Abstract
The United States relies on the Child Protective Service (CPS) system to protect children from abuse and neglect. Local CPS agencies, typically divisions or units within county child welfare departments, receive reports about children who may have been maltreated or may be in danger of abuse or neglect, decide whether the situation requires a response and, if so, provide the type of response that is required. The foundation of this system is reporting—reporting is supposed to bring maltreated children to the attention of CPS, and CPS is supposed to issue an appropriate response to the report.
This chapter examines trends in CPS reporting, considering the existing evidence that maltreated children are reported and receive CPS attention. It begins with a brief overview of the history and current status of mandatory reporting laws and of the types of CPS responses to reports. The discussion then turns to the challenges involved in studying mandatory reporting and the limitations of the existing evidence. The three sections that follow summarize the relevant research findings: one on reports CPS receives and how CPS deals with these reports; another on the maltreated children mandated reporters encounter, whether these children receive CPS investigation, and why they may not; and the third section on the mandated reporters—who doesn’t report and why not. The chapter ends with conclusions and implications for future research.
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Notes
- 1.
States frequently amend their laws (Child Welfare Information Gateway 2009a).
- 2.
Required in the CAPTA reauthorization act of 2010.
- 3.
Nearly all States that use the disposition of “alternative response victim” also use the “alternative response nonvictim” classification. During a few years in the past decade, one or two States have used only the disposition of “alternative response victim” for their alternative response cases.
- 4.
NCANDS defines a victim as a child for whom maltreatment was substantiated, indicated, or alternative response victim. Most victims (93 % in 2010) have substantiated maltreatment (US DHHS 2011). The rates given here for overall maltreatment, and for the component categories through 2008, are duplicated rates, meaning that a child is counted in every report where he or she is found to be a victim. The unduplicated rates, which count each child victim just once, are available in NCANDS publications for 2005 and later (US DHHS 2010b, 2011, 2012). These also evidence declining trend lines, but below the duplicated rates depicted in the graph. For instance, the rate of overall unduplicated maltreatment drops from 109 per 10,000 in 2005 to 91 per 10,000 in 2011.
- 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 these analyses to further characterize the NIS trends. To date, they are not published elsewhere.
- 8.
NCANDS does not distinguish between emotional abuse and emotional neglect.
- 9.
The NIS classifies children on the basis of the most severe injury or harm they suffered from maltreatment.: fatal (maltreatment caused the child’s death), serious (child needed professional treatment to alleviate current suffering or prevent significant long-term impairment), moderate (observable symptoms lasting at least 48 h), inferred (no observable harm recorded, but the extreme or traumatic nature of maltreatment makes it probable the child sustained significant injury or impairment), or endangered (the maltreatment acts or omissions seriously endangered the child but the child appears not to have been harmed).
- 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.
This figure excludes the 13 % of all maltreated children who enter the NIS data only through the CPS-investigated reports—from nonsentinel sources (previous footnote). NIS has no information about maltreated children these sources encounter who are not investigated.
- 12.
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.
- 13.
In NIS, “other” sentinels were employees with direct service responsibilities at day care centers, shelters, public housing, social services, and mental health services.
- 14.
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.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the many colleagues who read, discussed, and critiqued earlier drafts of this chapter. George Gabel, Ronna Cook, and David Finkelhor provided especially helpful feedback, questions, and recommendations.
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Sedlak, A.J., Ellis, R.T. (2014). Trends in Child Abuse Reporting. In: Korbin, J., Krugman, R. (eds) Handbook of Child Maltreatment. Child Maltreatment, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7208-3_1
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