Contact with Child Protective Services is pervasive but unequally distributed by race and ethnicity in large US counties

Frank Edwards, Sara Wakefield, Kieran Healy and Christopher Wildeman ()
Additional contact information
Frank Edwards: School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ 07102
Sara Wakefield: School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ 07102
Kieran Healy: Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708
Christopher Wildeman: Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708; Research Unit, ROCKWOOL Foundation, DK 1472 Copenhagen, Denmark

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021, vol. 118, issue 30, e2106272118

Abstract: This article provides county-level estimates of the cumulative prevalence of four levels of Child Protective Services (CPS) contact using administrative data from the 20 most populous counties in the United States. Rates of CPS investigation are extremely high in almost every county. Racial and ethnic inequality in case outcomes is large in some counties. The total median investigation rate was 41.3%; the risk for Black, Hispanic, and White children exceeded 20% in all counties. Risks of having a CPS investigation were highest for Black children (43.2 to 72.0%). Black children also experienced high rates of later-stage CPS contact, with rates often above 20% for confirmed maltreatment, 10% for foster care placement, and 2% for termination of parental rights (TPR). The only other children who experienced such extreme rates of later-stage CPS interventions were American Indian/Alaska Native children in Middlesex, MA; Hispanic children in Bexar, TX; and all children except Asian/Pacific Islander children in Maricopa, AZ. The latter has uniquely high rates of late-stage CPS interventions. In some jurisdictions, such as New York, NY, (0.2%) and Cook, IL (0.2%), very few children experienced TPR. These results show that early CPS interventions are ubiquitous in large counties but with marked variation in how CPS systems respond to these investigations.

Keywords: child maltreatment; foster care; termination of parental rights; racial/ethnic inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.pnas.org/content/118/30/e2106272118.full (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nas:journl:v:118:y:2021:p:e2106272118

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by PNAS Product Team ().