I’m not a big fan of these months, days, and weeks dedicated to specific causes, whether they be Social Work Month, Child Abuse Prevention Month or Foster Care Month. These days, weeks, and months often allow us to feel good by paying lip service to a group or a the cause on social media without taking any concrete steps to help the group or address the problem. But when states begin renaming Child Abuse Prevention Month, there is reason to ask whether this change is a significant reflection of a changed child welfare zeitgeist.
Ronald Reagan declared April to be National Child Abuse Prevention Month in 1983, and the designation soon took hold around the country, with public and private agencies displaying blue pinwheels, sharing information about child maltreatment, and urging the public to get involved in preventing child abuse and neglect. But no longer is that the case in Utah, where April has been renamed Family Strengthening Month, or Montana, where it has been declared Strengthening Families Month.
In Utah, a document called, a bit confusingly: Family Strengthening Month: A Toolkit for 2022 Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Month, begins with an attempt to answer the question, “Why Family Strengthening Month?” Diane Moore, the director of Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) starts by asserting that “focusing on…. an individual family’s failure ignores any societal or economic influence, and the potential for communities to take action to strengthen families to safely care for their own children.” This statement is confusing. Almost every commentator in the field recognizes that socioeconomic factors influence child abuse and neglect. And asking communities to support families has been a focus of child abuse prevention month on the federal level for some time.
Moore goes on to state that 55% of confirmed allegations are related to some type of neglect in Utah. The preponderance of neglect is often used by left-of-center leaders and commentators as support for the argument that child protection agencies are finding parents guilty of neglect when the real problem is poverty. But Utah is a Republican state, and Moore is not about to blame child maltreatment on poverty. Instead, she states that “High stress, substance abuse, social isolation, and lack of support for parents are among the most common risk factors associated with child abuse and neglect.” Not a word about poverty, unless “lack of support for parents” is an euphemism for it. So it’s not clear what purpose is served by the mention of neglect, or what the “economic influences” mentioned in the first sentence might be.
Moore goes on to say that “When we truly care about the safety and well being of children, then we must equally care about the safety and well being of the adults in those children’s lives.” This statement is questionable as well. Children are more vulnerable than adults, especially the youngest children, and the power imbalance is huge. Moreover, children are our future, and will parent the next set of children. Most parents put the needs of their children before their own needs, so why wouldn’t society do the same? That being said, I agree that parents must be safe and well if they are to keep their children safe and well. But if I have to choose between the well-being of a child and that of an abusive or neglectful parent, I’ll go with the wellbeing of the child any day.
Finally, Moore concludes that “We want to do more in Utah than just prevent abuse and neglect. We want to back away from that line of crisis by leaning in as communities and neighbors in order to ensure that every family has the resources and support they need to be truly successful.” More than “just” prevent abuse and neglect? If that were easy, I’d certainly be happy to aim for more, but I think we are a long way from doing that.
So Utah’s justification of the name-change depends on a set of vague and questionable statements. Then what is the real reason to take the focus off child maltreatment and replace it with “strengthening families”? This change is certainly in tune with the current climate n child welfare. We are supposed to lead with family strengths rather than weaknesses, prioritize keeping families together and minimize government intrusion in family life. If those are the priorities, child abuse and neglect prevention may have to take a back seat. We might even be willing to tolerate more abuse and neglect in order to keep families together – a bit of collateral damage, so to speak. The social worker and supervisor working with Noah Cuatro‘s family wanted to concentrate on its strengths, not its weaknesses. So they ignored the signs of abuse, and Noah was killed by his parents. Collateral damage.
It is interesting that two red states were the first to drop the “Child Abuse Prevention Month” designation. As a child advocate, I have been more critical of Democratic leaders and commentators, because they have tended to be more extreme, with statements equating neglect with poverty proposals like abolishing the “family policing system.” But I’ve been equally hard on the Trump and the Biden appointees to the Administration on Children and Families, because their views are essentially the same. And that is because child welfare is an issue where both sides of the aisle often agree on what I think are terrible policies. The focus on parents’ rights rather than children’s needs jibes with the Left’s focus on racism as the cause of almost everything and its reluctance to punish parents who may be victims of poverty. For the right, parents’ rights have always been important: keep your government out of my family, except when it comes to abortion and birth control. That’s how Left and Right could agree on the Family First Act, a terrible bill which transferred the costs of necessary group care to states while paying lip service to family preservation by offering funding for services that were already funded from other sources.
In Texas, Democrats and Republicans agreed in the 2021 legislative session on a slate of reforms designed to restrict CPS intervention into the lives of families. These laws were pushed by a coalition of strange bedfellows indeed: “abolitionists” who want to abolish child welfare along with police and prisons, with conservative groups intent on reducing government intrusion into families.
So it turns out that two “red” states were the first to rename Child Abuse Prevention month to focus on strengthening families. But next to follow suit may be one or more blue states that are eager to demonstrate their progressive bona fides. Who will be the next? Stay tuned.
