For many years, Florida was synonymous with child welfare failure. That's not true anymore. The state has begun a remarkable turnaround, a fact made clear from two remarkable "firsts" in 2007.
One of them has been known for some time. In 2007, for the first time in nearly a decade, there was a significant statewide decline in the number of children taken from their homes. It is likely that the number declined again in 2008.
The other "first" just became public this week. In 2007, again for the first time in nearly a decade, the number of child maltreatment deaths of children previously "known to the system" in Florida declined. The number had risen from 26, the last year before the Florida foster-care panic, to 54 in 2005.
Then in 2006, the chair of the state's Child Abuse Death Review Committee, Manatee County Sheriff's Department Major Connie Shingledecker, began putting pressure on local law enforcement and mandated reporters to call the state's child abuse hotline for all sorts of deaths that used to be considered accidents, notably drowning. (See Drowning in Misinformation Jan. 6, 2008.) So while the figures shot up still further in 2006, and, on the surface, that would further support my contention that foster-care panics endanger children, they're not really comparable to previous years. But 2007 can be compared to 2006 – and in 2007, deaths of children previously known to the Florida Department of Children and Families went down. (All of the committee reports are available here).
The committee, however, doesn't seem to want you to know this. Previous Annual Reports included bar graphs showing the three-year trend in deaths "known to the system" – that was when the deaths were going up, supporting the take-the-child-and-run rhetoric that permeates these reports under Shingledecker's leadership. In contrast, the graph in the 2007 report includes the 2007 figure only.
That figures. Manatee County, where Maj. Shingledecker is in charge of child abuse investigations, has lagged behind the rest of the state in changing course and abandoning the take-the-child-and-run approach that dominated Florida for so long. Indeed, in 2007, a child was more likely to be torn from his or her parents in Manatee County than any other region of the state except one. (For details, see NCCPR's Florida Rate-of-Removal Index.)
Of course, I have often warned that one should not make too much of changes in child abuse fatalities, even in jurisdictions as huge as Florida where it might be possible to see some pattern in the numbers. So if the decline in fatalities were the only indication that Florida's change in course toward family preservation was paying off, then there would be reason to view it with extreme caution. But the decline in fatalities comes in addition to years of evidence from better measures – reabuse of children left in their own homes and foster-care recidivism – and by these measures, regions in Florida that take proportionately fewer children tend to do better than those which take more.
The likely reason: As fewer children are taken, workers have more time to find, and rescue, the children in real danger.
But Maj. Shingledecker continues to ignore the lessons from her own data. For instance, this year's report from her committee repeats a recommendation to create a special group the real purpose of which seems to be to intimidate the state's judges. The idea is that if a judge dared to disagree with the state Department of Children and Families, and allowed a child to stay in her or his own home – or did anything else less restrictive than DCF asked for – and then the child died, the committee would "review" the judge's decision.
In fact, the far bigger problem is judges routinely rubber-stamping DCF when the agency seeks to remove a child or keep that child out of the home. As a result, the child may bounce from foster home to foster home, emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone. The child might be abused, or even die, in foster care. Yet Maj. Shingledecker has no interest in setting up a committee to review those decisions.
So now that we have still more evidence that Florida is keeping children safer as it reduces entries into foster care, there is one recommendation for improving child safety that should take precedence over all others: Ignore those, like Maj. Shingledecker, who remain wedded to the failed policies of the past.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query "drowning in misinformation". Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query "drowning in misinformation". Sort by date Show all posts
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Drowning in Misinformation
You’re late for work one morning. Before you get to work you need to get your two-year-old daughter to day care. You’ve just buckled her into her car seat – or did you? - when you remember some extremely important document you left in the house.
You know what you’re supposed to do – unbuckle your daughter and walk her or carry her back in with you; but you’re running late, it’ll only take a second and, what could possibly happen?
999 times (or more) out of 1000: Nothing. But there’s always that one time that can lead to catastrophe – especially if you hadn’t quite buckled the child in.
That’s just one scenario.
Are you sure you childproofed every electrical outlet? What about the one behind the sofa – until you rearranged the furniture last month? Now that your child is three, are you certain she can’t unlatch the back door? Are there any heavy items of furniture, even big books on high shelves, that can come loose while your back is turned or you’ve just run into another room to answer the phone? And, are you absolutely certain you locked the sliding door that leads to the swimming pool?
The number of such scenarios is endless; I suspect any parent could come up with a dozen variations off the top of her or his head. And, according to the Florida Child Abuse Death Review Team, unless you can honestly say none of them has ever applied to you, you are guilty of child neglect.
That means almost every parent in Florida, and pretty much everyplace else, is guilty of neglect. But if everything is neglect, nothing is neglect. It only desensitizes us to the real thing. And that’s the least of what is wrong with the approach the Team has taken in its latest annual report, which exanmines deaths that occurred in 2006 and was released at the very end of 2007. The worst of it is the incredible cruelty of its recommendations – and the harm those recommendations can do to the siblings who survive after a scenario like the ones suggested above takes the life of a child.
As usual in child welfare, the cruelty and the harm are not intentional. If I’d spent a huge amount of my time pouring over autopsy reports and other documents about the deaths of helpless, innocent children, I think it would distort my perspective as well. The resulting report is another example of the distortion inherent in a skewed sample, something discussed on this Blog previously in connection with reports from the New York City Department of Investigation and the New Jersey Office of Child Advocate. Tragically, the Florida team has a larger sample to work with, since it looks at every child maltreatment death in the state, and it is now applying a very broad definition of maltreatment – but in a state with four million children, the sample is still grossly unrepresentative.
This kind of distorted perspective becomes a form of self-indulgence – indulging one’s righteous wrath, even if the consequences are only more harm to more children.
In one sense, it would be in my interest not to bring all this up. The report generated headlines across Florida about a supposed record number of child abuse deaths. That reinforces what NCCPR has been saying in that state for a long, long time.
We first predicted that deaths would go up in 1999, when the child welfare agency came under the control of a leader more hell-bent on a take-the-child-and-run approach than any we’d encountered anyplace else in the country. She set off a huge foster-care panic; removals soared 50 percent in a single year. Though she’s long gone, and there now are wide variations in different regions, the foster-care panic she started never stopped, and statewide, Florida still takes children at the same rate as in 1999. (For more on all this, see NCCPR’s Florida Rate-of- Removal Index and our other reports on child welfare in Florida).
Unfortunately, our prediction about fatalities was correct. We’ve argued that the only hope for reducing such deaths is to rebuild the system to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together. And as the Florida system decentralizes, some parts of the state are trying to do just that.
So, if we used “advocacy numbers” and felt that it was o.k. to bend the truth because, after all, it’s for a good cause, (something done over and over by various alleged ‘child advocates’) NCCPR would put out a press release that said Florida’s ongoing embrace of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, statewide, had led to still another huge increase in child abuse deaths.
There’s just one problem: We don’t know that it’s true. In fact, it’s probably not.
It’s not entirely clear, either from news accounts or the report itself, but it appears that the “increase” is a result of a concerted effort to label scenarios like those above neglect instead of what they really are: accidents. Terrible, tragic accidents, but accidents nonetheless. The kinds of accidents that should make all parents of young children think twice, but before wagging a finger, also make us think: “There but for the grace of God…”
Consider some real cases, as reported by the St. Petersburg Times in its story about the Death Review Team report:
Joyce White, 54, of Plantation was sitting on the front porch with her 3-year-old grandson when the phone rang.
When she returned, Garcie Luna was gone. He was found in a neighbor's pool. The fence surrounding the pool had been damaged during Hurricane Wilma and was missing a gate.
"It was just a few seconds of carelessness on my part for answering the phone and my neighbor's part because they didn't fix the gate," White said of the death in March 2006.
"It's torn our lives apart. It was more than I could take losing him, especially for something so stupid."
When she returned, Garcie Luna was gone. He was found in a neighbor's pool. The fence surrounding the pool had been damaged during Hurricane Wilma and was missing a gate.
"It was just a few seconds of carelessness on my part for answering the phone and my neighbor's part because they didn't fix the gate," White said of the death in March 2006.
"It's torn our lives apart. It was more than I could take losing him, especially for something so stupid."
___________
Ann Unger set her 9-month-old daughter on the floor of the family's Plant City home and headed to the bathroom. Angelica, a fast crawler, usually followed close behind. Not this day.
Five minutes passed. Or was it six?
When Unger, 22, returned to the room, Angelica wasn't there. A frantic search ended in the backyard pool, where Unger found the child floating face down.
The mother's screams pierced the neighborhood as efforts to save the baby failed. Angelica Unger died on Jan. 24, 2006, three months before her first birthday.
In the past, her death likely would have been considered accidental, a family tragedy. But investigators labeled her death a result of parental neglect. Unger had left open the door that led to the pool. …
Five minutes passed. Or was it six?
When Unger, 22, returned to the room, Angelica wasn't there. A frantic search ended in the backyard pool, where Unger found the child floating face down.
The mother's screams pierced the neighborhood as efforts to save the baby failed. Angelica Unger died on Jan. 24, 2006, three months before her first birthday.
In the past, her death likely would have been considered accidental, a family tragedy. But investigators labeled her death a result of parental neglect. Unger had left open the door that led to the pool. …
Or consider a case that would, were I to accept the Review Team’s new definition of neglect, reinforce the case I’ve been making for years:
Cara Eaton's drug problems prompted caseworkers to take her infant daughter.
But weeks later, the baby died in foster care. The one-month-old suffocated after her Sarasota County foster mother put her to sleep face down.
Eaton, 31, of North Port blames DCF and its foster care contractor, the Sarasota Family YMCA. She wanted the child with her grandmother, instead of foster care.
But weeks later, the baby died in foster care. The one-month-old suffocated after her Sarasota County foster mother put her to sleep face down.
Eaton, 31, of North Port blames DCF and its foster care contractor, the Sarasota Family YMCA. She wanted the child with her grandmother, instead of foster care.
But, if this is all that happened, Cara Eaton is mistaken. The Review Team report notes that nationwide there is a “back to sleep” campaign to alert parents to the fact that it is safer to put an infant to sleep on his or her back. Odds are the foster parent simply didn’t know it or, if it was part of her training, she forgot it.
The grandmother might have made the same mistake. (There are lots of other reasons to prefer kin placements, of course). It was an accident. Accidents happen. That doesn’t mean we have to be sanguine about it; on the contrary, we need to focus more efforts on real prevention, but that begins by recognizing accidents for what they are.
Of course the Times story also included some very different scenarios, like these two:
Alyssa Doe's mother left her to die in a West Tampa alley shortly after she was born. Relatives alerted police to her mother, Mary Louise Doe, after finding her no longer pregnant and unable to explain where the baby was. Mary Louise told authorities that alcohol and crack cocaine blurred her memory of the birth in May 2006. A judge sentenced her to five years in prison and 10 years of probation. Alyssa Doe was just one of many children who died while their caretakers were under the influence.
Hunter Lanier, 2, of Santa Rosa County died in a car accident after his mother wrecked after drinking and driving.
Hunter Lanier, 2, of Santa Rosa County died in a car accident after his mother wrecked after drinking and driving.
But that’s the whole point. Any reader can draw common sense distinctions here. The Death Review Team should be able to do so as well. Yes, there also are fact situations that fall in between, where the judgment call is tougher, but that’s part of the job.
Instead, the Review Team seeks to prohibit such judgment calls at all. It demands that every drowning death be reported to the state’s child abuse hotline for a neglect investigation.
The Review Team would argue that I don’t understand; none of this is meant to be punitive, they would say, we just need to label these cases as neglect in order to bolster prevention efforts. But why? Why, exactly, does it require labeling someone neglectful – and possibly taking away surviving siblings – in order to get more people to be sure the door to the backyard pool is locked?
Obviously it doesn’t. As with so much else in child welfare, this is another example of hate disguised as love. It’s not about helping children, it’s about punishing “bad parents.” Almost all of the recommendations involve doing more to treat parents as suspects and/or to punish them. Apparently, nobody on the Review Team even thought of a simple and obvious way to reduce drowning deaths: Florida law already requires fencing around pools built after 2000. So why not give a big tax credit or other incentive to homeowners and landlords who fence in their older pools? But that doesn’t involve wagging a finger at parents, so it’s not on the Team’s radar.
