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.”

No Way to Treat a Child: a needed corrective to the dominant narrative

No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives

These days, It is a bit difficult to be a left-leaning liberal while also being an advocate for abused and neglected children. I would never have expected that a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Naomi Schaefer Riley, would be one of my closest allies in child advocacy. Or that my proudest achievement since starting this blog would be my service on a child welfare innovation working group that she organized out of AEI, or that, with a few quibbles over details, I would agree with the main points of her new book. But that is the case in these strange times, in which many of my fellow liberals appear effectively indifferent to the fate of children whose parents they view as victims of a racist “family policing system.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a journalist, a former editor for the Wall Street Journal, and the author of five previous books. In her new book, No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives, uses examples, data and quotes from experts to show in heartbreaking detail how policymakers from the left and the right have converged in creating a child welfare system that puts adults first. Much of this occurs because in deciding how to treat abused or neglected children, the people who create and carry out child welfare law and policy “consider factors that are completely unrelated to and often at odds with a child’s best interests,” as Riley puts it.

Take family preservation and reunification, for example. Instead of placing the safety of the child as the highest priority, Riley illustrates that child welfare agencies leave many children in dangerous homes long past the time they should have been removed, with sometimes fatal results. They give parents more and more chances to get their children back, long after the law says that parental rights should be terminated. The book is full of stories of children ripped away from loving foster parents (often the only parents they have ever known) only to be returned to biological parents without evidence of meaningful changes in the behaviors that led to the children being removed.

Not only do today’s advocates of “family first” wrest children away from loving families to return home, but Riley describes how they send other hapless children to join distant relatives that they never knew, on the grounds that family is always best even if the relative does not appear until as much as two years after an infant has been placed in foster care. The fact that a relative may display the same dysfunction that the parent showed may be ignored. I would add, based on personal experience, that in my foster care work I often met grandmothers who seemed to have gained wisdom (and finally, for example, gave up drugs) with age, as well as aunts and uncles who avoided the family dysfunction and went on to lead productive lives, making their homes available to the children of their less well-adjusted siblings. But Riley is right to say we should consider not just blood, but also fitness and bonding before removing a child from a good pre-adoptive home to live with a relative.

As Riley describes, one of the primary factors that is now taking precedence over a child’s best interest is that of race or ethnicity. Riley explains how data on the overrepresentation of Black and Native American children in foster care in relation to their size is being attributed to racism in child protective services, as I have explained elsewhere, ignoring the evidence that the underlying disparities in abuse and neglect are largely responsible for these differences in foster care placement. And they don’t seem to have a problem with holding Black parents to a lower standard of parenting than White children to equalize the ratios. Moreover, many of these “racial activists” are recommending eliminating child welfare systems entirely along with abolishing the police. As Riley states, Native children are the canaries in the coal mine, “for what happens when you hold some parents to a lower standard, as we have done with the Indian Child Welfare Act with devastating effects for Native children.

Another way we subordinate the interests of children is by minimizing their parents’ responsibility for their treatment by saying it is simply due to poverty. Riley addresses the common trope that “neglect,” the reason that 63 percent of children children were removed from their families in 2019, is “just a code word for poverty,” a myth that I have addressed as well. I’d venture that anyone who has worked with families in child welfare knows there is often much more going on in these families than poverty alone, including substance abuse, mental illness, and domestic violence. Riley puts her finger on an important issue when she suggests that part of the problem may be that we use a general category called “neglect” as the reason behind many removals. However, I don’t agree with her recommendation to discard neglect as a reason for removal. As I explain in a recent post, we need to distinguish between the over-arching categories of “abuse” and “neglect” and the specific subcategories of neglect such as lack of supervision, educational neglect, and medical neglect. Contrary to Riley’s suggestion that they are types of neglect, substance abuse and mental illness are factors that contribute to it. This important information should be included in the record but should not be confounded with types of neglect.

Another way that policymakers disregard the best interests of the child is by deciding that foster homes are better than institutions for almost all children instead of recognizing that some children need a more intensive level of care for a limited time, or that others can thrive in group homes that simulate a family setting but provide more intensive attention than a typical foster home can provide. The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which went into effect for all states on October 1, does allow for children to be placed temporarily in therapeutic institutions, although it sets some unreasonable limits on these institutions and on placement of children in them. But it does not provide any funding for placement in highly-regarded family-like group settings such as the Florida Sheriff’s Youth Ranches. (I’m not sure why Riley says in later in the book that FFPSA “is looking like another piece of federal legislation that will be largely ignored by states, many of which have already been granted waivers from it.” Those waivers were temporary and there is no way states can ignore the restrictions on congregate care).

In her chapter entitled “Searching for Justice in Family Court, Riley describes the catastrophic state of our family courts, which she attributes to a shortage of judges, their lack of training in child development and child welfare, and their leniency with attorneys and parents who do not show up in court. As a model for reform, Riley cites a family drug court in Ohio that meets weekly, hears from service providers working with parents, and imposes real consequences (like jail time) on parents who don’t follow orders. But this type of intensive court experience is much more expensive. These programs are small, and expanding this service to everyone would require a vast infusion of resources.

I appreciated Riley’s chapter on why CPS investigators are underqualified and undertrained.” Having graduated from a Master in Social Work (MSW) program as a midcareer student in 2009, I could not agree with her more when she states that the “capture of schools of social work and child welfare generally by a social-justice ideology has produced the kind of thinking that guides social welfare policy.” I’d add that some students are ill-prepared for their studies and may not get what they need while in school to exercise the best judgment, critical thinking, effective data analysis, and other important hard and soft skills. Riley suggests that the function of a CPS worker is really more akin to the police function than to the type of traditional social work function performed by other social workers in child welfare–those who manage in-home and foster care cases. As a matter of fact, Riley quotes my post suggesting that CPS Investigation should be either a separate specialty in MSW programs or could be folded into the growing field of Forensic Social Work.

