Child Welfare Myths: Foster Care Is Worse than Remaining Home

As a field, child welfare seems to be particularly vulnerable to myths and misconceptions, which are often backed up by inaccurate interpretations of research. Unfortunately, these myths and misconceptions, when promoted by powerful and wealthy advocates, can be perpetuated and enshrined into policy. This is the beginning of an occasional series in which I attempt to deconstruct some of the most common myths. We start with one of the most common and potentially destructive–the myth that children left with their families always do better than they would if placed in foster care.

This myth was recently exhibited in all its glory by the Arizona Star as part of a major series on child welfare in that state. Here is how reporter Emily Bregel describes a frequently quoted study.

Research indicates that children left with their own troubled families fare better than those brought into the foster care system. A 2007 study found children whose families were investigated for abuse and neglect but remained home were less likely to become teenage parents or juvenile delinquents than similarly abused children who were removed from home. Those left at home were also more likely to have jobs as young adults, compared with children of similar backgrounds who were put in foster care.

This oft-misquoted study was published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Joseph Doyle in 2007. Doyle’s study has been used relentlessly–and often inappropriately–by advocates of reducing foster care placements. Doyle used a creative method to estimate the effects of foster care on Illinois children ages 5 to 15 who were receiving welfare and who were investigated for maltreatment for the first time between July 1, 1990 and June 31, 1991. He compared long-term outcomes (delinquency, teen motherhood, and employment) for the children assigned to investigators with higher removal rates to outcomes for those assigned to investigators with lower removal rates.

By comparing the outcomes for the two groups, Doyle could estimate the effects of being placed in foster care for children who were on the margin of placement–those who might have been placed by one investigator and not by another. For those children, Doyle found large differences favoring those children who were not removed from their homes. Doyle’s results say nothing about the children whose cases were unambiguous and who would have been placed (or not placed) regardless of the investigator.¹

Obviously, we cannot do a controlled experiment in which the same child is both placed and not placed in foster care to get at the true difference that it makes in children’s lives. Perhaps the best we can do is ask the children themselves. Researchers at the University of Chicago’s ChapinHall research center surveyed 727 sixteen and seventeen year olds who had in foster care in California for at least six months. When asked about their treatment by their parents or other caregivers before entering foster care, 36% reported that they were hit hard with a fist, kicked or slapped; 32.4% reported that a caregiver threw or pushed them; 28.4% reported missing school to do chores or care for a family member; 28.3% reported having to go without things they needed because the parent’s paycheck was spent on “adult interests,” 26.4% reported that their caregiver beat them up; and 24.9% reported that their caregiver failed to protect them from harm by someone else. A shocking 29.7% reported sexual molestation and 20.7% reported rape. Horribly, 18.6% reported that their caregiver tried to choke, smother or strangle them and 16.9% reported being locked in a closet or room for several hours or longer.

When asked about characteristics of the parent or caregiver they lived with before entering foster care, 48.8% reported inadequate parenting skills, 49.7% a criminal record, 48.3% drug abuse, 48.8 alcohol abuse, 33% reported that a caregiver was abused by or abused a spouse or partner and 25.6% said a caregiver had mental illness. In addition, a total of 56.9% reported that they either agreed, strongly agreed or very strongly agreed with the statement, “All in all I was lucky to be placed in the foster care system,” while only 17.6% disagreed.

The California survey suggests that more often than not, foster care is an improvement over families where children are unsafe, fearful, hungry, unsupervised, or unloved. However, I have learned from my own experience as a social worker that, while some children make the miraculous journey from hell to heaven when they are placed in the best foster homes, many foster homes are only slightly less chaotic and more nurturing than the homes from which the children have been plucked. The beatings, rapes, and hunger may be over but many children and youth continue to be neglected emotionally, educationally, and in other ways in foster care. When combined with the trauma caused by separation from family, it is not surprising that young people whose home lives were on the border between acceptable and unacceptable to an investigator may do worse in foster care than they would have done at home.

Neglect of children in foster care is inexcusable: these children need more than the usual nurturing in order to make up for the trauma and deprivation they may have already suffered in their birth homes. That’s why we need to increase the number of children placed with kin as well as other alternatives to traditional foster care, such as residential schools and hybrid arrangements that combine features of foster and group homes. But what we don’t need to do is abandon children in homes where they are not safe.

The misuse of Doyle’s article has supported the ideas that it is always better to reduce the number of children in foster care and that reduced care numbers are a prima facie indicator of improvement. It has led to many systems, like that of my home town of Washington DC, using reduction of foster care numbers as an outcome in itself–independent of trends in actual maltreatment. Using foster care reduction as an indicator of success fails to recognize that some placements are needed to keep children safe. It also means that jurisdiction, like New York City for example, may be claiming partial credit for the results of gentrification.

