Child Abuse

Reports of child abuse soared from 60,000 in 1974 to more than 2.6 million in 1990. The federal government gives the states billions of dollars annually to deal with the aftermath of child abuse, but targets only a meager sum for abuse prevention--an imbalance Congress could help remedy by authorizing adequate reimbursement to the states when they carry out effective prevention programs. For example, federal payments to states for foster care for abused children totaled more than $1.8 billion in 1991 whereas federal funding for prevention and treatment is less than $60 million annually. Child abuse prevention programs, however, have been shown to be effective. A recent evaluation of a nurse home-visiting program showed that high-risk teen mothers who did not receive services were far more likely to abuse their children. Other studies suggest that prevention programs also alleviate other problems linked with abuse, such as learning disabilities and chronic health conditions. One estimate pegs the cost of lost productivity of adults who were victims of severe child abuse at as much as $1.3 billion annually. Many programs GAO visited are struggling to survive because they rely on multiple short-term funding sources.

GAO found that: (1) studies show that child abuse prevention programs are effective, but future evaluations need to focus on what program works best under what circumstances; (2) prevention programs may pay for themselves by lowering the social costs resulting from child abuse; (3) it could not determine the amount of total federal funding for prevention programs because funds are scattered among many agencies and are not labelled as targeted to child abuse prevention; (4) federal child abuse prevention funding appears relatively low compared to federal expenditures for assistance to victims of abuse; (5) prevention programs have difficulty meeting their funding needs because grants are short-term and come from multiple sources, which increases the programs' administrative costs; (6) efforts toward statewide coordination of prevention programs are hampered by a lack of resources; and (7) only one state has begun implementation of a statewide program, and another has developed plans to do so.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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