Our annual reminder: If it's April Fools', it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , MOST RECENT UPDATE:  MARCH 21, 2026.

Back in 2003, one of the groups most responsible for fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse came remarkably close to admitting that they did just that – and that it had backfired. 

Rather like Dr. Frankenstein admitting he’d created a monster, in a 2003 Request for Proposals concerning how to improve their messaging, Prevent Child Abuse America wrote: 

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities. 

In 2020, PCAA went further. They actually branded what they had done “health terrorism” – but refused to apologize for it. 

This is especially worth remembering as we begin “Child Abuse Awareness Month” – a month, which, appropriately, starts on April Fools Day. 

So I’ve reprinted below our 2010 blog post on the topic – with some updates and links to newer data – since, unfortunately, aside from those data, little has changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under control.

If it's April Fools', it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op-ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse. 

There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fools' Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real nature of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op-ed column follows a standard formula: 

1.  1. Take the most horrifying case to occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.

2.   2. Jump immediately from that story to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports" alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror story. Rather, they often involve the confusion of poverty with neglect. Or…

3.   3.  Use only the total number of cases that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed," giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on a form, far more credibility than they deserve. A major federal study found that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.

4.   4. Pile hype onto hype by reasserting the racist, discredited COVID-19 “pandemic of child abuse” myth.  (Now that we know child abuse actually went down when COVID forced the family police to step back, and simply because memories of COVID are fading, that myth seems to pop up less often.)

5.    5. Throw in huge lists of "symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be "signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number of other things.

6.     6. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of cautioning us about the harm of even well-meaning false reports and advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" actual maltreatment - not poverty -- the same standard theoretically used in law to guide "mandated reporters."  

      7. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity. (Fortunately, in most cases in Texas and New York, you can't do that anymore.)

Of course, given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, in recent years the usual op-eds have included token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as these establishment groups propose making a profoundly racist family policing system, one that will, at some point investigate the families of more than half of America's Black children, even bigger and more powerful.  But watch what they do, not what they say.  Are they proposing anything that would actually curb the power of the family police, or just tacking on the usual “prevention” programs and blathering about “more training."

All of this can do enormous harm to children.  

Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.  

Reality check 

NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions: 

·        -- Issue papers on Understanding Child Abuse Numbers, False Allegations: What the Data Really Show. The Failure of Mandatory Reporting,  and many more.

·        -- Solutions pages: Our Due Process Agenda, Doing Child Welfare Right and the NCCPR Good Bill Bank.

·        -- Our presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health approach. And our warning to be cautious when you hear the phrase "child and family well-being system."

If the people behind "Child Abuse Awareness Month"  (also known as "Child Abuse Prevention Month") really want to prevent "child abuse" then how about campaigning to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty?  

Poverty increases the stress that can lead to actual abuse and, as noted above, poverty itself often is confused with "neglect." This can be seen by the fact that study after study shows even small increases in income significantly reduce what child welfare systems call "neglect."

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness" campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems even worse.

If only there were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.

NCCPR in Cal Matters: California shouldn’t bail out beleaguered foster family agencies

California’s private foster care agencies are running back to Sacramento, demanding another taxpayer bailout to cover rising insurance costs. Cal Matters reported recently that the state’s foster family agencies want another $30 million, on top of the $31.5 million they got last year. 

One of the many reasons these agencies should not get a bailout — or any other help — can be found in the very reason they’re in trouble: … 

Read the full column in Cal Matters 

NCCPR in the Louisiana Illuminator: Who’s doing child welfare better than Louisiana? Here’s the answer.

Confronted with the failure of the Department of Children and Family Services, lawmakers and administrators in Louisiana have responded the way they do in most states … None of this worked. It never does. But at least now one Louisiana lawmaker, Sen. Thomas Pressly, is asking the right question.

“Someone has to be doing it better,” Pressly asked DCFS Secretary Rebecca Harris last week,  wanting to know who. … 

Read the answer, and the full column, in the Louisiana Illuminator

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 25, 2026

We start this week with three items from New York City, and my usual reminder: New York has one of the least bad systems in the country; wherever you are, it’s probably worse.

● You know how family police agencies love to say, “We can’t remove children – only a judge can do that!” It is, of course, a lie. And here, first from Gothamist and then the New York Post, is the latest example: 

A lawsuit alleges that an 11-month-old was torn from the arms of her mother and taken away, screaming “mama” – cries that could be heard a block away -- after the city family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, decided there was no safety threat in the home. The mother was never so much as accused of abuse or neglect. Nobody asked a judge first. When a judge did get to hear the case, five days after the removal, the judge ordered the child returned, but still placed the mother under months of onerous surveillance. This kind of never-mind-the-judge-just-take-the-child-and-run removal happens in half of all entries into foster care in New York City. 

