Flying blind: the strange story of a strategy, an ideology, and an evaluation

By Marie K. Cohen

As readers digest the report that follows, the content may cause significant discomfort stemming from painful, lived personal experiences and perspectives shaped by social constructs made implicit through centuries of white supremacy and structural oppression. Readers are invited to practice self-care while navigating this content and to consider reading the findings with a group to engage in collective reflection.
Tyrone Howard et al, Beyond Blind Removal: Color Consciousness and Anti-Racism in Los Angeles County Child Welfare. UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families, March 2024, page 5.

For several years, and accelerating after the murder of George Floyd, concerns about the overrepresentation of Black children in child welfare compared to their share of the population have been a leading factor behind proposals to reform child welfare services. One reform proposal–known as “blind removal”–seemed blessedly simple: just hide the race and ethnicity of a child being considered for placement in foster care, and racial differences in child removal will disappear. Los Angeles County was one of the jurisdictions that decided to pilot this new approach, and an evaluation of this pilot was released last month. On first reading, the evaluation looks like evidence that the pilot failed to reduce disproportional Black representation in child welfare. On second reading, the weaknesses of the study come into focus, and it appears to be proof of nothing. On third reading, it becomes clear that the poor quality of the evaluation reflects the evaluators’ and agency’s response to a legislative mandate to pilot a program that they no longer supported because it was “color-blind,” as they proceeded in their plans to develop the “color-conscious” programs they preferred. Apparent from the beginning was that neither the sponsor, nor the agency, nor the researchers stopped to examine the data on blind removals provided in a TED Talk, nor did they consider the basic assumption behind this approach.

On July 13, 2021, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors passed a motion requiring the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) to pilot the blind removal concept. The sponsor, Supervisor Holly Mitchell, was influenced by the publicity around an experiment in New York State suggesting that the simple process of hiding racial details about children reported to CPS had been successful in erasing much of the racial disproportionality in foster care placements. A TED talk by Jessica Pryce, the scholar who “discovered” the use of this procedure in Nassau County New York, has been viewed 1.37 million times. In that talk, Pryce presented, to thunderous applause, her finding that after five years of implementing blind removal, the proportion of children entering foster care who were Black plummeted from 57 percent to 21 percent. A post entitled The power of wishful thinking: the case of race-blind removals in child welfare showed that the numbers cited by Pryce were simply wrong. The Black percentage of children who were removed fluctuated from year to year during and after the implementation of blind removals, ending up higher in FY2020 than it was before implementation of the program. But the supporters of blind removal did not seem to have much interest in anything that would cast doubt on this apparently simple fix for the stubborn fact of racial disproportionality in child welfare.

The blind removal pilot evaluation

This month, the Pritzker Center quietly released its report on the Los Angeles pilot, Beyond Blind Removal: Color Consciousness and Anti-Racism in Los Angeles County Child Welfare. The pilot ran from August 2022 to August 2023 in two county offices, West Los Angeles and Compton-Carson. The blind removal process began after the office had investigated an allegation of maltreatment and determined that the removal of a child or children was the only safe alternative. The case was then referred to a panel of administrators in West LA, and to one administrator outside the supervisory line in Compton-Carson. In both offices, the case reviewers were given case details that left out all information that could signal race or ethnicity, including name, race, ethnicity, zip code, income, and school district. Cases were not referred for blind removal when “exigent” circumstances were present, which means there was “reasonable cause to believe that the child was in imminent danger of serious bodily injury (which includes sexual abuse).” In West LA, a “Coach Developer” presented the case to a team of case reviewers with the investigative social worker and supervisor present, and the case reviewers voted at the end of the meeting on the decision to remove the child. The decision would then be conveyed to the social worker and supervisor. In Compton-Carson, the final decision was made in the blind removal meeting between the social worker, supervisor and case reviewer.

To assess the results of the pilot, the researchers used three separate administrative datasets from the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) for hotline referrals, petitions filed, and cases that went through the blind removals process. The referral and removal datasets covered five years and three months from April 1, 2018 to June 30, 2023. The blind removal datasets covered the pilot period, from August 1, 2022 to July 31, 2023 in West LA, and September 1, 2022 to August 31, 2023 for Compton-Carson. It is strange and unfortunate that the referral and removal datasets did not cover the last month of the pilot in West LA and the last two months in Compton-Carson; we will see below that this omission caused a serious problem. For referrals and removals, the evaluators calculated a “Disproportionality Index” (DI), which depicts racial overrepresentation when greater than one, equal representation at one, and underrepresentation when less than one.

The researchers found that the total number of children who were removed from their families by each office trended downward during the study period but “racial disproportionality persisted with Black children overrepresented in removals in both offices and Latinx children overrepresented in the West LA office in most quarters.” They found very few non-exigent cases identified for removal in West LA went through the blind removal process. The office petitioned for the removal of 46 children over the period, of whom less than half (21 out of 46) received a blind removal review. The reasons these children were not referred for blind removal were not documented. The researchers report that the pilot was implemented with more fidelity in Compton-Carson, but they reported the results using different categories than they used for West LA, which made it hard to understand or compare the results of the two offices.*

Responses to a survey of workers and administrators provided little evidence of positive change. Social workers and supervisors largely perceived no change in how much they talked about race and ethnicity, the amount of support they received for talking about race and ethnicity and “managing their racial and ethnic biases in their work.” In addition, social workers and supervisors “mostly perceived no changes in how they conducted their daily work.” However, the researchers took pains to share the comments of the minority of employees that expressed positive views, reporting that “[s]ome interviewees came to understand that racial biases and stereotypes might unconsciously affect how decisions are made in the child welfare system.” And a fifth of social workers and supervisors “perceived greater engagement and support across key aspects of their work as defined in the Core Practice Model.”

But majorities of the staff interviewed expressed negative views about changes brought about by the pilot. Most important was the perception that the pilot worked against the prevailing approach of addressing disproportionality through race-conscious policies. As the authors put it, the blind removal pilot “was perceived as contradicting concerted efforts to address racial disproportionality in child removals by explicitly talking about race and increasingly building bridges with individuals and organizations in Black communities to support Black families.” The increased workload for administrative staff was a negative outcome, mentioned as a “source of frustration” by the authors.

A sloppy, poorly-planned and badly-documented study

While it would not be surprising if the pilot was not the cure that its sponsors hoped for, the sloppy research design and presentation make it difficult to accept the results as proof of the failure or success of blind removal in achieving its goal in reducing disproportional removals of Black children. The lack of a comparison site was a big problem. One cannot compare trends over time and assume that nothing changed other than the pilot. The two pilot sites chosen were far from ideal. The West LA office has both a small caseload and a very small proportion of Black children in the population served–only 5.9 percent. The authors report that there were only 46 children removed during the entire pilot, only 21 of whom went through the blind removal process. The total number of Black children removed per quarter, as shown in Figure 4 below, ranged from 0 to what looks like six. Compton-Carson had three times as many cases as West LA. However, 81 percent of the service area population was Latino, and only 17 percent was Black. In the Compton-Carson office, the number of Black children removed was five or less in the last four quarters and the bulk of the children removed were Hispanic. The researchers also assessed Hispanic disproportionality, but it was almost nonexistent at Compton-Carson. Almost all of their discussion of disproportionality relates to Black children, so one might expect them to choose two districts with enough Black children to provide meaningful numbers of removals.

Even more problematic is the way the data were grouped for display and analysis, as shown in Figures 4 for West LA and Figures 9 and 10 for Compton-Carson. The researchers pooled their data for each calendar quarter despite the fact that in both sites, the pilot started and ended in the middle of a quarter. To make matters worse, data for the final month of the West LA pilot and the final two months of the Compton-Carson pilot are not provided because data were not available for the remaining one or two months–as mentioned above. So the reader cannot see the actual numbers of removals for the pilot period at either site; in only two of the four quarters shown was the plot was operational throughout the quarter.

The confounding of the effects of different interventions is another problem with the study design. This one cannot be blamed on the researchers, who warned that it would be a problem, as discussed below. Figure 9 shows that there was a decrease in the proportion of Black children removed in Compton-Carson starting in the second quarter of 2022, and a concurrent increase in the number of Hispanic children who were removed. This trend began before the blind removal pilot started but after the commencement of 4DX, another initiative to reduce disproportionality that was implemented in January 2021. Figure 10 shows the consequent decline in the Black DR, which falls below one in the first half of 2023, meaning that Black children were underrepresented in that period. The researchers conclude that the “decline cannot be attributed to 4DX because the intervention was not evaluated, nor can it be attributed to blind removal because this intervention was confounded by 4DX and other interventions meant to serve Black families more effectively, such as the Eliminating Racial Disparities and Disproportionality (ERDD) roundtables, and interventions designed to improve assessment of safety versus risk.”**

Additional Note: “4DX refers to the “Four Disciplines of Education,” a “leadership and goal-setting concept” implemented in some counties with the goal of reducing disproportionality by 10 percent.

Missing information is also a problem. It would be impossible to assess the effect of the blind removal process without knowing how often the panel or individual reviewing the cases reversed the decision to remove a child, and whether there was any pattern in terms of race and ethnicity. The authors report that of the 21 children who were referred for blind removal in West LA, the panel agreed with the decision to remove all but two of the children. DCFS reported that those children had situations that “stabilized” presumably between the initial removal decision and the meeting, but the numbers are too small to make any general conclusions. In any case, there wre few reversals of the initial decision, and it appears that these reversals did not relate to race but to changes in the child’s situation. In Compton-Carson, the researchers did not even report on how often the initial removal decision was reversed in the blind removal meeting.

It is also odd that the authors devoted so much of their analysis to topics and periods outside of the one-year blind removal pilots. Much of the text and graphics is devoted to analysis of referrals (not addressed by the pilot), and they usually refer to the entire five-and-a-quarter-year period with little mention of what happened during the pilot. Much of the analysis simply documents the disproportionality in referrals and foster care placements throughout the period–something that really does not need more documentation and was not the reason for funding the pilot. Concentrating on the full period also allowed the writers to disregard the effect of the pilot. In the most flagrant example, the authors state that “Further, while overall child removals decreased in the Compton-Carson office, Black children were disproportionately represented in removals by the office during most quarters for which data were analyzed with a very slight upward trend collectively.” Clearly, the quarters during which the pilot was implemented show a downward trend. The authors are probably right that this proves nothing about blind removals, but this presentation gives the impression that they wanted to avoid saying anything that could be quoted by those wanting to demonstrate the pilot’s success.

A pilot that was doomed to fail?

The report’s section on “Timeline and Related Events” provides clues to the origins of the problems with the pilot’s design. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent demonstrations, the authors report that “child welfare systems and their stakeholders began having deeper and more honest conversations about addressing the longstanding connections between racism and the child welfare system.” It was in that context that the Pritzker Center invited Jessica Pryce to present a three-part series on how to eliminate bias in the child welfare system, which included a discussion of blind removal. The following September, DCFS Director Bobby Cagle expressed interest in developing a blind removals pilot, and DCFS and the Pritzker Center worked to develop a pilot and evaluation plan. But at the same time, Casey Family Programs notified the Center that DCFS also wanted to implement a the “Four Disciplines of Execution,” or 4DX, a framework bills itself as a “simple, repeatable formula for executing your most important priorities.” The Pritzker Center evaluators report that they warned against implementing both programs simultaneously in the same offices, as it would be impossible to identify the source of any change that occurred.

In February 2021, DCFS submitted a letter to the Doris Duke Foundation in support of a grant to the Pritzker Center to evaluate blind removal. But in March, 2021, DCFS withdrew its plan to pilot blind removal. Meanwhile, 4DX was implemented in regional offices throughout Los Angeles County with a goal of “safely reducing entries” into foster care for Black children by 10 percent. The Pritzker Center met with DCFS to discuss an evaluation of 4DX, but no plan was developed. Also in July 2021, the LA County Board of Supervisors passed the motion to pilot blind removal and designated the Pritzker Center as evaluator.

In October 2021, DCFS began meetings with the Pritzker Center to plan the blind removal pilot. It appears that they considered only sites that were in the supervisory district of Holly Mitchell, the Supervisor who had pressed for the pilot. The updates from DCFS Director Bobby Cagle to the Board of Supervisors shed more light on the site selection. Only one site was required in the motion that was passed by the Board of Supervisors. In its first update, dated September 13, 2021, Cagle proposed selecting just the West LA office, because it was apparently the only appropriate site that had not implemented 4DX. Cagle argued that it would be a mistake to pilot blind removal at one of the other sites because the “core of the 4DX work is rooted in authentically seeing and addressing families through a cultural lens.” Shifting to a methodology that negates this approach, Cagle argued, would be “contradictory to helping staff make the adaptive change toward leaning into a family’s natural strengths, focusing on natural supports, and activating community partners as resources to mitigate Black/African American children from entering care.” But in the second progress report, dated May 2, 2022, Compton-Carson was listed as a second pilot site with no explanation. And in the third progress report, dated August 1, 2022, Cagle explained that Compton-Carson was added because it had already implemented 4DX, unlike the other sites that were still in the implementation phase.

It is understandable that a second site was added, as the numbers in West LA are so small, even though Cagle inexplicably reported to the the Supervisors that the two offices “have the additional benefit of serving a large enough population of Black/African American children to allow for sufficient sample sizes during the pilot phase.” We can now understand the lack of a comparison site, since it appears that no sites were available within the supervisory district that had not implemented 4DX or other interventions, and the small number of available sites may not have included one that was comparable to West LA. But it is clear that not only did the implementation of 4DX possibly contaminate the results of the pilot, but the various programs got into each other’s way in Compton-Carson. That office implemented not only blind removals and 4DX but also another program called Eliminating Racial Disparities and Disproportionality (ERDD), which provided “roundtables, cultural brokers, and father involvement.” The authors of the study report that because of the blind removal process, Black children could not be referred to ERDD until they had been removed, while it was normally used to prevent removals.

Reading between the lines, it appears that DCFS and the Pritzker Center were saddled with the blind removal pilot at a time when they had already lost interest in that program. Both the Center in its evaluation and Cagle in his updates made clear that they saw a conflict between the idea of blind removals and the color-conscious vision behind the other approaches they were implementing, and they both favored the latter. The Pritzker authors wrote, “Colorblind approaches are widely considered harmful to Black people and people of color because they seek to negate race and all the experiences that come with being a racial minority in this country.”

The Pritzker Center also had methodological reasons to avoid blind removals: they had already warned about the problems of evaluating any program when another program is implemented at the same time. Even though the 4DX implementation was complete, one might assume that lasting effects would be expected–and hoped for. It does not appear that anyone had looked closely at Pryce’s data; Cagle was still saying on August 1, 2022, that “[g]iven the successful research findings from New York’s study, …DCFS is excited about piloting Blind Removals in the hopes of achieving similar outcomes…”

To add insult to injury, the county was forced to pay for its no-longer-wanted blind removals pilot. In a classic example of an unfunded mandate, the Board of Supervisors directed DCFS to find $150,000 to fund the blind removals pilot, a directive with which DCFS duly complied. And the Pritzker Center had no choice but to accept the funds that DCFS was directed to provide. Despite their clear negative feelings, the authors tried to justify their work on blind removal, arguing post facto that “the blind removal pilot was viewed as an opportunity to assess the attitudes and perspectives of DCFS staff and social workers toward race, racism and racial bias. Thus, whereas the strategy itself involved a color-blind protocol, the day-to-day experience of blind removal involved significant and insightful discussion about the role of race in child removal.” But it seems unlikely that the pilot was viewed beforehand as an opportunity to assess staff attitudes. And the “insightful discussions” are hard to reconcile with the survey results showing no change in how most workers did their jobs or talked about race and ethnicity.

In the end, the authors tried to reconcile their original goal with the final product by saying the report “articulates a vision that thoroughly documents the pilot, but necessarily urges readers and stakeholders to imagine a color-conscious future for Black families that goes well beyond blind removal.” Bizarrely, though, they insisted that for some jurisdictions, “blind removal may be a worthwhile effort given the possibilities it holds when implemented with proper support and the insights it can afford concerning race and racism within the agency.”

Blinded by ideology

In addition to the difficulties caused by the adoption of multiple interventions at the same time, the blind removal evaluation was flawed from the beginning by the failure to question basic assumptions behind the concept. In their explanation of the idea, the report authors state that “It is hypothesized that racial disproportionality will be reduced because the investigative team’s implicit biases will be mitigated by the case reviewers’ input on the case’s merits for removal.” The missing piece is the assumption that such implicit biases are a major cause of disproportionate removals of Black children. The agency and the evaluators completely ignored the research that suggests that the bias (if any) is probably in the other direction. Most recently, a paper by Brett Drake and a star-studded group of researchers*** shows that once reported to CPS, Black children were slightly more likely to have been substantiated as victims of neglect and placed in foster care than White children until 2011 and somewhat less likely to be substantiated or placed thereafter. In the last few years before the Covid-19 pandemic, they calculated that Black children were about 80 percent as likely to be substantiated and placed as white children, whether or not demographic factors were held constant. Perhaps the increasing concern about disproportionate removals of Black children has been causing social workers and supervisors to be biased in the opposite direction.

Even if the evaluators did not learn from prior research, they could have tried to assess whether investigator bias was actually a cause of disproportionate removal of Black children. They could have collected data at both sites about the proportion of decisions that were overturned by the reviewers, the reason for these reversals, and whether being blind to race had any impact at all. Perhaps they would have learned something about what happens when race and ethnicity are hidden, or perhaps they would have found that hiding these characteristics is impossible. But the authors of the evaluation were apparently too blinded by ideology to even consider the possibility that past rather than current racism is behind current disproportionalities in child welfare. Of course it is not just the researchers, but also the leadership of DCFS, that labored under the assumption that the biases of social workers determine the disproportionality in child removals.

