Child abuse drops, but domestic violence rises. What the numbers mean in Placer County

Child abuse and neglect reports across Placer County dropped more than 8% last year, according to data from the county’s Child Welfare Services.

The drop in cases, a trend also seen throughout California, was expected because the county’s children had historically few interactions with mandated reporters and people beyond their immediate family last year, Placer officials said. The combination of distance learning, pandemic restrictions and isolation created difficult situations for families.

“As for the family cases themselves, they are not necessarily more severe, but they are more complicated,” Twylla Abrahamson, the county’s Children’s System of Care director, said in an email to The Sacramento Bee. “The family situations of stress and strain have increased due to loss of jobs, loss of housing, lack of family and social support, lack of child care, and with children and youth distance learning, many caregivers and parents had additional stresses around educational processes that no one was prepared for.”

To make up for lost time in the classroom, Abrahamson said the county’s child welfare staff held a training with teachers and law enforcement in April last year after noticing a slight decline in calls into the crisis hotline when the lockdown orders took effect in March.

In April 2019, 115 people made reports via the 24-hour hotline. For the same month in 2020, the number dropped to 68.

To counter this, the training was designed to help educators and officers identify signs of possible maltreatment, she said.

The result was an increase in the number of reports coming from law enforcement and other mandated reporters.

“While school (and) day care personnel did account for a proportional reduction in calls — down 34%, from 687 to 417 — other callers increased their reporting such as a 24% proportional increase year over year from law enforcement, from 653 to 739; a 155% increase year over year from advocates,” Abrahamson said.

Child Welfare Services staff also worked with other county departments such as behavioral health and probation to identify situations that were potentially dangerous to children, she added.

The downward trend of child abuse cases is consistent in neighboring Sacramento County, where in 2020, Child Protective Services received 24% fewer calls into its Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline, and opened 185 fewer cases during the course of pandemic, representing a 12% decrease. Investigations into complaints dropped, too, with CPS staff investigating 430 fewer cases compared to 2019, a 5% decrease, the agency said in an email to The Bee.

In Placer County, the number of opened cases of child abuse and neglect decreased by 11% compared to 2019. But the decline of child abuse cases comes on the heels of an increase in domestic violence cases, according to data from Stand Up Placer, one of the county’s leading domestic violence service providers.

Stand Up Placer’s legal assistance team, which consists of a staff attorney, paralegal and part-time advocate, saw a 33% increase in survivors in the past year.

The organization received 800 calls from local law enforcement agencies to help domestic violence survivors, a slight increase from the previous year, a spokesperson said.

“(The pandemic) has led to increased anxiety and depression for both caregivers and youth, so the families are experiencing more acute mental health and substance-use issues and more need for services, which is straining the system at times,” Abrahamson said. “We have had increased calls to the suicide prevention hotline and calls for Mobile Crisis Services, but we cannot state these are all child welfare involved families.”

This story was originally published April 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.