It also is revealing that Manatee County, the county where the chair of the review team is in charge of child abuse investigations, has the highest rate of removal in its region, and one of the higher rates in the state.
And the Review Team’s approach undermines real prevention.
For starters, all the money for all those additional investigations and additional foster care could have been used for things like a more effective “back to sleep” campaign – or those tax credits to put fences around pools.
Worse, it plays into the take-the-child-and-run mentality that still plagues much of Florida.
The worst consequence of that is the danger to the siblings.
There may be no time when it is more important for a family to stay together than in the wake of a tragic accident. But once you label the parent neglectful, the chances soar that the surviving siblings will be torn from their parents, and each other. So at the one time when, say the four-year-old brother of the two-year-old who drowned most needs his big sisters, ages 6 and 8, and his mom and dad, he is taken away from all of them and suddenly placed with strangers. It would be hard to find a better way to almost guarantee lifelong emotional scarring. Indeed, the four-year-old is likely to think he’s somehow responsible for the drowning – why else is he being punished?
Of course that won’t always happen. It depends on who’s running the state child welfare agency. And who’s running the private agency in charge of all substitute care in a given region of the state, under Florida’s “privatized” system. And who’s in charge of the child welfare agency in that particular region. And, perhaps most of all, it depends on whether a high-profile child abuse tragedy is in the headlines locally.
Not only does the Review Team fail to recognize this, the Team actually belittles the compassion of those who do. According to the report: “Often drowning deaths are not reported as neglect. It is felt that ‘the family has suffered enough’ or ‘it’s just a tragic accident.’”
But that’s because, in many cases, the family has suffered enough, and it is a tragic accident. (No one in fact would call something this awful “just” a tragic accident – that’s the Team’s way of stacking the rhetorical deck).
The report argues that any drowning in a bathtub “should be looked at as neglect” since the only way to be sure it never happens is for the caretaker always to be in the bathroom with the child.
And that is the heart of the matter: If a parent in such a circumstances runs out of the room to answer the door or the phone and the child dies, then the death was, indeed, preventable. But what is accomplished by slapping the label neglect on the parent? What is accomplished by, in some cases, throwing the siblings into foster care – where the risk of actual abuse probably is one in three?
Nothing. In fact, under circumstances like these (as opposed to those where the failure to supervise is due to drug abuse, for example) the one person in the state of Florida least likely ever to leave a child alone in a bathtub ever again is the one who has endured such a tragedy.
While not as serious a problem, the Review Team report also contributes to Statistics Abuse. I began this post with one example – claims that there were a record number of deaths in Florida in 2007. This is still another reason why it’s difficult to measure progress, or lack of it, in child welfare based on fatalities. What constitutes a child abuse fatality can be surprisingly subjective. Last year’s accident is this year’s “neglect” death.
And not only can definitions change from year to year, they also vary from state to state, and even region to region within a state. The competence of state death review efforts also varies enormously.
That’s why one of the most intellectually dishonest things an advocate – or a reporter, if she or he knows better – can do is to try to compare fatality rates among the states. The only thing that does is penalize states that are rigorous about determining causes of death and zealous (rightly or wrongly) about labeling a death as maltreatment.
For example, several years ago, Washington State bragged about its low rate of child abuse fatalities compared to other states. Then the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did a series on how many such deaths allegedly were unreported and/or mislabeled.
This kind of statistics abuse also fuels the hype about child maltreatment in general. For example, the St. Petersburg Times story says:
An analysis of 2006 state death reports, the latest data available, shows seven out of 10 child deaths were due to neglect.
Well, yes. And if the Review Team keeps broadening the definition of “neglect” in a couple of years it will be nine out of ten – and it will mean absolutely nothing. But it will make a great “scare number” to make people think “neglect” is far more prevalent than it actually is.
What the Review Team report really illustrates is the need to focus more attention on deaths due to accidents. Of course, Freud said there are no accidents. But I’ll bet Mrs. Freud raised the kids.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
A guarantee for Major Shingledecker
Readers of this blog may remember Maj. Connie Shingledecker of the Manatee County, Fl. Sheriff’s Department. She chairs Florida’s Child Abuse Death Review Team – the bunch that wants to be sure and bring an extra dose of misery into the lives of almost every family that loses a child to an accident – and put the surviving siblings at grave risk of further trauma through foster care - by accusing those parents of neglect. (See “Drowning in Misinformation,” Jan. 6, for details)
So it’s no surprise that where Shingledecker runs the show, children are a lot more likely to be needlessly torn from everyone loving and familiar than in places with more enlightened leadership.
Last week, we noted the progress being made in most of Florida in reducing such needless removal. Even Shingledecker’s county has made some progress. But if her county were its own separate region it would have the second worst rate of child removal in the state. The rate or removal in Manatee County is more than 50 percent above the national average.
Manatee is one of several Florida counties where the sheriff’s office, not the Department of Children and Families, makes the initial decision on removing a child. But that’s not the problem. The sheriff also is in charge of child abuse investigations in nearby Hillsborough County. But Hillsborough takes away children at a dramatically lower rate than Manatee – while doing better on key measures of child safety. Details are in NCCPR’s latest Florida Rate-of-Removal Index. No, the problem, good intentions notwithstanding, is the approach taken by Maj. Shingledecker.
That was clear when she tried to justify her actions in a story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune.
For starters, the story raises questions about whom, exactly, Shingledecker is most interested in protecting:
Shingledecker says the agency and investigators there are liable if they leave a child in a home and something bad ultimately happens. "We come under the gun for, 'Why didn't we remove the child,'…”
More to the point, though Maj. Shingledecker undoubtedly means well, when it comes to the inherent harm of foster care, and the risk of abuse in foster care, it looks like Shingledecker doesn’t have a clue. According to the story, Shingledecker is willing to offer a deal, of sorts:
She says she is willing to leave more children in their homes -- as long as the social service interventions can "guarantee" the safety of the child to investigators.
Oh, is that all. Then how about holding yourself to a similar standard: You can keep your job, Major, if you can guarantee that no child you remove ever will turn out worse for the experience than had the child been left in his own home. You can keep your job, Major, if you can guarantee that no child ever will be abused in foster care on your watch. And you can keep your job, Major, if you can guarantee that no child ever will be harmed because the officer who should have spotted the problem was too busy dealing with a case where the child never needed to be taken in the first place.
Do we have a deal?
I didn’t think so. Because no sheriff or child welfare agency can guarantee that; any more than it can guarantee that every child it leaves in her or his own homes will never be abused – or have an accident.
But if you persist in remaining one of Florida’s last holdouts for a take the child and run approach, even as most of the rest of the state passes you by, there are some things I can guarantee:
--I guarantee that hundreds of children will be traumatized for life after being needlessly torn from everyone loving and familiar and bouncing from foster home to foster home. One major study found that only one in five former foster children does well in later life. Another found foster children typically fared far worse even than comparably maltreated children left in their own homes.
--I guarantee that many children who could have remained safely in their own homes instead will be abused in foster care. Several studies reveal abuse in one in three foster homes and the record of institutions is worse.
--I guarantee that more children in real danger will be missed because your officers are so busy dealing with children needlessly taken away. That’s why, for all your talk about safety, areas taking proportionately fewer children, such as Hillsborough, do a better job keeping them safe.
There is a term for mindlessly throwing one child after another into a foster care system we know churns out walking wounded four times out of five: It’s called child abuse. Guaranteed.
So it’s no surprise that where Shingledecker runs the show, children are a lot more likely to be needlessly torn from everyone loving and familiar than in places with more enlightened leadership.
Last week, we noted the progress being made in most of Florida in reducing such needless removal. Even Shingledecker’s county has made some progress. But if her county were its own separate region it would have the second worst rate of child removal in the state. The rate or removal in Manatee County is more than 50 percent above the national average.
Manatee is one of several Florida counties where the sheriff’s office, not the Department of Children and Families, makes the initial decision on removing a child. But that’s not the problem. The sheriff also is in charge of child abuse investigations in nearby Hillsborough County. But Hillsborough takes away children at a dramatically lower rate than Manatee – while doing better on key measures of child safety. Details are in NCCPR’s latest Florida Rate-of-Removal Index. No, the problem, good intentions notwithstanding, is the approach taken by Maj. Shingledecker.
That was clear when she tried to justify her actions in a story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune.
For starters, the story raises questions about whom, exactly, Shingledecker is most interested in protecting:
Shingledecker says the agency and investigators there are liable if they leave a child in a home and something bad ultimately happens. "We come under the gun for, 'Why didn't we remove the child,'…”
More to the point, though Maj. Shingledecker undoubtedly means well, when it comes to the inherent harm of foster care, and the risk of abuse in foster care, it looks like Shingledecker doesn’t have a clue. According to the story, Shingledecker is willing to offer a deal, of sorts:
She says she is willing to leave more children in their homes -- as long as the social service interventions can "guarantee" the safety of the child to investigators.
Oh, is that all. Then how about holding yourself to a similar standard: You can keep your job, Major, if you can guarantee that no child you remove ever will turn out worse for the experience than had the child been left in his own home. You can keep your job, Major, if you can guarantee that no child ever will be abused in foster care on your watch. And you can keep your job, Major, if you can guarantee that no child ever will be harmed because the officer who should have spotted the problem was too busy dealing with a case where the child never needed to be taken in the first place.
Do we have a deal?
I didn’t think so. Because no sheriff or child welfare agency can guarantee that; any more than it can guarantee that every child it leaves in her or his own homes will never be abused – or have an accident.
But if you persist in remaining one of Florida’s last holdouts for a take the child and run approach, even as most of the rest of the state passes you by, there are some things I can guarantee:
--I guarantee that hundreds of children will be traumatized for life after being needlessly torn from everyone loving and familiar and bouncing from foster home to foster home. One major study found that only one in five former foster children does well in later life. Another found foster children typically fared far worse even than comparably maltreated children left in their own homes.
--I guarantee that many children who could have remained safely in their own homes instead will be abused in foster care. Several studies reveal abuse in one in three foster homes and the record of institutions is worse.
--I guarantee that more children in real danger will be missed because your officers are so busy dealing with children needlessly taken away. That’s why, for all your talk about safety, areas taking proportionately fewer children, such as Hillsborough, do a better job keeping them safe.
There is a term for mindlessly throwing one child after another into a foster care system we know churns out walking wounded four times out of five: It’s called child abuse. Guaranteed.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
UPDATED, MARCH 26: The “surge” that failed
There is an update at the end of this post
There's a very depressing number that wasn't available for a long time and now, finally, is public.
The latest issue of Child Welfare Watch a project of the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School and the Center for an Urban Future, has the number: 49. That's the number of child fatalities in cases previously known to the New York City Administration for Children's Services (ACS) in 2008. That's the highest single-year figure since 1993, which is as far back as I've ever been able to find data. And the total for the most recent three years, 134, is the worst three-year total.
That means, by the standard used most often by media and politicians, the "surge" in New York City has been a huge failure. What surge? The surge in "get tough" rhetoric from ACS, the surge in new policies encouraging things like automatic confiscation children born to mothers who already have children in foster care, and, most of all, the surge in removals of children from their homes – all of which followed the death of Nixzmary Brown in January, 2006.
I'm not terribly keen on using fatalities as a measure, even in New York City, one of the very few places where, arguably, the system is large enough to detect a pattern. But more reliable measures, reabuse of children left in their own homes and foster care "recidivism" also show that the surge has failed.
And, as anyone who has read this Blog from the beginning knows, none of this is hindsight.
Back in late 2005, when The New York Times was linking every death of a child "known to the system" to efforts to keep families together – and claiming that there had been a "series" of such deaths – we pointed out that there was no such series, the rate of such deaths was about the same as in previous years. (The reporter who made the claim later would famously explain that "it was a series – but not statistically.") We also said the most likely way to increase such deaths was to overload a child welfare system with false allegations, trivial cases and needless removals of children, therby making it even harder for caseworkers to find the children in real danger.
So now, entries into foster care are up 55 percent from their record low in 2005, and what does ACS have to show for it? A real series of deaths of children "known to the system" and a deterioration in more reliable measures of safety as well.
Meanwhile, ACS faces drastic budget cuts, the subject of a City Council hearing yesterday. According to the Times, "council members said laying off workers at the agency risked another disaster like the case of Nixzmary Brown …" which just goes to show the infinite capacity of some politicians for doublethink.
