Soaring rhetoric, tepid recommendations: A new report suggests a child welfare establishment group fighting with itself

The real leaders of the movement for racial justice in child welfare
 need allies, not backseat drivers. (Image from depositphotos.com)

After years of ignoring, or impeding, racial justice in child welfare, the group calling itself “Children’s Rights” now claims it’s “driving” the conversation about that very issue. 

No, CR. You just climbed into the backseat.

 In a story about a new report on racism in child welfare from the group that calls itself Children’s Rights, The Imprint includes a question I posed:  Is this a sincere effort to change, or just a callous ploy to raise money?

The lead author of the report, attorney (and relatively new hire at CR) Shereen White had a good answer: 

“The answer will live in our work, whether it’s the recommendations we lay out in our report, or the actions we take in the future." 

The rhetoric in the report is terrific (regular readers of this blog might even find a phrase or two that’s familiar).  But the recommendations don’t live up to that rhetoric.  The report declares that “radical change at the front end of the child welfare system is … a moral and civil rights imperative…” but none of the recommendations involves radical change.  

● The report quotes others who want to repeal the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, a racist law that has done enormous damage to children of color – but is silent on whether CR will support such efforts, or even support more modest changes to ASFA.   

● The report acknowledges that another awful federal law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act “strengthened the child welfare surveillance state” (see what I mean about familiar phrases)?  Yet it is silent about the need to repeal or even amend CAPTA.  

● And while radical change means abolishing mandatory reporting – because it doesn’t work – and actually endangers children -  the report calls for only tiny changes to mandatory reporting.  

● The report discusses narrowing neglect laws. Yes, we should do that.  I first suggested that in a book I wrote in 1990.  But what I came to realize is that this does almost no good unless there is someone to enforce it (as is discussed below, the report does seem to recognize this much).  This is illustrated, by accident, when the report cites as a model the neglect definition in Iowa – but Iowa tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation. 

● Yes, we should require states to make “active efforts” to keep families together, not just reasonable efforts. But how does CR propose to enforce it, when even the requirement in current federal law to make “reasonable efforts” is not enforced?  Indeed, in Michigan judges admitted they lied and checked a box on a form stating reasonable efforts had been made even when the judges themselves didn’t believe it.  But though, CR has a lawsuit settlement in Michigan, discussed in detail below, that settlement is silent on this issue. 

The recommendations in the report are not bad; three are genuinely useful, most notably providing high-quality family defense – which would help do things such as enforce a narrower definition of neglect.  That means CR is going farther than all those other child welfare establishment groups who are just posting #blacklivesmatter statements on their websites and hoping the whole thing will blow over. And just having an establishment group using the rhetoric of real change may help.  

But many of CR’s significant recommendations, such as high-quality family defense, originated with other organizations, and that’s important for reasons I’ll discuss below in the section on CR’s marketing. 

So, by Ms. White’s criterion, whether this report represents real change or a marketing ploy all comes down to the actions CR takes in the future.  Those actions should involve undoing some of the damage they’ve done in the past. 

Throughout its history, Children’s Rights has occasionally been a force for good – often by accident. More often it’s brought McLawsuits that lead to settlements that make systems bigger without making them better.  In some cases, they have made systems worse. 

In Michigan, for example, as we explain in our publication The Children Wronged by Children’s Rights. 

Instead of requiring Michigan to do [cut caseloads] by controlling needless removal of children and bolstering programs to keep children out of foster care, the settlement allowed Michigan to slash its already meager funding of prevention and family preservation in order to fund a child abuse investigator/foster care worker hiring binge. And that’s exactly what the state did. 

The state also cut basic assistance to poor families – and said it wasn’t a problem because, thanks to the settlement, they also were hiring more child abuse investigators. 

The Michigan settlement also imposed strict new requirements forcing any relative who
wants to provide kinship foster care to meet the same rigid, hypertechnical licensing requirements as middle-class strangers.  Those requirements revolve more around middle-class creature comforts than health and safety.  And since relatives of poor children taken from their homes tend to be poor themselves, they often can’t meet them.  In many cases, relatives had to stop caring for children already in kinship care. 

CR settlements also threw up barriers to kinship care in Rhode Island and Wisconsin. And in Georgia, Mother Jones reports, the state did what Michigan did: "cut spending on child care and put the money into child protective services in the wake of a lawsuit against the state over the mistreatment of children in foster care." 

Show us the lawsuits 

So, had CR, at the same time as it released the report said that they were writing to the Governor of, say, Michigan and asking to reopen their settlement to conform to the principles CR now claims to espouse, that would have been impressive.  But they didn’t. 

And while the report suggests strategies for future lawsuits aimed at curbing needless removal of children from their homes, CR did not actually announce such a suit. 

Indeed, the report seems to reveal an organization at war with itself. 

In one of those preface-type “letters” almost nobody reads, CR’s executive director, Sandy Santana seemed to maybe, possibly sort-of apologize: 

“For Children’s Rights, writing about the history of Black experiences in the child welfare system has led us to critically reflect on our own history in child-focused civil rights litigation.  We recognize that in the past our overarching belief that no child should grow up in the foster care system blinded us to the ways in which our legal cases, and the reforms they delivered, did not always support the preservation of Black families.”

 But the very last paragraph of the report itself seems to say: Pay no attention to what Sandy Santana said at the beginning. The report closes by setting up a straw man: 

At the same time, Children’s Rights will not stop fighting to protect the rights of children and families already in the system. These children and families can never be forgotten or effectively viewed as casualties of a changing child welfare system, even as advocates successfully drive radical transformation, and ultimately abolition, of that system. 

No one has ever said CR shouldn’t protect the rights of children in the system.  What we have said is that much of their litigation makes things worse, because they have ignored the entire issue of wrongful removal.  Furthermore, though they say “These children and families can never be forgotten …” for decades CR’s litigation – the very litigation that closing paragraph defends – has forgotten families.

 Backseat driving … 

The reason I raised the issue of whether the whole thing is a fundraising ploy is because, whether intended or not, the marketing of the report comes across like an effort to bigfoot smaller organizations that have actually led this fight at a time when racial justice is an attractive cause for foundations. 

Even before releasing the report, CR started fundraising off it.  In a fundraising email, CR claims to be “driving a national conversation about the urgent need to end unjust government intervention in the lives of Black children and families.” [Emphasis added.] 

No. That conversation is being driven by, among others, Dorothy Roberts, and Joyce McMillan, and Movement for Family Power, and Rise and DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children,  and  #ReimagineChildSafety and the UpEnd Movement and the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, and Isuroon, and Kelis Houston and Vivek Sankaran, and Victoria Copeland, and Angela Olivia Burton, and Judge Ernestine Gray, and J. Khadijah Abdurahman and Maleeka (MJ) Jihad and Angeline Montauban and Jessica Pryce and Tehra Coles and Shanta Trivedi and Kelley Fong and providers of high-quality family defense all over the country.  It also was driven by groups that didn’t survive, even as CR raked in money at glitzy celebrity fundraisers, groups such as the Child Welfare Organizing Project, People United for Children and Concerned Citizens for Family Preservation, and so many other groups and individuals who were fighting this fight when CR was on the sidelines – or impeding it. 

The closest CR came to acknowledging any of this was having Prof. Trivedi speak at an event launching the report.  

In fact, if you really want to meet the drivers of the conversation, check out the presentations at next week’s Strengthened Bonds virtual conference commemorating the 20^th Anniversary of Prof. Roberts’ book: Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.  CR isn’t among them. 

Driving the conversation? No. Children’s Rights just climbed into the backseat.  

…and a meaningless “pledge” 

Similarly, in another email, CR asks people to sign something called “The Children’s Rights Pledge” in which you pledge to “disrupt institutional racism” in child welfare by – well, uh, by naming it.  If that doesn’t seem like much, take a closer look. The “pledge” is just a way to harvest email addresses for future fundraising pitches.  

The agenda CR released in its new report would have been an impressive, progressive agenda – in 1995. The people who are really driving this conversation are way ahead of this. 

So, how will we know that change at CR is real? 

● If they call for repealing ASFA and fight for it.  If the former head of the Children’s Bureau, Jerry Milner can do it – and he did - why can’t CR? 

● If they call for repealing CAPTA. 

● If they apologize, without reservation, for their own past role in at best ignoring at worst perpetuating the harm they now decry. 

● If they put their lawsuits where their rhetoric is and sue to stop needless removal of children. 

● If they seek to reopen their most harmful settlements. 

● If they leave the driving to those who have earned a place at the wheel.

It’s official! Racism is over in child welfare! (We know because a social work school dean says so)

via GIPHY

                Great news, everyone! It’s now official: Unlike every other aspect of American life, the child welfare system has eradicated racism!  Like the parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch when it comes to child welfare, racism is gone!  It is no more!  It has ceased to be! 

            How do we know? Because the dean of an actual school of social work says so.  Toward the conclusion of a power-point presentation aimed at social work students planning to work in child welfare, Richard Barth, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland, sums things up this way:

We can celebrate our success in developing a CWS [child welfare system]* that does not result in evidence of biased outcomes. This has long been an aspiration of CWS and it appears that it is, largely, realized. 

            Let us now pause, sip some celebratory champagne and contemplate the sheer magnitude of this achievement. 

            After all, no one denies there is racism in the police. In fact, the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police has admitted it and apologized. I’ll bet child welfare practitioners are really proud that they don’t have to admit any such thing!  And it’s not just police. 

