When a report of suspected child maltreatment is screened in, a Minnesota caseworker is required to see the child. Best practice calls for that child to be interviewed outside the presence of any alleged offender, including a parent, whenever possible. The reasoning is simple: a child is far more likely to speak honestly about what happened to them when the person who may have hurt them isn’t standing in the room.
New data obtained by Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota from the Department of Children, Youth, and Families shows that, in most cases, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Across nearly 95,000 finalized child maltreatment cases from 2023 through 2025, children were interviewed alone in 78.6% of cases — and the trend is moving in the right direction, rising from 78.0% in 2023 to 79.1% in 2025. That’s a strong and improving baseline for a practice that puts the child’s voice first.
The rate is even higher where it matters most for safety: in family investigations, used for the most serious allegations, children were interviewed alone 80.2% of the time. And the practice is clearly well established as kids get older with 89% or more of children age 6 and up are interviewed alone, climbing to nearly 94% for children 12 and older.
Among the smaller share of cases where a child wasn’t interviewed alone, the data tells a reassuring story too: 77% of the time, the reason was simply the child’s developmental capacity — for example, a baby too young to be meaningfully interviewed— not a barrier caseworkers failed to work around. Only a small fraction involved worker safety or a missing court order.
However there is room for growth in some Minnesota counties. Olmsted, Sibley, Stearns, McLeod, Becker, and Itasca counties currently have the lowest rates of interviewing children alone, each below 67%. The counties leading on this practice show it’s achievable and we hope to see practice changes in the counties mentioned above.
Safe Passage requested this data to better understand current practice, and we’re encouraged by what we found. The full county-by-county data is below for anyone who wants to see how their local agency compares to other counties.
Source: Social Services Information System (SSIS), Research and Evaluation Unit, Child Safety and Permanency Administration, Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Data retrieved April 2026.