The current mainstream discourse in child welfare is all about prevention: reaching families before maltreatment occurs instead of intervening afterwards. Many jurisdictions pay lip service to this mantra by making services available to high-risk communities but not targeting these services to the families who need them most. The Detroit Prevention Project, launched by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in conjunction with an innovative organization called Brilliant Detroit, is different. It reaches out to families at risk of child maltreatment with an intensive case management and peer mentorship intervention aimed at preventing child abuse and neglect.
“One of the top priorities of the new administration when it comes to the child welfare system is to connect with families and provide them with support and resources before there is a need for Children’s Protective Services to file court petitions,” said JooYeun Chang, who served previously as the head of the Children’s Bureau and Managing Director of Casey Family Programs and came to Michigan in 2019. “We believe children are better off when they are with their families as long as we can work with families to make sure the children are safe.”
Interest in preventing child maltreatment before it occurs has been increasing in child welfare. But the drop in CPS reports under virtual schooling, which deprives the current system of its main trigger for action, has led to even more interest in prevention. In Michigan, DHHS had already begun to formulate plans for shifting toward a more proactive approach but COVID-19 accelerated those efforts, according to a recent article from Second Wave Media.
The new program, called the Detroit Prevention Project, pairs families at risk for child maltreatment with two workers, each performing a different function. Peer mentors, also known as “parent partners,” are community members who have experience in navigating the child welfare system in Detroit. They receive training in mental health peer support and how to work within MDHHS systems. Benefits navigators connect families to community resources such as food, housing assistance, education, and employment. The use of peer mentors or counselors is a newer approach in child welfare that has been shown to produce positive effects on outcomes associated with reduced child maltreatment. While many other programs use either peer mentors or benefits navigators, combining the two is an innovative approach.
DHHS decided to pilot its new approach in two of the zip codes with the highest rates of referrals of child abuse and neglect in the state. They chose to work with Brilliant Detroit, an organization founded in 2015 to “provide a radically new approach to kindergarten readiness in neighborhoods,” according to its website. The program has created family centers in neighborhoods which attempt to provide families of children aged 0 to 8 with all the services (emphasizing health, family support and education) needed to ensure school readiness and provided needed family support. Co-Founder and CEO Cindy Eggleton was awarded a 2021 Purpose Prize from AARP for her work in founding and directing Brilliant Detroit.
Families are also given access to a variety of programs already offered by Brilliant Detroit. These range from anger management and GED classes to nutrition workshops and fitness activities. Also offered are community based playgroups, intensive tutoring for the kids, family literacy programs, “parent cafes” to help parents connect, workforce and financial literacy training, free sports for children, and more.
The program is strictly voluntary and is being offered to a group of families drawn from two sources. DHHS is referring families that were the subject of a child protective services investigation in the past year based on their score on its Structured Decision Making (SDM) Tool. SDM is an actuarial assessment system, used by many states, to assess risk and make decisions about how to handle a case. Families that had an investigation closed with a score of III (evidence of abuse or neglect but a low or moderate level of risk to the child) or IV (insufficient evidence to show that abuse occurred but future risk of harm to the child) are normally referred to community services. These families will be invited to participate in the Detroit Prevention Project. Brilliant Detroit is also offering the program to families that it already knows from its neighborhood work.
The goals of the program are as follows, according to the document provided by Brilliant Detroit:
Reduce the number of at-risk families in zip codes 48205 and 48288 that are reported from child abuse and neglect;
Align existing MDHHS programs with Brilliant Detroit’s network of partners to create a comprehensive continuum of services.
Provide data on the efficacy of the model
Construct a model that can be scaled up through additional funding and community based partnerships.
The Detroit Prevention Project was jointly developed with leadership from the Skillman Foundation and Casey Family Programs. Skillman suggested that MDHHS talk to some of their partners on the ground, including Brilliant Detroit, to flesh out the ideas, which led to the partnership. The funding is being provided by MDHHS, Casey and Skillman. When it reaches full scale, the program will serve 400 families.
The Detroit Prevention Project embodies the prevailing sentiment in child welfare in favor of preventing abuse and neglect before they occur. This push has been led from the top by the Children’s Bureau, where Chang’s successor Jerry Milner has been a forceful advocate for this approach. Many states have responded with enthusiasm and new programs. However, some states have created new programs (like the Family Success Centers recently opened by the District of Columbia based on New Jersey’s model) without targeting them to children that are at risk of child abuse or neglect. Without a systematic effort to reach out to the families who need these services most, there is no assurance that these families will receive the services.
DHHS might want to consider using the Detroit Prevention Model to reach further upstream, following the example of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Allegheny County’s Hello Baby program reaches out to parents of new babies to offer them a tiered set of services. Families with the most complex needs based on a predictive risk model are offered the most intensive approach which, similar to the Detroit Prevention Program, matches each family with a peer counselor and a case manager. Given Brilliant Detroit’s mission of focusing on children from zero to eight and DHHS’s focus on prevention, this would be a natural step for both partners.
Participation in the Detroit Prevention Program is strictly voluntary, which means that some of the most troubled families will refuse to participate. Research indicates that it is difficult to engage the highest-risk families in voluntary services. We hope that the program will collect and report on the number of families refusing to participate and track their future maltreatment reports, in order to assess the extent of this problem. If it is extensive, leaders may need to consider using a family’s refusal to participate as the trigger to initiate an investigation.
Michigan DHHS should be commended for the implementation of the Detroit Prevention Program. We hope that child welfare leaders in other states are watching this initiative carefully. We also hope that DHHS will subject this program to intensive evaluation so that we can learn from this experiment experiment.
With the end of the holiday break, about half the nation’s public students are not returning to school buildings but instead are continuing with virtual education. The impacts of school building closures on education, the economy and student mental health have been widely covered. But there is another consequence of virtual education that has not been as widely reported–the loss of the protective eye on children that their teachers and other school staff provide. Now that the COVID vaccine is becoming available, it is urgent that we get teachers vaccinated and students back to school.
In the wake of the coronavirus emergency beginning last March, almost all public school buildings in the nation closed, with few if any reopening before the end of the term. Many systems reopened buildings for fully in-person education or “hybrid” (partially virtual) models in August or September, and others opened their buildings later. As of Labor Day, 62 percent of U.S. public school students were attending school virtually, but only 38 percent were still online-only by early November, according to a company called Burbio, which monitors 1,200 school districts around the country.However, a spike in COVID cases beginning in November resulted in many systems returning to virtual education, with 53 percent of students attending virtually by January 4, 2021. Burbio expects a decrease in this percentage over the next six weeks as systems open up again after the virus spikes abate.
Almost immediately after the school closures last spring, reports began rolling in about the failure of online education to reach many students, especially those who were poor and most at risk of school failure. Some students lacked computers or internet access; others were unable to engage remotely in education. There is deep concern about the long-term impact of school building closures on young people’s academic performance, particularly for those at most risk of poor outcomes. With the passage of time, more information began to flow in about other consequences to children of missing school, such as worrisome impacts on their mental health.
But many child welfare professionals and advocates have long shared another concern. They worried about unseen abuse and neglect among the children stuck at home with increasingly stressed parents and not being seen by teachers and other adults. This is especially concerning for younger children, who are less likely to seek help on their own. And indeed, as soon as schools closed around the country last March due to the COVID pandemic, almost every state reported large drops in calls to their child abuse and neglect hotlines. The loss of reports from teachers (who make one in five of reports nationwide) was probably the major contributor, combined with the loss of reports from other professionals, friends, and family members seeing less of children due to stay-at-home orders and physical distancing.
After the academic year ended, data became available that that allowed comparison of reports, investigations, and findings of maltreatment in the pandemic spring compared to the spring of 2019. These analyses showed a large difference between reports, investigations, and substantiations of maltreatment in 2020 relative to 2019, followed by a convergence in data during the summer when schools are normally closed. In our local blog, we analyzed data from the District of Columbia Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA). For this post we used our DC data and information from three other jurisdictions for which data was readily available: New York City, Los Angeles, and Florida.[1]
In the District of Columbia, schooling has remained virtual since the onset of the pandemic, with a small number of students joining their virtual classrooms from school buildings while supervised by non-teaching staff. Figure One shows the number of reports received at the CFSA hotline in January through September 2019 and 2020. The contrast between the two years is obvious. In the “typical” year of 2019, the number of reports increased every month until May,[2] dropped to a much lower level in July and August when schools were closed, and then bounced up in September after schools reopened. The pandemic year of 2020 looked very different. The number of calls fell from February to March with the closure of schools, followed by a much larger drop in April, and stayed fairly flat until a modest rise in September with the opening of school. It’s as if summer vacation started in March, with a slight increase of reports when virtual school started again. In every month of the pandemic, the number of hotline calls in 2020 was considerably less than its counterpart in 2019. The total number of hotline calls received between March and June and in September (roughly the period affected by COVID-19) fell from 7916 in 2019 to 4681 in FY 2020, a decrease of 40.8 percent.
New York City data show a similar picture, as shown in a report from the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) comparing hotline calls in 2020 to those in previous years. It is clear that 2020 is the outlier, with reports in 2017 through 2019 displaying similar seasonal patterns. In contrast to the previous years, reports fell in March 2020 with the schools closing on March 16 and then plunged in April during the first full month of school closure. There was a slight uptick in May and then reports remained basically flat before jumping up in October (when school buildings reopened) and falling again in November after schools closed again on November 19. ACS does not provide the numbers for each month but for January through November of 2020, there were 46,375 reports compared to 59,539 during that period in 2019. That is a difference of 22 percent; this difference would clearly be greater if we were able to look only at the weeks when schools were closed due to COVID-19.
