Marie Cohen argues that Colorado’s claimed 40 percent drop in child abuse and neglect cases over four years reflects administrative choices, not a real decline in child abuse.
State data show “substantiated” victims fell from 12,101 in 2021 to 6,470 in 2025, yet hotline reports actually increased from 109,947 to 117,467, likely boosted by post‑pandemic school reopening and teacher reporting. The apparent improvement comes from systematically narrowing who gets counted as a victim.
First, Colorado screened in a smaller share of hotline calls, dropping from about one‑third to about one‑quarter accepted for in‑person response, which significantly shrank the pool of children who could ever receive a substantiated finding. Second, among children who were screened in, the state sharply expanded use of the Family Assessment Response (FAR) track, which is intentionally non‑adversarial and produces no formal finding of abuse or neglect. Families that refuse or ignore FAR resources pay no consequences and the child remains in what could be a very toxic environment.
FAR was used for 59 percent of accepted reports in 2025 versus 33 percent in 2021, cutting the number of traditional investigations from 36,493 to 17,516—less than half. Because only investigations can yield substantiated findings, it is unsurprising that substantiated cases dropped by nearly 50 percent.
A Colorado Department of Human Services spokesperson attributes the FAR surge to 21 additional counties adopting the option, including large metro jurisdictions, but Cohen notes that advocates and researchers warn that overreliance on FAR can leave children unsafe when it is used inappropriately.
She argues Colorado’s leadership is shifting away from traditional protective services—investigation, in‑home services, foster care—toward rhetoric about “upstream” prevention and community support, without commensurate new resources or programs. Officials emphasize coping skills, material support, and neighborly help, while Cohen stresses that the families most often seen in child welfare typically struggle with intertwined substance abuse, mental illness, and domestic violence that are not resolved by light‑touch prevention messages. In her view, the state has offered no evidence of a true decline in maltreatment, only a change in how cases are processed and counted, so there is “no reason to celebrate.”
This pattern is becoming common nationally because child protection agencies operate with very limited transparency and strong incentives to show “improvement” on paper. When CPS controls definitions (what counts as abuse), screening thresholds (what gets investigated), and pathways like FAR that avoid formal findings, they can significantly reduce official victim counts without changing underlying harm. Internal dashboards and complex decision trees are rarely accessible or intelligible to the public, legislators, or reporters, making it easy to present declining substantiation numbers as success while the system quietly shifts more cases into unreported or less visible categories. This kind of data manipulation in the world of child abuse will bring about more child death and egregious harm to America’s at-risk children.
It’s why KARA is building our online child abuse/trauma &
child protection information and resources platform.
KIDS AT RISK ACTION / KARA / INVISIBLE CHILDREN
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