Tag: reports

Child Maltreatment 2024: Did abuse and neglect really decline?

Maltreatment Reports, Victims and Fatalities All Down in 2024, reported The Imprint upon the release of the new federal report, on child maltreatment data for Federal Fiscal Year 2024. In my last post, I showed how the child fatality numbers from that report are too flawed to allow a conclusion that child deaths decreased. Five states account for over 100 percent of the decline in child maltreatment fatalities reported by the states for FFY 2024. All of these states have acknowledged that the declines in fatalities that they reported for FFY 2024 reflected changes and errors in how child maltreatment deaths were counted, not real trends in child maltreatment fatalities. But could it be that the number of reports and child maltreatment victims are more accurate than the fatality counts, which are based on smaller and more unstable numbers? The evidence suggests that these declines are also too heavily influenced by state policy and practice changes to be taken as true indicators of actual maltreatment trends.

The annual Child Maltreatment reports, produced by the Children’s Bureau of the US Department of Health and Human Services, are based on data that states submit to the National Child Abuse and Neglect (NCANDS) data system. The new report, Child Maltreatment 2024 (CM2024), provides data for Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2024, which ended on September 30, 2025. Exhibit S-2 summarizes the findings of the newest report. Child welfare systems operate somewhat like a funnel, at each stage selecting a fraction of the cases or children to proceed to the next stage.. Child welfare agencies received 4.365 million “referrals” alleging maltreatment and “screened in” 47.1 percent of them as “reports,” of which 2,058,720 reports received an investigation or alternative response. The investigations resulted in a total of 532,228 children determined to be victims of child abuse and neglect.1

In discussing each stage of the child protective services process, CM2024 follows the regular practice in these reports of showing the changes in key indicators over time for the five years leading up to and including FFY 2024. But 2020-2024 is an unfortunate period to feature, given the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. A more thoughtful approach would have been to start from 2019 or an earlier year before the onset of the pandemic. That approach would allow the observation of trends before they were interrupted by the pandemic. To facilitate such observation, I have provided charts of the changes in key indicators between 2015 and 2024, using the five-year trend data provided in CM 2019 and CM 2024.

Referrals

NCANDS uses the term “referrals” to mean reports to child welfare agencies alleging maltreatment. According to CM 2024, child welfare agencies received an estimated total of 4,365,000 referrals, or 59.3 referrals per 1,000 children, through their child abuse hotlines or central registries in that year. The number is an estimate because the states do not provide data on the total number of referrals, only on the number that were screened in and (usually) the number that were screened out. But not all states are able to provide the number of screened-out referrals; there were five jurisdictions that were not able to do this in FFY 2023 and FFY 2024, and more in earlier years.2 To estimate the total number of referrals nationally, the Children’s Bureau imputes numbers for the nonresponding states based on the national referral rate for the responding states.3

A state’s referral rate depends on what referrals it actually counts. The state-by-state tables for 2024 document large differences in referral rates, from 19.2 per 1,000 children in Hawaii to 169.1 per 1,000 in Vermont–also the top and bottom states in 2023. Vermont reports that it counts “all calls” to the hotline as referrals, which accounts for its high number of referrals. Connecticut reports that none of the calls that are assigned to alternative response are included in NCANDS, resulting in a lower number of rererrals than many states report. Hawaii does not submit commentary so reasons for its very low referral rate are unknown.

As shown in Chart 1, the total referral rate had been increasing until the onset of the pandemic in 2020, when it fell sharply; it then rose only slightly in 2021. It increased for the next two years, almost reaching its pre-pandemic level in 2023. In FFY 2024, the estimated number of referrals decreased slightly from 4.380 million to 4.365 million, and the referral rate decreased from 59.4 to 59.3 per 1,000 children.

Source: Child Maltreatment 2019 and Child Maltreatment 2024, Exhibit S-1.

The very small decrease in the referral rate between 2023 and 2024 could have been caused by changes in policy, practice, and the types of messaging coming fom child welfare agencies, state officials and advocates around mandatory reporting of child abuse and neglect. State legislators, agency heads and advocates have recently worked to discourage calls to their child abuse hotlines based on the prevailing belief that many of these calls do not concern maltreatment but rather poverty and are often influenced by bias against parents of color. Agencies have been revising their mandatory reporter training4 to discourage reporting of concerns that are allegedly about poverty rather than child abuse or neglect. Implicit bias training is often included based on the belief that mandatory reporters are influenced by racial, cultural and class bias. In some states, “warmlines” are being set up to accept calls that are allegedly related to poverty rather than child maltreatment.5 Some states have banned anonymous reports to child abuse hotlines on the grounds that such reports are frivolous and expose children and families to unnecessary trauma–an assertion that has been challenged by based on research showing that anonymous reports save children’s lives. Such bans passed by the legislatures in Texas and Arkansas took effect shortly before the beginning of FFY 2024. In Texas, the number of referrals fell from 249,283 in 2023 to 233,112 in 2024. In Arkansas, it fell from 63,732 to 57,371. (A ban on anonymous reporting has been signed by the Governor of New York State and will take effect next summer; we may see its effect in the following fiscal year.)

The changes in policy and practice related to mandatory reporting are related to a broader change in the ideological climate around child welfare. It is reflected in the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act and similar legislation in many states. Among the tenets of this ideology are that child welfare is a racist family policing system, neglect allegations and findings reflect poverty rather than maltreatment, and that child welfare intervention does more harm than good for children. The prevalence of these beliefs among legislators and agency leaders has led to policy changes that affect not only reporting but the subsequent stages of screening and investigation.

