The Minnesota Child Maltreatment Fatalities Report: Essential reading for child advocates everywhere

A shattering new report from a Minnesota child advocacy group demonstrates that many of the more than 160 deaths of children from abuse and neglect over an eight-year period ending last May were preventable. These deaths, the report concludes, can be attributed to “a child welfare philosophy which gave such a high priority to the interests of parents and other adults in households, as well as to the goals of family preservation and reunification, that child safety and well-being were regularly compromised.” This report is essential reading for child advocates everywhere, because this philosophy reigns around the country, and the troubling factors identified exist in states where most of the child population resides.

Produced by the child advocacy group Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota, and authored by Safe Passage Executive Director Richard Gehrman and Maya Karrow, a fellow from a local law school, the project collected information about 88 children who were killed between 2014 and 2022. The Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) told project staff that it was aware of 161 child maltreatment deaths during a period that mostly coincides with the period studied.¹ But DHS refused to provide information on any of these deaths (in violation of state and federal law), so the staff had to rely on news reports, online court records, and information provided by counties for the 88 cases it had identified.

Like child maltreatment fatality victims nationwide, the dead children were young, with 42 percent under a year old and 36 percent between one and three years old. Children under four were 78.4 percent of the Minnesota deaths very similar to the 76.3 percent for child maltreatment fatality victims nationwide. Black children accounted for 26.1 percent of all the fatalities reviewed. In contrast, Black children were 17.8 percent of children involved with child welfare and 10.6 percent of the state’s child population in 2021.² Based on the statistics and case file reviews, the report’s authors expressed concern that chld welfare agencies in Minnesota “may have tended to leave Black children in more high-risk situations for longer periods of time than children of other races and ethnicities.” The report’s authors are not the first to have asked whether fears of being accused of racism may be leading agencies to leave Black children in harm’s way even more than children of other races.

The most common causes of death among the cases reviewed were blunt force trauma to the head (33 percent) and body (19.3 percent). The other major causes of death were asphyxiation (17.0 percent) and gunshot wounds (8.0 percent). Other causes included drowing, sepsis, poisoning from drugs, stabbing, hypothermia/hyperthermia, fire, and undetermined causes.

The most common perpetrators of child fatalities were mothers (27.3 percent), mothers’ significant others (23.9 percent), and fathers (22.7 percent). In 65.9 percent of the cases, one or more of the perpetrators had a history of substance abuse. Shockingly, there were seven deaths in foster care, of which six were in kinship foster care. In another appalling finding, there were seven cases in which a child was killed along with the mother or while attempting to intervene in an assault on the mother.

A concerning pattern was the evidence of child torture in a surprisingly large number of cases. The project’s reviewers identified 14 cases (or 15.9 percent) that displayed signs of torture, according to criteria outlined by experts. The authors used the case of Autumn Hallow, who was killed at the age of eight, as an illustration. Investigators found that Autumn’s father and stepmother frequently bound her in a sleeping bag as punishment, sometimes with her hands tied behind her back or overnight, and starved her for six months so that she weighed only 45 pounds when she died. A particularly appalling feature of her case was the “chilling indifference by all the authorities involved to the screams of a child [reported repeatedly by neighbors] and the pleas of an increasingly distraught mother.” Autumn’s cause of death was declared to be asphyxia and blunt force trauma. Her father and stepmother were convicted of second-degree unintentional murder in her death.

The project uncovered numerous systemic flaws that contributed to the 88 deaths reviewed. These included inappropriate assignment of reports to a “family assessment” rather than a factfinding investigation; the failure to respond adequately to repeated reports suggesting chronic maltreatment; seemingly endless chances given to parents to address chronic problems; the return of children from foster care to homes where safety had not improved; the placement of children with kin without appropriate vetting; leaving children with mothers who repeatedly failed to protect them from violent partners; and the lack of integration between child welfare and child custody cases.

