Providing economic relief to struggling families can lead to another positive effect — fewer cases of child neglect, according to new research by the 91̽��.

A 10% increase in a common benefit for low- to moderate-income working families, the Earned Income Tax Credit, led to a 9% decrease in the annual number of reports of child neglect made to child welfare agencies over a 14-year study period. That’s a significant impact, researchers say, and can inform future social policies.

The study is relevant to current policy actions, as President Joe Biden has recently proposed an as part of his new stimulus plan.

“The EITC is an important part of the U.S. safety net that has been shown to substantially reduce child poverty. Our results add to growing evidence that policies that improve family economic security can also prevent child maltreatment,” said , a doctoral student at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the UW.

She is lead author of the published Jan. 19 in the journal Child Maltreatment.

Child maltreatment is a common problem in the United States, with an estimated subject to a child protective services investigation before they turn 18. The stress of poverty has been linked to child abuse and family instability, and other research has explored the impact of different economic policies on child-abuse prevention. The 91̽��study is the first to focus on the Earned Income Tax Credit – a program designed to assist lower-income families, often with a tangible benefit in the form of a tax refund – and its potential association with reports of child maltreatment made to child welfare agencies across the U.S.

The is provided by both the federal government and 28 states, and eligibility and credit size vary with income and family size. 91̽��researchers focused on the generosity of refundable state EITCs, noting that such a benefit has been found .

The research team analyzed the number of child abuse and neglect reports to local and state agencies from 2004 through 2017 and the correlation with the EITC program at the state level. The team hypothesized that the more generous a state’s EITC, the more necessities, such as child care or rent, a family can put the money toward, potentially alleviating some of the stress that can lead to child maltreatment. Over the course of the study period, many states altered their level of benefit as a percentage of the federal tax credit, while others generally held steady. Minnesota, for example, provided an average of 33% of the federal credit, depending on household income, while Oklahoma provided 5% of the federal credit before making its EITC nonrefundable in 2016.

With the child abuse and neglect data, the 91̽��team counted all reports of maltreatment, rather than just those reports that were found to be substantiated, reasoning that . Taking all states into account – those with and without an EITC — during the study period, states averaged nearly 4,400 maltreatment reports per 100,000 children each year.

When annual state EITC benefits were taken into account, the team found maltreatment reports, particularly those of neglect, declined as benefit levels rose: A 10 percentage-point increase in state-level benefits was associated with 241 fewer reports of neglect per 100,000 children. The effect was even more pronounced in the number of neglect reports on children from infancy through age 5, the age range at which .

Put another way, a 10 percentage-point increase in the refundable EITC benefit led to a 9% drop in rates of reported child neglect.

“This study highlights the importance of investigating the impact of social policies on health. Violence is a health issue with multiple forms, such as child maltreatment. An emerging body of evidence is empirically demonstrating that violence prevention can be an added benefit of social policies that were not necessarily enacted with that specific goal originally. This study is the most recent addition to that literature,” said , an associate professor of epidemiology at the UW, director of the Violence Prevention Section at the , and the principal investigator of the that supported this study.

While child neglect showed a trend, the link between EITC benefits and reports of specific types of abuse – physical, sexual and emotional – was not statistically significant. Researchers note that child abuse rates, in general, have declined much more significantly than neglect rates in recent decades, while neglect is found in .

Child neglect, too, may be more distinctly associated with poverty, potentially making some interventions more effective in preventing certain types of maltreatment than others.

“Child neglect often involves the failure of a caregiver to provide children with necessities, such as food, shelter and basic supervision. Additional income provided to families through the EITC can improve parents’ abilities to meet these basic needs,” Kovski said.

Researchers say the findings point to the fundamental value of an economic policy – the EITC – as a child-maltreatment prevention strategy. In other words, proactively improving financial stability among families may mitigate the circumstances that lead to child neglect and abuse.

The study was funded by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Co-authors were of the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the UW; and of the 91̽��Department of Epidemiology; and of  the 91̽��Department of Epidemiology, the Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center and the 91̽��Department of Pediatrics.

For more information, contact Kovski at kovskin@uw.edu.

In the United States, individual state laws barring 18- to 20-year-olds from buying or possessing a handgun make little difference in the rate of homicides involving a gun by people in that age group, a new 91̽�� has found.

“The central issue is that there’s a very high degree of informal access to firearms, such as through family members or illicit channels,” said , the study’s lead author and a doctoral student in epidemiology in the 91̽��School of Public Health. “And we can’t address that kind of availability with age limits.”

The 91̽��study compared homicide rates involving firearms in this age group between five states that increased the minimum age to buy or possess a firearm to higher than the set by the 1994 federal law and the 32 states that did not.

The five states were Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Wyoming. With the exception of Wyoming, these states also increased the minimum age for possession of a handgun. (States that raised age limits before 1994 were not included. Washington was not included for this reason, and the initiative passed in 2018 increasing age limits became law after the study period, which was 1995 to 2017.)

In the study, published Aug. 31 in JAMA Pediatrics, 91̽��researchers found that rates of firearm homicides perpetrated by young adults age 18 to 20 years old were not significantly different in the two groups of states.

Determining what laws do have an effect on homicide rates is paramount, she added, because of the roughly 275,000 homicides involving a firearm during the years studied nearly 36,000 were perpetrated by people in the study’s age range. Because most handguns used in crimes by young adults are acquired from sources unlikely to be affected by age restrictions, “it is not surprising that we found no association” between state laws and homicides, the study said.

Also, Moe emphasized, firearms are the second leading , after motor vehicle crashes.

“It’s incredibly important that we address this major cause of death in young people,” said Moe, who is also affiliated with the Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center. And that solution will need to be a countrywide, unified effort to address the “de facto availability” of firearms, especially among youth.

Co-authors include Miriam Haviland and Andrew Bowen, Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center; Ali Rowhani-Rahbar and Frederick Rivara, 91̽��Department of Epidemiology, Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center and the 91̽��Department of Pediatrics. This research was funded by the state of Washington.

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For more information, contact Moe at cmoe2@uw.edu.

While gun violence in and as calls for policies to stem the crisis grow, 91̽�� researchers point out in a new analysis that barriers to data stand in the way of advancing solutions.

“Firearm data availability, accessibility and infrastructure need to be substantially improved to reduce the burden of the public health crisis of firearm violence,” said , lead co-author and associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology in the 91̽��School of Public Health.

The paper was in JAMA on Oct. 11. Other co-authors are and from the Department of Pediatrics in the 91̽��School of Medicine.

The authors look at three specific categories — firearm ownership and storage, firearm purchase and firearm tracing — to show how previously available data led to published research. In these three cases, data either is no longer being collected or researchers are not allowed access.

For example, a 2003 amendment to the U.S. Department of Justice appropriations bill still blocks the release of federal data involving the tracing of firearms to anyone outside of law enforcement or prosecutors. In another example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System previously collected data related to household firearm ownership and storage, but the CDC stopped asking those questions in 2004.

“There are fundamental questions of policy and practice important for preventing firearm violence that have been left unanswered for decades,” Rowhani-Rahbar said. “Part of our inability to answer those questions is due to limited research funding. However, there are circumstances in which the lack of access to pertinent data that are not readily collectible by or available to investigators, regardless of research funding, can substantially impede research progress.”

For the authors’ complete analysis, read the . For more research and information on firearms, visit the .

For more information, contact Dr. Rowhani-Rahbar, rowhani@uw.edu.