Screening

Once a state agency receives a referral, it will be “screened in” or “screened out” by agency staff. In general, referrals are screened out if they are deemed not to contain an allegation of child abuse or neglect, contain too little information on which to act, are more appropriately assigned to another agency, or for some other reason do not fall under the mandate of the child welfare agency. In NCANDS, a referral becomes a “report” once it is screened in. “Reports” are assigned for an investigation or “alternative response.”

The Children’s Bureau, as it does every year, chooses to show screened-in referrals divided by the child population, calling the result the National Screened-In Referrals Rate. This is an ambiguous indicator that reflects both the number of referrals and the proportion of those that are screened in. It is more useful to look at the percentage of referrals that an agency decides to screen in, which is an indicator of its willingness to intervene with families to protect children. Unfortunately, the the lack of screened-out numbers from some states makes this number an estimate because the total number of referrals in those states is unknown.6 Nevertheless, a clear pattern emerges when the percentage of referrals that were screened in between 2015 and 2024 is plotted in Chart 2. That percentage has decreased every year since 2015, especially after 2017, with the decline continuing during and after the pandemic. Between 2017 and 2024, the percentage of referrals that were screened in dropped from 57.6 to 47.1.

Source: Author’s Calculations from Child Matlreatment 2015, Child Maltreatment 2016, Child Maltreatment 2017, Child Maltreatment 2018, Child Maltreatment 2019, and Child Maltreatment 2024. These numbers are based on screened-out referral rates for 44 states in FFY 2015, 45 states in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, 47 states in 2020 and 2022, and 46 states in 2021 and 2023. The states that did not report screened-out referrals in all ten years include New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and North Dakota.

Some states with larger decreases in the number of screened-in referrals attributed them in their commentaries to more consistent screening processes with the implementation of centralized intake, more structured processes for determining if a report meets criteria for acceptance, or new screening tools such as a Structured Decision-Making model. Nebraska reports that in July 2023 it dropped a policy that was implemented in June 2019 that required the acceptance of all reports made by medical professionals about a child aged five or under. The state reports a modest decline in the number of screened-in referrals in the following year. Considering changes in the prevailing child welfare climate mentioned above, it is likely that other states made policy or practice changes designed to reduce the number of reports that were screened in.

National Child Disposition Rate

An informative rate reported by the Children’s Bureau is the “national child disposition rate,” which is the number of children subject to an investigation or alternative response. This rate is a good measure of the “footprint” of CPS–what proportion of children it touches. This rate ranges from 12.0 per 1,000 children in Hawaii (the lowest again) to a high of 90.4 per 1,000 in West Virginia–nearly one out of every ten children. The West Virginia rate, which has fallen significantly from the high of 148.8 in FFY 2019k presumably reflects the state’s substance abuse (particularly opioid) epidemic.

The National Child Disposition Rate rose from 2015 to 2019, falling drastically with the pandemic in 2020 and again 2021. In 2022 it was back to the 2020 level of 40.1 per 1,000 children, but then began declining. The pandemic may have masked what would have been an annual decline in this rate every year between 2018 and 2024. The proportion of children touched by CPS has dropped significantly since its high of 47.8 per 1,000 in 2018 to 40.6 in 2024. Given the lack of a decrease in referrals during that time period except for the very small decrease in 2024, this pattern must reflect the drop in the proportion of reports that were screened in over the period.

“Victimization”

Once a referral is assigned for investigation or alternative response, the next phase in the funnel is the determination of whether abuse or neglect has occurred, or in NCANDS parlance, whether the child is a “victim.” A “victim” is defined as “a child for whom the state determined at least one allegation of maltreatment was substantiated or indicated7; and a disposition of substantiated or indicated was assigned for a child in a report.” “Victims” include children who died of abuse or neglect if the maltreatment was verified. Those children who receive an “alternative response”8 instead of an investigation are not counted as victims because alternative response does not result in substantiation or “indication” of a report. The Children’s Bureau somewhat tautologically treats “alternative response” as one of the possible dispositions for children assigned to an investigation or alternative response.

As I explain every year (with apologies to my faithful readers), the number of “victims” reported by states does not represent the true number of children who experienced abuse or neglect, which is unknown. Many cases of child maltreatment go unreported. Children assigned to alternative response are not found to be victims unless their case is reassigned to the investigation track. And finally, substantiation may not be an accurate reflection of whether maltreatment occurred. Making a determination of whether maltreatment occurred is difficult. Adults and children do not always tell the truth, the youngest children are nonverbal or not sufficiently articulate to answer the relevant questions. So it is not surprising that research suggests that substantiation decisions are inaccurate9 and a report to the hotline predicts future maltreatment reports and developmental outcomes almost as well as a substantiated report.10 

The vast difference in state “victimization rates” illustrates how these rates may reflect agency policy and practices as well as underlying rates of abuse and neglect. These rates range from a low of 1.2 per 1,000 children in New Jersey (even lower than Hawaii and even lower than last year’s rate of 1.5) to a high of 15.4 in Maine. It is unlikely that Maine has more than ten times more child abuse and neglect victims than New Jersey. “”Victimization rates” reflect what happens at earlier stages in the funnel of child welfare–reports, screening, and the use of alternative response to divert a child from the investigative track. They also reflect policies including different definitions of abuse or neglect and levels of evidence required to confirm maltreatment. They also state idiosyncracies in state systems: referrals concerning less serious neglect that are routed to General Protective Services in Pennsylvania do not appear at all in NCANDS. In Calendar Year 2024, the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services received 176,496 General Protective Services reports and only 41,070 Child Protective Services reports, so the overwhelming majority of referrals in Pennsylvania are not included in NCANDS In view of the deceptiveness of these terms, I have put the terms “victims” and “victimization rates,” when not qualified, in quotation marks in this post.

