So Professor Nicole Racine, who holds the uOttawa Faculty of Social Sciences and CHEO Research Institute Research Chair in Child and Youth Mental Health, is leading a national project to change that. Through the Better Together partnership, youth with lived experience, caregivers, service providers and researchers came together to identify the top 10 research priorities what could help improve the systems supporting children and youth across Canada. The priorities, recently published in Child Abuse & Neglect Journal, offer a roadmap for future research, funding decisions and policy development.
For one member of the Youth Consultant Panel, the project addressed a longstanding gap in how research priorities are determined. “The agenda has been set for far too long by people who had never lived through anything like this,” she says. “Those most affected need to have a voice, need to be involved, need to be engaged. And the academic power structures that we work in need to create spaces and opportunities where that can happen.”
A national roadmap shaped by lived experience
After gathering hundreds of research questions from across Canada, the Better Together team compared them against existing evidence. Questions that had already been thoroughly answered by research were removed from consideration. The remaining questions were ranked by youth with lived experience, along with caregivers and service providers, to identify the issues they believed should shape the future of child maltreatment research in Canada.
The resulting priorities focus on safer systems, stronger prevention efforts, better treatment options and a deeper understanding of how maltreatment affects young people. The highest-ranked priority examined how Indigenous ways of being and knowing can be integrated into health care, education, mental health and justice systems to create safer, more supportive environments for Indigenous youth who have experienced trauma.
Canada’s top 10 child maltreatment research priorities
- Integrating Indigenous ways of being and knowing into systems supporting youth
- Preventing harm caused by health-care, justice and child welfare systems
- Improving gaps across systems that support children and youth
- Addressing intergenerational trauma and supporting whole families
- Understanding systemic contributors to neglect in Black communities
- Identifying the most effective strategies to prevent child maltreatment
- Evaluating therapies that best support youth who have experienced maltreatment
- Improving trauma-informed education across health care, education, child welfare and mental health systems
- Understanding links between maltreatment, mental health and neurodevelopmental disorders
- Understanding how child maltreatment affects brain development and cognitive functioning.
What surprised the research team
Several findings stood out to Professor Racine.
Although Indigenous participants did not make up a majority of contributors, Indigenous approaches emerged as the number one priority overall. For Racine, that reflects a broader recognition that Indigenous perspectives offer universally valuable lessons for supporting children and youth.
Priorities also varied by group. Young people tended to focus on understanding the impacts of maltreatment and identifying effective treatments, while caregivers and service providers prioritized improving systems.
The study uncovered another challenge: making existing evidence accessible to the people who need it. “We found that some of the issues people identified as priorities were areas where evidence already exists. That’s a knowledge translation gap,” says Racine.
The finding suggests that important research is not always reaching the youth, families and front-line professionals who could benefit from it most. As Racine’s team moves forward, that lesson may prove just as valuable as the top 10 list itself.
“When you understand the data through people’s stories and see the numbers as individuals, it’s hard to turn back.”
Nicole Racine
— Associate Professor, School of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences
From research subjects to research partners
The project grew out of Racine’s conviction that research should be shaped by the people most affected by it. As a psychologist working with young people who had experienced maltreatment, she saw firsthand the value of their perspectives. “Once you’ve done that, it’s hard to turn back. You understand the data through people’s stories and see the numbers as individuals,” says Racine.
With funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Racine and her collaborators created a Youth Consultant Panel composed of young adults with lived experience of child maltreatment. Members helped lead every stage of the project, from design to implementation, and were recognized as collaborators and co-authors.
That approach reflects a central idea behind Better Together, namely that young people affected by maltreatment should help shape the research intended to improve their lives.
“After years of disenfranchisement, it’s really valuable to be present in a space where our previous experience can be deconstructed,” says the Youth Consultant Panel member cited above. “I learned that there’s a lot of value in engagement and collaboration like this.”
Turning priorities into policy, funding and research
Organizations across Canada have already expressed interest in using the findings to inform their work. Child advocacy centres have invited the team to share the results nationally, and researchers can now point to the priorities when applying for grants or developing new studies.
Racine also sees potential policy implications. One example involves youth aging out of the child welfare system, who often lose formal supports at age 18 despite facing significant challenges during the transition to adulthood. Better evidence about service gaps could help shape more supportive policies and programs.
Ultimately, Better Together demonstrates what can happen when research begins with the people it is meant to serve. Rather than setting priorities from within academia alone, the project created a national research agenda grounded in both evidence and lived experience.
“I hope this translates over time to better questions being asked and more constructive research being done,” she says.