The repeated inappropriate assignment of cases to the “Family Assessment” (FA) track, which is intended for low-risk cases, was a major recurring theme in the case reviews. Minnesota is one of 34 states that initially adopted a two-track model, often known as differential response, for responding to reports of suspected maltreatment. (Some states have since terminated the practice). The idea was that a less-adversarial response than an investigation would be a better way to engage families with lower-risk cases. But with its practices like informing parents of visits beforehand, interviewing children in front of their parents, and making no finding as to whether maltreatment occurred, the report explains that FA is not appropriate when the risk to children is high. Yet, by 2020, 62 percent of CPS reports in Minnesota were assigned to Family Assessment. The researchers found that 31 of the 59 families with Minnesota child protection history had at least one and as many as six Family Assessment cases prior to the fatality. As the authors point out, “it is self evident that the repeated use of FA in chronically referred families is inconsistent with the policy that FA be used only in low-risk cases.”

Among the examples cited by the authors for the inappropriate use of FA was one that occurred following a report that a mother and her boyfriend were hitting their children with objects and dragging them by their hair. This family was the subject of six previous reports that included allegations of “physical abuse, sexual abuse, and unhygienic and unsafe conditions, including rotten food, garbage, drugs, alcohol, and sharp objects accessible to children throughout the home.” Twenty days after that last FA, two-year-old Lyla Koob was dead. Her mother’s boyfriend admitted to shaking her in frustration after she vomited. Her autopsy revealed bleeding on the brain and injuries behind both eyes.

Based on analysis of court records, the researchers found that 71.6 percent of the dead children’s families had previous involvement with child protection. The 61 families included 59 with prior history in Minnesota and two with prior history in another state. In view of these percentages, it is not surprising that the project staff found that Minnesota child welfare had a pattern of failure to respond adequately to chronic maltreatment.

In some cases, the researchers noted a pattern of inaction by child welfare agencies in the face of chronic multitype maltreatment, or maltreatment that includes neglect as well as abuse. The case of Tayvion Davis, who died in 2018 at the age of eight, was used to illustrate this type of negligence. Before he was born, Tayvion’s mother was convicted of malicious punishment of a child after she and two adult relatives held down and beat one of her children. From that time until Tayvion’s death, the family was the subject of at least ten reports of physical abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect. According to court records, the children were hit with a hammer and a metal rod, whipped with a belt, burned with boiling water or chemicals, deprived of food and sleep as punishment, and threatened with death if they talked about the abuse. There were multiple reports of sexual abuse of Tayvion or a sibling by the oldest sibling, juvenile and adult relatives, and an unrelated adult.

Tayvion Davis froze to death in 2018 after his mother locked him in the garage overnight in subzero temperatures. The autopsy found numerous scars that suggested years of abuse that may have escalated into torture. Unbelievably, Tavion’s siblings were returned to their mother after being removed in the wake of Tavion’s death. They remained with her for another five months, during which she was the subject of several additional reports. It was not until they were removed again that they told their foster parents that Tavion was deliberately locked in the garage, resulting in murder charges against the mother.

The researchers also found that counties gave parents multiple chances to address chronic problems, while failing to execute effective safety plans for children remaining at home. One example of this tendency was the case of Aaliya Goodwin, who died at the age of five months. There had been eight reports for two older siblings regarding the parents’ substance abuse. Between 2015 and 2021, four safety plans were mentioned in court records, the oldest sibling was placed in foster care and returned home twice, the mother was charged with nine drug-related offenses and convicted of five, and the father was charged seven times with two convictions. The county opened a new FA in January 2022 due to a report of domestic violence and the mother agreed to a substance abuse assessment. Three days later she was found passed out on the couch after using drugs and alcohol. Aaliyah, squashed between her mother and the couch, was dead of positional asphyxia.