But what about changes over time? The fact that “victimization rates” reflect different policies and practices does not mean that trends over time don’t reflect real changes in the incidence of abuse and neglect. The national “victimization rate” declined in 2024 as it has done every year since 2018, even after the pandemic. It was down to 7.2 per 1,000 children in FFY 2024, compared to 9.2 per 1,000 children in 2018. Couldn’t this be good news about a decline in child abuse and neglect?

Victimization rates depend on screening decisions, and investigators’ decisions about whether a screened-in report will be substantiated as abuse or neglect. And these things can change over time. As mentioned above, recent changes have reflected the increasing prevalence of an ideology professing that child welfare involvement does more harm than good to children and families, and that agencies should scale back child removals into foster care and perhaps even in-home services. One way to do this is to make it more difficult to substantiate maltreatment, as New York and Texas (two states on the opposite ends of the political spectrum) have recently done. In Texas, the Legislature changed the definition of neglect to require both “blatant disregard” for the consequences of a parent’s action or inaction and either a “resulting harm or immediate danger.” New York changed the level of evidence required to substantiate an allegation of abuse or neglect from “some credible evidence” to “a fair preponderance of the evidence.” Both of these states mention these changes in explaining their declines in “victimization” counts.

Surprisingly, plotting the number of children who received an investigation or alternative response by disposition (see Table 1) casts some doubt on opinion of states like New York and Texas that the decreased number of victims they found reflects state policies making it more difficult to substantiate maltreatment. The proportion of children judged to be victims of abuse or neglect dropped from 16.8 percent in 2018 to 15.8 percent in 2024. Yet the percentage of children who received a disposition of “unsubstantiated” hardly changed during the period, nor did the proportion of children receiving an alternative response. The only category that increased enough to account for the decrease in substantiations was a category called “no alleged maltreatment,” which increased from 10.4 to 11.8 percent of the children. According to CM 202411 that category would include children who are not the subject of an allegation but who are investigated because they live in a state that provides a response to all children in a family, even those who are not the subject of an allegation. It is not clear why the percentage of children in this category would have increased so much since 2018.

Table 1 Children who Received an Investigation or Alternative Response by Disposition (Percentage), FFY 2018-2024

FFYVictims (Substantiated/Indicated)Alternative ResponseUnsubstan-tiatedNo alleged maltreatmentOther
201816.814.056.310.42.3
201916.713.856.510.62.4
202017.613.256.410.42.4
202117.813.356.010.32.6
202216.113.956.311.12.5
202315.813.756.311.82.4
202415.813.956.211.82.2

Source: Child Maltreatment 2024, Child Maltreatment 2022.

The number and rate of child maltreatment referrals registered by states saw a small decline in Federal Fiscal Year 2024. This decline may reflect changed messaging from states regarding mandatory reporting of child maltreatment as much or more than a real reduction in concerns regarding children being maltreated. States report a declining number of child maltreatment victims as well, but it is not possible to say with any confidence that the number of victims and their proportion of the population decreased in FFY 2024 or in the past five or ten years. There are simply too many factors influencing these numbers and how they change over time, including recent changes in policy and practice by state child welfare agencies designed to reduce their intervention with families. Adding to the confusion is the existence of unexplained changes, such as the reduction in the percentage of children who received an investigation or alternative response with “no alleged maltreatment.” Sadly, Child Maltreatment 2024, like its predecessors, tells us little about the true state of maltreatment in America.

Note: This blog was edited on February 17, 2024 to incorporate information about the disposition category of “no alleged maltreatment” and also to make some other changes suggested by comments from readers.