● A new commissioner for ACS could change that. In the Daily News, Sandy Santana, executive director of Children’s Rights, writes about the kind of leader Mayor Zohran Mamdani should be looking for: 

The next commissioner must be willing to acknowledge past failures, center the voices of youth and families who have experienced the system’s harm, and prioritize racial justice in every decision. They must understand that supporting families and protecting children are aligned, not competing priorities. Without this type of bold leadership, the results are predictable: families investigated for material hardship and over-burdened systems that miss opportunities to keep children safe. 

● The federal Family First Act reimburses only a small group of “preventive services,” – and that small group does not include what most families need most: concrete help. But, the New York City Family Policy Project and Action Research point out, once the federal reimbursement comes in, those funds can be used for all the good stuff Family First itself won’t fund. The amounts are small, and not every state is even participating, but it’s a small opportunity that shouldn’t go to waste. Though the data are specific to New York, the principle applies in any state. 

In other news: 

● At a recent legislative hearing in Louisiana, one lawmaker, frustrated with the failures of the state family police agency, said “Someone has to be doing it better.” He wanted to know who. NCCPR answers his question in the Louisiana Illuminator.

● Maryland is going to spend more than $1 billion over five years to fund 637 beds for foster children. At that price, we’re not talking family foster homes, we’re talking institutionalization. You can guess who will be disproportionately institutionalized. I thought of that when I read this column in The Imprint from two former top officials of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services. It shows how this kind of horror goes back centuries. 

● Former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin has been held in contempt for failing to provide financial records to a court hearing a case brought by his estranged Ethiopian adopted son. As the Kentucky Lantern reports, Jonah Bevin “alleges his affluent parents abandoned him at age 17 in a brutally abusive youth facility in Jamaica.” Jonah is now seeking financial support. 

And, the Kentucky Lantern reports, there’s also this: 

Three Republican lawmakers have filed a bill that would bar children from intervening in a parent’s divorce case and limit their ability to obtain child support. … While the proposed bill doesn’t mention the parents’ divorce pending in Jefferson Family Court, the legislation tracks developments in the case in which Jonah Bevin, now 19, has intervened and is seeking support. 

Two of the bill’s three sponsors, Rep. Steven Doan, R-Erlanger, and Rep. John Hodgson, R-Fisherville, worked in the Bevin administration …

NCCPR in Youth Today: Children suffer when child welfare ignores the evidence base

In an evidence-based world, one recent landmark study of foster care would be enough to give America’s child welfare establishment second thoughts. Add to that a second study — with findings the study author called “staggering” — and it should be enough to turn the entire system on its head. 

These studies undermine the entire rationale for a child welfare surveillance apparatus so huge that more than one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children, will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18 — and almost always it will turn out to be a false allegation or a case in which family poverty is confused with neglect. And though entries into foster care have declined in recent years, more than 170,000 children are torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care every year. … 

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 18, 2026

● As I approach the 50^th anniversary of my first work on this issue as a reporter, I can add another to the “I never thought I would see it in my lifetime” file: The Ethicist columnist for The New York Times telling a writer she may well have done the right thing by not reporting a family to the family police. From his response: 

This probably wouldn’t be a hard call if we all trusted the ability of social services to intervene — and to refrain from intervening — thoughtfully and protectively. After all, child abuse and neglect take place on a distressing scale. In an ideal world, you could note the car’s plate number, report what you’d seen and be confident that you were more likely to help than harm. A widespread concern, though, is that C.P.S. can do a great deal of damage; indeed, some child-welfare experts have concluded that, on net, these programs do more harm than good. 

A big problem is that C.P.S.’s most powerful instrument is family separation, which can be traumatic for both children and parents. Despite efforts to reduce reliance on it, a built-in asymmetry of blame can lead to overuse. Headlines and public outrage can ensue when a caseworker makes a judgment that leaves a child in a dangerous situation; there’s seldom much notice when a caseworker makes a judgment that unnecessarily separates a family. As one social-policy expert has put it, this imbalance of incentives means that those in the child-protection sector aren’t so much “risk averse” as “risk-to-self averse.”[Emphasis added.] 

● One of the reasons attitudes toward the child welfare surveillance state at last are changing is because the evidence of the harm this approach has done keeps piling up. In Youth Today, I discuss two recent landmark studies, the one showing that taking away more children does nothing to curb child abuse deaths, and the one showing that, when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, the foster children were more than four times more likely to die by age 20.

● The Imprint reports on the failure of still another attempt to overturn the federal Indian Child Welfare Act,this time in state court in Minnesota. In the case at issue, Native children were first placed with white strangers, then moved to the care of relatives. From the story: 

According to the most recent report to the court from guardian ad litem McKenzie Borth, in 2024, “the twins were thriving in their grandmother’s care.” The grandmother is a member of the Red Lake Nation who lives close to their doctors and who also cares for their half-sister. The twins have weekly visits with their biological mother, who lives in the same neighborhood, the children’s guardian reported. 

But the white strangers have been trying to take the children away from their Native family. 

● In Cleveland, an injustice so blatant even a CASA can’t stomach it: accusing parents of educational neglect because they don’t have a way to get their children to school.  In Cleveland.com, the CASA writes: 

Blaming parents is the wrong approach. … The Cleveland mom described above knows the value of education. She knows every missed day is a setback. But without a car, she is stranded by a system that treats transportation as an afterthought rather than the foundation of opportunity.

● WBAL-TV Baltimore reports on how a family Miranda bill, known in Maryland as “Know before They Knock,” would make the state’s most vulnerable children safer.

● The Imprint reports on how some police in Upstate New York are getting around a law barring them from arresting children under age 12 – they’re arresting the mothers.  Well, not all mothers. From the story: 

“It appears that it’s being used, unsurprisingly, to prosecute Black and brown mothers,” said Bernadette Rabuy, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union. … 

The three upstate cases lay bare the “unconscionable lack of investment in non-punitive community-based services for children and families in New York,” said José Perez, program strategist at Children’s Defense Fund New York. If the response to the 2021 law is to arrest parents, “we have not changed the mindset. We have just changed the target.” 

● Have you noticed all the differences between how Trump talks about immigrants and how those fanatical about throwing more children into #fostercare talk about parents? Yeah, neither have I. I have a blog post about it. 

● WLVT-TV has another story about that obscene Tennessee bill to allow the state family police agency to effectively jail foster children pretty much whenever they damn well feel like it. I have a blog post about the bill. 

● The Imprint’s Youth Voices Rising section features this account from a foster care survivor:  

This is foster care’s quiet failure. It’s not the big scandals that make headlines, but the daily harm that gets ignored because it looks like improvement. Adults get checks to take care of other people’s kids the way they see fit. Kids live with the consequences and are told they’re “lucky.” 

● San Antonio Report has a close look at a new program to help families in Texas facing the family police get legal aid from the moment an investigation begins. Among other things, this might help curb the widespread use of hidden foster care in Texas. 

● We’ve updated our index comparing the propensity of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties to tear apart families. Once again, the worst, by far, is Phoenix, Arizona. I have a blog post about it with a link to the data. 

There are three stories about accountability in the news: 

● Mississippi Today reports that state may become the next to open court hearings in child welfare cases to the media and the public. NCCPR estimates that at least 40% of America’s foster children live in states where these hearings are open. In many cases, they’ve been open for decades, and none of the fears of critics has come to pass. In Mississippi, a lot of opposition is coming from judges who apparently don’t want to see their “informal”, closed little club that passes for a court system. But to her credit, the head of the state child welfare agency favors the change. 

● In The Imprint, Valerie Frost, a longtime advocate in Kentucky, writes about the  harm done in that state and everywhere else when the vast power of family police agencies is accompanied by no real accountability: 

Families, meanwhile, experience life-altering interventions with little recourse when mistakes are made. Internal investigations often prioritize institutional risk management over systemic learning. Families are held to strict standards; agencies are not. … A system designed to protect children cannot function ethically when it resists transparency and shields itself from scrutiny. When agencies face no meaningful consequences for error or misconduct, families become collateral damage. 

● Speaking of issues involving accountability in Kentucky: In 2012, businessman Matt Bevin and his then-wife adopted a five-year-old boy, one of four adopted from Ethiopia. They named him Jonah. I’ll bet he was adorable. Three years later, Bevin would become Governor of Kentucky, prompted to run, he claimed, in part because the adoption process was so hard. In 2019, the Bevins were still promoting adoption and explaining on a podcast that “God called us to Ethiopia.” But once he turned 13, Jonah says, he was sent away to various out-of-state institutions. 

And by 2023 or thereabouts, if the now young adult’s charges are true, the Bevins apparently didn’t seem to find him quite so adorable. As the Kentucky Lantern reports: 

Jonah Bevin alleges his wealthy parents abandoned him at age 17 in a brutally abusive youth facility in Jamaica, closed in 2024 by child welfare officials, leaving him with no resources or education. 

The Bevins deny everything. Again from the Kentucky Lantern: 

Matt Bevin, in a [court] filing … said Jonah’s claims of neglect, abandonment and abuse “are not grounded in fact or law and are, instead, intended to garner media attention and outrage.” 

Now, Jonah is seeking financial assistance from his wealthy adoptive parents. His lawyers are seeking to hold Matt Bevin in contempt for allegedly failing to provide financial information. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions 

● From WRAL-TV in North Carolina: 

Woman worries for sons in foster care after one was murdered, allegedly by adoptive mother 

Felicia Chandler is feeling deep pain because in addition to her son Blake's death, her surviving sons who also lived with him are in foster care, including one about to age out of the system.

