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These registers differ very much between countries, both in their total coverage and in what they report [3]. A large problem is that social service registers may be nationwide, but quite often regional and sometimes even local and may be run by private institutions. Before working with such registers, one must check their quality, coverage and how detailed the data is. Processing such data will not usually give a true picture of prevalence, but the results may nonetheless be of great importance for decision makers. Such organisations may encompass community institutions involved with children, such as schools, mental health agencies, NGOs and child protection agencies. Data from these agencies can also be of importance in comparison with self-report data in order to demonstrate the number of abuse cases that have gone unreported over the years.

Another essential problem with agency registers and police registers is that many incidents of abuse or neglect are never admitted or reported. Estimates indicate that between 50 and 80% of all victims of maltreatment are not known to the child protection services. There are vast differences even between adjacent countries. As an example, the rate of substantiated physical abuse in Canada is two and a half times that of the United States [9].