Donald Trump and the child savers: It's not a band, but they sing the same song

Photo by Gage Skidmore

This post originally appeared at the Chronicle of Social Change

Last month, author and political commentator Jeff Greenfield wrote an essay for Politico on the politics of fear – and how Donald Trump exploits it.  He wrote:

History teaches us lessons of what can happen when genuine public fears are co-opted by the demagogues, fear-mongers and over-reactors. There was a reason to fear crime in the 1960s and 1970s, because violent crime in America was increasing by leaps and bounds, but that didn’t mean the only response [had to be] four decades of over-incarceration, driven by politicians’ fears of looking soft on crime. There was a reason to fear a Soviet espionage network looking for military secrets during a Cold War waged in the shadow of countless nuclear weapons, but that didn’t require McCarthyism as a response.There was a reason to fear where Al Qaeda might strike next after 19 men with box cutters killed 3,000 people in the heart of two great cities, but that didn’t mean we had to invade Iraq.

Let me add one to Greenfield’s list: There is a reason to fear that a small number of parents are brutally abusive and will do terrible things to innocent children if they are not stopped.  But that doesn’t mean we needed to create a system that puts millions of children through frightening investigations every year, and casts thousands of them into a chaotic system of foster care, traumatizing some of them for life. 

Yet that’s what we’ve done. Some of the same people who probably are horrified by Donald Trump seem to have no problem using his tactics in the fight against child abuse.

Case in point: Suppose someone tried to set up a role-playing exercise concerning international relations. But every Muslim character was a terrorist and they all said things like “death to America” and “kill the infidels.”  The furor at this blatant bigotry would be enormous.

Yet a column in the Chronicle of Social Change recently sang the praises of a role-playing exercise about foster care in an article that begins with the script for those taking the role of birth parent:

The birth parent leans in and whispers horrific things to her child.“I don’t want you.”“I can’t protect you.”“Don’t tell anyone our family secret.”

Everyone playing a birth parent is instructed to “choose an addiction” – since, of course, every parent who loses a child to foster care must be an addict. 

In fact, the problem of drug abuse, like the problem of child abuse, is serious and real. But both also have been subjected to enormous hype, and inflated figures.

Where in this role-playing exercise are the birth parents who lost their children because their poverty was confused with neglect? Where are the mothers who were beaten by their husbands and then had their children taken away because they “allowed” the children to “witness domestic violence”?   And where are the ones who lost their children because of a false positive drug test, or whose “drug problem” consists of smoking marijuana?

This same role-playing exercise features only “enlightened foster parents.”  There are many of these.  But since multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, they can’t all be enlightened.

And where are the caseworkers who immediately jump to conclusions about families because they are poor, and especially if they are poor and African-American?  has shown that to be a common problem.

Yet this exercise in stigma and stereotyping not only isn’t condemned, it is honored. The guy who came up with it, David White, won and “Angels in Adoption” award.

Donald Trump would be proud.

Or suppose Donald Trump were asked which states were doing the best job at solving a social problem. Suppose he replied that it’s complicated, “but I will tell you the states that do the best overall are the ones that have smaller, whiter populations” [emphasis added].

Even Trump never actually said that - but Michael Petit did, when asked which states are best at preventing child abuse. He’s the founder of the group that calls itself Every Child Matters, and he said it at a Congressional hearing. 

And then there is this, from a former social worker for the Washington, D.C. child welfare agency. She laments the fact that a judge would not let foster parents adopt a child, and instead awarded custody to

The 19-year-old father, jobless and a high school dropout. … He had not abused or neglected Davon. Nevertheless, it was clear that Davon would do better with his foster parents. 

In other words, why do we need actual maltreatment to take away a child forever? And why help a birth father with employment and child-rearing?  Let’s have a society in which mostly white, middle-class caseworkers descend upon impoverished communities and take black children from parents because they would be “better off” elsewhere! 

Perhaps she should send the idea to the Trump campaign. I’m sure they’d love it.

None of this is new. In the 19th Century, Protestant Minister Charles Loring Brace snatched away the children of poor Catholic immigrants whose parents he deemed genetically inferior and threw them onto “orphan trains” even though many were not orphans.  Brace knew how to whip up a crowd with scare stories. 

Other child savers, as they proudly called themselves, hid their agenda of fear and loathing of the immigrant poor – and their efforts to confiscate their children -- behind horror stories of brutally beaten children, complete with “before” and “after” pictures for the media.

They, and their latter-day counterparts, could be Donald Trump’s role models.

