Christopher Wildeman, "Geographic Variation in the Cumulative Risk of Maltreatment and Foster Care Placement."

Christopher Wildeman,  Associate Professor of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University.

In this talk, I will advance three arguments:

First, examining daily or yearly risks of experiencing confirmed maltreatment and foster care placement for American children would make it reasonable to conclude that these events, though tragic, occur at too low a rate in the population for them to matter much for child wellbeing or social inequality in child wellbeing.

Second, examining cumulative risks of ever experiencing either of these events over the course of childhood, however, indicates that these events are common enough that they may both have important effects on population health and racial/ethnic inequalities in child wellbeing.

Finally, there is dramatic geographic variation in the cumulative risk of experiencing these two events, suggesting that contact with the child welfare system is an extremely common stage in the life-course for some children but a rare one for others and that it is not just race/ethnicity that drives these differences.

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