The federal government recently released Child Maltreatment 2017, its annual report of cases in the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). While these numbers have methodologic flaws that stop them from being considered a true measure of the incidence if maltreatment, they are very useful for advocacy and messaging, One especially compelling message is to apply the estimates of the economic cost of each case of child abuse and neglect to the number of cases in your state, and compare it to what’s spend on prevention and services promoting resilience and known protective factors. This table offers two different calculations.
- We multiply the numbers of cases in each state by $802,928, the lifetime cost of a non-fatal case of maltreatment (Peterson, Florence and Klevins, 2018)
- We divide the $89 billion the US spends on child abuse each year proportionally by the number of child abuse cases in each state.
