We have pulled the bald eagle from the brink of extinction, we've saved the California condor, and even the alligator and the buffalo have made a comeback.

Now, as reports of child abuse climb, Cornell University experts recommend applying the successful wildlife preservation model to protect young people. Rather than focusing on individual cases, they suggest addressing the heart of the problem by restoring what they call safe family habitats.

"Could there be methods in the wildlife-preservation movement that might be useful in child protection?" asks Frank Barry, Cornell senior extension associate with the Family Life Development Center (FLDC) in Cornell's New York State College of Human Ecology.

Barry thinks so. He will lead a policy forum on Thursday, April 8, at the fourth annual Child Abuse Prevention Conference at the Albany Marriott in Albany, N.Y. The session is scheduled from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. The conference, "Practical Solutions to Difficult Problems," is sponsored by Prevent Child Abuse-New York, the Family Life Development Center at Cornell and the New York State William B. Hoyt Memorial Children and Family Trust Fund. This forum is part of an initiative of the College of Human Ecology to inform legislative staff in Albany about research findings at Cornell that could affect policy.

Children who grow up in neighborhoods surrounded by drugs and crime stand a higher-than-average chance of being abused, Barry says. At the conference, Cornell researchers will offer social workers and state policymakers a possible solution: patterning new legislation after laws that have helped save endangered wildlife.

Barry says, it became clear to him during his tenure on the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, that efforts to reduce child abuse were not succeeding. "Not only have child abuse reports tripled between 1980 and 1993, but the actual incidence of child abuse appears to have more than doubled in that time according to the National Incidence Studies," says Barry. He believes this is because human services systems focus most of their resources on trying to "patch up" individuals after the damage is already done.

"The wildlife preservationists, by contrast, spend very few resources on individual members of species they want to protect," says Barry. "Instead, nearly all their effort is focused on the habitat, or environment, in which each species raises its young. They assume the species will survive and thrive if the environment is healthy."

Measures such as perinatal home visiting and economic investment in communities, Barry says, "will prevent all kinds of negative behavior -- not just child abuse -- but also juvenile delinquency, substance abuse, teen pregnancy and the like. This is because all of these result from basic environmental factors which aggravate or even cause individual negative behavior."

Barry thinks reactive measures to abuse reports put too much dependence on the child protection system. "We keep hearing that families are being reported to the child abuse hotline because that's the only way they can get help," he says. Rather than abuse, he says, too many calls are mainly about families struggling with poverty. "We need far more emphasis and funding for less-stigmatizing ways to provide help. Right now it's much easier for someone to pick up the phone and get their neighbor investigated for child abuse than it is for that same neighbor to call and get help to prevent the abuse. That doesn't make sense."

Joining Barry on the panel will be other experts from Cornell's Family Life Development Center: James Garbarino, the center's co-director and professor of human development; John Eckenrode, the center's co-director and Cornell professor of human development; and Michael Nunno and Martha Holden, Cornell senior extension associates.

Numerous FLDC staff are giving workshops at the conference and Garbarino is presenting two keynote addresses: "Reflecting on Where We Have Come Over 25 Years: Have We Failed? Challenges?" at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, April 8, and "Kids and Violence," at 9 a.m. Saturday, April 10.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Family Life Development Center at Cornell, an interdisciplinary unit that focuses on risk factors in the lives of children, youth, families and communities that lead to violence and neglect. Its staff conducts training, research and evaluation projects that serve New York, the nation and the international community.