Riley’s chapter on the promise of using predictive analytics in child welfare shows how concerns that using algorithms in child welfare would exacerbate current discrimination are not borne out by history or real-world results. Use of an algorithm to inform hotline screening decisions in Allegheny County Pennsylvania actually reduced the disparities in the opening of cases between Black and White children. As Riley states, this should not surprise anyone because data has often served to reduce the impact of bias by those who are making decisions. As she puts it, “if you are concerned about the presence of bias among child-welfare workers and the system at large, you should be more interested in using data, not less.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, it is Riley’s two chapters on the role of faith-based organizations in child welfare that made me uncomfortable. Riley describes the growing role of these groups, especially large evangelical organizations, in recruiting, training, and supporting foster and adoptive parents.” Like it or not,” she states, “most foster families in this country take in needy children at least in part because their religious beliefs demand such an action.” But the Christian Alliance for Orphans, an organization often quoted by Riley, was one of the groups behind the “orphan fever” that took hold among mainstream evangelical churches in the first decade of this century. Many families were not prepared for the behaviors of their new children and some turned to a book by a fundamentalist homeschooling guru named Michael Pearl that advocated physical discipline starting when children are less than a year old. Many of the adoptions were failures, some children were illegally sent back to their own countries, some children were abused, and at least two died of the abuse. But Riley’s narrative suggests that many evangelical churches working with foster youth are using a trauma-focused parenting model (Trust-Based Relational Intervention) that is diametrically opposed to the Pearl approach. Nevertheless, the association of evangelical Christianity with a “spare the rod” parenting philosophy as well as the possibility that saving souls is part of the motivation for fostering or adoption, make me a bit queasy about over-reliance on evangelical families as foster parents, and I would have liked to see Riley address this issue.

In her esteem for religious communities and their role in child welfare, Riley is worried that some jurisdictions will bar all organizations with whom they work from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, driving religions institutions out of business. Since the book was written, however, the Supreme Court has ruled that the City of Philadelphia violated the First Amendment when it stopped referring children to Catholic Social Services for foster care and adoption because the agency would not certify same-sex foster parents. So this threat may be dwindling for the time being. In general, unlike many liberals, I agree with Riley that, as long as there is an agency to work with any potential foster parent, we should “let a thousand flowers bloom” rather than insisting that every agency accept every potential parent.

Riley ends the book with a list of recommendations for making the system more responsive to the needs of children rather than adults. She agrees with liberals that we need an influx of financial resources as well as “better stewardship of the money we already spend.” We need both a massive reform of our child welfare agencies and a family court overhaul, she argues. She wants recruitment of more qualified candidates for child welfare agencies and better training for them. She urges the child welfare system to move away from “bloodlines and skin color” and allow a child to form new family bonds when the family of origin cannot love and protect that child. I certainly hope that policymakers on both sides of the aisle read and learn from this important book.

Child Neglect: a misused and misunderstood term

There is much confusion around child neglect. Opponents of the current child welfare system are fond of stating that most children reported to child protective services (CPS) are suffering from neglect, not abuse, that neglect is synonymous with poverty, and therefore that children are commonly being removed from home because of poverty. While neglect is clearly related to poverty, the facts suggest that the removal of children due to poverty alone is rare. To know more about this most common form of maltreatment, it is necessary to collect more specific data on the types of child neglect that are found when a neglect allegation is substantiated. Nevertheless, child welfare must recognize the important role of poverty in promoting child neglect and the role of poverty alleviation programs in child neglect prevention.

A useful way to distinguish between abuse and neglect of children is that abuse is generally an act of commission, while neglect is an act of omission. According to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, neglect is “commonly defined in state law as the failure of a parent or other person with responsibility for the child to provide needed food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or supervision to the degree that the child’s health, safety and well-being are threatened with harm.” The most commonly recognized categories of neglect include physical neglect (failure to provide for basic physical needs), medical neglect, inadequate supervision, emotional neglect, and educational neglect. Some states include exemptions for certain types of neglect, like religious exemptions for medical neglect. Twelve states and the District of Columbia exclude financial ability to provide for a child from the definition of neglect.

How true are common statements about neglect?

A number of statements about neglect are are frequently made in support of various views and proposals. These are discussed below.

The national child welfare system was established to address abuse, not neglect. This is absolutely true. The discovery of “battered child syndrome” by Henry Kempe at the University of Colorado led to the passage of child protection laws in every state within a few years. On the federal level, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), which established the federal role in supporting and monitoring these systems, was also focused on abuse rather than neglect. According to an oft-quoted book about the history of CAPTA, Democrats feared that President Nixon might veto CAPTA if it was viewed as an anti-poverty program, so they took pains to reiterate that child maltreatment could happen to anybody, regardless of socioeconomic status. As a result, the responses to child maltreatment focused on mental health and parent education services rather than economic supports. In his essay, Poverty, Neglect and Cultural Denial, child welfare commentator Dee Wilson recalls that when he began working as a CPS social worker in the 1970’s, all his training focused on battered children. Yet, in his work he encountered battered babies and toddlers maybe “once or twice annually out of 100 to 150 assigned cases.” Instead, he received both in Colorado and later in Washington “a steady diet of reports of child neglect and, to a lesser extent, reports of excessive punishment of children with minor injuries that did not require medical attention.” Academic literature has contributed to the problem by failing to distinguish between abuse and neglect.

Neglect is the main reason for children’s involvement with child welfare. This is also a true statement. According to the latest data collected from the states and published in Child Maltreatment 2019, three-quarters (74.9 percent) of the 656,000 children found to be victims of maltreatment in 2019, were found to be neglected, 17.5 percent were physically abused, 9.3 percent were sexually abused, and 6.8 percent were “other.” Some children were found to be victims of both neglect and another maltreatment type. These percentages should not be viewed as an exact representation of the relative importance of different types of maltreatment. As Font and Maguire-Jack point out, investigators do not have to substantiate every allegation to justify intervention. So If there is more than one type of maltreatment in the home, investigators may not substantiate all of the different types. Thus a child found to be a victim of neglect only may actually have suffered abuse as well. Comparison of substantiation data with other sources, as shown in Font and Maguire-Jack’s table listed below. suggests that “substantiations are likely to grossly understate all forms of child maltreatment, but especially physical abuse.” So neglect does appear to be more common than abuse as a reason for child welfare involvement, but abuse may be be present in a higher fraction of cases than the percentages indicate.

