Research

Child maltreatment is a serious and common issue in the United States, with nearly 4 in 10 children experiencing a child welfare investigation by adulthood. Education personnel play a critical role in the early detection and reporting of such cases due to their repeated interactions with children, but the frequency and quality of such interactions may have been reduced during school closures and virtual instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to investigate how virtual instruction during the pandemic has affected the child maltreatment reporting process, I employ a difference-in-differences strategy leveraging variation in the level of virtual instruction across different counties in the United States during the 2020-21 school year. I find that a fully virtual county is associated with a 36.4% decline in child maltreatment reports made by education personnel relative to a fully in-person county. This decline in reporting is approximately half of the decline in education personnel reporting during the initial nationwide school closures after March 2020. In contrast, there were no significant differences in reporting by non-education personnel. I also find that more severe cases were disproportionately affected by under-reporting. Subsequently, during the 2021-22 school year, education personnel reports rebounded as the previously virtual schools returned to in-person instruction. These results underscore the importance of in-person interaction with education personnel for the detection of child maltreatment cases and the need for appropriate policies when education interactions are limited.  

with Nolan Pope

with David Blazar, Seth Gershenson, Ethan Hutt

with David Blazar