The assumption that disproportional representation in child removals reflects racism in the child welfare system does more damage than simply leading to the adoption of ineffective programs. If the assumption is wrong, as the research suggests, then Black children’s overrepresentation in reporting, substantiations, and removals reflects their real need for protection. And if a child welfare system finds a method that is actually effective in reducing Black children’s representation in child welfare systems, then we are effectively lowering our standards for safely parenting Black children. And that is obviously fine with the authors, who made no bones about their feeling that concerns about child safety unnecessarily interfered with implementation of the pilot. As they wrote:

In general, the West LA staff strongly believed that the slightest concern about safety trumped involvement in the pilot. Though well intentioned, these safety concerns may be informed by bias and thus impede the widespread application of blind removal to families in the West LA office. Across child welfare systems, safety concerns are often prioritized over diverting families from system involvement.
Beyond Blind Removal, page 27.

It is obvious that the authors believe child safety should take a back seat to diverting Black families from child welfare involvement. And there is reason to fear that this happened in Compton-Carson, where removals of Black children fell sharply between Quarter 2 of 2022 and and the same quarter of 2023. Perhaps the LA County has found an intervention that is effective in reducing the removals of Black children absolutely and relative to other groups. Cagle reported that 4DX produced a 47 percent decrease in Black children removed within seven months. That is a pretty radical change–a change that may have severe costs to Black children.

The blind removal report tells a strange and complicated story. It is the story of a pilot program that was apparently imposed by a politicians on a child welfare agency and an evaluator that had moved beyond that program in search of more color-conscious approaches. It is a story of an agency that adopted these preferred approaches simultaneously with blind removal, making it impossible to evaluate any of the interventions. It is the story of researchers and an agency who never stopped to examine the data on blind removals provided in a TED Talk, and who never stopped to think about the assumptions behind this approach. It is the story of an attempt to make it appear that this pilot was anything other than a waste of time and money.

Many thanks to Brett Drake, who made me aware of this report and who shared his thoughts about it.

Notes

*They report that Compton-Carson had higher fidelity to the model because more children’s cases (195) were referred to blind removal than the number of children for whom court petitions were filed (146). But this is confusing compared to the description for West LA, which speaks of the proportion of petitioned children who were subject to blind removal. When I requested clarification from the researchers, they simply restated the language from the report.

**In his first update to the Board of Supervisors, Cagle reported that the offices participating in 4DX had experienced a 47 percent reduction in Black children removed between January and August of 2021. The Compton-Carson data shown above documents part of that drop in the Compton-Carson office.

***Brett Drake et al., “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Child Protective Services Reporting, Substantiation, and Placement, With Comparison to Non-CPS Risks and Outcomes: 2005-2019. Child Maltreatment 2023, Vol 0(0) 1-17.

Child Welfare Update: February 2024

Greetings to my faithful readers! I’m trying out a different format for Child Welfare Monitor–a monthly newsletter format that highlights events and information that catch my eye. I’m not ruling out a single-issue piece now and then, particularly when there is a major new report or data source to discuss and analyze. Please let me know what you think of the new format. If you can think of a more exciting title than “Child Welfare Update,” let me know. And if you do find this to be a useful resource, please share it with your colleagues.

Adam Montgomery convicted of Harmony Montgomery’s death

In December 2021, Manchester, New Hampshire Police announced the disappearance of Harmony Montgomery, who would have been six years old if she were alive. We learned that Harmony’s noncustodial mother, Crystal Sorey, had called the police a month earlier to say that she had not seen or heard from her daughter since April 2019, two-and-a-half years earlier. The country was rapidly transfixed by the search for Harmony. We soon learned that the little girl, who was blind in one eye, had first been removed from Sorey at the age of two months by the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) due to Sorey’s substance abuse. Harmony’s father, Adam Montgomery, was in jail at the time. Harmony was returned to her mother at seven months, and removed again at ten months. At almost three years old, and after two straight years in foster care with the same family that fostered her from the start and wanted to adopt her, Harmony was returned to her mother for the second time. At age three-and-a-half, Harmony was removed from her mother for the third time. Since Harmony was first removed, Adam Montgomery had been released from prison and begun visiting her. In February, 2018, a judge awarded Montgomery immediate custody of Harmony, without waiting for an assessment of his wife or a study of his living situation in New Hampshire.

A shattering report by the Massachusetts Child Advocate revealed the many missteps by all the professionals tasked with keeping Harmony safe. The OCA concluded that “Harmony’s individual needs, wellbeing, and safety were not prioritized or considered on an equal footing with the assertion of her parents’ rights to care for her in any aspect of the decision making by any state entity.”

Two years after the search for Harmony began, Adam Montgomery has been convicted of her death, thanks to the testimony of his wife. She told prosecutors that after Harmony soiled her bed at night he beat her viciously on the head in the morning of December 9, 2019 and again that afternoon in the car when she soiled herself once more. He then injected opioids and ate fast food as Harmony died of her injuries in the back of the car. He concealed Harmony’s body for months until renting a U-Haul and dumping her remains somewhere outside Boston. Her body has never been found. Montgomery is already serving 32 1/2 years in prison for another case and I hope he will never see the light of day, but what about all the professionals who failed to prioritize Harmony’s needs? And what has Massachusetts done to ensure that there will be no more Harmonies? The adoptive parents of Harmony’s brother have been speaking out; I assume Harmony’s foster parents are too devastated to do so, but their hearts must be broken.

Race trumps child welfare I: Black children don’t get attached?

Harmony Montgomery’s case illustrates, among other things, what happens when the importance of attachment for young children is disregarded. Attachment theory, which is widely accepted and taught in classes on psychology, social work and human development, posits that a strong attachment is central to the development of infants and affects their brain development and their ability to form relationships throughout life. The critical role of attachment in human development, which has been confirmed in mammals as well as humans, is the reason that the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) set a timeline requiring states to file for termination of parental rights after a child had spent 15 of the last 22 months in foster care. That is the deadline that Harmony’s team disregarded when they returned her to her mother after two years in foster care and continued to work with both parents after her return to foster care at the age of three-and-a-half. The continued disruptions were so devastating for Harmony that her foster parents, according to the OCA, could no longer meet her needs when she was placed with them for the third time, and asked that she be transferred to a specialized therapeutic home.

But some lawyers that counsel parents in child protection cases are being told that attachment theory does not apply to Black children. In Race Trumps Child Welfare, Naomi Schaefer Riley calls attention to a paper called “The Weaponization of Whiteness in Child Welfare,” originally published by the National Association of Counsel for Children. The paper calls attachment theory a “tool to justify the separation of families” and a manifestation of “racism in psychology.” The authors take aim at professionals who utilize attachment theory to argue for the adoption of Black children by White foster families who have raised them from infancy rather than returning them to their parents or placing them with kin. They argue that a Black child who has lived with a White foster family for the entire two-and-a-half years of his life should be placed with a relative who has never even seen the child. Black families, they say, belong to a collective culture, which emphasizes the needs of the group as a whole over the needs of an individual. Thus, any suffering to an individual child, they imply, is justified by the gain to the group–though it is hard to understand how Black people as a whole gain from the traumatization of young Black children.

Race Trumps Child Welfare II: ABA “addressing bias in medical mandated reporting” in Michigan

The American Bar Association (ABA) has announced that its Center for Children and the Law is piloting a new initiative in Michigan “to address overreporting by medical professionals of Black, Indigenous and Latino/a children to the child welfare system.” Without a footnote, the ABA reports that “injuries in Black children are 9 times more likely than those in White children to be reported as abuse despite evidence that child abuse and neglect occur at equal rates across races.” (Italics are mine.) Equal across races? I wonder what data they are using. While I am the first to acknowledge that maltreatment substantiation rates may not reflect actual incidence of abuse or neglect, evidence suggests that the two-to-one Blsck-White difference in child maltreatment substantiation rates is likely an understatement, not an overstatement. Moreover, Latino children nationwide are not reported to CPS disproportionately to their share of the population.

The pilots, funded by the Children’s Bureau, will use a “multisystem approach developed by the ABA’s Stop Overreporting Our People (STOP) project” to “address each decision made from the time a medical provider has a concern about maltreatment through child welfare hotline report and investigation to the decision of the judicial officer to remove the child from the home.” In Michigan, according to Child Maltreatment 2022, of the 174,000 referrals to the hotline in Federal Fiscal Year 2022, about 68,000 were screened in, about 139,000 children received an investigation or alternative response (down 12 percent from the previous year), and 23,500 were substantiated as victims of abuse or neglect–a whopping 37.7 percent drop over the previous year. Of those “victims,” a total of 2,760 or 11 percent were placed in foster care–along with an additional 956 children who were not substantiated as victims but may have been siblings who were deemed to be equally endangered. Despite the precipitous drops in investigations and substantiations and the very low proportion of children substantiated as victims that were placed in foster care, the ABA isn’t satisfied…or doesn’t bother to look at data. The Michigan pilots will also focus on how doctors are trained to report maltreatment, according to the ABA. Discouraging doctors from reporting the signs that they are uniquely trained to spot may not strike all readers as a good idea.

Where was CPS?

Utah: Abuse in plain sight: Ruby Franke, a parenting influencer who achieved fame by promoting her strict parenting style, was sentenced to up to thirty years after pleading guilty to aggravated child abuse of two of her children. Franke rose to prominence with a youtube channel called 8 Passengers (now taken down) that documented her life with her husband and six children and was criticized for promoting abusive discipline methods. She eventually formed a business partnership with another woman named Jodi Hildebrandt, who encouraged and participated in the abuse of Franke’s children. Both women were arrested in August 2023, after one of Franke’s children escaped the home and ran to a neighbor’s house asking for food and water. The neighbor noticed the child’s open wounds, duct tape around his ankles and wrists and emaciation and called the police. After the arrest, the oldest daughter posted on social media that: “We’ve been trying to tell the police and CPS for years about this, and so glad they finally decided to step up.” “Several of us tried to help,” one neighbor told the Salt Lake Tribune. “I know people left food on doorsteps knowing the kids might not be eating; I know people were making phone calls to DCFS, to the police — people really did try and care. No one was looking the other way.”

New Mexico: $5.5 million settlement reached in eight-year-old girl’s brutal death: The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that the New Mexico Children Youth and Families Department (CFYD) has agreed to pay $5.5 million to the brother and half-siblings of Samantha Rubino, acknowledging that it placed Samantha and her brother in the care of a man (Juan Lerma) with a history of child abuse and domestic violence, who had been investigated once before for abusing her and had not seen either Samantha or her brother for two years. Samantha died of blunt force trauma to the head, and Lerma placed her body in the trash. This is the latest in a series of big-money settlements by CYFD, funded by the taxpayers. New Mexico’s system is in crisis, with a backlog of 2,000 investigations of abuse and neglect. Is it too much to hope that the legislature will decide it is better to spend money up front to keep children safe than to pay massive settlements to their survivors?

The march continues to remove protections for homeschooled children

The powerful homeschool lobby continues its crusade to eliminate the few regulations that still exist to protect homeschooled children. In Nebraska, LB 1027 would eliminate two of the three minimal documents required for homeschool enrollments. It would bar school districts and Health and Human Services from investigating educational neglect in a homeschool setting. And it would give one parent the power to make homeschooling decisions without input from the other parent. The unicameral legislature’s Education Committee heard testimony from the Nebraska Christian Home Educators Association, the president of a Christian homeschoolers’ co-op, and another homeschooling parent. There was no testimony against the bill. The Education Committee has recommended the bill, and it is headed for a floor vote.

In West Virginia, legislators have tried to bar abusive parents from homeschooling ever since an eight-year-old girl named Raylee Browning died of sepsis, possibly caused by drinking toilet water, in 2018. Teachers had called CPS multiple times because Raylee was constantly hungry and covered in bruises. To avoid further problems, her guardians removed her from school for the ostensible purpose of homeschooling, thus enabling them to torture ber to death without interference. Every year since 2019, legislators have introduced Raylee’s Law, which would prohibit homeschooling if the parent or home educator had a pending investigation for child abuse or neglect or had been convicted of abuse, neglect or domestic violence. This very modest bill, which probably wouldn’t even have saved Raylee because her guardians did not have a pending investigation when they withdrew her from school, nor were they convicted of abuse, has never gotten through the legislature. This year it was voted down in the Education Committee by 15-5 after several legislators outlined their concerns–such as the fear that it would force children to enter public school before an investigation could be completed!

This year, the sponsors of Raylee’s Law managed to get a version of the legislation included in a bill that removes certain testing requirements for homeschooled children, and it passed by a voice vote. Unfortunately the amendment that passed was watered down further from the original bill, which itself was very weak The amendment that passed requires that a parent cannot withdraw a child for homeschooling if there is a pending child abuse or neglect investigation. But if the complaint is not substantiated within 14 days, the superintendent must authorize homeschooling. And the bill to which it was attached (HB 5180) reduces protection of homeschooled children by removing the requirement that parents submit academic assessments for homeschooled children in certain grades, as well as the requirement that the parent or home educator submit evidence that they have a high school or post-secondary degree.

Readers who care about the protection of homeschooled children and the drastic disproportion of power between homeschooling parents and advocates for their children should give to one of my favorite organizations, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. They are doing their best on a shoestring budget, but they can’t afford to go to every state where protective legislation is threatened.

From the “Are you kidding me?” department

“Safe Haven laws” are a way for new parents who are not ready to raise a child to surrender their newborns safely without any questions or legal consequences. The laws exist in all 50 states. The Committee to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities has endorsed these laws as a way to protect vulnerable infants and recommended that they be amended to extend the age of protected infants to age 1 and to expand the types of safe havens allowed. And it turns out that this option has existed in Europe since Pope Innocent III required churches to install “Foundling Wheels” in 1198!

In New Mexico, mothers are told they can anonymously surrender their infants through “safe haven baby boxes” located around the state. But recent media coverage from local stations KRQE and KOB4 has revealed the state’s Children Youth and Families Department (CYFD) has been investigating these surrenders–because they are required to do so by the state’s safe haven law. CYFD Secretary Teresa Casados told KRQE that “state law requires CYFD to investigate to ensure the mother was not forced to give up her baby, to make sure she is safe, and to inform the father of the child as well.” (She was apparently not asked what would happen if the father had raped or abused the mother.) She also explained that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) requires CYFD to look into each case and notify “all the tribes and pueblos” to ensure they are following the Act’s requirement that placement with a Native family be preferred. It is not clear that any other state has interpreted ICWA this way. New Mexico legislators rushed to draft legislation to retain the right of mothers to surrender their infants safely and anonymously, but the short session ended before a bill could be passed.

Never underestimate a persistent child advocate

John Hill, the Investigative Editor at Civil Beat, a nonprofit news outlet in Honolulu, Hawaii, has never given up on his quest to find out how a six-year-old girl named Ariel Sellers was placed with Lehua and Isaac Kalua, the adoptive parents who tortured her, culminating in her murder two-and-a-half years ago. The Kaluas have been charged with murder and abuse of both Ariel and her then 12-year-old sister, among other charges. The prosecution alleges that Ariel was kept in a dog cage and denied food, and that Lehua Kalua caused her death by duct-taping her mouth and nose. For more than two years, according to Hill, the Hawaii Department of Human Services has stonewalled in accounting for its actions in the adoption of Ariel, who was renamed “Isabella Kalua” by her adoptive parents. But Hawaii’s Public First Law Center, motivated by a series of columns written by Hill, has filed a motion to receive the foster and adoption records for Ariel and her siblings. Now Hill is asking uncomfortable questions about the January 2024 death of 10-year-old Geanna Bradley, who was also allegedly tortured and starved to death by her adoptive parents.

In a bizarre twist, the Honolulu Star Advertiser has reported that the Kaluas have retained custody over Isabella’s three sisters, who were removed from the home in September 2021. But apparently the state of Hawaii hasn’t moved to terminate the parental rights of the Kaluas. A special master appointed to oversee the interests of Ariel’s sisters is concerned that the failure to terminate the rights of the Kaluas will interfere with efforts to find permanent families and educational opportunities for the girls. (And already has, I would think!)

The guaranteed income craze continues

At its February oversight hearing, the Director of the District of Columbia Child and Family Services Agency announced a forthcoming grant from the Doris Duke Foundation to a guaranteed income for some low-income families. The announcement was greeted with congratulations from the Council Chair who referenced the great results from the recent Strong Families, Strong Futures pilot, which provided 132 new and expecting mothers with $10,800 in the course of a year. I don’t know where she got her information. An article in the Washington Post reported on interviews with three of the mothers participating in the pilot. One of the mothers took the money as a lump sum. Setting aside about $5,000 for essential expenses, she used the remaining money on a $6,000 trip to Miami preceded by the purchase of new clothes, shoes, gadgets and toys for all of her three children and a $180 hair and nails treatment for herself. Another mother decided to spend $525 on a birthday party for her one-year-old, who clearly couldn’t appreciate it. Program coordinators said that the mothers reported spending most of their funds on needs such as housing, food and transportation. But I’m not sure how I feel as a DC taxpayer to see my money spent in ways that I personally find wasteful, nor am I sure that allowing such spending provides appropriate training in how to budget scarce resources. Such no-strings-attached money giveaways might not be the best use of taxpayer money, even if foundations choose to support it.

And the prize for cynical use of data goes to….

Kentucky! The State’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS) is crowing about Kentucky’s drop from the highest rate of child maltreatment “victimization” to number 13 among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In a statement reported by Spectrum News1, CHFS said this improvement “demonstrates the efforts made by the Department for Community Based Services and its many partners to increase the provision of child welfare prevention services and reduce child abuse and neglect within the Commonwealth.” But child advocates and family court judges are not convinced, citing a longstanding problem with hotline workers screening out cases that should be investigated–exacerbated by the adoption of an actuarial screening tool at the hotline in April 2022. The report quotes two family court judges and a CASA program director who linked child deaths to the failure to investigate prior reports involving the same families. According to one judge, “The alarm has to be sounded because I’m not joking when I say children are perishing in the state of Kentucky because of this ‘Structured Decision Making’ tool….'” The judges are right. One has only to look at Kentucky’s commentary in the Children’s Bureau’s report, Child Maltreatment 2022.