The misuse of research and data, especially when translated into policy, should disturb everyone regardless of their feelings about the particular issue. Doyle’s research suggests that when the case for removal is marginal, the default option might be to keep the child at home–with supervision and services by the state. It does not suggest that removal of a child from home is always the wrong decision or that programs should be rated solely on the ability to cut foster care rolls.

Another problem with making inferences from Doyle’s study about foster care today is the age of his data, which are from 1990 and 1991. Child welfare culture and practices have changed greatly since that time and the relevance of research from 25 years ago is questionable. ↩

New book debunks prevailing child welfare myths

A new book by two leading child welfare researchers aims to elucidate the complex world of child welfare for the general public and policymakers. In After the Cradle Falls, Melissa Jonson-Reid and Brett Drake of Washington University provide a useful primer for the child welfare field. While they may be overly optimistic in assuming that a lay audience will pick up this book, it will certainly be useful for policymakers, journalists, students and advocates who want a general overview of child abuse and neglect, child welfare systems, and proposals for change.

Jonson-Reid and Drake make a particularly valuable contribution by highlighting myths and common misconceptions that are rife in the child welfare field. Among the common myths they debunk are the following:

“Neglect” is just another word for poverty, and parents become embroiled with Child Protective Services just because they are poor. Johnson-Reid and Blake explain that while poverty increases the risk of neglect, most parents who are poor do not neglect their children. Neglect is much more serious than a missed dental appointment or a messy house. Some neglect cases are extremely severe, even fatal. But even less severe cases can result in devastating lifetime consequences on brain development and the ability to form relationships.
Racial disproportionality in child welfare involvement is caused by racist decision-making by Child Protective Services (CPS). There is no dispute that African-American children are overrepresented in child welfare services and foster care compared to their share of the population. But Jonson-Reid and Drake conclude that “it is hard to find current empirical data that suggest that widespread bias within today’s CPS system is a significant driver of current disproportionality.” It would have helped if they had included the key research finding that actually debunked the myth about racism and disproportionality. As I have explained elsewhere, research has conclusively shown that higher Black representation in the child welfare system reflects higher rates of maltreatment in African-American families. This Black/White maltreatment gap may in turn reflect the relationship between race and poverty, as Jonson-Reid and Drake suggest.
State and local agencies have an incentive to take more kids into foster care. This trope was mentioned over and over again by supporters of the Family First and Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which was signed into law on February 9, 2018. Jonson-Reid and Drake rightly give it short shrift. They explain that states are required to make “reasonable efforts” to keep children with their families and can be sanctioned by the federal government if they fail to document that they have made such efforts. The authors could have cited some other key evidence against this myth. For example, only about half of children in foster care are eligible for federal foster care support under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act and the federal government pays only part (50 to 83% depending on the state) of the cost. States and localities spent about $8 billion on foster care in FY 2014, 47% of their total child welfare spending, so it is hard to understand how they could have an incentive to place children in foster care. Moreover, states have access to other federal funds for services to intact families, such as TANF, Title IV-B, and the Social Services Block Grant.
Child welfare systems should prevent abuse and neglect. As the authors point out, child welfare systems (which they refer to as CPS, a term that I prefer to reserve for the investigation function only) have no truly preventative role. They are charged with responding to abuse and neglect after they have already occurred. This common misconception is particularly important in relation to the recent debate on FFPSA. Despite its name, the Act does not fund prevention; rather it funds treatment, or services to parents who have already maltreated their children. Obscuring the distinction between prevention and treatment prevents an honest and clear-headed debate about the appropriate allocation of resources between these purposes.
Child welfare is a broken system: Jonson-Reid and Drake argue that rather than being broken, the child welfare system has never been completed. They compare it to a fire department that will will send out a fire truck only 60% of the time, and often after the house has been consumed by flames. When a truck does respond, the firefighters may have minimal training in firefighting. A firefighter might show up without a truck and will have to wait until a truck with water is found. An injured person, instead of being taken into a hospital, may be placed in the home of someone who has no idea what treatment they need.
Child welfare can be fixed in a cost-neutral manner. Jonson-Reid and Drake point out that reform efforts (such as privatization or differential response) have often aimed to do more with less or the same amount of resources and have thus either done harm or failed to make a difference. They argue that any real improvement would raise costs but but could result in big long-run savings. They point out that we spend only $30 billion a year on child welfare when the long-term costs of child maltreatment have been estimated at $250 to $500 billion for each year’s cohort of victims.