Data from Los Angeles, where school buildings have not yet reopened, tell a similar story–a decline in reports in March after the pandemic emergency and school closures and then a big drop in April, the first full month when schools were closed. Referrals remained below the previous year for the rest of 2020, though the difference narrowed. The total number of referrals was 44,959 in March through November of 2020, compared to 61,515 in the same period of 2021–a decrease of 26.9 percent, and the decrease would be greater if only the weeks of school were included.
It is interesting to look at Florida, where the governor mandated that school buildings open in the fall semester. Florida data for last spring looks a lot like that for DC, New York City, and Los Angeles. But referrals almost matched 2019 during June and July, with the onset of summer break. August 2020 referrals were slightly lower than those in August 2019, perhaps because many schools opened virtually, but the gap narrowed again in September, October and November as more schools opened in person. And the shape of the fall curves was nearly identical in both years, with referrals rising in October.
Not everybody agrees that the loss of reports from school staff is a problem. Teachers have sometimes been criticized for making too many reports, and some analysts have suggested that the COVID closures might serve a useful function by eliminating frivolous or inappropriate reports. Indeed, some analyses have shown that the reports that are being made tend to be more serious or high-risk, suggesting that more of the less serious reports are being suppressed. If there was a large increase in the percentage of reports accepted for investigation or found to be substantive, there might be less reason to worry. But this does not appear to be the case.
In the District of Columbia, as shown in Table One at the bottom of the article, the percentage of reports accepted for investigation was slightly greater in 2020 than in the previous year. But as Figure Five shows, this percentage increase in accepted reports was not enough to substantially narrow the large gap between the number of accepted reports in the two years. Both the number of hotline calls accepted for investigation and the number of substantiated investigations showed the same sharp decrease as the number of reports to the hotline.
Similarly, the number of investigations in New York City showed the same precipitous drop from 2019 to 2020 as did the number of reports, as Figure Seven shows. And the percentage of investigations that “showed some credible evidence of abuse or neglect” in January through September 2020 was actually one point lower than that in the same period of 2019.
In Los Angeles, the percentage of referrals accepted for investigation actually declined during the pandemic, as indicated in Table Two below. So the year-to-year gap in number of referrals accepted for investigation (see Figure Seven) was even greater than the gap in total referrals. (Los Angeles does not provide data on substantiated reports.)
In Florida, as indicated in Table Three, there was a very slight increase in the percent of of intakes accepted for investigation during March-May 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. But as Figure Eight shows, the total numbers were much lower than in the previous year. (Florida does not provide data on the number of reports that were substantiated.)
It is clear from data in the four jurisdictions described here that reports to child abuse hotlines fell steeply in all four jurisdictions after the pandemic school closures, absolutely and relative to the same months of the previous year. In Florida, where schools reopened in September, reports increased to almost the level of the year before. It seems indisputable that measures imposed to fight COVID-19 were behind these changes and highly likely that school building closures were a large factor behind the reporting reductions. Moreover, as reports decreased, so did the numbers of reports investigated and substantiated, thus dashing any hope that only frivolous reports were being weeded out by the school closures.
Now that a vaccine is available, some Governors in states that have not reopened schools have proposed plans to prioritize teachers for vaccines and finally reopen buildings. Governor Gavin Newsom of California has offered a reopening plan including prioritization of school staff for vaccinations throughout spring 2021. West Virginia Governor Jim Justice has announced his plan to open pre-K, elementary, and middle schools for in-person learning on Tuesday, Jan 19. High school students will return to in-person school only in less-heavily-infected counties. Justice announced that the state will vaccinate all teachers and school personnel over the next two to three weeks as part of Phase One of the state’s vaccination plan.
Data from around the country clearly show that child welfare agencies received fewer reports, conducted fewer investigations, and made fewer findings of child abuse or neglect in times and places where schools were virtual. This fact adds to the many other reasons to open all closed school buildings as soon as possible. Opposition from teachers and their unions has been a major reason for keeping schools virtual. It is understandable that teachers were reluctant to return to buildings. But now, availability of vaccines makes it possible for schools to reopen throughout the country without endangering teachers–as long as all teachers are offered the vaccine before returning to classrooms. The high costs to to students of closed school buildings, among which undetected abuse should be included, mean that we should not wait any longer to bring students back to school in person.
[1]: These jurisdictions were chosen as large state or county child welfare systems that had readily available about reports, investigations and substantiations. Many other large jurisdictions do not post such data.
Many Americans recall the horrific case of Bobbie Joe Stinnett, who in 2004 was strangled to death, her belly sliced open, and her baby removed. There is no doubt that the perpetrator was Lisa Montgomery, who brought the baby home, announcing that she had given birth. What most of us don’t know about is the nightmarish childhood that led to Ms. Montgomery’s crime, and the extent to which family members and authorities knew of her suffering and did not take action.
On January 12, Lisa Montgomery is scheduled for execution–the first woman to be executed on federal death row for 70 years. In a hearbreaking op-ed published by the New York Times, writer Rachel Louise Snyder explains Lisa’s hellish upbringing and the multiple failures that allowed the torture to continue.
As Snyder describes, Lisa Montgomery was born to a family “rife with mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.” Lisa’s father left the family when she was a toddler. Her family moved once a year or more, spending time Washington, Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma. Lisa’s mother, Judy Shaughnessy, abused her “in extreme and sadistic ways,” according to interviews with nearly 450 family members, neighbors, lawyers, social workers, and teachers. She was forced to sit in a high chair for hours if she did not finish her food. Her mouth was covered with duct tape so frequently that she learned not to cry. According to her mother, her first words were: “Don’t spank me, it hurts.”
Lisa’s older half sister, Diane Mattingly, told Elle Magazine that Lisa’s mother hit them with brooms and belts. She forced Diane to eat raw onions until she cried and once stripped her naked and put her out of the house in freezing temperatures, telling her not to come back. She made nightly trips to a bar, leaving the girls with “babysitters” who raped Diane, whose “sole purpose in life” was to protect her little sister. At the age of eight, Lisa lost her sole protector when Diane was removed from this home and placed in foster care with a loving family. Diane reports that she vomited all the way to the foster home, knowing the fate that awaited four-year-old Lisa without her protection.
Lisa’s stepfather, Jack Kleiner, a “rampant alcoholic,” began to assault her sexually when she was about 13. He built a “shed-like room” next to the family’s trailer in Tulsa Oklahoma and kept her there. He brought friends over to rape her, “often for hours, often three at once.” As if that was not enough, Lisa’s mother began to prostitute her to pay household bills.
When she was 18, Lisa married her 25-year-old stepbrother, the son of her mother’s fourth husband, who also raped and abused her. By the age of 23 she had four young children (whom she in turn abused and neglected) and suffered from episodes of mania and psychosis. She eventually remarried. In the years before her crime, she repeatedly claimed to be pregnant and then to have lost the baby–despite the fact that she had been sterilized after the birth of her fourth child. One week before Christmas in 2004, Lisa Montgomery arrived at a meeting she had set up with a pregnant dog-breeder, Bobby Jo Stinnett, ostensibly to adopt a puppy. Instead, she took Stinnett’s life and left with her child.
Lisa Montgomery most likely suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and by the time she was arrested for her crime she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder, psychosis, and traumatic brain injury. Scans of her brain showed damage and abnormal patterns in the areas responsible for regulating social and emotional behavior and memory, which can be affected by trauma. Her “Adverse Childhood Experiences” (ACES) score was 9 out of 10 and global functioning score showed “severe impairment in daily activities.”
Perhaps the most shocking information in Dr. Snyder’s article is the extent to which many people in authority knew of her abuse and did nothing.
Lisa’s older sister was sent to foster care due to abuse or neglect, but there was no help for Lisa. In any child welfare system, Lisa’s life should have been investigated as well. If she was not removed, her family should have at least been monitored. (Her sister says she was afraid to say anything to her foster parents, not wanting them to know of her history of rape and abuse for fear they would send her away. She has regretted this decision for all her life.).
An A student in elementary school, Lisa was placed in special needs classes in middle school. An administrator thought this academic deterioration might be due to “deep emotional trauma” but it appears that the school took no action to uncover or report the underlying cause.
As a teenager, Lisa told her cousin, a deputy sheriff in Kansas, about being raped by Kleiner and his friends. He told investigators that he knew she was telling the truth and still regrets taking no action.
When Lisa’s mother divorced Jack Kleiner, she forced Lisa to testify about the rapes for their divorce proceedings. The mother sat unmoved during Lisa’s testimony. A social worker found Lisa’s claims believable and turned the file over to the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office, where no action was apparently taken.
It is difficult to understand how so many people in positions of authority knew about Lisa’s plight and did not interfere. The family’s repeated moves from state to state may have been part of the answer, as by the time a pattern was observed the family might have been gone. The events are too far in the past to determine who failed and why. But Lisa’s fate is a cautionary tale against ignoring any suspicion of child abuse.
Sadly, many child welfare leaders and advocates are currently recommending that state intervention in abusive and neglectful families be scaled back or even eliminated, just one more swing of the national pendulum on child welfare. There are concerns about the tendency for teachers and community members to over-report minor concerns that do not rise to the level of abuse. There are also criticisms that some systems are too quick to remove children from their homes instead of trying to help the parents take better care of their children. A new coalition calls for the elimination of “the forcible surveillance and separation of children from their parents.”
