States across the U.S. are reporting a spike in child abuse and neglect over the last few years, and experts say stress from the pandemic is a big factor.
Factors like the loss of loved ones, unemployment, and other challenges from the pandemic are still issues people are experiencing today and unfortunately can potentially lead to child abuse or neglect.
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, and New York are just some of the states reporting an increase in abuse, neglect and in some cases even deaths.
FamilyForward is a St. Louis, Missouri, nonprofit that works with children who have gone through a wide variety of trauma. FamilyForward’s Chief Program Officer Sharon Skidmore-Stern says the nonprofit focuses intentionally on kids who had traumatic experiences prior to the age of eight.
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When it comes to the prevalence of early childhood and early neglect, we’ve certainly seen an increase in referrals as have other agencies in the area," said Sharon Skidmore-Stern.
Skidmore-Stern says all the agencies in the area that deal with childhood trauma are struggling with waitlists, and many kids are coming to the system's attention for neglect.
"What neglect looks like is pretty broad. Neglect can look like missing school frequently, it can look like unsupervised care, it can look like food insecurities, but what that also ends up looking like is lack of access to affordable childcare, reliable transportation. Lots of things that contribute to that, and a lot of these are really still ramifications of the pandemic." said Skidmore-Stern.
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Prevent Child Abuse America is a national organization that’s been around for 50 years with the focus of preventing child abuse and neglect and operates a network of chapters across the United States.
Prevent Child Abuse America’s Chief Research Officer Dr. Bart Klika says the pandemic took a huge toll on families, and many of those effects are still continuing to be experienced.
"We don’t have what we would think about as a child well-being system established in our country where if a family says hey, I’m struggling with housing, I’m struggling to put food on the table, where they can go and receive these services early, and as often as they need to get back up and running," said Dr. Klika.
To help these children, FamilyForward offers a therapeutic preschool, in-home visitation services, early interventions, trauma assessment, parent education, and more.
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"We don’t focus on the granular ‘we need to fix these behaviors’ but we really focus on why are they not able to succeed and how do we help build them up and provide interventions that can make them successful in those settings?" said Skidmore-Stern.
Both FamilyForward and Prevent Child Abuse America say a solution to this issue isn’t simple.
"I think understanding how are we going to allocate resources to mitigate some of these things…this isn’t an individual child problem, there are larger systematic players that contribute to that," said Skidmore-Stern.
FamilyForward is launching a research and training institution, and Prevent Child Abuse America is continuing with home visiting programs, policy work, among other things, all with the goal of prevention.