Source: Sarah Font and Kathryn Maguire-Jack, *The Nature and Causes of Child Abuse and Neglect.*
ANNALS, AAPSS, 692, November 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002716220969642?journalCode=anna

Child neglect is strongly related to poverty. This is also true. Research demonstrates that poverty is a major risk factor for child neglect. According to the most recent National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, children in low socioeconomic status households experienced maltreatment at five times the rate of other children. Studies have also demonstrated that providing economic supports for families (through programs like tax credits, passing on child support, food assistance, and child care subsidies) have direct effects on child maltreatment. We do not know exactly how poverty affects child neglect but in an excellent article in a journal issue devoted to child maltreatment Feely et al provide a useful way to think about it. They posit that the inverse of neglect is what they call “safe and consistent care or SCC,” which they define as “to provide safe, consistent supervision and constantly provide for children’s basic needs.” As they describe, time and money are two core resources a family needs to provide SCC. For a poor parent, it may be very difficult to provide acceptable levels of time and money simultaneously. So a poor parent might have to choose between going to work and letting the children be unsupervised or inappropriately supervised, or losing their job and letting their children go hungry.

Most parents found to be neglectful are actually just poor. The confusion of poverty with neglect is a trope that is cited again and again by those who advocate restricting government intervention in maltreating families. For example, Jerry Millner and David Keller, the former Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau and his special assistant, have written that It’s time to stop confusing poverty with neglect. They claim that many children become involved with child welfare only because their parents are poor. For example, children might be taken into care because a parent gets evicted or cannot afford childcare and leaves them alone. Despite the popularity of this belief, the evidence does not support it. It is clear that most poor parents do not neglect their children. They find a way to provide safe and consistent care, whether it means extensive research on community resources, creative use of existing supports, or delaying the next birth until adequate resources are available to care for the children they already have. Dee Wilson argues based on his decades of experience in child welfare that “a large percentage of neglect cases which receive post-investigation services, or which result in foster placement, involve a combination of economic deprivation and psychological affliction, beginning with mood disorders such as depression and PTSD,” which often lead to substance abuse as a method of self-medication.

The most serious cases of neglect are often chronic. Chronic child neglect can be defined as “a parent or caregiver’s ongoing, serious pattern of deprivation of a child’s basic physical, developmental and/or emotional needs for healthy growth and development.” Chronic neglect by a single mother often opens the door for physical or sexual abuse by her boyfriend. Children who have experienced chronic neglect may suffer “serious cognitive and social deficits because of the….lack of responsive parent-to-child interaction that is essential for healthy child development.” Chronic neglect can have effects similar to trauma, such as difficulties with emotion regulation.

Many child neglect reports are frivolous and unnecessary, cluttering up the system and making it harder to identify serious maltreatment. Many critics of mandatory reporting and CPS cite a study estimating that 37.4 percent of all U.S. children (and 53 percent of Black children) experience a CPS investigation by the age of 18. Some argue that many of these reports are the consequence of a racist system that ensnares too many poor and Black families. Some are supporting bills to end anonymous mandatory reporting in New York and Texas. Another, smaller set of reports has drawn attention, as described by Naomi Schaefer Riley in her article, Reforming Child Neglect Laws. These reports target stable, functional middle class families that have chosen to give their children more independence than many other parents in their geographic and demographic stratum. The case of the Meitiv children, who were picked up by police while walking a mile to their home in Silver Spring, Maryland and became the subject of not one but two CPS cases, drew publicity around the country.

It is clear that some reports coming into hotlines do not warrant investigation, but we do not know what proportion. Annual data submitted by states and compiled in the Child Maltreatment 2019 report shows that that 45.5 percent of referrals (for all kinds of maltreatment) in 2019 were screened out. And of all children receiving an investigation or alternative response, only 18.9 percent were found to be victims of maltreatment. However, research suggests that the likelihood of another report, a substantiated report, or a foster care placement is the same for a child who is the subject of a substantiated versus an unsubstantiated report. Chances are that many of the children with unsubstantiated reports were previously the subject of substantiated reports, or will be the subject of such reports later. Moreover, as Font and Maguire-Jack point out, “it seems unavoidable that some number of non-maltreated children will be reported to CPS if mandatory reporters are acting appropriately.” After all, they are told that they do not need to be sure the maltreatment is occurring, but to leave that decision to CPS. Changing that guidance, in my opinion, would be dangerous to children.

Should neglect be treated differently from abuse?

Even if neglect is not “just poverty,” some commentators argue that it should be treated differently from abuse. Two former directors of large child welfare systems, Tom Morton and Jess McDonald, argue that because child protective services were designed around abuse rather than neglect, they were patterned after the criminal justice system and treat all maltreatment as antisocial behavior. Morton and McDonald argue that because neglect is an act of omission rather than commission, it should be treated differently, The response to neglect should occur in a “public health framework” outside the current child protection system.

I do not agree that we need a separate system to deal with neglect. As I have discussed, many neglected children are also victims of abuse, whether or not it is substantiated by authorities, and neglect by one caregiver can pave the way for abuse by another. We already have a criminal justice system that addresses criminal abuse and neglect separately from the child welfare system. While the effect may seem punitive, the goal of CPS is to make children safe, not punish parents. Both abuse and neglect make a child unsafe, and the first mission of child welfare is to ensure child safety. Splitting this mission into two is probably not be the best way to promote children’s safety.

Even if we do not need a separate system to deal with neglect, we need to recognize the importance of anti-poverty strategies to help families provide safe and consistent care and prevent child neglect. Prevention has become a major priority of child welfare leaders and thinkers, so this is a good time to talk about incorporating poverty alleviation into child maltreatment prevention. In this new vision, as Feely et al propose and as I have discussed in an earlier post, child maltreatment (especially neglect) prevention should not be the responsibility of child welfare agencies alone. This responsibility should be shared by all the agencies responsible for alleviating poverty. The new initiatives proposed by the Biden Administration for child tax credits, universal pre-kindergarten and expanded child care assistance should be a good beginning.

Is it time to drop the term “neglect”?