Notes

  1. Of those victims, 296,738 received some type of services, which are not discussed in this blog. ↩︎
  2. I use the term “states” to mean “jurisdictions,” including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Four states were unable to report complete data for both FFY 2023 and FFY 2024: New Jersey, New York, North Dakota and Pennsylvania. West Virginia did not report complete data for FFY 2023 so its data could also not be used for a year-to-year comparison. ↩︎
  3. See CM 2024, page 11. ↩︎
  4. See also DCYF Updates Mandatory Reporter Training (Washington), Family Experiences Shape Efforts to Reform Missouri’s Overburdened Foster Care System. ↩︎
  5. See A Phone lifeline for families in need in DC receives support from Doris Duke Foundation, Warmline offers alternative to calling protective services (Colorado). ↩︎
  6. See notes to Chart 2. ↩︎
  7. Substantated is defined as “supported or founded by state law or policy.” “Indicated” is a less commonly used term meaning a “disposition that concludes maltreatment could not be substantiated understate law or policy, but there is a reason to suspect that at least one child may have been maltreated or is at risk of maltreatment.” ↩︎
  8. An “alternative response” includes an assessment and referral to appropriate services if the parent agrees to participate. There is no determination on whether abuse or neglect occurred and no child removal unless the case is transferred to the investigative track. ↩︎
  9. Theodore Cross and Cecilia Casanueva, “Caseworker Judgments and Substantiation,” Child Maltreatment, 14, 1 (2009): 38-52; Desmond K. Runyan et al, “Describing Maltreatment: Do child protective services reports and research definitions agree?” Child Abuse and Neglect 29 (2005): 461-477; Brett Drake, “Unraveling ‘Unsubstantiated,’” Child Maltreatment, August 1996; and Amy M. Smith Slep and Richard E. Heyman, “Creating and Field-Testing Child Maltreatment Definitions: Improving the Reliability of Substantiation Determinations,” Child Maltreatment, 11, 3 (August 2006): 217-236.  ↩︎
  10. Brett Drake, Melissa Jonson-Reid, Ineke Wy and Silke Chung, “Substantiation and Recidivism,” Child Maltreatment 8,4 (2003): 248-260; Jon M. Hussey et al., “Defining maltreatment according to substantiation: Distinction without a difference?” Child Abuse and Neglect 29 (2005): 479-492; Patricia L. Kohl, Melissa Jonson-Reid, and Brett Drake, “Time to Leave Substantiation Behind: Findings from a National Probability Study,” Child Maltreatment, 14 (2009), 17-26; Jeffrey Leiter, Kristen A. Myers, and Matthew T. Zingraff, “Substantiated and unsubstantiated cases of child maltreatment: do their consequences differ?” Social Work Research 18 (1994): 67-82; and Diana J. English et al, “Causes and Consequences of the Substantiation Decision in Washington State Child Protective Services,” Children and Youth Services Review, 24, 11 (2002): 817-851 ↩︎
  11. See page 23. ↩︎

Child Maltreatment 2023: A reduction in child maltreatment victims or a retrenchment of child protection?

“New Federal Report Demonstrates Reduction in Child Maltreatment Victims and Underscores Need for Continued Action,” the Administration on Children and Families (ACF) of the US Department of Health and Human Services proclaimed in releasing the latest annual report on the government response to child abuse and neglect. As in the past several years, ACF’s language suggested that child abuse and neglect are decreasing. But with states around the country changing law, policy and practice to reduce child welfare agencies’ footprint, the number of “child maltreatment victims” cited by ACF is likely more a reflection of policy and practice than an indicator of actual maltreatment.

The annual Child Maltreatment reports, produced by the Children’s Bureau of ACF, are based on data that states submit to the National Child Abuse and Neglect (NCANDS) data system. The new report, Child Maltreatment 2023 (CM2023), provides data for Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2023, which ended on September 30, 2024. The report documents the funnel-like operations child welfare protective services (CPS), which at each stage select only a fraction of the cases or children to proceed to the next stage. Exhibit S-2 summarizes the findings of the newest report. Child welfare agencies received 4.399 million “referrals” alleging maltreatment in Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2023 and “screened in” 2.1 million of them as “reports” for “disposition” through an investigation or alternative response. The investigation or assessment of those reports resulted in a total of 546,159 children determined to be victims of child abuse and neglect. (The final stage of the funnel involves services and is not covered in this post.) State and local policies and practice affect every stage of this process, as explained in detail below.

Referrals

NCANDS uses the term “referrals” to mean reports to child welfare agencies alleging maltreatment. Agencies received an estimated total of 4,399,000 referrals through their child abuse hotlines or central registries in FFY 2023, according to CM 2023. This is a very slight increase over the previous year and represents about 7.8 million children, or 60 per 1,000 children. As shown in Exhibit S-1, the total number of referrals has been increasing since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a large drop in referrals. In FFY 2023, the number of referrals surpassed the pre-Covid 2019 total for the first time as the lingering effects of the pandemic, which acted to suppress reports, finally dissipated.

As in past years, the state-by-state tables document large differences in referral rates, from 19.9 per 1,000 children in Hawaii to 171.2 per 1,000 in Vermont–also the top and bottom states in 2022. These differences reflect not just different numbers of calls to child abuse hotlines but also state policy and practice. Vermont reports that it counts all calls to the hotline as referrals, while other states do not do so. For example, Connecticut reported in CM2022 that none of the calls that are assigned to alternative response are included in NCANDS, resulting in a far lower number of calls than the number they actually receive. Referral rates may also affected by a state’s policy on who is required to report and what must be reported. Such policies are disseminated to mandatory reporters through training and agency communications. New York reported implementing in FFY 2023 a new training for mandated reporters that helps them identify when concerns do not rise to a level legally requiring a report be made.” The training also focuses on implicit bias in order to “reduce the number of SCR reports influenced by bias about race or poverty.” The number of referrals in New York dropped by a very small fraction in FFY 2023. Missouri reported in CM2022 that it stopped accepting educational neglect referrals in 2021 as the COVID emergency ended, resulting in a decreased number of referrals received the following year.

Reports

Once a state agency receives a referral, it will be screened in or out by agency staff. In general, referrals are screened out if they are deemed not to contain an allegation of child abuse or neglect, contain too little information to act on, are more appropriately assigned to another agency, or for some other reason do not fall under the mandate of the child welfare agency. In the language used by NCANDS, a referral becomes a “report” once it is screened in. “Reports” are assigned for an investigation or “alternative response.” State data indicates that child welfare agencies screened in 2.1 million referrals, about 47.5 percent of referrals for an investigation or alternative response, and “screened out” the other 52.5 percent as not warranting a response. The number of screened-in referrals was 11.6 percent less than in FFY 2019 and slightly less than in FFY 2022.

