ANNA, Ill. (AP) - In late spring and into the summer, Dr. Kathy Swafford, who specializes in treating child victims of sexual abuse, noticed a significant drop in patient referrals. If she could have trusted it meant children were safer than they’d ever been, it’s the kind of change that would have been welcome.
But as the pandemic raged across the country, shuttering businesses, schools and churches to slow the spread, the sudden change gave her and other child advocates an uneasy feeling.
“It was very quiet, which made us all very nervous,” said Swafford, who is the executive director of the Children’s Medical and Mental Health Resource Network, a division of the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.
The concern, she said, was that children were trapped inside their homes with the people abusing them. That might make them less likely to tell another adult about the situation, they worried. As well, teachers, counselors and other school officials play an important role in protecting child abuse victims.
As mandated reporters who spend hours with children each weekday, they are required to report any suspicions about abuse, whether or not a child discloses to them, to the Department of Children and Family Services’ Child Abuse Hotline. But with schools moving to remote-only in the spring, they had fewer opportunities to interact with children.
Across the state, the hotline saw its call volume drop to concerning levels. Though, that has started to change.
Since the fall and the resumption of school in some form or another, the number of reports have picked back up for both physical abuse and sexual abuse, Swafford said. “At least for us, I would say it’s pretty much at the normal level,” she said of the 34 southern and central Illinois counties her service territory spans. But that doesn’t mean a sigh of relief, either.
While some schools are back to in-person learning, others have mostly continued to hold classes remotely or in a hybrid format.
Other types of activities have also been curtailed. Coupled with the fact that child sexual abuse victims often delay reporting, sometimes for years, it may be some time before there’s a clear picture for whether the pandemic and associated stay-at-home orders resulted in an uptick in undetected child abuse.
Betti Mucha, executive director of the Perry-Jackson Child Advocacy Center, said she’s been concerned about children who are not regularly attending in-person school this year.
Most Perry County schools returned to in-person learning in the fall, and reporting did increase. In Jackson County, where schools have spent more time in remote-only learning, reporting has also gone up some, but not to the same degree.
While children attending remote-only learning may see their teachers virtually, it doesn’t give them the same ability to assess a situation as when children are physically present at school, she said. And children may be less likely to say something if their abuser is in the house with them.
“I really didn’t realize until the schools went to remote learning how much school officials report, and without having the schools open for kids to have someone to tell, it’s been an issue,” she said.
The regional child advocacy centers play an integral role in helping law enforcement and DCFS hold to account people who abuse children. Their primary role is to provide a safe, neutral space to interview children, and specially trained interviewers who are skilled in ascertaining information about what transpired from children in a non-leading manner that is more likely to hold muster in court.
Mucha says the vast majority of referrals her center receives are related to child sexual abuse. She hasn’t noticed a discernible change in caseload for those types of crimes. But she said the center has seen slightly more physical abuse cases, and the ones that have come through are more severe than is typical.
For families living on the edge where one adult may already be prone to abuse, she said additional stressors, such as financial strain due to a job loss, can cause a situation to escalate. “It’s more intense right now,” she said. “Things are very unstable … We have just seen a lot of repercussions from the added stressors.”
Williamson County State’s Attorney Brandon Zanotti said the most disconcerting aspect about child abuse during the pandemic is the not knowing. With schools closing early to in-person learning in the spring and a lot of summer activities for children canceled, it’s hard to say whether increased incidences of abuse transpired undetected, he said.
Williamson County schools did return to at least partial in-person instruction this fall, but it’s still not a typical school year, he noted. “It’s really going to be a wait-and-see approach to see what’s going on, in terms of whether we’re going to see a major uptick in those cases,” he said. “In a lot of cases we see, I’d say most even, the child isn’t telling when they’re seeing the abuser every day and they’re not able to tell a third party.”
Zanotti said one identifiable red flag his office has noted is an increase in domestic abuse cases. Oftentimes, child abuse and neglect cases coincide with domestic abuse where one adult partner is abusing the other. The partner perpetrating abuse may also be harming the children, or the children may be generally neglected because of the dysfunctional and stressful home situation.
Victor Vieth, director of education and research with the Zero Abuse Project, a national nonprofit that advances policies aimed at preventing and responding to child sexual abuse, said there’s a general consensus among people who work in the field that child maltreatment has increased during the pandemic. Cyber crimes against children are a particular concern, he said, pointing to an uptick in cyber tip line reports in recent months.
“If you look at it from the standpoint of the sex offender, the conditions are ideal for the offender. You’ve got kids that are under quarantine, kids that are isolated, kids that are in stressful situations with their parents and are at high risk to run away … And so all of those factors coming together would suggest that there’s a rise in child maltreatment during the pandemic.”
But echoing others, Vieth said it may be some time until hard evidence is available to back up what advocates suspect is happening. That won’t be available until “after we come out on the other side of the pandemic … but most folks in my field say they’re confident that there is an increase,” he said.
Denise McCaffrey, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Illinois, a statewide child abuse prevention advocacy organization, said the increased levels of stress families are dealing with is, unfortunately, likely to lead to increased incidences of child abuse and neglect.
“Families are under so much stress right now,” she said. “We all are. We’re all feeling the stress of everything surrounding COVID and everything else going on in our country. I think families are a lot more isolated than they were before. They’re not getting out and children are often isolated in the homes with their abusers.”
Gary Huelsmann, CEO of Caritas Family Solutions, said his agency’s caseload has remained fairly steady during the pandemic. DCFS typically assigns Caritas, a nonprofit social service agency that contracts with the state to provide foster care, adoption and intact family services across southern and central Illinois, about 40 to 60 new cases monthly.
The agency currently has about 1,600 children under its care - a number that has remained about the same over the past year.
Huelsmann stressed that it’s too early to know how the pandemic may affect child abuse. A child comes into Caritas’ care after a DCFS investigation and court hearing. If there is an uptick in incidences of unreported abuse, there could be delays across the system in terms of getting children seen and appropriately placed within the system. Further, when courts shut down or slowed hearings in the spring at the start of the pandemic, that delayed both the completion of adoptions as well as reuniting children with their primary caregivers, in some cases.
But in the months since, court hearings have resumed, and permanency rates have stabilized, he said.
Huelsmann said the vast majority of cases referred to Caritas deal with some type of child neglect rather than physical or sexual abuse. Except in extreme cases and when circumstances make it unsafe, the goal is to place children in foster care temporarily until they can be reunited with parents. Huelsmann said economic strain can lead to increased incidences of neglect. In some cases, other family members who are temporarily out of work are able to step in to provide extra assistance to struggling relatives.
But that’s not always the case. Early in the pandemic, federal relief packages extending and bolstering unemployment and other aid helped some families avoid crisis.
But as the pandemic stretches on, with widespread delivery of a vaccine still likely months away and with uncertain prospects for additional federal relief, he worries what’s on the horizon for families in stressful situations. The pandemic also puts a lot of strain on the people who work within the system to ensure children are living in safe and healthy environments, including foster care case managers, investigators and foster parents.
“It’s already a tough job,” he said. “COVID just makes it all that much more difficult.”
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Source: The (Carbondale) Southern Illinoisan, https://bit.ly/3fUlsDm
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