An overall decrease for child victims was observed between FFY 2021 and FFY 2022.
Kentucky has worked diligently over the past several years to implement a safety model
which includes the implementation of SDM® Intake Assessment Tool and a thorough review and modification of the state’s acceptance criteria to ensure a focus upon children and families with true safety threats versus risk factors. This shift in the approach to the work may have contributed to the decrease in child victims this year.
Children’s Bureau, Child Maltreatment 2022, p. 13

In other words, they changed the screening criteria to screen out more cases and voilà! Fewer child victims! Amazing! The percentage of referrals that was screened in decreased from 45.5 percent in 2021 to 39.9 percent in 2022, and the maltreatment substantiation rate decreased from 14.9 to 12.3 per thousand children during the same period. But both of these rates have been decreasing since FFY 2018, so more factors than the new screening tool are likely responsible. It’s unlikely that a decrease in actual maltreatment is among them.

The placement and workforce crises continue

Every month brings another crop of articles on the intertwined placement and workforce shortages plaguing child welfare. February’s news on the placement crisis included a story from Texas Public Radio reporting on the release of hundreds of incident reports about “Children Without Placements” in the state from 2021 to 2023. They include stories of children squaring off to fight each other in the hallway of a Houston hotel that resulted in the hospitalization of one youth. These incidents, occurring at a rate of about two a day, often involved injured staff, injured youth, and calls to police.

In a state that requires some social workers to supervise youths in hotels and other unlicensed placements, its not surprising that about one in four caseworkers left the job in January, according to the head of the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS). And even workers who don’t have to supervise unruly youths are dealing with untenable caseloads and terrible working conditions. Some states are taking action to attract and retain workers. The Governor of Maine announced a series of three one-time lump-sum payments of $1,000 to recruit and retain child welfare workers. Let us hope it is enough to reduce the state’s high caseloads.

And now for some good news: efforts to keep siblings together

It’s always nice to read about people who see a need and create a program to meet it. February brought news of two new “foster care villages” to house larger sibling groups, an idea I have promoted in the past. In California, the actor Christian Bale achieved a dream he has nurtured for 16 years–breaking ground on Together California, a new foster home community in Palmdale, Los Angeles County. The project will include a dozen foster homes built to accommodate up to six siblings and staffed by full time, professional foster parents. A 7,000-square foot community center will offer academic, therapeutic, social, and recreational activities for young people in the foster homes and the surrounding community, which is very short on such resources.

In South Carolina, a new foster care “village” called Thornwell is transforming old houses built about 100 years ago to house foster families and large sibling groups. Two homes are in use, a third is under renovation and more homes await renovation provided the funds and parents can be found. Foster parents will pay one dollar of rent per month and receive free utilities. Children will be eligible for Thornwell’s early learning center, charter school, and recreational facilities. Here’s hoping for more programs like Together California and Thornwell!

Child Maltreatment 2022: reports increase but response lags

“Child Maltreatment Victims Have Decreased for the Past Five Years to a New Low,” proclaimed the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) as it released Child Maltreatment 2022, its long-awaited annual compendium of child maltreatment data shared by the states. Contrary to the headline, the report says nothing about the actual incidence of child abuse and neglect. It does show that in Federal Fiscal Year 2022, calls to child protective services hotlines almost rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. But the number of investigations and assessments that CPS undertook in response to these calls did not bounce back as much as calls, and states are confirming even fewer allegations of maltreatment as they did in FFY 2021 and 2022. Moreover, child fatalities are up for the fifth year in a row. Some of the most striking and interesting results are discussed below, though this is not an exhaustive summary of the report’s contents.

Referrals and Reports

The annual Child Maltreatment reports, produced by the Children’s Bureau of ACF are based on data that states submit to the National Child Abuse and Neglect (NCANDS) data system, and this latest report concerns Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2022, which ended on September 30, 2022. NCANDS uses the term “referrals” to connote contacts to child protective services (CPS) hotlines. In 2020, the number of referrals dropped sharply as schools closed and children vanished into their homes. In FY 2021, with some opening of schools and society, the referral rate rose slightly but was still much less than in FFY 2019. But in FFY 2022, the referral rate bounced back to 58.6 per 1,000 children, bringing it close to the rate of 59.7 per 1,000 in FFY 2019. Some states mentioned in their commentaries that the pandemic continued to suppress referrals somewhat in FFY 2022, which began in October 2021. That fall and winter in particular, there were still temporary school building closures and increases in absenteeism due to big waves of infection. This continued pandemic effect may help explain the failure of referrals to reach their 2019 level.

As usual, the state-by-state tables document huge differences in referral rates, from 21.1 per 1,000 children in Hawaii to 180.7 per 1,000 in Vermont. Vermont reports in its commentary that its very high referral rate reflects that the state counts all calls to the hotline as referrals, suggesting that most states do not do so. And indeed, Connecticut and Alabama report that none of the calls that are assigned to alternative response are included in NCANDS, resulting in a far lower number of calls than the number they actually receive. Louisiana reports that some referrals are neither screened out nor accepted; these are calls related to open investigations or in-home or out-of-home service cases; it appears that these are not counted as referrals at all. These inconsistencies between states make it difficult to interpret state-by-state differences in referral rates.

Once a state agency receives a referral, it will be screened in or out by hotline staff. In general, referrals are screened out if they are deemed not to contain an allegation of child abuse or neglect, contain too little information to act on, are more appropriately assigned to another agency, or for some other reason do not fall under the mandate of the child welfare agency. In NCANDS, a referral becomes a “report” once it is screened in, and it then is assigned for an investigation or alternative response. The 47 jurisdictions that reported both screened-in and screened-out referrals collectively reported screening in 49.5 percent of referrals and screening out 50.5 percent. The national screened-in referral rate was 29.0 per 1,000 children, an increase of one percentage point from the rate in FFY 2021. In that year, as shown in Child Maltreatment 2021, the 46 states reporting screened in 51.5 percent of referrals and screened out 48.5 percent. So as the number of referrals increased, it appears that the states screened in a lower percentage of them.

State by state differences in the percentage of referrals that are screened in were vast; ranging from 16.9 percent of referrals to 98.7 percent in Alabama. But as discussed above, differences in which calls are reported in NCANDS will affect these percentages, making the data hard to interpret. Some of the very high rates reported, such as the 98.7 percent for Alabama, and Texas’s reported 84.5 percent, are hard to understand.

Indiana’s commentary provides an example of how a state can purposely reduce its screen-in rate. The state reported that the Department of Children’s Services “partnered with the Capacity Building Center for States as well as ran internal events targeted at reducing our screen-in rate.” Added to the types of allegations to be screened out during FFY 2021 were “sexting concerns among adolescents,” “pre-adolescent children exhibiting potentially sexually maladaptive behaviors,” and “educational neglect.” Some child advocates might be concerned about excluding these types of allegations, as all of them could indicate serious problems in the home, and the exclusion of educational neglect is particularly surprising. Perhaps the changed screening guidelines are one reason the number of Indiana children receiving an investigation or alternative response fell from 139,343 in 2020 to to 123,644 in 2022, a decrease of 11.6 percent.

Screened-in Referrals by Referral Source

Before the pandemic, teachers were the most common source of screened-in referrals, submitting 21 percent of all referrals that were screened in in FFY 2019. They lost that position in FFY 2020 with the pandemic school closures, while legal and law enforcement personnel increased their share of reports. It is not surprising that teachers did not recoup their leading role in 2021, since many students were still attending school virtually for some part of the year. But even in 2022, legal and law enforcement personnel still submitted slightly more screened-in referrals than education personnel–21.2 percent of screened-in referrals compared to 20.7 percent for education personnel. Medical personnel submitted 11.2 percent of referrals and social services personnel 9.8 percent. Because these data are available only for referrals that are screened in, they reflect both the number of referrals each group submits and the extent to which they are screened in. It seems likely that teachers submit more referrals than law enforcement but that their referrals are more likely to be screened out.

Child Disposition Rates: The “Footprint” of CPS

In every state, screened-in reports may receive an investigation, which results in a determination (or disposition) about whether or not maltreatment has taken place. Some states assign some reports (often those deemed to be lower risk) to an alternative track (often called “alternative response” or “family assessment”) that does not result in a formal disposition as to whether maltreatment occurred and who was the perpetrator. ACF calls the proportion of children receiving either an investigation or an alternative response the “child disposition rate.” This is an important indicator, because it can be seen as a measure of the “footprint” of CPS–the number of children it actually touches.

For FFY 2022, an estimated 3,096,101 children, or 42.4 per 1,000 children, received an investigation or alternative response, as shown in Exhibit S-1 of the report, reproduced above. That rate has dropped 12.7 percent since FFY 2018. Not surprisingly, the biggest drop was during the pandemic, but it dropped again in 2021 and rose by only one percentage point from 41.4 in FFY 2022, remaining significantly lower than before the pandemic.

The diversity in child disposition rates across states is striking. Disregarding the 15.0 in Pennsylvania, which excludes most neglect cases from NCANDS,¹ this rate ranges from a low of 17.1 per 1,000 children in Maryland to a chilling 131.3 in West Virginia (over one out of 10 children!). The opioid crisis and its catastrophic effects on children in West Virginia has received considerable media attention. It is worth noting that West Virginia’s child disposition rate has decreased from 143.2 in FFY 2018. Below West Virginia, Arkansas and Indiana have similar child disposition rates of 79.9 and 78.8 respectively, far above the next group of states at about 66. The five states with the lowest child welfare “footprint,” (other than Pennsylvania) are Maryland, Hawaii, South Dakota, Connecticut and Louisiana.

Some states or jurisdictions, including Alaska, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and South Carolina, had very large decreases in their disposition rates between FFY 2021 and FFY 2022. These may reflect purposeful policy changes to reduce the role of child welfare (such as Indiana’s addition of categories to be screened out), but it may also affect other factors such as the workforce crisis that is affecting child welfare in most states.

CPS Workforce Data and Child Disposition Rates

Child Maltreatment 2022 also provides interesting data on state child welfare workforces although the quality of the data is impossible to assess. Table 2-4 of the report provides the CPS caseload, which is obtained by dividing the number of intake, screening, investigation and alternative response workers by the number of “completed reports,” meaning reports with a disposition. That is not a very meaningful number, because it leaves out all the alternative response cases, while the workers who handle these cases are included in the numerator. In order to get a better sense of the number of children seen by each worker, I divided the number of children receiving an investigation or alternative response by the number of workers in the 20 states with the highest populations, minus the four states that did not provide workforce numbers–Florida, Georgia, New York and Ohio, as well as Pennsylvania.¹

Among the 15 states in the table below, there is a staggering variation in the number of children per worker, which ranged from 21.1 in Wisconsin to 199.4 in Indiana. As child welfare commentator Dee Wilson explains in an unpublished analysis, “Differences of this magnitude develop over time when policymakers do not staff child welfare systems in accordance with workload standards.” We must also keep in mind that we do not know if the data are truly comparable between states.

Children Per Worker, FFY 2022

“Victimization”

An investigation can result in a variety of dispositions, depending on the state. Most states use the term “substantiated” to indicate that the allegation was verified, but some states use another term, usually “indicated.” In NCANDS, a “victim” is defined as “a child for whom the state determined at least one maltreatment was substantiated or indicated; and a disposition of substantiated or indicated was assigned for a child in a report.” A reader might think the terms “victim” and “victimization” reflect the true number of children who experienced abuse or neglect. But there are many reasons they do not provide such a true count. Many cases of child maltreatment go unreported. Children assigned to alternative response will not be found to be victims unless their case is reassigned to the investigation track. And finally, substantiation is not an accurate reflection of whether maltreatment occurred. Adults can lie, children can lie, perhaps when coached by adults, the youngest children are nonverbal or not sufficiently articulate to explain what happened or didn’t, and making a determination of whether maltreatment occurred is difficult. So it is not surprising that research suggests that substantiation decisions are inaccurate² and a report to the hotline predicts future maltreatment reports and developmental outcomes almost as well as a substantiated report.³ For all of these reasons, it is widely recognized that the number of children estimated to be victims of maltreatment is likely an underestimate. And over time, events such as the coronavirus pandemic or changes in state policies can be confounded (innocently or cynically) with actual changes in child maltreatment victimization. For that reason I generally put quotes around “victimization” or replace it with “substantiation,” and use the terms “substantiated victims” or “children found to be victims of maltreatment” instead of “victims.”

The 2022 report provides an estimate of 558,899 substantiated victims of maltreatment, or 7.7 per 1,000 children, down from 8.2 in FFY 2021. States differed greatly in the “victimization rates” that they found in FFY 2022. Of course these differences can stem from the factors mentioned above, as well as from actual maltreatment. The number of substantiated victims per 1,000 children ranged from 1.6 in New Jersey to 16.5 in Massachusetts. We know that New Jersey has been intent on reducing CPS involvement in the lives of families, no doubt encouraged by its effort to exit a class action suit monitored by the Center for the Study of Social Policy, one of the founders of the upEND movement to abolish child welfare. So its low victimization rate is not surprising (An article by Sarah Font and Naomi Schaefer Riley discusses the New Jersey experience in more detail.) New Jersey’s “victimization” rate has dropped by more than half since FFY 2018.

The number of children found to be victims of maltreatment has declined every year since FFY 2018. The change in state “victimization rates” between FFY 2018 and FFY 2022 ranged from a 48 percent decrease in Kentucky to a 14.5 percent increase in Nevada over those five years. Many things could explain these changes other than an actual change in maltreatment, including policy changes made by state legislatures or agencies. Two of the largest states made it more difficult to substantiate maltreatment in FFY 2022, and both found a decline in the number of maltreatment victims. In Texas, the legislature narrowed the definition of neglect, requiring the existence of both “blatant disregard” for the consequences of a parent’s action or inaction and either a “resulting harm or immediate danger.” Perhaps this helps account for the drop in the number of substantiated victims from 65,253 to 54,207. In New York, the level of evidence required to substantiate an allegation of abuse or neglect was changed from “some credible evidence” to “a fair preponderance of the evidence.” The number of victims found in New York dropped from 56,760 to 50,056. States reported other reasons for changes in their rates of “victimization,” including changes in the use of alternative response, new screening and intake tools, reduction in investigation backlogs, and the continued effects of the pandemic.

It is instructive to look at the changes in the number of referrals, screened-in referrals, child disposition rates, and child “victimization rates” between FFY 2021 and FFY 2022, as the nation came out of the pandemic. Thinking about the process as a funnel starting with referrals and ending with victims, we can see that the effect of the increased referrals is further attenuated at each stage. While the number of referrals increased from 4,010,000 to 4,276,000, an increase of 6.6 percent, the number of screened in referrals increased only 3.3 percent. The number of children receiving an investigation or alternative response increased by only 2.0 percent. And the number of children substantiated as victims decreased by a whopping 7.2 percent. It’s just another way of describing what we have already seen–that the child welfare system’s response is not keeping up with the public’s renewed reporting activity.

Source: Child Maltreatment 2022 and author’s calculations

Demographics and “Victimization”

Younger children are more likely to be substantiated as maltreatment victims. The likelihood of being a substantiated victim of maltreatment is is more than twice as high for an infant younger than one than for a two-year-old, and drops a bit with every one-year increase in age. Girls are more likely to be substantiated as victims than boys, with a rate of 8.2 per 1,000 children, compared to 7.1 for boys. This is probably related to sexual abuse; girls are the overwhelming majority of victims of substantiated sexual abuse, as shown in Exhibit 7-F of the report.

In terms of race and ethnicity, American Indiana and Alaska Native children had the highest rate of substantiation as a victims, at 14.3 per 100,000 children, followed by Black or African-American children with a rate of 12.1 per 100,000 children. The rate for Hispanic children was 7.0 per 100,000 and for White children it was 6.6 per 100,000. Again, the number of substantiated victims is not equal to the number of actual victims. These rates reflect the extent to which these children are reported to CPS, the referrals are screened in, and they are substantiated. If, as many assert, there is systematic bias affecting referral, screening, and investigation, then the total number substantiated will also reflect that bias.

Victimization Rate per 1,000 children by Race and Ethnicity, FFY 2022

American Indian/Alaska Native: 14.3
Asian: 1.3
Black or African-American:12.1
Hispanic: 7.0
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 9.3
Two or more races: 9.4
White: 6.6

The claim that these rates are biased has resulted in a movement to eliminate racial disproportionality in child welfare or even to eliminate child welfare itself, as promulgated by the upEND Movement. However, evidence confirms that the Black-White difference in substantiation rates is actually less than the disparities in other indicators of child risk and adversity. A group of prominent child welfare researchers led by Brett Drake estimated the “expected rate” of being reported to CPS, using several categories of risk and harm that are known to be highly correlated with the risk of child abuse and neglect, such as poverty, single-parent families, teen birth rate, very low birth weight, and homicide. Drake et al. reported that the disparity in all the measures of risk, and in all of the measures of harm except accidental deaths, were greater than the disparity for CPS reports, as measured by NCANDS. In other words, there was a greater disparity in risk and harm to Black children compared with White children than there was in CPS reporting. Thus, given their likelihood of being abused or neglected, Black children appear to be reported to CPS less than White children, not more. And even when adjusted to account for confounding factors, Black children are less likely to be substantiated (and placed in foster care) than White children. So if anything, the “victimization rates” provided in CM 2022 may underestimate the true disparities in child maltreatment substantiation of Black and White children.

