Who Takes the Call? Practice Discretion in Child Maltreatment Reporting

Background: Screened-in child maltreatment report rates vary widely across U.S. states and counties. Patterns can be hard to discern, but generally, report rates are higher in predominantly rural and very dense urban areas, and in counties with higher rates of poverty, housing problems, and higher percentages of populations of color. A notable exception pertains to rural counties with majority Black populations in the U.S. South, which tend to have comparatively low maltreatment report rates despite having characteristics associated with vulnerability to child welfare involvement. Informed by theories of street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980) and reciprocal exchange (Homans, 1958), this study sought to illuminate aspects of the reporting process to help to explain perplexing report rates in rural, southern counties. The study addressed the questions: What are the experiences of rural, southern human service professionals with child maltreatment reporting? What do these professionals’ experiences with child maltreatment reporting reveal about the report and screen-in process?

Methods: Taking a pragmatic qualitative approach, the study involved semi-structured interviews with human services professionals working in rural counties of a southern state. Participants were identified through professional networks focused on child maltreatment services and prevention. Of ten human services professionals contacted, all agreed to participate. The study P.I. conducted individual interviews via Zoom lasting from 48 to 72 minutes. The interviews probed experiences with filing child maltreatment reports. With interview transcripts, two researchers followed an inductive thematic coding and analysis process.

Results: Five themes emerged from the analysis. Professionals conveyed: (1) discretion in filing and accepting reports, noting that “feelings change” about report filing, and “going through ‘the what ifs’” to decide whether to report; (2) surprising challenges in filing reports, noting that “no one answers the phone,” reports going to voice mail, and receiving no response to messages left with county intake offices; (3) reports commonly declined, noting that intake workers sometimes argued that the local office was “already aware” of reported families; (4) leveraging personal relationships when filing reports by, for example, calling a county director of the local office if an intake call was not answered; and (5) race-based generalities, such as, Black families “take care of [our/their] own.”

Discussion: Unlike many states in which child maltreatment reports go to a central registry, in the state where this study was conducted, child maltreatment reports go to local county child welfare offices. As a result, multiple levels of discretion and subjectivity influenced the report and screen-in process, including personal relationships between callers and screeners, screeners’ past experiences with reported families, staffing levels of local offices, callers’ and screeners’ awareness of potential response resources, and callers’ and screeners’ views and experiences with local norms and practices related to race. Such discretion could help to explain widely-varying child maltreatment report rates in otherwise similar communities, and comparatively lower report rates in majority Black rural counties. Findings underscore the potential role of practice discretion in child maltreatment reporting and the need for further investigation of the report and screen-in process, especially in rural communities.