A total of 42 states reported a decrease in the number of screened-in referrals in FFY 2023. In their commentaries, several of these states described policy and practice changes that led to their screening out more referrals. Ohio reported that two of its major metropolitan counties, which had significantly higher screen-in rates than the rest of the state, adjusted their screening procedures to be consistent with the rest of the state, resulting in a lower screen-in rate in those counties and statewide. Mississippi reported an increasing the amount of screening it conducted, especially when a report was received regarding a case that was already open; perhaps this is why its screen-in rate dropped from 41.3 to 36.5 per 1,000 children. Nebraska reported dropping a policy to require accepting all referrals from a medical professional involving children under six. Some states explicitly reported that their screening changes were adopted in order to decrease the number of screened in referrals. Kentucky reported adopting a new SDM® screening tool designed to decrease the number of referrals that are “incorrectly accepted for investigation.” Nevada reported a decrease in screened-in referrals because it established new intake processes to ensure that referrals are screened out when they do not meet criteria for acceptance.

“Victims”

The next phase in the funnel of CPS is the determination of whether abuse or neglect has occurred. At this stage, the level of analysis shifts from the case to the child, and the number of “victims” is the result. In NCANDS, a “victim” is defined as “a child for whom the state determined at least one maltreatment was substantiated or indicated1; and a disposition of substantiated or indicated was assigned for a child in a report.” “Victims” include children who died of abuse or neglect if the maltreatment was verified. Some children receive an “alternative response”2 instead of an investigation; these children are not counted as victims. According to CM2023, states reported a total of 546,159 victims of child abuse and neglect in FY 2023, producing a “victimization rate” of 7.4 per 1,000 children.

The number of “victims” reported by states according to the NCANDS definition does not represent the true number of children who experienced abuse or neglect, which is unknown. Many cases of child maltreatment go unreported. Children assigned to alternative response are not found to be victims unless their case is reassigned to the investigation track. And finally, substantiation may not be an accurate reflection of whether maltreatment occurred. Making a determination of whether maltreatment occurred is difficult. Adults and children do not always tell the truth, the youngest children are nonverbal or not sufficiently articulate to answer the relevant questions. So it is not surprising that research suggests that substantiation decisions are inaccurate3 and a report to the hotline predicts future maltreatment reports and developmental outcomes almost as well as a substantiated report.4 

State “victimization rates” range from a low of 1.5 per 1,000 children in New Jersey to a high of 16.2 in Massachusetts. It is unlikely that Massachusetts has more than ten times more child abuse and neglect victims than New Jersey–a not dissimilar Northeastern state. Policy and practice must be at play, including different definitions of abuse or neglect, levels of evidence required to confirm maltreatment, and policies regarding the use of alternative response or “Plans of Safe Care”5 to divert children from investigation, among other factors. Maine reported the second highest “victimization rate.” The Maine Monitor asked experts why this might be so. Among the reasons suggested were the definition of maltreatment; Maine allows abuse or neglect to be substantiated when there is a “threat” of maltreatment, even if there is no finding that it already occurred. In view of the deceptiveness of these terms, I have put the terms “victims” and “victimization rates,” when not preceded by the word “reported,” in quotation marks in this post.

The national “victimization rate” of 7.4 per 1,000 children, is a small decrease from 7.7 in FFY 2022 and the total number of reported “victims” was 19.3 percent less than the total reported in FFY 2019. This “victimization rate” has declined every year since FFY 2018. Of course, this decline is in part a result of the decline in the number of screened-in referrals that was discussed above. Any referral that is screened out is one less reported “victim,” even though some percentage of the screened-out referrals almost certainly reflected actual incidents of maltreatment.6 It is also clear that changes in policy and practice have contributed to the decline in the number of “victims” reported by states, as described below.

Policy and practice changes affecting “victimization” numbers

The change in the number of “victims” between FFY 2019 and FFY 2023 ranged from a 52 percent decrease in North Dakota to a 32 percent increase in Nevada, suggesting that these changes may reflect policy and practice more than actual trends in abuse and neglect. And indeed, two of the largest states made it more difficult to substantiate maltreatment in FFY 2022, and both found a decline in the number of maltreatment victims. In Texas, the legislature narrowed the definition of neglect, requiring the existence of both “blatant disregard” for the consequences of a parent’s action or inaction and either a “resulting harm or immediate danger.” Perhaps this helps account for the drop in the number of reported victims from 65,253 in FFY 2021 to 54,207 in FFY 2022. But the number of victims actually rose very slightly in FFY 2023. Perhaps the new definition had been assimilated into practice and was no longer resulting in a decrease in substantiations. In New York, the level of evidence required to substantiate an allegation of abuse or neglect was changed from “some credible evidence” to “a fair preponderance of the evidence” in FFY 2022. The number of victims found in New York dropped from 56,760 in FFY 2021 in to 50,056 in FFY 2022, which the Office of Child and Family Services attributed in its CM 2022 commentary to that change in evidentiary standards. The number of reported victims fell further to 46,431 in FY2023; perhaps the changed evidentiary standards were continuing to take hold or other state policies affecting other parts of the funnel–such as the attempt to rein in mandatory reporting–were contributing factors. The agency did not address this issue in its 2023 commentary.