The last myth is particularly poignant in view of the recent passage of FFPSA. It expands the use of federal Title IV-E funds to services to parents at risk of losing their children to foster care. But it finances some of this new spending by taking money from other key functions of child welfare. like congregate care placements (necessary both for therapeutic reasons and to make up for the foster parent shortage), and foster care payments to kin, who will now not be allowed these payments if the parent is receiving federally-funded services.

Jonson-Reid and Drake end with an extensive list of suggestions for changing programming, policy and law. These include primary (or universal) prevention such as poverty reduction and educating parents about positive parenting, systemic improvements to child welfare (such as completing the system), and improving and expanding treatment for children and families. The list is somewhat overwhelming, but gives policymakers and advocates many options for where to start addressing this massive and complex problem.

After the Cradle Falls is a realistic and informed discussion of child welfare. It will be a useful resource to those who are open minded enough to accept the conclusions of science and common sense even when they conflict with the facile platitudes of ideologues, which have all too often had a disproportionate influence on policy and practice.

Why The Child Welfare Establishment May Not Want to Know About Child Torture

The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), one of America’s most venerable child welfare organizations, issued its weekly update on January 21 with something conspicuously missing. “Last Week in Child Welfare, January 14 -21” contained updates on Mississippi’s lack of representation for families involved with child welfare, a recent report from New Jersey’s court monitor, and an opinion piece in the Indiana star about Indiana’s struggles with opioid abuse and its impact on the foster care system.

You would never know that on January 14, a starving seventeen-year-old escaped from a house of horrors where she and her twelve siblings were being starved, beaten, chained to beds, and kept prisoner. The teenager told police that her parents would kill her if her escape plan failed. During the week after the children’s rescue, public and press around the country and indeed the world were fixated on this story, trying to understand why it could happen and what could be done to prevent similar occurrences in the future. But this event apparently did not figure in CWLA’s “week in child welfare.”

One might think that an organization with a self-described mission “to advance policies, best practices and collaborative strategies that result in better outcomes for children, youth and families that are vulnerable” would be concerned that 13 children were allowed to suffer for so many years. You’d think that they would be putting out information about the warning signs of child abuse and neglect and an admonition to make the call that might save a life. But you’d be wrong.

CWLA is part of what I think of as the child welfare establishment–the group that dominates the national conversation around child welfare. These organizations’ resources have enabled them to dominate the national conversation around child welfare by funding materials, conferences, and technical assistance to state and local child welfare agencies. Since the 1970s, this group has been preoccupied with keeping families together and children out of foster care–with scant concern about the costs to kids in families that are so dysfunctional and dangerous that foster care is clearly a better alternative

Like the other members of the child welfare establishment, CWLA believes that “children fare better in their own homes compared to children in foster care who have been similarly maltreated, suggesting that social services should promote therapy, education, and treatments to increase family stability instead of relying on removals. ”

Of course child removals should should be minimized unless absolutely necessary, but it is difficult to imagine that parents like the Turpins could be helped through “therapy, education, and treatment” to love and nurture their children. The child welfare establishment appears not to want to believe in the existence of such parents who are so bad as to be beyond rehabilitation.

The child welfare establishment also fears that publicizing cases like that of the Turpins will result in a flood of calls to child abuse hotlines, resulting in the type of “foster care panic” that sometime occurs after a tragic case. Perhaps they would rather not encourage members of the public to report suspicions of child abuse that might save children in the future, because they believe such reports must increase the foster care rolls.

Of course we don’t want the public making frivolous, malicious, or fallacious reports. Nor do we want investigators responding to tragic events by sweeping kids up into foster care who don’t need to be there. In some cases, we can help children by monitoring their situation and providing services to their parents without removing the children. But in other cases, the children can only be protected by removing them from their toxic families.

The desire to avoid publicizing extreme cases of abuse and neglect might also explain why the child welfare establishment was not part of the coalition that supported the establishment of the Commission the Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities. And it might explain why, as I wrote in an earlier post, child deaths and other tragedies that are missed by CPS are often followed by the comment from system administrators that “systems should not be judged by one case.”

During the week the Turpins were uncovered, CWLA thought it was more important to cite an op-ed piece that criticized Indiana’s highly respected former child welfare commissioner, who resigned with warnings that children would die if more funding was not provided. CWLA assured readers that “Even infants who have been exposed to narcotics fare better when they are kept with their mothers, assuming the mother has access to government resources and drug treatments.”

Unfortunately, the child welfare establishment’s obsession with keeping kids out of foster care may be condemning more children to suffering, physical and emotional injury, and death at the hands of their own parents.

This post was updated on January 29, 2017.