Lisa’s case tells us why we must not eliminate mandatory reporting of child abuse and neglect. If anything, we need to enhance training for mandatory reporters in order to increase the reporting of real maltreatment while reducing unnecessary reports. However, given the extreme costs of continuing abuse, it is better to tolerate some frivolous reports than to miss future Lisa Montgomerys.
Nor do we want to eliminate the forcible removal of children from their homes, as some child welfare critics propose. Rather, in the words of former child welfare administrator BJ Walker, systems must learn “to differentiate between the small fraction of parents who have neither the skill nor will to keep children safe [like Judy Shaughnessy], and those who have the capacity to learn, and overcome existing vulnerabilities and limitations.”
Lisa’s story is particularly timely now because abused children are more isolated than ever while school buildings in many places are closed due to COVID-19. Reports to child abuse hotlines dropped drastically around the nation as schools closed, but there is reason to believe that the job loss, deaths, and social isolation caused by COVID-19 have led to increases, not decreases, in child maltreatment. Who knows how many Lisas are suffering in silence now?
Studies have documented the relationship between child abuse and many of the adverse outcomes endured by Lisa Montgomery, including brain damage, diminished executive functioning and cognitive skills, poor mental and emotional health, post-traumatic stress, and adult criminality. Ending the suffering of children should be enough reason to require reporting and investigation of child maltreatment, the huge costs to society of severe child maltreatment provide another incentive to make sure severe maltreatment is found and stopped. If Lisa Montgomery could have been saved, Bobbie Joe would have been saved as well.
Note to my faithful readers: Please excuse the long gap in time since my last post. I’ve been busy working on my local blog, Child Welfare Monitor DC. That blog contains posts that are specific to the District of Columbia but may be of interest to observers of child welfare around the country. Please check it out and consider subscribing!
The tide of opinion in the U.S. child welfare arena has been turning against institutional settings for foster youth for some time. A spate of reports of child abuse and improper disciplinary techniques in residential facilities for young people has intensified calls for the elimination of residential care as an option for foster youth. But as all who are intimately involved in the child welfare world know, therapeutic residential care is a critical part of the continuum of services that must be available for foster youth.
Media investigations have targeted abusive behavior by staff at poor-quality residential facilities around the country, with a spotlight on a for-profit company called Sequel. Concern and outrage reached a fever pitch when a 16-year-old boy died at a Sequel home in Michigan after being restrained for 12 minutes. The Imprint and the Texas Observer co-published a harrowing account of Residential Treatment Centers (RTC’s) in Texas, documenting horrific instances of abuse at multiple centers around the state.
Unfortunately, some commentators, like the author of the report on Texas RTC’s, are using reports of abuse and violence to support ending all residential care rather than getting rid of bad providers. These critics of residential care miss two basic points. First, there are children who, for a variety of reasons, are not having their needs met in a family setting. These are the children who bounce from foster home to foster home, spend nights in agency offices or hotels, or even end up sleeping in cars with their caseworkers. Many have endured years of trauma, including physical and sexual abuse, severe neglect, and living in dangerous and chaotic conditions. Some have cognitive or neurological issues caused by drug exposure in utero or severe neglect. Some have violent outbursts, many are verbally aggressive, and many have difficulty in making attachments. These children need treatment delivered in a residential setting before they can function safely and thrive in a family setting.
Perhaps some of these youths could heal and thrive in a home with professional therapeutic foster parents, an option which is gaining increasing popularity. These foster parents are highly-trained and paid to take care of children with complex needs full-time. This is an option that deserves more attention but its growth is probably limited by both the lack of willing and qualified candidates and the expense.
Residential care abolitionists also miss the importance of quality. Residential programs can range from outright abusive to very high quality and highly successful in achieving positive outcomes for their clients. In an op-ed in The Imprint, Dana Dorn and Kari Sisson of the Association of Children’s Residential Centers explain that “High-quality residential interventions have the ability to change lives for the better and are a critical part of the continuum of behavioral health services. They have well-trained and supported staff who provide individualized, trauma-informed, youth-guided, family-driven care in environments that are safe, welcoming and encourage healthy relationships.” The authors stress that providers who are incompetent or “prioritize profits” over people should not be allowed to stay in business.
Opponents of residential care often use faulty reasoning to make their point. They often state that children who attend residential care have worse outcomes than those in family care without explaining that it is the most traumatized, troubled kids with complex histories who are placed in residential facilities. Those children would be expected to have worse outcomes than their peers because they have often had the worst past experiences by the time they finally have access to treatment.
The State of Washington provides a cautionary tale of what can happen when residential care in a state almost disappears. Budget pressures stemming from the 2008 recession dovetailed with the growing sentiment against residential options, as described in an excellent article in The Imprint by Elizabeth Amon. Between 2009 and 2019, over 200 residential beds in 13 locations disappeared. Unfortunately, the state lacks enough appropriate placements for youth with psychiatric, behavioral and developmental needs. These young people end up staying overnight in offices, emergency one-night foster homes, hotels, and cars–or sent to out-of-state facilities including some operated by Sequel. Not only are these arrangements anti-therapeutic, but they are extremely expensive, as Amon points out.
In Texas, where the Imprint focused on the poor quality of many RTC’s, child welfare administrators are worried about the declining number of residential centers. Every year, at least one RTC stops contracting with the state due to inadequate reimbursement, which means they cannot pay workers enough to retain them. As a result, the number of Texas foster children sleeping in offices and hotels spiked last year, according to an article in the Austin American-Statesman. These were mainly teenagers with trauma histories and/or significant behavioral and mental health issues, according to a state official.
In New Mexico, the Department of Children, Youth and Families (CYFD) contracts with ten residential treatment centers in the state, but that is not enough to care for all the foster youth who need therapeutic residential care, as the Secretary told the Santa Fe New Mexican. As a result New Mexico still sends children to out-of-state facilities. The Secretary has requested more funding for additional therapeutic residential care resources.
In Maryland, the Baltimore Sun and WYPR reported last February that dozens of children were spending weeks or even months in psychiatric units of hospitals without a medical reason because social workers had nowhere else to place them. Often these children were placed in psychiatric units after experiencing a crisis in a foster home. Most of these children are not ready to move to a foster home upon discharge and need a higher level of supervision and therapeutic care. But there are waitlists for the roughly 350 spots at Maryland residential treatment facilities, and for out-of-state facilities as well. These long hospital stays are destructive and traumatic to the children as well as extremely expensive.
Last January, I wrote about similar problems in Oregon, New York, California, and Illinois. Residential critics miss the point. If states don’t have quality residential facilities, or any residential facilities at all, they will send their kids to facilities run by operators like Sequel, put them up in offices, hotels, temporary placements or cars, or leave them in hospitals. That’s why only three out of 40 states and territories sending children to Sequel facilities have severed ties with the company, despite its awful track record.
Those who oppose all residential care for foster youths are blind to the challenging problems of some foster youth, the life-changing potential of quality therapeutic residential care and the vast differences between high and low-quality residential facilities. We need to make sure quality residential services are well funded and regulated to keep children out of offices, hotel rooms, abusive or out-of-state facilities, and hospitals. Legislators at all levels of government must recognize the need for adequate funding of this crucial service necessary to heal the wounds of our most fragile foster youth.
Image; University of Houston/Center for study of Social Policy
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police, expressions of outrage from around the country and calls for police reform were soon followed by calls for completely abolishing police forces. It did not take long before a chorus of cries were launched to eliminate child welfare as we know it as well. Child welfare was described as yet another system that controls and punishes people of color. Yet, these calls disregard the suffering of Black children who are abused and neglected; it also ignores the evidence on the reasons for Black families’ high level of involvement in child welfare.
The call for the abolition of child welfare did not come out of the blue after George Floyd’s death. It is the direct descendant of a movement that began around 2004, when a coalition of foundations, nonprofits, and academics formed around the idea that the “disproportionate” representation of Black children in child welfare stemmed from a racist system.[1] This coalition launched a well-funded campaign to reduce the representation of black children in child welfare and especially foster care. They issued reports, held conferences, and provided training and technical assistance to help states analyze their disproportionality problems. The movement seemed to run out of steam afternew research (described below) debunked their major thesis, but it regained strength in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, and came roaring to the forefront after George Floyd’s killing.
One of the leaders in the earlier coalition, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, has joined with the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston to launch a movement entitled upEND, with the aim of ending child welfare as we know it. Several representatives of upEND have published an article in the Journal of Public Child Welfarewhich attempts to explain their thesis. The upEND argument relies on two assertions: that the high rate of Black child and family representation in the child welfare system is due to racism within the system, and that this high rate of representation harms Black children and families. Unfortunately, these assertions are largely wrong, as I explain below.
ASSERTION ONE:The difference in Black vs. white involvement in the child welfare system aredue to a racist child welfare system.[2]
There is no disagreement about the truth of upEND’s statement that Black children and families are more likely to be involved in child welfare than White children and families. In its article, upEND cites studies concluding that Black children are more likely to be reported to child abuse hotlines, more likely to be investigated, more likely to be found to be maltreated, and more likely to be placed in foster care. The ultimate result is that of this chain of disparities at each phase of the child welfare pathway is that in 2018, black children represented 14% of the total child population but 23% of all kids in foster care.
However, the real controversy (although buried in the upEND article) is about the reasons for this disparity. Is it due to a racist child welfare system, as upEND and its allies posit, or due to a difference in the underlying rate of child abuse and neglect among Black versus White families? Data suggest it is the latter. Of course, it is difficult to measure child maltreatment, which makes this question hard to answer. Although the U.S. Children’s Bureau collects annual data on official reports of child maltreatment and agency dispositions of these reports, these numbers leave out unreported maltreatment and may reflect erroneous determinations by investigators. To provide a better estimate, the Bureau periodically conducts National Incidence Studies (NIS) of child abuse and neglect. These studies are designed to estimate more accurately the incidence of child maltreatment in the United States by using community professionals to report on the actual cases of maltreatment that they have seen during the reporting period.
According to the most recent national incidence study, NIS-4, conducted in 2010 on data collected in a year spanning 2005 and 2006, Black children were almost twice as likely to be abused or neglected as white children. It estimated that 24.0 of every 1,000 black children experienced maltreatment severe enough to cause harm in the study year as compared to 12.6 per 1,000 white children.[3] There is other research evidence that Black and White maltreatment rates differ, including studies finding that black children have higher rates of preventable injury deaths; and “evidence that other predictors or markers of maltreatment are higher for black children, including maternal arrest rates, traumatic brain injury rates, parent self-reported maltreatment rates, intentional injury rates, and homicide rates.” A study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2017 concluded that the child abuse fatality rate for children aged four and under was 8.0 per 100,000 African-American children, compared with 2.7 per 100,000 white children.
A conference convened in 2011 by Harvard, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the National Court Appointed Special Advocates, brought together leading scholars on child welfare and race from around the country. A research brief summarizing the conference concluded that “there is a significant black/white maltreatment gap, one that roughly parallels the gap in official maltreatment reports. This evidence contradicts the belief that black children are included at high rates in the child welfare system because of bias.” One speaker noted that “African American children are at least as likely to be underserved as overserved” by current child removal rates. The authors of the brief suggested that the higher rate of maltreatment of Black children stems from the history of slavery and racism, which led to higher poverty and concentration in impoverished neighborhoods characterized by crime, substance abuse, unemployment, and limited community services. As Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School put it, “given the history of race and racism, given the deplorable conditions suffered disproportionately by black families—conditions that produce high rates of substance abuse and other self-destructive behavior—it would be surprising if black children did not have higher rates of contact with the child welfare system than white children.”
In her important book, Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America, Stacey Patton has added to this narrative by linking the legacy of slavery to current patterns of discipline by Black parents. Introduced to whipping by White slaveholders, Black parents adopted a similar practice to train their children to be docile workers and avoid worse punishments from their masters. Even today, Patton contends, some Black parents justify “whupping” their children as the only way to prevent them from being shot or locked up.
In other words, there is a strong argument that disproportionality is rooted in racism. But It’s not a racist child welfare system that results in disproportional representation of black children in the child welfare system. Rather, it is the our country’s history of slavery and continuing oppression of our Black citizens that has created the difference in child maltreatment which in turn resulted in disproportional representation of Black and White children in child welfare.
ASSERTION TWO: The disparity between Black and White representation in child welfare systems causes “pervasive and persistent harm” to Black children and families.
The next pillar of upEND’s argument is that differences in child welfare involvement cause harm to Black children and families. The authors emphasize the placement of Black children in foster care, stating that “the act of forcible separation of children from their parents is the source of significant and lifelong trauma.” It is first worth noting that most children involved with child welfare are not separated from their families. Nationally, more children receive in-home services than are removed to foster care.[3] Moreover, it is not always clear that separation from parents is traumatic for a child. A child’s reaction to placement depends on the child’s age, the quality of the attachment with the parent, the type of environment from which the child is removed, and the way the placement is handled, according to Vera Fahlberg’s authoritative book, A Child’s Journey through Placement. A child who has been emotionally neglected and has no connection to the parent may have “almost no reaction” to the placement, Fahlberg points out. Moreover “if a child is actually fearful of his living environment, he may not react as adversely to the separation. Indeed, relief is occasionally observed.” And even if the child is traumatized by separation from abusive or neglectful parents, that child may still benefit from being removed from that environment.
There is an extensive literature on the harmful and often lifelong consequences of abuse and neglect. These can include impaired brain development, health problems; diminished executive functioning and cognitive skills; poor mental and emotional health; attachment disorders and social difficulties; post traumatic stress; unhealthy sexual practices; juvenile delinquency; alcohol and other drug use; and intergenerational transmission of maltreatment, as described in an issue brief from the Children’s Bureau. The specific outcomes for each child depend on “the child’s age and developmental status at the time of maltreatment, the type, frequency, duration, and severity of the maltreatment, and the relationship between the child and the perpetrator,” according to the Bureau.
Advocates of upending child welfare often point out that most children are removed for neglect rather than abuse, and they suggest that neglect is synonymous with poverty. But the actual prevalence of neglect versus abuse is unknown. One must remember that there may be several types of abuse and neglect in one family but the investigator may not be able to substantiate all of them.There may very well be abuse in a family where only neglect was substantiated. Moreover, the kind of neglect that leads to child welfare involvement is often serious or chronic and is not at all synonymous with poverty. Chronic neglect can lead to serious cognitive and social difficulties, chronic disease, and difficulties in emotion regulation similar to the effects of trauma, as discussed in another brief from the Children’s Bureau. Moreover, chronic neglect often “opens the door” for physical or sexual abuse by a mother’s male partner.
Even though child maltreatment can cause lifetime harm to its victims, one might still believe with upEND that the treatment (child welfare services) is worse than the disease, at least for Black children. To address this contention, Richard Barth and other well-known child welfare scholars recently published a review of the literature entitled Outcomes following child welfare services: what are they and do they differ for Black children? They reviewed more than 50 rigorous studies of outcomes following a child welfare intervention and found “very little reason to believe that children’s outcomes are worsened by participation in child welfare services.” They noted that the vast majority of children received short-term services, with only a fraction placed in foster care. Based on their analysis, they found that child welfare in general results in improved outcomes in the areas of safety and education for both White and Black children and generally neutral effects on health, mental health and behavioral outcomes. Moreover, they concluded that child welfare may protect Black children in particular against some future harms as early death, transitions to juvenile services (for girls), and early childbearing. The authors found no evidence that Black children are doing worse than other children as a consequence of system involvement. Perhaps most important, the researchers found that Black parents and youth, like their White peers, are generally positive about their experience with child welfare. (Most interesting were the two surveys of 21-year-olds that found about two-thirds saying that they were lucky to have been placed in foster care.)
It is very sad that the measurable benefits of child welfare on children’s outcomes are so modest. This may be a consequence of the poor quality of services that are generally provided to many children and their parents. Far from the intensive parenting and enrichment that abuse and neglect victims need, many foster children and youth receive benign neglect at best and outright abuse at worst. As I have written based on my experience, many foster homes provide little nurturing and attention. The system is particularly unsuccessful for older youth with behavioral problems, who are often moved from home to home, placed in residential programs which vary from highly therapeutic to abusive, or spend nights in agencies and hotels, as described in an excellent blog post by Dee Wilson. Moreover, the services provided to children and families by other systems, like mental health and drug treatment, are often low-quality and plagued by waiting lists and provider turnover.
upEND’s policy prescription
In order to end racial disproportionality and its harmful effects, upEND proposes “the abolition of the child welfare system as we know it.” While the exact meaning of this phrase is not specified, the writers make it very clear that abolition means “that the forcible and involuntary separation of children from their parents is no longer viewed as an acceptable form of intervention.” To bolster their proposal, the authors contend that for Black families in America, forced family separation has its roots in the dehumanizing system of slavery.
The historical connection of child removal to racism and slavery is not clear. White children were removed from their families by child welfare agencies long before Black children. Dorothy Roberts, who herself has called for the abolition of child welfare, traces the intellectual roots of child removal to the early progressives around the turn of the twentieth century, who tried to address poverty by placing poor immigrant children in orphanages or sending them to work on rural farms. As Roberts describes in her famous book, Shattered Bonds: the Color of Child Welfare, “black families were virtually excluded from openly segregated child welfare services until the end of World War II.” When public agencies began to take over child welfare from private agencies, they started to turn their attention to Black children. But the disproportionality took some years to appear, according to statistics cited by Roberts. So it is hard to understand the logic of the claim that the practice of child removal by child welfare is rooted in racism.
While not clear on exactly what shape the new child welfare system (if any) would take, upEND states that it will replace the current child welfare system with “community-based supports for the care and well-being of children that are designed by and for families and communities…” The authors call for a broad range of policies including: creating and expanding critical safety net programs and affordable housing; expanding the use of informal care and supports for kin care providers; ending the use of congregate care placements; strengthening the efforts states must make to prevent foster care placement; and eliminating “arbitrary timelines” to terminate parental rights.
The authors do not explain how they would respond to maltreatment of children whose parents are not capable of protecting them, or who have seriously harmed them. As a member of the District of Columbia’s Child Fatality Review Panel, I have learned about many deaths of children whose families had long histories of contact with the city’s child welfare system. These families were the subject of numerous calls to the child abuse hotline for physical abuse, school absenteeism, children left alone, parents under the influence of drugs or alcohol or both–often multiple types of abuse and neglect for the same family. Some of these calls were set aside as not worth investigating, in some cases child protective services found no cause for intervention, and in some cases the intervention was not enough. Whether the child was accidentally crushed as an infant while sleeping with a parent on drugs or alcohol, beaten to death by a parent or the mother’s boyfriend, or shot as a teenager by a member of a rival crew after years of unresolved problems in the home, these children were abandoned by the system that was set up to protect them. upEND’s prescriptions would likely result in more such deaths, even more serious injuries and damage to children, and much more suffering.
As upEND proposes, we need to address the the unconscionable inequality and poverty that affects a disproportionate number of Black families by creating a true safety net and making affordable safe housing available to everyone. To add to their list, we also need to reform policing and criminal justice to eliminate a huge source of stress on Black families. But we cannot wait to protect children until present inequities and the impacts of past ones are eliminated. We should develop programs specifically aimed at preventing abuse and neglect among high-risk families of any race as soon as a child is born, such as Pennsylvania’s new Hello Baby program. Another promising approach is to provide high quality early childhood education accompanied by family support to all infants who are at risk of maltreatment. And as we work toward eliminating child abuse and neglect before they occur, we must continue to respond to children who are currently being maltreated. We must improve the accuracy of this response by eliminating any racial or other biases that result in false positive or negative findings of maltreatment. For example, the use of predictive risk modeling to screen hotline calls has been shown to reduce the disparity between the case opening rates between Black and White children.
As Barth and his colleagues put it, not responding to maltreatment of Black children is a “violation of children’s essential rights.” If we accept upEND’s prescription for eliminating differences in child welfare representation between Black and White children, we will subordinate the rights of children for safety, security and love to the rights of parents to complete autonomy in childrearing. For those who say Black Lives Matter, the this is a sad lack of concern for Black children’s lives.
[1]: The term “disproportionate” or “disproportionality” refer to the fact that a higher proportion of Black children are involved in child welfare relative to White children. In general I prefer to use a more neutral term, such as black children’s “higher level of involvement” or “representation” in child welfare.
[2]: I have taken the. liberty of formulating these assertions to reflect the actual pillars of upEND’s argument. As stated in the article, it appears that their first pillar is that there are racial disparities. But there is no disagreement about that. The authors gloss over the reasons for these disparities, which is the actual point of disagreement between the child welfare abolitionists and others.
[3]:Black children were also nearly twice as likely to experience maltreatment as defined by the more inclusive “endangerment standard.” This broader concept of maltreatment affected 49.6 per 1,000 Black children as compared to 28.6 per 1,000 White children.
[4] According to the Children’s Bureau’s most recent Child Maltreatment report, less than half of the maltreatment victims who received services in Fiscal Year 2018 (146,706 out of 391,661) were placed in foster care. Unfortunately, we do not have these data by race.
On September 21, 2020, the Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) Department of Human Services (DHS) began rolling out a “first of its kind” parenting initiative called Hello Baby. The program aims to support and strengthen families of newborns who are at risk of abuse and neglect, so as to prevent the occurrence of maltreatment rather than responding after it occurs. This new program is an innovative approach that attempts to avoid the flaws of many other programs that aim to prevent child maltreatment.
Hello Baby is a “voluntary program for parents of new babies, designed to strengthen families, improve children’s outcomes, and maximize child and family well-being, safety and security.” As described in a Frequently Asked Questions document and a Methodology Report on the Allegheny County Analytics website (which contains. many other relevant documents as well), the program combines a universal entry point with differentiated services in a three-tiered approach, as described below:
Universal Tier: Services available to all new parents in the county include a “warmline,” the Hello Baby website, and a texting service staffed by volunteers to answer questions about newborns and parenting issues.
Family Support Tier: Families with “moderate needs” will be served through the existing network of 27 Family Centers located around the county. These families will have access to the rich array of services offered by these centers, including home visiting, family support, and child care subsidies.
Priority Tier: Families with the most complex needs are offered the support of a two-person team employed by Healthy Start Pittsburgh, which was selected through a Request for Proposals. The teams are made up of a family engagement specialist, who functions as a peer counselor, and a social worker who plays the role of case manager. In the pandemic environment, they will meet with families both virtually and in home visits. These teams work with families to learn about their needs, connect them to resources, and provide wraparound assistance, which will be available until the child turns three years old. This wraparound assistance can include concrete goods, transportation assistance, and connections to community resources. The priority tier model is based on the COACH Model of the Camden Coalition, a behavior change intervention for people with complex needs.
Every new mother in the county receives information about the program through her birthing hospital, OB/GYN, or pediatrician and may receive an initial visit from a nurse to talk about the program in more detail. A few weeks later, each family receives a postcard informing them of the universally available services and giving them the opportunity to opt out of further contact. Families with moderate and higher levels of need who have not opted out of services will be contacted by the Family Centers or two-person teams, respectively.
The placement of newborns into three different risk groups will be based on a predictive risk model (PRM), another unique part of this program. The model is designed to identify the families with the highest likelihood of having a child removed to foster care before the age of three. The model uses data already available from birth records, child protective services, homeless services, and justice system records to calculate a risk level for each child. Model development was led by Rhema Vaithianathan and Emily Putnam-Hornstein, along with the data science team based at the Centre for Social Data Analytics (Auckland University of Technology, NZ). Vaithianathan and Putnam-Hornstein are world leaders on the use of PRM in child welfare, and they have been working with Allegheny DHS since developing the county’s child abuse hotline screening tool in 2015. While most Priority Tier slots will be filled through PRM, some slots will be reserved for parents who request intensive support or those referred by clinical providers.
The program planners made extensive efforts to address potential concerns about privacy, coercion to participate, or involvement with child protective services (CPS). Hello Baby is not connected to CPS. The risk scores will not be shared beyond program staff, used after the initial screening, kept on file, or used for any child welfare purpose. No family will be reported to CPS for refusing to participate in the program. DHS estimates that 40 percent of the families assigned to the most intensive service tier will already be involved with child welfare. These families will be eligible for the program except when safety issues are so grave that the baby is removed right after birth by CPS. If the family agrees, Hello Baby staff can work directly with the child welfare caseworker to make sure the family receives the best services to meet their needs.
The FAQ document cites several reasons for the development of Hello Baby. For one, agency leaders recognized that the county was rich in programmatic resources but that the resources were not reaching those who needed them both. Second, they realized that the historical practice of targeting high-poverty areas for prevention efforts (like the county’s Family Centers) leaves out many families in need because the root causes of child maltreatment (such as substance abuse, mental illness and intimate partner violence) cut across economic lines. Finally, even within a community with a Family Center, evidence suggests that those who need it most may not access the services.
The focus on ages 0 to 3 was chosen because infants and children are most at risk of serious abuse and neglect–and most likely to die of such maltreatment. Almost 80 percent of Allegheny County children who suffered fatalities connected with abuse or neglect were under the age of three. And half of them were unknown to the child welfare system, which means that there had been no earlier opportunity to protect the child.
According to an account on the county’s DHS website, Allegheny’s child welfare leaders began thinking about a child maltreatment prevention program using a tiered approach supported by predictive risk modeling (PRM) in 2015, when they were developing the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) for screening hotline calls to determine their relative risk level. If they could use PRM to screen child maltreatment reports, DHS leaders asked, would there be a way for them to use these methods to reach families “BEFORE they reach the breaking point?”
The fact that Allegheny County DHS is already using PRM to screen hotline calls is a testament to the vision and courage of its leadership. Few other jurisdictions have implemented PRM in child welfare in part because of the controversy surrounding the use of an algorithm in decisions about case opening.[1] But DHS Director Marc Cherna is one of the longest-serving human services directors, having served in the position since 1997 and has won nationwide recognition for his innovative initiatives. He was was the first director of DHS, a mega-agency that was the outcome of a merger between several discrete departments. As described in a case study, Cherna took the opportunity to create a “data warehouse” integrating information from the formerly separate agencies. This integrated database in turn provided the opportunity to improve decision-making using PRM. In response to a Request for Proposals, DHS chose the team led by Vaithianathan and Putnam-Hornstein to develop the AFST and later the Hello Baby tool as well.
Hello Baby is the outcome of many years of research and planning by DHS leadership working together with community members, according to the FAQ document. The process included an extensive literature review focused on how to engage and retain families with intensive and complex needs. In addition to the internal literature review, DHS commissioned two independent ethical reviews. The developers also met with families receiving services, service providers, clinical experts, judges, Family Court advocates, peer support agencies, national experts, local funders; and civil liberties, civil rights and social justice organizations to identify service gaps and concerns. Finally they conducted case reviews with social workers and child development experts in order to understand the population they were seeking to reach.
Hello Baby was launched on September 1, 2020 and is being piloted at a subset of sites before being rolled out statewide after a year. DHS anticipates providing Priority Tier service to five percent of families with new babies or about 650 families per year when the program is fully implemented. The County has contracted with two respected social science research institutes–Chapin Hall and the Urban Institute–to conduct process and impact evaluations of Hello Baby.
As Vaithianathan and Putnam-Hornstein explain in their methodology document, we know very little about what works, and for whom, to prevent child maltreatment. Therefore, new approaches are needed. Hello Baby’s combination of universality and targeting is appealing based on logic. As DHS. explains in an implementation brief provided to Child Welfare Monitor, universal services have many benefits, like reduced stigma, wider reach and no need for eligibility requirements. But when resources are limited, services are stretched thinly across many families. Families with the greatest needs may not get the intensity of services they need, while families with lesser needs may receive support disproportionate to their needs. Hello Baby addresses this problem with its tiered service array.
DHS has undertaken an elaborate process to protect privacy and self-determination and prevent the use of risk scores in any context other than assigning families to Hello Baby tiers. However it must be recognized that there is a tradeoff between parental self-determination and protecting children. Prior research indicates that it is difficult to engage the highest-risk families in voluntary services. By ruling out the possibility of reporting these families to CPS, DHS may be condemning some children to years of neglect, abuse, injury, or even death. We hope that DHS will collect and report on the number, risk scores, and future maltreatment reports, of those who decline to participate in order to assess the extent of this problem.
We congratulate Allegheny County for the implementation of Hello Baby. The lack of attention to the rollout by prominent child welfare organizations, thought leaders and media is surprising. We hope that child welfare leaders are are paying attention to this important initiative and thinking about options for similar programs.
[1]: Much of the controversy around PRM centers on fears that it will exacerbate racial disparities in child welfare decision making. But an evaluation of the AFST has suggested that it has reduced, rather than increased, racial disparities in the rate of case opening between White and Black children, thus assuaging fears that it would increase such disparities.
Hera McLeod did everything she could to protect her baby son from a father who she said had attempted to suffocate her when she was pregnant, raped her 19 year-old sister and was a suspect in killings of his mother and the mother of his other child. But it was not enough The judge in her custody case accepted her ex-husband’s favorable evaluation by a school counselor who was not certified to evaluate adults. In contrast, he did not accept a police report regarding the father’s abuse of another child in Virginia in the absence of the arresting officer. On his fifth unsupervised visit, paramedics responding to a 911 call found 15-month-old Prince naked, wet and not breathing at Rams’ home. Joaquin Rams is serving a life sentence for drowning his son.
Prince’s case is not unique. Around the country there has been a growing awareness that family courts are failing to protect children in custody cases where there is domestic violence or child abuse. Parents who attempt to protect their children from abusive ex-partners (often known as “protective parents”) are labeled as alienators or “high conflict” and often penalized and their warnings disregarded, as discussed in an earlier post by Child Welfare Monitor. The results can be tragic. The Center for Judicial Excellence has documented 758 children murdered by a divorcing or separating parent since 2008. We have no idea how many children are ordered into some type of unsupervised contact with an abusive parent: this number was estimated at 58,000 in 2008. While murder is an extreme result of bad custody decisions, the devastating results on surviving children of being left with an abuser are incalculable.
Anne Hoyer directs the State of Maryland’s Safe at Home Address Confidentiality Program for domestic violence survivors. From talking to the women she served, Hoyer became more and more concerned about how often she was hearing about judges awarding custody of children to their abusers. She worked with State Senator Susan Lee to draft legislation setting up a workgroup to study child custody court proceedings involving child abuse or domestic violence.
The legislation took effect in 2019 and the workgroup began meeting in June of that year. Chaired by the Secretary of State, who has jurisdiction over the Safe at Home program, the workgroup included four legislators, 12 other members with expertise on domestic violence, child abuse or child custody, and one parent with personal Family Court experience. On September 15, 2020, the workgroup issued its final report. It contains a summary of its findings as well as 24 recommendations designed to improve the performance of Maryland’s Family Court in protecting children involved in custody cases involving abuse or domestic violence.
The workgroup acknowledged the difficulty of making custody decisions in cases where domestic violence or child abuse are present. Abused children, domestic violence victims, and domestic abusers may all behave in counterintuitive ways. An abusive parent may make a better impression on the court than the protective parent; an abused child may deny the abuse and demonstrate attachment to the abusive parent. As a result, protective parents may be labeled as unreasonable, vindictive, or attempting to “alienate” their child from the abusive parent. Ms. McLeod described trying to abide by the advice of attorneys to express her desire that her son have a healthy relationship with his father while at the same time convincing the court that her husband was dangerous–an almost impossible tightrope to walk. The workgroup also noted that abusive parents with greater financial means often use litigation to assert continued control over protective parents and can use their superior resources to buy better representation in the court case and impose burdensome costs on protective parents.
The workgroup also expressed its concernabout the widespread acceptance by courts of parental alienation claims against protective parents–a national problem. Specifically, a child’s fear or hostility toward a parent accused of being abusive by the other parent is attributed to the latter’s attempt to “alienate” the child from the other parent. The workgroup heard from Joan Meier, whose massive study on this issue has drawn much attention. Meier presented her results that indicate when a father claims alienation, the court’s likelihood of believing a mother’s abuse claim is dramatically reduced.
Professor Meier’s results also supported the conclusion that courts are now biased against mothers– in contrast to the anti-father bias that used to be prevalent in family court. For example she found that when fathers alleged that mothers were alienators, they took custody 44 percent of the time. Mothers who alleged that fathers were alienators took custody only 28 percent of the time. Fathers who were proven to have committed child physical abuse still took custody 25 percent of the time; mothers proven to have committed physical abuse were never granted custody. Experts cited additional evidence of gender bias in custody cases. Dr. Daniel Saunders presented a survey of 200 judges and 465 custody evaluators showed the prevalence of sexist myths, such as that mothers often accuse fathers falsely of domestic violence, that lead to recommendations likely to harm domestic violence victims and their children. Deborah Epstein, the Co-Director of the Domestic Violence Clinic at George Washington University Law School shared observations from many years of experience in DC Superior Court documenting routine disbelief of women’s claims of domestic abuse. (Summaries of all the presentations are provided at the end of the workgroup’s report).
Two of the most important workgroup recommendations, according to Hoyer, address judicial training and specialization. The workgroup recommended that the judiciary, in consultation with domestic violence and child. advocacy organizations, develop an ongoing training program for judges who preside over custody cases that involve child abuse or domestic violence. A judge would be required to receive at least 60 hours of training before presiding over such a case and to pursue at least 10 hours of such training every two years to continue hearing these cases. The workgroup also recommended a list of topics to be covered in the initial training, including: the impact of adverse childhood experiences on children and variations in how children respond to trauma; limitations in Child Protective Services responses to allegations and the fact that abuse may have occurred even if an investigation did not substantiate it; the impact of exposure to domestic violence on children; the effects of bias on custody decision-making; the history of parental alienation theory and its inappropriate use in child custody cases; and tools to assess children’s credibility in court.
Considering the impractically of training all circuit court judges this deeply in these issues, the workgroup recommended that a limited number of judges be specially trained to handle custody cases in which child abuse or domestic violence have been alleged or established. Moreover, the Judiciary must ensure that such cases are assigned only to Judges with this specialized training.
The workgroup made many other recommendations, including several that would change statutory language to better account for child abuse and domestic violence, impose more stringent qualifications and requirements for other professionals (lawyers and custody evaluators) involved in custody cases, and give parties access to needed resources without financial hardship. But according to Hoyer, “establishing a corps of judges who want to do this work and giving them the tools to do it is the essential foundation that will pave the way for future changes.” For example, fully-trained and specialized judges will be less likely to accept evaluations that are inadequate or performed by unqualified people.
Legislators and other workgroup members will be meeting in the weeks ahead to translate some of the recommendations into legislation to be introduced during the upcoming legislative session. Maryland’s workgroup is the first of its kind in the nation and Hoyer has received questions from many other states. Child Welfare Monitor hopes that other states will follow Maryland’s example and initiate the process for making our troubled family courts safe for children.
Every year when school resumes after summer vacation, child welfare agencies brace themselves for an onslaught of reports as teachers see children after the entire summer and flood hotlines with reports of suspected abuse or neglect. Earlier in the year, many officials and advocates expressed concern that this fall would see any even greater surge of calls than usual and that child welfare agencies would be overwhelmed. But as more and more schools and systems opted for a virtual opening this year, policymakers and advocates began to worry about the opposite problem–a continued dearth of reports to child abuse hotlines and a continued fear that children are suffering unseen.
A chorus of media reports from all over the country last spring documented drastic drops in calls to child abuse hotlines following school closures due to the coronavirus pandemic. As Child Welfare Monitorreported, almost every state reported declines in hotline calls last spring, with calls dropping often by half and sometimes by as much as 70 percent since schools shut their doors. A survey of children’s advocacy centers, which work with victims of physical and sexual abuse nationwide, found a 21 percent drop in the number of children served in January through June of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019; the drop would probably be much greater if only March through June were considered.
The loss of reports from schools was the primary explanation for the drops in reports of child maltreatment. And indeed the shift to online education delivered a double-whammy to any attempts at child protection. For children who did attend virtually, it was harder for teacher to see signs of trouble, like bruises or hunger. And many students who did did not show up for virtual education regularly or at all. The New York Times heard from many teachers around the country that fewer than half of their students were participating in online education. The School Superintendent in Los Angeles has reported that only 60 percent of students participated daily in online learning last spring. A child’s failure to participate may reflect the lack of a dedicated computer or internet access, difficulties in accessing platforms, a child too busy watching siblings or even working, or lack of engagement in virtual education. Whatever the explanation for their absence, these children were not being seen by teachers, counselors or other school staff, often the ones who notice red flags. Other reporters, like doctors and extended family members, were also less likely to see children under the Covid-19 quarantine.