If there is a difference between Donald Trump and today’s child savers it is this: The child savers mean well.  They want to help children and they really believe their “solutions” will work. 

But Greenfield wrote something else in his Politico column on the politics of fear:

The dilemma, of course, is that in every one of these examples, the lunge toward useless, or foolish, or dangerous, or deplorable responses seems almost built into the political system.

In child welfare, we have a system that subjects millions to needless investigations, traumatizes thousands with needless foster care – and still overlooks children in real danger.

Useless, foolish, dangerous and deplorable seems like a pretty good description of that system. If we’re ever going to change that, America’s latter-day child savers need to stop playing the Trump card.

More about the impact of Trump-style paranoia, and the implications for child welfare, in this post. 

Child welfare and race: The smoking transcript

The director of Every Child Matters tells Congress that the states that do best at preventing child abuse have “smaller, whiter populations.”

I’ve written before about the hype and hysteria spread by the group that calls itself “Every Child Matters” in its effort to stampede child welfare systems into diverting $3 billion to $5 billion into hiring more child protective services workers to take away more children.

I’ve noted how their executive director, Michael Petit, spent 45 minutes comparing rates of child abuse deaths among the states – and maligning states that allegedly rated high – only to admit that it was, in fact, impossible to make such a comparison.

Over the past couple of years, Petit spent an enormous amount of time and effort  trying to get Congress to hold a hearing on the issue where he could be in the spotlight as a witness.  If any nonprofit has gone through so much just to give its director five minutes of this kind of fame (you don’t even get 15 for your statement) I’m not aware of it.

On July 12, Petit got his hearing, before a House subcommittee, complete with the obligatory celebrity witness, a second-tier cast member from Law and Order: SVU, to guarantee a crowd.  But I’ve said nothing about Petit’s remarks until now because one thing he said was so disturbing I decided to wait until the transcript came out to be sure I’d heard it correctly. 

Unfortunately, I did, in fact, hear what I thought I heard.  It happened when Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Washington) asked Petit “what states have had the best system in place to predict and deal with and prevent [child abuse]?”

Petit said it was a complicated question, and he explained some of the complexity.  And then he said:

But I will tell you the states that do the best overall are the ones that have smaller, whiter populations. 

Petit immediately realized that might not have been the best thing to say, and rushed to clarify:

So where ‑‑ which translates into less poverty and less complicated issues around domestic violence, around imprisonment issues, around substance abuse."

But then he couldn’t resist raising the issue of race again:

If you take a look at the overall distribution of these issues, they are concentrated especially most severely in the states with large minority populations.  And I say that, saying that that correlates, in turn, with high rates of poverty in those communities.

MYTHS ABOUT SUBSTANCE ABUSE

Notice how Petit repeats the common canard about minorities and substance abuse.  In fact, as the Annie E. Casey Foundation notes in this report:

Despite being more likely to be poor, black and Hispanic Americans use drugs at levels comparable to, and in some instances, lower than white Americans.

So if Petit is really referring to the impact of substance abuse on child maltreatment, why would he claim that “whiter” states do better at curbing the child abuse that stems from substance abuse?  Perhaps he got his misimpression the way so many Americans do – by looking at who gets punished for substance abuse.

As that same Casey study notes:

Despite having drug use rates comparable to whites, black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to experience negative consequences from drug use, including being involved in the child welfare system and in the criminal justice system          

And as The New York Times reported in this recent story about children being taken from their parents because of those parents’ marijuana use:

Over all, the rate of marijuana use among whites is twice as high as among blacks and Hispanics in the city, the data show, but defense lawyers said these cases were rarely if ever filed against white parents.

So first, child welfare systems apply racially-biased double standards when it comes to dealing with substance-abusing parents, and then Michael Petit runs to Congress to perpetuate stereotypes resulting from those very double standards.

A little later in the hearing Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia) a hero of the civil rights movement, demonstrated grace equal to his well-known courage and gave Petit a chance to walk back his remarks.  But Petit only dug himself in deeper with comments veering disturbingly close to the stereotypes about Black women debunked in this excellent article from Colorlines.  Petit’s comments can be found by going to the transcript and doing a search for “Mr. Lewis.”

There is no evidence that there is more child maltreatment (or more of what we label child maltreatment) in poor Black communities than in poor white communities.  Even those who are “in denial” about the racial bias that permeates decisions to take away children claim that Blacks are overrepresented in child welfare systems only because of the pressures of poverty.  (In fact, the overrepresentation of African American children in foster care is due to both poverty and racism, as is discussed in detail in our Issue Paper on child welfare and race.)

