- Recommendations now being finalized by the "Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities" would create a regime of domestic spying that would make the NSA blush
Today, NCCPR releases a report analyzing draft recommendations from the federal "Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities."
The analysis responds primarily to two documents containing
draft recommendations from the Commission, available here and here. Other parts of the analysis are based on recent public
meetings of the Commission held via conference call.
We realize some might wonder why we are responding to
recommendations before they are final.
But we’re sure the Commission will understand. After all, the entire theme of their work is
the need to try to stop harm before it occurs.
Below, is the introduction to the report. The full report is available here.
It is, of course the most noble of
goals: eliminating child abuse and neglect fatalities. But a commission created by a federal law and
charged with recommending ways to achieve those goals is debating draft recommendations
that, if enacted, are doomed to fail. They
would harm hundreds of thousands of children who were never maltreated and
actually make it less likely that children in real danger will be found in time.
We
estimate that just one of the recommendations from the “Commission to Eliminate
Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities” probably would add more than 800,000 new
child abuse investigations every year – a 44 percent increase. One Commission document
appears to say that this recommendation alone would cost more than $1 billion,
at another point it was suggested that the cost for all recommendations would
be at least $4 billion per year – and even that may be just the amount the
Commission wants the federal government to supply. These funds would have to be taken from far
better approaches to reducing child abuse.
And the additional 800,000 investigations would inundate the system, so
overloading workers that they actually would wind up missing more children in
real danger.
Another
recommendation, the one the Commission appears most proud of, would require Child
Protective Services (CPS) to go back and reconsider every open case in which
they decided to leave a child in her or his own home. Some commissioners are calling it a “surge;”
others prefer “accelerant.” (There are a
number of variations on this floating around – some say it would be every open
case with certain risk factors – but all versions target only children left in
their own homes.) This appears to be
based on the false assumption that at least if the child is in foster care,
that child is safe. The high rates of abuse in foster
care indicate
otherwise.
This recommendation gives no weight to
the enormous emotional trauma of foster care, trauma so great that two huge studies found that children left in their own
homes fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster
care.
And once again it would
divert time, energy and resources from far better options. One
state that tried this approach wound up with a huge increase in its foster care
population – and an increase in child
abuse deaths.
Indeed, if the
Commission’s top priority is child safety, it should be calling first and
foremost for a review of every child in foster care to see if the child really
needs to be there.
Still another recommendation, discussed below, reveals
the same sort of racial and class biases as permeate the child
welfare system itself.
All of the members of the Commission
have the best of intentions; some have an excellent track record as child
welfare reformers. But strip away the rhetoric and the jargon and all that the Commission
really is recommending is more of the same: a vast expansion of the current failed
child protective services bureaucracy that already wreaks havoc in the lives of
millions of innocent families even as it overlooks children in real
danger.
The Commission added a dystopian, 21st
Century twist. They appear to justify
the draft recommendations based on the
notion that science has advanced to the point where the same sorts of
algorithms that Netflix uses to predict which movies you want to see also can
tell us where CPS workers can barge into a home and, often, take away the
children.
It
is much like the model depicted in the science fiction film Minority Report, in which people are
arrested and jailed based on the predictions of three psychics in a bathtub. But instead of seeing that film as a warning,
the Commission seems to view it as a blueprint.
But
what the Commission does is even worse.
At least the algorithms are, in theory, tailored to individual
circumstances (though anyone looking at their suggestions list from Netflix may
question that). The Commission is
proposing wholesale changes in law, changes that would apply to millions of
Americans, based on wild extrapolations from studies of individual risk
factors.
 |
| The commission uses the same sort of fear-mongering as Donald Trump to justify its recommendations. Photo by Gage Skidmore |
The rationale behind these recommendations echoes the
worst excesses of the so-called war on terror.
Terrorists kill innocent men, women – and children. So demagogues like Donald Trump propose that
we prevent all Muslims from entering America. Most of the members of the Commission
probably found Trump’s proposal appalling.
But it is remarkable how often otherwise sensible people resort to Trump’s kind of fear-mongering
and extremism when
the topic is child abuse.
In this case, the draft
recommendations use the same justification as Trump – the killing of innocent
children - to justify allowing CPS workers to barge into hundreds of thousands
of homes where the evidence of maltreatment is so weak that child abuse
hotlines did not even accept the call for investigation. They use Trump’s logic to try to justify
their proposed “surge” – with Trump-style disregard for the massive collateral
damage it would cause. And they use Trump
logic for what appears to be a call for changes in state law that would allow
CPS workers to conduct traumatic investigations of children, have the children
stripsearched, and consign those children to the chaos of foster care, all
based on a hunch that and at some point in the future someone in that home
might abuse or neglect a child.
In Minority Report,
this was known as “pre-crime.”
Still another draft recommendation might expand the
authority of CPS workers to remove children in one of the places where such
removal hurts children the most – when a parent has been a victim of domesticviolence.
And like the child
welfare system itself, the recommendations reflect profound bias. One recommendation calls for universal drug
testing for pregnant mothers whose birth is paid for by Medicaid – in other
words, mothers who are poor. The Commission member whose lobbying led to
creation of the Commission, and who has been the strongest supporter of the
most draconian recommendations, Michael Petit, once
told a Congressional committee that, when it comes to preventing child
abuse “the states that do the best overall are the ones that have smaller, whiter populations” [emphasis added]. During that same testimony, Petit perpetuated
stereotypes about minorities and drug abuse.
A transcript of the December 3, 2015 Commission
meeting reveals Petit still trying to minimize the
role of racial bias
in the disproportionate rate at which African-American and Native American
children are taken from their homes.
Indeed, in a dialogue with another commissioner, Cook County Judge
Patricia Martin, the presiding judge of the Court’s Child Protection Division, Petit
seems to have difficulty even grasping the concept. (For details, see the previous post to this blog.)
Even
if one thinks it’s worth this massive undermining of civil liberties in order
to reduce child abuse fatalities, there is another problem with this approach:
It will backfire. In fact, it already
has. All over the country, high-profile
child abuse deaths have led to demands to investigate more cases and take away
more children. That’s led to foster-care
panics – sharp sudden
spikes in removals of children from their homes. Over and over, these panics have been
followed by increases in child abuse deaths.
The draft recommendations are a formula for
a nationwide foster-care panic, on a massive scale.
The
Commission recommendations involve a huge increase in the number of people to
be investigated and spied upon by child protective services agencies. We know that state and local governments
aren’t going to raise taxes to pay the more than $1 billion per year or $4
billion per year or maybe much more that this will require. Rather, they will turn to one of two
alternatives: They will cut back on other human services programs – programs
that are far more likely to curb child abuse – or they will simply increase the
workload of existing staff.
Indeed,
at a time when Congress finally is giving serious consideration to allowing
funds now reserved for foster care to be used for safe, proven prevention and
family preservation programs as well, there are Commissioners who seem to have
their eye on that pot of money as a way to fund child abuse investigations
instead. (There was a somewhat vague,
general discussion of this during a Commission conference call on January 16.)
Either
way, it backfires. If you cut effective
child abuse prevention programs the result is obvious: more child abuse. If you overload staff they have less time to
investigate any case properly, so they make more snap judgments in all
directions. So even as more children are
taken needlessly from their homes, more children also are left in danger.