More detailed data from Allegheny County Pennsylvania and two Colorado counties (shared in a webinar from Mathematica Policy Research) and from Maine (shared in a Child Welfare League of America webinar) shed some light on changes in reporting trends in the last school year and what they might mean. The number of calls to child abuse hotlines (also called reports or referrals), as compared to the previous year, fell dramatically in all three states. The decline in reports was especially marked among teachers and other school staff such as counselors. In all the jurisdictions the lower-risk referrals tended to drop off the most. In the data for Colorado and Allegheny County, where predictive risk modeling is used to screen hotline calls, the average risk scores of the children being referred rose, suggesting that the lower-risk referrals tended to drop off more than the higher risk referrals. Maine officials found that reports were generally more severe and that they were getting fewer reports that were screened out as inappropriate or because there were multiple reports from the same family. Participants in both webinars suggested that in normal times schools make too many unnecessary reports for minor issues, and that many of these reports were being suppressed by the school closures.
It is encouraging that less serious referrals are more likely to be dropped than more serious ones, but it is equally clear that higher-risk referrals are being lost as well. Another important indicator is the percentage of referrals that result in a substantiation–or a finding that abuse or neglect has occurred. If the missing referrals were mainly frivolous, we would expect a big increase in the percentage of reports that was substantiated. That did not occur in at least one state–Michigan–spurring its child welfare director to design an initiative discussed below. Unfortunately, substantiation data on a national level for last spring will not be available for another year from the federal government.
At the same time that reports dropped, many child advocates have expressed fear that child maltreatment has actually increased. Based on past research, family violence increases in times of natural or economic disasters, probably in large part due to parental stress. In addition to the stress imposed by job loss and health concerns, parents who are cooped up in close quarters for months with their children may be more prone to respond with violence. And parents who need to work despite school closures may leave their children uncared for or with caregivers who are unprepared.
Despite these reasons to suspect that child maltreatment may be increasing, we do not have any national data to confirm or deny it. Data from individual hospitals in various locations around the country has been cited to demonstrate that cases of severe child abuse are increasing. Hospitals around the country have reported increases in serious injuries and even deaths compared to previous years. Reports of such excessive child abuse injuries and deaths have come from hospitals in Fort Worth, Texas, Orlando, Florida, Colorado Springs, Colorado, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. But without systematic data from hospitals, we really cannot know if this represents a national trend.
Last Spring, child advocates worried about the unseen children who would have to wait until schools reopened after the summer to have their situation discovered. But as more and more districts abandoned plans to open school buildings, it became clear that the anticipated onslaught of hotline calls would not occur in these jurisdictions. What can be done to ensure that children are safe? Several different approaches have been tried or suggested.
Public awareness campaigns: Some jurisdictions have instituted publicity campaigns encouraging members of the community to report child abuse and neglect. For example, the New Jersey Department of Children and Families launched a ‘Social Distancing Shouldn’t Mean Social Isolation’ campaign to raise awareness about child abuse, domestic violence and other dangers facing residents while homebound. It include a flyer about warning signs of child abuse as well as a more general resource that includes telephone numbers for the child abuse, domestic violence, mental health, and other hotlines. In a Call to Action for State Governors, CHILD USA, a national think tank focused on child protection, suggests that Governors should add to all their COVID updates a reference to the need for all adults to be alert for signs of abuse and neglect, along with how to reach the child abuse hotline.
Providing new guidance to traditional reporters: Some agencies have created new resources to share with educators and other traditional reporters of child abuse and neglect. Maine issued guidance for educators, medical personnel, and community members to help them identify warning signs of child abuse and neglect in a time of virtual education. CHILD USA released a useful list of Tips for Teachers on Child Welfare and Online Safety during COVID-19 which suggests questions for teachers to ask that are targeted at elementary, middle and high school students. The questions focus on food, physical safety and online safety. The document also includes tips on what to look for in the home environment as perceived through a computer screen. The Zero Abuse Project has published Responding to Child Abuse During a Pandemic: 25 Tips for MDT’s, which provides tips that might be useful for child welfare agencies as well. The authors included some valuable advice, such as a reminder to teachers that abuse has been shown to increase after a child receives a bad report card. They suggest that teachers. contact parents in advance of giving out a bad grade, promise to follow up (with the hope of defusing any violence) and call authorities if parents indicate a plan to punish the child physically,.
Reaching Out to Nontraditional Reporters: Some child advocates like family violence researcher Andrew Campbell have urged states to reach out to nontraditional reporters, such as postal workers, garbage collectors, and home repair agencies, who are continuing to see children as they move through homes and neighborhoods. A simple postcard listing the warning signs of child maltreatment and the phone number of the child abuse hotline could be distributed to businesses and agencies employing such workers. Animal protection agencies are another potential community partner for child welfare agencies, as Campbell also suggests. Animal control officers could be trained and enlisted to check up on the wellbeing of humans as well as animals in homes where animal abuse has been reported.
School Based Approaches: Schools have a critical role to play in ensuring that children can be protected in a time of virtual schooling. Districts must make sure that all students have access to a computer and high-speed internet service. It is critical that they adopt a policy of checking in with all students they have not been able to reach for a specified period of time, whether a day or a week. Clearly this is easier said than done in schools serving largely disadvantaged populations. Media outlets have reported on the herculean efforts of dedicated school staff who have spent months trying to locate students who were missing from virtual education. Schools can also provide training to their teachers in how to spot red flags in virtual meetings, as Pueblo County Colorado has done. Schools should also consider adding to their virtual platforms an option for children to indicate that they are in trouble at home and need help.
Reaching out to at-risk families known to the system: Noticing the precipitous fall in calls to the hotline without a corresponding rise in substantiation rates, Michigan’s child welfare director JooYeun Chang feared that some children in need were “simply invisible,” as she explained to the editor of The Imprint. Before the pandemic arrived, the agency had commissioned an assessment from Chapin-Hall, a child welfare think-tank, which had identified 14,000 families that had been involved with the agency and had a high risk of children entering foster care without receiving additional preventive services. About 1,000 child protection workers freed up by the decline in hotline calls were assigned to reach out to these families to find out if they needed any type of assistance. Data provided to Child Welfare Monitor indicate that workers spoke with 8,267 of the 14,162 families on the list, and 80 percent of the families received a text, email, or mailing. Workers provided general support, information and referrals. Many parents expressed great appreciation for the calls; some conversations lasted 45 to 90 minutes. One worker was able to contact a cash assistance worker and rectify the erroneous closing of a case, another provided referrals to a father struggling with physical and mental health problems who thanked the worker several times just for listening. The agency is now reaching out to another 10,000 families that were investigated since the Covid-19 shutdowns began.
Inspired by Michigan, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania DHS is using staff and community partners to connect with higher-risk families involved in child welfare cases that closed six months earlier, to check in and find out whether they need help with food, housing or other services. Checking in with families to offer assistance is not designed to identify ongoing abuse or neglect. However, it may reduce the probability of child maltreatment recurrence by helping families meet concrete needs for food, clothing and shelter and even by offering them a friendly ear and reducing their social isolation.
Investing in Prevention: Interest in preventing child maltreatment before it occurs as was already growing before the Covid-19 pandemic. The drop in CPS reports under virtual schooling has led to even more interest in prevention. Particularly relevant are secondary prevention approaches, which target families that are at risk of child maltreatment. Michigan DHHS under Jooyeun Chang is working on a new pilot that will be run by a nonprofit in two of the five Detroit zip codes from which the bulk of Detroit’s foster youth were removed. The program will target 400 families (chosen based on the previous calls), who will each receive a peer counselor with similar “lived experience” and a benefits navigator, who will connect the family to needed resources in the community. Combining peer counseling and benefits navigation is an innovative approach that may enhance the value of each of these components when provided together. In addition to the peer navigators, group activities will provide needed information and help participants build their social networks.
The Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) Department of Human Services (DHS) is launching the Hello Baby prevention program in partnership with local Healthy Start and Family Centers. The program, which is voluntary and not affiliated with child protective services, is an interesting hybrid of universal and targeted prevention. It will be offered to all families with a new baby but will offer three levels of services to families depending on how they score based on a predictive risk model using integrated data from multiple sources. The families with the most profound needs will be offered intensive services through Healthy Start Pittsburgh while others will be welcomed to their neighborhood Family Center and/or offered a variety of web-based and “warmline” supports and resources. While the program has not yet launched officially, DHS has soft-launched in some communities with a high density of vulnerable families.
The approaches outlined above fall into two broad categories: initiatives to enhance detection and reporting of child abuse and neglect and those designed to prevent it. These approaches are often supported by different groups in the child welfare space. However, both approaches are valid and important. We cannot go back in time and prevent the abuse and neglect that are already occurring, so we must have a robust system of reporting and investigation to find the children who need protection. On the other hand, to the extent that we can prevent future abuse and neglect before it starts, the benefits would be enormous.
Richard Gelles, one of the nation’s leading child welfare experts, died late in June of brain cancer, as reported by the Chronicle of Social Change. Gelles’ death deprives the nation of one of its leading child welfare scholars, and one of the few remaining spokespersons for a child centered approach to child welfare.
Richard Gelles played an important role in the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1996 through the publication of The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children’s Lives. This book told the story of a 15-month old boy who was murdered by his abusive mother. David’s parents had an open child welfare case when he was born, due to their severe abuse of his sister Marie when she was six weeks old that left her with lifelong disabilities. While Marie was still in foster care, the parents were reported to the child abuse hotline twice for abusing David. In closing their investigation without removing David or opening a case, agency workers ignored two huge red flags–the grievous injury to six-week-old Marie and the failure by her parents to comply with the agency’s reunification plan, resulting in the termination of their parental rights to their daughter. Three and a half months after the case was closed, David was dead.
