In an article being early released this week in Pediatrics, the author team of Liwei Zhang, PhD (University of Georgia), Yi Wang, PhD (Hunter College), and Lawrence Berger, PhD (University of Wisconsin at Madison), examined rates of child protective services involvement in relation to eviction moratoria (10.1542/peds.2024-068174). The authors thoughtfully and wisely made use of an unintentional national experiment occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which some but not all states implemented moratoria on housing eviction.
The study used national data from multiple sources over the period January 2019-August 2022: the “always treated” group included counties in 10 states with continuous eviction moratoria and the “never treated” group included counties in 7 states that never implemented eviction moratoria. While federal moratoria (under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security [CARES] Act and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) overlapped this time period, state-based moratoria were more comprehensive and more systematically enforced.
County-level maltreatment reports were obtained from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), which includes case-level county-level data on all child maltreatment investigations and child welfare services in US states, and these numbers were compared between the “always treated” and “never treated” groups before and after the pandemic when moratoria were in effect.
The authors use a statistical approach called “difference-in-difference,” which is uniquely suited for analysis of this situation. Difference-in-difference is a quasi-experimental method that estimates the causal effect of a specific policy or intervention, here eviction moratoria, by comparing outcomes between those exposed (“always treated”) and those unexposed (“never treated”) before and after the policy is implemented.
This study is especially relevant as we consider what else we know about this arena:
- Insufficient housing was directly responsible for 11% of child removals (2022 data), with evidence that housing instability contributes to caregiver stress and child maltreatment, and
- During the pandemic, community reports of child abuse were neither clearly lower nor higher, while hospital reports increased, widely interpreted as evidence of barriers to reporting coupled with an “unseen pandemic” of increased abuse.
The authors found that eviction moratoria were significantly associated with lower biweekly reports of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect, with relatively large effect sizes on maltreatment report rates, with:
► Physical abuse rates reduced by 16%
► Sexual abuse rates reduced by 21%, and
► Child neglect rates reduced by 12%.
What can we take home here, no pun intended?
Housing matters, and stability of housing is clearly and directly important to the health and welfare of families and children. At least in the context of the pandemic, eviction moratoria appear to be an evidence-based method of decreasing child physical and sexual abuse and neglect, and merit strong consideration as a key policy initiative for study in the post-pandemic period. If preventing evictions has potential to reduce child maltreatment reports, let’s begin the work now. Please see the authors’ engaging video abstract for their summary of this excellent work.