CM 2022 also provides information on the number of substantiated victims with different maltreatment types. Three-quarters of the substantiated victims, or 74.3 percent, were found to have experienced neglect, 17 percent physical abuse, 10.6 percent sexual abuse, 0.2 percent sex trafficking, and another 3.4 percent another type of maltreatment. (These percentages add up to more than 100 because some children were found to be victims of more than one type of maltreatment during the year.) As shown in Table 3-9 of the report, some states diverged from the pattern that substantiated allegations are for neglect–and instead found more (or almost as many) children to be physically abused than neglected. These states include West Virginia, where 76.2 percent of substantiated victims were found to have suffered physical abuse; Vermont, (58.6 percent); Tennessee (51.8 percent), Alabama (53.5 percent), South Carolina (47.5 percent), and Ohio, with 46.6 percent.⁵ Corporal punishment often opens the door to physical abuse, some of these states are in regions where corporal punishment is known to be more prevalent. But the absence of Mississippi on this list (with only 16.0 percent of victims substantiated for abuse) and the presence of Vermont are surprising. Perhaps liberal Vermont is simply reluctant to find neglect in cases associated with poverty; only three percent of its victims were found to be neglected. And perhaps in Mississippi, a state that allows corporal punishment in the schools, the standard for finding abuse is may be high.

Substantiation by Reporting Source

Chapter 7 of CM 2022 contains an interesting table plotting the number of substantiations for each reporting source. We have seen that legal and law enforcement personnel made only slightly more screened-in reports than education personnel in FFY 2022: Table 7-3 of the report shows that each group made approximately 21 percent of the reports that were screened in. Yet the reports made by law enforcement personnel accounted for 38 percent of the substantiated victims, and the reports of educators accounted for only 11 percent of the substantiated victims. So reports from law enforcement personnel were over three times more likely to be substantiated than reports from teachers. Medical personnel did better but not quite as well as the police: they made 11 percent of screened-in reports, which accounted for 13 percent of substantiated victims. An analysis by The Imprint shows that social services personnel have a slightly higher share of substantiated reports than of total reports, while nonprofessionals have a substantially lower share. The data align with increasing criticisms of teachers as making too many reports that do not rise to the level or abuse or neglect. Whether that is true, or whether reports from teachers are automatically devalued because of their source, cannot be ascertained from this information.

Fatalities Continued to Increase

CM 2022 reports an estimated increase in child maltreatment fatalities for the fifth consecutive year. The report provides a national estimate of 1,990 children who died of abuse or neglect in FFY 2022 at a rate of 2.73 per 100,000 children in the population. That number has increased every year since 2018, and the 2022 estimate is a 12.7 percent increase over the estimate from 2018. The increase in child fatalities started before 2018; Child Maltreatment 2017 reported an 11 percent increase in child fatalities from 1,550 in FFY 2013 to 1,720 in FFY 2017. That amounts to a 28 percent increase between FFY 2013 and FFY 2022.

There are many caveats to be made about year-to-year comparisons of child fatalities. First, there is nearly universal agreement among experts that the annual estimates of child fatalities from NCANDS dramatically undercount the true number of deaths that are due to child maltreatment. As CM 2022 states, some child deaths may not come to the attention of CPS at all. That can happen if nobody makes a report, perhaps because there are no surviving children in the family, or if the family is not already involved with CPS. For this reason the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act (P.L. 112-34) requires states to describe in their state plans all the sources used to compile information on child maltreatment deaths, and to the extent that information from state vital statistics departments, child death review teams, law enforcement agencies and medical examiners or coroners is not included in that description, to explain why that information is not included and how it will be included. Most states that comment on fatalities report using at least some of these sources, but the extent to which they are capturing actual fatalities is unclear. Only Virginia reports that it does not collect child fatality data from external sources.

Second, the fatalities reported in the 2022 report did not all occur in 2022. The report explains that child fatalities reported in CM 2022 are generally those that were determined to be due to maltreatment in 2022, not those that actually occurred during 2022. That is because It may take more than a year to find out about a fatality, gather the evidence (such as autopsy results and police investigations) to determine whether it was due to maltreatment, and then make the detrmination. Some states report that the deaths they reported may have occurred as long as five years before 2022. However, each state has its own way of determining which fatalities to report. California, for example, explains that the fatalities reported in the 2022 report were actually fatalities that occurred in FFY 2021 and were known to the state by December 2021, meaning that the estimate is truncated.

The meaning of the increasing fatalities is not obvious. Just like “victimization,” the classification of a death as a maltreatment fatality depends upon whether the fatality was even reported to the child welfare agency as well as whether the correct decision was made to substantiate the fatality as due to maltreatment. As mentioned above, states are supposed to gather the information about fatalities from other sources like medical examiners, but the extent to which they are receiving this information, and the extent to which these other sources are identifying maltreatment, is unclear.⁶

From the explanations that some states provided in their commentaries, it appears that annual maltreatment fatality counts can reflect a variety of factors. Year-to-year changes are often attributed to random fluctuations due to small numbers or timing issues. In their commentaries, states often explained a year-to-year jump by explaining that many children in one family died, or or that a large group of fatalities that occurred the previous year were reported in the current year.

Some states reported on societal issues that have contributed to increasing child fatalities over time. For example, Washington’s commentary suggests that the opioid crisis has contributed to its increase in fatalities from 19 in FFY 2021 to 31 in FFY 2022. The state reports that between FFY 2021 and FFY 202 the percentage of child fatalities in the state that were due to opioid ingestion or overdose rose from less than one percent to 23 percent of child fatalities. Of the deaths and near-fatalities that qualified for a review because they occurred in families touched by the system in the previous year, that percentage jumped from 28 to 44 percent. Ohio reported that it attributes the increase in child fatalities to an increase in the overall death rate due to violence. Other states commented on the type of deaths that have increased, such as unsafe sleep coexisting with substance abuse.

Changes in how maltreatment fatalities are defined can also affect fatality counts, and in the case of Texas, the change resulted in a decrease in child fatalities from 206 in FFY 2021 to 176 in FFY 2022. Specifically, Texas attributes this decrease to the new law that makes the definition of neglect more stringent. Considering that the new law requires both “reckless disregard” of the consequences of parental action or inaction and actual harm, and given that death is certainly harm, this suggests that those investigating the deaths did not consider that the parents or caregivers exhibited such reckless disregard. Texas reports that deaths from unsafe sleep, drowning, and vehicle-related fatalities declined in FFY 2022 under the new definition of neglect.

Some states attribute increases in reported fatalities to improvements in the accuracy with which they report child fatalities. Commentaries from states that experienced an increase in child maltreatment fatalities in recent CM reports include accounts of their improvements in their ability to identify such deaths. These included several states that reported an increased awareness of unsafe sleep practices and hot car deaths resulting in more reports involving these cases, the creation of a Special Investigation Unit that investigates child fatalities to determine whether they are due to maltreatment (Mississippi); requiring mandated reporters participating on child fatality review boards to report suspected maltreatment fatalities to the local child welfare agency (Ohio); the development of capability to track fatalities at report, during investigation, or in care (Maine); ensuring that documentation of deaths is included in the states CCWIS system (Maryland); increased training of staff and partners on reporting child fatalities (Texas); and implementation of death review panels (Arkansas). Therefore, it is not possible to determine the extent to which the increase in reported child maltreatment fatalities reflects better identification, more maltreatment deaths, or a combination of the two.

Demographics and child maltreatment fatalities

Infants under a year old are more than three times more likely to die of maltreatment than one-year-olds, and the fatality rate generally decreases with age. In contrast to the different rates of substantiated abuse or neglect, boys have a higher maltreatment fatality rate (3.26 per 100,000 boys) than girls (2.25 per 100,000). Black children have by far the highest fatality rate of all the groups for whom information was available; 6.37 per 100,000 black children died of substantiated maltreatment, compared to 3.37 for American Indian or Native American children, 1.99 for White children, and 1.68 for Hispanic children. The maltreatment fatality rate for Black children is over three times as high than the rate for White children, a difference that is even more stark than the difference in the “victimization rate,: which is twice as high for Black children than for White children.

The question of bias has to be addressed again when talking about fatalities from maltreatment. It is theoretically possible that racial bias could play a role in whether a fatality is substantiated as maltreatment. But it is likely that there is less opportunity for bias when it comes to fatalities, as the fact that harm was done cannot be disputed even if the parent’s role may be unclear. Drake et al. found that in 2019 indicators of risk and harm for Black children are usually between two and three times greater than those for White children, while the Black-White homicide disparity was four times as great as that for White children. So while we cannot rule out any role for bias, it is unlikely to be the main cause of the disparities in child maltreatment fatalities.

The data showed that most of the perpetrators of child fatalities were caregivers; more than 80 percent of child fatalities involved “one or more parents acting alone, together, or with other individuals.” NCANDS does not collect the official cause of death, but it does ask for the type of maltreatment that was substantiated in each fatality. Thus, one child can be found to have suffered more than one type of maltreatment, though it is not clear that each maltreatment type that was substantiated must have contributed to the fatality. Over three quarters (76.4 percent) of the children who died were found to have suffered from neglect, and 42.1 percent were found to have endured physical abuse.

It is worth noting that CM 2022 was originally released on or about January 8 without a press release and then disappeared from the internet for about three weeks. It is hard to avoid speculating about the reasons for the removal of CM 2022 and then its publication several weeks later. Could it be that officials were trying to figure out how to spin the five years of increase in fatalities? When the press release finally appeared along with the restored report, ACF had elected to basically recycle last years headline, New Child Maltreatment Report Finds Child Abuse and Neglect Decreased to a Five-Year Low. Once again, the press release failed to explain that victimization is not actual maltreatment. It did mention the increase in child maltreatment fatalities and, surprisingly, did not raise the possibility that better measurement contributed to this increase, which might have helped their case.

In the press release, Children’s Bureau Associate Commissioner Aysha Schomberg is quoted as encouraging “agencies to pay particular attention to data in this report that is disaggregated by race.” There is something perplexing about this suggestion. Paying attention to race means observing the stark disparities in child maltreatment “victimization” and fatal child maltreatment, between White children and Black and Native American children. ACF and its allies at Casey Family Programs, the Center for the Study of Social Policy and other like-minded organizations typically argue that these disparities are not due to different rates of maltreatment but to racial bias built into the system. But ACF’s press release accepts these “victimization” rates as a true indicator of child maltreatment, which suggests that the racial disparities in child maltreatment are real. And if that is indeed the case, as I believe it is, isn’t the right answer to protect Black and Native American children through a stronger and better-functioning CPS, rather than trying to weaken or abolish it?

ACF’s Communications team’s misuse of the term “victimization” to suggest that maltreatment is declining is disappointing in a government agency with a responsibility to inform the public. We will never get an accurate measure of child maltreatment because so much of it occurs behind closed doors. So what is the real meaning of CM 2022? The failure of the child disposition rate to keep up with the increase in reports suggests a decreasing response by child welfare to reports of maltreatment, with the slight uptick after the pandemic disguising a downward secular trend over the entire period. The continuing decline in substantiations despite the increase in referrals, while not indicative of declining maltreatment, shows even more clearly how child welfare systems are seeking to reduce their involvement with families. Could the increase in child fatalities be the consequence of this reduced involvement? It is possible, but the improvement of fatality reporting in some states makes it impossible to answer this question definitively.

Notes

In Pennsylvania, referrals that involve non-serious injuries or neglect are assigned to General Protective Services (GPS), and information on these cases is not reported in NCANDS.
Theodore Cross and Cecilia Casanueva, “Caseworker Judgments and Substantiation,” Child Maltreatment, 14, 1 (2009): 38-52; Desmond K. Runyan et al, “Describing Maltreatment: Do child protective services reports and research definitions agree?” Child Abuse and Neglect 29 (2005): 461-477; Brett Drake, “Unraveling ‘Unsubstantiated,'” Child Maltreatment, August 1996; and Amy M. Smith Slep and Richard E. Heyman, “Creating and Field-Testing Child Maltreatment Definitions: Improving the Reliability of Substantiation Determinations,” Child Maltreatment, 11, 3 (August 2006): 217-236.
Brett Drake, Melissa Jonson-Reid, Ineke Wy and Silke Chung, “Substantiation and Recidivism,” Child Maltreatment 8,4 (2003): 248-260; Jon M. Hussey et al., “Defining maltreatment according to substantiation: Distinction without a difference?” Child Abuse and Neglect 29 (2005): 479-492; Patricia L. Kohl, Melissa Jonson-Reid, and Brett Drake, “Time to Leave Substantiation Behind: Findings from a National Probability Study,” Child Maltreatment, 14 (2009), 17-26; Jeffrey Leiter, Kristen A. Myers, and Matthew T. Zingraff, “Substantiated and unsubstantiated cases of child maltreatment: do their consequences differ?” Social Work Research 18 (1994): 67-82; and Diana J. English et al, “Causes and Consequences of the Substantiation Decision in Washington State Child Protective Services,” Children and Youth Services Review, 24, 11 (2002): 817-851.
The ideal numerator would be the duplicated count of children who received and investigation or alternative response, because even if one child is investigated five times, each investigation needs to be counted. But CM 2022 does not provide that number, and I am assuming that there won’t be enormous differences in repeat responses by state.
Pennsylvania also has a high percentage of abuse findings but that reflects the fact that it does not report General Protective Services cases in NCANDS.
Each state submits both a child and an agency file. The Child File contains case-level data on reports that resulted in a disposition in the reporting year. The Agency File contains data that are not reportable at the child-specific level and often gathered from agencies external to CPS, like medical examiners vital statistics departments and child fatality review teams. Child fatalities can be included in the Child File, which means the entire record of the case from report to disposition is included (as well as any previous cases) or it can be included only as part of the aggregate total in the agency file. States must report as part of the Agency File the total number of victims who were not reported in the Child File, so that those that were reported are not double-counted.

What is the cause of racial disparity in child welfare?

There is no doubt that Black children and families are reported to child abuse hotlines, investigated, and removed from their homes more than White children. But many leading voices in child welfare today have made the dubious assumption that racial bias in reporting and child protective services is the underlying reason for these disparities. Unfortunately, based on this assumption, they propose policy solutions that risk destroying existing protections for Black children or even for all abused and neglected children. A star-studded group of researchers has collaborated on a paper that ought to put this presumption to bed for good. I hope that this brilliant paper is able to change the minds of some who have unquestionably adopted the fashionable theory that is being promoted by the child welfare establishment.

There is no dispute that Black children are reported to authorities, investigated for abuse or neglect, and placed in foster care at a higher rate than White children. The federal publication, Child Maltreatment 2021, reports that Black children are nearly twice as likely as White children to be the subject of a screened-in report and almost twice as likely to be substantiated as a victim of child abuse or neglect. In 2020, Black children were 14 percent of the child population but 20 percent of the children entering foster care. Kim et al estimated that 53 percent of Black children will experience a CPS investigation by the age of 18, compared with 28 percent for Whites. But are these disparities greater than what would be expected given the higher rates of poverty and other social problems among Black children? That’s the question that a group of 13 researchers addressed in a recent article on racial and ethnic differences in child protective services reporting, substantiation and placement, published in the leading child welfare journal, Child Maltreatment. The authors include most of the top researchers in the field, such as lead author Brett Drake and his co-authors Richard Barth, Sarah Font, Emily Putnam-Hornstein, Jill Duerr-Berrick, and Melissa Jonson-Reid–an accumulation of starpower rarely seen collaborating on a single article.

Previous studies cited in the paper have already concluded that when adjusting for income and family context, Black children were actually reported to CPS at similar or slightly lower rates than White children and that Black children who are the subject of investigations were no more likely to be substantiated or placed in foster care than White children. Despite these results, the belief that racial disparities are due to anti-Black bias in reporting and child protective services (CPS) decisionmaking has been asserted as established fact in publications by the federal government, numerous child welfare groups, the American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, and many media outlets. A report by a leading legal advocacy group and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute urged the UN to investigate the American child welfare system for racial discrimination. After conducting its own review, a UN Committee recommended that the United States “take all appropriate measures to eliminate racial discrimination in the child welfare system, including by amending or repealing laws, policies and practices that have a disparate impact on families of racial and ethnic minorities.” Rather than advocating for reform of child welfare systems, some individuals and organizations, such as upEND, press for the extreme step of abolishing the entire child welfare system.

The new paper provides a needed antidote to the certainty that racial bias is the principal source of racial disproportionalities in reporting, substantiations, and foster care placements, and provide compelling evidence against it. The authors use universal national data to ask two questions:

Are Black-White and Hispanic-White disparities in CPS reporting lower than, similar to, or higher than disparities in non-CPS measures of social risk and child harm?
Once referred and accepted for investigation, do Black or Hispanic children experience substantiation and removal into foster care at rates lower, similar or higher than White children?

The authors focused on Black, White and Hispanic populations. Native American populations, which are also disproportionately involved in child welfare, are difficult to study because many are served by tribal child welfare systems and may not be reflected in the national data that the authors use. The authors used CPS data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), which gathers information from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico about reports of child abuse and neglect and their handling by child welfare agencies. Data from certain states and years had to be eliminated because of data quality problems and missing data. The elimination of all data from New York and Pennsylvania is unfortunate, but it is unlikely that these omissions changed the overall trends. Data for income and other indicators of risk and harm came from the Census Bureau, the Kids Count Data Center, National Vital Statistics records, and the Centers for Disease Control.

Question One: Reporting Disparities

The authors posit that the “expected rate” of Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement for a particular group of children should be “the rate at which children in that population experience child abuse, neglect, or imminent risk thereof.” But the authors explain that we cannot actually observe the incidents of abuse or neglect, as they are not always reported to authorities. And when reports are made, the system may not always make the correct decision when it decides whether or not to “substantiate” or confirm the allegations made by the reporter. To estimate the “expected rate” of being reported to CPS, Drake and colleagues used several categories of risk and harm that are known to be highly correlated with the risk of child abuse and neglect. Indicators of “social risk” included the numbers of children in poverty, children in single parent families, teen birth rate, and adults without a high school degree. To indicate harm to children, the authors used “very low birthweight,” “very preterm births,” infant mortality, homicide injury, and “unintentional death.”

