Research & Evaluation of Child Abuse & Neglect

Child Abuse & Neglect Data

American Humane has a long history of conducting research on national child welfare trends. From 1973 to 1987, American Humane conducted the National Study on Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting, a project funded by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.

Currently, American Humane is involved in the design, data collection, data utilization, and provision of technical assistance for the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). NCANDS is a voluntary, national data collection effort incorporating maltreatment information both by state and by case-level. These data describe trends across the United States in the reporting of child abuse/neglect, rates of substantiation, fatalities, victim and perpetrator characteristics, access to services for victims, and worker caseloads. The annual Child Maltreatment reports based on NCANDS represent the most comprehensive reporting on child protective services by the federal government. Forty-eight states, including the District of Columbia, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, contributed case-level data to NCANDS for 2007, the last year for which federal data is available. These data are widely used by administrators, researchers and clinicians in the field of child welfare and address substantive issues, such as characteristics that lead to a recurrence of child abuse/neglect and the factors that influence access to services.

American Humane is a subcontractor to Walter R. McDonald and Associates (WRMA) on this project and is part of the NCANDS Technical Team. A unique feature of NCANDS is the intensive level of technical assistance offered to states to help them map their state data to the standard NCANDS format. American Humane works with nine states providing technical assistance (Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas), and contributes to data analyses and national statistics for the yearly Child Maltreatment report, which is the preeminent resource for national statistics regarding child abuse and neglect.

Please click here to review Child Maltreatment 2007 (published in 2009) at the Children’s Bureau website.