In an article in The Imprint, Rebecca Masterson of Gen Justice argues correctly that the term “child neglect” has become almost meaningless because it is used so broadly and so deceptively as a symptom of poverty. Masterson argues that “neglect” needs to be replaced by more specific terms, such as abandonment or refusal of medical care. I do not agree that the term neglect should be dropped. Just as “child abuse” is an umbrella term that includes physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse, “neglect” has value as an umbrella term that refers to acts of omission that harm children, in contrast to abuse, which is an act of commission. It makes sense to have these umbrella categories.

But the umbrella categories of “abuse” and “neglect” should not be put in the same list of categories as the specific acts (or lack thereof) underneath the umbrellas. Unfortunately, state and local data systems often list “neglect” as a category along with other more specific terms for types of neglect. This results in bizarre analyses where “neglect” is often described as the most common category of child maltreatment–more common than its subcategories–as if anything else is possible! Just as social workers do not have to check off “abuse” as well as “physical abuse,” in their agency database, they should not be asked to check off “neglect,” as well as specific types of neglect. In order to fix this problem everywhere, and to make sure we have comparable data from all states, the federal government should mandate that all states use the same subcategories of abuse and neglect, and that “abuse” and “neglect” not be among the specific categories.

In devising these alternative categories, we also must be careful to avoid confounding neglect with conditions that may cause it, such as substance abuse and mental illness. These are contributing factors that should be noted in databases and shared with the federal government but are not in themselves forms of neglect. And indeed, in some jurisdictions, like the District of Columbia, substance abuse is not considered neglect unless it is considered to impair parenting.

Child neglect is the most common form of child maltreatment, yet it received little attention in the first decades of the modern child welfare system. It took a long time for child welfare scholars and leaders to recognize the importance of neglect. Unfortunately now that they have recognized its importance, many leaders are using this new knowledge in order to support their proposals to upend child welfare in ways that may be harmful to neglected children. This misuse of the concept of neglect can be addressed by requiring that child welfare agencies collect uniform data on the types of neglect that are being found. That being said, it is important for child welfare leaders to understand the importance of poverty alleviation strategies in preventing maltreatment in general and to recognize that this job does not belong to the child welfare system.

Opioid Crisis: Removing Infants from Mothers on Medication Assisted Treatment is Misguided

An NPR story (New Hampshire Mothers Struggling with Opioid Addiction Fight to Keep their Children) aired on June 2, 2018, introduced us to Jillian Broomstein, a New Hampshire mother whose two-week-old infant was removed from her by the state’s child welfare agency. Broomstein was on methodone to combat her addiction to heroin and it was working. She had not taken heroin for months.

Methadone is one of the two medications that is used in Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) for Opioid Use Disorder. MAT is “the use of medications in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies to provide a whole patient approach to the treatment of substance use disorders.” The medications commonly used to treat opioid addiction in pregnant women include methadone and buprenorphine.

Research has shown that MAT is the most effective treatment for opioid use disorder, at least doubling the rates of abstinence from opioids compared with treatments that use a placebo or no medication. MAT has been recognized by the World Health Organization as the most effective treatment for opioid use disorder. Moreover, MAT is the treatment the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommends for pregnant women with opioid use disorder.

Concerns about MAT for pregnant women arise from the fact that their infants may experience neonatal abstinence syndrome. But as the lead author of the ACOG guidance states, “Concern about medication-assisted treatment must be weighed against the negative effects of ongoing misuse of opioids, which can be much more detrimental to mom and baby.” MAT increases adherence to prenatal care and drug treatment and reduces the risk of pregnancy complications. Abrupt withdrawal from opiates or safer substitutes means a mother is more likely to relapse, thus making it less likely that she can reunify with her child. Neonatal abstinence syndrome, on the other hand, is treatable and does not appear to have lasting effects.

Bias against MAT among professionals working with substance-abusing families has been documented often. An excellent federal study, discussed in an earlier post, found that MAT is not always understood or accepted by child welfare professionals, judges or even in the substance abuse treatment community. One reason for such bias may be that many professionals have past experience with other types of drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine, for which MAT is not available

Information on state policies regarding reporting, investigation, and placement of infants exposed to methadone and buphrenorphine is not readily available. A report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration suggests that New Hampshire is not alone, indicating that child welfare agencies “may use a positive toxicology result for methadone or buprenorphine at birth as a presumptive cause for child removal.”

In some states, on the other hand, these cases may not even be reported or investigated. Pennsylvania law requires reporting only if the drug is illegal, although individual hospitals may choose to report other cases. In Massachusetts, for example, the Department of Children and Family Services can screen out a report involving a substance-exposed newborn if the only substance affecting the newborn was methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone and if the substance was used as part of a treatment program.

But do we know that methadone and buprenorphine are consistent with safe parenting? Unfortunately, there seems to be no research evidence on this question. We do know that with stable dosing, methadone and buphrenorphine does not cause the euphoric “high” associated with heroin and prescription painkillers.

Removing infants from their mothers who are participating in MAT has many negative consequence. It disrupts the critical attachment process between infant and mother. It may lead discouraged mothers to go cold turkey in order to get their children back. This may lead to relapse and permanent loss of the children.

Instead of automatic removal of the children, new mothers on MAT should be supervised by CPS for at least six months to ensure that they are capable of safe parenting. During that period they should receive intensive services akin to those provided by Kentucky’s Sobriety Treatment and Recovery Teams (START), a program that has been in municipalities in New York, Indiana, Georgia and North Carolina. Each family is paired with a specially-trained CPS worker and a mentor who is in long-term recovery. Caseloads are limited and each family receives weekly visits from both the CPS worker and the mentor for the first 60 days. START has been rated as a promising practice by the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare.

Most states, particularly those ravaged by the opioid epidemic, are reporting critical shortages of foster homes. Preventing unnecessary foster care placements, in addition to the obvious benefits for parent-child attachment and long-term sobriety of the parent, will allow these homes to be available for children who really need them.

