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| A page from the 2018 report of the Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team |
● A
propaganda campaign by the San Jose Mercury News and a
grandstanding member of the Board of Supervisors has been so effective, not
everyone seems to know it.
● Both the very limited available data from Santa Clara
County and a
massive peer-reviewed national study find no evidence that taking
more children reduces child abuse deaths or that taking fewer children
increases such deaths.
It shouldn’t really be necessary to point this out. But judging by some statements during the public comment period at a recent meeting of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, it appears there may be people who think that children only started to die of child abuse in that county toward the end of 2023.
The “journalism” from Julia Prodis Sulek of the Mercury News, and the comments of County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, certainly leave that impression. Though they presumably jumped to their conclusions with good intentions, they have wrongly scapegoated very recent efforts to keep families together for three recent deaths. They are undeterred by the fact that one of those deaths occurred well after those family preservation efforts were abandoned, while entries into foster care skyrocketed as a result of pressure from the Mercury News and Arenas.
They’ve been aided in their propaganda campaign by County
District Attorney Jeff Rosen. In response to the latest tragedy, Rosen
has pledged to investigate who, besides the actual killer, “is
responsible criminally, civilly, morally, ethically, and systemically for what
happened in this case. And I think that we should all be asking
questions of county officials at the highest level…” It turns out Rosen has another problem with at
least one county official at the highest level. Rosen wants to take funds
desperately needed by the county’s health care system to offset federal Medicaid
cuts, and divert
some of that money to his office. The County Executive disagrees.
Of course, no one literally said that there were no child abuse deaths before 2023. Instead, those pushing the take-the-child-and-run response to recent fatalities engaged in what should be called “inference peddling.” We were left to infer that in all those years before the county tried to do more to keep families together, child abuse deaths didn’t happen. Therefore, it is suggested, anyone in charge of child welfare in the county now or whose work brought them anywhere near the three recent tragedies should be fired and, ideally, tarred and feathered.
But of course, children have died of abuse in Santa Clara County, probably every year going back decades if not forever. That’s true in every other jurisdiction of Santa Clara’s size – nearly two million people – and many that are far smaller.
We don’t know much more than that because of a process for tracking fatalities in Santa Clara County that is subjective and inconsistent.
For decades, the county has had a Child Death Review Team. It issues periodic reports, on no apparent schedule, in which it examines child deaths and assesses the causes. But determining whether a death is due to abuse or neglect is surprisingly subjective.
Consider a hypothetical example: Early one Sunday morning, while his parents are asleep, a three-year-old wakes up, manages to unlatch the back door of the family home and wanders away. He falls into a body of water and drowns. Accident or neglect? The history of American family policing suggests that if the body of water is the pool behind a McMansion, it will be labeled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a trailer park, it will be labeled neglect.
The subjectivity is magnified for an ironic reason: Each child abuse death is the worst imaginable tragedy; the only acceptable goal is zero. But in most places, the number of child abuse fatalities is low enough that, depending on how even one or two deaths are characterized, it can suggest a pattern that does not exist or obscure one that does. Even random chance can play a role. If in one year, say, a father comes home drunk and shoots his wife and two children, that can create a “spike” in child abuse death statistics.
Compounding the problem: The Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team sometimes neglects to note its assessment of cause of death. Other times, it does not mention the relationship between the victims and the alleged perpetrators.
So, below is a graphic representation of what I was able to infer from the available data for most of the years from 2005 through 2023. But please read these caveats:
● There were no data available for 2013 and 2014.
● The official report for 2010, 2011, and 2012 – one death
in each year -- is much to be hoped for, but unlikely.
● From 2017 on, the reports gave totals for two or three years, without breaking them down by year, so the numbers shown in this graphic for those years are multi-year averages.
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| Source: Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team Reports |
So, everybody see the pattern?
Exactly. There is no pattern.
While it might be tempting for family preservation advocates to argue that the reported numbers were larger in the early years, when the number of children taken away was at its highest, the relatively low raw numbers and the unreliable reporting methods don’t allow such a conclusion. In fact, they allow only two conclusions:
● Yes, children did die of abuse and neglect before 2023.
● There is no pattern concerning deaths and entries into
foster care.
That should surprise no one – though given the propaganda campaign waged by Sulek, Arenas and their allies, it probably will.
Once again, the reason is one for which we all should be grateful. In Santa Clara County in 2023, there were allegations of abuse and, far more often, neglect involving 12,036 children. There were approximately six known child abuse fatalities. That means of all the children known-to-the-system that year, at least 99.951% did not die of child abuse. The odds of finding an impurity in Ivory Soap are greater than the chances of a Santa Clara child “known to the system” dying of abuse or neglect.
Again, the only acceptable number of child abuse fatalities is zero. But such fatalities are needles in a haystack. Here’s the haystack; look closely for the needles. And even this representation makes the needles easier to spot, because they’re all in one place:
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| Sources: Investigations: California Child Welfare Indicators Project; Fatalities: Santa Clara County Child Death Review Team Reports |
By pressuring everyone to make the haystack far bigger, Sulek, Arenas and their allies have only made it less likely that the next child in grave danger will be found in time.
Nationally, some defenders of the take-the-child-and-run approach have a bizarre response. They argue that these are not needles in a haystack because other causes of death – such as cancer – take fewer children’s lives. Of course, cancer tends to be a disease striking older Americans. I’m sure more children also die of child abuse than die of Alzheimer’s. More important, the fact that other causes of death take even fewer lives means only that there are fewer needles; it is not a reason to keep growing the haystack.
The only way to really know if there is any relationship between foster care entries and child abuse deaths would be if one could do a massive, peer-reviewed study looking nationwide over many years. Say, a study of 3.4 million records and more than 24,000 fatalities over 13 years. Fortunately, that’s just been done. And, unsurprisingly, here’s the key finding:
“Child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates.”That means, at best, all those Santa Clara County children torn from everyone they know and love in the name of reducing child abuse deaths may well have had their own chance for a loving, secure future taken from them for nothing. At worst, making the haystack so much bigger may have contributed to the latest tragedy in Santa Clara County, the death of Jaxon Juarez, and perhaps others to come.
There are far better ways to work to reduce fatalities – and all other child abuse and neglect – in Santa Clara County. But step one is to consider the possibility that a “Pulitzer-sniffing” newspaper and a grandstanding politician and their allies are not the most reliable sources.
See also our
earlier post about the Silicon Valley foster-care panic.