Drake and his colleagues calculated “disparity ratios (DR’s),” by dividing the incidence of social risk or harm for Black or Hispanic children by the rates for White children by year. They found that the DR’s for all the measures of risk, and all of the measures of harm except accidental deaths, were greater than the DR’s for CPS reports. In other words, there was a greater disparity in risk and harm to Black children than there was in CPS reporting. Thus, given their likelihood of being abused or neglected, Black children appear to be reported to CPS less than are White children.

The tables below illustrate the incidence of risk, harm and CPS reports for Black children compared to White children. While Black children were reported to CPS at a rate close to twice the rate of White children throughout the period studied, their poverty rate was three times that of White children in 2019, the proportion of Black children in single-parent households was 2.5 times as as that of Whites, and the disparity in the rate of single-parent households and adults without a high school degree was almost as great. In terms of harm, Black children were four times as likely to be a homicide victim in 2019, nearly three times as likely to have a very low birth weight, and more than twice as likely to die of maltreatment, in 2019.

Disparities in Substantiation and Removal

To address disparities in substantiation and removal following investigation, Drake and coauthors compared the raw data and also ran regressions to adjust for demographic factors that might affect placement, such as poverty. They found that in both adjusted and unadusted estimates, Black children, once investigated, have been less likely to be substantiated and placed in foster care in more recent years. Before 2011, Black children were slightly more likely to be substantiated and placed in foster care than White children before the trend reversed. The unadjusted estimates are shown below.

When they compared Hispanic children to White children, the authors found a very different pattern. While Hispanic children face much more exposure to social risks like poverty than White children, they experience harm and CPS reporting at about the same rate as White children. This pattern is consistent with what is known as the “Hispanic paradox.” This term describes a well-documented phenomenon in the child welfare and medical literatures wherein Hispanic children and families have indicators of well-being similar to their White non-Hispanic counterparts, despite having much higher indicators on risk factors like poverty. For Hispanic children, there were slightly greater unadjusted rates of substantiation and placement than for White children, but these differences disappeared when statistical controls were added.

Conclusions and Implications

The authors draw two primary conclusions from their research. First, “Black-White CPS reporting disparities were consistently lower than Black-White disparities in external indicators of social risk and child harm.” Black children were exposed to more risk and experienced harm at greater rates than White children, and these disparities were consistently greater than the disparities in reporting. If either group is overreported in relationship to their risk it is White children. It is still possible, the authors point out, that all children are overreported to CPS in relation to external indicators of risk and harm. But “if there is systemic overreporting, it is not specific to Black children and thus, unlikely to be driven by racial animus.” They also found no evidence that once investigated, Black children were disproportionately substantiated or placed in foster care.

Second, the authors found continued evidence for the “Hispanic paradox” in CPS reporting compared to observed risk exposure. Although Hispanic children face substantially greater social risks than White children, they experience harm and CPS reporting at about the same rate as White children. This supports the well-documented pattern whereby more recently immigrated Hispanic families, despite having higher risk factors, tend to have indicators of well-being similar to Whites.

In the authors’ own words:

It is indisputable that despite progress in certain areas, the United States has not overcome the legacy of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow. This legacy lingers most clearly in the patterns of segregation that emerge in many of our metro areas…To assert that these patterns, and the poverty and chronic stress they perpetuate, would have no impact on behavioral and psychosocial functioning among the individuals and families in those neighorhoods is to reject decades of scientific consensus on human development. Indeed, this history and its unresolved legacy is essential to understanding why Hispanic families face similar individual socioeconomic disadvatage but appear to have sigificantly lower rates of CPS involvment than Black children.

If I have one quibble with the authors of this brilliant and essential article, it is their lack of attention to the possile psychological impacts of intergenerational trauma from the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial hatred and violence. As the child of Holocaust survivors, I can attest that the six years of trauma that my parents suffered after the Nazis invaded Poland has affected me and even my daughter. For families in which nearly every generation going back almost 400 years suffered the trauma imposed by living within slavery, Jim Crow, or a culture of virulent and violent racism that continues in some form today, it would be surprising if there was no current mental health impact on the generation that is parenting children today. Such a impact might include elevated levels of mental illness as well as self-medication through drugs and alcohol, both of which are associated with child maltreatment.

In the section on Implications, the authors assert the need to address the factors that underlie the differing rates of risk and harm to Black children, outside the CPS system itself–factors such as poverty and racial segregation. The belief that abolition of child protections would in and of itself help Black children, the authors point out, relies not only the assumption that CPS is racially discriminatory, which this paper has debunked. It also relies on the assumption that CPS provides no protection to children. Certainly there is room for improvement in our child protection systems, particularly in the quality of care they provide to children removed from their homes. Yet, foster youth testimonies such as “being placed in a foster home saved me,” or “Using my voice is the reason I am no longer in a household that is broken,” as well as the silent testimony of the more than two thousand children who die of abuse and neglect every year,¹ are a testament to the untruth of this statement.

The authors suggest three courses of action for the future. First, we should acknowledge and address the true drivers of racial inequity among families, such as multigenerational poverty, underresourced schools, and lack of access to quality substance abuse and mental health treatment programs. Second, despite their results, we must acknowledge that racial bias may exist in certain localities and be prepared to address it. And third, “there is clearly room to consider restructuring child and family policy generally to include a focus on providing preventive services, including material assistance, to families. (See my discussion of universal yet targeted programs to prevent child maltreatment.)

The authors go on to state that “It is possible that a narrow focus on reducing Black children’s CPS involvement without addressing the pronounced inequities documented by the external indicators will result in systematic and disproportionate unresponsiveness to abuse and neglect experienced by Black children.” And indeed, there are already reports that professionals are already more reluctant to report Black children and CPS employees are more reluctant to substantiate or remove them.² Or to put it more bluntly, the standards for parenting Black children will be lowered, and the level of maltreatment that Black children are expected to endure before getting help will be raised. Ironically, this calls to mind some manifestations of racism that have been cited by scholars and advocates, such as treating Black children as if they are older than their actual age, and thinking that Blacks have a higher pain threshhold than Whites. Of course if the child welfare abolitionists have their way, the entire system will be abolished, destroying protections for all children. That is unlikely to happen, but what is more likely is a weakening or repeal of critical laws like the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act or the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which are both currently under attack, to eliminate or weaken provisions like mandatory reporting.

Sadly, few leaders on either side of our increasingly polarized political scene will be open-minded enough to read, understand and accept the conclusions of this important paper. While the progressive mainstream (and even many others in the child welfare establishment) has blindly accepted the notion that racial bias is the primary driver of child welfare disparities, conservatives remain obsessed with reducing the size of government and cutting taxes, refusing to recognize the need for massive spending, even a domestic Marshall Plan, to rectify the result of centuries of slavery and anti-Black racism in America.

Notes

States reported 1,820 child maltreatment fatalities to NCANDS in 2021. But experts cied by the National Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities (p. 9) estimate that the actual number is at least twice as many as that reported to NCANDS.
See, for example, Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota, Minnesota Child Fatalities from Maltreatment, 2014-2022. The report authors found evidence that raised the question of whether Minnesota child welfare agencies may have tended to leave Black children in more high-risk situations for longer periods of time than children of other races and ethnicities. See also Stacey Patton, The Neglect Of 4 Texas Brothers Proves That The Village It Takes To Raise A Black Child Is The Same Village That Stands By And Watches Them Die, Madamenoire, November 2, 2021. She states that “To reduce the number of Black children entering into foster care as a result of abuse, child welfare professionals are increasingly “screening out” calls for suspected child abuse. There haven’t been any state or national level studies to show whether disproportionately higher numbers of calls of Black child abuse are being screened out to avoid claims of racial discrimination. However, in my work as a child advocate, I keep hearing stories of non-Black child welfare professionals who don’t report abuse because they either don’t want to be accused of racism, or they just accept that beating kids is an intrinsic part of Back culture.”

Book Review: A Place Called Home: a needed antidote to the dominant narrative

It’s Christmas in Manhattan, and five-year-old David Ambroz (then called Hugh), six-year-old Alex and seven-year-old Jessica trudge through the freezing nighttime streets. “I’m only five,” writes Ambroz, “and all I know about Christmas is the stories I’ve heard at the churches where we go for free meals.” “Mom, we’re close to the Port Authority, can we go inside?” asks Hugh. “Walk straight. They’re after us” is the reply he receives. “There’s a calculation I make whenever I talk to Mom: Will she hit me, and is it worth it?” Ambroz explains.

So begins David Ambroz’s harrowing account of life with a mother, Mary Ambroz, whose mental state varies from manic to apathetic to floridly paranoid. A former nurse who was once married to a doctor,* Mary has been in the grips of her untreated mental illness for as long as Hugh can remember. The family bounces back and forth between New York City and Albany, eventually relocating to Western Massachusetts. The children are condemned to a life of sleeping at all-night Dunkin Donuts shops, dining on tiny cups of creamer mixed with sugar packets, and eating out of dumpsters, interspersed with short periods of relative normalcy when the family finds a temporary home. Those periods last until Mary decides the CIA or other pursuer is back on their trail. Some years the children don’t go to school at all, other years they change schools one or more times due to their frequent moves. The children don’t receive medical or dental checkups or vaccinations and visit the occasional clinic only for emergencies. When Hugh breaks his arm at the age of four, he is taken to the emergency room to have it set but never brought back to have the cast removed; when it starts to smell, Mary removes it with a kitchen knife.

Over the years the family has been investigated many times without getting any help, reports Ambroz. Mary Ambroz usually manages to convince authorities that she is a good mother, although she has lost custody more than once–one time when she threw a shoe at a judge in eviction court and was carted off to a psychiatric ward. The children went to a friend’s mother, but were returned to their mother as soon as she was released.

When she finds work as a live-in nurse for an older woman who allows the family to live with them, Mary instructs the children to call their benefactor “Aunt Flora.” Hugh is thrilled to live in an apartment where he can take a bath and to be enrolled in third grade only a month into the school year even though he missed most of second grade. In an apparent effort to ingratiate the family with “Aunt Flora,” Mary tells eight-year-old Hugh he is Jewish, renames him David, and immediately takes him to a doctor to be circumcised. But she does not bring him back for follow-up care and the wound becomes infected. Mary refuses to seek medical care despite “Aunt Flora”‘s pleas, rippimg off the protective mesh that had become stuck to the wound. Dismayed at Mary’s refusal to seek medical care for her son, “Aunt Flora” expels the family and they are living in Grand Central station again.

Even during relatively stable periods, when they are able to rent an apartment in Albany with the help of public assistance, life is far from normal for the children. Mary Ambroz doesn’t cook and when the food stamps start to run low the children have strategies for getting fed, like sneaking into Ponderosa Steakhouse by pretending to be part of a family that has already paid. A kitten they were allowed to adopt during a good period starves to death despite David’s attempt to steal enough food to keep him alive. “He ate his own shit and died,” his mother tells him. “Enough whining, David. You should have taken care of him,” she said, putting the body in a trash bag along with the cat toys and the litter box.

Mary Ambroz uses a gift of $500 to take a taxi to Boston, and the family ends up in a domestic violence shelter in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Shelter staff try to help her get back on her feet and David tries to assist, accompanying her in selling vacuum cleaners door to door. The children are enrolled in school But that situation falls apart when Mary accuses a 65-year-old staffer groundlessly of sexually abusing David, after beating David up for allowing it to happen. “Nobody wants to tangle with my mother….And so, at this shelter for abused women, the response to our mother’s unhinged behavior is to move us to an apartment where they won’t have to witness the abuse.” And that is the same story, reports Ambroz, that repeats over and over again in their lives. Adults intervene with temporary kindnesses but don’t take steps to rescue the children from what is clearly a dangerous situation.

The children are thrilled with their new apartment, but Mary grows worse, alternating between almost catatonic apathy and violence. Twelve-year-old David realizes that foster care could be his salvation. He and his siblings been have been hiding their bruises for years at their mother’s demand but he finally understands that he must reveal his injuries in order to be saved. He shows his bruises to a DARE officer visiting his school. Two weeks later, two social workers knock on their door. “David, does your mother hurt you?” asks one of them, in front of his mother. As often happens when children are asked this question in the presence of the abusive caregiver, David retracts the allegation and the case is closed.

Mary Ambroz’s violence continues to escalate. She beats Alex severely with a curtain rod when he refuses to make a list of all the men with whom he has had sex. The children hatch a plan: 14-year-old Alex will ride a stolen bike 40 miles over the hills of Western Massachusetts at night to get help from a friend’s mother in Albany. The children gather $40 worth of food stamps, candy, and snacks and Alex is off. The family hears nothing for three weeks, and then the police call. Alex had made his way to Albany and disclosed the abuse to police and social services and is now in foster care. Once again, David is interviewed in front of his mother. Once again, denies the abuse. Once again, the social workers leave him and Jessica at home.

Just a few days later, Mary throws David down the stairs of their apartment building and then kicks his head, and everything goes dark. Covered with blood, David drags himself into the nearby courthouse and collapses into the arms of a bailiff. Finally David has had enough. From his hospital bed, he tells the investigating social worker what happened. His mother insists that he fell down the stairs, but the doctor opines that “it is not impossible, but these are pretty extensive injuries for a fall.” The CPS worker, unbelievably, tells David that while the investigation proceeds, “we think it’s best that you go home with your mom.” But a week later, the police knock on the door. A social worker tells David to pack his things. As he drives away from the apartment, David thinks, “This is it. I’m free.”

And now starts David’s life in foster care, which is only slightly less harrowing than his life with his mother. Jessica is placed in the foster home where Alex is living, but the home is not open to David and he knows why; the social workers can tell that he is gay. David spends his first night in foster care sleeping in the Department of Social Services (DSS) office, an experience of many children in foster care today. Then David is brought to a facility for juvenile delinquents, after being told by a social worker that it was not the right place for him but “we don’t have a place that can accept your kind.” At the facility he is called “fag” and “Ms. Ambroz” by a staffer, loses privileges for talking back, and is beaten up by other residents at the apparent instigation of the homophobic staffer. David’s illusion of safety is gone. “I am destroyed. It took everything I had to escape my mother. I thought nothing could be worse, but now, at twelve years old, I feel like this is it.”

David quickly cycles through several foster and group homes. He is finally placed with his siblings in the home of Buck and Mae, a couple who should never have been accepted as foster parents. After the children go to bed in their basement, they are not allowed upstairs for any reason, not even to go to the bathroom. They can’t use the shower without an escort, they can’t go into the kitchen except for mealtimes, and no snacking is allowed. Abetted by a succession of therapists, Buck and Mae try to suppress David’s homosexuality, forbidding him to close the door to the bathroom all the way and designing “manly” chores like clearing a swamp and digging out a backyard swimming pool. He is sent out to hang up wet laundry in the winter without gloves. They say he is too fat and put him on a starvation diet, and now he is hungry again and scrounging for food.

Thanks to a high school friend of David’s siblings, he is hired to work at a summer camp, and that summer changes David’s life. He bonds with the camp director, Holly, and her small daughter, a camper. Holly senses that something is wrong in David’s home. Knowing he needs support, she visits him weekly after camp ends but the visits eventually stop. Later David learns that Holly stopped visiting him after Mae became furious when she bought him new clothes. Holly called David’s social worker and asked to become his foster parent. She and her husband were working on receiving their foster care license until the social worker told them that Mae and Buck insisted it was better for him to be kept with his siblings.

Finally, Jessica and Alex run away. They disclose abuse at the foster home and refuse to go back. But there is no room in the new foster home for David, and DSS keeps David with Buck and Mae even while recognizing their abuse, requiring them to do additional training and not allowing them to take on new children. (Holly is never told that David is no longer with his siblings or invited to apply for her foster care license). Mae restricts David’s food even more while citing his obesity, even though he is dangerously underweight. Nobody at school appears to notice or care. Even when David faints in school, he does not explain that he is starving and no red flags are raised. Buck and Mae begin taking him out of school to work for an acquaintance, pocketing his pay and that too raises no concerns at school.

The torture escalates until one spring morning in 1995, Mae tells David he is staying home from school and David decides he is not going to take it anymore. He leaves the house and tracks down Holly, learning of her attempt to have him placed with her. Finally, David is placed with Holly, her husband Steve, and their two small children. He cannot believe that he is allowed to freely roam upstairs, or that he is allowed to eat whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Steve teaches David how to drive and laughs when he destroys their mailbox, saying he never liked it anyway. Holly ensures that he, Alex and Jessica get the braces that Mae refused to let them get since her kids could not have them.

David always loved school, but the dislocations imposed by his mother, and the hunger and absences posed by his foster parents, often affected his grades. One he is stable and fed, he gets straight A’s. As a high school junior, he joins the Foster Youth Advisory Council and begins attending annual meetings in Washington. But even with loving foster parents, David is tired of the system. He emancipates himself with the help of a fictitious custody arrangement with his siblings’ father and goes off to Spain for a miraculous year of healing and fun with a loving host mother. He applies and is accepted to his dream school, Vassar, with a generous financial aid package.

Even with his financial aid, David struggles to buy books and to survive during school breaks. (It is not clear why he does not ask Holly and Steve for these things or return to them for the holidays; it seems to be a matter of pride or reluctance to burden them.) He eventually gives up on fulfilling his mother’s dream that he become a doctor and switches his major to political science and his plan to law school, remembering his experience as a White House intern the summer before. At a meeting of the Foster Youth Advisory Council, he agrees to be a liaison to a collaboration working to help gay foster youth. That’s when he comes out as a gay man. The story ends with his graduation from Vassar in May 2002. He is on his way to UCLA to study law and public policy. Now, Ambroz works for Amazon as head of Community Engagement (West) and is the founder of Fostermore.org, an organization that encourages those in the entertainment industry, businesses, and nonprofits to raise money and heighten awareness about the needs of foster children.

