The Impact of Sports Gambling Legalization on Child Maltreatment

• In Event: Upstream Policies, Downstream Harm: Systemic Influences on Child Welfare

Abstract

In 2018, a Supreme Court decision effectively paved the way for states to legalize sports gambling. As of February 2025, 40 states have legalized sports gambling in some form and 34 states have specifically legalized sports betting on a mobile device. Legal sports betting is growing in popularity with over $100 billion wagered in 2023 (Hoffer, 2024). This popularity has also brought with it numerous hidden costs including a greater number of help-seeking posts in online gambling support groups (van der Maas et al., 2022), worsening consumer financial health specifically through lower credit scores and increased rates of bankruptcy (Hollenbeck et al., 2024), and the amplification of sports outcome-related intimate partner violence (Arnesen and Matsuzawa, 2024). Two of these costs, financial constraints and intimate partner violence, are also well-established risk factors for child maltreatment. This study addresses a pressing gap in understanding the unintended consequences of sports betting legalization. Risk factors for child maltreatment appear to increase in response to the legalization of sports betting, but the direct impacts on the prevalence of abuse and neglect remain unexplored.

 

Child abuse and neglect remains a major public health problem in the United States. In 2022, 1,955 children died due to maltreatment and more than 4.2 million cases of suspected child abuse or neglect were reported to Child Protective Services (HHS, 2022). Of these reports, further investigations determined that 13 percent of reports, or more than 550,000 children, were confirmed victims of abuse or neglect. This may be a lower bound of the prevalence of child maltreatment. Survey data suggests that child maltreatment may affect around 1 in 4 children (Finkelhor et al., 2015). These alarming figures underscore the urgency of examining whether shifts in risk factors following sports betting legalization translate into measurable changes in child maltreatment rates.

 

Using administrative child protective services (CPS) case data retrieved from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), I use a difference-in-difference two-way fixed effects framework to assess how reported cases, family risk factors, and foster care placement outcomes change following the legalization of sports gambling. Moreover, by exploring the heterogeneity in case types, reporting sources, and placement outcomes, I try to disentangle the causal pathways (financial stress vs physical violence associated with intimate partner violence) between sports gambling legalization and child maltreatment. Preliminary results suggest that legalizing mobile sports gambling, but not in-person sports gambling, leads to an increase in the overall reporting of incidences of child maltreatment. I discuss further distributional and temporal shifts in the full paper.

Author

• Eric Wilken, University of Oregon
  Presenting Author