Child abuse is a root cause of many costly social problems, and its continued rise poses a major threat to the security and potential of the United States. Those with expertise in child protection policies repeatedly express concern about inadequate government actions to protect children exposed to violence in their homes. For example, most local child protective service (CPS) agency responses are single-incident driven so that agency efforts to often emphasize time-consuming investigation of an isolated report at the expense of services and treatment, especially for chronically troubled families. In addition, there are problems with inappropriately coercive interventions. For example, case workers are often poorly paid and insufficiently trained to deal with heavy caseloads. According to government data, 24 percent of victims are physically abused and 12 percent are sexually abused. The CPS system inappropriately intervenes in too many of these cases where a family's main problems are related to poverty rather than to parental behaviors that place children at risk of serious harm. Another important problem is the practice of citing mothers for child neglect based on their alleged failure to protect their children from male abusers who also terrorize the mothers. An agenda is proposed for attorneys to help close the gap between what needs to be done to protect children and what is actually being done. The agenda focuses on safety, accessible services, a team approach, and innovative intervention strategies and is designed for trial lawyers involved with government public safety and child protection programs and policies. 16 notes