So all Michael Petit needed to say was that the states doing better have smaller, richer populations.  When it comes to solving the problems, he’d still probably be wrong -  there is strong evidence, for example, that one of America’s most successful child welfare systems is the one in Alabama - but at least he wouldn’t have taken any gratuitous swipes at an entire race. 

Michael Petit is not a racist.  Like most people in child welfare, he cares deeply about helping vulnerable children, of all races, and sincerely believes his approach will help do just that.   But his comments reveal the extent to which our feelings about race bias our policy choices more than we realize - until something slips out, as it did at the hearing.  And what do such comments from Petit, who once ran an entire child welfare system and who had been a top official in the Child Welfare League of America, tell us about the unconscious biases of frontline workers and others when they decide to remove children from their homes?

AN UNSEEMLY ALLIANCE WITH NASW

Petit’s comments raise another question that is at least as troubling:

Why have none among Petit’s small group of allies, the groups supporting his crusade to divert funds to hiring more CPS workers, called him out on this?  Particularly disturbing is the silence from the National Association of Social Workers, which remains a part of the alliance Petit formed to push his agenda and continues to promote it.

Sadly, this isn’t all that puzzling. 

NASW is a trade association for social workers.  So of course, NASW would be pushing Petit’s agenda.  Three billion dollars can buy a lot of social work jobs.

But I would have hoped Petit’s linking child abuse to race would have prompted an end to an unseemly alliance.

UPDATE: The children who don’t matter to “Every Child Matters”

The posts below, best read from the bottom up, all deal with the harm done by the hype and hysteria being offered up by a group that calls itself Every Child Matters.  Like most of those whose 19th Century counterparts proudly called themselves "child savers" the people at ECM mean well.  But that doesn't lesson the harm they did in 2009, when these posts first were published.  They were at it again in 2010, and our update can be found here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/ECMUpdate.pdf

Actual date of this post: December 17, 2010

Child abuse report: ECM manages a few words – in the fine print

UPDATE: Every Child Matters was misleading the public again at the end of 2010.  Here's our response.

O.K. – so now Every Child Matters has managed to squeeze in, toward the bottom of the page introducing its report, a few words acknowledging that the spending data in the first version were wrong. But it's easy to miss, and people who go to the press release from the ECM home page could miss it completely. (Also: the second paragraph of their acknowledgment of error bears a certain resemblance to the "bait and switch" I predicted in my first, long post to this Blog about the ECM report.) Why is it like pulling teeth to get these guys to offer a prominent correction of a serious error?

Child abuse report: A clandestine correction from Every Child Matters

…BUT THE NEW VERSION STILL GETS IT WRONG

Sometime between 11:16am on October 26 and 5:00pm October 28, Every Child Matters finally got around to correcting its out-of-date, erroneous data on child welfare spending – the bad data that smeared reform efforts in Maine. Here at NCCPR, we're glad we were able to point ECM to the data they overlooked. But their clandestine correction doesn't go nearly far enough.

● I can find nothing in the press release or the report, as they appear online, to indicate that the data were wrong in the first place and now have been corrected. So there is nothing to tell readers who saw the old data and may have gotten the wrong impression of their state to look again.

●Did ECM send notices to all the reporters who did stories about the original reports – in particular the stories that highlighted a state's alleged performance in spending, to let them know the data were wrong so they could correct the information for readers? How about reporters who still may be working on such stories?

●Did ECM notify people on its own e-mail list? I'm on that list and I have received no such notice. (Well, I was on that list; perhaps I've been purged.)

●Worse, the data still suffer from an obvious flaw that ECM still does not disclose. The original source for these data makes clear that ten states could not supply information for certain categories of spending.

For example, in New York, individual counties and New York City run their own systems. But the researchers were unable to get a figure for local spending – and that's likely to be a lot of money.

●For other states the missing amounts may be lower. But two of the states ECM now claims are in the bottom five for spending, Mississippi and Virginia, were able to supply only incomplete data to the researchers. So the rankings still may be wrong.

NCCPR also puts out a list using the same raw data (though we divide the spending totals by the number of impoverished children in each state, while ECM, oddly, uses the total population of children and adults; which is, of course, unfair to states with proportionately fewer children). But our list specifies which states provided incomplete data, and calls particular attention to the fact that the New York figure may be a significant underestimate. With ECM's huge budget and lavish spending on slick PR, is it really too much to ask that they achieve this level of accuracy as well?