Another pattern cited in the report was counties’ tendency to return children from foster care to a home that was still unsafe. The project revealed that 26 percent of the children who died had been previously removed from their parents and then returned. The case of Khamari Golston was provided as an illustration of this pattern. Multiple abuse injuries to four-month-old Khamari resulted in his and his twin sister’s removal and placement in foster care. Their mother was charged with felony malicious punishment and assault. But only two months after adjudicating these children to be in need of protection, the judge sent them home for a “trial visit.” The mother was said to be cooperating with her case plan but there was no documentation of this in the court record. Eight weeks later, Khamari was dead of suffocation or smothering. He also had multiple injuries consistent with physical abuse. Khamari’s ten-year-old sister reported that their mother frequently choked him and covered him up when he cried.

Some children were returned from foster care to parents with serious mental illness. The report cites six-year-old Eli Hart, whose mother killed him with multiple shotgun blasts to the head and torso nine days after he was returned home. Eli was returned home without evidence that his mother’s mental illness was under control. Instead, her mental health remained a concern throughout the year that he was in foster care and during a trial home visit. She received eight traffic-related convictions (including for speeding and reckless driving) and was also charged with theft of pharmaceutical drugs during the time he was in foster care.

The occurrence of seven deaths of children in foster care, of which six were in kinship care, was a startling revelation of this study. There have been concerns raised around the country that the growing focus on kinship placements may be leading to the placement of children with family members who have not been adequately screened and are not appropriate caregivers. And indeed, the project staff found a “lack of due diligence in deciding whether a kinship placement would ensure the safety and well-being of the child.” To illustrate this pattern, the report offers the history of Leila Jackson, a 17-month-old who was killed by her foster father in 2018. Her autopsy showed “extensive subdural hemorrhages and severe brain injury, as well as extensive bruising on her buttocks.” Layla and her brother were placed in the kinship home after their mother’s parental rights were terminated. The foster parents denied having criminal records or substance abuse histories, but a background check (which was never conducted) would have revealed convictions for DWI, theft, possession of drug paraphernalia, and disorderly conduct.

The pressure to keep children with mothers who were victims of domestic violence, even when these mothers showed they were unable to protect their children, was another systemic problem noted by the project team. The authors found that 28.4 percent of the cases involved domestic violence–not surprising in view of the co-occurrence of child maltreatment with domestic violence. But that seven children were killed along with their mothers, or in an attempt to protect them, was shocking indeed. This is a difficult issue, and removals of children from domestic violence victims by CWS have been harshly criticized. But as the report put it, “at a certain point a line is crossed and it becomes imperative to move children to a safe place.”

In Minnesota, public child welfare cases are heard in juvenile court and custody cases in family court, which means that the same family can have two different court cases with different judges. The findings of the report suggest that the failure to consolidate these cases can place children at risk. In the case of Eli Hart, who was killed by his mentally ill mother, the custody case filed by his father was put on hold pending a resolution of the juvenile court case surrounding his mother. This is despite the fact that the mother’s mental health remained a concern and that all reports indicated that the father was a good and safe parent for Eli.

In sum, the report concludes that “the professional norms currently guiding child protection and foster care are out of alignment with those of the broader community.” As a first step, the report recommends that DHS release more information about child maltreatment fatalities, including making public the fatality and near-fatality reports that counties are required to submit to the state; such reports include information about previous reports and investigations on these families. This recommendation is particularly important because if the public knew about the types of egregious failures described in this report, there might be more public support for changes.

The report contains many specific recommendations to correct the systemic flaws found in the case studies. This year, Safe Passages will be distributing the report to legislators and briefing them on its findings and recommendations. Rick Gehrman, Executive Director Rick Gehrman reports that he will be working with legislators to translate some of these recommendations into legislation to be introduced in the next session, addressing at a minimum some of the Family Assessment practices that endanger children. The ultimate goal, Gehrman says, is to “raise public and legislative awareness of the child welfare practices that endanger children and to bring about a change in the overall philosophy of child welfare services in Minnesota.”

