Rereporting of child maltreatment: Does participation in other public sector services moderate the likelihood of a second maltreatment report?

Objective: This study uses administrative data to track the first rereports of maltreatment in a low-income, urban child welfare population (n = 4957) while controlling for other public service involvement. Service system involvement is explored across the following sectors: Child Welfare, Income Maintenance, Special Education, Juvenile Court, and various forms of Medicaid-reimbursed medical or mental health care. This study builds knowledge by adding the services dimension to an ecological framework for analyses and by following recurrence for a longer period of time than prior investigations (7.5 years). Method: We model the rereporting of a child for maltreatment as a function of child, caregiver, service, and neighborhood characteristics using data from birth records, child welfare, income maintenance, Medicaid, adult corrections, juvenile court, special education, law enforcement, and census sources. Bivariate and multivariate analyses are presented, the latter using Cox regression with a robust sandwich covariance matrix estimate to account for the intracluster dependence within tracts. Results: Key results across bivariate and multivariate analyses included a lower rate of rereporting among children with parents who were high school graduates and/or permanently exited from the first spell on AFDC (p < .0001); and for children in families that received less intensive in-home services compared to those not receiving services, receiving intensive in-home, or foster care services (p < .0001). Higher rates of rereporting were found for children with Medicaid mental health/substance abuse treatment records (p < .0001) and special education eligibility for emotional disturbance (p < .005). Conclusions: Caretaker characteristics and nonchild welfare service use patterns had a strong association with the likelihood of a child being rereported to the child welfare agency and should be more heavily attended to by child welfare workers. High rates of service sector overlap suggest that interagency ties and cooperation should be strengthened. The lower risk associated with less intensive in-home services compared to unserved cases may indicate underidentification of in-home service eligibility following a first report of maltreatment.