Reach Us
31 Porter Street #122
Stoughton, MA 02072
info@responsiblehomeschooling.org
media@responsiblehomeschooling.org
(617) 765-7096
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education is a 501(c)3 nonprofit.
© 2013-2024
Stoughton, MA 02072
info@responsiblehomeschooling.org
media@responsiblehomeschooling.org
(617) 765-7096
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education is a 501(c)3 nonprofit.
© 2013-2024
Recognizing and Reporting Child Sexual Abuse in Homeschool Settings
This resource provides an overview of homeschooling and child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) for both professionals working with children and the wider public. Child sexual abuse and exploitation is a rampant problem in the United States and across the globe. In 2023 alone, child welfare agencies in the United States reported investigating over 59,000 cases of child sexual abuse — but the true prevalence is far higher. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that about 1 in 4 girls, and 1 in 20 boys, will experience child sexual abuse. Somewhere between 1.8 and 4.2 million children are currently homeschooled in the United States and, while many children benefit from the flexibility of home education, CSEA does occur in homeschool settings.
Content note: extensive discussion of child sexual abuse
Last updated: March 2025
What are the risks for CSEA in homeschool environments?
The bottom line is that homeschooling probably does not increase risk, but that risk and protective factors may look different for homeschooled children. Additionally, we find that in situations where caregivers are deliberately homeschooling to hide and escalate abuse, social isolation allows for specific, extreme forms of child sexual abuse and exploitation to proliferate.
Abuse and neglect does occur in homeschool settings, and researchers continue to debate whether homeschooled children are more or less likely to experience abuse. When it comes to CSEA, the picture is nuanced. Across several studies that surveyed different populations, homeschool alumni self-reported lower rates of sexual abuse compared to national averages. A recent study found that, controlling for other factors, school status did not have a significant effect on rates of reported sexual abuse. More research is needed, but signs currently indicate that homeschooled children are not likely at greater risk for CSEA.
However, both our findings and wider research suggest that risk and protective factors for abuse and neglect vary depending on a child’s schooling. For example, children in schools are more vulnerable to sexual abuse at the hands of adults working in schools, and a federal report estimated that 1 in 10 children will experience adult sexual misconduct over their schooling. On the other hand, our analysis of about 500 publicly documented incidents of abuse and neglect in homeschool settings finds that homeschooling can be associated with not only lack of sexual education, but deliberate sexual miseducation. More fundamentally, the social isolation of homeschooling environments can allow for extreme abuse and exploitation to persist undetected.
Lack of sexual education
Comprehensive sex education is an important tool for preventing and addressing sexual abuse, and yet very few states ensure that children in public school receive comprehensive, evidence-based, and inclusive sex education. In homeschool settings, however, standards are even lower. Only 11 states require that health be taught at all, even if they stipulate other subject requirements.
Very few of these states have mechanisms to ensure subjects are being taught. Among them, only New York and Pennsylvania require home educators to submit evidence of educational progress in mandated subjects.
Health education standards can also be less stringent for homeschooled children. Washington, which is known for providing sufficient sex education in public schools, requires that homeschooled children be taught similar subjects as public schools, but allows home educators to interpret subject content “liberally.”
Social isolation
Social isolation is an established risk factor for abuse, and our work has shown how the social isolation in abusive homeschool environments allows abuse to reach extremes while remaining undetected. In fact, in many cases recorded in our database, abusive caregivers deliberately seek out isolation to hide and magnify abuse — often by withdrawing their children from school after being suspected of, or reported and investigated for, abuse.
In the severe cases that involve CSEA, CSEA takes on forms that thrive in isolation, like deliberate sex miseducation, sexual abuse as part of torture, and various forms of child exploitation and trafficking.
In the context of severe isolation, perpetrators cannot only refuse children appropriate and accurate sexual education, but have the ability to deliberately miseducate them to groom them for abuse. We have documented incidents in our database in which caregivers train children to consider incest as normal or God-ordained.
Case study: 9 homeschooled children and alumni in Oklahoma City
In 2023, police removed 9 children and adults from a home in Oklahoma City in response to a tip that the father had several children with his stepdaughter. Authorities later learned that the stepdaughter had given birth to her first child by her stepfather at age 12, and that the children had been subjected to extreme isolation, neglect, and sexual abuse.
All children in the home were homeschooled, but could not read, write, or speak properly; two children were nonverbal. They were also heavily medically neglected and did not leave the home unless accompanied by their father. In reference to the father’s incestuous relationship with the stepdaughter, a 23-year-old adult child in the home said that they “already knew about but I didn’t know there was anything wrong with it.”
While the sexual abuse itself was illegal in the case above, the educational neglect that normalized it was legally permissible in Oklahoma, which does not impose any oversight on homeschooling families.
And among these cases, professionals account for fewer reports and disclosures than do nonprofessionals.
Conclusions
While homeschooled children on the whole are not more likely to experience CSEA, homeschooling can be deployed to hide extreme forms of CSEA like deliberate sex miseducation, torture, child marriage, and sex trafficking. Moreover, there is seldom enough homeschool oversight in place to ensure that homeschooled children receive age-appropriate education. In most states, homeschool oversight is so lax that abusive and neglectful caregivers can homeschool even if they have been under investigation by social services, or have violent criminal history. Professionals need to be aware of how these gaps create risks for vulnerable children.