Child abuse report: Every fact matters

THE GROUP THAT CALLS ITSELF EVERY CHILD MATTERS ADMITS ITS BIG BLUNDER, BUT DOESN'T CORRECT IT.
The "research director" of the group known as Every Child Matters now admits they screwed up big time in their comparison of state child welfare spending, particularly concerning the State of Maine. In fact, their entire comparison of how much of your tax money went to child welfare agencies is highly suspect.
Maine was singled out as allegedly being among the five states that spent the least on protecting children – this in the context of a report that essentially equated spending big bucks with caring about kids and spending less as not caring if they die.

According to the Kennebec Journal, the newspaper in, Augusta, Maine's capital:

Stephen Clermont, research director at Every Child Matters, conceded in an interview Wednesday that the 2004 data for Maine turned out to be outdated and the numbers were underreported; information from at least 2006 was available -- unbeknownst to the group -- indicating that Maine spent at least $121 million on child-welfare services, at a per-capita rate of $92.69, he said.

But this still leaves a few questions unanswered:

● The 2006 data have been readily available online for nearly a year. How could a group with ECM's huge budget have missed it?

●ECM doesn't seem to have gone to the original source even for its old data, relying instead on a database compiled by the Child Welfare League of America. The database is very convenient, but not always up-to-date.

● NCCPR issued a child welfare spending comparison, using the 2006 data, on February 20, 2009. It's not on our website, but available on request. Those who request it will see that we went to great lengths to explain the limits of the data – and to note where only partial data were available. CWLA's 2004 chart doesn't note this – and that's why ECM wound up grossly understating Maine's spending.

And speaking of spending, ECM spends three times more just on printing than NCCPR's entire annual budget (if we're The Prius of Child Advocacy, think of them as the Hummer). And I'd love to know how much they paid GYMR, the slick Washington PR firm they worked with on this report. Couldn't they have spent a little more on research?

● Maine is not the only state for which those 2004 data are incomplete. Data are missing for 12 other states, and – surprise! – three of those states also are among the five that ECM alleges spend the least on child welfare.

● ECM's President, Michael Petit, reportedly promised state child welfare officials that he would correct any errors in the data. But even though ECM admits it knew of its screw-up by Oct. 21, the very day the report officially was released (though well after it had been sent to journalists), as of 10:30am Oct. 24, [UPDATE: Make that, as of 11:16am Oct. 26], the misinformation about Maine remains in the report and the press release – with no correction. [UPDATE: it finally was corrected between 11:16am Oct. 26 and 5:00pm Oct. 28, but the new version also contains errors]. And the 2004 data have not been replaced with the 2006 data. Why not? Aren't they worried that well-meaning backers of the organization who fill in the blanks on their generic Astroturf op ed template and claim it as their own are going to look like idiots when they're blamed for using old, and perhaps incorrect, data?

And when what was originally an honest mistake goes uncorrected, can it still be described as honest?

● The rankings of states appear to be at the heart of the ECM/GYMR strategy – every locally-written story I've found leads with the state's alleged rank on one indicator or another, usually either spending or child abuse fatalities. Getting these data wrong can do enormous damage, particularly in a state like Maine which has become a national leader in child welfare. But if anyone presses ECM on this, you can bet they'll fall back on the "bait and switch" described in a previous post to this Blog. They'll feign high dudgeon and say something like: "How dare anyone quibble about numbers when children are dying." But these aren't just numbers, these are facts. And you can't come up with life-saving answers if you don't get your facts right. Every child won't matter until every fact matters.

As noted in our previous post, ECM also purported to compare rates of child abuse fatalities, even though no honest comparison of fatality rates among states is possible.

So now we know that, actually, three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and the fact that Every Child Matters will misrepresent both to advance its ideological agenda.

Child abuse report: And now, the Astroturf op eds!

One of the things the group that calls itself Every Child Matters did with its big budget for misinforming people with its recent report is hire a PR firm. Their work included a conference call where ECM briefed state officials so they all could coordinate their "message," and lots of calls to local newspapers touting state data (even as the report itself warns of the limits of those data).

Looks like the hired flacks are still hard at work.

Those flacks know that op ed editors want their submissions to be local – from the grassroots. So they've created a fake "local" op ed column, the equivalent of Astroturf. It's a template, available here. All you have to do is fill in the blanks! Here's how it begins:

STATE Can Do Better – Stopping Child Abuse Deaths

Too often, the simple joys of a child's life in CITY that many of us take for granted in our own families are far beyond the reach of even our closest neighbors.

Occurrences of child abuse and neglect in STATE are all too common. They affect me personally and professionally because
INSERT PERSONAL STORY OF CAREER; PERHAPS BRIEFLY COTE [sic] A RECENT HEART-WRENCHING CASE.

