Introduction: COVID-19 Related Professional Challenges,Innovations,and Implications for Child Maltreatment Victims

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic preventative measures such as lockdowns and school closures impacted upon both children and families globally (Van Hoof, 2020). These closures disrupted children’s attendance at school, education opportunities, access to health care, and social interactions with peers through extra-curricular activities. At the start of the pandemic researchers indicated a reduction in the reporting of maltreatment (Baron et al., 2020; Stewart, 2020). However, with time and continued monitoring, many highlighted that although reporting may have been reduced during portions of the pandemic, reporting rates of maltreatment may not have been representative of what was occurring during these lockdowns and stay at home orders (Katz et al., 2021). As a result, researchers put forth a call for investigation into the prevalence and experiences of child maltreatment during COVID-19 stay-at-home measures (Rodriguez et al., 2021). To date, most child maltreatment research regarding effects of COVID-19 address important issues of prevalence and experiences of children and families (Katz & Fallon, 2022). Yet, there is still much to be learned regarding COVID-related challenges faced by professionals working on the frontlines of child maltreatment and the innovations they developed to cope with such challenges. Child protection workers, mandated reporters, and mental health professionals who work with maltreated child populations had to adapt quickly due to COVID-19 restrictions and it is important to empirically examine the effects of such changes and innovations. These professionals faced many barriers: limited means of accessing families, difficulties ascertaining children’s experiences in closed households, and few professionals having a direct purview on children’s home environments. Against this backdrop, the papers included in this special issue offer innovative explorations of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child maltreatment, featuring methodologies which circumvent the barriers introduced by stay-at-home measures. By focusing on practitioners’ experiences and observations, transitions to remote service provision, and systemic and contextual influences on parenting, these articles enrich our understanding of the landscape of the child maltreatment workforce during the pandemic and beyond.

The beginning stages of understanding a novel phenomenon require qualitative research methodologies to gather rich information on a given topic. In this vein, Baker and colleagues present their findings from interviews with child maltreatment investigators about their experiences and observations of child maltreatment during the onset of the pandemic. During a time when direct access to children was severely limited, these reporters offer a unique perspective both on the difficulties of accessing children directly to provide help, and on the experiences of children in abusive households during stay-at-home measures. Importantly, participants indicated that COVID-19 health precautions at times introduced barriers to investigating maltreatment claims, highlighting the importance of prioritizing continued access of investigators to households even during public health crises. The authors conclude with several calls for action, including developing a plan to ensure continuity of service provision during future disaster or emergency scenarios, examining the effectiveness of virtual service delivery, and supporting parent mental health and parenting practices through outreach programs.

Building on this call from Baker and colleagues, several studies in this collection examine the effectiveness of online delivery of services to maltreated children. Goslin and Epstein investigate the effectiveness of the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention, when delivered virtually, to reduce post-traumatic stress symptoms in children and caregivers. Their research provides support for the effectiveness of this intervention when delivered remotely, perhaps over and above in-person delivery. Similarly, Belachew and colleagues examined the impact of shifting to virtual telehealth for home visiting programs designed to improve parenting practices. Most providers and clients believed that telehealth service delivery offered benefits in the form of convenience and time-efficiency, but that telehealth reduced the ability to complete certain home visitation tasks and diminished intimacy and client engagement. In the context of child welfare hearings, Summers and Gatowski found that the quality of virtual court hearings is similar to in-person hearings. Finally, Rancher and colleagues discuss the successes and challenges faced by clinics transitioning to telehealth services for children experiencing maltreatment during early COVID-19, such as increased demand for telehealth services, barriers to accessing required technology for both practitioners and clients, and fewer hours of direct supervision. Overall, these studies address some early-pandemic concerns about transitions to remote service delivery (Stoll et al., 2020) and support the effectiveness of remote service models across a variety of child maltreatment settings - therapeutic intervention, student training, and court hearings. The implications of these findings on the effectiveness of virtual service delivery extends beyond emergency contexts, providing models for accessible services for individuals in rural and remote areas, and those with limitations in mobility due to disability and economic limitations (Annaswamy et al., 2020; Krider & Parker, 2021).

