UC Irvine

The purpose of this dissertation was to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the occurrence and identification of child abuse and neglect. The first study concurrently examined changes in identification and medical evaluations of maltreatment allegations from before to during COVID-19. Reports to social services and child maltreatment evaluation center medical evaluations were collected from two counties and compared across the months of March-December 2019 and 2020. Findings showed divergent trends in reporting and evaluation of suspected maltreatment cases from before to during COVID-19. Specifically, while reports of suspected maltreatment were lower in 2020 than in 2019, the proportion of children reported to the county that received medical evaluations was higher in 2020 compared to 2019. Studies 2A and 2B took a different approach, assessing the impact of COVID-19 on laypersons’ ability to identify the most common form of maltreatment, child neglect. To do so, adults read vignettes about a mother’s care of her daughter and responded to questions about the mother’s neglectfulness, their reporting likelihood, and their attributions of blame for the situation. Though most adults were able to distinguish situations with versus without neglect, some conflated poverty and neglect when making identification and reporting decisions. COVID-19 had an indirect, rather than direct, impact on these decisions. Moreover, attributions of blame partially explained laypersons’ perceptions and reporting decisions. Together these studies can help the developing public education efforts or alternative methods of identifying vulnerable children and intervening in situations of harm.