And then later:

While child abuse and neglect deaths total about five a day in the U.S., experts believe the real number may be as much as 50 percent higher due to inconsistent record-keeping and different definitions of abuse and neglect in the states. INSERT YOUR STATE-SPECIFIC FACTS FROM REPORT: NUMBER OF CHILDREN IN YOUR STATE WHO DIED OF CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT 2001-2007; CURRENT PER-CAPITA SPENDING TO ADDRESS AND PREVENT ABUSE/NEGLECT; HOW STATE COMPARES WITH REST OF NATION.

So right after the part where the generic op ed effectively admits it's impossible to really compare rates of child abuse deaths, the instructions are to do it anyway.

And then, at the very end, where you identify yourself:

NAME is TITLE of ORGANIZATION in CITY. Organization is INSERT BRIEF DESCRIPTION.

If it weren't so serious, it would be like playing a game of Mad Libs.

This is why I'm so fond of a policy they have at the Spokane Spokesman Review. They require anyone submitting an op ed to swear that he actually wrote it himself. Of course, that won't stop anyone from lying, but at least it's one small way to avoid being suckered by a PR firm offering the newspaper the best misinformation money can buy.

Child abuse report: The children who don’t matter to “Every Child Matters”

THE NET OF VOLUNTARY HELP TO FAMILIES SHOULD BE CAST WIDE. BUT THE NET OF COERCIVE INTERVENTION INTO FAMILIES SHOULD BE NARROW.

(A large part of the post below involves countering bad numbers with good numbers. Unless otherwise noted, citations for the data in the post below can be found in NCCPR "Other Issue Paper 2," and Paper 3. These Issue Papers originally were written to refute misinformation commonly spread in the 1980s and 1990s, but largely discredited by 2000, so they are not as prominent on our website as the Issue Papers on family preservation, nor were they updated as often – until now. Sadly, Every Child Matters has chosen to revive these misleading claims.)
A group calling itself Every Child Matters (ECM) has scheduled what it calls a Rally for Change on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol today (Oct. 21, 2009). But it's really just a Rally for the Same Lousy System Only Bigger.
Like most people in child welfare, those at ECM have good intentions. But the people at ECM are serial statistics abusers whose rights to their pocket calculators should be terminated. Their stock-in-trade is hype and hysteria, and many of their recommendations would only endanger the children they want to protect.

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but ECM's solutions are phony, and they're using bad data to promote those phony solutions.

● ECM proposes taking $3 billion to $5 billion that could be used for real prevention and family preservation and using it for a huge expansion of the agencies that investigate families and take away their children. Not only will this traumatize even more children who never were abused, it will further divert workers' attention from finding the children in real danger who really must be taken from their homes.

●At a time when 77 percent of child abuse allegations already turn out to be false, and many more are cases in which poverty is confused with "neglect," ECM wants to burden child welfare agencies with more false leads by starting still another campaign to urge every American to turn in her or his neighbor based on the slightest suspicion of maltreatment. In at least one American city half of all children have endured the trauma of a child abuse investigation by age 10. Does ECM really think that percentage is too low?

● Though it is not a formal recommendation, the report also appears to call for ending all screening of calls to child abuse hotlines – meaning that even the most absurd, frivolous or vindictive allegations would have to be investigated.

●To justify this take-the-child-and-run agenda ECM grossly misuses data, and sometimes uses data that are incomplete and out-of-date even when better data are available. ECM also attempting to compare fatality rates among the states, even as ECM itself effectively acknowledges there is no reliable way to do so.

● And ECM shows a sickening willingness to exploit tragedy. They include among their list of children who died of abuse at least one child who actually was taken from a loving birth mother only to be killed by her foster mother – a little detail ECM neglects to mention to readers.

Every Child Matters sent an endless stream of e-mails urging people to come to the rally and support their agenda – while keeping the actual agenda, and a report that goes with it, secret until less than 48 hours before the rally. That kind of arrogance has been par-for-the-course for America's "child savers" since they proudly gave themselves that name in the 19^th Century.

And the people at ECM are right out of that 19^th Century tradition. They are good people who really want to help children. But along with that comes an ends-justify-the-means mentality, best seen in a penchant for "advocacy numbers" – misleading statistics that don't stand up to serious scrutiny. (After all, what's a little exaggeration if it "raises awareness," right?)

The group is run by Michael Petit, a former commissioner of the Maine Department of Human Services. Petit founded ECM right after leaving the Child Welfare League of America, the trade association for public and private child welfare agencies, including the ones that couldn't survive without a steady supply of foster children. CWLA is one of the biggest obstacles to real reform in American child welfare, and Petit brought the CLWA mindset with him to ECM.