Breaking the Silence: How to Encourage Family and Neighbors to Report Child Abuse

Yesterday I published a post arguing for monitoring of home schools to prevent cases like the horrific story of the Turpins in California. But we really can’t be sure if regulation of home schools would have prevented the horrific abuse of these children. Even if David Turpin had not registered his home as a school, he would not have been caught unless somebody reported his children as truant. Given the silence of their neighbors and family about the disturbing signs of maltreatment, they might have been equally silent about the children’s apparent failure to attend school.

The silence of neighbors and family despite multiple signs that something was terribly wrong in this family was striking. There were numerous red flags. One neighbor reported trying to speak to some of the children when they were outside of the house. She reported that they “froze,” “shut down,” and were “terrified.” They also appeared thin and malnourished. And yet the neighbor did not notify authorities.

Multiple neighbors told reporters that the family was only rarely seen working in the yard or getting into vans at odd hours and always responded to greetings with silence. as a representative of the Riverside County Department of Social Services told USA Today, “Not one person called us. How sad,” she said. Sad indeed.

Before they moved to California, the Turpins’ household also raised questions among their neighbors in rural Rio Vista Texas, according to the Los Angeles Times. One neighbor, Ricky Vinyard, was concerned that the children rarely left their home, lights were on at all hours with blinds drawn, and eight new children’s bikes sat outside for months. A dumpster outside the house was filled with trash and David Turpin “would stand in the driveway shooting cans with his pistol, aiming toward the road.” Mr. Vinyard told the Times that he and his wife suspected abuse but decided not to report it, fearing repercussions, especially since Turpin had a gun.

Elizabeth Flores, Louise Turpin’s sister, tearfully told Good Morning America that all attempts by family members to see the children were rebuffed. When Flores came to her sister’s home in Texas, she was not allowed inside and visited with her sister in the driveway. The children never appeared. When her mother drove hours to visit in Texas, she was denied entry, and when her father bought a flight ticket, he was told not to come. The family must have discussed this strange behavior among themselves, but they never reported it to authorities.

The silence of neighbors and family seems to defy belief, yet similar silence has been noticed in other cases of long-term abuse. Is it part of American culture to believe that one’s home is one’s castle and neighbors should not interfere? What can be done to change this reluctance to intervene? This is not an easy issue so I would love to hear readers’ suggestions on how to get members of the public to report suspected abuse or neglect.

At a minimum, it seems clear that states should do a better job of informing the public of the signs of child abuse and neglect and the responsibility to report even a suspicion of maltreatment to avoid a tragedy. Brochures with this information should be available at libraries, pediatricians’ offices, health centers, departments of motor vehicles and police stations. This information should be given out along with drivers’ licenses and voter registrations and included with tax forms. Television and radio PSA’s (along the lines of “If you see something, say something”), bus ads, and other vehicles should be used to disseminate the information. Online training should be available to all citizens.

Beyond public information, the question is whether states should require reporting of suspected abuse or neglect with penalties for those who fail to report. All states require certain professionals, such as doctors and teachers, to report their suspicions. But most states (including California) don’t require ordinary citizens to report when they fear a child is being harmed.

However, Texas is one of about eighteen states that require any person who suspects abuse or neglect to report it. The identity of the reporter is confidential and cannot be released except under very limited circumstances. Failure to report suspected child abuse or neglect is a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment of up to one year and/or a fine of up to $4,000. And that law has been in existence in Texas at least 20 years. Nevertheless, Mr. Vinyard and his wife chose not to report.

This leaves several questions. Did the Vinyards know that they were required by law to report their suspicions of abuse? Did they know that failure to report was punishable by a fine or imprisonment? While penalties have been imposed on mandatory reporters who failed to report abuse that they saw in their professional capacity, I have not been able to find documentation of such a penalty being enforced upon a member of the general public. Such enforcement might be considered too heavy-handed by most citizens and legislators. However, one way or another it is critical that citizens report to the authorities when there are signs that things are desperately wrong as they were in in the Turpin case.

The Turpin children have been rescued. But they are physically and mentally stunted, most of them probably for life. We don’t know how many children are currently chained to their beds, locked in rooms. and starved by the people who are supposed to care for them. Monitoring all children who are ostensibly home-schooled and campaigns to encourage citizens to support their suspicions of maltreatment seem like the best ways to save these children and prevent more horror stories.

Turpin Case Shows Risks of Not Monitoring Home Schools

Turpins It seems that the whole country is talking about the Turpin family. Thirteen children and young adults were found imprisoned and emaciated in their home in Riverside County and California on January 14 after a seventeen-year-old escaped and called the police.

