Radio Iowa You are here: Home Impact of pandemic on child abuse numbers not fully known While reports of child abuse in Iowa fell dramatically a year ago, advocates fear the number of incidents where children were harmed actually spiked while the number of reports lagged. Alli Moerman, spokeswoman for Prevent Child Abuse Iowa, explains how that can happen. “Early in the pandemic, we saw reports of child abuse drop pretty significantly,” Moerman says. “We speculate that this is primarily due to students not being in school and out of the eyesight of many mandatory reporters who would specifically be making a lot of those reports.”