Abusive parents are using homeschooling to avoid detection

On April 25, 2018, Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) issued a stunning report. Using data from six school districts, OCA found that over a third of children removed from school to be homeschooled lived in families that had been reported at least once for abuse or neglect. This is the first publicly released data to suggest the extent to which homeschooling may serve as a vehicle for abusive parents to isolate their children from scrutiny by other adults.

The Child Advocate’s report was a follow-up to its investigation of the tragic death of Matthew Tirado. On February 14, 2017 , Matthew died of homicide from prolonged child abuse and neglect by his mother. While Matthew was never formally withdrawn from school (though he had not attended for a year), OCA found that his mother was able to withdraw his sister from school after numerous reports by the school district alleging abuse and neglect in the home.

To determine whether other children from families that were the subject of child abuse allegations were withdrawn from school, OCA collected data from six Connecticut school districts, the Hartford District where the Tirados lived and five other districts selected for their diversity. Their analysis showed that over three school years, 2013-2016, 380 students were withdrawn from the six districts to be homeschooled. Of those students, an astonishing 138 (or 36%) lived in families that were the subject of at least one prior accepted report of abuse or neglect. Most of these families had multiple prior reports, ranging from two to 30 reports. 11% of the withdrawn children belonged to families with four reports or more.

Executive Director Rachel Coleman of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) is not surprised by this percentage. She cites an unpublished study conducted in another state, which produced similar results. Coleman also cites the groundbreaking study of torture as a form of child abuse by Barbara Knox and colleagues. Of the school-aged victims they studied, 47% had been removed from school under the pretext of “homeschooling,” although no education was taking place in these homes. According to the researchers, this “homeschooling” “appears to have been designed to further isolate the child and typically occurred after closure of a previously opened CPS case.”

Like the parents in Connecticut and those studied by Knox, Jennifer and Sarah Hart removed their six children from school as soon as Minnesota CPS closed their last case in 2011. The school had made six reports concerning food deprivation and physical punishment, two of which resulted in findings of abuse. With their withdrawal from school, the children had lost their best advocates. They continued to endure starvation and cruel discipline until their deaths in 2018.

The OCA report suggests that “homeschooling is used to conceal abuse more frequently than has been commonly thought,” as Rachel Coleman puts it. With 1.7 million children being homeschooled today, it is possible that hundreds of thousands are living in abusive situations.

Abusive parents must not be allowed to withdraw their children from school on the pretext of homeschooling them. Legislators must act to require schools to report all withdrawals for the purpose of homeschooling to Child Protective Services (CPS) to be cross-checked for previous reports. Parents with at least one substantiated abuse or neglect report should not be allowed to homeschool. Parents who have been the subject of an unsubstantiated report could be allowed to homeschool, subject to frequent monitoring by the school district or CPS.

The powerful homeschool lobby will object to any such regulation of homeschooling. In California, a massive outcry from homeschooling parents killed a very modest bill to require annual fire inspections of all home schools, prompted by the Turpin case. The Home School Legal Defense Association has stated that “abuse is horrible and must never be tolerated. But imposing regulations that treat all home-schooling families like criminals is unjust.” Nobody is suggesting that homeschooling parents be treated as criminals. Rather, they should be treated a little more like schools.

Despite DHS Statement, Little Change Apparent in Oregon Child Protection Practice Since Hart Case

Policies and Procedures binders in the office. Stationery on a wooden shelf — Image: Oregon.gov

In a cover letter accompanying the records of its interactions with the Hart family–the six children and their adoptive parents who are all presumed dead after their van drove off a cliff on –the Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) tacitly acknowledged that it botched an opportunity to rescue the six children from years of suffering and a tragic death. DHS also suggested that such a catastrophic error would not happen today because policy and practice have changed. But available evidence raises questions about whether vulnerable children are any safer in Oregon today than they were in 2013.

The released records show that DHS knew that Jennifer and Sarah Hart had been reported for child abuse six times in Minnesota and two of these reports had been confirmed. Sarah Hart had even pleaded guilty to misdemeanor abuse charges and was placed on probation. At least two women who knew the family reported the Hart withheld food from their children and used excessively harsh punishments. Nevertheless, DHS closed its investigation after concluding it was unable to determine that there was abuse in the home.

Since the time of the Harts’ assessment, according to the cover letter, “DHS has shifted practice from incident-based investigations to comprehensive safety assessments” and Oregon has “greatly increased efforts to provide ongoing training…on Oregon’s Safety Model (OSM).” A quick search showed that OSM, in comparison with the previous practice model, indeed was a step toward protecting vulnerable children. Instead of being dependent on confirming the specific allegations of abuse, the decision to act would now be based on the present safety of the children.

But the recent audit of child welfare in Oregon reveals that the OSM was actually rolled out in 2006–and was in place long before the Hart investigation. Unfortunately, it was never fully implemented because of inadequate training and opposition from administrators and staff. There seems to have been a new push to implement the model fully at about the same time as the Harts were being investigated in 2013. But statewide effort to retrain workers in the model was halted in 2014 and the resources reallocated to training in a new model, Differential Response. That model was in turn dropped but training in the OSM never resumed. Managers were still resistant it in 2017, when the audit was conducted.

Moreover, the DHS website shows that the new push to train staff in the Oregon safety model is still in its early stages. In a description of a project called Fidelity to the Oregon Safety Model Part 2, DHS states that “Some caseworkers and supervisors know and use the model well but other caseworkers and supervisors do not.” The website goes on to say that while online training is available, the agency needs more trainings, as well as coaching and quality assurance, to make sure the model is used “consistently.” (And this is a model that has been on the books since 2006!) The project aims to “create new training so that all staff understand and use the Oregon Safety Model and use it correctly.”

The timeline for the Fidelity to the Oregon Safety Model Project Part 2 is dated April 2018. According to the timeline, the project began in “March – May 2017” with the hiring of a project manager. In the intervening year, according to the timeline, the agency has created a work team, developed a project scope, held a kickoff meeting, developed a project plan, developed a scope of work for a consultant, finalized deliverables, assigned tasks and set timelines. It looks like the “active work” begins in August 2018 and the training will not begin until February 2019! So Oregon’s new statewide effort to train staff in the Oregon Safety model does not appear to have begun. Who knows whether this effort too will be dropped before it is implemented, and how effective the training will be if it is actually put into place?

