Social Safety Nets May Reduce Child Maltreatment

This article was originally published on Public Health Post

One out of seven children in the U.S. experiences maltreatment—defined as abuse or neglect—every year, and poverty increases this risk. Three-fourths of all child maltreatment allegations are for neglect, which often occurs when caregivers living in poverty struggle to meet their children’s material, medical, and supervisory needs. With high child poverty rates, this means many children are at risk of maltreatment. Approximately 14% of children in the U.S. live in poverty, compared to a historic low in 2021 of 5.2 percent, which resulted from a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social safety net programs that aim to alleviate poverty may have protective effects against child maltreatment, even when programs are not explicitly designed to address this risk. Examples of these national programs include Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); Medicaid; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC); Child Tax Credit (CTC); the National School Lunch Program (NSLP); and the School Breakfast Program (SBP).

These programs, which primarily aim to alleviate poverty and improve food security, can also reduce the risk of child maltreatment through their influence on factors associated with maltreatment risk. For example, programs can reduce stress resulting from economic and food insecurity, improve caregiver mental and physical health, reduce alcohol and drug use, increase the availability of quality time spent supervising children, and improve access to health care.

In a recent review, we examined 27 published studies that estimated the effect of these social safety net programs on child maltreatment. Most (16) of the studies found protective effects. Among the remaining studies, three found no effects, four found mixed effects (some positive and some negative), and four found that safety nets increased child maltreatment. However, these studies varied greatly in their quality and ability to isolate the causal effects of the programs on child maltreatment.

When examining only those studies deemed to be of the highest quality (in terms of their ability to rigorously estimate causal impacts of programs), 10 out of 12 found protective impacts against child maltreatment, and none found that social safety nets increased maltreatment. Consideration of rigor and quality is important, as studies that simply compare families receiving safety net programs with those not receiving programs may ignore important systematic differences between the two groups and subsequently fail to isolate true program impacts, drawing incorrect conclusions. This is because families not receiving assistance may be at reduced risk of child maltreatment to begin with, due to having more resources (both financial and other forms) and support systems in place.

More rigorous studies use a variety of approaches (usually with experimental or quasi-experimental research designs) to come up with better comparison groups to rigorously estimate program impacts. Programs that had protective impacts against child maltreatment included TANF, EITC, SNAP, and Medicaid expansion. More research is still needed on the impacts of programs such as CTC, WIC, and free and reduced lunches in schools, which could also influence maltreatment risk through similar pathways, but have been less frequently studied.

This evidence demonstrates that policies that address poverty can have positive spillover effects on broader outcomes, such as improving child well-being, even when these impacts are not intentionally included in the programs’ design. This is because programs that address poverty and multidimensional vulnerability can facilitate the creation of conditions that enhance the health and safety of families and children. These social safety net programs have broad reach nationally and are a promising tool for reducing child maltreatment on a large scale and in ways that may be more cost-effective than dedicated violence prevention programs, which are often resource-intensive and have a smaller reach.

Nevertheless, critical gaps in the nation’s social safety net remain, and these findings can help inform debates to maintain or expand social safety net programming, including debates to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent.