NEW YORK (AP) – When the coronavirus pandemic took over the United States in mid-March, forcing schools to close and many children to be locked up in homes affected by job loss and other forms of stress, many experts on Child welfare warned of a likely increase in child abuse.
Fifteen weeks later, concerns persist. However, some front-line experts, including pediatricians who helped sound the alarm, say they have seen no evidence of a marked increase.
Among them is Dr. Lori Frasier, who heads the child protection program at Penn State Hershey Medical Center and is president of a national society of pediatricians specializing in the prevention and treatment of child abuse.
Frasier said he received information in the past few days from 18 of his colleagues across the country and that “no one has experienced the expected increase in abuse.”
A similar evaluation came from Jerry Milner, who communicates with child protection agencies across the country as head of the Children’s Office of the Federal Department of Health and Human Services. “I am not aware of any data that can corroborate that children are being abused at a faster rate during the pandemic,” he told The Associated Press.
Still, some experts believe the actual level of abuse during the pandemic is hidden from view because many children are seeing neither teachers nor doctors, and many child protection agencies have reduced home visits by social workers.
“There is no doubt that children are most at risk, and we will not be able to see them until school reopens,” said Marci Hamilton, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who heads CHILD USA, a group of experts seeking to prevent child abuse and neglect.
Several states said calls to their child abuse hotlines were reduced by 40% or more, which they attributed to the fact that teachers and school nurses, who must report suspected abuse, no longer had direct contact with children. students.
“While calls are down, that doesn’t mean the abuse has stopped,” said Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who reported a 50% drop in hotline calls.
According to Milner, full data on abuse during the pandemic will not be available for many months.
And whatever the current level of abuse, there is no doubt that part is horrible.
Georgia Boothe of Children’s Aid, a private agency that provides some of New York City’s foster care services, said some of the children now entering the system were brought in by police officers investigating reports of domestic violence.
“The level of severity in some of those cases is unreal,” he said.
Frasier, a Pennsylvania-based pediatrician, said some of his colleagues documented a sharp increase in shaken baby syndrome and children’s head injuries during the 2008 recession, which they attributed at least in part to economic stress.
“With the pandemic, we saw the high unemployment rates, the layoffs, and we thought ‘OK, now we are at it again,'” he said.
She and others have noticed some changes during the pandemic, for example, more accidental injuries from burns, falls, and mishaps on farms. What they have not seen is a wave of child abuse.
Frasier has a few guesses as to why: a protective effect in homes where multiple people were locked up together, and federal financial aid that eased stress on some vulnerable families.
In Nashville, Tennessee, Dr. Heather Williams says she and her colleagues who specialize in pediatric child abuse prepared for a wave fueled by a pandemic, based on the 2008 experiences. Now she wonders if the recent infusion of assistance Federal unemployment insurance could have helped prevent such an increase.
“We would be very excited if we were wrong,” he said.
At the Children’s Bureau, Milner says he is satisfied that child protection is considered a high priority during the pandemic, but he is concerned about the tone of some of the early warnings. He suggested that some had “racist grounds” – unfairly stereotyping low-income parents of color as prone to abusive behavior.
“To sound the alarms, because teachers don’t see children every day, that parents are waiting to harm their children, it is an unfair representation of so many parents who are doing their best in very difficult circumstances,” he said.
One of Milner’s top aides, Special Assistant David Kelly, noted that, in normal times, a vast majority of calls to child abuse hotlines do not trigger investigations.
“We know that most findings of child maltreatment are through neglect, not physical abuse or exploitation, and we know that there are strong associations between neglect and the challenges associated with poverty,” Kelly wrote in a June 12 article in the Chronicle of the Social. Change.
“If we take a closer look … we could see the depth of resistance that is present and the remarkable efforts poor parents make to survive in the smallest fraction of what many of us have.”
Concerns about the well-being of children in the midst of the pandemic extend beyond physical abuse. There are concerns that children do not receive vaccines when their parents skip doctor’s office visits.
For children with internet access, weeks away from school have increased the risk of online sexual exploitation, according to Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau. She runs the Johns Hopkins Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse.
However, Letourneau is encouraged by a recent trend: More older children are calling hotlines to report exploitation and abuse.
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