Foster Care and Child Maltreatment Mortality Rates in the US

This study was led by Dr. Frank Edwards and Dr. Robert Apel, faculty members in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, and Dr. Kelley Fong of the University of California, Irvine.

A major new study from the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University shows that there is no association between placing more children in foster care and reducing child abuse- or neglect-related deaths, calling into question a long-standing argument that removing more children from home reduces rates of fatal child abuse or neglect.

Published in JAMA Network Open, a journal of the American Medical Association, the research examines 10 years of data from all 50 states and finds that child deaths did not decrease when states placed more children into foster care, nor did they increase when fewer children entered care. The findings challenge claims that reducing foster care placements puts children at greater risk.