Reporters and politicians soon focused on one salient aspect of this family. The children were being ostensibly homeschooled under a provision of California law that allows parents to designate their homes as a private school by simply filing an affidavit. These “schools” are not monitored or inspected aside from an annual fire inspection.

I have already written about Natalie Finn. starved to death by her adoptive parents Adrian Jones, tortured to death by his mother and stepfather, and a little girl in Kentucky who was rescued at the last minute from a similar fate. All were ostensibly home-schooled, although little schooling was going on in these toxic homes.

Homeschooling is increasing in popularity in the United States. About 3.3 percent of the school-aged population was homeschooled in America in 2016. This is nearly double the percentage tin 1999. Clearly most of their parents are not abusive and want to provide the best education for their children, often at great personal sacrifice.

But available evidence suggests that the most severe cases of abuse and neglect, often fatal, tend to involve homeschooling. A study by Barbara Knox of the University of Wisconsin found that 47% of a sample of children tortured by their parents had been withdrawn from school and an additional 29% had never been enrolled.

.The Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) has collected nearly 400 cases of severe or fatal child abuse in homeschool settings that it identified from public records that mentioned home schooling as a factor. Even based on this incomplete database, CRHE estimates that homeschooled children are more likely to die of abuse or neglect than children of the same age overall.

Many of the severe and fatal homeschooling abuse cases that CRHE has collected share ugly details with the Turpin case. More than 40% of these cases involved some form of imprisonment. These children were chained to their beds, kept in cages, or locked in rooms for years. More than 45% of these cases involve food deprivation.

The linkage between home schooling and severe child abuse is not totally surprising. As Rachel Coleman and Kathryn Brightbill of CRHE point out in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, children who are in school cannot be isolated and locked away. They cannot easily be starved to death as school staff would notice and they would have access to food. And they are required to have an annual physical exam.

Of course children who attend school are abused and neglected too. But attending school exposes them to teachers and other staff. School staff submit more child abuse reports than any other group. Education personnel submitted 18.4% of the child maltreatment reports that received an investigation or alternative response in 2015, the most recent year for which the information is available

In order to prevent more cases like the Turpins, CRHE recommends requiring that homeschooled children receive annual education assessments and physical examinations. This would provide two opportunities for each child to be seen by a mandatory reporter.

State Assemblyman Jose Martinez, who represents the town where the Turpins live, has already expressed his concern about the lack of oversight of private and home schools and his intent to explore introducing legislation to mandate some type of oversight.

But homeschooling advocates are opposed to any regulations on homeschooling. The President of the powerful Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) asked a reporter for Reuters, “Should all the innocent home-school families, who do a great job, … be intruded upon because of this family?” he said. “I think the answer is no.”

HSLDA is one of Washington’s most effective lobbying groups, according to the Washington Post Magazine. State groups have also been able to scuttle attempts to regulate homeschooling in response to child abuse deaths in Florida, Iowa and Kentucky.

It is hard to understand why responsible homeschooling parents and their advocates would object to such minor requirements as requiring an annual doctor’s visit and educational assessment. State legislators should set aside their fears of backlash from extremist advocates and assume that most voters will support protecting children.

Yes, A System Should be Judged by One Case

“A system should not be judged by one case, no matter how sad or sensational,” said Joette Katz, Commissioner of Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF) Katz’ words were reported by the Hartford Courant.

Katz was referring to the case of Matthew Tirado. Matthew, a 17-year-old diagnosed with Autism and Intellectual Disability, died on February 14, 2017 from prolonged abuse and neglect by his mother. As revealed by a heartbreaking report from Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate (OCA), Matthew had been known to DCF for 11 years, since he was five years old. Yet, DCF missed several opportunities to save Matthew, who was nonverbal and could not speak for himself. Matthew’s interactions with DCF included:

