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The latest federal compilation of data from the states concerning child abuse and neglect shows that known child abuse fatalities declined significantly in 2024 compared to the previous year. It’s also the second decline in a row, following a smaller decline from 2022 to 2023. Overall, known fatalities during the two-year period declined by 12%.
That’s probably the most significant finding in the latest Child Maltreatment report released Friday by the federal Administration for Children and Families (and yes, 2024 is the latest).
During that same period – 2022 through 2024 – entries into foster care nationwide declined by about six percent.
Did the decline in foster care entries cause the decline in child abuse deaths? Almost certainly not. Correlation is not causation. But that’s also true when foster care entries go down and child abuse deaths go up – yet foster care apologists love to exploit those data points over and over – carefully picking and choosing among them.
Foster care apologists also will rush to point out that, they claim, child abuse deaths are underreported. They may be right. There also are reasons to believe they can be overreported.
Consider a hypothetical example: Early one Sunday morning,
while his parents are asleep, a three-year-old wakes up, manages to unlatch the
back door of the family home and wanders away.
He falls into a body of water and drowns. Accident or neglect? The history of American family policing
suggests that if the body of water is the pool behind a McMansion it will be
labeled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a trailer park it will be labeled
neglect.
But whichever may be the case, there is no evidence that agencies were, say, 12% more likely to overlook fatalities in 2024 than in 2022.
All this is all the more reason it’s a good thing a massive new study has settled the issue once and for all. The study looked at 3.4 million case records and more than 20,000 child abuse deaths over a period of 13 years. The result: No evidence whatsoever that increasing foster care reduces child abuse deaths. And no evidence that reducing foster care increases child abuse deaths.
For a full discussion of why that might be, and a discussion of what actually can reduce child abuse deaths, see this earlier post to the blog and NCCPR’s Issue Paper on child abuse fatalities.
And in contrast, let us never forget the new study from Sweden finding that, when compared to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes, children placed in foster care were more than four times more likely to die by age 20.
Other notable data from the Child Maltreatment report:
● For the first time since at least 2015, the number of calls to child abuse hotlines declined – ever so slightly. Perhaps the public is starting to understand that both underreporting the very rare cases of genuine, serious abuse and overreporting everything else harms children. Perhaps people are being a little more careful – and more willing to become, in Joyce McMillan’s phrase, mandatory supporters instead of mandatory reporters.
● The rate at which caseworkers checked boxes on forms
saying they believed it was at least slightly more likely than not that the
allegation is true (that’s all a “substantiated” report of child abuse or
neglect really means) declined for the sixth year in a row.