But one part of the OSM seems to have been in use already, despite DHS’s claim that it was not. The DHS letter claimed that things would be different today because “case workers are trained to assess factors that contribute to a child’s vulnerability such as isolation (sic). Children who have no outsiders observing them are considered ‘highly vulnerable’ under the [Oregon Safety] Model and this factor must be considered…when making child safety decisions.” The Hart records show that DHS investigators were already assessing for vulnerability. In a section called “Vulnerability,” the investigator reported that “The children are completely dependent on their caregivers and do not have contact with any mandatory reporters, as they are home schooled.” Despite this understanding, the investigators opted to close the case without protective action.

DHS appears to be manipulating its reporting of the facts in order to suggest that its child welfare system has been reformed to prevent future catastrophic errors. But the recent audit and the case files themselves suggests this is not the case. The subtitle of the audit, “chronic management failures and high caseloads jeopardize the safety of some of the state’s most vulnerable children,” provides further reasons to doubt the capacity of DHS to protect the state’s most vulnerable children.

Multiple System Failures Allowed Hart Children to Die

On March 26, an SUV filled carrying a family plunged off a cliff. The car belonged to Jennifer and Sarah Hart. Their bodies, and those of three of their children, were found on the scene. Three children are still missing although another body found in the ocean may be one of the children. Initial coverage focused on the fact that the family consisted of two white mothers and six adopted black children. The family had had an earlier brush with fame when one of the boys was in a viral photograph hugging a police officer at a Ferguson protest.

As the days passed, disturbing details came to light. Days before the crash, Washington Child Protective Services (CPS) had opened an investigation of the family after a neighbor called the child abuse hotline. We eventually learned the family had a history of abuse reports. Then we learned that the crash appeared intentional, and probably triggered by the CPS report.

With each new discovery, we learned of another systemic failure to protect these vulnerable children. The Hart case brings together several common themes found in many cases of severe child maltreatment. Each of these themes highlights a different gap in the system that is supposed to protect our children.

Adoption: All six Hart children were adopted from foster care in Texas: three in 2006 and the next three in 2009. It is not that being adopted makes children more likely to be abused. Indeed, one Dutch study indicated adopted children were less likely to be abused than children growing up in their biological families. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that adopted children are overrepresented among children who are severely abused or neglected, at least in homeschool settings. Many of these cases involve common elements, including locking children up in a room, withholding food, and isolating the child by homeschooling or other means, all of which were present in this case. One possible explanation for this pattern focuses on the traumatic backgrounds of many adoptive children, which may lead to behaviors that adoptive parents are not prepared to deal with. While they may start out with good intentions, they end up resorting to punitive and eventually abusive parenting to control the undesired behaviors.

Writer Stacey Patton has described a “white savior attitude” among some white parents who adopt black children from the U.S. or abroad. These parents “wear their transracial adoption as a status symbol.” These adoptive parents often post on social media about their extraordinary efforts to deal with their children’s emotional and intellectual challenges that they attribute to the deficiencies of their birth parents.” The Harts fit this pattern. According to the Oregonian, the Harts often said their children suffered a multitude of early childhood behavioral and developmental issues that made parenting a challenge. Jennifer Hart also polished her image as an ideal mom who gave her underprivileged children a beautiful life. She frequently posted on Facebook portraying an idyllic family life full of trips, celebrations, community service, and events like the Ferguson rally in which Devonte sported a sign offering “Free Hugs.” When adoption is all about the parents, and the children become part of their public image, a bad outcome is not surprising.

There is reason for concern about the vetting process the Harts received when adopting the children. The Hart kids were among the 300 to 400 Texas children adopted each year by out of state foster parents, often because they are harder to place because they are in large sibling groups or have special needs. The Harts would have been vetted by a Minnesota agency, which would have submitted their home study to Texas for approval. After a child visit, the children would have probably moved in with the Harts for a six-month trial period. A Texas agency spokesman told the San Antonio Express-News that during the trial period for out-of-state adoptions, the out-of-state agency would be monitoring the family and reporting back to Texas. But in September 2008, probably during the trial period for the second adoption, Hannah Hart was asked about a bruise in her arm. She reported that her mother hit her with a belt. Police and social services interviewed the mothers, who denied the beating and said she had fallen down the stairs. Nevertheless, the second adoption went through. We need to know whether Texas was informed of this investigation.

Once the adoption was finalized, there was nobody monitoring the Hart children, even though Texas continued to pay for their care. The San Antonio Express-News reports that Jennifer Hart received nearly $1,900 per month in adoption subsidies from the State of Texas. The paper estimates that she collected a total of $270,000 from the state for caring for the six children during the time they lived with her. Unfortunately, children who receive adoption subsidies are not monitored to ensure that they are being properly cared for, are still in the home, or are even alive. Such monitoring has not been imposed even in the wake of cases in which adoptive parents like Renee Bowman and Edward and Linda Bryant have fraudulently collected adoption subsidies after killing–or allegedly killing–their children.

Home Schooling. On April 11, 2011, Sarah Hart made a plea agreement a week after pleading guilty to physical abuse of a six year old child. The next day, all six children were removed from school, never to attend again. The Harts joined a long line of abusive parents that removed their children from school after a brush with CPS. The notorious Turpin family, who gained worldwide attention this winter when one of their 13 malnourished children escaped confinement in their home, who also liked to dress their children in matching tee shirts. As the Coalition for Responsible Home Education points out, Pennsylvania is the only state that bars convicted child abusers from homeschooling, and then only if the conviction is in the past five years. No state has any mechanism to identify cases where parents remove a child from school after a child protective services case is closed, or after a series of child abuse allegations.