In December 2005, when Matthew was six years old, his school called DCF to report that Matthew had missed more than 30 days of school since the school year began, . DCF investigated and found neglect but later closed the case after Matthew’s attendance briefly improved.
In December 2006, the school again contacted DCF to report that Matthew had missed over 50 days of school. DCF closed the case six weeks later without finding neglect. Matthew’s mother told DCF that her mother was moving in to help her care for the children. This should have been a red flag because agency files documented Matthew’s grandmother’s long history of involvement with DCF, alcohol abuse and mental illness. But repeated risk assessments erroneously noted that Matthew’s mother had no history of being abused or neglected as a child.
In 2009, school officials again called CPS stating that Matthew came to school with bruising on his face that was covered up with makeup. School officials also reported contacting Ms. Tirado on other occasions regarding bruises, which she responded were inflicted by Matthew’s two-year-old sister. Matthew’s mother denied abusing him and the case was closed before requested medical records arrived.
In October, 2014, Hartford Public Schools (HPS) reported that Matthew’s sister, a first-grader, showed signs of physical abuse and reported that her mother hit her. She told school staff that Matthew was also hit, but he was not seen or assessed.
In November 2014, HPS reported to DCF that Matthew was not enrolled in school and may not have been in school for a long time. In fact, Matthew had hardly attended school since 2012. DCF found Ms. TIrado to be neglectful and abusive and opened a case on the family for supervision by the agency.
Matthew attended less than 100 days of school between June 2012 and his death in February 2017. HPS made five reports to DCF between October 2014 and May 2016. about the children’s failure to attend school. After March 2016, Ms. Tirado refused to allow DCF access to her children. In July, DCS iled a neglect petition with the Juvenile Court.
The Court held six hearings on the case between July and December 2016 but Ms. Tirado never appeared. In December 2016 DCS asked the court to terminate the case. No orders were sought to compel Ms. Tirado to produce the children, permit visitation of Matthew’s sister in school, or to remove the children, even though there was legal justification for any of these actions. Unbelievably, after a failed attempt to compel Ms. Tirado to come to court, the court accepted DCS’ request to close the case. DCS closed its own case on the family in January 2017.

After Matthew’s death, the Hartford Courant reported that Commissioner Katz shockingly told legislators that “As horrible as this may sound, there comes a point where you have to make a determination that you have done all that you can legally do. There are 15,000 cases and only so many social workers.”

The Commissioner also said that a system should not be judged based on one case. It’s an old refrain. But is it true? I don’t think so. There are many reasons why a system should be judged by one case.

First, we are not talking about one bad decision. A child suffered for as long as 11 years and agency social workers missed multiple opportunities to protect him. His sister fared a little better since she survived but will probably bear lifetime scars. This is more than a one-time event.

Secondly, for each “worst case, “we don’t know how many children suffer for years and don’t die while the system ignores repeated red flags. At least Matthew is out of his misery. The others are still suffering. We may never know their names.

I’m tired of agency heads who tell us not to judge the system by the worst cases. Lets bury this trope once and for all. A system should be judged–above all–by the worst cases. For each of these cases represents many more children whose daily suffering will lead to lifetime emotional educational and physical damage.

Secrecy in child welfare: cover up or get better?

Kansas-Kids- — Evan Brewer, Caleb Blansett, Adrian Jones: From http://www.crimeonline.com

Clint Blansett’s 10-year-old son had been dead just a few days when a social worker from the state knocked on the family’s door in south-central Kansas . She wasn’t there to offer condolences after Caleb’s death or ask about his sister, Blansett said. She wanted him to sign a form saying he wouldn’t talk about his son’s death or the Kansas Department for Children and Families. No details about contact the agency had with the family before Caleb’s mom smashed his head with a rock while he slept and then stabbed him seven times.

So begins a story by the Kansas City Star entitled Secrecy inside child welfare system can kill: ‘God help the children of Kansas. In it. reporter Laura Bauer describes an agency that chooses to protect itself at the expense of fulfilling its mandate to protect kids. Among the examples included in the story are

A DCF deputy director resigned after she was asked to shred notes of meetings about critical cases. Furthermore, her attempt to implement a systemwide review process for such cases was refused because administrators did not want mistakes documented in writing lest they would be used in court against the agency.
For a year and a half, DCF refused to release information about its repeated interactions with the family of Adrian Jones, who was killed by his father and stepmother and fed to their pigs. It was only after the murderers were sentenced to life in prison that DCF reduced 2,000 pages of records that were haphazardly thrown together in what looked like a purposeful attempt to baffle readers. The records, once put in order, revealed multiple investigative errors, particularly three that probably cost Adrian his life.
A Wichita television station reported that DCF received several reports of mistreatment of Caleb Blansett, beginning in 2012 and continuing in the months before his death. On August 3, 2017, the Star requested information about these calls and any ensuing investigations. Three months later, DCF responded that it did not have the staff to respond to the request.
Just this past September, the body of three-year-old Evan Brewer was found in a cement structure outside the house where his mother and boyfriend were living. He had been missing at least since the previous March. His father claims to have made multiple reports to DPS alleging abuse of Evan. DCF denied a request from a local TV station for the records relating to these reports.

Kansas law requires that “in the event that child abuse or neglect results in a child fatality or near fatality, reports or records of a child alleged or adjudicated to be in need of care received by the secretary, a law enforcement agency, or any juvenile intake and assessment worker shall become a public record and subject to disclosure.” But unfortunately, the law does not define “reports and records.”