In effect, Safe Passages for Children has unofficially implemented the first recommendation of the Committee to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities in its 2016 final report, Within Our Reach. That report recommended that each state, with federal funding and assistance, identify and analyze all of their child abuse and neglect fatalities from the previous five years in order to identify factors associated with maltreatment fatalities and agency policies and practices that need improvement to prevent fatalities. Based on this report, every state would develop a fatality prevention plan. Unfortunately, legislation supporting this proposal stalled in Congress and no state has elected to do this on their own. Maryland’s Council on Child Abuse and Neglect and its Child Fatality Review Board, inspired by this recommendation, formed a joint subcommittee that produced an excellent review of child maltreatment fatalities between 2007 and 2015 which identified systemic flaws and made recommendations to correct them. Other than that report, I am not aware of any other similar project by a state or local government agency. Let us hope that this report encourages other child advocacy groups and community boards to act where governments have not.

The final words of the report deserve to be repeated. “The erosion in professional norms that has gradually caused human services entities to tolerate the current level of neglect and physical abuse of children has developed over the course of decades. A concerted effort by a community of professionals will be required to restore standards that were once taken for granted, and to place appropriate limits on the ability of adults in a child’s life to harm them.”

Notes

The actual number was likely two to three times as high because the manners of so many maltreatment deaths are misclassified.
See Child Maltreatment 2021. Table C-2, Child Population 2017 to 2021 shows the state’s child population rose from 1,300,061 in 2017 to 1,317,567 in 2021. Table C-3, Child Population Demographics, shows that there were 140,129 Black children in Minnesota in 2021. That figure, divided by 1,317,567 gives the Black percentage of all children in Minnesota as 10.6 percent in 2021.

Neglect as poverty: the myth that won’t go away

It’s one of those myths that won’t go away and instead is gathering steam–the idea that parents who are found to be neglectful by child welfare agencies are really just poor people being judged for their inability to provide sufficient material support to their children. It doesn’t matter how much evidence is cited against it. The myth continues because it is an essential part of the narrative that is currently dominant in the child welfare arena. Nevertheless it’s been over a year since my last attempt to shed some light on this issue, and some new research has become available, thus it seems a good time to revisit the topic.

It’s Time to Stop Confusing Poverty With Neglect, exhorted Jerry Milner, Children’s Bureau Commissioner and his special assistant David Kelly back in January, 2020, in a typical statement of this myth. “Most of the reasons for child welfare involvement fall into what we call “neglect” rather than physical abuse or exploitation. Our most recent child maltreatment data tell us that 60 percent of victims have a finding of neglect only…More times than not, poverty and struggles to meet the basic, concrete needs of a family are a part of the equation in all types of neglect.” Miller and Kelly now sell their expertise at Family Integrity & Justice Works, an arm of the Public Knowledge consulting firm which has the goal of “replacing child welfare.”

Media outlets have taken this story and run with it. Here is the Philadelphia Inquirer: “A common misunderstanding is that the leading reason kids are taken into the foster care system is because of physical or sexual abuse. But that accounts for only one of six cases. Children far more often are removed from their homes for ‘neglect,’ which often amounts to symptoms of poverty, like food insecurity or unstable housing.”

The Biden Administration has endorsed the idea that most neglect findings reflect nothing but poverty. The Administration on Children and Families (ACF) has solicited applications for a grant of between one and two million dollars “to support the development and national dissemination of best practices to strengthen the capacity of child abuse hotline staff to distinguish between poverty and willful neglect.”

There is no federal definition of child neglect, and state definitions vary. In contrast to abuse, it is usually defined as an act of omission rather than comission. 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 or failure to provide for basic physical needs, failure to provide adequate supervision , educational neglect or failure to educate the child as required by law, and medical neglect.