I have written before about the power of wishful thinking and how it causes people to disregard research and real-life results. In that earlier commentary, I discussed the successful promotion of a practice called race-blind removals based on data from an article by a scholar who now denies knowledge of their provenance, and which have been shown to be inaccurate. A program called Healthy Families America (HFA), which currently serves over 70,000 families per year according to its website, offers another example of the power of wishful thinking. This program has become the centerpiece of the nation’s oldest and largest charity dedicated to the prevention of child abuse, even though the program has failed to demonstrate its utility in preventing child maltreatment. This organization, now called Prevent Child Abuse America, launched HFA based on weak evidence that a program in Hawaii called Healthy Start Program (HSP) could prevent child maltreatment. The first experimental study of HSP found no impact on child maltreatment but did nothing to derail the launch of HFA. Studies of HFA programs around the country have found little evidence of reductions in child maltreatment, but the program has continued to grow and now serves more families than any other home visiting program. The story of HFA is a lesson in the power of wishful thinking and the failure of evidence (or lack thereof) to counteract it.
As told in a helpful history of home visiting, all modern programs can trace their origins to Henry Kempe, whose book, The Battered Child, brought about the recognition of child maltreatment as a national problem. To address child abuse, Kempe called for universal prevention through a network of home health visitors. Inspired by Kempe, modern home visiting began with Hawaii’s implementation of the Healthy Start Project (HSP) in 1975. As described in the 1999 evaluation by Duggan and colleagues, HSP was developed by the Hawaii Family Stress Center (HFSC) on the island of Oahu. It had two components: early identification (at the birthing hospital) of families with newborns at risk of child abuse and neglect and home visiting by trained paraprofessionals for those families classified as at-risk who agreed to participate. This initial program was never evaluated, but anecdotal information suggested it was successful in promoting effective parenting, and six similar programs were established on neighboring islands.
As described by Duggan et al., the Hawaii Legislature authorized a three-year pilot program focusing on one neighborhood in Oahu, which began in 1985. There was no control group in the pilot study, and the researchers used CPS reports and changes in family stress in participating families to measure program effectiveness. During the three-year pilot, there were few reports of physical abuse, neglect or imminent harm for program participants. Because evaluations of other home visiting programs had found much higher rates of reported maltreatment in comparison group families, these results were viewed as evidence that the program had a positive impact. According to Duggan and her co-authors, “The pilot study results might have been given too much weight, given the lack of a control group and the short period of follow-up for most families.” Nevertheless, the results of this unpublished study were enough evidence for the Legislature to expand HSP throughout Hawaii starting in 1989.
Home visiting in general was gathering steam in the 1980s and early 1990’s. In 1990, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report promoting home visitation as a “promising early intervention strategy for at-risk families.” In its summary of research evidence, GAO focused mostly on health and developmental benefits for children, rather than maltreatment prevention. In 1991, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect issued a report recommending a pilot of universal voluntary neonatal home visitation, stating that the efficacy of home visiting as a preventive measure was “already well-established.” The Board cited the results of a federally-funded demonstration begun 17 years earlier as well as the the nurse home visitation program started by David Olds in 1977. But HSP was not mentioned.
Despite the lack of a rigorous evaluation, the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse (NCPCA, now called Prevent Child Abuse America) the nation’s “oldest and largest organization committed to preventing child abuse and neglect before it happens,” had become interested in using HSP as the nucleus of a national home visiting program. But first, NCPCA conducted a one-year randomized trial of HSP, as described by Duggan et al. The trial suffered from severe methodological limitations, including “less than ideal followup,” differential dropout rates in the program and control groups, the failure to blind interviewers to experimental or control status, and reliance on program staff rather than researchers to measure some outcomes. Nevertheless, the trial concluded that HSP reduced child maltreatment, and this apparently gave NCPCA the assurance it needed to invest in the model.
NCPCA launched Healthy Families America in 1992, with financial support from Ronald MacDonald House Charities, arranging visits to 22 states by Hawaii Family Stress Center Staff. The “theory of change,” or theoretical basis for the program, as quoted by Duggan et al, started with the targeting to all newborns and their parents, which allows for diversified service options determined by individual need. Also part of the theory was a commitment to change at the individual and community levels. Rather than impose a single service model, HFA contained a set of critical elements, which included the prenatal initiation of services and the assessment of all new parents. A network was launched to bring together researchers doing experimental and quasi-experimental studies of HFA programs.
Unlike NCPCA, The Hawaii Department of Health recognized the limitations of both the pilot study and the NCPCA study and initiated a more rigorous evaluation of HSP in 1994. This was a randomized controlled trial, with at-risk families identified at the hospital and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. In 1999 the results of the Evaluation of Hawaii’s Healthy Start Program were released as part of an issue of the Future of Children journal containing evaluations of six different home visiting models. No overall positive program impact emerged after two years of service in terms of child maltreatment (according to maternal reports and child protective services reports). Early HFA evaluation results, published in the same issue, also failed to find effects on abuse and neglect in three randomized trials, which included the HSP evaluation discussed above and another Hawaii HSP study.
