The study isn’t the problem, and there are few metrics that would be useful besides reported cases. But the article doesn’t discuss any context, it simply says how many cases each state reports and then tries to sell courses to social workers in NY.

Discussion of how much child (or any other type of) abuse is happening in a given state should also include socioeconomic indicators that influence child abuse rates to help fill in the gaps from unreported crimes. The reports themselves mean little.

Say, for example, that a state introduces a massive budget increase to its child protective services dept and hires many well-paid social workers. They start spending money to advertise their reporting hotline, institute mandatory reporting across a variety of industries, and educate the populace about signs of child abuse. Their cases will increase dramatically, but that doesn’t mean their policies led to more child abuse. Hence the issue with the study as presented in this article.