Sonoma County Child Protective Services Referrals Down

Many people have been negatively impacted by the pandemic. However, COVID has also impacted Child Protective Services. Since the pandemic started the reports have been going down. However, Child Protective Service staff think there has been a rise in child abuse because of the pandemic and most of the cases haven’t gotten reported. According to one of the staff members at Child Protective Services, “Before COVID there were 12-16 cases reported per month, and when Covid started the cases reported went down 5-6 per month.”

The reason this is happening is that most of the reports come from teachers or staff at schools. Child Protective Services have been really worried about how the report rate is down. At first, there were 12 to 16 reports each month but now it decreased to 5 to 6 per month. Since Covid started the reports have been mostly domestic abuse and cases were more severe. It has been harder for teachers to figure out if their students are getting abused or neglected because everything is on Zoom. Most of the reports come from the police or hospital staff.

Child Protective Services have been trying to visit the children at their homes. They are all required to wear masks and stay 6 feet away from each other because the staff wants to visit the houses to figure out if that child is getting abused or neglected and it’s harder to tell via Zoom. The whole thing has been scary for all. Some of the Child Protective Services staff have gotten Covid and had to leave to get healthy again.

In Conclusion, the pandemic has affected Child Protective Services in a negative way. A good way to help is to support the staff is to have a program that helps the staff be able to visit the families in a safe way so the staff can’t get covid.