Alabama’s child maltreatment rate was below the national average in fiscal year 2023, reflecting some national trends but diverging in others. (Stephanie Nantel/Getty Images)
Alabama’s child maltreatment rates follow some national trends but diverge in some areas, according to a recent federal report.
In fiscal year 2023, Alabama screened in 26,397 reports of suspected child maltreatment, a rate of 23.3 per 1,000 children, below the national average of 28.7 per 1,000 children, according to the report published by the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The report defines child maltreatment, or child abuse and neglect as defined by the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), as “any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation; or an act or failure to act, which presents an imminent risk of serious harm.”
But according to the Alabama Department of Human Resources (DHR), which maintains a registry of child abuse and neglect cases, this lower rate does not necessarily reflect stricter screening or fewer maltreatment cases. Nearly all cases are handled by the department and very few are screened out, meaning they do not meet screening criteria for child abuse and neglect. The department may also conduct an assessment to prevent maltreatment, which may address issues that could potentially lead to abuse and neglect.
“The number of reports received that are screened in is independent from the count of those reports that will be indicated and counted in the maltreatment rate. In FY 2023, only about 1% of reports received were screened out,” said Daniel Sparkman, deputy commissioner for administrative services at DHR, in a statement.
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Nationally, infants under one year old have the highest victimization rate, at 21 per 1,000, while girls tend to have higher victimization rates than boys. The report does not break those rates down on a state-by-state basis, but Sallye Longshore, director of the Alabama Children’s Trust Fund, said in an interview that those trends are present in Alabama.
“The greatest number of children, when they are investigated and are found substantiated by DHR, the biggest category (of child maltreatment) is under one,” Longshore said, adding that is a significant issue because “those children don’t have verbal skills yet [and] parents don’t know what was causing that.” Sparkman confirmed Longshore’s statement.
The state has seen a modest decline in child maltreatment referrals since 2019, with a 7.9% decrease, compared to 11.6% nationally. But Sparkman said this trend is unrelated to policy or staffing changes.
“Alabama, like many other states, has seen a decline in the number of reports received over the past five years. However, this is not attributed to policy changes or personnel changes,” he said, saying it reflected a national trend in overall declining cases. The 28.7 per 1,000 reports of suspected child maltreatment nationwide in in 2023 was down from 2019, when the rate was 32.4 per 1,000, according to the report.
Longshore pointed to the state’s focus on prevention programs to educate and support families as a potential reason for Alabama’s declining rates of child maltreatment cases, saying “the heart of prevention is education.”
“We fund parent education and support. That’s the biggest category in terms of numbers of programs that we fund, and we fund home visiting programs, fatherhood programs, after school programs,” she said. For example, the department supports the Strengthening Families through Fathers program, a program designed to gain education and employment, while also teaching them parental resilience and knowledge.
She said it’s also important to educate parents about the challenges of early childhood since they have not developed verbal skills yet. When parents get frustrated because they don’t know why an infant is crying, that’s when infants are most vulnerable to maltreatment.
“When a child is colic or different things, and you can’t make them quit crying, and it can be very unnerving. It can be scary, and you lose it if you don’t have those parenting skills that make you kind of stop,” she said.
Longshore also pointed to other types of abuse children face, such as cyber abuse, which she said is something the Alabama Children’s Trust Fund is focusing on, sharing a recent story of an 11-year-old girl in Talladega County who, despite having a supportive family at home, died by suicide after being bullied online by her peers.
“It’s just tragic, but that’s some of the stuff we’re trying to get at and trying to educate,” Longshore said.
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