The Winnable Battle: How Practitioners Can Publish and Help Shape Child Protection’s Future
Across programmes, policy reform, financing and systems strengthening, practitioners are learning why promising prevention programmes work in one setting but struggle in another. Why multisectoral coordination produces genuine collaboration, or becomes just another meeting. Why successful pilots can, or cannot, be taken to scale. What happens when external funding ends. Why policy reforms gain traction, or stall. And why families sometimes respond very differently from what programme designers expected.
But how much of that learning makes its way into the wider evidence base?
For many practitioners, academic publishing can still seem a long way from the everyday worlds of programme implementation, policy reform, financing and systems strengthening.
That is why the upcoming Child Protection and Practice special issue, Making Child Protection a Winnable Battle: Reimagining Investment, Upstream Prevention, and Multisectoral Action, is worth a closer look. Child Protection and Practice is the sister journal of Child Abuse & Neglect. Both are official publications of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN).
Making child protection a winnable battle
The special issue starts from an ambitious proposition: child abuse and neglect should not be accepted as inevitable.
It asks what would happen if we invested much more seriously in preventing harm before it occurs. What if funding followed evidence upstream? What if health, education, social protection, justice, mental health and child protection worked around shared outcomes for children? And what would it take to make effective approaches sustainable and scalable?
These questions resonate strongly with work in which I have been involved through the Humanitarian and Development Partnership (HDPI), Reimagining a Better Future for Children initiative, exploring what needs to change now so that child protection and care systems become more responsive, resilient and better prepared for the next 10–20 years.
That work began from a sense of urgency. The global development landscape is changing, resources are under pressure, crises are increasingly prolonged, and familiar weaknesses in child protection systems remain. It has led us to ask fundamental questions about public responsibility, financing, workforce, services, coordination, evidence, community engagement and the conditions needed for systems to become stronger and more sustainable.
You don't have to be an academic to publish
As an Editorial Board member of Child Protection and Practice, I currently serve as Executive Guest Editor for the journal's special issue, The War on Children.
One of the most encouraging aspects of that role has been seeing the range of contributions coming through the journal. Alongside original research and review articles, the journal publishes discussion and debate papers, policy and practice discussions, Practice Perspectives and Practice Insights.
These formats create space for different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of contributors. An article might examine lessons from implementing a prevention programme, but equally it might explore financing, a policy reform, multisectoral governance, workforce development, community engagement, scaling an intervention, or why an apparently sound reform struggled in practice.
Practice-oriented articles can also be considerably shorter than conventional research papers. The central task is not necessarily to present new research, but to offer a clear analysis of an experience and what can be learnt from it.
What if you need some help writing it?
For The War on Children, we introduced a pairing approach to help address this.
It links practitioners with experienced writers or academics who act as mentors. The practitioner remains the lead author and retains ownership of the manuscript, while the mentor helps strengthen its structure, argument and presentation to meet the journal's publication standards.
The idea is simple: you should not need to become an academic to share valuable knowledge from practice.
If you have an experience that fits the special issue and would benefit from this sort of support, contact the guest editors, briefly describe your proposed contribution and ask what might be possible.
Start with the idea, not the manuscript
If you are thinking about contributing, don't start by worrying about writing several thousand words.
Start with a page.
Ask yourself:
What experience, reform or challenge do I want to share?
What did we try to change, and why?
What did we learn, including from what did not work?
What conditions helped or constrained progress?
Why does that learning matter beyond this particular programme, organisation or country?
Then look at the themes of The Winnable Battle. They include upstream prevention and public health; investment in prevention; multisectoral systems and shared accountability; mental health, resilience and recovery; data, evidence and scaling what works; and equity and cultural norms.
Where does your experience fit?
If you can identify the issue, explain what was learnt and show why that learning matters to the wider field, you may already have the foundations of an article.
The guest editors are Pragathi Tummala of ISPCAN, Todd Herrenkohl of the University of Michigan School of Social Work, and Sabine van Tuyll Rakotamala of the World Health Organization. The special issue welcomes research, policy analysis, implementation studies, economic analyses, practice innovations and perspectives.
You can consult the journal's Guide for Authors to consider which article format best suits your contribution.
The submission deadline is 31 December 2026.
Acknowledgements
I utilised OpenAI’s ChatGPT to assist in organising the research and drafting portions of this blog post. Any errors or omissions are entirely my responsibility.