David Olds had had begun testing his Nurse Home Visiting Program in 1977 and already had long-term results on the program in Elmira, NY, as well as shorter-term results for a replication in Memphis, Tenn. That program, now known as Nurse Family Partnership, was very different from HFA. It was restricted to first-time teenage mothers and the home visitors were nurses rather than paraprofessionals. The nurses followed detailed protocols for each visit. The researchers found that among low-income unmarried women (but not other participants), the program reduced the rate of childhood injuries and ingestions of hazardous substances that could be associated with child abuse or neglect. Follow-up of the Elmira group when the children were 15 found that the nurse-visited mothers were significantly less likely to have at least one substantiated report of maltreatment. These results are particularly impressive because they overrode a tendency for nurse-visited families to be reported for maltreatment by their nurse visitors. The researchers concluded that the use of nurses, rather than paraprofessionals, was key to the success of the program. In their analysis of all six studies published in the volume, Deanna Gomby et al. concluded that while the HFA and HSP evaluations showed some change in maternal attitudes and self-reported behaviors related to abuse and neglect, only the Nurse Home Visiting Program showed impacts on abuse and neglect other than from self-reports.
Gomby and her co-authors also concluded that the results of the six home visiting evaluations were discouraging for those who had high hopes for home visiting for solving an array of problems. All the programs “struggled to enroll, engage and retain families.” Program benefits generally accrued to only a subset of enrolled families and were often quite modest. The authors explained the disappointing results by concluding that human behavior is hard to change, particularly when problems are community-wide. They recommended that “any new expansion of home visiting programs be reassessed in light of the findings presented in this journal issue” and stated that home visiting services are “best funded as part of a broad set of services for families and children.”
But the home visiting juggernaut was already in motion nationwide. And NCPCA had already made HFA its centerpiece program. Home visiting grew, and HFA grew with it. In 2010, Congress created the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV), which was re-authorized in 2018 with funding of $400 million per year through FY 2022. According to the HFA website, HFA is the model most frequently implemented with MIECHV dollars. Home visiting programs can also receive funding through Medicaid, Title IVB and IVE of the Social Security Act, and many other funding sources.
The infusion of funding for HFA research by NCPCA initiative set in motion a multitude of research projects (both randomized trials and less rigorous studies) that continues to result in publications. Nevertheless, HFA research has yet to find solid evidence that these programs have an impact on child maltreatment: The California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC), the pre-eminent child welfare program clearinghouse, reviewed 19 research reports on HFA. It gave the program a rating of “4” on a scale of 1 to 5 for prevention of child abuse and neglect, meaning the evidence fails to demonstrate that the HFA has an effect on abuse and neglect. HFA did receive a rating of 1 for “child well-being,” based on its impacts on outcomes like physical health, child development, and school readiness. In contrast, Nurse Family Partnership was rated as “1,” “well-supported by the research evidence, for the prevention of child abuse and neglect, as well as for child well-being.
Despite the lack of evidence of its impact on maltreatment, HFA received a rating of “Well Supported” from the new clearinghouse established by the Family First Prevention Services Act (“Family First”) to determine whether a program can receive federal funding under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act. To get such a rating, the program must show improved outcomes based on at least two randomized trials or rigorous quasi-experimental studies. But these outcomes could be any sort of “important child and parent outcome,” (not just child abuse or neglect) and there is no standard for how to measure each outcome. Based on its review of all HFA studies that met their criteria for inclusion, the Clearinghouse found 23 favorable effects, 212 findings of no effect, and four unfavorable effects across 16 outcomes. This included five favorable effects on child safety based on parents’ self-reports of maltreatment, with no favorable effects on other measures of child safety. Self-report is generally frowned upon as a measure of child maltreatment, for obvious reasons. A positive impact of HFA might reflect that participants in HFA were more eager than control group members to provide the “right answer” to questions about maltreatment.
The “well-supported” rating from the Title IV-E clearinghouse opened up a new source of funding for HFA. Passage of Family First as Title VII of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, allowed states to spend Title IV-E funds on programs on services to families with a child welfare in-home case. To take advantage of this new demand, HFA announced in September 2018 that families referred by the child welfare system were now able to enroll until 24 months of age. To serve these families, HFA introduced special child welfare protocols, with limited evidence that that the program was effective for parents who had already abused or neglected their children.* The program had already departed from its initial mission of screening all families with newborns in a geographic area. Even without the child welfare protocols, each program can choose its own admission criteria and there is no universal screening; potential participants are generally referred by health or child welfare agencies, who often can choose between several home visiting programs when referring a client.
