The Opioid Crisis and Child Maltreatment Across Counties and Time in the United States, 2007–2017

Rises in opioid mortality coincides with child maltreatment report rises since the early 2000s. This project joins three literatures to consider mechanisms linking the opioid epidemic and child maltreatment that include: 1) social disorganization which implicates community-level characteristics such as residential mobility and poverty in deviant behaviors 2) geographic and temporal patterning of opioid mortality and 3) community-level substance use and child maltreatment. I combine data from the American Community Survey (ACS), CDC WONDER, and the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) in a county-level analysis using fixed effects. I test the relationships between opioid mortality, poverty, residential mobility, and child maltreatment. Regression analyses show a positive association between opioid mortality and child maltreatment with variation across time. They also suggest that opioid mortality has a stronger association with child maltreatment in high poverty counties, and that counties with higher levels of residential mobility have a negative association between opioid mortality and child maltreatment for lower mortality levels. The findings imply that decreasing poverty, opioid mortality, and increasing residential mobility opportunity may decrease child maltreatment.