Children ages 3 and younger were most often the victims of fatal child abuse in Illinois between 2015 and 2022, according to a sobering new report out of Northwestern University.
Crying or fussiness were the most commonly reported behaviors in children before they were killed, according to the report.
For the report, Northwestern researchers aimed to analyze violent deaths of Illinois children ages 10 and younger who died at the hands of caregivers between 2015 and 2022.
They found 121 cases that fit that description, based on data from the Illinois Violent Death Reporting System, which is operated by Northwestern in partnership with the Illinois Department of Public Health.
“This is a bigger problem than we may think as a society,” said Maryann Mason, lead author of the report and a professor of emergency medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
“We hear about an egregious case here and there and we think they’re very rare and uncommon, but I think we see here that for a segment of the population, this is something that happens … more often than anyone would like to admit and look at,” Mason said.
Of the 121 children who died in these cases, about 60% were ages 1 to 3. About 24% were ages 4 to 6, and nearly 16% were ages 7 to 10.
Crying and fussiness are developmentally appropriate for young children, “so it tells us that people who are reacting with violence to that aren’t prepared for the developmental needs of a child that young. Maybe they’re not aware of them, maybe they have too many stressors in other parts of their life, but they don’t have the bandwidth to deal with that,” Mason said.
Nearly 46% of the deaths were due to blunt force trauma. Other causes included multiple injuries, gunshot wounds, suffocation, burns and shaking.
Nearly half of the children who died were Black.
In nearly 45% of the deaths in which data about a suspect was available, the suspect was a parent. Other types of suspects included mothers’ boyfriends, babysitters, stepparents or other relatives.
In nine of the cases, parents were working while their child was injured by the caregiver.
“That tells me that they had certain stressors in order to have to work, but they left their children with obviously what wasn’t high-quality child care,” Mason said. “The need to hold down a job, the need to bring in income, can interfere with doing the best thing you can for your child.”
The largest share of deaths — about 40 of them — happened in census tracts with higher levels of poverty. But deaths occurred in census areas with low levels of poverty as well.
“Poverty isn’t the only thing that puts children at risk,” Mason said. “There are other things going on in these families where they may have money but they don’t have child care, or they may have money but they live in a household with somebody who has impulse control or anger management issues.”
In most cases, the children and families did not have prior contact with authorities. In about 17% of the cases, there had been a prior report to child protective services or the victim or household were previously known to authorities.
“One thing you realize when you study violence is that generally death isn’t the first experience of violence. People sort of work their way up to that,” Mason said. “There’s missed opportunities to notice what’s going on with these kids and get their families some support.”
Mason said one way to help avoid such deaths might be to offer parents more high-quality, accessible child care so parents don’t have to leave children with caregivers who might be problematic. For example, many parents might benefit from a drop-in child care option, where they can leave their child when needed, such as when their typical caregiver becomes unavailable, as opposed to on a regular schedule.
More high-quality child care options, as well as more education for parents and caregivers, might help prevent such deaths, said Jason Wynkoop, chief program officer for advocacy and investigative services for the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center. The center works to bring together public, private and community partners to help support children who are survivors of sexual abuse and violence.
“We need to invest as a society in prevention,” said Wynkoop, who also serves on a committee that reviews the deaths of children in Cook County for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
“Having this in the public eye, having people be aware that this is a problem and it’s often tied to things like poverty, things that we as a society have the ability to influence, is really important,” Wynkoop said.
Mason said the report is the first to look at child-abuse-related deaths of children in Illinois since the Illinois Violent Death Reporting System database began.
“It took us 10 years to do a report like this because it’s something we all want to look away from, but we knew these deaths occur in the data. They’re some of the worst things we see in data collection,” Mason said. “We knew we had to do it because there are too many of these deaths and if we can understand what’s contributing to these deaths and the factors involved, we can put things in place to prevent future deaths.”