Another part of HFA’s original theory of change was a “dual commitment to change at the individual and community levels.” As described by Daro and Harding in their 1999 evaluation of HSA, this meant that HFA “must move beyond direct efforts to help families and begin to serve as a catalyst for reshaping existing child welfare and health care efforts and improving coordination among other prevention and family support initiatives.” This vision has clearly gone by the wayside as HFA has become one choice in a menu of home visiting programs offered by local jurisdictions. Far from trying to enhance and coordinate available community offerings, HFA is busy trying to maximize its share of the pie through its public relations effort, exemplified by the self-promotional statements on its website.
It is disappointing that Prevent Child Abuse America (“Prevent Child Abuse,” formerly NCPCA), an organization that defines its mission as child abuse prevention, decided to fund HFA before it was proven to prevent child maltreatment and without apparently considering other approaches also being tested at the time. And it is concerning that the organization continued with this commitment even after the disappointing evaluations of 1999 might have led them to diversify their investment beyond HFA or even beyond home visiting or to focus more on advocacy rather than services. And finally, that Prevent Child Abuse continues to use charitable contributions made for the prevention of child abuse and neglect to fund a program that has not been proven after 40 years to accomplish this goal, raises serious ethical questions. Twenty-two of the 40 staff listed on the Prevent Child Abuse website have positions with Healthy Families America. Perhaps the charity has backed itself into a corner; it would be difficult to escape this commitment without serious repercussions.
Some federal administrators do not seem to be much more interested in evaluation results than Prevent Child Abuse. The legislation authorizing MCHIEV required a randomized controlled trial (RCT), which may provide useful information on the relative merits of these programs in addressing different outcomes. But strangely, HHS indicated in a response to a critique from the Straight Talk on Evidence Blog that it is not interested in a “horse race” between the models but rather is interested in assessing home visiting in general. This odd statement is an indicator of the kind of thinking that allowed Prevent Child Abuse to invest in HFA for 40 years despite the lack of evidence that it does “Prevent Child Abuse.”
The story of Healthy Families America is not an unusual one. My discussion of the Homebuilders program could also be called “the power of wishful thinking.” Such stories are all too frequent. They show us how wishful thinking can drive leaders to disregard research, especially after they have made a premature decision to commit to one program or course of action.
*One study of Healthy Families New York, published in 2018, looked at a subgroup of 104 mothers who already had a substantiated CPS report, and found a decrease in abuse and neglect among the mothers who were in the experimental group. However, the sample was small and was not planned in advance, so the authors recommend further testing home visiting programs as prevention of repeat maltreatment for child welfare-involved mothers.
Sometimes it seems like basic humanity and common sense get lost in the scramble to affirm parents’ rights at all cost. Nowhere was this more clear than in a quote from Aysha Shomburg, the former New York City child welfare official who was appointed by President Biden to head the Children’s Bureau. As quoted in The Imprint, Schomberg cited a 15-year-old father facing a termination of parental rights as evidence for the need to eliminate the timelines imposed by the Adoption and Safe Families Act. Speaking of this teen dad, Schomberg said, “That stays in my mind and makes me think, how many young fathers are out there and maybe want to take care of their children, but are maybe up against this timeline?”
After picking my jaw up off the floor, I wondered whether Schomberg thought a fifteen-year old was actually capable of parenting an infant, or whether she thinks ASFA should be amended so a child can stay in foster care as many years as it takes for the parent to grow up.
Schomburg’s statement reminded me of one of the saddest cases I carried as a social worker in the District of Columbia’s foster care system. A two-month-old (I’ll call him “Shawn”) came into care when he was removed from his teenage mother (“Shameka”) after she swung him wildly in his carseat and then stalked off in a temper from a home for teen mothers, abandoning her son there. Shawn was placed with one of the best foster families I have ever known–“the Smiths,” a couple who was Black like Shawn and had raised their own children and fostered numerous others. They quickly fell in love with Shawn and gave him the kind of parenting that textbooks envision. Mrs. Smith stayed home with Shawn all day, talking to him, playing with him, and loving him, until the Smiths placed him in a carefully-chosen early childhood education setting at the age of two. Shawn was the center of Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s lives and part of their extended family of children and grandchildren. I’ll never forget that when he fell in love with trains, they found every train-related toy, game or event.
As the months and then years rolled by, Shawn’s mother stopped visiting him. She had named a father for Shawn, but a paternity test came back negative. Shawn’s goal was changed to adoption with the Smiths and I imagined the happy life awaiting him in their loving home. But one day, Shameka admitted that she had lied about the name of the biological father for the sake of revenge against him. She named the real father, and the paternity test was positive. The father (“Antonio”) soon showed up at the agency, a pleasant seventeen-year-old who was delighted to meet his adorable young son. Shawn’s birth father lived with his parents and siblings in subsidized housing and relied on government assistance. Shawn’s grandfather was excited about the new family member. He told me that two of his older sons also had children as teenagers, and that becoming fathers is what made them actually grow up, finish high school, and get jobs.