To receive federal money under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), a state must allow “public disclosure of the findings or information about the case of child abuse or neglect which has resulted in a child fatality or near fatality.” Unfortunately, the vagueness of this language allows states to avoid releasing information necessary to identify how the agency failed. In a report entitled State Secrecy and Child Deaths in the U.S., two child advocacy groups found that all states have some sort of public disclosure policy regarding child abuse deaths. However, the report gave 20 states (including the three most populous states) a grade of C or below on these policies based on a variety of criteria, including whether they were encoded in statute, whether the disclosure is mandatory, and the scope and specificity of the information that must be disclosed.

Kansas was actually in the better half of states. It received a “B” from authors of the state secrecy report, mainly because it has a policy, the policy is encoded in statute, and is mandatory, despite the vagueness of the information that must be released. It is worth noting that only 14 states got higher than a B grade. Moreover, the report’s authors also found that states often fail to abide by their own disclosure policies–as when Kansas claimed to lack staff to respond to the request for information about the death of Caleb Blansett.

New Jersey’s child welfare agency, under the guise of protecting children’s privacy, in 2013 adopted a rule that the child welfare agency must release information only “to the extent it is pertinent to the child abuse or neglect that led to the fatality or near fatality.” Even the under the new tightened rules the agency should have disclosed information about its past interactions with the family of JoJo Lemons after he became the third sibling in his family to die while sharing a bed with other family members. His parents were charged with reckless manslaughter and child endangerment, and each pleaded guilty to a count of child endangerment. Nevertheless, CPS concluded that JoJo’s death was not caused by abuse or neglect. Therefore, the agency was not required to release information about its interactions with the family.

In Cleveland, 5-year-old Tenasia McCloud was beaten to death by her mother and her girlfriend on March 17, 2017. At the time of her death, the child welfare agency had an open case on the family, according to News 5 Cleveland. A social worker had visited the home eight times, including three days before Tenasia was brought to the hospital in cardiac arrest. The paper tried to find out how the agency did not see that the child was in danger. But Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services refused to provide records of agency contacts with the family, citing a rule prohibiting disclosures that might jeopardize a criminal investigation or proceeding. Only five other states have a similar rule, according to the State Secrecy study, suggesting that it is not a necessary requirement. Moreover, two states conversely allow disclosure only if a person is criminally charged or would have been criminally charged if they had not died.

Congress and the states must strengthen disclosure requirements in the event of child maltreatment fatalities or near-fatalities. Congress should amend CAPTA to define specifically what data states must release in the event of a child maltreatment fatality or near fatality. Until that happens, states should amend their own laws to strengthen the disclosure requirements. These disclosures should be required with no exceptions to any member of the public. The information required to be disclosed should include a summary of all past reports on the family or household, whether these reports were investigated, results of all past investigations and reasons for the determinations made; as well as a summary of all cases opened for the family or household, what services were provided, when the cases were closed and the reasons for closure.

Congress and states should also require that a commission of experts review every death or near-death of a child in a family known to the child welfare system. As I stated in a previous post, the death or severe injury of a child in a family known to the child welfare system should be treated like a plane crash or the loss of the space shuttle Challenger. All such deaths or severe injuries should be reviewed immediately and exhaustively by experts of the highest caliber with access to all agency records regarding contact with the family or household. The report should include recommendations to avoid similar tragedies in the future and should be released to the public with names redacted when necessary to preserve the privacy of innocent children and adults.

The point of requiring release of information and analysis of case history is not mainly to allocate guilt or punishment, although practitioners guilty of egregious errors should be retrained or let go. Rather it is to identify policies or practices that can save children in the future. As the authors of the state secrecy report put it:

Abuse and neglect deaths represent child welfare agencies’ most tragic failures. Unfortunately, it is often only through such cases that lawmakers and the public learn of systemic inadequacies in child welfare systems. If improvements and reforms are to be achieved, it is vital that the facts about these cases reach the public in a meaningful way.

Domestic violence and child abuse: a lethal combination

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It did not take long for the press to discover that Devin Kelley, the the perpetrator of the recent mass shooting in Texas, had repeatedly assaulted his first wife and fractured the skull of his infant stepson in 2012. He was court-martialed for those offenses, pled guilty, and was imprisoned for a year.

I could not help noting the parallel to the case that I wrote about in my last post–that of Antoine Flemons, who at two months old was beaten to death by his father, Antoine Petty. The post focused on one aspect of this case–the fact the father was known to have abused many other children. I argued that baby Antoine might have been protected by a broader policy to identify at birth babies born to parents with such a record.

But the revelations about the Texas shooter reminded me of another important aspect of Antoine’s family that put the baby in grave danger. In an interview with the Washington Post, Antoine’s grandmother stated that her daughter Geneice Petty loved her son but suffered from “battered women’s syndrome.” In other words, she was a victim of domestic violence.

