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In a recent issue of Child Maltreatment (2023 vol. 28 (4)), an editorial by Palusci et al. and a commentary by Briggs et al. were published. These two publications express the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) Board's and the Child Maltreatment editorial team's stance relative to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ). The current commentary expresses a range of concerns regarding how APSAC and Child Maltreatment plan to advance DEIJ through their editorial policies.

This article is a response to "Issues in Differential Response", a review of the current evidence pertaining to differential response (DR) programs in child protective services (CPS). In my view, the Hughes, Rycus, Saunders-Adams, Hughes, and Hughes article suffers from several weaknesses. First, DR programs are critiqued as if they were a manualized intervention rather than a policy orientation, resulting in unhelpful conclusions. Second, the strength of existing evidence pertaining to child safety in DR is framed in an overly negative way. Finally, I attempt to place our understanding of DR in a broader perspective reflecting the continuing evolution of CPS and policies.

Substantiation rates have long been the primary variable associated with research into child protective services (CPS) early intervention. Rates of substantiation have been used to criticize the efficiency of CPS screening procedures, to suggest that mandated reporting laws are cumbersome and require revision, and to posit that large numbers of CPS assessments result in high levels of unintended negative consequences for reported families. Substantiation is commonly used in empirical research as a proxy for the appropriateness of CPS referrals. These practices are problematic for several reasons. This article argues that many or most unsubstantiated reports involve either some form of maltreatment or preventive service needs appropriate to CPS intervention, and that using substantiation as a means of gauging the validity of a CPS referral is therefore intrinsically fallacious. A harm/evidence model is presented as an aid to conceptualizing the heterogeneity of unsubstantiated reports. The validity of the model is explored through a review of relevant empirical work. The article concludes with a series of suggestions for future research.

The role of child protective services in providing supportive and preventive services in unsubstantiated cases has received scant empirical attention. This article examines unsubstantiated child maltreatment reports where voluntary preventive services were provided by the state of Missouri. Logistic regression is used to isolate case characteristics that predict such services provision. Data are also presented on substantiated cases so that predictors of services provision can be contrasted to predictors of substantiation. Suggestions are provided for incorporating services provision into unsubstantiated cases as an additional dependent variable in future studies of substantiation rates.

This study examined the relationship of a family's duration in poverty-related programs (i.e., Aid to Families with Dependent Children/Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid) to the subject child's number of maltreatment reports while considering race and baseline neighborhood poverty. Children from a large Midwestern metropolitan area were followed through a linked cross-sector administrative database from birth to age 15. Generalized multilevel models were employed to account for the multilevel structure of the data (i.e., nesting of families within neighborhoods). The data showed a unique and significant contribution of duration in poverty-related programs to the number of maltreatment reports. The predicted number of maltreatment reports increased by between 2.5 and 3.7 times, as duration in poverty-related programs increased from 0 to 9 years. This relationship was consistent between Whites and non-Whites (over 98% Black), but non-Whites showed a significantly lower number of total maltreatment reports while controlling for duration in poverty-related programs. We were unable to find a significant association between child maltreatment reports and baseline neighborhood poverty.