There is no dispute that more children are found to be neglected than abused. Based on data collected by the federal government and published in Child Maltreatment 2020, three-quarters (76.1 percent) of the children found to be victims of maltreatment in 2020 were found to be neglected. A total of 16.5 percent were found to be physically abused, 9.4 percent were found to be sexually abused, and six percent were found to be victims of some other type of maltreatment.* Of the children who were removed and placed in foster care, according to the 2020 AFCARS Report, 63 percent had neglect listed as a circumstance associated with the child’s removal, compared to 12 percent with physical abuse and four percent with sexual abuse.

But the idea that neglect findings represent nothing but poverty is questionable. First, the neglect deniers would probably agree that most poor parents do not neglect their children but instead find a way to meet their needs, relying on charity, extra work, or subordinating their own wants to the needs of their children. When poor children are deprived of food, clothing or adequate housing, other factors such as substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence are often involved. Second, more than half of the states exempt from the definition of neglect any deprivation that is due to the lack of financial means of the parents. Third, the definition of neglect is not confined to the failure to provide adequate food, clothing or shelter but instead includes other acts of omission, such as failure to protect a child from dangerous caregivers, or failure to ensure that children go to school and get needed medical care. Lack of supervision, a common form of neglect, can reflect poverty when parents feel they must rely on inadequate arrangements in order to go to work; we just don’t know the degree to which neglect findings reflect such decisions by parents.

But until now we did not have quantitative data concerning the types of neglect being investigated or the importance of risk factors like substance abuse and mental illness. A recent study from California, the nation’s most populous state, begins to fill this data gap. Palmer and colleagues used a representative sample of 295 neglect investigations that took place in California in 2017. They found that only 14 percent of the investigations involved physical neglect–the deprivation of food, clothing, and housing that is most closely connected with poverty. The most common types of neglect that were investigated were inadequate supervision, investigated in 44 percent of the cases, and failure to protect (leaving the child in the care of a known abuser or failure to intervene with known abuse), in 29 percent of cases. Moreover almost all (99 percent) of the investigations of physical neglect included concerns related to substance use, domestic violence, or mental illness; or they involved another type of maltreatment such as physical or sexual abuse or an additional neglect allegation. Thus, the authors conclude that almost no parent was investigated for material deprivation alone, although it is true that they did not separate out any lack of supervision cases that involved the inability to obtain adequate childcare for work or other necessary activities.

The evidence from California is very suggestive, but as the authors caution, it is possible that other states receive more reports that focus on unmet material needs, are less likely to screen out such reports, or emphasize them more during the investigation. This is possible because California, according to a recent study of state neglect definitions, is one of five states that have adopted an “expanded” definition of child neglect, including more neglect types and allowing for the threat of harm, rather than actual harm, in neglect findings. Studies similar to the Palmer study from other states with more limited neglect definitions would be useful.

While the California study is not sufficient to negate the presumption that findings of neglect represent nothing more than poverty, it is important to note that there are no studies supporting this viewpoint. So why does the myth that child welfare treats poverty as neglect persist despite the lack of evidence supporting it, and the many reasons for skepticism? It persists because it supports the narrative and associated policy prescriptions of the child welfare establishment today–child welfare leaders, administrators, legislatures, and influential funders like Casey Family Programs. The dominant narrative describes a racist family policing system that persecutes people only because they are Black, Indigenous or poor. The policy prescriptions involve radically shrinking or even abolishing child welfare systems.

According to the prevailing view, if omissions that are labeled neglect are strictly due to poverty, there is no need to intervene with social services or child removal. Instead, governments should provide economic benefits to neglectful parents. There is a body of research suggesting that economic support for families does help reduce maltreatment, perhaps not only by helping parents meet their children’s financial needs, but also enabling them to provide better childcare and improving parents’ mental health through stress reduction. Independent of their impact on maltreatment, I strongly support increases in the safety net for families and children. But available information suggests that it will take more than financial assistance to cure neglect in most cases. Improved economic supports will not be a replacement for services to help parents address challenges with substance abuse, domestic violence, mental health, and parenting, and for child removal when there is no other option.