The Smiths were devastated, but I assured them that the court would not rip a two-year-old away from the only parents he had ever known. But then I talked to the agency attorney and realized there was no question in her mind that the agency had to change the goal to “reunification” with the father, a perfect stranger. And that is exactly what happened. The goal was changed and the Smiths had to bring Shawn to the agency for progressively longer visits with his birth father. At one visit, Mr. Smith was heard crying in the bathroom.
I am glad I was no longer at the agency when Shawn went ‘home’ with his father. But I’ll never forget the day I ran into Shawn’s Guardian ad Litem, the attorney appointed to represent him in court. “We ruined his life,” she told me. She had visited him often in the months following his return home, and and reported that his new household was chaotic, with none of the routine and predictability so crucial for growing children. And we will never know the effects of being ripped away from the Smiths after two years of security and attachment.
I thought about Shawn when I read Aysha Shomburg’s post. I wondered whether Schomburg cared more about the fifteen year-old than about his son. It was not about the infant’s future. It was about the father’s rights. And indeed, most child welfare officials would say Schomburg was correct in not speculating about the child’s future. Child welfare agencies are not in the business of choosing the best parent, just ensuring that the birth parents can provide the minimal acceptable care. But what about the attachment that Shawn had developed over two years with the Smiths? The importance of attachment, and the consequences of disrupting it for a young child, is why the timelines were included in ASFA–the timelines that Schomberg wants to eliminate. So attachment – and the trauma of disrupting it – does not seem to be a significant issue for her.
Schomburg’s citation of a fifteen year old father as an argument against permanency timelines is an illustration of what’s wrong with mainstream child welfare thinking today. It’s all about parents’ rights, while the most basic of children’s needs are disregarded. It is based on an idealized vision of families rather than the way they really are. It’s the kind of thinking that allowed a child named Noah Cuatro to die when the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services told social workers to emphasize his family’s strengths more than its weaknesses. We must stop using that kind of thinking to prescribe our actions toward our most vulnerable citizens–our youngest children.
On January 21, 2022, the Children’s Bureau finally released its long awaited report, Child Maltreatment 2020, which contains data submitted by the states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Coming over a year after the end of the period covers, the report holds few surprises. As we already know from individual state reports, the pandemic resulted in plunging calls to child abuse hotlines and an attendant drop in the numbers of children who were investigated, found to be abused or neglected, receiving family preservation services or placed in foster care. Vast differences between states in these numbers continued to be present, reflecting differing policies, practices, and conditions. These differences remind us that the use of the terms “victimization” and “victim” in the report is deceptive; they describe the state’s finding that maltreatment has occurred – not the actual existence of maltreatment.
Large disparities between racial and ethnic groups in the rate at which children are found to be victims of maltreatment also continued to exist, with Native American and Alaskan Native children having the highest rates, followed by African American children. For child maltreatment fatalities, African-American children having by far the highest rate of all racial and ethnic groups, three times greater than that for White children. This staggering disparity in fatalities (a much clearer concept than “victimization”) suggests that those who blame racial disparities in child welfare system involvement on racism in the system may be missing the main point–the greater need for protection among Black and Native children.
Effects of Covid-19
Almost as soon as governors began issuing stay at home orders and schools closed in the wake of the pandemic, experts and advocates feared that the isolation of children from adults other than their caregivers would result in reductions in calls to child abuse hotlines and in turn investigations and protective interventions like family preservation services and foster care. Data coming directly from states has already confirmed these fears. And on November 19, the Children’s Bureau released the AFCARS Report for 2020, which showed that both entries to and exits from foster care decreased during the first year of the pandemic, but since entries fell more than exits, the total number of children in foster care fell by over four percent, the largest decrease in the past decade. (This report was discussed in my last commentary.)
The annual Child Maltreatment reports from the Children’s Bureau of the federal Administration on Children and Families summarize data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), which is a federal effort to collect data on child abuse and neglect that is mandated by the CAPTA amendments of 1988. Child Maltreatment 2020 provides the backdrop to the foster care declines documented by AFCARS by showing that the number of hotline calls, children receiving an investigation or alternative response, and children determined to be victims of abuse or neglect all dropped substantially in Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2020 relative to FFY 2019. Breaking down the data by quarter showed that these drops relative to the previous year occurred mainly during the second two quarters of the Fiscal Year (April through September 2020), after the pandemic shutdowns began. Exhibit S-1 from the report shows the declines in the rates of total referrals, screened-in referrals, children subject to an investigation or alternative response, and children determined to be victims of abuse or neglect between FFY 2016 and FFY 2020.
