Member/Staff Login

   Home   Programs and Services   FYI

Through our Family and Youth Initiatives, JJF works to increase safety and permanency for children by strengthening families, training child protection workers, and providing education and information about the juvenile justice system.

Family and Youth Initiatives Projects include:

Family Visitation Centers
To assist and support families seeking to regain physical custody of their children placed in foster care, the Juvenile Justice Fund (JJF) partners with faith-based organizations strategically located throughout Atlanta and Fulton County to provide family visitation in safe, secure and neutral environments -a key step to reuniting as a healthier, stronger family unit. Through Family Visitation, trained, volunteer congregation members from community churches supervise weekly visits between children in foster care and their non-custodial parents. Family Visitation Centers are friendly and provide safe, comfortable, neutral and accessible locations for frequent visitations to take place. The program has enabled JJF to successfully develop important relationships within the faith-based community, resulting in critical services being made available to children and families in need.

Our faith partners include:

• Art Center Visitation Center at First Presbyterian Church
• College Park Visitation Center at St. John’s Episcopal Church
• Downtown Visitation Center at Big Bethel AME Church
• Inman Park Visitation Center at Inman Park United Methodist Church
• Mechanicsville Visitation Center at New Hope Baptist Church
• College Park Visitation Center at St. John’s Episcopal Church
• Roswell/Alpharetta Visitation Center at Northminster Presbyterian Church
• South Fulton Visitation Center at Kingdom of God Evangelistic Outreach Ministry
• Vine City Visitation Center at Central United Methodist Church

Family Visitation was featured on WSB-TV as part of its initiative on Georgia’s Forgotten Children, a year-long effort to raise awareness about Georgia’s foster care program. It has also been recognized as a model program within the state and nationwide.

Back to Top ↑

Child Protection Training

“We greatly value the expertise of the Juvenile Justice Fund in partnering with the Professional Excellence Project. The training conducted by the Fund on Interviewing Children and Adolescents is one of the most requested and highly praised courses offered and will go far in assisting DFCS workers statewide with the difficult task of investigating child abuse reports. Solid training is one road to helping protect Georgia's children.”

Mary McLaughlin LCSW Georgia State University, School of Social Work

Amy Mobley Professional Excellence Program, Georgia Division of Family and Children Services

In May 2007, the Juvenile Justice Fund (JJF) began working with Georgia State University to design and deliver a statewide training course for front line DFCS staff on Maximizing Information from Children: A Developmental Approach. This new and innovative course has been designed to assist front line child protection workers who observe, investigate, interview, assess risk, place, and treat children and adolescents who are the subject of maltreatment reports. The course curriculum shares information on current research and best practice regarding interviewing and eliciting free-recall narratives from children and adolescents. Professionals leave the training with a host of new tools and interview aids to assist them in their daily practice and communication with children of all ages. This course remains one of the most requested trainings by DFCS staff statewide.

Back to Top ↑

Children with Sexual Behavior Problems Diversion Program
When a child (under age 12) is engaging in sexual behaviors it is sometimes difficult to decide when the sexual behavior is natural and healthy and when it may be an indication of some distress or disturbance in the child’s sexual development.

The Juvenile Justice Fund (JJF), in collaboration with the Mental Health Unit of Fulton County Juvenile Court, will implement a new court approved screening tool and diversion program for children identified with sexual behavior problems in Fulton County.

The ISSACC (Intelligence, Social, Sexual, and Criminal Capacity) Survey, adapted from Jan Hindman’s Juvenile Culpability Assessment, is a research-based, structured screening tool whose outcomes help to formulate opinions of those front-line professionals making legal, protective, and placement decisions about children who present with sexual behaviors outside normative age-appropriate sexual development. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Children who engage in developmentally inappropriate sexual behavior with other children
• Children who engage in abusive sexual behavior
• Children who engage in aggressive or repetitive sexual behavior
• Children who exhibit sexualized behaviors

The ISSACC Survey will help frontline professionals of DFCS, law enforcement, and probation to gather pertinent information to determine needs for legal involvement, placement and treatment. The new Diversion Program will train the frontline investigators on the tool and facilitate reporting, scheduling, and referring of these families for diversion or treatment services.

The ISSACC Survey instrument will be available on-line for DFCS workers, law enforcement investigators, and juvenile court probation officers in late fall of 2008.

The diversion portion of the program will provide family assessment, education, and follow up support to children who have been identified as presenting low risk sexual behavior problems. These programs will be voluntary, short-term and center based support services that will serve as an alternative to juvenile court involvement.

A child’s age, the level of stress in the family, family violence, family sexuality and time spent in day-care may influence the type and frequency of children’s sexual behaviors (Friedrich, Fisher, Broughton, Houston , & Shafran, 1998). Children’s sexual behaviors, as well as their level of comfort with sexuality, may be affected by the size of the family’s living space, the neighborhood in which they live, the age of siblings, their level of sexual interest, and parental, religious, societal and cultural norms, values and attitudes regarding sex and sexuality.

Providing a sexually healthy and safe environment for these children is essential for their continued development.