$ FOR INVESTIGATIONS, LIP SERVICE FOR PREVENTION

Instead of offering positive, constructive 21^st Century solutions to the serious and real problem of child abuse – the kinds of solutions NCCPR offers in its publications Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right and Civil Liberties Without Exception, ECM calls for a $3 billion to $5 billion expansion of the agencies that tear children from their parents.

Of course they also mumble the usual platitudes about "prevention" – but mostly prevention that, while sometimes genuinely useful, such as voluntary home visiting, does nothing to curb coercive intervention into families. There is not a word about family preservation which both keeps families together and targets families about to lose their children to foster care. And they make no specific recommendation to spend a particular dollar amount on prevention. Similarly they acknowledge that poverty is bad and say we should do something about it. But they propose no dollar figure. In fact, their proposal amounts to stealing $3 billion to $5 billion that might go to prevention, family preservation and help to ameliorate poverty and spending it instead on investigating families and taking away children.

In its promotional material, ECM says their report shows "that the current child protection network is stretched too thin … the sheer magnitude of child maltreatment exceeds the capacity of the system to respond to every child needing help." Translation: spend a lot more money doing just what we do now.

Actually, it is the hype and hysteria spread for decades by groups like ECM that have stretched the system too thin – diverting it from its mission of finding children in real danger into wasting its resources on huge numbers of false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with "neglect."

Many states do indeed need to spend more on child welfare. But all states need to spend smarter. ECM calls for expanding what amounts to dumb spending. And ECM is on record as opposing allowing states to spend smarter. Thus, ECM opposes letting every state get the kind of waiver from federal funding restrictions that is allowing Florida to transform its child welfare system.

The net of voluntary help to families should be cast wide. But both because is traumatizes children who never were harmed and diverts resources from finding children in real danger, the net of coercive intervention into families should be narrow.

THE CHILD SAVERS' "BAIT AND SWITCH"

Here are some facts you won't hear at ECM's rally or read in ECM's report:

● ECM says the "real" number of child abuse deaths may be 50 percent higher than the official figure. But even if you go much further and triple the official estimate, in any given year, 99.993 percent of American children will not die of child abuse.*

● In any given year, 98.9 percent of American children will not be abused or neglected in any way – and that's true even when one counts all those cases in which what child protective services agencies call "neglect" really is poverty.**

The reason you almost never see those numbers is because groups like ECM have successfully intimidated critics away from mentioning them, using a kind of "bait and switch" technique. The bait: First they use inflated, phony numbers to lure us into their tent to sell us snake oil solutions. Then, if anyone tries to put the numbers into context comes the switch, as they say, in effect, "How dare you quibble about numbers when children are dying? If even one child dies of abuse it's one too many."

In one sense they are right, in another, tragically wrong. They are right in the sense that the problem of child abuse is not minor. The United States is a very big place, even a small percentage is a big number. And yes, even one child's life lost to the sadism or brutality of a parent is one too many. The percentage of children thrown into foster care also is low when compared to the general population (it can be a lot higher, however, in poor minority communities) – but that hasn't stopped NCCPR from working to make it lower.

But they are wrong in dismissing the importance of getting the numbers right. The numbers are significant not for what they say about the importance of the problem, but for what they say about how to solve it. The problem of child abuse is serious and real. It's ECM's solutions that are phony. Using bad numbers to promote phony solutions only makes it more likely that the real numbers, whatever they are, will get worse.

The fact that the percentage of children who face child maltreatment is, in fact, quite low, and the horror story cases that make headlines – or are ripped from the headlines for Law & Order scripts - is tinier still, has profound implications for how we try to reduce the number still further.

The horror story cases are needles in a haystack. Real solutions require finding more precise ways to detect the needless. Instead, we keep trying to vacuum up the entire haystack. The net of coercive intervention is made ever wider, with new categories of mandated reporters, broader definitions of maltreatment and constant exhortations to turn in our neighbors at the slightest suspicion of maltreatment.

As a result, we get that other big-number-small-percentage: about 300,000 children are torn from their families every year, and a lot of those removals are unnecessary. And we get a much larger number: Every year, at least 2.4 million children, are traumatized by investigations of false allegations of maltreatment.