A few states did mention in their CM 2023 commentary changes in policy or practice that might have contributed to changes in the number of “victims” in FFY 2023. North Dakota attributes a decrease partly to a change in state statute and policy which allows protective services to be provided when impending danger is identified, even without a substantiation. The agency appears to believe that workers are not substantiating as many reports now that they do not need a substantiation to provide services. Arkansas attributed a decrease in victims to the adoption of a new assessment tool that may have contributed to the routing of more reports to the differential response pathway. Kentucky reported that the adoption of new “Standards of Practice” may have contributed to the increase in the number of “victims” reported in FFY 2023.

Fatalities

Based on reports from 49 states (all but Massachusetts), the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, CM2023 estimated a national maltreatment fatality rate of 2.73 per 100,000 children. That rate was then applied to the child population of all 52 jurisdictions and rounded to the nearest 10 to provide a national estimate of 2,000. But experts agree that the annual estimates of child fatalities from NCANDS significantly undercount the true number of deaths that are due to child maltreatment. I discussed this in detail in A Jumble of Standards: How State and Federal Authorities Have Underestimated Child Maltreatment Fatalities.

The annual fatality estimates presented in the report increased by 12.3 percent between FFY 2019 and FFY 2022 and then fell slightly from 2,050 to 2,000 in FFY 2023, a fact that ACF mentioned in its press release. Such a small reduction of less than three percent over the previous year cannot be statistically distinguished from random fluctuation, especially because it is based on much-smaller numbers from the individual states. State commentaries illustrate the randomness of these year-to-year changes. In CM 2022, two individual states explained year-to-year jumps in fatalities by explaining that many children in one family died and that a large group of fatalities that occurred the previous year were reported in the current year. But even aside from statistical fluctuations, there are many reasons one cannot rely on year-to-year changes. These include the timing of reports and changes in policy and practice.

Timing

According to CM 2023 (and previous reports), “The child fatality count in this report reflects the federal fiscal year (FFY) in which the deaths are determined as due to maltreatment. The year in which a determination is made may be different from the year in which the child died.” The authors go on to explain that it may take more than a year to find out about a fatality, gather the evidence (such as autopsy results and police investigations) to determine whether it was due to maltreatment, and then make the determination. Alabama, for example, explained in its commentary that the deaths reported in a given year may have occurred up to five years before.

To add to the uncertainty around timing, the writers of CM 2023 are not exactly correct when they state that all states report on the fatalities determined in the reporting year. In their annual submissions to NCANDS, several states add fatalities for the previous year, implying that their practice is to report on fatalities that occurred in a specific time period, not those determined in the applicable year. Four states revised their number of 2022 fatalities in their submissions to CM2023. This suggests that their 2023 reports are in turn incomplete and will be revised in succeeding years. California, for example, explained that:

Calendar Year (CY) 2022 is the most recent validated annual data and is therefore reported for FFY 2023. It is recognized that counties will continue to determine causes of fatalities to be the result of abuse and/or neglect that occurred in prior years. Therefore, the number reflected in this report is a point in time number for CY 2022 as of December 2023 and may change if additional fatalities that occurred in CY 2022 are later determined to be the result of abuse and/or neglect.

So California is reporting (for CM 2023) a truncated count of child maltreatment deaths for Calendar Year 2022. But it did add 12 fatalities to the count of fatalities that it reported for FFY 2022, raising its total from 164 to 176. California reported 150 fatalities for FY2023; one can assume that additional deaths will be reported in the next report. The four states together added 56 deaths for FFY 2023. Arizona’s total increased from 14 to 39, Maine from three to 10 and Virginia from 39 to 51. .

Policy and Practice: Fatality Definition and Measurement

In addition to timing issues, year-to-year changes in fatality counts can reflect changes in how states screen or define child maltreatment fatalities. In previous issues of CM, states have reported on improvements in their collection of fatality information. Over time, some states have eliminated obsolete practices in screening and information collection. West Virginia reported in its 2016 commentary that it had begun investigating child fatalities in cases where there were no other children in the home. North Carolina ended its restrictive policy of reporting only fatalities determined by a chief medical examiner to be homicide, and it also began efforts to incorporate vital statistics and criminal justice data. 

During FY 2023, some states reported changes that may have resulted in a reduced number of child fatalities reported. 

  • Texas did not submit commentary for FFY 2023. But as reported above, it changed its screening policy so that reports involving a child fatality but include no explicit concern for abuse and neglect are not investigated if the reporter and other pertinent sources had no concern for abuse or neglect. DFPS reports that the number of child fatalities it investigated decreased from 997 in FY2022 to 690 in FY2023 (a 31 percent decrease) due to this new screening policy. And the number of child maltreatment fatalities fell from 182 to 164. But with a drastic drop in foster care placements in Texas, there is reason to fear that maltreatment fatalities increased rather than decreased. If that is the case, this change screening policy may have resulted in the failure to investigate and confirm actual maltreatment deaths.. 
  • The Illinois Division of Child Protection reported that it added a new administrative review process for sleep-related deaths. A senior administrator reviews the investigation to ensure that death included evidence of “blatant disregard.” DCF links this new policy with a decrease of 24.6% in reported child fatalities in FFY 2023.

Other states reported changes that might result in an increased number of child fatalities reported. Maryland attributed an increase in reported fatalities to a policy change requiring local agencies to screen in sleep-related fatalities as part of its prevention effort. Alaska reported a change that may affect fatality counts in future years: in December 2023 the agency dropped its practice of screening out cases where no surviving children remained in the home; from now on the agency will be making maltreatment findings even when there are no surviving children. 

