Child Welfare Update: February 2024

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

Adam Montgomery convicted of Harmony Montgomery’s death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where was CPS?

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

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

The march continues to remove protections for homeschooled children

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

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

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

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

From the “Are you kidding me?” department

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

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

Never underestimate a persistent child advocate

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

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

The guaranteed income craze continues

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

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

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

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

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

The placement and workforce crises continue

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

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

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

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

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

What is the cause of racial disparity in child welfare?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question One: Reporting Disparities

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

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

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

Disparities in Substantiation and Removal

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

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

Conclusions and Implications

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

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

In the authors’ own words:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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