I’m scared when I hear a hard knock at the door. I think they are coming. I was scared to go to school because they will come to the school and remove me and put me in a foster home. All because if my Mom and Dad don’t do what they want, never mind they are not abusing us.
I will be so glad when I am 18 and my brother is 18. Then I know [no one] will never be able to put us in a foster home again.
Those
words were written in 2006 by a 14-year-old
girl who’d already endured needless foster care placement once. A
caseworker decided her mother couldn’t cope with being a single parent, holding
a job and going to college. In 2006, the family was under investigation again –
because the school system lost some records.
The girl’s mother also wrote about the experience:
As soon as they heard the loud knock on the door my children knew it was [child protective services]. And they were scared. It’s amazing how a hard knock on the door can only mean one of two things – or maybe both – in certain neighborhoods.
The Knock That is Now the Norm
Even
more amazing, and more horrifying: the findings from a new study that attempts to estimate how often
children hear that loud knock on the door. If you’re black, it’s more likely
than not that it will be a part of your childhood. The study estimates that 53
percent of African-American children will be subjected to a child abuse
investigation before they turn 18.
It will happen to 32 percent of Hispanic children. It even will
happen to 28 percent of white children. In all, the study estimates, more than
a third of all American children will endure the knock on the door and all that
follows.
The study does not break down the figures by income level. We
can only imagine the percentage of poor children for whom this trauma is a
typical part of childhood.
Of course, the fear of that knock on the door is likely to be
greatest in cases where a child has already been consigned needlessly to
the chaos of foster care before, such as the 14-year-old quoted above. She was
repeatedly abused in foster care. But even when it does not result in removal,
a child abuse investigation is not a benign act.
At a minimum, children endure the trauma of strangers coming to
their home, asking about the most intimate aspects of their lives, turning the
house upside down, and leaving everyone in fear. If the allegation is physical
or sexual abuse, the children may be subjected to a strip search and an
intrusive medical examination. If anyone else did that, it would be sexual
abuse.
That
one should even have to point out that a child abuse investigation is traumatic
for a child is testament to the willful blindness about race and class that
permeates child welfare. Most of the time, when a black man is forced up
against a wall by police and frisked, it doesn’t result in arrest. But only
right-wing extremists dismiss the trauma of stop-and-frisk as harmless.
Of
course, if you’ve already convinced yourself that a child abuse investigation
is no big deal, it’s easier to oppose any change in the process to make it even a
little less traumatic.
When Appalling Findings Don’t Appall
But
there is something even more appalling than the actual findings: the fact that
the researchers were not appalled. On the contrary, approaching child welfare
as a public health problem and not a social justice problem, the
researchers blithely suggest that their findings mean child abuse is rampant,
and the fact that 78 percent of allegations don’t even meet the extremelylow criteria for “substantiation” is irrelevant.
How do
they know? Because some surveys in which questionnaires are administered
to children and youth find that a whole lot of them have been maltreated in
some way. One survey cited claims that 38.1
percent of children experienced “maltreatment.” But the actual questions posed by that
survey use some very broad definitions. Here’s the question about “neglect”:
When someone is neglected, it means that the grown-ups in their life didn’t take care of them the way they should. They might not get them enough food, take them to the doctor when they are sick, or make sure they have a safe place to stay. At any time in your life, did you get neglected?
They might as well have asked “At any time in your life were you
poor?”
The
researchers also cite a study which purports to show that the rate at which children are
re-abused is about the same whether the first report was substantiated or not.
But the researchers neglect to mention that the rate of alleged re-abuse in
either case was very low – between 4.5 percent and 18 percent, depending on how
one counts.
So even
taking the substantiation study at face value, it merely tells us what we
already know: substantiation decisions are arbitrary, capricious and cruel, and
whether a case is substantiated depends more on factors such as which
caseworker shows up at the door, the race of the family, and whether there was a high profile fatality in the news
recently than on any objective measure of maltreatment.
The findings in the new study of exposure to child abuse
investigations suggest not an epidemic of child abuse, but rather an epidemic
of false reports and over-investigation.
British researchers understood that after
they found similar staggering rates of investigation, and looked at them
without the willful blindness that sometimes characterizes their American
counterparts.
So here is a modest proposal for helping to open some eyes. The
next time researchers embark on one of those grand surveys asking young people
about the trauma in their lives, they should add this question: “Were you ever
the subject of an investigation of a false report of child abuse?”
They can grab a bunch of headlines by reporting that the rate of
“emotional abuse” has skyrocketed.