ECM: MASTERS OF WEASEL-WORDING

The people at ECM are masters of weasel-wording, and that's what they use to get around those 2.4 million inconvenient facts. So in its report, ECM says that "many" reports initially labeled false will turn out to be true when the same family is reported again. But "many" can mean anything – or nothing. And ECM offers no support for that claim – the endnote leads only to this government statistics home page, with no indication of how ECM came up with this claim, or even where to look. Furthermore, when multiple reports do lead to substantiation, that may be only because there were multiple reports - so CPS workers may assume they must be true.

The one serious study I know of to examine this issue found that caseworkers are two to six times more likely to wrongly substantiate a case than to wrongly declare one to be unfounded. So if anything, the official number of false reports understates the problem.

And, because of the racial bias that permeates child welfare, unlike actual child abuse, which is no greater in minority communities, the chances of being traumatized by a false allegation or needless foster care are much higher if you are a minority, particularly if you are Black or Native American. Indeed, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported in 2005 on a study revealing that in Cleveland, nearly half of all children were forced to endure a child abuse investigation by the time they were ten years old.
Does ECM really think that's not enough?

ECM's statistics abuse doesn't stop there. In addition to overstating the percentage of cases that workers substantiate (it's under 23 percent, not 30 percent as the report claims) ECM calls these cases "confirmed." Not true. No judge or jury reviews such decisions; it's just a caseworker checking a box on a form. And in many states the worker is supposed to "substantiate" the case even when there is more evidence of innocence.

But ECM's mastery of evasion is most apparent when they say "there is no evidence which suggests that intentionally false reports alleging maltreatment are a serious issue." The weasel word is "intentionally." Whether a child is subjected to a traumatic investigation, a stripsearch and separation from everyone she knows and loves because of a malicious report or because of a well-meaning error by someone who listened to one of those endless exhortations to report anything and everything isn't likely to matter much to that child. (And of course, even if the number of intentionally false reports is low, why don't the people at ECM believe even one is one too many in this case as well? Why do they simply dismiss the enormous suffering of children victimized by repeated investigations of malicious false allegations as not "a serious issue." You may be sure it is serious to the children affected.

Bottom line: No matter how much ECM tries to obscure the issue, the fact remains that, malicious or not, at least 77 percent of reports are false.

Furthermore, of the "substantiated" reports, the overwhelming majority are neglect – which often means poverty, since typical state laws define neglect as lack of adequate food, clothing shelter and supervision – a perfect definition of poverty. (For details and full citations, See NCCPR Issue Papers 5, 6 and 7.)

Indeed, out of every 100 children investigated as possible victims of abuse, at least 77 simply weren't - the report was false. Fourteen were "substantiated" victims of neglect, and 7 were victims of either sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse, from the most minor to the most severe. (Three of those eight may have been victims of both and/or other forms of maltreatment as well.) One was a victim of psychological maltreatment. One more falls into a category listed as "other."

All this is a huge tragedy, and not just for the children subjected to needless investigations and foster care. The time wasted on such cases only diverts more and more resources from finding children in real danger. All that time trying to vacuum up the haystack only leads to overlooking more needles.

And year after year, groups like ECM keep making it worse. Now, they're actually proposing what amounts to still another campaign to get everyone to turn in their neighbor based on any vague suspicion of maltreatment. (If you want to see how vague, just check out the lists of "symptoms" and "signs" of maltreatment that many organizations publish and that routinely turn up as "info boxes" in news stories. Based on these lists, there is hardly a child in America that couldn't be suspected of being maltreated at some point in her or his life.)

BAD DATA, PHONY COMPARISONS

But wait, there's more.

●In its new report, ECM purports to compare rates of child abuse deaths among the states – implying that the states it likes, big-spending and usually northern, are safer than the states it doesn't like, generally smaller-spending and southern. (This claim is made right after admitting that "… a clear correlation has not been established on how much states spend on child protective services and their child abuse and neglect death rates…")

But even were such a correlation to be found, it is, in fact, impossible to compare child abuse fatalities among states because of what has aptly been described as "differing definitions of child abuse and neglect among the states, varying data collection methodologies and inconsistent record-keeping across the country due to a lack of enforceable standards."

And who described it that way? ECM itself in a letter promoting today's event.

Of course, they noted these flaws only to suggest that fatalities allegedly are being undercounted. ECM never explains how, despite these very same failings, it's supposedly possible to compare states accurately. And in at least one case, the same failings have led to overcounting. ECM complains that deaths are undercounted by states that are prone to rule a child's drowning as an accident. But ECM never mentions that Florida's supposed high rate of fatalities only occurred after enormous pressure by the chair of that state's child death review team to take an extremist view and label almost every drowning as neglect. (For details, see a previous post to this Blog, "Drowning in Misinformation.")