The word “referrals” in child welfare denotes calls to child maltreatment hotlines, as distinct from “reports,” which are referrals that are “screened-in” for investigation. There were a total of 3.925 million referrals involving 7.1 children in FY 2020, for a rate of 53.5 referrals per thousand children. This was a drop of 10.4 percent in the referral rate compared to FFY 2019, which is particularly significant given that the annual number of referrals had been increasing annually since FFY 2016. As in previous years, there were big differences across states: the number of referrals per 1,000 children ranged from a low of 19.1 in Hawaii to highs of 126.9 in Alaska and 137.7 in Vermont. These differences may reflect differing laws and attitudes toward maltreatment reporting in the respective states more than they reflect actual maltreatment rates.
Due to the pandemic, teachers lost their usual place as the source of the largest number of referrals: in 2020 legal and law enforcement personnel made 20.9 percent of referrals, with education personnel coming next (17.2 percent), followed by medical personnel (11.6 percent), social services personnel (10.5 percent), parents and other relatives (6.3 percent each) and smaller amounts from mental health personnel, friends and neighbors, anonymous sources, and others.
Nationally, 54 percent of referrals were “screened in” for investigation or assessment, and the remaining 46 percent were screened out as not meeting the state’s definition of abuse or neglect. There was no change in the screened-in percentage from FY 2019 but the number of screened-in referrals dropped by 10.5 percent from FY 2019 to FY 2020. Of the 47 states reporting screened-in and screened-out referrals, the percentage that were screened in ranged from 17.3 in South Dakota and 17.5 in Vermont (a low that may be related to that state’s very high referral rate) to 98.7 in Alabama.
Investigations and substantiations
The number of children receiving an investigation or alternative response in FFY 2020 was 3.145 million, which was about 46.7 per thousand children. The rate was a decrease of 9.5 percent from FFY 2019, mostly due to decreased activity in April through September. Out of these children, an estimated 618,000, or 8.4 per thousand children, were the subject of reports that were “substantiated” or “indicated,” which means that the agency determined the allegation of abuse or neglect to be true. ACF calls this the “victimization rate,” which is a deceptive term. An investigator’s decision about the truth of an allegation is based on limited information and with limited time, and evidence indicates that many referrals are unsubstantiated when maltreatment actually exists. Moreover, substantiation rates are dependent on state policies and practices, as described below. Because of the confusion caused by the term “victimization,” I will use the term “substantiation” instead.
The national child substantiation rate fell by 5.8 percent in 2020 due to reductions in maltreatment findings in the second half of the fiscal year, suggesting that the drop was mainly the result of the fall in referrals due to the pandemic. This decrease was only about half the magnitude of the 10.5 percent decrease in screened-in referrals, suggesting that a higher percentage of reports was substantiated in FY 2020 than in FFY 2019.* Part of the explanation for this lesser decrease in substantiations may be the reduced proportion of referrals from teachers, whose reports are more likely than others to be unsubstantiated. Many commentators argue this is because teachers often make calls to comply with the mandatory reporting requirement, rather due to genuine concern for a child’s safety. Whether or not this is true, the loss of reports from teachers doubtless meant the loss of serious referrals that would have been been substantiated, as the reduced substantiation rate suggest.
State substantiation rates ranged from a low of 1.9 per thousand children in New Jersey to a high of 19 per thousand in Maine. As the report explains, these rates are affected by state policies and practices, such as their definitions of abuse and neglect, their use of investigation versus alternative response, and the level of evidence they require to substantiate an allegation. Other factors not mentioned by the authors include differences in the messages coming from an agency’s leadership about the relative importance of child safety versus family preservation. Also not mentioned are variations in the use of kinship diversion, the practice of placing children with a relative without court involvement or case opening. If this happens before the investigation is completed, it may result in an “unsubstantiated” finding as the child is now considered safe with a family member. (In a previous commentary, I speculated that New Jersey’s extremely low “victimization” rate might be at least partially due to the practice of kinship diversion.)
Most states had a decrease in the their substantiation rates during FFY 2020, but a few showed little change and some, including Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, and Maine, even had an increase despite the pandemic. In its commentary, Alaska cited a successful effort to eliminate backlogged investigations and Maine described an increase in reports, which may have been the consequence of several highly-publicized child deaths. North Carolina had a large increase from a very low substantiation rate in 2019 of 2.4 per thousand children to 9.7 in FY 2020 but was “not able” to submit commentary in time to appear in the report. Illinois reported an increase in substantiations due to large increases in the two pre-pandemic quarters but did not provide an explanation. It is worth noting that Arkansas and Illinois were two of only three states to report an increase in foster care entries during FFY 2020 – an increase which is probably related to the increased substantiation rates in those states.
