The over-arching goal of this study was to develop an understanding of how substance abuse effects America's systems and populations. Moreover, they sought to generally learn about the impact of substance abuse on child abuse and neglect from front-line workers. However, they also intended for the results to help replace the stigma of substance abuse, with hope that something could be done about the problem. CASA surveyed 3,000 child welfare professionals across the nation, asking them about their experiences with substance-abusing parents. The results of the study indicated that the interplay of substance abuse and child maltreatment is near a crisis stage.
Substance abuse contributes to seven out of ten instances of child abuse and neglect.
The reason for this is that substance-abusing behavior compromises, if not destroys, the ability of parents to provide safe and nurturing homes for their children. For example, other studies have shown that children of parents who use substances are 2.7 times more likely to be abused and 4.2 times more likely to be neglected than children whose parents do not use substances. Given this, it is not surprising that as the phenomenon of substance abuse increased over the past two decades, so did the incidences of child maltreatment. Much of this increase can be explained by the crack epidemic, which caused the caseloads of child welfare professionals to peak in this 11 year time period. Although the decline in the popularity of crack caused child welfare caseloads to fall, the number of abused and neglected children continues to stay high.