It is regrettable that most state commentaries do not include explanations for the changes in their reported number of referrals, reports, and victims. Worse, several states do not even submit commentaries in time to be included in each year’s report. In CM023, commentaries are missing for Arizona, Hawaii, Kansas, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and West Virginia. Given the importance of the state commentaries for understanding the data they submit, the preparers of the CM reports should reach out to agency personnel in states that have not submitted commentaries by a certain date or have not answered the important questions and ask the questions directly directly. This information is too important to be left out.

It is unfortunate that ACF continues to misuse term “victimization” and “victimization rate” to suggest that child maltreatment (including fatalities) is declining, particularly in its press release and executive summary, which do not provide any explanation of the true meaning of the terms. The deceptive language is not a surprise given the previous Administration’s desire to take credit for ostensible and support the prevailing narrative regarding the need for a reduction in interventions with abusive and neglectful families. One does not have to be a statistician or data scientist to realize that we will never get an accurate measure of child maltreatment because so much of it occurs behind closed doors. Finding fewer victims is one way to reduce CPS intervention in the lives of vulnerable children–and to deny that the reductions are harmful. Sadly, this report will be used as evidence to support policies that continue to roll back protections for our most vulnerable children.

Notes

  1. Substantated is defined as “supported or founded by state law or policy.” “Indicated” is a less commonly used term meaning a “disposition that concludes maltreatment could not be substantiated understate law or policy, but there is a reason to suspect that at least one child may have been maltreated or is at risk of maltreatment.” ↩︎
  2. An “alternative response” includes an assessment and referral to appropriate services if the parent agrees to participate. There is no determination on whether abuse or neglect occurred and no child removal unless the case is transferred to the investigative track. ↩︎
  3. Theodore Cross and Cecilia Casanueva, “Caseworker Judgments and Substantiation,” Child Maltreatment, 14, 1 (2009): 38-52; Desmond K. Runyan et al, “Describing Maltreatment: Do child protective services reports and research definitions agree?” Child Abuse and Neglect 29 (2005): 461-477; Brett Drake, “Unraveling ‘Unsubstantiated,’” Child Maltreatment, August 1996; and Amy M. Smith Slep and Richard E. Heyman, “Creating and Field-Testing Child Maltreatment Definitions: Improving the Reliability of Substantiation Determinations,” Child Maltreatment, 11, 3 (August 2006): 217-236. ↩︎
  4. Brett Drake, Melissa Jonson-Reid, Ineke Wy and Silke Chung, “Substantiation and Recidivism,” Child Maltreatment 8,4 (2003): 248-260; Jon M. Hussey et al., “Defining maltreatment according to substantiation: Distinction without a difference?” Child Abuse and Neglect 29 (2005): 479-492; Patricia L. Kohl, Melissa Jonson-Reid, and Brett Drake, “Time to Leave Substantiation Behind: Findings from a National Probability Study,” Child Maltreatment, 14 (2009), 17-26; Jeffrey Leiter, Kristen A. Myers, and Matthew T. Zingraff, “Substantiated and unsubstantiated cases of child maltreatment: do their consequences differ?” Social Work Research 18 (1994): 67-82; and Diana J. English et al, “Causes and Consequences of the Substantiation Decision in Washington State Child Protective Services,” Children and Youth Services Review, 24, 11 (2002): 817-851. ↩︎
  5. Plans of Safe Care are voluntary plans offered to the families of substance-exposed infants under the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA). ↩︎
  6. We. know this from child fatality reviews that many children who die have been the subject of previous referrals, which were not substantiated but later found in fatality investigations to have been correct. See discussions of the deaths of Thomas Valva and Gavin Peterson, for example. ↩︎

Child Protective Services in the District of Columbia: An alarming increase in incomplete investigations in FY2024

by Marie Cohen

Complete Fiscal Year 2024 data now on the Dashboard of the District of Columbia’s Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) reveal significant changes over the previous fiscal year. Most striking is a large jump in the number of incomplete investigations and a concomitant decline in “substantiated” and “unfounded” reports. The number of children entering foster care increased for the first time in over ten years. There was a drop in in-home case openings but a similar increase in foster care placements during the year. The agency did not respond to this writer’s questions about the meaning of these trends.

Referrals

Total referrals (or calls to the CFSA hotline) have increased for the second year in a row. After falling in 2020 and remaining below 2019 levels in 2021 and 2022, the number of referrals jumped from 16,899 in FY2022 to 20,246 in FY2023 and then rose more modestly to 20,978 in 2024–an increase of 3.6 percent. Prominent child welfare scholars like Emily Putnam-Hornstein have concluded that referrals are the best available indicator of actual maltreatment due to the strong correlation between referrals and future reports (regardless of the outcome of any associated investigation) and also evidence of the difficulty of correctly determining whether maltreatment has occurred. Thus, the increase in referrals may well be a sign of increasing maltreatment. Contributing factors might be the end of COVID-19 assistance programs and the growing mental health, substance abuse, and housing crises in the District.

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/hotline-calls-referral-type

Childcare and school personnel continued to make more than half of the referrals to CFSA, with another 13 percent coming from law enforcement and 11 percent from friends and neighbors. All three of these groups made more referrals in FY2023 than FY2024, while counselors, therapists, social workers and medical professionals made fewer, suggesting that children may be seeing fewer of these professionals with the disappearance of virtual options spawned by the pandemic.

