Report Sources and Child Maltreatment Report Disparities for Black and Urban Children before, during, and after COVID

Background and Purpose: Our understanding of the dynamics associated with child maltreatment reports during times of crises and other exogenous shocks to systems is limited. Social distancing and other health safety measures that were employed during the COVID-19 outbreak also resulted in a natural experiment where interaction patterns between people changed substantially. This paper describes findings about associations between types of report sources, urbanicity, pre-, during-, and post-COVID lockdown time periods, and reporting disparities in child welfare systems.

Methods: This study examined administrative data reported to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), reflecting 5,320,167 children with reports in 42 states between January 2019 and June 2021. We examined data from 14 months before COVID-19 lockdowns began, 6 months of lockdown, and 10 months of post-lockdown. Disparity ratios for rate of reporting in the population were calculated for Black compared with White children. We compared three groups of reporters: 1) “education personnel and child daycare provider;” 2) “other professionals” (which includes social services personnel, medical personnel, mental health personnel, legal, law enforcement, or criminal justice personnel, and substitute care provider); and 3) “non-professional, other, and unknown” (which includes alleged victim, parent, other relative, friends/neighbors, alleged perpetrator, anonymous reporter, other, unknown or missing, hereinafter “non-professional”). County urbanicity codes were derived using the US Department of Agriculture’s Rural Urban Continuum Code. We used descriptive and linear mixed effects models to examine whether and how Black to White reporting disparities changed during and after the COVID Lockdown, by urbanicity, and report source.

Results: Our analysis found that Black to White child maltreatment report disparity ratios declined during and since the pre-COVID/Lockdown era, and that during the lockdown, this reduction was most pronounced in urban areas and for education report sources. Reports from education and day care providers were associated with reduced disparities during and post- Lockdown, while those from other professionals and non-professionals dropped slightly during Lockdown but surpassed Pre-Lockdown rates in the Post-Lockdown period. During the Pre-COVID period, 92% of Black children and 71% of White children in all reports were in urban areas (compared to rural ones), in the combined included states, and these percentages did not vary during the Lockdown and Post-Lockdown periods. During the Pre-COVID period, 22% of both Black children and White children in maltreatment reports were reported by education or child daycare personnel. This decreased to 5.7% for Black and 6.3% for White children during the Lockdown period, and then increased during Post-Lockdown but not to the same level as during Pre-COVID (16% for Black children, 19% for White children). The pseudo R² for the model was 0.306 for the fixed effect component and the intraclass correlation was 0.258.

Conclusions and Implications: The COVID pandemic had a tremendous impact on child maltreatment reporting and some effects linger. What remains to be seen is the extent to which patterns of reports and disparities ultimately return to pre-COVID levels, or whether societal shifts and other COVID ramifications have a lasting impact on reporting dynamics and ethnoracial disparities.