Child Maltreatment in Rural Southern Counties: Another Perspective on Race, Poverty and Child Welfare

Background and purpose: Efforts to understand the disproportionate representation of African-American children in the child welfare system have revealed a lot about relationships among race, poverty, and child welfare system involvement.  Racial disparities in child maltreatment report rates, for example, are primarily due to poverty and other economic risk factors (Drake et al., 2009).  Although we have learned a lot about race, poverty and child maltreatment, some questions and regions of the country have received less attention.   Excellent studies have addressed black/white disparities at the individual or family level, but we know less about disparities in the child welfare response to whole racially-segregated communities.  Questions also remain about the US South, with its distinct patterns of racial segregation, and where matters of race and poverty have special resonance.  In particular, little is known about child welfare efforts in rural southern counties with predominantly African-American populations.  Focusing on southern counties, this study addresses the research question:  Are county-level child maltreatment rates associated with county racial composition?

Methods:  The study involves cross-sectional analysis of county-level data from Alabama.  Data from several sources were merged:  County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, NCANDS, Kids Count, and the US Census.  All of the state’s 67 counties are included.  The dependent variable is the 2014 child maltreatment rate.  Bivariate tests and multiple regression models were conducted to assess associations among the county-level maltreatment rate and county-level racial composition, rural percentage, and child poverty rate.  Mapping software illustrated patterns in child maltreatment, race, population density, and child poverty. 

Results: Child maltreatment rates were highly associated with county racial composition, but not as national data would predict.   Maltreatment rates in majority white counties (x = 9.89/1,000) were higher than in majority black counties (x = 6.78/1,000).  The racial disparity was larger among rural counties.  Despite a child poverty rate difference of 30% vs. 45%, majority white rural counties had maltreatment rates nearly two times higher (x= 10.8/1,000) than did majority black rural counties (x = 5.5/1,000).   Regression results indicated that, after controlling for child poverty rate and rural percentage, county black percentage was strongly negatively associated with the child maltreatment rate.  With each percentage increase in a county’s black population, the maltreatment rate decreased by .15 per 1,000 children.

Implications:  Majority black, rural counties in Alabama have among the highest county-level child poverty rates in the country.  These counties include many risk factors for child maltreatment: unemployment, single parenthood, struggling schools, and lack of resources.   Whereas these counties do not have family-level black/white disparities in child maltreatment, the extraordinarily low rates of child maltreatment, generally, stand in stark contrast to child maltreatment patterns in much of the country and raise questions about the adequacy of the child welfare response.  Study findings support the social construction of target populations theory (Schneider & Ingram, 1993) and the related Racial Classification Model (Soss et al., 2008), which suggest that jurisdictions with higher proportions of stigmatized populations, such as poor, rural, African American families, will receive less helpful public services