In fact, the disasters never stopped – the number of such disasters actually increased, with all those new workers simply chasing down all those new allegations. Now, some of the workers will be gone – with no change in the mentality that encourages anyone and everyone to report anything and everything, no matter how absurd, and no change in the pressure on the remaining workers to rush cases needlessly into court and take children first and ask questions later.
And the doublethink isn't limited to politicians. According to The Daily News, ACS "'looked at the system and said this is what's necessary to prevent [a case like Nixzmary Brown] from happening again,' said Jennifer Marino Rojas of the Children's Defense Fund. 'Now they're cutting back.'"
No, Ms. Rojas. The cases like Nixzmary Brown never stopped happening. You, and much of the media, stopped paying attention because the cases didn't fit the storyline: that ACS' get tough on families approach had somehow made things better. When it actually made things worse, everyone looked the other way.
Try to imagine what things would be like if ACS still were taking fewer than 5,000 children per year instead of more than 7,400. For starters, children would be safer, because workers would have more time to find the children in real danger.
But also, ACS would be spending less money. Because not only is keeping children in their own homes the better, safer option for most children most of the time, it also happens to cost less. A large chunk of the ACS budget gap is caused, in fact, by all that needless foster care and all that time and money spent dragging cases into court – because ACS workers are now so afraid to leave children in their own homes without a court backing them up.
The last time I wrote about ACS, I said it might be time to change the title of NCCPR's report on the agency. No doubt about it; that time has arrived.
UPDATE, MARCH 26: THE SPIN GETS DESPERATE AT ACS
Of course deaths of children known to the system have increased, ACS says, after all, there are more children actually known to the system.
But there is one big problem with that reasoning:
Depending on which set of numbers you use, the increase in reports since 2005 is anywhere from 23 percent to 26 percent. The increase in deaths of children previously known to ACS is from 50 to 60 percent.
Unfortunately, a story in today’s Times doesn’t allow for an apples-to-apples comparison – it compares the increase in reports from 2005 to 2008, but the increase in entries into care only from 2007 to 2008.
Second item from the ACS Department of Spin: We shouldn’t pay attention to deaths of children known to the system anymore, since some of them are accidents. Now ACS tells us we should pay attention only to homicides.
Hard to know where to begin on that one.
For starters, deaths of children known to the system has been the measure of choice for the media in New York ever since the Times claimed there had been a “series” of such deaths in late 2005, and blamed them on efforts to keep families together. (It also tends to be the measure of choice for media all over the country.) There was no such series – back then the rate of such deaths had been largely unchanged for several years.
Now that the deaths really have increased, even as ACS takes far more children, suddenly we’re supposed to ignore this number?
Actually, this isn't the first time ACS has tried to persuade New Yorkers to do just that. After the death of Elisa Izquierdo in 1995 was followed by a huge increase in removals of children - and an increase in deaths of children "known to the system" the agency pulled the same stunt. Here's how the Times reported the story back then.
Also, while a category like deaths known to the system can include some accidents, as the Daily News explains, looking only at those labeled homicide leaves out an enormous number of cases where ACS may have some culpability.
The way child abuse deaths are defined can be remarkably subjective. For instance: In a family with a history of alleged neglect, a toddler manages to get out the back door, wanders off and drowns. Accident or “neglect”? It may well depend on whether the water was a pond behind a trailer park (neglect) or the pool at a McMansion (accident). (See Drowning in Misinformation Jan. 6, 2008.)
And what do you think ACS would have said about using deaths of children “known to the system” as a measure had they gone down?
Finally, as I noted in the original post above, and every time I’ve commented on the spike in child fatalities in New York City since it first became known two years ago (and since NCCPR warned it was likely three years ago): I’d much rather use better measures such as foster care recidivism and rates of reabuse.
Those measures also have deteriorated since the surge in removals. Someone might want to ask ACS about that, if only to watch the spin machine go into overdrive.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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 19th Century.
And the people at ECM are right out of that 19th 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 21st 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 19th 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, 12th ranked Colorado and 13th 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.
(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 19th Century.
And the people at ECM are right out of that 19th 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 21st 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 19th 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, 12th ranked Colorado and 13th 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.
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