A Place Called Home provides some important corrections to the prevailing narrative in child welfare. That narrative features struggling parents who are doing the best they can, and who are being persecuted by an evil “family policing system” that is dead set on removing their children. Clearly, that is not the story of David Ambroz and his siblings. At every stage of the child welfare process–reporting, investigation and reunification–the deck was stacked against the children’s interest in safety and stability and in favor of their mother’s keeping them. While it has been some years since David Ambroz was an abused child (he does not give his date of birth but we know that he graduated from Vassar in 2002 and we can assume he was born close to 1980) the problems he identified are very familiar to those with knowledge of the system and indeed some of them may even have worsened due to the current ideological climate in child welfare.

Failure to Report: The number of people who knew that David and his siblings were suffering but took no action to help them is truly staggering. As Ambroz puts it, “Priests, rabbis, teachers, shelter directors, church members, welfare employees and Aunt Flora have all been witnesses to our bruises and lice, our hunger, a ceaseless tide of neglect and abuse.” David acknowledges that reports were made and the children were even removed once or twice, but the vast majority of people who witnessed their abuse apparently did not report it. We often hear similar stories in the wake of a child’s maltreatment death. For example, eight-year-old Dametrious Wilson was killed by his aunt in June 2022. Though he missed 60 days of school in the year before he died, his Denver Colorado school never reported his absences as required by law, even when his aunt said she was keeping him home “for few weeks” as punishment for his behavior!

And yet, today there is a groundswell of opposition to mandatory reporting and serious proposals to eliminate it, mostly on the grounds that children of color are disproportionately reported. It is true that a staggering proportion of Black children are investigated by CPS; it has been estimated that over half of Black children experience a CPS investigation by the time they turn 18, compared to 28 percent for white children and 37 percent of all children. It is possible that reporting is overused in some communities and underused in others. But it seems more logical to address these problems directly (and also educate ordinary citizens about the need to report suspected maltreatment) rather than eliminating mandatory reporting itself.

Flawed investigations: Even when reports were made, the investigations were often flawed. Ambroz states that “Over the years we’ve been investigated many times without getting help. Mom always fights to keep us, and it’s a battle she’s mostly won.” So what went wrong? Ambroz gives us part of the answer when he explains that social workers and police interviewed him at least twice in front of his mother. Both times he recanted and denied the abuse he had alleged earlier, knowing that he risked severe punishment for telling the truth. It seems obvious that children should be interviewed away from their parents since either love or fear or both will lead them to lie. Yet, this clueless and dangerous practice of interviewing children in front of the alleged perpetrator contnues in many jurisdictions. In Minnesota, a young woman named Maya, who was forced to report her fathers’s sexual abuse while he was listening, worked with an advocacy group to draft Maya’s Law, which required that Minnesota children be interviewed privately regarding allegations of abuse. But like the previous attempts, Maya’s Law failed. Instead, the language was revised to read “When it is possible, and the report alleges substantial child endangerment or sexual abuse, the interview may take place outside the presence of the alleged offender…” Sadly, many “advocates” for Black and indigenous children argued against the requirement for private interviews, fearing that it would increase disproportional involvement of these groups in child welfare.

Unwarranted reunifications: Even when David and his siblings were removed from their mother briefly, they were returned at least twice with no indication they would be safe. When Mary returned from the psychiatric ward after throwing a shoe at a judge, “nobody cared that we are being put in the custody of a homeless woman who’d recently thrown a shoe at a judge in a court of law.” We know that many children are reunified with their parents despite a lack of evidence of any change in their behavior or capabilities. In Lethal Reunifications, I wrote about two such cases that ended in a child’s death, but clearly that is just the tip of the iceberg. We never know about the children left to suffer in silence, unless they decide to write about their experiences.

Necessity of foster care in some cases: The current narrative holds that foster care is almost never necessary. But David Ambroz’s story reveals the stark truth that some children must be removed in order to be saved. Of course every effort should be made to help parents conquer their problems while monitoring children for safety in the home. But in cases of chronic maltreatment, ingrained patterns may be impossible to change. As Dee Wilson put it in his briliiant commentary on chronic multitype maltreatment, “Chronic neglect is marked by the erosion or collapse of social norms around parenting resulting from chronically relapsing conditions.” There is no better example of such collapsed social norms than Mary Ambroz, who had completely lost any sense of responsibility to keep her children clothed, fed, and housed, not to mention to avoid abusing them. In such cases, it is wrong to sacrifice the well-being of the child or children for the general value of family preservation.

Ambroz’s story also provides a needed antidote to the current trope that what child welfare describes as neglect is actually just poverty. The confusion of poverty with neglect is a pernicious misconception being perpetrated today by those who wish to eviscerate the child welfare system. David’s story clearly shows the difference. He says of the mother of friends they make in Albany: “Aurora and her sons are poor like us, and yet she still manages to take care of them. She feeds and clothes them. She cares about where they are when they roam around at night. She gives them a home that is stable in all the ways I’ve never dreamed.” And there, in a nutshell ,is the distinction between poverty and neglect.

The dominant narrative portrays foster care as harmful for children and even abusive at times. That part of the narrative is accurate for the first part of David’s time in care, when the system proved incapable of keeping David and his siblings safe, let alone meeting their needs. Among the major reasons for this failure, Ambroz draws attention to the lack of qualified foster parents and overwhelmed social workers.

Lack of Qualified Foster Parents: David fell victim to one of the scourges of our system, insufficient numbers of good foster parents. For this reason, he was initially placed in a facility for juvenile delinquents where he was abused for being gay, and then in a totally unsuitable home. In Buck and Mae, David provides a classic example of a couple who become foster parents to make ends meet. The foster care payments they received helped Buck and Mae keep their house and clothe their children. It is not surprising that such foster parents exist: some foster care agencies leave recruiting brochures in food stamp offices and laundromats; one that I worked for advertised in in a publication called the PennySaver. And yet, even when David’s siblings ran away and their abuse allegations that were taken seriously enough that the agency decided to send no more children to this couple, they were allowed to keep David. One reason, as Ambroz points out, is that there are not enough foster parents, especially for large sibling groups, so the focus is on finding any “bed” for a child. As a foster care social worker in the District of Columbia, I knew many foster parents who were motivated mainly by money. My recommendations to fire such foster parents were never accepted because the agency needed the beds.

To address the shortage of good foster parents, Ambroz recommends recruiting more middle and upper-income foster parents with higher education degrees. In order to do this, he suggests providing benefits that might attract such parents, such as government pensions, participation in the federal employee health plan, and access to free or subsidized tuition and state colleges and universities. I’m not confident that any of these benefits will attract more educated foster parents, and financial incentives also pose the risk of attracting more educated versions of Buck and Mae. Perhaps the lesson of David’s story lies the willingness of Holly and Steve to be his foster parents and the unresponsiveness of the system to this request. There is now a big push to locate kin who can care for children who are removed–and this may be happening much more frequently than when David and his siblings entered care. Perhaps agencies can do more to find unrelated adults who may have bonded with children as their teachers, parents of their friends, mentors or employers, who might serve as foster caregivers. This is certainly done; I myself agreed when asked by CPS to provide a temporary home to a friend of my son’s. If most children who are removed could be placed with adults known to them, it would be easier to fire the Bucks and the Maes and reserve the great foster parents for the children for whom no known adults are available.

Overwhelmed social workers: One reason David’s social worker did not jump at the chance to move him to Holly’s home may be that she was overwhelmed. “I have a rotating cast of social workers, who don’t have the bandwidth to pay attention to anything but immediate and obvious problems,” Ambroz reports. Based on my experience as a social worker in foster care, I could not agree more. Foster care, especially for older and more troubled children, is plagued with constant crises. With caseloads in most jurisdictions far too high, social workers have no time to deal with anything besides the latest crisis. Contributing to the problem are frivolous paperwork and metrics that have nothing to do with child wellbeing. Between the foster parents who did not perform the most basic parental responsibilities, and the caseloads that were too high for me to pick up the slack, I could not spend the time I needed to ensure that each child received the care they needed to thrive, and I eventually left the job.

David Ambroz recommends attracting more and better social workers by decreasing their caseloads and increasing their pay and benefits by either a salary increase or alternative compensation such as student loan forgiveness and home loan assistance. These are excellent ideas. There are other ideas worth considering, such expanding and publicizing the current Title IV-E social work education program that provides tuition assistance for social worker students who want to go into child welfare. Also worth considering are recruiting among populations that do not traditionally seek these jobs, such as military retirees, and perhaps changing education requirements for social workers in child welfare to allow other backgrounds besides social work.

Flaws in the Analysis

While David Ambroz’s story is powerful and carries many important lessons, his acceptance of the current child welfare zeitgeist may have prevented his drawing the conclusions that logically flow from his story. First, he buys into the currently popular misconception that parents are being found neglectful when they are simply poor. Second, he misses the opportunity to advocate for strengthening child protection services, not weakening them.

Poverty vs. neglect: While I’ve already described how Ambroz’ story contradicts the currently popular assertion that “neglect” is synonymous with poverty, he unfortunately repeats that same trope. Describing the domestic violence shelter staff’s decision to place the family in an apartment after observing Mary Ambroz’s abuse of her children, Ambroz states that “[T]his is a pattern that is repeated across the country–children in poverty are given kernels of assistance but are rarely rescued from their circumstances.” But David and his siblings were abused children, not just children in poverty. As mentioned above, he acknowledges that other poor families were not like theirs. By confusing poverty with maltreatment, Ambroz loses a key opportunity to clarify the difference between these problems and to explain that eliminating maltreatment requires more than just economic assistance .

Child protection failures: In his list of policy prescriptions, included in an appendix to the book, Ambroz does not address any of the problems with CPS that were revealed in his memoir. He focuses mainly on foster care, as if his earlier experience as an abused child did not have policy implications. Ambroz could have thrown his weight behind mandatory reporting in light of the movement to end it and could have argued for education of all citizens on the need to report suspected abuse. He could have supported reforms requiring that children be interviewed away from her parents. But these such policies are opposed to the current climate in child welfare which favors hobbling or eliminating CPS and minimizing interference with families. Ambroz appears to be determined to stay within the mainstream, saying “the best way to reform foster care is to decriminalize poverty and help families remain intact whenever possible with wraparound support–be it jobs, mental health care, or whatever is needed.” If abused and neglected children can remain safe with wraparound support that is clearly the best option, but to receive this support, these children must be identified through reporting and investigation. It is unfortunate that Ambroz did not recognize the discrepancies between some of the lessons of his story and the dominant narrative in child welfare and missed the opportunity to spell them out.

Despite its flaws, Ambroz’s story takes its place with other haunting memoirs of abused children, like Stacey Patton’s That Mean Old Yesterday, Regina Calcaterra’s Etched In Sand, and most famously Educated by Tara Westover, which put the lie to the current narrative of good parents vs. the evil state. If only Ambroz had recognized the conflict between his narrative and the dominant one, his book would be even more useful. But the story speaks for itself; the commentary is secondary. David Ambroz’s story is a must-read for anybody who cares about the abused and neglected children among us, including those who are in foster care.

*The doctor was the father of Alex and Jessica, but Mary Ambroz never told David who his father was.

Using child welfare data to learn from the past: why is it so unpopular?

Miracle Jackson, a seven-month-old in Detroit, died with a sock stuffed down her throat and her face covered in duct tape at the hands of her father in 2000. During the same week in the same city, a five-month-old named Jamar was severely beaten. It turned out that Miracle’s mother and Jamar’s parents had abused or neglected their previous children seriously enough that their rights to parent those children were terminated. Yet, when Miracle and Jamar were born, nobody checked on them to make sure they were safe. But that was about to change in Michigan, which became the first state to match birth and child welfare data to identify new children born to parents who had severely abused or neglected previous children – a practice that has become known as “birth match.”

The logic behind birth match is simple. Research suggests that in parenting as in other areas, past behavior is often the best predictor of future actions. Current technology makes it possible to match existing databases maintained by the child welfare and health agencies in order to identify infants born to parents who have had their parental rights terminated, been convicted of a crime against a child or have other history identifying them as a safety risk to a newborn. So it is not surprising that the Committee to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities (CECANF) in its 2016 report recommended birth match as one strategy to identify children at high risk of maltreatment so that action can be taken to keep them safe. Yet, only four other states have adopted birth match, and only one (Missouri) has adopted it since the CECANF recommendation.

In a report called Learning from the Past: Using Child Welfare Data to Protect Infants Through Birth Match Policies, published by the American Enterprise Institute, I discussed what we know about birth match in the five states that use it. As the report illustrates, birth match policies and procedures varied widely from state to state.

All of the states that use birth match identify infants born to parents who had their rights terminated because of abuse or neglect, with some specific differences. It is not surprising that they all identify parents with a termination of parental rights (TPR), because a TPR usually means that there has been severe abuse or neglect and and the parent has been given multiple chances to ameliorate the behaviors or conditions that caused the child’s removal.

Each state has chosen to include certain other parents in addition to those who had a TPR. Maryland has the most limited policy, including (in addition to those who had their rights terminated) only parents who have been convicted of the murder, attempted murder, or manslaughter of a child. Minnesota includes the broadest group of parents–all those who were determined to have committed “serious maltreatment,” the highest of four categories of severity that are assigned to all substantiated instances of maltreatment. States also differ in how far back they look in time for evidence of dangerous parental behavior: Texas looks back only two years, Maryland and Missouri look back ten years, and Michigan and Minnesota match all available records, regardless of when the maltreatment or termination occurred.

States also differ in whether they treat birth match referrals as allegations of abuse and neglect, requiring a regular CPS investigation. The first two states to adopt birth match, Michigan and Minnesota, already had a category of child maltreatment called “threatened harm” or “threatened injury.” Birth matches in those cases receive a CPS investigation of an allegation of threatened harm or injury. In Texas, matched infants and their families also receive a regular investigation, but the type of allegation depends on the content of the report.¹ In general, investigations result in a finding on the truth of the allegation; if it is “substantiated,” or found to be true, it may result in the removal of a child or children into foster care, the provision of in-home services and monitoring to ensure their safety, or a possibly a placement with a relative or family friend with the consent of the parent.

In contrast to the other three states, Maryland and Missouri treat birth match referrals differently from allegations of child abuse and neglect. In Missouri, birth match referrals are treated as “Non-Child Abuse/Neglect Referrals” and receive a “Newborn Crisis Assessment,” a special type of investigation that was designed to respond to calls from hospital personnel who are hesitant to release newborns from the hospital because of safety concerns. If no safety concerns are identified, parents can decline any services that are offered; if safety concerns are identified, social workers have the same choices as in a regular investigation: they may go to court to request immediate custody, allow the child to stay at home under a safety plan supervised by the department, or negotiate a voluntary placement with a relative.

In Maryland matched families receive an “assessment,” which is less comprehensive than a regular investigation. Families can refuse to participate, unless there is “reason to believe a child has been abused or neglected or is at substantial risk of abuse or neglect,” in which case the local department of social services is directed to make a report to CPS. Similarly, the department is directed to call CPS if there is such a concern at any time during the birth match assessment process.

The lack of data makes it difficult to assess the impact of existing birth match processes. Other than Missouri, where birth match has been in use for less than a year, none of the states publishes data on the results of these programs as part of their regular reporting, and it appears that administrators do not review this data internally. In response to the request for data for the report, child welfare officials had to generate new tables from their databases. But the data raised many questions and without knowing exactly how it is obtained, one cannot judge its accuracy. There were some anomalies that state administrators were unable to explain, like the fact that the total number of matches in Michigan dropped from 1186 in FY 2019 to to 873 in FY2020 and then down to 515 in FY2021–a drop of 50 percent in two years! It appeared that state administrators were unaware this anomaly before being asked about it, and they were unable or unwilling to provide an explanation.

If the data provided by the states is approximately accurate, birth match is identifying significant numbers of children. The number of matched infants identified in FY2019 (before the pandemic) was 1,188 in Michigan, 1,138 in Texas, 420 in Minnesota, and 243 in Maryland. Between half and two-thirds of these children already had an open investigation or case. It is encouraging that so many of these infants were known to CPS without birth matching, but it also shows that a sizable number and proportion of infants at risk due to their parents’ earlier behavior would be unidentified in the absence of this tool.

But the effectiveness of birth match depends on the quality of the investigations or assessments that are conducted and whether they result in actions to ensure child safety. The limited evidence is not encouraging. The number and percentage of matched children and families reported to be actually receiving services was surprisingly low. In Texas, of the 302 families investigated due to birth match in FY2019, only 70 received in-home services and 28 had a child or children removed. In Michigan, of the 484 investigations due to birth match, only 49 cases opened for services and 24 had a removal of a child. In Maryland, only four of the 89 families investigated due to birth match were documented to have received services. Minnesota provided no data beyond the number of matches. Without better data and case reviews, it is impossible to know why so few families received services.

The fact that the data requested had to be specially generated suggests that child welfare administrators in birth match states have little interest in the implementation and effects of of birth match. That was not always the case, at least in Michigan. One former CPS director in Michigan, who had served as a CPS worker and supervisor earlier in his career, had a strong belief in the potential of the process to protect children if correctly implemented. He conducted an internal review of birth match cases and found that 75 percent of the investigations resulted in no finding of threatened harm to the child, and only 6.5 percent of the cases eventually went to court for removal or court-ordered services. He concluded that investigative workers were not following agency policy and that supervisors were nevertheless approving the findings of the flawed investigations. He was working on ways to improve implementation through oversight of supervisory decisions. But with a change of personnel, those efforts never came to fruition. Now, birth match is under review in Michigan as part of a “front end redesign” of the child protection system.