Nationally, children younger than one had the highest substantiation rate at 25.1 per 1,000 children, and the rate decreased with age. Comparison to 2019 shows that the number of children aged eight to 12 who were found to be victims of maltreatment had the largest percentage decrease of 8.2 percent when compared to children aged under one, 1-5 and 13-17, presumably because reporting on this group is most likely to be affected by school closures. Next came children aged 1-5, with a 5.0 percent decrease in the number of substantiated victims, while children under one had a decrease of 3.9 percent. The number of substantiated victims aged 13-17 decreased about the same amount as the youngest group at 3.7 percent.** This is also not surprising because these older children are not dependent on teachers and care providers to report abuse or neglect concerns.
American Indian/Alaskan Native children had the highest substantiation rate of all racial/ethnic groups at 15.5 per thousand children in the population; African-American children had the second highest at 13.2 per thousand, followed by multiple race children at 10.3 per thousand, Pacific Islander children at 10.0 per thousand, Hispanic children at 7.8 per thousand, White non-Hispanic children at 7.0 per thousand, and 1.6 per thousand for Asian children. There is considerable controversy about the higher referral, substantiation, and foster care placement rates for African-American and Native American children. Many scholars and advocates attribute these disparities to racism among those who report alleged maltreatment and those who investigate the reports. Nevertheless, there is evidence from other sources that these disparities may reflect greater underlying maltreatment rates among these populations. The latter view is supported by the even greater racial difference in child maltreatment fatality rates, as described below.
While substantiation rates went down for almost all racial categories during the second half of FFY 2020, these rates actually increased for Native American and Alaskan Native children. Quarterly data reveals that, unlike all other groups, this group experienced an increase in substantiation in the April-June quarter of 2020 relative to that quarter of 2019. But there was a large decrease of 20.3 percent in the July-September quarter relative to FFY 2019. It is almost as if the effects of the pandemic appeared later for this population. Further inquiry is needed to understand what might have caused this anomalous result.
Nationally in FY 2020, three-quarters (76.1 percent) of children found to be maltreatment victims were found to be neglected, 16.5 percent physically abused, 9.4 percent sexually abused, 6.4 percent psychologically maltreated, 6.0 percent victims of an “other” type of maltreatment, and 0.2 percent victims of sex trafficking. A child can be found to be maltreated in more than one way, so the percentages add up to more than 100. The percentages were fairly similar in 2019.
Starting in FFY 2018, states were required to report on the number of infants born with prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol. In 2020, 49 states reported that 42,821 infants were referred to CPS agencies for prenatal substance exposure. That was an increase over the 38,625 reported by 47 states in FFY 2019; this increase may reflect the addition of two states and an improvement in reporting by states as they phased it in. Many states are clearly not yet reporting all substance-exposed infants, with a large state like Florida reporting only nine substance-exposed infants in FFY 2020.
NCANDS collects data on caregiver risk factors, although these data may be incomplete as many risk factors may go undetected and not every state collects data on every risk factor. From the data available, domestic violence was the most common risk factor, with 37 states reporting 28.7% of the victims had a caregiver with this risk factor. Substance abuse was almost equally prevalent, with caregivers of 26.4 percent of the victims having this risk factor in 41 reporting states; alcohol abuse was reported as a factor for 15.8 percent of caregivers in 34 states; unfortunately mental illness was not included in the reported data. The prevalence of domestic violence as a risk factor confirms reports from around the country about the importance of this factor in families involved with child welfare. This data suggests that domestic violence services should be included in services for which reimbursement should be provided under the Family First Act.
Child Maltreatment 2020 contains estimates of child fatalities due to abuse and neglect from all states but Massachusetts, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These jurisdictions reported a total of 1,750 fatalities, for a population rate of 2.38 per 100,000 children, compared to 1,825 or 2.50 per 100,000 children in FFY 2019. But to say that the maltreatment fatality rate went down in 2020 as compared to 2019 would be deceptive, because the fatalities counted in one year did not necessarily occur in that year. Rather, the authors indicate that “the child fatality count in this report reflects the federal fiscal year … in which the deaths are determined as due to maltreatment,” which may be different from the year the child actually died.” Such determinations may come a year or more after the fatality occurred. There is no evidence of a declining or increasing trend in the child maltreatment fatality rate based on data from 2016 through 2020 presented in the report; rather there are small annual fluctuations.
A second problem with the fatality estimates is that they are widely believed to be too low. One reason is that many states report only on fatalities that came to the attention of child protective services agencies. As the report’s authors point out, many child maltreatment fatalities do not become known to agencies when there are no siblings or the family was not involved with the child welfare agency. States are now required to consult certain sources (such as Vital Statistics agencies, medical examiners, and Child Fatality Review Teams), or to explain in their state plans why they are not using these sources. But for 2020, only 28 states reported on such additional fatalities, adding 233 fatalities to the total. And we cannot assume that even those states identified all of the child maltreatment fatalities that were known to other sources. Moreover some fatalities resulting from abuse or neglect are mistakenly labeled as due to accident, sudden infant death syndrome, or undetermined causes for lack of a comprehensive investigation.
