If the Great Recession increased suspicion of child maltreatment, why were fewer cases reported? Keep in mind first that many, probably most, suspected cases are never reported. Even primary care doctors, who are legally mandated to report suspected child abuse, admit in surveys that they do not report 27 percent of suspicious incidents.

It is certainly plausible that an economic downturn could lower the rate at which suspect cases are reported. Budgets were slashed in hard-hit states, particularly on social programs directed toward children. Overworked teachers, doctors and nurses may be that much less likely to go through with the reporting process. Shorter hours and more thinly stretched staffs at child protective service agencies may make it harder to report cases. There is abundant anecdotal evidence of people attempting to report maltreatment by phone facing long wait times and hanging up.

When you compare places that Google search data suggest have similar levels of abuse or neglect, you find that the less an area spends on social services for children, the lower its reported rates of child maltreatment. My research also shows that when a particular group’s budget is reduced, it reports fewer cases of maltreatment. Cut resources for teachers, for example, and teachers report fewer of their suspicions.

THERE are four take-aways from this research. First, the maltreatment of children is yet another cost of the Great Recession, one that will be felt long after the economy fully recovers. The evidence from medical researchers and psychologists is overwhelming: as adults, victims of child abuse or neglect will face higher probabilities of mental illness and criminal behavior and lower probabilities of employment and stable family lives.

Second, we should be skeptical of statistics based on official reports of crime in general, not just child abuse or neglect. According to government surveys, between 2006 and 2010, throughout the United States, 52 percent of violent crimes, 60 percent of property crimes and 65 percent of rapes and sexual assaults were never reported to the police. When reported crime drops, it is always possible that this is a result not of a decline in crime itself but of factors that make it more difficult to report crime.

Consider, for example, Detroit. Its police department recently reported 20 percent reductions in some major crimes. Might this be because of dwindling police department resources? The average time it takes to get a response to an emergency call to the Detroit police is now 58 minutes, and many precincts have stopped taking crime reports in evening hours.

Third, Google search data can fill holes in our understanding of crime generally. If your iPad was stolen, whom would you be more likely to tell: the police or Google? Indeed, I have found that Google queries for “stolen iPad” and “stolen iPod” yield meaningful information about property crime rates. Searches like “I was just raped” and “rape hot line” might help us measure a city’s true rape rate. (Here’s a disturbing side note: Rape proves the most difficult to measure crime using Google data, but not because of women’s historical reluctance to report rapes. The problem is that the majority of rape-related Google searches are typed in by people looking for pornography.)

Fourth, and most important, 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.