Abstract
The United States relies on the Child Protective Service (CPS) system to protect children from abuse and neglect. The foundation of this system is reporting—reporting is supposed to bring maltreated children to the attention of CPS and CPS is supposed to appropriately respond to the report. This chapter examines trends in CPS reporting, the evidence that maltreated children are reported and receive CPS attention, and current issues affecting this system. Beginning with the history and current status of mandatory reporting laws, it describes the challenges involved in studying mandatory reporting and the limitations of the existing evidence. Subsequent sections summarize research on reports CPS receives and how CPS responds; on the maltreated children mandated reporters encounter, whether these children receive CPS investigation, and why they may not; and on the mandated reporters—who doesn’t report and why. The chapter then considers current issues and trends, including the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and of racial inequities on reporting and the use of data-driven approaches to understand reporting patterns and manage screening of referrals and responses to reports. The conclusion discusses the failures of mandated reporting and recent system reform efforts that may dramatically alter reporting trends in the future.
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Notes
- 1.
States frequently amend their laws (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2019a).
- 2.
Screened-out referrals are only tabulated in the NCANDS Agency File, which does not provide unique records for them. They are not in the Child File at all.
- 3.
Used random assignment and a true experimental design
- 4.
In this graph, a victim is defined as a child whose disposition was substantiated, indicated, or alternative response victim. The overall maltreatment lines depict NCANDS changing measures over the years. Most victims (96% in 2019) have substantiated maltreatment (US DHHS 2020). The duplicated counts include children as many times as they were the subject of a report over the year. The unique counts include a child just once regardless of the number of reports that included them. In 2018, NCANDS excluded alternative response victims from its victimization tabulation, giving the adjusted data for several retrospective years, as graphed. The rates given here for the component categories through 2008, are duplicated rates. The unduplicated rates, which count each child victim just once, are available in NCANDS publications for 2005 and later (US DHHS 2010b, 2011, 2012). Beginning in 2018, NCANDS report introduced another modification, providing a category of multiple maltreatment and redefining the component maltreatment categories to include only children who experienced that single form of maltreatment. For definitional consistency, Fig. 1.1 does not use the NCANDS 2018 and 2019 data for the component categories. We are indebted to Finkelhor et al. (2020, 2021) for sharing special tabulations that they obtained from NCANDS to complete the 2018–2019 entries using the earlier definitions (i.e., including all children who experienced any component maltreatment regardless of other maltreatment events).
- 5.
The NIS follows the usage of CAPTA in referring to its findings as “incidence estimates.” In the epidemiological literature, however, they would be more appropriately termed “annual prevalence estimates.” Technically, they are period prevalence estimates, where the focal period is a year.
- 6.
- 7.
The authors conducted additional analyses, not published elsewhere, which show that, whereas the rate of sexual abuse decreased at all levels of severity, the rates of physical and emotional abuse significantly decreased only for moderately harmed or endangered children—not for those seriously harmed.
- 8.
NCANDS does not distinguish between emotional abuse and emotional neglect.
- 9.
Between 1995 and 2015, rates of domestic violence victimization decreased from 15.5 per 1000 women and 2.8 per 1000 men to 5.4 per 1000 women and 0.5 per 1000 men (Smith et al., 2018), further suggesting that the increase in children exposed to domestic violence comes from an increased awareness of this as a maltreatment subcategory.
- 10.
These include other governmental social service agencies, other (non-sentinel) professionals or agencies (e.g., community health clinics not affiliated with a hospital, private practice pediatricians, physicians, therapists) and all other sources (primarily the general public, such as neighbors, friends, family, anonymous callers, and the victims themselves).
- 11.
The percentages shown in Fig. 1.2 display a best-case scenario in that they assume that all the children in these jurisdictions would have met the agency’s criteria for assignment to the alternative response track.
- 12.
In NIS, “other” sentinels were employees with direct service responsibilities at day care centers, shelters, public housing, social services, and mental health services.
- 13.
This study also demonstrated how the legal implications of failing to report can affect responses; some clinicians changed their original opinion that an injury was caused by abuse when explaining why they did not report the case to CPS.
- 14.
Disproportionality is the underrepresentation or overrepresentation of a racial or ethnic group compared to its percentage in the total population. Disparity is the unequal outcomes of one racial or ethnic group as compared to outcomes for another racial/ethnic group (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2016b).
- 15.
These same sources show that the disproportionality has been decreasing, with the percentage of Black children decreasing among victims in CPS investigation from 22.3% in 2009 to 20.8% in 2018 and decreasing among foster care children from 30% in 2009 to 23% in 2018.
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Acknowledgements
Raquel Ellis was co-author on this chapter in the previous edition of this Handbook. The current authors acknowledge her contributions to the text in several sections that we have retained here. We are thankful as well to our colleagues who read, discussed, and critiqued drafts of the chapter in that earlier edition: George Gabel, Ronna Cook, and David Finkelhor.
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Sedlak, A.J., Heaton, L., Evans, M. (2022). Trends in Child Abuse Reporting. In: Krugman, R.D., Korbin, J.E. (eds) Handbook of Child Maltreatment. Child Maltreatment, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82479-2_1
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