Child abuse was defined as any of the following acts being committed by a caretaker (parent or guardian) on a person younger than 18 years: physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and psychological abuse.3 Details on the reporting of abuse under the Japanese system are given in eMethods in Supplement 1 . Hokkaido University deemed this cross-sectional study exempt from ethics review and waived the informed consent requirement because publicly available aggregated and anonymized data were used. We followed the STROBE reporting guideline.
We obtained the publicly available 2019 to 2021 monthly number of child abuse consultations and estimated the child abuse consultation rates in 47 prefectures from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan.3 The pandemic binary term was encoded with 0 for 2019 (prepandemic period) and 1 for 2020 to 2021 (pandemic period). We used an interrupted time series method to estimate the association of the pandemic with consultation rates for the first-stage, prefecture-level analysis. Subsequently, the first-stage analysis estimates were pooled using a random-effects meta-analysis model to generate the nationwide association. Parameterization of methods is described in the eMethods inSupplement 1 . Analyses were performed using R, version 4.2.0 (R Core Team).
We obtained the publicly available 2019 to 2021 monthly number of child abuse consultations and estimated the child abuse consultation rates in 47 prefectures from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan.3 The pandemic binary term was encoded with 0 for 2019 (prepandemic period) and 1 for 2020 to 2021 (pandemic period). We used an interrupted time series method to estimate the association of the pandemic with consultation rates for the first-stage, prefecture-level analysis. Subsequently, the first-stage analysis estimates were pooled using a random-effects meta-analysis model to generate the nationwide association. Parameterization of methods is described in the eMethods in
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