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Our entire massive child welfare surveillance state – a system so omnipresent that it will investigate the families of one-third of all American children and more than half of Black children – was never built on science. It didn’t grow based on research showing that this approach will make children safer.
It was fed, and grew to its current monstrous proportions, almost exclusively on horror stories.
Over and over, child abuse fatalities among children “known to the system,” horrors as rare as they are tragic, were exploited to call for ever more investigations and the removal of ever more children to foster care. It never worked; but that never mattered.
As we have begun to catch on, as some states have passed laws curbing the reach of the child welfare surveillance state, the invocation of horror stories has become even more desperate. Think of that one person to whom your local media turn time and time again. Maybe it’s your “Senator (or Representative) Soundbite” – the state legislators who worm their way into every story. Maybe it’s the state child welfare ombudsman or “child advocate.” Maybe it’s the head of a trade association for group homes or residential treatment centers. Sometimes, sadly, it’s the journalists themselves.
The message is always the same - some version of: If you don’t investigate even more families and take away even more children, more children will die!
The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero. But there is no evidence that exploiting such fatalities to create the current system, no evidence that investigating ever more families, and no evidence that taking away more children, has ever done a damn thing to curb child deaths – even as it caused enormous collateral damage. And now there is evidence that the system itself may cause more children to die.
The evidence comes in the form of a stunning study from Sweden. The study determined the fate of children involved in 21,000 cases, comparing those placed in foster care to comparably- maltreated children left in their own homes. (Note the part about comparably-maltreated. No, the foster youth did not suffer from worse abuse or neglect than those left at home.)
The result: By age 20, those who had endured time in foster care were more likely to die. Not just a little more likely to die – more than four times more likely to die.
Of course, percentages don’t mean a lot if the raw numbers are low. But the raw numbers are not low. Among children left in their own homes 1.8% died by age 20. Among those who were forced into foster care, 8.6% died by age 20, a figure the study author calls “staggering.”
She writes:
This effect is mainly driven by suicides that occur while the removed children are still placed in out-of-home care. There is a sharp and persistent increased risk of suicide already within nine months after the court’s decision. The empirical evidence suggests that unfavorable care conditions and harmful exposure to peers serve as important explanations.
Among other things, this is still more evidence that the “residential treatment center” model, in which children said to have serious mental health problems are thrown together right when they are most vulnerable to peer pressure, is, well, insane. And there certainly is nothing to suggest that “care conditions” in the United States are more favorable than in Sweden – not when you consider all the exposes of residential treatment and all those studies showing high rates of abuse in American foster care.
This is, of course, on top of all the other studies, one after another after another, finding all sorts of terrible outcomes for foster youth when, in typical cases, children placed in foster care are compared to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes.
No, this doesn’t mean no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means family policing systems need to be a whole lot more careful about whom they police. They need to be a whole lot more certain that there is danger in the home so great that it outweighs the risk of abuse in foster care, and the risk that the children will kill themselves in foster care.
All the Senator (and Representative) Soundbites across the country, all the “Child Advocates” and all the others who exploit child abuse deaths to panic us into throwing more and more children into foster care need to stop and consider: To the extent that they succeed, is it their own rhetoric that, however unintentionally, is really putting children at risk?