The connection between domestic violence and child abuse is well-documented. Research suggests that “in an estimated 30 to 60 percent of the families where either domestic violence or child maltreatment is identified, it is likely that both forms of abuse exist.”

In the 40 states providing domestic violence data to the Administration Children and Families for its Child Maltreatment 2015 report, 25% of child maltreatment victims were found to have a caregiver who was either a victim, perpetrator or witness of domestic violence.

Co-occurring domestic violence and child abuse can take several forms. In many cases, one parent (usually the father) abuses both the other parent and the child or children. There are other configurations, such as families in which the abused parent in turn abuses the children.

In baby Antoine’s case, no information has been released to the public. One can speculate in view of the father’s extreme violence that Geneice Petty was afraid to protect her children and that her husband bullied her into covering up his killing of their son.

The key question is what could have been done to prevent the death of Antoine. Historically, child welfare systems have had not responded effectively to domestic violence. Common and problematic patterns have included ignoring or minimizing the domestic violence and, conversely, giving women an ultimatum to leave the abuser or leave their children–a response which often leads women to fear and avoid child protection authorities rather than seek their help.

One study found that “[Domestic violence]appears to have only a minor role in influencing the decisions of child welfare workers; yet, children exposed to [domestic violence] often have multiple contacts with [child welfare services] due to the higher number of repeat allegations of maltreatment.”

The Children’s Bureau has has published a useful manual about how to handle child maltreatment cases in which domestic violence is present or suspected. The manual’s many recommendations provide alternatives to the problematic practices mentioned above.

Unfortunately, we don’t know if Maryland child welfare workers even identified domestic violence in earlier cases involving Antoine’s parents, let alone how they responded. That’s why, as I have said over and over again about all child maltreatment deaths and serious injuries, there needs to be a thorough investigation, a public report, and a proposal for changes in policy and practice to protect future baby Antoines.

Would a broader birth match have saved Antoine Flemons?

Antoine Flemons 3 — Photo from GoFundMe fundraiser by Geneva Flemons

Little Antoine Flemons never had a chance. Prince George’s County Maryland Prosecutors described how his father, Antoine Petty, “dangled the infant by the arm and repeatedly struck him before handing the baby to his mother to feed. When the baby continued to cry, Petty dealt another round of blows, quieting the child forever.”

Antoine’s parents left his body in the car for over 24 hours before burying him, according to police. The Judge sentenced Petty to 40 years in prison for his son’s murder. Antoine’s mother pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and will be sentenced in December.

Information shared by the prosecutors revealed that Petty, the father of nine, had a long history with Child Protective Services dating back until at least 2007. He was reported for carving a three-inch cross into a five-year-old daughter’s arm, pushing a five-year-old down stairs, giving a ten-year-old a black eye, forcing a daughter to watch him having sex with a girlfriend, and failing to adequately nourish an eleven-month-old. One of his children was found at age 11 months to have rib fractures which were found by a doctor to be ‘not accidental.”

How could this father be allowed to mistreat child after child and this mother to fail to protect them for close to ten years when so many acts of maltreatment were reported to CPS? It would be more appropriate to ask how such a parent can be stopped. When an abusive parent has a new child, there is no mechanism in most states to trigger protection for that child.

Interestingly, Maryland is one of the few states that does have such a mechanism– a “birth match” program. Under birth match, birth records are matched against a list of parents who had their parental rights terminated within the last five years due to abuse or neglect. Parents thus identified receive a visit from a social worker to assess the child’s safety. If the parents refuse the visit, a case can be opened if there is reason to expect abuse or neglect.

But Maryland’s birth match law did not protect little Antoine. It is unlikely that his parents had their rights terminated in the past. Perhaps Antoine would have been protected by a broader law, such as Minnesota’s, which triggers an investigation or family assessment under a broader set of circumstances. These include when a parent has subjected a child to “egregious harm,” has failed to protect a child from such harm, has committed child neglect endangering physical or mental health, and has committed first second or third degree assault among others.

We don’t know if a broader birth match law would have protected little Antoine because no information has been released about the results of the prior investigations against Antoine’s parents.

As I discussed in an earlier post, all deaths of children in families known to CPS should be investigated immediately and the results made available to the public. Only with such an investigation can we know how and why the system failed little Antoine.

There has been a shocking lack of calls for such an investigation from Maryland legislators and child advocates. Only the Washington Post broke the silence, asking, Could this 2-months old’s death have been prevented? Nobody who cares about children in Maryland should rest until they know the answer, and until measures have been put in place to prevent similar tragedies in the future.