It turns out, some kids make some tragic, and heart-wrenching, searches on Google—such as “my mom beat me” or “my dad hit me.” And these searches present a different—and agonizing—picture of what happened during this time. The number of searches like this shot up during the Great Recession, closely tracking the unemployment rate.
Here’s what I think happened: it was the reporting of child abuse cases that declined, not the child abuse itself. After all, it is estimated that only a small percentage of child abuse cases are reported to authorities anyway. And during a recession, many of the people who tend to report child abuse cases (teachers and police officers, for example) and handle cases (child protective service workers) are more likely to be overworked or out of work.
There were many stories during the economic downturn of people trying to report potential cases facing long wait times and giving up.
Indeed, there is more evidence, this time not from Google, that child abuse actually rose during the recession. When a child dies due to abuse or neglect it has to be reported. Such deaths, although rare, did rise in states that were hardest hit by the recession.
And there is some evidence from Google that more people were suspecting abuse in hard-hit areas. Controlling for pre-recession rates and national trends, states that had comparatively suffered the most had increased search rates for child abuse and neglect. For every percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, there was an associated 3 percent increase in the search rate for “child abuse” or “child neglect.” Presumably, most of these people never successfully reported the abuse, as these states had the biggest drops in the reporting.
Searches by suffering kids increase. The rate of child deaths spike. Searches by people suspecting abuse go up in hard-hit states. But reporting of cases goes down. A recession seems to cause more kids to tell Google that their parents are hitting or beating them and more people to suspect that they see abuse. But the overworked agencies are able to handle fewer cases.
I think it’s safe to say that the Great Recession did make child abuse worse, although the traditional measures did not show it.
Anytime I suspect people may be suffering off the books now, I turn to Google data. One of the potential benefits of this new data, and knowing how to interpret it, is the possibility of helping vulnerable people who might otherwise go overlooked by authorities.
So when the Supreme Court was recently looking into the effects of laws making it more difficult to get an abortion, I turned to the query data. I suspected women affected by this legislation might look into off-the-books ways to terminate a pregnancy. They did. And these searches were highest in states that had passed laws restricting abortions.
The search data here is both useful and troubling.
In 2015, in the United States, there were more than 700,000 Google searches looking into self-induced abortions. By comparison, there were some 3.4 million searches for abortion clinics that year. This suggests that a significant percentage of women considering an abortion have contemplated doing it themselves.
Women searched, about 160,000 times, for ways of getting abortion pills through unofficial channels—“buy abortion pills online” and “free abortion pills.” They asked Google about abortion by herbs like parsley or by vitamin C. There were some 4,000 searches looking for directions on coat hanger abortions, including about 1,300 for the exact phrase “how to do a coat hanger abortion.” There were also a few hundred looking into abortion through bleaching one’s uterus and punching one’s stomach.
What drives interest in self-induced abortion? The geography and timing of the Google searches point to a likely culprit: when it’s hard to get an official abortion, women look into off-the-books approaches.
Search rates for self-induced abortion were fairly steady from 2004 through 2007. They began to rise in late 2008, coinciding with the financial crisis and the recession that followed. They took a big leap in 2011, jumping 40 percent. The Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights organization, singles out 2011 as the beginning of the country’s recent crackdown on abortion; ninety-two state provisions that restrict access to abortion were enacted. Looking by comparison at Canada, which has not seen a crackdown on reproductive rights, there was no comparable increase in searches for self-induced abortions during this time.
The state with the highest rate of Google searches for self-induced abortions is Mississippi, a state with roughly three million people and, now, just one abortion clinic. Eight of the ten states with the highest search rates for self-induced abortions are considered by the Guttmacher Institute to be hostile or very hostile to abortion. None of the ten states with the lowest search rates for self-induced abortion are in either category.
Of course, we cannot know from Google searches how many women successfully give themselves abortions, but evidence suggests that a significant number may. One way to illuminate this is to compare abortion and birth data.
In 2011, the last year with complete state-level abortion data, women living in states with few abortion clinics had many fewer legal abortions.
Compare the ten states with the most abortion clinics per capita (a list that includes New York and California) to the ten states with the fewest abortion clinics per capita (a list that includes Mississippi and Oklahoma). Women living in states with the fewest abortion clinics had 54 percent fewer legal abortions—a difference of eleven abortions for every thousand women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. Women living in states with the fewest abortion clinics also had more live births. However, the difference was not enough to make up for the lower number of abortions. There were six more live births for every thousand women of childbearing age.
In other words, there appear to have been some missing pregnancies in parts of the country where it was hardest to get an abortion. The official sources don’t tell us what happened to those five missing births for each thousand women in states where it is hard to get an abortion.
Google provides some pretty good clues.
We can’t blindly trust government data. The government may tell us that child abuse or abortion has fallen and politicians may celebrate this achievement. But the results we think we’re seeing may be an artifact of flaws in the methods of data collection. The truth may be different—and, sometimes, far darker.
THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS