New Jersey to foster parents: thanks but no thanks!

Foster Parents Needed As COVID-19 Pandemic Strains Families is a typical headline these days, as illustrated in an article from Illinois. The pandemic has imposed new impediments to recruiting and retaining foster parents, including fears of exposure to COVID-19, loss of employment and income, and concerns about supervising virtual schooling. But these issues do not seem to be affecting New Jersey, where prospective foster parents are told that they are not needed, thank you very much! While the state credits its efforts at child abuse prevention and family preservation for its lack of need for foster parents, the explanation seems to lie elsewhere. Over the course of five years, the state has cut in half its rate of confirming allegations of abuse and neglect–resulting in a similar fall in the number of children entering foster care. This is a big change, and one that demands explanation in order to ensure that the agency is continuing to fulfill its mission of ensuring children’s safety in New Jersey.

Would-be New Jersey foster parents who click on “Be A Foster Parent” on the website of the Department of Children and Families (DCF) are greeted with the following message: “Thank you for your interest in becoming a resource parent to children and youth in state care.  Due to the COVID19 Pandemic and its impact on operations, DCF has suspended all new inquiry submissions at this time. Please continue to check our website for any updates.” This is an odd message indeed, as it seems to imply that the pandemic has made recruitment and licensing impossible. But agencies around the country have adapted quickly to move vetting and training online in order to enable new foster parents to enter the pipeline. Not so New Jersey.

When we asked DCF why foster parents are being turned away, we received the following reply from DCF Communications Director Jason Butkowski. “[W]e did experience a 19.17% reduction in out-of-home placements from 2019 to 2020.  This is attributable both to New Jersey’s statewide prevention network and our ongoing work to preserve families and keep children and parents together in their homes while receiving services.”

Interestingly, a message sent earlier to prospective foster parents gave a different answer. In May, 2020, would-be foster parents received a message saying, “In New Jersey, the number of youth in foster care continues to be reduced each year because we are focusing first on kinship placements,” as quoted in an article by Naomi Schaefer Riley. We asked Mr. Butkowski which explanation was more accurate–prevention and family preservation or kinship placements–but received no answer.

So what is going on in New Jersey? Certainly, foster care numbers have been decreasing. According to the data portal maintained by Rutgers University, annual entries to foster care fell from 5,504 in 2013 to 2,525 in 2019, as shown in the chart below. The rate of decrease in foster care entries became even steeper between 2018 and 2019, with a decrease of 23.7 percent in the number of entries in that one year alone. The total number of children in foster care dropped from a high of 7,775 in May 2014 to 4,463 in February 2020–before the pandemic closures occurred. So what could be causing this drastic decline in foster care placements and caseloads?

Source: NJ Child Welfare Data Hub, available from https://njchilddata.rutgers.edu/portal/entering-placement-reports#

One possibility might be a decline in child abuse and neglect, which Butkowski is implicitly assuming by attributing part of the fall in foster care cases to DCF’s “statewide prevention network.” In that case, one might expect reports to child abuse hotlines to decline significantly. But according to monthly state reports, calls to child abuse hotlines hardly changed between 2014 and 2019, decreasing very slightly from 165,458 to 164,417. Of course we cannot be sure that reports are an accurate measure of child maltreatment; but one might expect a significant reduction in hotline calls if a large reduction in maltreatment were occurring.

DCF’s Butkowski also credited the agency’s work to “keep children and parents together in their homes while receiving services” as a reason for declining foster care entries. It is true that most substantiations of abuse or neglect do not result in foster care. Instead, DCF works with many families in their homes to help them avoid future maltreatment. But DCF has been emphasizing in-home services for years. Of all the children who were under DCF supervision in foster care or in-home services, the percentage receiving in-home services rather than foster care was 84.7 percent in May 2014 and 90 percent in February 2020. So children were somewhat more likely to receive in-home services in 2020 than in 2014, but the difference was small and not likely to explain the big fall in the foster care rolls.

So with hotline calls basically unchanged, and only a slight increase in the emphasis on in-home services, how did New Jersey manage to reduce its foster care entries by almost half in six years? One can think of the child welfare process as a funnel, starting with referrals, the child welfare term for hotline calls. As we discussed, those have fallen only slightly. Only some referrals are screened-in and accepted for investigation; many are rerouted or receive no action because hotline workers determine that they do not concern abuse or neglect. But a reduction in screened-in referrals is not part of the explanation for New Jersey’s drop in foster care placements. New Jersey reported that 60,934 referrals were screened in in FFY 2019, compared with 59,151 in FFY 2013–a slight increase.

The next step in the child welfare funnel is investigation, and here the count shifts from the number of referrals to the number of children. According to data submitted to New Jersey to the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and published in Child Maltreatment 2019, the number of children receiving an investigation in New Jersey increased slightly from Federal Fiscal Year (FFY 2015) to FFY 2019–from 74,546 to 78,741. However there was a stunning drop in the proportion of these children who were found to be abused or neglected (known as “substantiation” in the child welfare world). In FFY 2015, 13.0 percent of the children who received investigations (or 9,689 children) were found to be abused or neglected. In FFY 2019, only 6.5 percent of the children receiving investigations (5,132 children) were found to be victims of maltreatment. In other words, among the children who were involved in investigations, the proportion who were found to be maltreated dropped by half. Similarly, the number of children found to be maltreatment victims dropped by 47 percent. (This is very similar to the 44.6 percent decrease in foster care entries between those years shown in the Rutgers data portal cited above).

Note: The substantiation rate is the number of children found to be maltreatment victims divided by the number of children who were the subject of CPS investigations. Data are from Child Maltreatment 2019, available at https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2019.pdf

It turns out that aside from Pennsylvania, which is not comparable to other states because it does not report on most neglect allegations, New Jersey had the lowest rate of substantiation per 1,000 children of all the states in FFY 2019. Only 2.6 children per 1,000 were found to be maltreated, compared to a national rate of 8.8 children per 1,000. In FFY 2015, this rate was 4.9 per 1,000 children in New Jersey–almost twice as high.

How did the number and percent of children found to be victims of child maltreatment drop so much in New Jersey over a four-year period, despite little decline in hotline calls? We asked DCF this question but received no reply. In the notes it submitted to ACF with its 2019 data, DCF acknowledged a decrease in the number of substantiated victims of maltreatment and stated that this is consistent with a continued trend–but provides no explanation. Perhaps policy or practice has changed to make it more difficult to substantiate abuse or neglect, through a change in definitions or in the standard of proof, or perhaps in training or agency culture. But such a change was not mentioned either by Butkowski or in DCF’s submission to ACF.

Let us revisit DCF’s previous message to foster parents saying that “In New Jersey, the number of youth in foster care continues to be reduced each year because we are focusing first on kinship placements.” This is an interesting statement because it implies that these kinship placements are not through the foster care system. It is important to understand that children can be placed with relatives in two ways. A child can be found to be a victim of maltreatment and placed with a relative, who becomes licensed as a foster parent. In New Jersey, 1,619 foster children (or 41 percent of the 3,951 children in foster care) were living with licensed kinship foster parents in November 2020. But these children are included in the state’s count of children in foster care, so they cannot account for the caseload drop. DCF must have been referring to something else.

Perhaps DCF’s earlier message to foster parents referred to the agency’s increasing use of a practice called “kinship diversion.” As described in an issue brief from ChildTrends, kinship diversion is a practice that occurs during an investigation or an in-home case when social workers determine that a child cannot remain safely with the parents or guardians. Instead of taking custody of a child, the agency facilitates placing the child with a relative. If this occurs in the context of an investigation, kinship diversion may result in a finding of “unsubstantiated” even when abuse or neglect has occurred, on the grounds that the child is now safe with the relative. We have no idea how widespread this practice is in New Jersey or nationwide since neither New Jersey nor other states report the number of these cases. However, the system of informal kinship care created by diversion has been called America’s hidden foster care system and nationwide it appears to dwarf the provision of kinship care within the foster care system.

There are many concerns about kinship diversion, as described in an earlier post: caregivers may not be vetted or held to the same standards as foster parents; they and the children they are caring for do not receive case management and services; they do not receive a foster care stipend and may have to depend on much-lower public assistance payments; there is nothing preventing caregivers giving children back to the parents without any assurance of safety; and parents are not guaranteed the due process rights and help with reunification that come with having their children in foster care. Because of the various concerns around kinship diversion, litigation has been filed in several states challenging this practice.

There is one other possible explanation that comes to mind for DCF’s foster parent surplus–dropping foster care rolls due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We removed data from the time of the pandemic from the above discussion to avoid confounding its effects with those of policy and practice changes but we need to ascertain whether the pandemic’s impact on calls to the hotline has affected entries into foster care. As in most states, hotline calls in New Jersey fell sharply in the aftermath of school closures and other pandemic measures. The number of child maltreatment referrals between March (the onset of school closures and quarantines) and November 2020 (the last month for which data are available on the DCF website) was 98,306, compared to 131,344 in the same period of 2019–a drop of 25 percent, based on monthly reports from DCF. It is likely that fewer calls from teachers now teaching virtually were a major factor behind this drop in hotline calls.