Failure to report: At a festival in Oregon, the Oregonian reports that one acquaintance observed the mothers become enraged after she brought Devonte and Sierra back to her parents from a day out, bearing food. Sarah Hart grabbed Sierra’s arm, inflicting a bruise that lasted for days, and both mothers chastised her for “being selfish” and not sharing. Sierra told the woman that she often got in trouble for talking to people her mothers did not know. But the neighbor did not report the disturbing incident. The Hart family’s neighbors in Washington, Dana and Bruce DeKalb, told reporters that they had suspected that something was not right in the Hart household. A few months after the Harts moved to Washington, the DeKalbs reported that Hannah Hart came to their door at 1:30 AM. She had jumped out of a second-story window and ran through bushes to their home, begging them to protect her from her abusive parents. The neighbors noted that she was missing her front teeth and appeared to be about seven years old, although she was twelve. The other children also appeared small and thin when the family came over the next morning.

The DeKalbs told the Washington Post that they considered calling CPS but “tried to overlook the incident.” In the next eight months, the DeKalbs saw Devonte doing chores but never saw the other children outside. About a week before the crash, Devonte began coming to the DeKalbs’ house requesting food and saying that his parents had been withholding food as punishment. The visits escalated from daily to three times a day. It was only after a week of such visits that they finally called CPS, setting in motion the the escape attempt that ended in the fatal crash.The DeKalbs’ hesitation echoes that of the Turpins’ neighbors, who never reported the many red flags they saw.

Biased Investigative Process: As mentioned above, Oregon CPS was unable to substantiate a report from a family friend that the Harts were punishing the children by withholding food and emotionally abusing them. CPS interviewed the children but told the friend that it appeared they had been “coached” to lie, so there was no evidence to substantiate the allegation. The question is, why were the parents given enough warning that the children could be coached? This is only one example of how the system is biased toward parents’ rights over children’s safety.

Multiple systemic gaps allowed the abuse of the Hart children to continue until it culminated in the deaths of the entire family. A variety of policy changes are needed to address the gaps highlighted by this tragic case. I will discuss these in my next post.

Why Kansas let Adrian and Evan die

Image: kansascity.com

Image: cbsnews.com

Dianne Keech, a former Kansas child welfare official and currently a child safety consultant, was asked by the Wichita Eagle and Fox News to analyze case files regarding the highly-publicized deaths of Adrian Jones and Evan Brewer. I asked Ms. Keech to prepare a guest blog post about the factors contributing to the deaths of Evan and Adrian. She prepared a ten-page document, which you can access here. Below, I highlight some of her conclusions.

Calls to the Kansas child abuse hotline began when Adrian Jones was only a few months old. There were 15 screened-in reports for Adrian before he was six years old. Out of 15 reports in total that KCF investigated, Keech found that there was only one substantiated allegation of abuse, and that was based on an investigation by law enforcement. After Adrian was removed from his mother’s custody due to lack of supervision and placed with his father and stepmother, calls alleged that there were guns all over the house, that the stepmother was high on drugs, that Adrian had numerous physical injuries, that he was being choked by his father and stepmother, and that he was beaten until he bled. Adrian’s father and stepmother consistently denied every allegation and the agency did nothing to verify their stories. Adrian’s body was found in a livestock pen on November 20, 2015. It had been fed to pigs that were bought for this purpose. It was later found that Adrian’s father and stepmother had meticulously documented his abuse through photos and videos. They are serving life terms for his murder.

DCF received six separate reports of abuse of little Evan Brewer between July 2016 (when he was two years old) and May 2017. These reports involved methamphetamine abuse by the mother, domestic violence, and physical abuse of Evan. Only three of these reports were assigned for investigation and none were substantiated. In the last two months of Evan’s life, the agency received two reports of near-fatal abuse, one alleging that he hit his head and became unconscious in the bathtub and the other alleging that his mother’s boyfriend choked Evan and then revived him. The first of these reports received no response for six days and the investigator apparently accepted the mother’s claim that the child was out of state. The investigator of the second report also never laid eyes on Evan. On September 22, a landlord found Evan’s body encased in concrete on his property. Horrific photos and videos documented Evan’s months of torture by his mother and her boyfriend. His mother and her boyfriend have been charged with first-degree murder.

Looking at Root Problems

Keech believes that there are three root problems that led to Adrian and Evan’s deaths: a dangerous ideology, the pernicious influence of a well-heeled foundation, and faulty outcome measures used by the federal government. These are discussed in order below.

Dangerous Ideology: Signs of Safety is a child protection practice framework that was never officially adopted by Kansas. But Keech alleges that its philosophy has permeated all aspects of child welfare practice in the state. The Signs of Safety framework, according to its manual, seeks to avoid “paternalism,” which “occurs whenever the professional adopts the position that they know what is wrong in the lives of client families and they know what the solutions are to those problems.” Signs of safety links paternalism with the concept of subjective truth, citing “the paternalistic impulse to establish the truth of any given situation.” According to Keech, this implication that all truth is subjective means that investigating “facts” is a worthless task. Workers are encouraged to “engage” parents, not investigate them. Keech gives numerous examples of how this practice approach left Evan and Adrian vulnerable to further abuse. When Adrian’s younger sister was brought to the hospital with seizures, she was diagnosed with a subdural head trauma that was non-accidental. But when Adrian’s stepmother insisted that Adrian inflicted the injury with a curtain rod, DCF believed her and did not substantiate the allegation–not even finding her neglectful for letting the child be hurt. When DCF received a report that Evan’s mother was using methamphetamine and blowing marijuana in his face, they accepted her denials and closed the case with no drug test required.

Along with a new practice framework, Kansas adopted a new definition of safety. As in many other states, safety in Kansas has been redefined as the absence of “imminent danger.” This is in contrast to “risk,” which connotes future danger to the child. As a result, children can be paradoxically found to be at high risk of future harm but safe–which happened twice with Adrian. (He was found to be at “moderate” risk three times.) As long as a child is deemed “safe,” the child cannot be removed from home. The decoupling of risk from safety explains why both Adrian and Evan were found to be “safe” 18 times in total, when they were anything but. This is a common situation in many other states. “Risk,” on the other hand, triggers an offer of services, which can be refused, which is what Adrian’s father and stepmother did when he was found to be at risk. I’ve written about the case of Yonatan Aguilar in California, who was found four times to be at high risk of future maltreatment but “safe.” His parents refused services. He spent the last three years of his life locked in a closet until he died.