Many former birth match advocates appear to have lost interest as well. In Texas, birth match was adopted in response to a recommendation by the State Child Fatality Review Team (SCFRT). But after requesting updates on implementation in FY2013 (which were never provided) and recommending expanding the program to look back five years in FY2018 (a recommendation which DFPS rejected), the SCFRT stopped making recommendations about the program. In Maryland, advocates pushed to strengthen the program by increasing the “lookback” period from five to ten years. But after such legislation was passed in 2018, it does not appear that advocates asked about its implementation nor about the effects of the expansion. Moreover, in passing the 2018 legislation, the legislature included a provision that appears to be aimed at finding less controversial alternatives to birth match.

The changing ideological climate might be the reason for the loss of interest in birth match among officials and advocates in the first four states to adopt it. In today’s atmosphere, identifying parents based on their past involvement in child welfare or criminal justice is likely to be criticized because these systems involve Black people at a rate that is disproportionate given their share of the population, though proportionate to their rate of abuse and neglect compared to other populations. There is no escaping the conclusion that birth match is simply at odds with the current zeitgeist in child welfare. Missouri was the only state to institute birth match since it was recommended by CECANF in 2016.

The report makes three recommendations. Due to its support in research and common sense, birth match should be added to every state’s set of tools to prevent child abuse and neglect and Congress should consider mandating birth match as a requirement to receive funds under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). Birth match provisions should include all parents who committed severe abuse or neglect whether or not they had a TPR or criminal conviction. And finally, states with birth match programs should track and publish data on the children matched and should conduct case reviews to assess the implementation of their programs. But it is not likely that any of these recommendations will be widely adopted until the pendulum swings toward the needs of children living in unsafe homes.

When a new baby is born to parents who had their rights terminated to a previous child due to severe abuse or neglect, or who killed or severely harmed another child, the child welfare agency should be notified, and a professional should make contact with the family to ensure the child is safe and offer the parents any assistance needed. It is such a commonsense idea that it’s hard to imagine anyone would oppose it. Nevertheless, only five states have adopted such a program, and and the four states with programs that have been in effect for more than one year have displayed what appears to be little interest in assessing or improving their implementation; on the contrary, there seems to be some interest in eliminating the programs among administrators and legislators in some states. The current ideological climate in child welfare may be be responsible for our failure to use a simple tool to protect children.

Notes

How the allegation type is determined and by whom, and how maltreatment can be found before it has occurred are unclear. Birth match is not mentioned in the department’s policy manual and DFPS’ Media Relations Director was not able or willing to answer these questions.

Where is the outrage at the death of Chase Allen in Detroit?

On June 24, the decomposing body of Chase (also spelled Chayse or Chayce) Allen was discovered in a freezer in the basement of a rundown house in Detroit. It did not take long for the media to learn that Chase’s mother had a history of child abuse, including a conviction in court, resulting in the removal of all six of her children by Children’s Protective Services (CPS). Nevertheless the children were returned over the objections of their grandmother and aunts, whose continued calls to the hotline to report suspected incidents of abuse were to no avail. The last time CPS came out in response to one of their calls, it was too late to save Chase. Shockingly, media interest in this story dropped off after a few days, and legislators and community activists have been totally silent. There have been no demonstrations, no vigils, nobody demanding justice for Chase. One doesn’t have to look far for the reason for this appalling lack of concern. Chase’s story does not fit into the prevailing narrative, which features CPS wresting Black children from their loving parents simply because they are poor.

The discovery of Chase’s body was first reported by media outlets including the Detroit News on June 24. On June 26, Channel 7 and others reported that Chase’s mother, Azuradee France, was charged with first-degree murder, child abuse and torture and concealing the death of an individual, and was jailed. In the next few days, the Detroit News reported that France had a history with the Children’s Services Division of MDHHS dating back at least to 2017 and had been involved with the agency at least seven times as a parent. She had been arrested and convicted for child abuse of a nephew for whom she was caring temporarily, serving two years of probation, and her children had been removed from her. When she gave birth to a fifth child in 2020, MDHHS obtained a court order to take custody of that child, citing her failure to address the conditions (including untreated mental illness) that brought her children into care. Nevertheless, all five children were inexplicably returned to her only three months later, and she apparently gave birth to a sixth child about two months ago. Relatives reported making multiple calls to the child abuse hotline since the return of the children. One visit, due to a burn to Chase, resulted in no action by CPS; the next visit in response to a CPS call resulted in the finding of Chase’s body.

The last bit of media coverage appeared on July 3, when Karen Drew of Channel 4 reported on Chase’s grandmother’s belief that CPS could have prevented his death if he had not been returned to his mother. But since July 3, Chase’s story appears to have totally disappeared. Shockingly, there is no mention of Chase on the website of the city’s paper of record, the Detroit Free Press and the Metro Desk did not respond to a tip from this writer. And amazingly there has been no coverage anywhere of the preliminary court hearings on the case. Even worse, there has been no response to the tragedy from the Detroit City Council, the Michigan Legislature, or community activists.

Is Chase’s story an outlier? Not likely. Several families and attorneys told Kara Berg of the Lansing State Journal earlier this year that Michigan children are often left in abusive households due to inadequate investigations and a failure to act by state employees. An audit of CPS investigations in Michigan published in 2018 by the Michigan Auditor General found that MDHHS’s efforts to ensure “the appropriate and consistent application of selected investigation requirements” such as starting investigations in a timely manner, conducting required child abuse and criminal history checks of adults in the home, and assessing the risk of harm to children were “not sufficient” and that ineffective supervisory review of investigations contributed to the deficiencies they found. Such an inadequate response to children’s suffering almost invariably results in lifelong damage to children, but can also result in severe injury or death as in Chase’s case. Michigan reported 43 children died of abuse or neglect in 2020 (undoubtedly a gross underestimate¹) but was not able to report how many of these children were known to CPS. Nationally, the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities estimated that one-third-to one half of children killed by maltreatment were known to CPS.²

So what is the explanation for this lack of outrage about Chase’s death, given that evidence of problems already exists? In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the ensuing “racial reckoning,” and the movement to defund the police, a parallel narrative and associated movement has sprung up in child welfare. Funded by deep-pocketed foundations led by Casey Family Programs and embraced by the US Administration for Children and Families, this narrative portrays CPS as a “family policing system“ that wrests helpless children from parents only because they are poor. Perpetrators of this narrative have devoted obsessive attention to the disparities in the proportion of Black and White children who are involved with the child welfare system at every stage–reporting, investigation, case opening and child removal. There is a problem with this analysis. The evidence suggests that Black children’s higher likelihood of being reported, investigated and removed reflects their higher tendency to be abused and neglected. Reducing their involvement in the system to a rate comparable to that of White children would mean to establish separate, lower standards for the safety of Black children.

But nowadays there appears to be little concern about Black children who are killed by their parents. B As one Black woman told reporter Kara Berg of the Lansing State Journal about her failure to interest CPS on the neglect and sexual abuse of her nephew, “They think this is how Black children are supposed to live.” What could be more racist than disregarding Black children’s suffering and deaths at the hands of their parents, when such suffering and death would be cause for massive protest if it happened to White children? Do Black lives matter only when taken by a White police officer, and not by a Black parent?

If Black lives matter, then surely Black children’s lives matter. More than twice as many Black children are killed by their parents every year as the total number of Black people of all ages killed by police. in 2020, 504 Black children were killed by parental or caregiver abuse or neglect, according to annual child maltreatment report of the US Children’s Bureau, which is widely considered to be an understatement of the actual number of child fatalities.³ That is more than twice the number (243) of Black people of all ages who were killed by police in the same year, according to the Washington Post‘s police shootings database.

The lack of public outrage at the death of yet another Black child means there is no pressure on MDHHS to release information on Chase’s family’s history with its children’s services division. A public information officer for MDHHS has told WXYZ (Channel 7) Detroit, that “The department, by law, cannot release specifics about Children’s Protection Services (CPS) investigations or confirm whether or not CPS has received complaints about a specific family or individual.” The exact opposite is true. The agency is actually required to release certain information in a child abuse or neglect case in which a child who was a part of the case has died.” That information includes anything in the case record related specifically to the department’s actions in responding to a complaint of child abuse or child neglect.”³

The public needs access to the case files in order to understand what went wrong and what policies and practices need to be changed. In addition, the case files are necessary to ensure that public officials, including investigators, supervisors, and court personnel, are held accountable for their decisions. Some of the many questions that need answers include the following:

What caused Chase to go blind? (Relatives indicated he lost his sight “over a year ago.”) Was this the result of some sort of maltreatment? Was he targeted for abuse because he was disabled? Did CPS ever ask these questions?
Why were the children returned to their mother three months after MDHHS filed a petition to take custody of the newest baby she was deemed to be far from ready to parent them? And did the juvenile court referee named by Channel 7 and the Detroit News make this decision at the behest of MDHHS or against its recommendation?
The children were returned to their mother “under the supervision of the department,” according to the court record cited by the Detroit News. Exactly what did this supervision consist of? How long did it last? Who agreed to the end of supervision and why? What does the record state about the mother’s improvement and readiness to parent? What “intensive reunification supports” were provided?.
Why did CPS take no action after the most recent report, when the grandmother reported that three CPS investigators came to the home?
How many calls from Chase’s family were screened out and did not even receive an investigation?

Receiving no response to my emails to local reporters urging them to request the the files on MDHHS’s involvement with Chase and his family, I contacted the agency’s public information office on July 11 to make the request. On July 25, I received a denial of my request based in part on the fact that the investigation of Chase’s death is not complete. It is unclear why the fact of an incomplete investigation is a reason for the denial of my request; the agency could send me the records of all previous investigations now and I would be happy to wait for the latest one. It’s a shame that several media outlets, who have attorneys who can appeal decisions by agencies to withhold information, did not choose to seek this information. Readers can help by sharing this post with their contacts in Michigan and asking them to urge their state and local legislators to demand answers.

The reaction, or lack thereof, to the death of Chase Allen shows a blatant disregard for Black children’s suffering and death at the hands of parents or caregivers, in large part because it does not fit within the prevailing narrative of CPS snatching children from loving Black parents. Anyone who believes Black lives matter should be asking why CPS and the courts left this vulnerable child unprotected in such a dangerous home. We’ve already let Chase die. Let us at least learn from his death how to save children in similar situations.

Endnotes

This is almost certainly an understatement for several reasons. As Michigan describes in its notes for the 2020 Child Maltreatment report, only deaths that are found to be due to maltreatment by a CPS investigation are counted. Second, the count of 43 is considerably lower than the estimates for previous years (63 in 2019, for example), suggesting that the Covid pandemic delayed completion of child death investigations by CPS.
See footnote 14 on page 35 of Within Our Reach: A National Strategy to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities.
As reported by the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities in its final report, this number is considered to be an understatement because not all states currently report on fatalities and in some states the death is not reported to the federal system if the child was not known to the CPS agency.
MCLS Section 722.627c states that “The director shall release specified information in a child abuse or neglect case in which a child who was a part of the case has died.” “Specified information” is defined in Section 722.622bb as “information in a children’s protective services case record related specifically to the department’s actions in responding to a complaint of child abuse or child neglect.”

Another abuse death in Michigan: Why doesn’t child protective services want to learn from the past?

On June 24, a child protective services worker (CPS) accompanied by police officers knocked on the door of a rundown house on Detroit’s west side to conduct a welfare check. Azuradee France answered the door but tried to keep them out. When they entered the house, they found the badly decomposed body of a three-year-old, later identified as Chayse Allen, in a freezer and five more children living in squalor. The media soon learned that Chayse’s mother had been involved with CPS at least seven times as a parent. She had been arrested and convicted for child abuse, serving two years of probation, and her children had been removed but later returned. And yet, there were no procedures in place to protect France’s six children from her lethal violence. And Chayse Allen, described by family members as a sweet, shy and soft-spoken child who had become blind about a year ago, is dead as a result.

There is a common belief that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, and that certainly seems to be the case in child maltreatment. Over twenty years ago, Detroit was transfixed when in one week a child was murdered and another suffered irrevocable brain damage, both in the custody of parents who had lost their rights to previous children. This coincidence of horror was enough to spur change–and a new process was created to protect children whose parents had already harmed other children. On September 23, 2000 the directors of the human services and health department agreed to cross-reference the names of parents of newborns with the names of parents who had severely abused their children. The system, which became known as “Birth Match,” is still in effect. This process as designed would not have saved little Chayse, but the story of its imperfect implementation and the state’s declining interest in its application may shed some light on why he too was abandoned by the public officials who were charged with protecting him.

I researched birth match in Michigan while preparing a report on this important tool for child safety, which is being used in only five states. In Michigan, birth match is an automated system that notifies the statewide child abuse hotline when a new child is born to a parent who previously had parental rights terminated in a child protective proceeding, caused the death of a child due to abuse and/or neglect or was manually added to the match list.¹ When a birth match report is received, hotline staff must check whether it is accurate and whether there is a pending investigation or open case, and if so, whether the investigative worker is aware of the historical concerns. If there is a pending investigation, the birth match information must be used in assessing the child’s safety.

If the match is accurate and there is not already a pending investigation, the complaint must be assigned for investigation with the allegation of “threatened harm” to the child. “The MDHHS policy manual lays out requirements for assessing threatened harm, including the severity of the past behavior; the length of time since the last incident; the nature of the services received since that incident and whether the parent benefited from those services; a comparison between the historical incident and the current circumstances; and the vulnerability of the child. As in any other investigation in Michigan, if the investigative worker does confirm the allegation of threatened harm, the next step depends on the worker’s assessment of safety and risk. If the child is assessed to be unsafe, the worker must petition the court to remove the child or place the child under supervision at home. If the child is found to be safe but the risk level is considered high or intensive, the worker must open a case to provide services to the family in the home. And if the risk is found to be low or moderate, the worker is directed to refer the family to community–based services.²

At one time Michigan was very proud of its birth match process. Stacey Bladen, the Acting Deputy Director of Michigan’s Children’s Services Administrator gave a presentation about birth match to the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities in 2014. She displayed a graph showing an increasing number of birth matches and case openings over time. Three other states had adopted birth match by this time, and CECANF in its final report recommended its adoption by all states as a way to protect vulnerable infants born to parents who have harmed other children. (Only Missouri has adopted birth match since CECANF made this recommendation.)

But even while Bladen was trumpeting the virtues of birth match, the Manager of CPS in Michigan was already concerned that tool was not fulfilling its potential due to imperfect implementation. Based on an internal review of 105 cases conducted in 2011 and 2012, he told a Harvard Law School class that he was disturbed about the small proportion of investigations that found threatened harm (only about a quarter) and the even smaller percentage (6.5 percent) that resulted in a court petition. Given that 4.5 percent of all investigations resulted in a court petition at the time, he would have expected a much higher proportion of birth match cases to go to court, considering the gravity of the behaviors committed by the parents and the fact that a parent’s rights were rarely terminated without a long history of agency attempts to assist a family. Based on these findings, the CPS Manager concluded that investigators were not following agency policy; in particular, he concluded that they often failed to assess the severity of the earlier maltreatment and parents’ response to services they had received since that time.

I asked MDHHS for an update of the data provided by Bladen to CECANF and quickly learned that birth match was no longer a point of pride for the agency. MDHHS was no longer routinely tracking birth match cases: the agency had to generate the tables to respond to my request. Moreover, once received, the data displayed some anomalies. The number of birth match complaints dropped from 1,186 in FY2019 to 873 in FY2020 and 515 in FY2021—a drop of more than half between FY2019 and FY2021. Stranger still, MDHHS administrators appeared to be unaware of this sharp drop in birth match complaints and had no explanation for why it occurred. This is particularly odd because these matches occur automatically; one wonders whether the drop was related to the pandemic, but the continued sharp decline in 2021 casts doubt on that theory.

Throughout the period from FY2009 to FY2021, about half the matched families already had an open investigation or case when the match was generated. But the number and percentage of the remaining matches that resulted in an open case have fallen considerably, from 99 cases, or 9 percent of all matches, in FY2012, to only 30 cases, or three percent of matches, in FY2020. Child removals also dropped from 41 removals, or 3 percent of matches, in FY2012 to 11 removals, or one percent of matches, in FY2020. MDHHS was unwilling to provide any theories about why these changes occurred. Moreover it appeared that agency leaders were not interested in the fate of birth match, as evidenced by their failure to track the data themselves, or to discuss birth match in their published reports or press releases. Furthermore, Michigan’s policies concerning birth match are currently “under review” as part of a “front end redesign” of the state’s child protection system.

Birth match started in an atmosphere of hope. In a heartfelt essay, a blogger named Donna Pendergast expressed her feeling that “As horrific as the murder of Miracle Jackson was, it can be said that something good came of it,” citing the new practice of birth match. “May [Miracle’s] legacy be that other children are spared her horrific fate.” Unfortunately, Miracle’s legacy appears to be fading.

Even as it was envisioned, Miracle’s legacy of birth match was not broad enough to save Chayse Allen. His birth would not have been matched because his mother’s parental rights were never terminated, she was not found to have caused a child’s death, and she probably would not have been added manually to the birth match list. But the failure to learn from the past which has hampered the implementation of birth match is on full display in the agency’s dealings with Chayse’s mother. As media outlets have revealed, Azudee France had a history of child welfare involvement including at least seven separate episodes. Court records obtained by WXYZ, Detroit’s ABC affiliate, and the Detroit News showed three CPS contacts in 2016 and two in 2017 due to “physical abuse, improper supervision, sexual abuse, failure to protect, and physical neglect.” The records also show that at least the allegations received in November 2017 were substantiated for physical abuse and improper supervision. In 2018, France admitted to assaulting her two year old nephew, who was staying with her temporarily, leaving him with “swollen lips, a black eye, a contusion on the forehead, and bruises to his rib cage and both ankles,” described as “severe physical abuse” in a court document. She was charged with felony child abuse and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, serving two years of probation.