Entries into foster care also fell sharply in the wake of the pandemic. Foster care entries dropped from 1,949 in March through November 2019 to only 1,211 in the same months of 2020–a drop of 37.9 percent–which may have reflected in part the reduction in hotline calls and in part the continuing decrease in foster care entries that we have described. But the number of children in care did not drop nearly as much as entries into care. Between February and November 2020, the total number of youth in care decreased only 11 percent from 4,463 to 3,951. This drop is surprisingly low–in fact it is less than the decrease in the foster care caseload during the same months of 2019 (16.1 percent). The small size of this caseload decline reflects the fact that foster care exits dropped even more than foster care entries. Exits from foster care dropped from 2,754 in March through November 2019 to 1,661 in the same months of 2020. That is a drop of over 1,093, when the drop in foster care entries was “only” 738.[1] As a result, it appears that the number of children in foster care was higher, rather than lower, due to the pandemic. Therefore, it does not appear that the pandemic contributed to the decline in demand for foster parents.

One might expect to hear expressions of concern, or at least interest, in the recent precipitous drop in the number and rate of substantiations and in the foster care caseload from the court-ordered monitor charged with ensuring that New Jersey’s child welfare system is fulfilling its mission of protecting children. Since 2006 New Jersey has been operating under a settlement agreement in a lawsuit filed in 1999. The Court Monitor is Judith Meltzer, Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP). In its most recent report, CSSP praised DCF for maintaining its progress toward meeting all the benchmarks required to exit the lawsuit, despite the challenges posed by COVID-19. Ironically, the report mentions DCF’s progress in “Prioritizing Safety.” The report does not mention the precipitous drop in foster care entries or substantiations before the pandemic or the fact that the state is turning away prospective foster parents.

New Jersey may be the first state to have stopped accepting applications for foster parents, and the reasons cited by DCF do not seem to explain this unusual event. Careful study of DCF data shows that the rate at which allegations of abuse or neglect are substantiated has been cut in half, and that there has been a similar reduction in entries into foster care. This cut in the substantiation rate could be due to policy or practice changes making it harder to confirm child maltreatment or it could be due to an increased tendency to place children with relatives without establishing officially that maltreatment has occurred. Without an adequate explanation from the state, the extent to which either of these factors is driving these trends is unknown. It is imperative to know the explanation of this trend to ensure that DCF’s new policies and practices are not compromising its mission of keeping children safe.

[1]: Reasons for this drop in foster care exits may include court shutdowns and delays and suspension of services parents need to complete their reunification plans.

Declining child abuse? The misuse of data in child welfare

Lowest number of maltreatment victims in five years, crowed the Administration on Children and Families (ACF), summarizing its annual report, Child Maltreatment 2019. Child welfare newsletter The Imprint eagerly repeated the claim, claiming that the Number of Child Abuse and Neglect Victims Reached Record Low in 2019. The venerable Child Welfare League of America followed suit in its Children’s Monitor saying “Data Shows Decline in Child Abuse in FY2019.” It is only by reading the report that one learns that the decline was not actually in the number of victims of abuse or neglect. Instead, it was a decline in the number of children who were found by Child Protective Services (CPS) to be abused or neglected, which is not the same thing at all.

Child Maltreatment, the Children’s Bureau’s annual report on child abuse and neglect, is based on data from the states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico collected through the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). Child Maltreatment 2019 is based on data from Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2019, which ended September 30, 2019. (Note that these data reflect the year before the inception of the coronavirus pandemic.) Displayed below is a summary of four key national rates reported by ACF between 2015 and 2019. The first indicator shown is the referral rate, which describes the number of calls and other communications describing instance of child maltreatment per 1,000 children. Next is the screened-in referrals rate, which includes referrals that are passed on for investigation or alternative response. Once screened in, only some reports are referred for investigation, and the third set of bars represents children who received an investigation per 1,000 children. The fourth group shows the rate of children found to be abused or neglected–or those who received a substantiation. Let us go over these numbers in more detail.

*Note that Investigation and Substantiation Rates are based on number of children, not referrals
Source: Child Welfare Monitor tabulation of data from Child Maltreatment 2019, available from
https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2019.pdf

Total referrals: A referral is a call to the hotline or another communication alleging abuse or neglect. In 2019, agencies received an estimated total of 4.4 million referrals, including about 7.9 million children. The “referral rate” was 59.5 referrals per 1,000 children in FFY 2019. This rate has increased every year since 2015, when it was 52.3 per 1,000 children. It is worth noting that the referral rate differs greatly by state, ranging from 17.1 referrals per 1,000 children in Hawaii to 171.6 per 1,000 children in Vermont, as shown in the report’s state-by-state tables. These differences in referral rates may stem from cultural differences regarding the duty to intervene in other families, differences in publicity for child abuse hotlines and ease of reporting, or temporal factors like a recent highly-publicized recent child abuse death.

Screened-in referrals (reports): A referral can be either “screened in” or screened out because it does not meet agency criteria. In FFY 2019, agencies screened in 2.4 million referrals, or 32.2 referrals per 100,000 children. This was a decrease in the rate of screened-in referrals per 1,000 children after three straight years of increases. This percentage of referrals that were screened in varied greatly by state, ranging from 16 percent in South Dakota to 98.4 percent in Alabama. States reporting a decrease in screened-in referrals gave several reasons, such as a change in how they combine multiple reports and a decision to stop automatically screening in any referral for a child younger than three years old.

Children who received an investigation (child investigation rate): Once a report is screened in, it can receive a traditional investigation or it can be assigned to an alternative track, which is often called “alternative response” or “family assessment response.” (Two-track systems are often labeled as “differential response.”) This rate represents the number of children who received an investigation as opposed to an alternative response. Only an investigation can result in a finding of abuse or neglect; an alternative response generally results in an offer of services. Like the referral rate, the investigation rate increased from 2015 to 2018 and then decreased in 2019. This rate also varies widely between states and over time. Some states eliminated or expanded their differential response programs in 2019, resulting in more or fewer investigations, as described in the report.

Substantiation: A “victim” is defined in NCANDS as a “child for whom the state determined at least one maltreatment was substantiated or indicated; and a disposition of substantiated or indicated was assigned for a child in a report.” The report’s authors refer to the number of such children per 1,000 as the “victimization rate.” But clearly substantiation does not equal actual victimization. The difficulty of making a correct decision on whether maltreatment has occurred is well-documented. Stories of families with repeated reports that are never substantiated or not confirmed until there is a serious injury or even death are legion. So are reports of parents wrongly found to be abusive or neglectful. Therefore, we have chosen to use the term “substantiation rate” instead of ‘victimization rate.” This rate varies greatly by state, from 2.4 per 1,000 children in North Carolina to 20.1 in nearby Kentucky.[1] The national substantiation rate in FFY 2019 was 8.9 per 1,000 children, down from 9.2 per 1,000 in FFY 2019 and FFY 2015. States reported a total of 656,000 (rounded) victims of substantiated child abuse or neglect in FFY 2019–a decline of four percent since 2015.

So does this decline in the number and rate of substantiations really connote a decline in child abuse and neglect? The range in substantiation rates among states argues against this idea. Unless states differ by almost a factor of 10 in the prevalence of child abuse and neglect, these numbers must reflect factors other than the actual prevalence of maltreatment. And indeed the report’s authors acknowledge that “[s]tates have different policies about what is considered child maltreatment, the type of CPS responses (alternative and investigation), and different levels of evidence required to substantiate an abuse allegation, all or some of which may account for variations in victimization rates.” Changes in these policies and practices can account for changes in these rates over time. Moreover, changes in all the earlier stages of reporting, screening, and assignment to investigation or alternative response contribute to changes in the substantiation rate. In 2019, screened-in referrals and investigations per thousand-children both decreased, which clearly contributed to the decrease in the substantiation rate.

It is interesting to note that while referrals increased every year between FFY 2015 and FFY 2019, both screened-in referrals and investigations decreased in FFY 2019. This suggests a general tendency among states to be less aggressive in responding to allegations of maltreatment, perhaps in accord with the prevalent mindset among child welfare leaders nationally and around the country, as discussed below.

Understanding the difference between “victimization” and “substantiation” and the many possible causes of a decrease in this rate reveals the deceptiveness of ACF’s statement that “[n]ew federal child abuse and neglect data shows 2019 had the lowest number of victims who suffered maltreatment in five years.” Lynn Johnson, the HHS assistant secretary for children and families, is quoted in ACF’s press release as saying that “[t]hese new numbers show we are making significant strides in reducing victimization due to maltreatment.” Unless Johnson and the ACF leadership intended to mislead, it appears they are woefully ignorant of the meaning of these numbers.