Pernicious Influence: Casey Family Programs is a financial behemoth with total assets of $2.2 billion. Its mission is to “provide and improve, and ultimately prevent the need for, foster care.'”Over a decade ago, Casey set a goal of reducing foster care by 50% by the year 2020. Casey works in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, two territories and more than a dozen tribal nations. It provides financial and technical assistance to state and local agencies to support its vision. It conducts research, develops publications, provides testimony to promote its views to public officials around the country. As Keech puts it, “There is not a corner of child welfare in the United States where Casey is not a highly influential presence.” Keech has experienced firsthand Casey’s efforts to pressure Kansas to reduce its foster care rolls. At a meeting in that Keech attended in 2015, Casey used “peer pressure” to “shame one region for having a higher foster care placement rate. Casey adopted and promoted the Signs of Safety approach discussed above.

Faulty Federal Outcome Measures: The Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) is an intense federal review of the entire child welfare system. If a state does not pass the review (and no state has passed, to date) then the state must agree with the federal government on a Program Improvement Plan (PIP) or lose funding. Keech feels that the federal reviews can be manipulated by states to improve their outcomes at a cost to child safety. For example, one of the two measures of child safety is timely initiation of investigations. When a hotline screens out a report (as was done three times with Evan) or a case manager fails to report a new allegation (which was done three times while Adrian had an open services case) the agency does not need to worry about timely initiation of an investigation. Another CFSR outcome is “reduce recurrence of child abuse and neglect, ” which is measured by calculating the percentage of children with a substantiated finding of maltreatment who have another substantiated finding within 12 months of the initial finding. This outcome can be improved by failing to investigate reports, or investigating them but failing to substantiate. Only one of the allegations involving Adrian was substantiated; three of the allegations involving Evan were not even investigated and the other three were not substantiated. By not substantiating allegations, Kansas reduces its recurrence rate.

The factors that Keech discusses are not unique to Kansas and are occurring around the country, in states including most of America’s children. All of these states should consider Keech’s recommendations for protecting Kansas’ children from the fate of Adrian and Evan. Most importantly, states need to prioritize the safety of children over and above any other consideration. The primary goal of child welfare must be the protection of children, not reducing entries to foster care. The artificial division between risk and safety should be eliminated and risk should be allowed to inform safety decisions. States must treat substance abuse, domestic violence, criminal activity, mental health issues, and parental history of maltreatment, as real threats to child safety. Workers must be empowered and required to gather all of the information needed to determine the truth of allegations, not rely on adults’ self-serving denials. And they must be allowed–and required–to request out of home placement when there is no other way to protect a child.

Childhood trauma: Let’s invest in prevention as well as treatment

Oprah childhood trauma — Image: jsonline.com

In the past decade, the world has discovered trauma. More and more “trauma-informed” models of care have been developed, and more and more institutions and government agencies have adopted these models, making a lot of money for their developers. Awareness of trauma and trauma-informed care took a big leap with its discovery by Oprah Winfrey, who highlighted in a 60 Minutes segment the adoption of the approach by her home town of Milwaukee.

Recognizing the impacts of trauma on human development and incorporating this knowledge into education, social services and other areas is important. But I wish we could devote as much attention to preventing trauma as we do to treating its effects.

Oprah’s story started with the case of Alisha Fox. She was removed from her mother at the age of one and placed in foster care. At the age of four, she was placed with her father, “a sometimes construction worker prone to heavy marijuana use and violent bouts of depression, “according to an article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel which inspired Oprah’s story. For the next ten years, Alisha endured sexual abuse by her father. By the time she revealed the abuse and was removed from her father, she had a full-blown case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Whether Alisha’s trauma could have been prevented is not clear. The child welfare system may have erred in placing her with a deeply troubled and drug-abusing father. Alisha told the Journal Sentinel that she covered up the abuse until age 14. It is common for abused children not to report their abuse. One can’t help but wonder if there were warning signs that were disregarded. There is more awareness now of the signs of child sexual abuse than there was when Alisha was a child. So we just don’t know if Alisha’s years of trauma could have been cut short or if other children in her situation can nowadays be protected better than she was.

But we do know that many other children are abused for years while numerous red flags are disregarded. Nobody called the authorities about the 13 Turpin children as they were beaten, starved and chained for years in two states, even though family and neighbors in two states noted numerous warning signs. Texas neighbors considered reporting but had seen Turpin with a gun and feared “repercussions.” California neighbors perceived a peculiar and private family but claimed not to draw the conclusion that abuse was occurring.

Other traumatized children are reported numerous times but the system never intervenes to help them. We we often hear about these children only after they die. Evan Brewer was killed by his mother’s boyfriend after the Kansas child welfare agency had received eight reports that Evan was living in a home of chronic meth users and that the mother’s boyfriend was choking him until he blacked out. For every Evan Brewer who is finally killed, there must be many more Alisha Roths, who escape after years of suffering. Or like Congressional intern Tonisha Hora who wrote:

At 14 years old, my twin sister and I were removed from a kinship care placement and put in foster care after experiencing severe physical and verbal abuse for ten years…Child Protective Services often visited our home, sometimes multiple times a year, after they received reports from neighbors and teachers who we often asked for food to keep from being hungry or saw our bruises. We were scared children who wanted to run away every day in hopes of escaping. We were aware of how the system continued to fail us by never removing us from our home when they should have. To us, the signs were obvious, yet CPS workers always left us there. The abuse worsened after every CPS visit. That was the problem: they always left without us. Every time. For ten years.

There are things we can do to save the Alishas, Tonishas and Evans of this world before they end up with PTSD or die. We need universal mandatory reporting accompanied by a massive public education campaign about the signs of child abuse and the duty to report even a suspicion of maltreatment. We need enough funding to ensure that CPS workers are qualified and have time to make good decisions. And we need to ensure that the current bias by agencies around the country toward preserving and reunifying families does not go too far and leave children to suffer in silence.

It is great that cities, states and the federal government are investing in trauma-informed care. Lets hope that with the help of citizen input, they soon decide to allocate equal resources to save traumatized children before they suffer as long as Alisha did.

Child Welfare Myths: Foster Care Is Worse than Remaining Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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