By Caitlin Farmer

At the start of 2020, schools, offices and businesses across the U.S. closed their doors, encouraging people to stay in their homes to avoid the risk of catching and spreading COVID-19, leading to a period of lockdown and isolation. 

For families across the country, this meant parents were in the home while children were attending school virtually and not coming in contact with peers or teachers. 

“Trauma is one of those things that sort of multiplies on itself,” Caleb Kimpel, program director of communications at Childhelp said. “If one parent lost their job, and the other parent is struggling with mental health issues, and now they’re both stuck in the house with a child, then the risk factors that already existed in the first place, now are that much worse because of the strain of COVID-19.” 

Childhelp is a national nonprofit founded in 1959 focusing on advocacy and outreach to work toward meeting the physical, emotional, educational and spiritual needs of abused, neglected and at-risk children, according to their website. 

Reaching the reporter

“A lot of child abuse that happens, it never gets reported to begin with,” Kimpel said. “We know that about one in eight kids, by the time they hit 18, will have been identified as victims of abuse by a child welfare agency.” 

Kimpel said that when adults are asked whether or not they experienced child abuse or neglect, the number of victims are higher.

“If you look at retrospective studies, where they ask adults whether they experienced abuse as a child or neglect, it’s more like one out of every three or one out of every six, depending on which type of abuse or neglect you’re looking at,” Kimple said. 

From 2016 to 2019, the number of referrals to Child Protective Services for children being neglected or abused had been continually increasing nationally, according to the 2020 child maltreatment report from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, published in Jan. 2022. The number decreased from 4,380,000 in 2019 to 3,925,000 in 2020. 

“On a national basis, most reports of child abuse come from school professionals and so whenever kids didn’t go to school and teachers didn’t get a chance to get their eyes on students, there was there’s a significant drop in reports,” Kimple said. 

From his perspective, Kimple said he sees this as a main contributor to the overall decrease in reports of child abuse and neglect in 2020. 

“Reporting was a lot more difficult because the folks who would normally be there for a kid to reach out to were just an extra step away and you can see that play out in some of the national statistics where educational professionals made significantly fewer reports in 2020,” Kimple said. 

The structure of the system 

The number of child abuse and neglect victims is much lower on paper than in reality. According to Kimple, the child welfare system receives a referral to investigate a report and if the allegations can be substantiated, or proven as neglect and abuse in accordance with federal and state laws, they can identify the child as a victim. 

“It [a report] has to pass a certain threshold of evidence after it was brought to the attention of the child welfare agencies to begin with,” Kimple said. “So the the number of victims overall, the actual number of people who have experienced child abuse isn’t necessarily captured by the reporting of the state child welfare agencies.”

In Georgia, as with several other states in the U.S., there are mandated reporter laws in place for professionals who work closely with children, Kimple said, meaning if they see signs of abuse and neglect they are legally obligated to report them. 

In 2018, 67.3% of child abuse and neglect reports were made by professionals such as teachers, police officers, lawyers and social services staff, according to the 2018 child maltreatment report from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, published in 2020. 

According to the 2018 HHS report, teachers were responsible for making the highest percentage of professional reports in 2018, at 20.5%. Legal and law enforcement personnel made 18.7% of reports and social services personnel made 10.7%. 

In 2020, professionals submitted 66.7% of child abuse and neglect reports, according to the 2020 HHS report, with legal and law enforcement personnel submitting the most at 20.9%. Teachers made 17.2% of reports and medical personnel made 11.6%. 

“The folks who usually bring the report to the attention of the child welfare agencies just didn’t have access to the kids and so there were a lot of cases that probably should have been reported that weren’t,” Kimple said. 

According to the 2020 HHS report, there were about 618,000 victims of child abuse and neglect during that year. The report found that children younger than one-year-old had the highest victimization rate, averaging 25.1 per every 1,000 children in the total population. 

Of the victims reported, HHS found that in 2020 girls were more likely to be victims at a rate of 8.4 per every 1,000 in the total population whereas the rate for boys is 7.9 per every 1,000. 

American-Indian or Alaska Native children had the highest rate of victimization out of any racial or ethnic group in 2020, according to the report. Out of every 1,000 American-Indian or Alaska Native children in the U.S., 15.5 were victims of abuse and neglect. African-American children had the second highest in 2020 with a victimization rate of 13.2 of every 1,000 African-American children in the U.S.

“This is definitely one of those cases where even like the social justice picture, it’s kind of dire,” Kimple said. “It’s not to say that abuse and neglect doesn’t happen in rich families or something like that. It’s just to say that, especially when you think in terms of compounding traumas of things like COVID-19, there are definitely strong correlations between access to medical care and resources and abuse and neglect.”

Reoccuring roadblocks

Children are typically reluctant to come forward when being abused or neglected, Kimple said. This could be due to the fact that they lack the knowledge to recognize their abuse and neglect, or because they’re too afraid to report it, he said.

“Either they [children] don’t have education to understand that what’s happening to them is abuse, or if they understand it as abuse, but they don’t want to risk their family members getting in trouble,” Kimple said. “There’s lots of different societal constraints and then the parents of course, perpetrators of child abuse, there’s a lot of reasons that they might not go to the child welfare agencies or seek out help for what’s going on.”

Overall, Kimple said the effects of COVID-19 on all children at home during the lockdown period will come to light as they enter adulthood, but little is known about it now. 

“We do know though, that trauma that children experience, regardless of the kind of trauma, it doesn’t have to be abuse or neglect, it can be a death in the family, it can be a car crash, it can be a natural disaster, any trauma a child experiences has really similar impacts on their overall health outcomes,” Kimple said.