Remember the Keystone Kops of Commissions? Its official name was the Commission to
Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities.
But its entire process was marked by secrecy, chaos, anger, racial bias and a proclivity for making decisions based on newspaper horror stories. So
instead of studying the child welfare system, the commission essentially recreated the child welfare system.
Now a member of the commission, Teri Covington,
is trying to salvage the commission’s reputation by essentially giving the
commission credit for almost anything that anyone is doing, or planning to do,
that might have something to do with reducing child abuse deaths.
So Covington declares
in The Hill that, thanks to the
commission “a tremendous amount of progress and change” has occurred.
Normally when one reads that “a tremendous amount
of progress and change” been made in dealing with a problem, one expects
evidence that the problem actually has been solved – or at least ameliorated.
But for the Commission the standards are far
lower. In lavishing praise on
her own work Covington cites no evidence that there are actually fewer child
abuse deaths. The most recent federal
data, while
not terribly reliable, and only from 2016, actually suggest an increase in such deaths.
Instead, Covington devotes her column largely to
bragging about how states are throwing paperwork at the problem. Some places have prevention plans! One even has a strategic plan!
The good news: Few seem to take the commission seriously
In one sense this really is good news. Because if
states were implementing the worst of the actual recommendations of the Commission, (and, sadly, here and there that is happening) our
child welfare system would be even worse than it is now.
The Commission assumed that child abuse
fatalities could be isolated from larger problems and predicted in
advance. As Child Trends, among others, has explained, they
can’t. The reason for that is one for which we all should be grateful. Though
each is the worst imaginable tragedy, the number is too small to detect
meaningful patterns.
Even if you double the officially-reported number
of child abuse fatalities you get 3,400 – out of 73,600,000 Americans under
age 18. That’s a tiny number of needles in a gigantic haystack.
Yes, you can try to isolate this or that “risk
factor” – but where that risk factor exists it means only that the chances of a
child dying go from infinitesimal to ever-so-slightly less infinitesimal. And you risk wreaking havoc in an enormous number of families who happen to have the same "risk factor" but are not about to harm any children.
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| You'll never find the needles by trying to vacuum up the haystack |
Though couched in the soothing rhetoric of
prevention, the Commission recommendations are all about trying to vacuum up
the haystack - scarring far more children who were never actually abused by
inflicting traumatic
investigations and, often, stripsearches and creating a regime of domestic
surveillance that would make the NSA blush.
All that would only further overload child welfare systems, actually increasing
the chances that children in real danger will be missed.
It also would further overload foster care,
filling more foster homes with children who don’t need to be there,
notwithstanding the two massive studies
that found that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes fared
better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. And it
would further lower the quality of foster care, where already study after study has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of
foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even
higher.
700,000 more useless investigations
Consider just one recommendation: Right now,
child abuse hotlines screen millions of calls every year. The standards for screening-in
calls are incredibly low, yet, after investigation 83 percent of screened-in
allegations turn out to be false. (And you know that oft-repeated claim that the reports aren't false, child protective services just couldn't "prove" abuse or neglect? That's also false.)
Yet, as we discuss in our analysis of the Commission report, the Commission recommended that every call
about a child under age 3, no matter how absurd, be investigated with no
screening at all. That would add at least 700,000 additional investigations per
year – a 39 percent increase for the average caseworker.
Still another recommendation, which the
commission called a “surge” or an “accelerant” until they realized that wouldbe bad p.r., would reopen thousands more cases based on the flimsiest
criteria. Again, as we discuss in our
response, the one time a state actually tried this it backfired; child abuse
deaths increased.
The commission also rushed to embrace the latest
fad in child welfare – predictive
analytics. Think of it as Big Brother meets the movie Minority Report. It’s already in use in
criminal justice – and, in a comprehensive investigation, ProPublica already has found it rife with racial bias.
The commission itself was willfully blind to the massive
problem of racial bias in child welfare – voting down one recommendation
after another to deal with it. The recommendations came from one of only two
African-American members of the commission, Judge Patricia Martin.
That should be no surprise. Michael Petit, the
commissioner who came up with the idea for the commission, and who was most
fervent in advocating what amounts to a take-the-child-and-run approach to
child welfare, once told a Congressional committee that the places doing the
best jobs of preventing child abuse are the ones with “smaller, whiter populations.” During commission
deliberations his condescension
toward Judge Martin was deeply disturbing.
The digital poorhouse
In child welfare, predictive analytics is one
pillar of what Prof. Virginia Eubanks, in her book Automating Inequality, calls “the digital poorhouse.” Ultimately, many of those pushing the use of predictive analytics in child welfare want to assign a risk score to every child at birth. Eubanks’
devastating critique of what is actually the least harmful version, in Allegheny
County, Pa. was just excerpted in Wired.
The model the Commission endorsed, called Rapid
Safety Feedback, may well be worse. Covington brags that seven states adopted it.
She neglects to mention that one of them, Illinois, already has dropped it,
after it failed spectacularly.
Even the agency that invented Rapid Safety Feedback never claimed it could predict who would kill a child. And one of the nation’s
leading proponents of predictive analytics specifically warned the commission
that no predictive analytics model could do that.
The commission left that out of its report. To
find it you have to look in the scathing dissent
published by Judge Martin, after, she says, the commission chair threatened to
censor any dissents he didn’t like – still another example of how the
commission proved to be at least as dysfunctional as
the child welfare system itself.
Better solutions
The only acceptable goal for child abuse
fatalities is zero. But approaching that goal requires a radically different
approach than the one recommended by the commission. It requires learning from a study of what does
and does not reduce child abuse deaths. That study found:
●The rate at which people report child abuse does
not change the number of child abuse deaths.
●The rate at which a state screens reports for
investigation does not change the number of child abuse deaths.
●The rate at which a state takes children from
their parents does not change the number of child abuse deaths.
The same report found three key factors that do
correlate with higher rates of child abuse deaths:
●High rates of poverty
●High rates of teen pregnancy
● Low rates of services to prevent child
maltreatment.
That means, of course, if we take some of the
millions of dollars states waste investigating false reports, initiating
“surges,” and consigning children to needless foster care whenever there is a
high-profile tragedy, and spend it instead on proven
prevention programs that focus on ameliorating the worst effects of
poverty, then, finally, we might see a decline in child abuse deaths that’s
significant and sustained. (And no, a new federal law, the Family First Act
won’t really do that.)
We might also reduce the burden on caseworkers
caused by chasing down all those false allegations and
poverty-confused-with-neglect cases, giving them a better chance to find the
needles in that giant haystack, reducing child abuse deaths still further.