What can be done to alleviate the confusion and misinformation around child neglect and poverty? Collecting better data from the states would be helpful. In its annual Child Maltreatment reports, the Children’s Bureau uses data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). When reporting on the type of maltreatment alleged and then found, states must pick up to four out of eight categories, including physical abuse, “neglect or deprivation of necessities,” medical neglect, sexual abuse, psychological or emotional maltreatment, sex trafficking, no alleged maltreatment, other or “unknown or missing.” It is not clear whether the “neglect” category is supposed to indicate all types of neglect or just those involving “deprivation of necessities,” but there is no way for states to clarify what they mean or to distinguish between the most common types of neglect. The same problem exists with the AFCARS data used to compile federal reports on foster care and adoption.

Clearly, a reform of the data elements that states are required to submit is needed so that resesarchers can see the types of neglect that are being alleged and found for each child. However, such an improvement would not substitute for careful research like the California study cited above because it will never be possible to rely on the thoroughness of database entries by overworked social workers. We cannot be sure they will enter all of the applicable categories, for many reasons, including that not all the applicable categories may be substantiated for a particular case. Moreover, while states are required to report on some caregiver risk factors contributing to abuse and neglect, such as alcohol and drug abuse, emotional disturbance and domestic violence, these seem to be vastly understated by the social workers who enter these factors in state databases. For example, only 26.4 percent of caregivers of maltreated children were found to have the risk factor of drug abuse and only 36 percent of removals involved parental drug abuse, according to federal data. Yet anecdotal reports from states and localities tend to indicate a much higher percentage of cases that involve substance abuse.

Thus, a reform of data collection might help, but would not solve the problem, especially considering that that many child welfare leaders and funders seem inclined to maintain the hypothesis that CPS confuses poverty with neglect. Ideally, the federal government and other funders would support more studies like that of Palmer et al, and more academics would consider performing such studies.

The myth that CPS confuses neglect with poverty is pernicious because, like other myths currently prevalent in child welfare, it runs the risk of hurting abused and neglected children. It is being used to justify dismantling child protective services, eliminating mandatory reporting, or more modest proposals to hamper these critical protections for children. The federal government should improve data collection on child neglect and associated risk factors as well as supporting additional research to provide more accurate estimates of their prevalance.

*According to the report’s authors, “other” could be anything that does not fit into the categories offered by the Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting System and includes threatened abuse and neglect, drug addiction, and lack of supervision according to state comments submitted with the data.

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.

Family court crisis: courts placing children with abusive parents with tragic results

00QUEENSMOM1-jumbo — Autumn Coleman’s crib is now a shrine: New York Times

On May 5, New York City firefighters were called to a horrible scene. A three-year-old girl had been locked in a car and the doors had been chained shut. Then the car was set on fire. As reported by the New York Times, the perpetrator had weekend visitation rights with his three-year-old daughter Autumn. Less than two weeks before, Autumn’s mother wrote to the family court in charge of her custody case, that Pereira was “losing a grip on reality and I honestly feel my child is in danger while in his care.” The court did not intervene.

This terrible case is not an aberration. The Center for Judicial Excellence (CJE) has compiled data on 707 children who have been murdered by a divorcing or separating parent since 2008. CJE has documented 98 cases during that time period in which a child was killed by a parent or parental figure after the family court allowed them unsupervised contact with the child despite being warned that the perpetrator posed a risk to the child. But this is likely only the tip of the iceberg as there is no agency that records these cases.

A four-month investigation by Gillian Friedman in the Deseret News found that in many cases family courts are failing to protect children, allowing unsupervised visits or even custody to abusive parents. These decisions are resulting in physical and sexual child abuse and sometimes homicide.