In April, 2020, MDHHS filed a petition requesting court approval to take custody of France’s newborn son, who was born on April 7, 2020. France’s other four children were already in foster care, apparently due to her conviction for abusing her nephew. The petition stated that France “has not yet rectified the conditions that brought her other children into care” and that she “continues to have untreated mental health concerns.” It also stated that France had a history of postpartum depression and threatened to harm her newborn son.

It appears that the MDHHS petition to take custody of the baby was granted, but three months later following a hearing on August 24, 2020, all five children were returned to France. The court referee³ stated that “Mother has completed parenting classes. … mother is currently in therapy…. mother’s home is suitable.” France’s sister Azunte Sauls told Detroit News reporter George Hunter that she could not imagine how France’s home was deemed suitable as it was filthy and “not suitable for any adult.” And It’s hard to understand how the serious and deep-seated issues outlined in the petition could have been resolved in three months.

Sauls told Hunter that CPS workers came to her sister’s home again last year, to investigate a report of a burn to Chayse. But apparently the investigators, unfazed by France’s history, accepted her explanation that he had burned his hand on some noodles. Sauls and her mother also reported that they and other relatives called CPS many times after incidents of suspected abuse, but to no avail. France subsequently gave birth to a sixth child, who was two months old at the time of Chayse’s death.

When is enough enough? When does an agency accept that it is time to stop waiting for a parent to change and place the children in a safe environment, preferably with loving extended family members? Chayse’s aunt told WXYZ that she had custody of Chayse and his siblings when he was two months old and all of the children were removed from their their mother after her conviction for child abuse. “She should have never gotten her kids back after that,” another aunt told reporter Kimberly Craig of WXYZ. Michigan law allows a parent’s rights to a child to be terminated if “there is a reasonable likelihood, based on the conduct or capacity of the child’s parent, that the child will be harmed if he or she is returned to the home of the parent.” That argument could certainly have been made for any of France’s children long before Chayse was killed.

The desire to let parents start anew with each new child or report is one reason why birth match has been adopted by only four states and appears to be so unpopular among the current DHHS leadership. Moreover, the current child welfare climate is exacerbating the failure to protect children, especially children of Black or Indigenous origin. The concern about racial disparities in child welfare involvement may be discouraging agencies from protecting vulnerable children like Chayse and his siblings.

Azudee France has been charged with with felony murder, first-degree child abuse, torture, and concealing the death of an individual in the death of Chayse, and the children are now with relatives. Maybe by his suffering and death, Chayse was able to save the lives of one or more of his siblings. But they have endured experiences that will leave scars for a lifetime. And it’s all because CPS was unable or unwilling to learn from the past, as its imperfect and waning implementation of birth match illustrates so well.

Notes

The provision for manual additions allowed the inclusion of adults who committed an egregious act of maltreatment but did not have their rights terminated, or who harmed a child that was not their own child.
It is not totally clear how “threatened harm” can be found and yet the risk level can be determined to be low or moderate.
A referee is an attorney who holds hearings, examines witnesses, and makes recommendations to a judge.

Did child maltreatment fall under COVID-19?

As the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, stay-at-home orders were declared, and school buildings closed, many child advocates voiced fears that child abuse and neglect would increase but would remain unreported as children were locked in with their maltreaters. But some newly available data has led to a spate of commentaries announcing triumphantly that rather than increase, child maltreatment has actually decreased during the pandemic, suggesting to some that we may not need a child welfare system after all. In fact, while the data provides no definitive evidence of either an increase or decline in child maltreatment, there are some concerning indicators from emergency room visits, teen self-reports, and domestic violence data that there may have been an increase in child abuse and neglect after Covid-19 closed in.

There are many reasons to think that the Covid-19 pandemic and our nation’s response to it would have led to a spike in child abuse and neglect. Research indicates that income loss, increased stress, and increased drug abuse and mental illness among parents (all associated with the pandemic) are all risk factors for child abuse and neglect.* On the other hand, the expansion of mutual aid networks and the influx of new government assistance programs with few strings attached may have protected children against abuse and neglect. Data on hotline calls, emergency room visits, child fatalities, teen self-reports of abuse, and domestic violence are being cited as indicators of what happened to maltreatment during the pandemic. I examine the evidence below.

Child maltreatment referrals

As soon as stay-at-home orders were imposed, child advocates warned of the likely drop in reports to child abuse hotlines as children vanished into their homes. And indeed, this is exactly what happened. Individual jurisdictions began reporting large drops in reports starting in April 2020 But national data did not become available until the publication of Child Maltreatment 2020, the compendium and analysis of data the US Children’s Bureau received from states for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2020. According to the report, there were 484,152 screened-in referrals (reports to hotlines) between April and June 2020, following the declaration of emergencies at the national and local levels and the closure of most schools buildings and subsequent transition to virtual operation. This compares to the 627,338 referrals in the same period of 2019–a decrease of 22.8 percent.** For July through September, referrals decreased from 553,199 in 2019 to 446,900, or 19.2 percent. So even in the summer when schools are mostly out anyway, referrals decreased.***

Despite the concerns among child advocates about the drop in hotline calls as a natural consequence of lockdowns and school closures, some parent advocates, such as Robert Sege and Allison Stephens writing in JAMA Pediatrics, have argued that these decreases in hotline calls show that “child physical abuse did not increase during the pandemic.”**** Similarly, In her article entitled An Unintended Abolition: Family Regulation During the COVID-19 Crisis, Anna Arons argues that the decline in hotline reports during the first three months of pandemic shutdowns in New York City relative to the same period the previous year reflects an actual decline in maltreatment rather than the predictable effects of lockdowns and school closures.

Interpreting the decline in hotline reports to suggest a decline in child maltreatment during the pandemic is either naive or disingenuous. The drop in reports was predicted by experts as soon as schools shut down because school personnel make the largest share of reports in a normal year–about 21 percent in FY 2019. The number of reports from school personnel dropped by 58.4 percent in the spring quarter and by 73.5 percent from July through September.** Exhibit 7-B from Child Maltreatment 2020 shows the drastic decline in reports from school personnel, as well as smaller decreases in reports from medical and social services professionals. To claim that this drop in reports reflects reduced abuse and neglect is to disregard the most obvious explanation-that children were seeing less of teachers and other adults who might report signs of abuse or neglect.

Source: Child Maltreatment 2020, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2020.pdf

In her article about New York City, Anna Arons cites the absence of an oft-predicted surge of child maltreatment reports when schools reopened in September 2020. Far from such a surge, she states, reports did increase, but only “at a rate in line with the typical increase in a non-pandemic fall, rather than a more dramatic leap.” But the grounds for predicting a surge in reports are far from clear. First, only 25 percent of New York City children returned to school buildings in September, as Arons reports. Moreover, is not obvious that the concept of a backlog makes sense in reference to abuse and neglect reports, as it does with tax returns, for example. Bruises may heal, a hungry child may be fed when there is money in the house; living situations may change. Many of the most troubled families are the subject of multiple reports of maltreatment over the course of a year; a child who would have been reported in the spring and again in the fall will not necessarily receive an “extra” report in the fall.*****

Emergency room visits for suspected maltreatment

As the pandemic closed in, child advocates feared that hospital emergency rooms would see an influx of maltreatment-related injuries among children. To address this question, Elizabeth Swedo and colleagues at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention used a platform that provides information on approximately 73 percent of all Emergency Department (ED) visits in the United States. The authors did not find the increase that these advocates feared, reporting that the total number of ED visits related to child abuse and neglect decreased sharply during the early part of the pandemic as compared to the analogous period in 2019, though ED visits for all causes increased even more during that period. Despite the decreases in the number of ED visits for maltreatment, the number of such visits ending in hospitalization stayed the same, which suggests there was no decrease in maltreatment severe enough to result in hospitalization.

Using an administrative database from 52 U.S. children’s hospitals, Kaiser et al. found a sharp decline in all ED visits and hospital admissions, and in visits and admissions for child physical abuse (not including admissions related to sexual abuse or neglect) during the first six months of the pandemic period compared to previous years. Moreover, they found no increase in the severity of the child physical abuse cases resulting in ED visits or hospitalizations. They concluded that coronavirus aid programs and eviction protections might have resulted in reductions in child physical abuse.

To disentangle the effects of reduced healthcare usage during the pandemic changing levels of child maltreatment, Maassel et al. looked at hospitalizations for abusive head trauma (AHT), arguing that it is more difficult for caregivers to forego medical care for such life-threatening injuries. They found a significant decrease in admissions for AHT among 49 children’s hospitals during the COVID pandemic compared to the three previous years.****** They hypothesize that the marked increase in job losses for women, along with more adults working from home, may have led to more children being cared for by two or more caregivers, and specifically fewer being cared for by sole male caregivers, who are the most common perpetrators of AHT.

Swedo et al’s finding that the number of ED visits for abuse or neglect that ended in hospitalization stayed the same contrasts with Kaiser et al and Maassel et al’s findings that hospitalizations for child abuse (and specifically) AHT declined during the early period of the pandemic. One explanation may be that abuse decreased but neglect did not; it may also be relevant that Swedo et al used a different database than did the other two teams. More research is needed to explain these differences.

Child Fatalities

One might argue that child maltreatment fatalities are best indicator of maltreatment rates during the pandemic because fatalities are less likely to avoid being reported than non-fatal maltreatment. 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 incorrect, 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. So it is not possible to make inferences from this small decrease in the child maltreatment fatality rate in FY 2020. Moreover, it is not not implausible that the pandemic affected reporting, so that year-to-year comparisons between pandemic years and non-pandemic years are particularly problematic.

Teen Self-Reports of Abuse

Results from a nationwide survey of 7,705 high school students conducted in the first half of 2021 and reported by the New York Times revealed disturbing indications that abuse, at least of teens, increased during the pandemic. Over half (55.1 percent) of adolescents reported being emotionally abused by a parent, and more than one in 10 (11.3 percent) reported being physically abused by a parent. Black students reported the highest rate of physical abuse by a parent–15 percent, compared to 9.8 percent for White students. Students who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual, and those who identified as “other or questioning” experienced the highest rate of emotional abuse (74.4 percent and 75.9 percent respectively). Female students were more likely to experience emotional abuse by a parent than male students (62.8 percent vs. 46.8 percent). While using a different sampling frame, methodology and wording, a survey of a nationally representative sample of children aged 14 to 17 conducted in 2011 (as quoted by the authors of the new survey) found much lower estimates of abuse–13.9 percent for emotional abuse by a caregiver in the past year and 5.5 percent for physical abuse. The change in these percentages, even if accurate, is not necessarily due to the pandemic, but it is a troubling indicator nonetheless.

Trends in Domestic Violence

Domestic violence is highly correlated with child abuse and neglect, and the same risk factors, heightened by the pandemic, contribute to both of these problems. A systematic review of 12 US studies, most including multiple cities, concluded that domestic violence incidents in the US increased by slightly over eight percent after jurisdictions imposed stay-at-home orders. The authors speculated that the increase in domestic violence was driven by factors such as increased unemployment and financial insecurity and stress associated with childcare and homeschooling–the same factors that might contribute to increased child maltreatment.

I have written often about the propensity for wishful thinking in child welfare, whether it relates to home visiting programs, “race-blind removals,” or other programs and issues. Unfortunately, this propensity is on full display in the commentaries that try to portray reduced calls to child abuse hotlines as showing that child maltreatment did not rise during the pandemic. But it is certainly true that emergency room and hospitalization data do not provide evidence of a surge in child abuse and neglect, and there are even some suggestions that abuse may have declined perhaps due to fewer children being left alone with male caregivers. Overall, the data we have so far do not conclusively demonstrate that maltreatment rose or fell. Some children who lived through this period will eventually share their memories of life at home during the period. But these memories of course will be impossible to generalize. We may never know what really happened to maltreatment during the covid-19 pandemic.

This commentary was revised on May 18, and May 19, 2022 to incorporate new findings on ER visits and hospitalizations by Kaiser et al and Maassel et al.

*How neglect would be affected by a pandemic is somewhat less straightforward than with abuse. Many neglect cases involve lack of supervision, which may have increased with parents leaving children alone to work, with schools and childcares closed. Increased drug and alcohol abuse by parents might have also increased the occurrence of neglect. On the other hand, with more parents unemployed or working at home, lack of supervision may have become less prevalent during the pandemic.

**Unfortunately, the Bureau did not provide the total number of referrals including those screened in and screened out, by quarter. For the whole year the report shows that 54.2% of referrals were screened in, compared to 54.5% in FY 2019.

***The continued suppression of hotline calls could be due to fewer children in summer camps, summer schools, and childcare, as well as fewer attending health appointments and family gatherings in the first summer of the pandemic.

****It is not clear why Sege and Stephens refer to physical abuse only, as they data they discuss concern all types of child maltreatment,

*****However, it is interesting that even in September 2022, when almost all NYC children returned to school, reports did not return to their 2022 level. There are several reasons this could be the case, including a decline in child maltreatment and a decrease in reporting due to changes in messaging coming from ACS and advocates.

******Maassel and colleagues compared AHT admissions between March 11 and September 30 in 2020 to admissions during the same period over the previous three years.

“Five Myths about the Child Welfare System” misleads more than it corrects

by Marie Cohen and Marla Spindel

The following was submitted as an Op-Ed to the Washington Post in an effort to ensure the. public has the benefit of various viewpoints on this topic but, unfortunately, the Post chose not to publish it.

We were troubled to read Dorothy Roberts’ “Five myths about the child welfare system” in the April 17th Outlook section of the Washington Post. Roberts’ version of reality does not agree with what we see every day as child advocates in the District of Columbia, nor with the research on child welfare.

“Myth” No. 1: Child welfare workers mainly rescue children from abuse. Roberts is correct that at most 17 percent of the children placed in foster care in FY 2020 were found to be victims of physical or sexual abuse. But she is wrong when she implies that most neglect findings reflect parents who are too poor to provide adequate housing, clothing and food to their children. Many of the neglectful parents we have seen have serious, chronic mental illness or substance use disorders that impact their parenting, and they are unwilling or unable to comply with a treatment plan. Meanwhile, the children in their care are often left to fend for themselves because their parents cannot feed and dress them, change their diapers, or get them to school. Many children neglected in this way develop cognitive and social deficits, attachment disorders, and emotional regulation problems. Most poor parents do not neglect their children. Even with scarce resources, they find a way to provide safe and consistent care.

“Myth” No. 2: Homes are investigated only if children are at risk of harm. The purpose of an investigation is to determine whether children are at risk of harm. Professionals who work with children are trained to report concerns about possible maltreatment, not to investigate on their own. The system is not perfect. Some reports are too minor to meet the definition of maltreatment, or even maliciously motivated. A surprisingly large number of children are reported every year and only a minority of these reports are substantiated—but that does not mean they are not true. But to propose that investigations should take place only if it is first determined that children are at risk puts the cart before the horse and disregards the safety of children.

“Myth” No. 3: Foster children are usually placed with loving families. Roberts’ statement that large numbers of children are placed in some form of congregate care — group homes, residential treatment centers and psychiatric hospitals—is misleading. Only eight percent of children in foster care were in a group home or institution at the end of September, 2020, though the percentage is higher for older youth. The problem is the lack of quality therapeutic placements for children who have been so damaged by long histories of abuse and neglect that they cannot function in a family home. It is true that many children bounce from one foster home to another, but these are often youths with acute behavior problems that make it difficult for them to function in a home. Roberts also fails to mention that 34 percent of foster children were residing in the homes of relatives as of September 2020, and that they have more placement stability than children placed in non-kinship homes.

“Myth” No. 3: Foster children are usually placed with loving families. Roberts’ statement that large numbers of children are placed in some form of congregate care — group homes, residential treatment centers and psychiatric hospitals—is misleading. Only eight percent of children in foster care were in a group home or institution at the end of September, 2020, though the percentage is higher for older youth. The problem is the lack of quality therapeutic placements for children who have been so damaged by long histories of abuse and neglect that they cannot function in a family home. It is true that many children bounce from one foster home to another, but these are often youths with acute behavior problems that make it difficult for them to function in a home. Roberts also fails to mention that 34 percent of foster children were residing in the homes of relatives as of September 2020, and that they have more placement stability than children placed in non-kinship homes.

“Myth No. 4: Placing children in foster care improves their well-being.” Arguing that foster care is harmful is like arguing that treatment in a cancer ward increases the risk of dying of cancer. Foster youths are likely to have poor outcomes given their history of maltreatment, which foster care cannot erase. It is difficult to assess how foster care placement affects children, since we cannot do a controlled experiment in which some children are placed and a similar set of children are not. Roberts quotes only one study, from 2007, that shows harm from foster care—and that study included borderline cases only, leaving out children suffering severe and obvious maltreatment. She does not quote the same author’s brand-new paper, which finds both positive and negative effects for different contexts, subgroups, and study designs.

“Myth” No. 5: This system was founded after the case of Mary Ellen Wilson. This is an esoteric myth, as few people have heard of Wilson. Roberts is right that many histories trace the roots of today’s child welfare system to the case of that little girl. We appreciate Roberts’ clarifications but are not convinced of their significance. We believe other myths are much more relevant, such as that neglect is synonymous with poverty, or that all children are betteroff with their parents no matter how badly abused or neglected they are.

It is disappointing that the Post allowed Roberts to use this series to propagate new myths, rather than dispel old ones.

Marie Cohen is a former foster care social worker, current member of the District of Columbia Child Fatality Review Committee, and author of the blog, Child Welfare Monitor. You can findher review of Dorothy Roberts’ new book here. Marla Spindel is the Executive Director of DCKincare Alliance and a recipient of the 2020 Child Welfare League of America’s Champion for Children Award.