California Child Welfare Co-Investment Partnership

A new research brief from the California Child Welfare Co-investment Partnership looks at the impact of substance abuse on families entering California’s child welfare system. As The Imprint reported in its series on how a spike in opioid and meth use has impacted families in the child welfare system, parental substance use has been linked to the recent rise in the number of children entering the foster care system nationwide.

This week, the California Child Welfare Co-Investment Partnership released a summary of their recent research and analysis efforts, entitled “Crossover Youth: A Shared Responsibility.” The first two sections of the report begin with two statistics on California youth: first, “there were 496,972 reports of [child] neglect and abuse in 2014, with 81,391 substantiated,” and second, “there were 101,531 young people referred to juvenile probation in 2014.”