Child Abuse Reports Dropped in 2020

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has published its review of child maltreatment reports in FY 2020. To no one's surprise, it concludes that the number of reports during school closures dropped significantly from FY 2019. Comparing the March-September of 2020 to the same months of 2019, there was a 12% decrease in referrals. The "screened-in" reports, i.e., those that received some sort of follow-up from state agencies, dropped by 21%. The vast majority of the decrease is explained by lack of contact with schools, as referrals from other sources actually increased.

It is impossible to know whether the lack of reports from school personnel allowed more child maltreatment to go unnoticed during the lockdowns. The one hard number that we do have is child fatalities, and those overall went down a bit from 1830 in 2019 to 1750 in 2020.  

It is far too soon to tell whether fears of an explosion in child maltreatment and neglect during the pandemic were justified. This new report, however, shows glimmers of hope in the lower number of child fatalities during the pandemic.