As in the case of abuse and neglect in general, younger children are much more likely to die from child maltreatment according to NCANDS data: 68 percent of the fatalities were younger than three years old. As in the past, there were sharp demographic differences in the proportion of the population that was found to be the victim of a child maltreatment fatality. Black children died at a rate that was 3.1 times greater than the rate of White child fatalities and six times greater than the rate of Hispanic child fatalities. These differences cast doubt on the arguments that racial disparities in referrals, substantiations and foster care placements reflect racism in the child welfare system, since unlike substantiation, death is an unambiguous outcome. (It is true that racism could affect decisions about whether a death is attributable to maltreatment, but this unlikely to be a large effect). Looking back at Child Maltreatment reports since 2016 shows that Black child fatalities as a percent of the population increased in four out of the five years, and went up from 4.65 to 5.9 over the entire period, as shown in the second table below, so there is reason to fear that this year’s increase reflects a real trend. American-Indian and Alaskan Native children had the second-highest rate of maltreatment fatalities, followed by children of two or more races.
NCANDS does not collect data on the cause or manner of a child’s death, but 73.7 percent of the children who died were found to have suffered neglect and 42.6 percent were found to be abused, either exclusively or in combination with other types of maltreatment. More than 80 percent of the perpetrators were parents. Anecdotal information and some research indicates that mothers’ boyfriends are disproportionately found to have perpetrated child abuse homicides, but NCANDS does not collect this information. Nor is NCANDS able to provide an estimate of how many child victims of maltreatment fatalities had prior CPS contact; some states are able to report on how many of them had prior family preservation or reunification services, but as the authors indicate, “the national percentage is sensitive to which states report data.”
Services
Based on state data, the authors of Child Maltreatment estimated that about 1.1 million children received “postresponse” services, which include a wide variety of family preservation services and foster care. This was a decrease of 9.4 percent from the number receiving such services in 2019, with states attributing the decrease to the decline in referrals due to Covid-19. Nationally, based on the reporting states, 59.7 percent of children determined to be maltreatment victims and 27.1 percent of those not determined to be victims received postresponse services. Children who were not determined to be victims may receive post-response services after being assessed as at risk despite the inability to substantiate an allegation, or because their parents voluntarily accepted services. The percentage of such children who received post-response services varied greatly between states, from 2.2 percent in Colorado to 100 percent in Iowa. Such high percentages may reflect the inclusion of very short-term and “light-touch” services, such as the provision of referrals, gift cards for food or clothing, or bassinets for safe sleep.
Based on data provided by 49 states, the report indicates that 124,360 children determined to be victims of maltreatment (or 21.8 percent) were removed from their homes, along with 48,710 (or 1.8 percent) of children not determined to be victims, for a total of 173,079 children.*** The latter may have been removed because they were deemed to be in imminent danger despite the lack of substantiation; some may have been siblings of children for whom abuse or neglect was found that was serious enough to warrant removal of all children from the home.
The data available from some states show that many children found to be maltreatment victims had prior child welfare involvement:data from 30 states indicates that 13.9 percent of these children had received family preservation services in past five years and data from 39 states indicates that 4.9 percent were reunited with their families in the past five years. Of course these percentages do not include children that were the subject of reports, referrals or investigations, but not services, in the previous five years, which would undoubtedly be much larger.
In closing, it is worth reiterating that many of the results of the annual Child Maltreatment reports are open to misinterpretation–even by the very agency that publishes the reports. The press release announcing the report is titled, “Child Fatalities Due to Abuse and Neglect Decreased in FY 2020, Report Finds” even though the report explains that many of the child fatalities counted for a given year actually occurred in previous years. While the report is very clear in attributing the drop in victimization findings to the pandemic, ACF Acting Assistant Secretary JooYeun Chang is quoted in the press release as saying, “While the data in today’s report shows a decrease in child maltreatment, there is still work to do.” These misstatements suggest that agency leaders either did not read the report or knowingly distorted the data to support an optimistic message. It is not surprising that federal leaders are trying to present the data to their advantage. In my commentary on the AFCARS report, I reported that states that were taking credit for the falling foster care rolls due to the pandemic. The urge to take credit seems to be irresistible; that is why it is so important for the media and commentators to analyze these reports independently rather than paste the press release statements into their articles, as some outlets are all too willing to do.
*We cannot assert this as fact because the unit of analysis for substantiation switches to children rather than reports. Theoretically, the difference in percentages could occur if each substantiation involved half as many children in FFY 2020 as in FFY 2019–which is very unlikely.
**Decrease for 13-17 age group was calculated by Child Welfare Monitor from data in Table 7-5.
***In contrast, the AFCARS report indicates 216,838 children were placed in foster care. The reason for the difference might be the missing data from some states in NCANDS as well as the fact that AFCARS includes all removals that took place in 2020, not just those that occurred after a referral made in the same year.
Child Welfare Monitor 