How Many Children are Maltreated? - Collecting Child Maltreatment Data

The 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA; Public Law 93-247) created the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) to coordinate nationwide efforts to protect children from maltreatment. As part of the former U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, NCCAN commissioned the American Humane Association (AHA) to collect data from the states. The first time the AHA collected data, in 1976, it recorded an estimated 416,000 reports, affecting 669,000 children. Between 1980 and 1985 the AHA reported a 12% annual increase in maltreatment reports to CPS agencies. By 1990 reports of child maltreatment had risen to 1.7 million, affecting about 2.7 million children.

In 1985 the federal government stopped funding data collection on child maltreatment. In 1986 the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse (NCPCA; now called Prevent Child Abuse America) picked up where the government left off. The NCPCA started collecting detailed information from the states on the number of children abused, the characteristics of child abuse, the number of child abuse deaths, and changes in the funding and extent of child welfare services.

In 1988 the Child Abuse Prevention, Adoption and Family Services Act (Public Law 100-294) replaced the 1974 CAPTA. The new law mandated that NCCAN, as part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), establish a national data collection program on child maltreatment. In 1990 the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), designed to fulfill this mandate, began collecting and analyzing child maltreatment data from CPS agencies in the fifty states and the District of Columbia. The first three surveys were known as Working Paper 1, Working Paper 2, and Child Maltreatment 1992. NCANDS has since conducted the survey Child Maltreatment. The latest survey was Child Maltreatment 2002, released in April 2004.

As part of the 1974 CAPTA, Congress also mandated NCCAN to conduct a periodic National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS). Data on maltreated children are collected not only from CPS agencies but also from professionals in community agencies, such as law enforcement, public health, juvenile probation, mental health, and voluntary social services, as well as from hospitals, schools, and day care centers. The NIS is the single most comprehensive source of information about the incidence of child maltreatment in the United States, because it analyzes the characteristics of child abuse and neglect that are known to community-based professionals, including those characteristics not reported to CPS. The latest study, NIS-3, was released in 1996. In 2003 the Keeping Children and Families Safe Act (Public Law 108-36) directed the collection of data for NIS-4.

Pursuant to the CAPTA Amendments of 1996 (Public Law 104-235), NCCAN ceased operating as a separate agency. Since then all child maltreatment prevention functions have been consolidated within the Children's Bureau of the HHS.