Although child maltreatment professionals largely rose to the challenges posed by COVID-19 and successfully developed innovative policies and practices that served the needs of children and families, it may not have been without some cost to their own well-being. In the context of austerity claw backs of health and social services across the public sector in recent decades, stress and burnout among service providers has emerged as a distinct challenge (Farr-Wharton et al., 2021; Russo et al., 2021), amplified during COVID-19 (Duong, 2021). With the goal of understanding the unique stressors contributing to job turnover during the pandemic, Hoffmeister & Slack surveyed child welfare caseworkers about their job experiences, stress, and intention to remain in their positions. Child welfare workers were not considered essential workers and were not prioritized for protective equipment nor emergency pay during the pandemic (Renov et al., 2022). These authors found that workers’ job stress related to their organization’s response to COVID-19, particularly stress related to job competency, was associated with less commitment to their jobs, feelings of unsafety, and feeling overworked. In a similar vein, Stevenson and colleagues explore how the pandemic affected mandated child abuse reporting among nurses. Within their sample of registered nurses, compassion fatigue and parental burnout emerged as factors that contributed to negative attitudes to reporting suspected child abuse. COVID-19-related stress, such as potential exposure to the virus at work, predicted increased compassion fatigue, which in turn predicted negative attitudes toward abuse reporting.

Several studies in this collection point to the exacerbation of existing social problems during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in worse outcomes for maltreated children. This work furthers our understanding of the connection between systemic issues and child maltreatment, and points to the need for child maltreatment prevention and intervention systems to be designed to address multiple levels of the ecological systems in which children are nested. Difficulties such as income and food insecurity, unemployment, and access to physical and mental healthcare were widely reported following the onset of the pandemic, particularly in racialized communities represented by McGoren and colleagues’ participant sample. In this light, the authors’ findings are particularly important, as they draw a direct connection between the broad social and economic impacts of COVID-19 on families and risk for child abuse. Moreover, in a novel study of the impacts of school closure on child maltreatment reporting, Wolf and colleagues’ findings underscore the critical role of social conditions, such as poverty, in allegations of maltreatment. Specifically, they found that higher poverty, and not whether children had in-person schooling, was linked to referral rates. Such research supports the implementation of broad emergency economic and social support to families as a preventative measure against child maltreatment.

Additionally, these papers further illuminate the contexts of parenting in COVID-19, and adaptations needed by researchers and service providers alike to assess these contexts. Job loss and health concerns during the pandemic also increased parents’ stress, resulting in poorer parent-child relationships, more yelling, spanking, neglect, and violence in parenting (Katz et al., 2021; Rodriguez et al., 2021). Parenting style and parents’ social support are identified by McGoren and colleagues as unique predictors of child maltreatment during the pandemic. These authors provide an innovative approach to measuring maltreatment via child abuse potential rather than distinct and verified incidents. This metric combines several factors that put a child at risk of maltreatment, which may be useful to screen and identify children at high risk in contexts where it is not possible to directly access children in their home environments.

Finally, the commentary by Quas synthesizes two important themes across these articles and offers valuable suggestions for future research. First, Quas highlights the breadth and depth of the effects of the pandemic on the professionals working with vulnerable children and families, which spanned their work practices, future career aspirations, and personal lives. Second, the author underscores the success of remote adaptations for assessment, treatment, and services for maltreated children and families, noting that remote services are viable options when necessary. Quas concludes by urging researchers to consider maltreatment subtypes more carefully in future research. Because different subtypes of maltreatment are typically identified by different sources and require different interventions, focusing on how professionals’ abilities to assess, identify, and treat different types of maltreatment were uniquely altered during the pandemic will be important for responding most effectively to both the pandemic and to future disasters and emergencies.

Taken together, the results of the current special issue papers highlight several areas of innovation and change as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ultimate hope of the current editors is that these valuable lessons from the pandemic and the associated lockdowns will improve the field and service delivery to those who experience child maltreatment. Additionally, the editors wish to highlight the efforts of all those who work within the child maltreatment field and the challenges they faced both during the pandemic and in its wake. Amidst times of considerable stress and uncertainty, their creativity, generativity, and innovation yielded downstream positive effects on child and family well-being.