Findings
Last updated April 2026
Summary of Key Findings
Most families homeschool responsibly, and many instances of so-called “abuse and neglect” are manifestations of caregivers being under-resourced, as opposed to their actively causing harm. Nonetheless, there do exist cases of caregivers inflicting deliberate and extreme abuse on their children. We have found that lax homeschooling oversight creates loopholes that enable abusive caregivers to hide abuse. Only three states do anything at all to prevent caregivers who are demonstrably acting in bad faith from pulling children from school to homeschool. No state has measures that comprehensively address this problem.
These gaps in safeguarding have led to devastating outcomes for homeschooled children. We have documented fatalities of over 230 homeschooled children from abuse.
Research on homeschooling has historically neglected negative outcomes, especially abuse and neglect in homeschool settings. In fact, despite the fact that a growing body of evidence at the state level suggests a relationship between withdrawal from school to homeschool and various forms of maltreatment, many deny that abuse is a problem at all in homeschool settings.
Recent research concerns itself with asking whether homeschooled children or children at school are more likely to be abused. Not only is this question exceedingly difficult to answer given patchy data on both homeschooling and child maltreatment rates, but it does not consider what happens when abuse does occur.
It is an indisputable reality that abuse and neglect happen regardless of how a child is schooled. However, risk factors may differ depending on school status. Social isolation is a key concern when it comes to abusive homeschooling environments specifically. Our analysis shows that social isolation can reach extremes in homeschool settings that would be impossible to cover if the victim(s) were in school, and that caregivers use the cover of homeschool to intentionally isolate victims from outside adults and other resources that can help them.
We analyzed 500 cases of abuse and neglect in homeschool settings in the public record to look for risk factors, red flags, and patterns in abuse. Our analysis illuminates how policy and procedural failures put vulnerable children at risk for harm.
Key Findings
Abusive caregivers are able to "homeschool" to hide abuse and neglect.
In certain contexts involving at-risk children, the choice to homeschool may be a red flag indicating abuse and neglect. Growing evidence from various US states points to a relationship between withdrawal from school to homeschool and “non-purposeful homeschooling.” Non-purposeful homeschooling refers to parents choosing to homeschool not for educational reasons, but in a reactive way, such as in response to truancy, academic failure, or suspicions of abuse and neglect.
Our data provide a national picture of how withdrawal from school to homeschool can be a red flag for abuse and neglect. 38% of all cases in the HIC database — and 55% of fatality cases — involve known withdrawal from school, and these cases represent 44 US states and the District of Columbia.
From an analysis of these cases, we have found that withdrawal from school is associated with both higher risk factors for abuse and worse outcomes: withdrawal cases involve higher social service history, higher rates of systematic abuse, and higher fatality rates relative to other cases in the database.
We conducted a close qualitative analysis of 60 cases (n=63) in which families withdrew their children from school during an active CPS investigation, soon after the closure of an investigation, or in direct response to school officials raising concerns of abuse. These cases have resulted in 32 deaths. In the vast majority of states, it is legal for caregivers to remove children from school under suspicious circumstances such as these.
We identified a number of cases in which caregivers who had been convicted of crimes against children were permitted to homeschool. This occurred in states with a range of homeschool oversight policies, from Idaho to California to Oregon. In California in 2019, Trinity Love Jones lost her life to systematic abuse at the hands of her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Both perpetrators had been convicted of violent crimes against minors; her mother was on the sex offender registry for enticing prostitution from a minor, while her stepfather had been convicted of felony child abuse and torture. They were permitted to withdraw her from school to homeschool her about a year prior to her death.
Social isolation in abusive homeschooling environments makes it difficult for abuse to be noticed and addressed.
The presence of vigilant adults is crucial to identifying and stopping child abuse. From national data on social service referrals, we learn that professionals trained to notice child abuse – whether they work in education, law enforcement, child welfare, or medical or mental health – make up the majority of referrals. Abusive caregivers who homeschool intentionally limit their children’s access to mandated reporters by withdrawing them from school, refusing to take them to the doctor, or not letting them leave the house. Since no state currently requires that all homeschooled children come into contact with a mandated reporter, it follows that the abuse of homeschooled children is less likely to be uncovered and stopped by these established channels.
We analyzed how abuse is ultimately discovered and stopped across HIC cases, and found the following.
When abuse is successfully reported, it is most often not reported by professionals. When reports were made (n=137 cases), 76% (n=104) came from non-professionals, while only 24% came from professionals (n=33). This indicates that children in our database may have limited access to professionals trained to recognize and report abuse.
These cases involve a victim running away or being abandoned (n=73), abuse being reported after the fact (or child abuse not being reported directly), abuse coming to light under circumstances irrelevant to the victim, or when the victim is dead or dying.
Homeschooling hides severe abuse that would be noticed if the victim were in school.
Our data show that abusive caregivers use the cover of homeschooling to inflict systematic abuse on victims. We have identified at least 168 cases that we consider to involve systematic abuse, on the basis that they feature, at the very least, a combination of two deliberate forms of abuse: imprisonment and food deprivation. School is a protective factor against both: a caregiver cannot imprison a child during the period of time that the child is physically at the school, some children have access to food at school, and schools provide regular access to mandated reporters to whom children can report mistreatment (and who may notice children becoming progressively emaciated).
In our whole dataset, a majority (63%, n=325) of cases involve either food deprivation or imprisonment, and when cases involve one form of abuse, about half of the time they involve the other. Imprisonment and food deprivation can be treated as indices for not only isolation of victims over an extended period of time, but also for abuse that is intentionally cruel. The National Center for Child Abuse Statistics and Policy defines torture as protracted abuse that involves at least “two cruel or inhumane acts,” and imprisonment and food deprivation are counted among such acts. The database contains nearly 170 cases (n=168) that involve both imprisonment and food deprivation.
All these cases involve caregivers isolating victims from the outside world, generally preventing them from leaving the home. The choice to “homeschool” is not educational, but to remove victims from the public eye. HIC cases that involve withdrawal from school to homeschool are associated with higher rates of most kinds of abuse. 73% of withdrawal cases involve forms of abuse consistent with torture, versus 63% of total HIC cases.