Most regular leaders of this blog already know why ACF wants to support the narrative of declining child maltreatment. The current trend in child welfare policy, regardless of political party, is to oppose intervention in families. Republicans who oppose government spending and interference in family life have made common cause with Democrats who think they are reducing racial disparities and supporting poor poor families by allowing parents more freedom in how they raise their children, even if it means leaving children unprotected. Members of both parties came together to pass the Family First Act, which encoded this family preservation mindset into federal law.

Child Welfare Monitor has pointed out many other instances where ACF or by other members of the child welfare establishment in the interests of supporting the family preservation mindset. For example, we wrote about the Homebuilders program, which was classified by a federally-funded clearinghouse as “well-supported” despite never having been proven effective for keeping families together. In fact, Homebuilders had to be classified as well-supported because it was one of the key programs touted by ACF and others in promoting the Family First Act and other policies promoting family preservation.

So if ACF’s “victimization” data do not in fact tell us what is happening to abuse and neglect rates, what else is available? We call on Congress to pass an overdue re-authorization of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and include a fifth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect. Data for the last study was collected in 2005 and 2006; it is high time for an update which should put an end (at least temporarily) to the misuse of NCANDS data as an indicator of trends in child maltreatment.

President Biden has called for ending a “culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.” We hope that ACF under its new leadership, as well as the rest of the child welfare establishment, will take these words to heart and commit themselves to truth and transparency from now on.

[1]: Pennsylvania has a substantiation rate of 1.8, even lower than that of North Carolina, but in Pennsylvania, many of the actions or inactions categorized as “neglect” are classified as “General Protective Services” and not included in the substantiation rate, making its data not comparable to that of the other states and territories.

[2]: Massachusetts did not provide data on FFY 2019 child maltreatment fatalities.

The Detroit Prevention Project: Preventing child maltreatment by supporting at-risk families

Connect With Us - Brilliant Detroit

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.

Hidden child maltreatment: One more reason to vaccinate teachers and open schools

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.

Source: CFSA Data Dashboard, https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/, data analyzed by Child Welfare Monitor DC.

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.

Figure Two

Source: NYC Children, Flash Monthly Indicators Report, December 2020, available from https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2020/12.pdf

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.

Figure Three

Data from Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services, https://dcfs.lacounty.gov/resources/data-and-monthly-fact-sheets/, analyzed by Child Welfare Monitor

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.

Figure Four

Data from Florida Department of Children and Families, https://www.myflfamilies.com/programs/childwelfare/dashboard/intakes-received.shtml?Landing%20Page%20InvRec=2, analyzed by Child Welfare Monitor

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.

[2]:DC’s pattern of increasing reports from January through May is different from the other jurisdictions and may be related to its law requiring schools to report educational neglect when a student accumulates ten unexcused absences in a school year.

Table One: Hotline Calls Accepted for Investigation, District of Columbia

Source: https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/; Data analyzed by Child Welfare Monitor DC

Figure Five

Source: https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/; Data analyzed by Child Welfare Monitor DC

Figure Six

Source: NYC Children, Flash Monthly Indicators Report, December 2020, available from https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2020/12.pdf

Table Two

Source: https://cfsadashboard.dc.gov/; Data analyzed by Child Welfare Monitor DC

Figure Seven

Table Three: Intakes Accepted for Investigation, Florida

Source: https://www.myflfamilies.com/programs/childwelfare/dashboard/intakes-received.shtml?Landing%20Page%20InvRec=1; Data analyzed by Child Welfare Monitor

Figure Eight

Data from https://www.myflfamilies.com/programs/childwelfare/dashboard/intakes-received.shtml?Landing%20Page%20InvRec=1; Data analyzed by Child Welfare Monitor

What can happen when a child is left in an abusive home: the sad case of Lisa Montgomery

Lisa Montgomery: Mercury News.com

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!

Therapeutic residential care: A necessary option for foster youth with greater needs

Photo by kat wilcox on Pexels.com

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.

“Upending child welfare” means devaluing Black children’s lives

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 Welfare which 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 are due 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.

Hello Baby: Innovative child maltreatment prevention program launches in Allegheny Co., PA

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.

Maryland child custody committee recommends specialized judges for custody cases involving child abuse or domestic violence

Prince McLeod Rams and Hera McLeod: Fauquier.com

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 concern about 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.

Child protection in the time of Covid-19: what we know and what we can do

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 Monitor reported, 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.