A Review of Screened-Out Families and Child Protective Services Involvement: A Missed Opportunity to Prevent Future Maltreatment With Community-Based Services

Levels of Involvement with Child Protection Services Associated with Early Adolescent Police Contact as a Victim and Person of Interest

The relationship between childhood maltreatment and subsequent offending/victimization is well established. However, the magnitude of this relationship for different levels of child protection services (CPS) involvement is poorly understood, due to measurement issues, lack of longitudinal data, and reliance on reports of substantiated maltreatment, which can underestimate the impact of maltreatment. This study examined associations between CPS involvement during childhood (ages 0 to <11 years) and police services contact (as a victim and/or a person of interest) for criminal incidents in early adolescence (11 to ~14 years), differentiated according to levels of CPS involvement (i.e., no risk of significant harm [non-ROSH], unsubstantiated ROSH, substantiated ROSH, and out-of-home care; each examined relative to no CPS contact). Data for 71,465 children were drawn from the New South Wales Child Development Study, an intergenerational, longitudinal investigation that uses administrative records from CPS and police alongside other health, justice, and education data. Multinomial regression analyses were conducted to determine associations between increasing levels of CPS involvement and police contact as a victim only, a person of interest only, and as both victim and person of interest while accounting for covariates (i.e., child's sex, Aboriginal, and/or Torres Strait Islander background, socioeconomic status, maternal age at child's birth, and parental offending history). Children exposed to any of the four levels of CPS involvement had higher odds of police contact, relative to children with no CPS involvement. Odds ratios were higher for contact with police as both a victim and a person of interest, compared to police contact as a victim or a person of interest only. These findings highlight that children with even unsubstantiated CPS reports (i.e., non-ROSH and unsubstantiated ROSH reports) are at heightened risk of police contact compared to children who are unknown to CPS, underlining the need to support all families in contact with CPS.

Racial/Ethnic Differences in Child Protective Services Reporting, Substantiation and Placement, With Comparison to Non-CPS Risks and Outcomes: 2005-2019

We used National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System and Census data to examine Black-White and Hispanic-White disparities in reporting, substantiation, and out-of-home placement both descriptively from 2005-2019 and in multivariate models from 2007-2017. We also tracked contemporaneous social risk (e.g., child poverty) and child harm (e.g., infant mortality) disparities using non-child protective services (CPS) sources and compared them to CPS reporting rate disparities. Black-White CPS reporting disparities were lower than found in non-CPS risk and harm benchmarks. Consistent with the Hispanic paradox, Hispanic-White CPS reporting disparities were lower than risk disparities but similar to harm disparities. Descriptive and multivariate analyses of data from the past several years indicated that Black children were less likely to be substantiated or placed into out-of-home care following a report than White children. Hispanic children were slightly more likely to be substantiated or placed in out-of-home care than White children overall, but this difference disappeared in multivariate models. Available data provide no evidence that Black children were overreported relative to observed risks and harms reflected in non-CPS data. Reducing reporting rates among Black children will require addressing broader conditions associated with maltreatment.