Lives cut short: a new project to document child maltreatment fatalities

On May 2, 2024, an extraordinary gathering was held in Washington, DC. It brought together scholars, advocates, and family members of children who lost their lives to abuse and neglect to mark the inauguration of a new project, Lives Cut Short. This project, under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, will shed a light on the lives and deaths of abused and neglected children, many of which would never otherwise be known to the public. I am proud to be a part of this project, along with Naomi Schaefer-Riley AEI’s point person on child welfare, and eminent child welfare scholars, Emily Putnam-Hornstein of UNC-Chapel Hill and Sarah Font of Penn State. If you missed the event, you can watch it here.

We are grateful that family members of two children who died of abuse were able to join us for our launch. One of these special guests was the aunt of Joanna (age three), Terry (age two) and Sierra (age six months) Denton-Carrillo, who were drowned by their mother despite desperate efforts by their father to warn the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) and LAPD about her deteriorating mental state. Also in attendance was the aunt of Sophia Mason, who was physically and sexually abused and forced to live in a metal shed by her mother and mother’s boyfriend in the months before she died. Alameda County (California) DCFS social workers ignored repeated warnings from school staff and medical professionals and family members about Sophia’s injuries and the danger she was in.

About 1,900 children died of maltreatment in the United States in 2022, according to national statistics that are known to be greatly underestimated. All of these children of them were likely known to a family member who could have reported or intervened. At one time, the fact that a large number of children died of abuse or neglect was a big national issue. A national coalition worked to mobilize support for the funding of the Protect Our Kids Act of 2012, which authorized the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities (CECANF) and charged it with developing a national strategy to reduce fatalities from child abuse and neglect. CECANF began work in 2014, holding public hearings around the country. In March 2016, after two years of work, it published Within Our Reach: A National Strategy to Eliminate Child Abuse and Negect Fatalities, a 167-page report with 110 recommendations. Eight years later, the report is forgotten, the recommendations disregarded, and mentioning the issue is considered gauche in ruling circles. An office founded to monitor the progress of this state and local efforts to monitor the CECANF recommendations produced a “First Progress Report” and appears to have been disbanded.

Child welfare leaders, legislators and advocates appear to have lost interest in child maltreatment fatalities. As Naomi Schaefer Riley put it at the project launch, she often hears that talking about child maltreatment deaths is “letting the tail wag the dog.” We can’t make policy based on rare events and small numbers, she is often told. Yet, as she stated, these numbers are not small at all. They far surpass the number of people killed in mass shootings, that get a lot more attention. Perhaps more importantly, if child maltreatment is an iceberg, the fatalities represent the part we cannot see. How many more children are suffering in silence?

The Lives Cut Short project has multiple goals. We seek to draw attention to this issue, knowing that public attention is necessary to build up support for reform. We hope to provide a context for media outlets, who often cover an incident in their area without any knowledge of the context. We will draw attention how differently states are defining, identifying, and reporting child maltreatment fatalities, and how this results in a final tally that is like adding apples to oranges, grapes and other fruit, but in any case is underestimated. Already posted on our website is a report that illustrates this diversity in great detail, showing how the numbers that states report to the federal government reflect their definitions and reporting practices as much or more than they reflect the actual rates of child maltreatment. Entitled A Jumble of Standards: How State and Federal Authorities Have Underestimated Child Maltreatment Fatalities, the report may be the only available resource that describes this diversity in state reporting in such detail. And as several speakers explained on May 2, this diversity creates a paradoxical situation in which states that are more transparent and conscientious about reporting child fatalities end up looking like they have higher fatality rates.

The core of Lives Cut Short is a database called CANDID, which consists of records of children who died of abuse or neglect since 2022 whose deaths that fit the federal definition of maltreatment fatalities–those that are caused by maltreatment or for which maltreatment was a contributing factor. All of the data come from publicly available sources, including media reports and official case summaries or reports from states. Right now, the website enables the user to sort the children by state and age. Clicking on each child’s name will allow the reader to access media and non-media sources of information about the circumstances under which the child died. A detailed state-by-state page provides links to each state’s statute governing disclosure of child fatality information as well as links to any child fatality notifications, case summaries, and case reviews, that each state provides.

We will continue both to add child fatalities and to broaden the information on each death. As our searches yield new media reports and state notifications and reviews, which often appear as much as two years after a child’s death, we will add them to our census of child deaths. We plan to seek out other sources, such as Medical Examiner reports, to learn about cases of which we are still unaware. To broaden the information on each case, we have already begun to enter detailed data about these deaths in a detailed database that will record demographic characteristics of the children and families, causes of death, perpetrator characteristics and risk factors, past involvement with CPS and other services, and systemic factors that may have prevented the discover of these children’s plight before it was too late. By bringing together media reports, official case summaries, and other sources such as wrongful death suits, we will be able to provide a richer description than any one source can provide. This information can then be analyzed to provide valuable information to help prevent such fatalities in the future.

We hope that Lives Cut Short will restart the conversation about how to prevent child maltreatment fatalities, and more broadly, redirect the conversation about how to prevent child maltreatment fatalities, which must start with an honest consideration of what serious child abuse or neglect means. Even more broadly, perhaps it will even change the conversation around child welfare services, bringing child safety and well-being back into focus, but also bringing in other systems and their responsibility to vulnerable children. These goals may be ambitious, but we cannot afford to fail.