Protecting children from maltreatment during COVID-19: Struggling to see children and their families through the lockdowns

Abstract

It has been one year since COVID-19 took the world by surprise imposing fundamental restrictions to every aspect of daily life across the globe. Even with the vaccine’s anticipated impact on preventing the spread of the disease there will be long lasting health, economic, developmental and social impacts of COVID-19. The true extent of the effects of COVID-19 is largely unknown and understanding and intervening in the sequelae will demand scientific and practice excellence. There are examples of child welfare systems responding to these challenges with innovative policies that reflect the best interests of the child. In Canada, there were several jurisdictions where there was an immediate stop to youth aging out of care. McMaster University’s Violence-Evidence-GuidanceAction (VEGA) Project is an evidence-based open access interactive curriculum for learning how to recognize and safely respond to family violence. With the focus on COVID infection, the opportunities and responsibilities of professionals to safeguard children need to become a priority of healthcare providers. Acknowledging the adverse consequences of COVID-19 for children, families and communities worldwide, Child Abuse & Neglect continues its efforts to bring you the most advanced and groundbreaking empirical knowledge on the protection of children from maltreatment during COVID-19 beginning with a two volume special issue. The special issue “Protecting children from maltreatment during COVID-19: First volume,” focused on analyzing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on various aspects of child maltreatment and child protective services (Katz & Fallon, 2020). The issue explored three main areas of research, the first examined the psychological effects of COVID-19 in two populations: individuals with a history of abuse and caregivers. The influence of COVID-19 and related stressors on parental stress levels was of particular interest given the well-established relationship between parental stress and child maltreatment (Brown, Doom, Lechuga-Pena, Watamura, & Koppels, 2020; Lawson, Piel, & Simon, 2020; Xu, Wu, Levkoff, & Jedwab, 2020). The second area consists of articles concerning COVID-19 legislation in various countries (including South Africa), and its influence on the ability of child protective services to protect children. A final group proposed new intervention strategies for child welfare professionals in response to the restrictions and challenges presented by COVID-19. This included recommendations for service workers handling the rapid return of children in care to families, and the development of a clinical tool to assist child protection workers in Canada (Fallon et al., 2020; Wilke, Howard, & Goldman, 2020). Overall, this special issue covered a wide range of research areas, providing valuable information on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic to advance the theory and practice of child protection. This second volume is a continuation of the first and comprises studies intended to address two core questions: (1) how does COVID-19 impact the rates of child maltreatment (CM); and (2) how does COVID-19 impact the delivery of child protective service responses. These two questions are discussed and studied in a variety of international settings. The first manuscript, by Petrowski and colleagues, is a study examining the use of social media data to assess children’s exposure to violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. This innovative approach and measurement strategy is particularly compelling given that formal reporting systems and traditional reporting sources were either unavailable or severely restricted, making the use of other monitoring methods and support efforts essential. A study carried out by Bravery and colleagues takes a novel approach to illustrate children’s circumstances in times of lockdown. In their study, conversations of children on Twitter and Reddit were reviewed to assess violence related and abusive content as a proxy for exposure. Investigating the epidemiology of CM during COVID-19, Adesman provides us with an analysis of CM in New York City from March to May 2020. The results clearly show a decrease in CM reports for all forms of maltreatment and referral sources during the study