Congratulations Phoenix: When it comes to tearing apart families in big cities, you’re still #1!

 

Bipartisanship in action! In Arizona both parties have failed the state's children

(This post is adapted from NCCPR’s press release to Arizona media.) 

NCCPR has updated its Big CityRate-of-Removal Index, comparing the propensity of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties, to tear apart families. Once again, the champion for big-city family destruction, metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona. 

Children are at greater risk of being torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care in Phoenix than in any other of America’s largest cities. It’s a long, ugly tradition. 

Year after year, the Department of Child Safety, Arizona’s family police agency (a more accurate term than ‘child welfare’ agency), cuts a swath of destruction through poor families in Phoenix at a vastly higher rate than any other such agency does in any other of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties. 

And while it’s all done in the name of ‘child safety,’ of course, the DCS take-the-child-and-run mentality makes all children less safe. The mentality was revealed to the nation in 2020 when workers in a DCS office thought it would be a laugh riot to wear matching t-shirts emblazoned with the words ‘Professional Kidnapper.’ The workers were fired, but the data show the mentality remains. 

NCCPR’s Big City Rate-of-Removal Index compares the number of children thrown into foster care to the impoverished child population in America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties. Maricopa County (metropolitan Phoenix) is an extreme outlier. Children are taken from their parents in Maricopa County at a rate: 

● 50% percent higher than the second-worst region – Santa Clara County.

● More than 60% higher than the third worst, Los Angeles County.

● Nearly two-and-a-half times the national average for big cities.

● More than triple the rate of New York City.

● Nearly six times the rate of Chicago. 

There is no evidence that Phoenix is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than any other big city in America. Rather, this is evidence of a take-the-child-and-run mentality, rooted in racial and class bias, that has plagued child welfare in Arizona for decades. 

The problem is compounded by Arizona’s overreliance on the worst, and most dangerous, form of care – group homes and institutions. Arizona institutionalizes 41% of children entering foster care, a rate more than two-and-a-half times the national average. 

You may be sure that DCS will respond to the facts about its abysmal performance with the Big Lie of American child welfare: the false claim that child removal equals child safety. 

But the Big Lie ignores:

● The mass of research showing that, in typical cases, not the horror stories, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children thrown into foster care. That research includes a stunning recent study showing that, under these circumstances, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to die.

● The mass of research showing high rates of abuse in foster homes and even higher rates of abuse in group homes and institutions – all those news accounts about the horrors of Arizona group homes and institutions are not aberrations.

● The mass of research showing that poverty is routinely confused with neglect. The research is confirmed by data from Arizona, where, in 87% of cases in which children were thrown into foster care, there was not even an accusation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In fact, Arizona took away more children because of inadequate housing than for physical and sexual abuse combined. In 62% there was not even an accusation of any form of drug or alcohol abuse – not just no accusation of meth or fentanyl, no accusation of any drug or alcohol abuse of any kind.

All this does enormous harm to the children needlessly taken – and also to those who might be spared foster care but still face the enormous trauma of a child abuse investigation – which involves a traumatic interrogation and, sometimes, a stripsearch. Almost always, this trauma is inflicted as a result of a false report or a poverty case. Nationwide, more than half of all Black children will be forced to endure this trauma at some point in their childhoods. But Arizona is different. In Arizona, it’s two-thirds.

But these aren’t the only children harmed. All the time, money and effort wasted harming children in these cases is, in effect, stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger. That’s almost always the real reason such children are overlooked, leading to the horror stories that, rightly, make headlines. That’s how the Arizona approach makes all children less safe.

Actions by Gov. Katie Hobbs have compounded the problems. These actions include:

● Giving a giant rate increase to a politically-connected group home operator.

● Giving a giant pay raise to foster parents – and, in effect, making poor people pay for it.

● Taking away support for the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, in which children are placed with extended family.

But the governor’s political opponents have no cause to gloat. In a rare example of bipartisanship, governors and legislators from both parties have been failing Arizona’s vulnerable children for decades, something we documented in a report we released on Arizona child welfare in 2007.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In other states, lawmakers and state leaders have worked across party lines to curb needless removal and make all children safer. In Texas, for example, with strong bipartisan support, lawmakers raised the threshold for coercive intervention into families. In New York and New Jersey, governments bolstered high-quality legal defense for families – not to get “bad parents” off but to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter ‘service plans’ churned out by agencies like DCS. For more solutions, see NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda and for more examples of strong legislation see the NCCPR Good Bill Bank. Together, these bills and other solutions create a true blueprint for child safety.

They represent ways Arizona could turn its system around and make all children safer. All it needs is the will to finally renounce the take-the-child-and-run mentality that has made all of the state’s children less safe.