Why would family courts put a child in danger by allowing unsupervised contact with a dangerous parent? One reason, experts told Friedman, is that judges and custody evaluators hired by courts often do not believe the claims of danger from the other parent who is trying to protect the child. As the director of CJE told Friedman, “In custody proceedings, family courts often see a parent’s allegation of child abuse as no more than a tactic to undermine the other parent’s custodial rights to the child — and therefore not a credible accusation.” Several of the mothers interviewed by Friedman reported that their attorneys told them not to allege abuse for fear that these allegations would lead to an adverse custody ruling.

Disbelief of the protective parent is not the only possible factor that causes courts to make decisions that put children in danger. Experts told Friedman that evidence of child abuse is often not conclusive and courts are reluctant to bar a parent from access to a child unless the evidence of past abuse is airtight. Moreover, many judges are overwhelmed. They may see as many as 20 cases a day and may have to make a decision after spending no more than 20 minutes on a case.

Finally, judges may be prioritizing parental rights over child safety and well-being. Even if a judge believes that a parent has been abusive, family court professionals told Friedman that it is very hard to get a judge to deny visitation to a parent. Instead, they will require the abuser to engage in treatment or counseling, while maintaining visitation.

Judges may also think a child is safe with a parent who has abused the other parent but not the child. But placing a child with a parent who has a record of domestic abuse may be dangerous even if that parent had not hurt a child. That’s because the parent may harm the child in order to punish the other parent.

Both mothers and fathers can abuse and kill their children. But domestic violence victim advocates like Joan Meier cite evidence that women are in a disadvantage when alleging abuse in the context of a custody dispute, in part due to the influence of inaccurate beliefs about “parental alienation,” which I described in an earlier post. The “alienation” concept can be used by either parent to connote that the other parent is poisoning the child’s mind against them and has often resulted in the placement of children against their will with a parent that they allege abused them–more often than not, the father.

But fathers’ advocates claim that that family courts are prejudiced against fathers. It seems clear that judicial attitudes have changed over time. As described in a useful article published in 2011 by San Francisco Weekly, family courts were traditionally biased against fathers, believing that children belonged with their mothers. However, as divorce became more common, advocacy by fathers’ rights group has led to the acceptance that children’s time should be split as evenly as possible between parents. While it seems clear that child safety should trump any considerations of equity between mom and dad, it seems that some judges do not agree.

The problem of placing parents’ rights over safety should be familiar to readers of Child Welfare Monitor from our many columns about child welfare agencies and family court judges accepting risks to child safety and well-being in order to keep families together or reunite them. In our experience with such cases. the court and the child welfare agency usually agree about the primacy of parents and the need for children to remain or be reunified with their parents. There are occasional disagreements. Child Welfare Monitor will never forget tearfully trying to convince a judge that my six-year old client would do better with a foster parent who had loved her for two year than with a mother who could not think of one good thing to say about her–to no avail. But in these custody cases it is the protective parent whose pleas to keep the child safe are being disregarded.

Thankfully, there is a growing recognition that family courts are failing to protect children in custody cases, with sometimes tragic results. Last year, Congress passed a resolution stating that “child safety is the first priority of custody and visitation adjudications, “and that courts should resolve safety risk and family violence claims first, before assessing other factors that may affect a child’s best interests. The resolution makes several recommendations to states for improving their court processes, including setting standards for evidence presented in custody proceedings and for the professionals who are accepted as experts.

In 2019, the Governor of Maryland signed a bill requiring the formation of a new workgroup, the first of its kind, to study child custody court proceedings involving child abuse or domestic violence allegations and make recommendations about “incorporating the latest science regarding the safety and well-being of children and other victims of domestic violence.”

It is important for child advocates to become involved with this issue, which has generally been the province of mainly domestic violence advocates. Child advocates around the country should push for legislation like that passed in Maryland to establish commissions to study this issue and make recommendations about how the family courts can be improved to ensure the safety of children involved in custody litigation.

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.

Domestic violence and child abuse: a lethal combination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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