What Is Neglect? a Comparative Analysis of State Definitions of Child Neglect in the United States

Background and Purpose:

Child neglect, the most common type of child maltreatment in the United States, is widely regarded as exceptionally difficult to define (Zuravin, 1999; Rose & Meezan, 1993).  The Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act Reauthorization Act of 2010 minimally defines neglect, but each state has its own definition. Since these definitions are used by social workers and judges in the child welfare system when assessing families brought to their attention, the ways in which states define neglect are consequential in practice. Despite this, analyses of this variation are lacking. The purpose of this qualitative study was to compare civil legal definitions for child neglect, identifying themes and differences across the fifty states and Washington D.C.

Methods:

Legal definitions for each of the 50 states and Washington D.C. were compiled from www.childwelfare.gov. A comparative analysis was conducted using directed content qualitative analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005), which uses existing concepts to direct the coding process.  Coding was initially guided by definitions from the literature (English, et al., 2005; Giovannoni & Becerra, 1979) and the Fourth National Incidence Study (NIS-4), the federal estimate of child abuse and neglect incidence in the U.S.  Additional themes emerging inductively from the states’ definitions were also coded. 

Results:

Wide variation was found in the states’ definitions, from generic to very detailed.  The majority of states include in their definitions medical neglect (45) and the provision of basic needs (47).  Beyond these elements, there was little adherence to the other forms of neglect in the NIS-4 definitions: educational neglect (24), emotional/psychological neglect (19), lack of supervision (12), abandonment (9), illegal transfer of custody (6), and exposure to domestic violence (0).  Twenty-six states have definitions that are child-focused (English et al., 2005), meaning concentrated on the needs of the child. Thirteen states have exclusions for poverty, primarily in the Northeast and Midwest, where it is only considered neglect if parents have the financial means to provide what is lacking.  Substance abuse was identified in different forms including prenatal exposure to substances, exposure to drug manufacturing, and parental substance abuse. Most states used the words “failure” or “deprivation” in their definitions, with 31 using the former and five using the latter and one state using both terms.

Conclusions & Implications:

Findings demonstrate the marked heterogeneity in definitions of neglect across the U.S.  Given this wide variation, child welfare practitioners and researchers need to be cognizant of the legal definitions of the jurisdictions they are working within, and of the potential implications of this definitional variability both at the policy level and, downstream, for system-involved children and families. Paralleling the relationship between the federal and state statutes, for example, broader, minimally-specified definitions may allow for greater interpretive discretion by “street-level bureaucrats” in the child welfare system, such as social workers and judges, with potentially problematic implications, including the risk that unexamined assumptions or biases may shape decision-making and intervention.