Looking at CFSA’s response to the referrals, the largest portion, or 73 percent, were screened out. That compares to only 19 percent that were accepted for investigation. The remaining referrals were either linked to an existing investigation (three percent) or classified as an information and referral that does not involve an allegation of abuse or neglect. These percentages are quite similar to those of the previous year.

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/hotline-calls-referral-type

Investigations

An investigation can have five different dispositions. According to the definitions provided in the Dashboard, unfounded means that there is not enough evidence to conclude that the child has been maltreated or at risk of being maltreated. “Substantiated” means that there is enough evidence to conclude that the child has been maltreated or is at risk of maltreatment. “Inconclusive,” means that “there is insufficient evidence to substantiate the report but there still exists some conflicting information that indicate the abuse or neglect may have occurred.” “Incomplete” means that the investigation could not be completed due to barriers like inability to locate the family, a family’s refusal of access to the home, or finding out that the family lived out of state.

There was a big jump in the number of investigations categorized as incomplete, from 525 in FY2023 to 1,442 in FY2024. That was an increase from 15% of all investigations to 38% of all investigations. As a consequence of the increase in incomplete investigations, the number and percentage of investigations that were unfounded and substantiated dropped drastically. The number of investigations that were substantiated fell from 799 (21 percent of investigations) in FY2023 to 606 (or 16 percent of investigations) in FY2024. Unfounded remained the most common disposition in FY2024, but the proportion of cases that were unfounded dropped from 58 percent to 41 percent.

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/investigations-abuse-and-neglect
Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/page/investigations-abuse-and-neglect

CFSA’s communications director did not respond to several emails asking for an explanation of the the jump in incomplete investigations. But it seems likely that this trend stems from the workforce crisis that is affecting CFSA and other child welfare and human services agencies around the country. A spreadsheet that the agency provided to the DC Kincare Alliance shows 27 out of the 36 social workers performing investigations as of August 2024 were carrying more than the 12 to 15 cases that CFSA uses as an indicator of satisfactory performance. This included 19 social workers carrying 20 or more cases and five social workers carrying more than 30 cases. Even more concerning is that the number of social workers doing investigations fell from 42 in January 2024 to 36 in August 2024, according to the spreadsheet.

If social workers are not able to complete the required interviews and collect needed information timely, endangered children may suffer further harm. It is possible that most of the incomplete investigations have been essentially concluded with a determination of findings, leaving only the completion of needed documentation and forms undone as workers hurried to start new investigations. Such a scenario might be somewhat less alarming but would still raise concerns that overburdened social workers are not able to thoroughly investigate allegations, thereby endangering vulnerable children.

In-Home Case Openings and Foster Care Placements

The table below shows the number of in-home case openings and children entering foster care by year. These two numbers cannot be added together because because in-home entries are reported at the case level (with multiple children in many cases) and foster care entries are reported at the child level. However the trends over time can be compared, showing that the number of in-home cases opened dropped between FY2023 and FY2024 while the number of children entering foster care increased. This was the first time the number of children entering foster care increased since FY2021, after the drop in foster care placement due to COVID-19.\

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/

The total number of children served in home and in foster care on the last day of every quarter are available on the CFSA Dashboard and can be added to yield the total number of children served on that date. The chart below shows that the total number of children served on the last day of the fiscal year (September 30) stayed basically the same between FY2023 and FY2024. But the number of children being served in their homes decreased by 50 while the number in foster care increased by 49. FY2024 reverses a trend of annual decreases in the number of children in foster care going back at least as far as 2011.

Source, For 2010-2023, CFSA Annual Needs Assessment, available from https://cfsa.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/cfsa/publication/attachments/FY23_Needs_Assessment_and_FY25_Resource_Development_Plan.pdf; ,CFSA Dashboard for FY2024.

The increase in the number of children in foster care between September 30, 2023 to September 30, 2024 reflects an excess of entries to foster care over exits from care during FY2024. Specifically, the number of children in foster care at the end of the fiscal year should reflect the number of children in foster care at the end of FY2023, plus the number of entries to foster care during the year, minus the number of exits from foster care. While there is a discrepancy of two between the results of this calculation and the foster care caseload reported by CFSA, the numbers confirm that there were about 50 more entries than exits, so the caseload increased. A similar calculation cannot be performed for children served in their homes, as the entry data are based on cases, not children.

2023 FC Caseload2024 FC Entries2024 FC Exits2024 FC Caseload
496243196545
Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/

It may be reassuring that the number of children served by CFSA changed so little in FY2023. One can hope that despite the high percentage of incomplete investigations, CPS workers are doing what is necessary to find the children that need help and simply leaving some of the paperwork for later. However, such a situation is not sustainable without endangering children. And the 3.6 percent increase in the number of referrals between FY2023 and FY2024 was not met with an increase in the number of children served, which may be a result of the incomplete cases.

It is not possible to understand the FY2024 data without further information from CFSA. How alarming the increase in incomplete investigations may be depends on whether these investigations are truly incomplete or basically finished except for forms and documentation. More concerning still, CFSA caseload data indicates that there are fewer than half the number of social workers doing this work now than in previous years. It is good that the total number of children being served has not dropped precipitously along with the drop in completed investigations. But the public needs to know more about how CFSA is functioning and what it is doing to alleviate the workforce crisis.