by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, The New York Times

The contrast between the search data and the reported data tells a sad story about social services in this country. Just when more children are searching for help, we decimate the budgets of the very people who might actually do something to protect them.
Stephens-Davidowitz reports that he spent months studying the incidence of child abuse using a number of different data sources, including Google search queries. He found that the Great Recession caused a significant increase in child abuse and neglect. At the same time, far fewer of these cases were reported to authorities, with much of the drop due to slashed budgets for teachers, nurses, doctors and child protective service workers.