●At the very start of the new report, ECM uses the same trick used by "child savers" since the 19^th Century – they start with horror stories about child abuse fatalities and immediately jump to a classic scare number – the fact that there are millions of "reports" of child abuse every year. We are meant to be left with the gut feeling that all those reports are just like the horror-stories. But, as noted above, the overwhelming majority of those reports are false and the overwhelming majority of the rest are nothing like the horror story cases.

This misrepresentation is reinforced with photos of one dead child for every state – but even there, ECM misleads. For Maine they use a photo of Logan Marr – without bothering to mention that Logan Marr was taken from a loving mother because family poverty was confused with neglect. She was placed in the foster home of a caseworker for the state child welfare agency. The caseworker/foster parent killed Logan. Since then, the Maine system has dramatically improved – by moving in the opposite direction from that pushed by some of its prior leaders.

Indeed, one of those prior leaders, Michael Petit, seems to have a lot of trouble getting things right about Maine.

HOW ECM MISREPRESENTS MAINE

●Like other ECM reports, this one also suggests that if your state spends a lot on its child welfare system it must be a good system, and if it doesn't, the state, and by implication, the people of that state, don't care if children are abused. The report compares what is says are the five highest-spending and five lowest spending states and implies that the high-spending states must be investing in training and services.

Now, I'm a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. I believe strongly in spending more on child welfare. But you also have to spend smarter. ECM's comparison draws no distinction between states that spend a lot wisely and states that spend a lot stupidly. And that makes it a stupid comparison. Worse, ECM used data that are older and less complete than the best data available.

So of the ten states listed, it is one of the supposedly low-spending states, Maine, that has one of the nation's best systems. Indeed, this year Maine's child welfare transformation was a finalist for a prestigious Innovations in American Government award from Harvard (because the current leadership is doing a far better job running the system than Michael Petit ever did.) In contrast, none of the high-spending states is exceptionally good – and a couple of them, Alaska and Rhode Island, are real stinkers, as are the systems in seventh-ranked Iowa, 12^th ranked Colorado and 13^th ranked Nebraska.

That's because of the great paradox of child welfare: The worse the intervention is for the child, the more it costs. So of course, states like Alaska, Rhode Island, Iowa, Colorado and Nebraska, which tear apart families at among the highest rates in the nation, may spend more than states like Maine that may spend a little less, but get better results by wisely investing limited resources in safe, proven programs to keep families together. Indeed, Maine has had great success reducing the most expensive, least effective form of "care" of all – residential treatment.

And in any event, ECM got the figures for Maine all wrong. That's because they used data from 2004 and used a secondary source – the Child Welfare League of America – to obtain it. In fact, data are available, from Child Trends, for 2006. Those data show more than three times as much spending in Maine. (NCCPR can supply these data and full sourcing on request.) Of course, spending in Maine didn't really triple; rather, the older data were incomplete – but because ECM didn't track its 2004 data to their original source, pages 47 and 48 of this report from the Urban Institute, ECM never figured that out. So they the wound up offering up inaccurate, out-of-date data to make an ideological point.

●And finally, though I am a lifelong liberal, I find it offensive to see that, in another ECM publication, Geography Matters, ECM, which says it is non-partisan, repeatedly presents what it considers to be the "good" states in blue, and the "bad" states in red.

Even the one recommendation in today's report that might do some good, a call for more transparency in child death cases, does not go far enough. We need a rebuttable presumption that all court hearings and nearly all records in all child maltreatment cases are open. Otherwise you get a look at the system that is like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. If the only time there is any openness is when a child dies, people think that's the only error child welfare agencies make. All those cases of wrongful removal, all those children's lives destroyed by needless foster care, remain secret. And apparently, that's the way ECM likes it.

In short, ECM isn't living up to its name.

--The children traumatized by false allegations of maltreatment and forced to endure stripsearches and other indignities don't matter to Every Child Matters.

--The children torn from everyone loving and familiar and thrown needlessly into foster care don't matter to Every Child Matters.

--The children moved from foster home to foster home emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone don't matter to Every Child Matters.

ECM should stick to what it knows: issues like education and health insurance and after school care, and stop promoting a child welfare agenda that will leave us with nothing but the same lousy system only bigger.

*This figure is calculated by taking ECM's figure for child abuse fatalities in 2007, tripling it, and then dividing it by a Census Bureau estimate of the total population of Americans under age 18
* This figure is calculated by taking the total estimated number of children for whom allegations of maltreatment were "substantiated" as published in note 8 on this page of this federal report, and dividing by the total population of Americans under age 18.