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The Consequences in Statistical Form
The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) is a federally sponsored effort that collects and analyzes annual data on child abuse and neglect. The data are submitted voluntarily by the States and the District of Columbia. State laws determine what is considered abuse, maltreatment or neglect in each state and these laws can vary from state to state. The information that is collected in each state also varies.
The data presented here is provided voluntarily by each state and compiled by NCANDS. The first report from NCANDS was based on data for 1990; the most recent report on data, the 14th edition, was published in 2005 for data collected in 2003. Most of the statistics come from the US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children, Youth and Families' Child Maltreatment 2003 (the full reference appears in the References section).
In New York State
The same NCANDS data that provided information for Child Maltreatment 2003 also provided state-specific information related to certain categories of information. The following information has been obtained for New York State from the same document.
In 2003, the child population in New York State was 4,532,748 children; 253,866 children were subjects of child maltreatment investigations. Of those, 75,784 cases were determined to be "founded". This is a child victimization rate of 16.7. The highest rate of child victimization in 2003 occurred in Alaska, with a rate of 42.2; the lowest rate occurred in Pennsylvania, with a rate of 1.6. These rates were based on the number of victims divided by the child population in the reporting states and multiplied by 1,000. It must also be noted that the data for some states was not reported due to missing information.
Of the 75,784 cases of child maltreatment in New York State in 2003, 68,593 or 90.4% were victims of neglect; 9,715 or 12.8% were determined to have been victims of physical abuse; 2,698 or 3.6% were victims of medical neglect and 3,018 or 4.0% were victims of sexual abuse; 710 or 0.9% were victims of psychological abuse; and 19,031 or 25.1% were victims of "Other" abuse. A child may have been the victim of more than one type of maltreatment; therefore the total percent may equal more than 100%. The total number of maltreatments of children in New York State in 2003 was 103,711 or 136.9%.
In 2003 the rate of victimization by gender mirrored the national picture: 37,330 victims were boys (49.1%); 37,885 girls (50.4%).
In 2003, 62 children in New York State were known to have died as a result of child maltreatment, a rate of 1.37 per 100,000 children.
In New York State for the year 2002, 66,686 children were abused or neglected, that is between 14 to 15 of every 1,000 children in the state. The NYS Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment, the Child Abuse Reporting Hotline, received 153,603 reports of suspected child abuse or neglect, 33 reports for every 1,000 children in the State. Upon investigation, 44,251 (28.8 percent) were substantiated as situations of child abuse and neglect. (There are more child victims than reports, because more than one child is involved in some cases.) Compared to the prior year, the number of reports increased by 2.5 percent from 149,892, but the number of substantiated cases decreased by 2.3 percent from 45,298.
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