Did maltreatment fatalities in Texas really decline?

It may be too soon to celebrate. Policy changes may be obscuring the numbers.

This is a revised version of a column by Marie Cohen and Naomi Schaefer Riley that was published in the Dallas Morning News on April 1, 2025. Around the same time, Texas Public Radio published an excellent analysis with the same message, Why Texas’ Massive Drop in Child Neglect and Abuse Deaths is Misleading, as part of a major project called When Home is the Danger.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has reported a dramatic decline in child maltreatment fatalities from 199 in FY 2021 to 99 in FY in 2024. Perhaps most surprising about the purported decline in fatalities is that it occurred alongside a massive drop in the number of children placed in foster care from 16,028 in Fiscal Year 2021 to 9,623 in Fiscal Year 2022, with similar numbers of children placed in 2023 and 2024. 

Supporters of recent changes in Texas law regarding child maltreatment were quick to highlight these findings as evidence that foster care can be greatly reduced or eliminated with no adverse effects on child safety.

But these claims do not stand up under careful scrutiny. Changes to policy and practice can result in dramatic year-to-year changes in official counts of child maltreatment fatalities, and Texas has implemented at least three significant policy or practice changes during this period. 

First, a Texas law that took effect September 21, 2021 tightened the definition of neglect to require the presence of “blatant disregard” for the consequences of an act or failure to act that results in harm to the child or that creates an immediate danger to the child’s physical health or safety. This new requirement means that deaths that would have been attributed to maltreatment prior to the law change are now not investigated at all or not confirmed as maltreatment. Indeed,  DCF cites this changed definition as one cause of the decline in reported fatalities between FY 2021 and FY 2024. 

Child fatality numbers were also affected by a practice change implemented by DCF that involves the way the agency handles reports of child fatalities. Previously, DCFS assigned all child death reports it received for a full investigation. But starting in September 2022, reports to the Texas Child Abuse Hotline that involve a child fatality but include no explicit concern for abuse and neglect are treated as “Case Related Special Requests,” requiring field staff to confirm that the reporter or first responders had no concern for abuse or neglect. If there are any concerns for abuse or neglect, the child fatality is then sent for a full investigation, but otherwise there is no further action. DFPS reports that the number of child fatalities it investigated decreased from 997 in FY2022 to 690 in FY2023 and 587 in FY 2024.  DFPS attributes this decline in investigations to both this practice change and to the legislature’s change in the definition of neglect.

There is one newer policy change that DFPS announced in its recent report. Investigations that are closed “with a disposition of reason to believe for neglect with a fatal severity code” receive a further level of review. It seems possible that this level of review may be reducing the number of reported cases even further.

Given all these policy and practice changes affecting the count of child maltreatment fatalities, It seems highly likely that Texas did not see an actual reduction in these deaths, but rather reclassified them as not due to child maltreatment.  Perhaps it is not surprising that neither DFPS nor the supporters of weaker child protection are interested in exploring what is really happening to vulnerable children in the aftermath of the drastic decline in the use of foster care.