the necessary cognitive complexity to enhance independent self-regulatory capacities in fifth-grade students.
Silje Eikanger Kvalø, Megan M. McClelland, Edvin Bru et al.