According to Gelles, David’s death could be traced to the doctrine requiring that agencies make “reasonable efforts” to keep or reunite abused and neglected children with their parents. Without any definition or timeframe, efforts to keep children like David with their birth parents often cross the line separating reasonable from unreasonable. Gelles argued that David’s death could also be traced to “the larger ideology behind ‘reasonable efforts,’ ‘the sacrosanct belief that children always (or nearly always) are better off with their biological parents.”
In his testimony at a 1995 Congressional hearing, Gelles argued that the current obsession with family preservation should be replaced for a “child centered child welfare system” where abused and neglected children would longer remain for years in abusive homes, nor would they languish for years in foster care. Instead, the goal of a child-centered child welfare system would be “to terminate parental rights, when appropriate, quickly enough so that (1) children are not permanently harmed, physically or psychologically, and {2) make children available for adoption earlier enough in their lives so that they are ‘adoptable.'”
Gelles’ perspective was incorporated into several changes made by ASFA, as described by former Hill staffer Cassie Statuto Bevan in an Urban Institute compilation on ASFA ten years after its passage. The requirement for “reasonable efforts” was moderated by requiring that such efforts must maintain the child’s health and safety as the “paramount concern.” Moreover, a deadline was placed on reunification efforts, requiring a state to file for termination of parental rights after a child had been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. ASFA also allowed states to bypass reasonable efforts altogether in extraordinary cases, such as when parents have committed a felony assault resulting in serious injury to the child or another child–clearly an exception that could have been applied in David’s case.
While it appears that ASFA has resulted in shorter stays in foster care as Gelles hoped, the impact of the provisions designed to protect children from dangerous parents appears to have been less than their authors hoped. Agencies make frequent use allowable exceptions to the 15-month time limit for termination of parental rights and rarely use the provisions that allow them to forego reunification plans. In order to make the system more child-centered, these provisions should be strengthened. Unfortunately, we seem to be going in the opposite direction.
There is a groundswell of attacks against ASFA, with critics claiming that 15 months is not enough time for with problems like drug addiction to address them, especially if services are not immediately available. Some critics even denounce the law as racist because they say it penalizes black parents, ignoring the needs of black children for safety and permanency. Contrary to the child-centered perspective Gelles promoted, these advocates prioritize parents’ rights over children’s needs to be placed in a loving home quickly enough to avoid permanent damage and early enough in their lives to be likely to be adopted.
In The Book of David and in his testimony, Gelles also criticized the investment of a billion dollars in unproven “intensive family preservation programs” to keep families together. These new programs, such as the well-publicized Homebuilders, were intensive, short term, crisis intervention services designed to address parental behaviors that are putting their children at risk. Gelles pointed out that there was no research evidence to support the success of intensive family preservation programs at preventing foster care placements, let alone keeping children safe–which was not even evaluated. And from a theoretical perspective, Gelles pointed out that intensive family preservation programs would be effective for only those families with a low level of risk and a high level of readiness to change. To assume that these services could work for all maltreating families was unrealistic.
Sadly, the same programs that were supported without evidence in the 1980’s are being supported again with more baseless claims of research support. As reported in a recent post, Homebuilders is once again being promoted as effective in keeping families together, although the research is no more convincing than that of the 1980s. Recently Homebuilders was approved as a best practice that can be funded by the Family First Act, based on only two studies. One of the studies focused on a program that did not follow the Homebuilders model and worked only to reunify families already separated by foster care—not prevent foster care placement which is the main purpose of Family first. The second was a study of Homebuilders family preservation programs and according to its authors failed to demonstrate any favorable program impacts.
Why invest in a program that has failed to document success over several decades of research? The renewed push for family preservation has once again taken over the child welfare world. With the passage of the Family First Act, allowing billions in funding for programs that keep families together, there is a desperate need for programs to spend that money on. The federal clearinghouse established to approve programs for this purpose has demonstrated that its standards for calling a program “well-supported by the evidence” are low indeed. And that is not surprising, since there are few such programs that have been shown to be effective in helping abusive and neglectful parents change longstanding and often intergenerational patterns. And so the story starts again.
As we face increased backlash against ASFA and increased incentives to spend billions of dollars on unproven family preservation programs, Richard Gelles’ keen analysis and advocacy for children will be greatly missed.
The COVID-19 pandemic is having a disastrous effect on the systems designed to protect children from abuse and neglect, as discussed in an earlier post. With children being isolated from teachers and others who might report suspicions of maltreatment, a drastic decline in calls to child protection hotlines has been reported nationwide. This decline calls for equally drastic measures to identify at-risk children before schools close for the academic year.
The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis has given rise to widespread fears of increasing child abuse and neglect, as well as domestic violence. The stress imposed by job and income loss, unmet basic needs, school closures, and fear of sickness all are likely to lead to increases in child abuse and neglect. Older children who are too young to care for siblings safely may be nevertheless left in charge. Research suggests that child abuse increases during natural and economic disasters and the current crisis combines both.
Reports from emergency rooms suggest that the fears about increased child abuse are warranted. Hospitals in Texas, Florida, Philadelphia,Maryland and Washington DC have reported more children coming to emergency rooms with serious child abuse injuries, such as head trauma and fractures, that require hospitalization. A spokeswoman for the American College of Emergency Physicians told the Washington Post that members “nationwide have reported treating more serious injuries in a week than they are used to seeing in a month.”
At the same time as abuse and neglect appear to be increasing, social distancing is separating children from the professionals and others who might notice abuse or neglect and report it to authorities. As a result, calls to child abuse hotlines around the country have dropped drastically since the national lockdowns began. Child Welfare Monitor has collected reports of drops in the number of hotline calls from 37 states and the District of Columbia, most of which are reporting decreases of 50 percent or more.
The drop in child abuse and neglect reports is not a surprise. The largest source of such reports is education staff, who made 21 percent of such reports around the nation in 2018 according to federal data. With schools closed, some children are in contact with their teachers through video apps, where signs of abuse or neglect are harder to spot than in person. But that is the best case. Not all schools are using video applications to run virtual classrooms (known as “synchronous” education) and relying instead on “asynchronous” teaching methods where teachers record lessons and post assignments, which students in turn email or upload.
Whatever the nature of online education, many children are participating sporadically or not at all. The New York Times heard from many teachers around the country that fewer than half of their students were participating. Not surprisingly, participation has been lowest in schools with many low-income students, who often lack access to computers and the internet. These are the same students who are most likely to be victims of abuse or neglect. Many systems, in conjunction with internet providers, have distributed computers and made free internet available to families that lacked these resources but it is not clear how successful these efforts have been in bridging the digital divide.
Despite the reduced access to students, many teachers are making special efforts to monitor their most vulnerable students. The Washington Post reported on a teacher in Virginia who added a pop-up prompt to her power-points asking children how they are feeling on a scale from red (awful) to orange to yellow to blue (perfect). Staffers for Danville County Virginia public schools who are delivering meals to students try to take the opportunity to engage with families and lay eyes on the children. Teachers are still making reports to hotlines, although certainly these reports are fewer in number. For example, as reported in Child Welfare Monitor DC, teachers made 30 percent of the 897 hotline calls received by the Child and Family Services Agency between March 16 and April 18 of this year, as compared to 52 percent of 2,356 hotline calls during the same period of 2019.
Aside from teachers and education personnel, other important reporting sources also have less access to children during this crisis situation. This includes medical personnel, who are seeing few children for routine appointments, as well as friends, family members, and neighbors.
Once schools close for the summer, the best opportunity to identify children at risk of maltreatment will be gone. Therefore, we urge schools and child welfare agencies to work together to identify these children before schools close for the summer. School personnel could make efforts to reach all students who has not been in regular contact with their teachers via telephone, text, email, or other means available. Any student that they cannot reach even after several tries using more than one method could be referred to child protective services to be contacted through a home visit if necessary.
One official who has seen the need for action has been Sheriff Alex Villanueva of Los Angeles County, which has seen a 50% decline in calls to its child maltreatment hotline since the lockdown began. The county has been the site of numerous deaths of children known to the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), including the death of Gabriel Fernandez, which was the subject of a widely viewed documentary. Stating that “We do not want another Gabriel Fernandez,” Villanueva announced a plan to have patrol officers check up on high-risk children who have not been in contact with their schools. Apparently the Sheriff was planning to reach out to schools reminding them of their mandatory reporting duties and announcing that deputies would be available to do welfare checks on children for whom schools express concern.
The Sheriff’s plan was rejected by DCFS on the grounds that sending uniformed officers to check on families without a specific allegation of abuse or neglect would only exacerbate their stress and not necessarily improve safety for children, as DCFS Director Bobby Cagle told the Los Angeles Times. Child Welfare Monitor agrees that police officers might not be the most appropriate professionals to do these welfare checks. But instead of rejecting the idea of reaching out to these children and their families, DCFS could have worked with the schools to identify and reach out to these students, as suggested above.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. While child welfare agencies would not normally consider sending out workers to check on children with no specific allegation of abuse or neglect, it is crucial that we take advantage of the quickly disappearing window of opportunity to reach children that have not been in regular touch with their teachers during the societal lockdown. Child welfare agencies should work with schools to identify these children before schools close, leaving abused and neglected children completely at the mercy of their caregivers.
Richard Gelles, one of the nation’s leading child welfare experts, died late in June of brain cancer, as reported by the 
The COVID-19 pandemic is having a disastrous effect on the systems designed to protect children from abuse and neglect, as discussed in an earlier 