School officials are required by law to report suspected cases of child abuse or neglect, but sometimes they fail to do so because of concern that child protective services will not help the children.

Trying to determine how well the U.S. child protection system actually works is the responsibility of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW), an ongoing study authorized by the 1996 welfare reform law and administered by the Child and Family Services Division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The study currently looks at outcomes of abuse and neglect charges for more than 5,000 randomly selected children in investigated families in 92 randomly selected counties in the United States, plus several hundred children in foster care and a number of children living in child welfare institutions.

In a report published in July by the Brookings Institution, the authors examine what NSCAW has found so far and suggest that studies of children and families touched by the child protection system are rare. "We do not know enough about child abuse and neglect, and much of what we think we know is questionable."

Some of the findings:

• Each year in the United States, nearly 900,000 children are physically harmed or neglected by their caretakers and approximately 1,300 of them die.
• Half a million children live in foster care—a living arrangement that includes families previously unknown to the child, relatives, and various forms of group and residential care.
• The nation's child protection system includes mandatory reporting laws written and enforced in every state that require various professionals who have contact with children, such as doctors, nurses, and teachers, to report incidents of suspected abuse or neglect.
• Every state operates programs that are supposed to investigate these reports, to determine whether children have actually been abused or neglected and to decide what to do about it if abuse or neglect is confirmed.
• A third component of the protection system is "a somewhat haphazard set of services" that aims to help abusive families and their children.
• As established in federal and state statutes, the goals of the child protection system are to maximize child safety, keep children in permanent living arrangements, and promote the development of children in its care.
•  In pursuing those goals, if abuse or neglect is confirmed, the welfare agency must first decide if it is safe to leave a child with its family or whether the child should be removed and placed in foster home or with relatives. If children stay at home, the agency has to determine whether to provide services. If children are placed outside their homes, the agency must make reasonable efforts to reunify them with their families unless the situation is so dire that reunification would not be reasonable. If these efforts fail, the agency must make permanent arrangements in as timely a fashion as possible, with adoption the preferred option.
• These various and complex decisions are made by social workers who may have caseloads of 20 or more children. The courts then review the decisions.
• The child protection system is paid for by a combination of state, federal, and local resources. Federal funds flow from Title IV of the Social Security Act, which provides approximately $7 billion a year to states that agree to abide by the rules specified in Title IV and the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.
• Parent training programs are believed to be effective in preventing future abuse, but most child protection agencies do not provide such services or use programs with little validation of effectiveness.

Making the case for parent training, the Brookings report points out that in most child protection cases, even when maltreatment is substantiated, children remain at home with their parents, and  "a surprising share" of those families receive no services except,  possibly,  visits from a social worker. "Logic would suggest that parent training should be among the preferred offerings. After all, if parents are maltreating their children, they need a new set of parenting skills to replace those that brought them to the attention of the child protection agency in the first place."

Parenting techniques are only part of the services families may need, however, the report points out. "A major finding is that children with parents who have mental health or substance abuse problems are themselves at greatly elevated risk for mental health problems," which suggests that many parents need two kinds of services—mental health or drug programs for themselves and parenting improvement programs so they can provide better care for their children.

Overall, the report concludes that "children in the child welfare system are being shortchanged" not only in provisions for their safety and continuity of care but in the important area of education, where surveys show that many of the children in protection may need special education services but fewer than 40 percent receive them. "Statutes and a sense of equity for these children both dictate that the child welfare system improve it performance in making certain that children receive the educational services they need."

Information about the report, "Child Protection: Using Research to Improve Policy and Practice," is available at www.brookings.edu.