The Oregon family police agency fudges the figures at children’s expense

They’re misleading us about the rate of entries into foster care …

 Oregon is one of those states operating under a settlement resulting from one of those pointless McLawsuits that Marcia Lowry brings all over the country. (How pointless? The organization she now runs, A Better Childhood, is the fourth from which she has brought these lawsuits over the past 50+ years. All three of the others have turned their backs on her approach.) 

The settlement requires the state family police agency, the Department of Human Services, to submit “progress reports.” This is the most recent.   

DHS took advantage of the opportunity to engage in a whole lot of disingenuous figure fudging in an area the settlement doesn’t care about (because Marcia Lowry almost never cares about it): reducing entries into foster care. 

Let's start with the basics. In FFY 2025, Oregon took away children 2,391 times. That’s actually 227 more times than children were taken in Oregon in 2024. But what measure should be used to compare Oregon to the rest of the country? Oregon DHS's method is so ludicrous that if torturing logic were a war crime, they'd be hauled before an international tribunal.

After claiming that Oregon took away 2.7 of every thousand children in 2024, the progress report says: 

Oregon has a lower rate of foster care entry than the national median. Nationally, the median foster care entry rate in 2021 was 3.0. 

How are they misleading us? Let us count the ways: 

● The data for the national median are from 2021, while DHS compares it to Oregon data from 2024. Since nationwide entries have been declining slowly but steadily since 2021, odds are the median is lower now. And, by the way, as noted above, data now are available for 2025. 

● National median is an odd choice for comparison. If the DHS figures are correct, it would mean only that, compared to total child population, more states take proportionately more children than Oregon than take proportionately fewer. 

Source: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database

But comparisons typically are to the national average (the mean rather than the median). Why doesn’t DHS do that? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because when you do an apples-to-apples comparison involving the same year, 2025, Oregon took away children at a rate more than 25% above the national average, even when comparing entries to total child population (which, as is discussed below, is the wrong comparison anyway). 

And, by the way: While DHS says it took away 2.7 children for every thousand in 2024, in 2025 it rose to 2.89 per thousand.

But even that isn’t the worst of it. 

● DHS is using the wrong denominator, thereby hiding the full extent to which Oregon remains an outlier. DHS compares entries only to the total child population. But the far more valid measure is to compare entries to the impoverished child population. When you do that for every state, the national average is 16 children taken per thousand impoverished children. The figure for Oregon is 21.7 – thirty-five percent higher. 

By the way, that’s also the 23^rd highest rate of removal in the country, so it’s above the mean and the median. 

Sources: Entries: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database
Impoverished children: Census Bureau Current Population Survey (3 year average).

So, DHS misleads by comparing entries only to the total child population (and misleads about even that). That comparison is b.s. for one simple reason: Family police agencies don’t target the total child population – they target the impoverished child population. Can you find a middle-class family caught in the family police net? Occasionally. Can you find such a child placed in foster care? Even less often.

 As we explain in the annual NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index: 

We could have simply compared the number of children removed to a state’s total child population. But then all the states with high rates of removal and high child poverty rates would complain that this was unfair because we didn’t consider a risk factor for actual abuse (not to mention the factor most often confused with “neglect”) – poverty. 

In addition, since family policing agencies almost never take children from affluent families, using the total child population would allow affluent states that still take large numbers of children from impoverished neighborhoods to camouflage this fact. 

Based on per-capita Income, Oregon is America’s 18^th most affluent state. So Oregon DHS’s selective use of data hides what it does to its impoverished families by diverting our attention to what it doesn’t do to affluent families. And then it further hides the result by comparing only to the median instead of to the mean. 

… and their data on abuse in foster care are meaningless 

The report also contains a bunch of gobbledygook about the rate of abuse in Oregon foster care. The report acknowledges that their rate appears high compared to a target number that is based on the rate in other states. DHS is right in claiming such a comparison isn’t really valid, because definitions of abuse and neglect vary so widely. But it doesn’t matter. Because the entire measure is such a farce that DHS should be ashamed to put forward the figures it does, and Marcia Lowry should be ashamed of using official agency measures of abuse in foster care in this, or any other, settlement. 

That’s because, in every state, official measures of abuse in foster care are ludicrously low. For example, in 2024, 6,675 children spent at least one day in Oregon foster care. DHS claims that, of that number, only 114 were abused by a foster parent or group home or institution staff – that’s 1.7%.  That means Oregon DHS wants us to believe that if you gathered 100 former foster youth in a room and asked them: “How many of you were abused in foster care in 2024?” only two would raise their hands. 

Yet, study after study after study, including at least one specific to Oregon, find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate in group homes and institutions is even higher. These studies use conservative methodology, often imposing limits on things like which placements or which perpetrators are counted.

(Oregon DHS may try to defend itself by saying theirs is a single-year estimate, while the studies may cover a longer time period. But the average length of stay in Oregon foster care is 18 to 24 months, so even if one doubles the amount of abuse Oregon admits to, as in the graphic below, that figure is vastly below the reality.)  

  1.                                   2.
1.=% Oregon admits to in 2024, x2
2.=LOW END national average estimate from indepdendent studies

The reason for the difference in findings is obvious: When agencies investigate abuse in foster care, they are, in effect, investigating themselves. That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file. 

DHS and the governor even tried to get the Oregon Legislature to pass a law that would make this worse – it would have raised the threshold before awful things done to children in group homes and institutions would count as “abuse.” 

The very fact that people in the Oregon family police agency have to know they are putting forward numbers that are probably between one-tenth and one-twentieth or less the real rate of abuse in foster care should be cause to question their credibility and even their fitness for their jobs. (Unfortunately, however, every state essentially lies this way about the real rate of abuse in foster care.) 

If DHS, or Marcia Lowry, really wanted to know how much abuse there is in foster care, they would do what those independent scholars do: Pull together a random sample of former foster youth  - and ask them. 

In fact, Marcia really does know. In 2010, she told the Philadelphia Daily News: 

“I’ve been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not.” 

And that’s only one kind of abuse. 

Marcia also commissioned an actual study of abuse in foster care as part of another of her McLawsuit. The study found vastly more abuse than officially reported.

Why we need to whack the weeds … 

Here’s why going so deep into the weeds is important. If people get the misimpression that Oregon DHS is removing children at a rate below the national average, it tees up the next inevitable false claim. It will happen right after the next tragedy involving the death of a child “known to the system.” Someone (and I think we all know who it’s most likely to be) will rush to claim that this “raises questions” about whether “the pendulum has swung too far” toward keeping families together. 

That is the biggest lie of all. 

Yes, Oregon has made some real progress. Tearing apart families at a rate “only” 35% above the national average is a big improvement over where things were many years ago. But it’s hard to give DHS the credit it's due, when it keeps trying to claim credit it doesn’t deserve. 

Meanwhile, maybe it’s time to add a corollary to a famous adage in journalism that goes: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” Here’s the corollary: “If a ‘child welfare’ agency hands you data, check it twice!”