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February 2012Vol. 13, No. 1Child Maltreatment 2010 Released

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has released Child Maltreatment 2010, the 21st in a series of reports designed to provide national statistics on child abuse and neglect. These reports provide State-level data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) and include information on screened-in referrals (reports) of abuse and neglect made to child protective services (CPS) agencies, the children involved, types of maltreatment, CPS responses, child and caregiver risk factors, services, and perpetrators.

Highlights of Child Maltreatment 2010 show:

  • The number of nationally estimated unique (counted just one time) victims was 695,000.
  • Unique victims in the age group of birth to 1 year had the highest rate of victimization, at 20.6 per 1,000 children of the same age group in the national population.
  • The most common type of maltreatment was neglect. More than 75 percent (78.3 percent) of unique child victims suffered neglect.
  • The national rate of child fatalities was 2.07 deaths per 100,000 children.
  • Forty-seven States reported that more than 3.4 million children received preventive services.

The full report is available on the Children's Bureau website:

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm10/cm10.pdf#page=9 (4 MB)