            ● We know there is racism in medicine.

         ● We know there is racism in science.

            ● We know there is racism in journalism

            ● We know there is racism in academic publishing.

            ● We know there is racism in everything else in academia.

            ● We know there is racism in housing.

            ● We know there is racism in hiring.

● We know there is racism in who gets followed around by store security.

            ● We know there is racism in who can hail a cab.

           ● UPDATE: And sometimes, the racism is - literally - at our fingertips.

             But if Barth is right, when it comes to the pandemic of American racism, child welfare, and only child welfare has achieved herd immunity! 

The caucus of denial

            Of course, there has long been a de facto “caucus of denial” in child welfare, a group that says the enormous disparities in who gets reported for child abuse, who gets substantiated, who gets taken away from their families and who does or does not get reunified are solely due to Black people supposedly being worse parents who are more prone to endangering their children to the point where systems dominated by a white power structure must rush in and save them.  

Not that that’s racist, you understand.  No, no.  They claim it’s just that all that historic racism and oppression made Black people more likely to be bad parents.  (In the world of the caucus of denial, the word “racism” almost always is preceded by the modifier historic – because, remember, it’s all in the past.) 

Those who hold such views have good intentions; they really want to help children and families.  But it’s no wonder the system they have helped to build and now defend in order to do that has backfired.  The existence of this caucus of denial does, indeed, distinguish child welfare from other professional fields, but not in a good way. 

            How, then, does Barth get around the study after studyafter study that control for all other variables and still find that, even when all else is equal, children are more likely to be declared abused or neglected, and more likely to be torn from their families, if they are not white? Simple, he ignores them. As another slide explains: 

We did not address the usual questions of (1) the reasons for disproportionality in foster care or (2) whether [child protective services] delivers equitable decision-making regarding substantiation and placement—we believe that those have been well addressed in prior research. 

            So how do you conclude that racism has been eradicated in child welfare and ignore all those studies about biased decision-making?  By looking at much narrower questions, and extrapolating way beyond the evidence.  Thus, in the presentation and in a paper on which it is based,  Barth and his co-authors claim: 

            ● “Current research with adequate comparisons provides no robust evidence to support the idea that children have worse outcomes from CWS involvement.” [Emphasis added.] 

            ● The outcomes for Black children are no worse than the outcomes for white children, although “few studies focused on Black children.” 

            Could they possibly have set the bar any lower? 

            The first thing to understand here is that Barth & Co. are talking about “child welfare services,” a category that includes both foster care and services to families in their own homes.  Although child welfare services often exist largely to make the helpers feel good, some such services are genuinely helpful, such as the Homebuilders Intensive Family Preservation Services program and, where genuinely needed, the right kinds of drug treatment.  And a few, innovative systems actually provide concrete help to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty. 

            Far fewer studies compare the outcomes for children placed in foster care to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes.  But the findings from many of them are alarming.  Barth and his co-authors get around this by minimizing or ignoring studies that don’t come out the way they want them to. 

Even with all that, the best they can claim is: Well, after disrupting all these families lives, tearing the children from their loved ones, forcing them into foster care, and wasting billions of dollars that could have been used to help alleviate family poverty, you critics can’t prove that we actually made things worse! 

So let’s consider what that means. Consider a study of what is widely considered one of the finest, most elite foster care programs in America, run by Casey Family Programs.  That study found that among alumni of the program: 

● They had twice the level of PTSD of veterans of the first Gulf War.

● Only one in five was doing well in later life.

● The former foster children were three times more likely to be living in poverty –

and fifteen times less likely to have finished college.

● At least one-third were abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. 

All of which raises one more question: If, in fact, the system really doesn’t do any harm anyway, are Barth and his coauthors equally sanguine about the children torn from their parents at the Mexican border by the Trump Administration?  

The leap of logic about race 

Barth’s next great leap concerns race.  As noted above, Barth and his coauthors found few studies that directly compared outcomes for children placed in foster care to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes – and, also as noted above, they sidestepped the massive studies showing that in typical cases the outcomes for the foster children were worse.  But among those few studies of outcomes for all children, even fewer actually tried to disaggregate the results based on race.  Yet based on these few studies, Barth and Co. conclude that the outcomes are no different for Black children. 

There are plenty of studies (not discussed by Barth) that show that Black children are
likely to stay in the system longer and are less likely to be reunited with their parents.  So what Barth really seems to be saying is that in spite of the fact that the system inflicts more foster care and longer foster care on Black children, they are so resilient that their outcomes are no worse than those for white kids. 

I am willing to stipulate that the outcomes for youth in foster care tend to be rotten for all races.  So the fact that Black children are: 

● more likely to be placed in a system

● more likely to spend more time in a system

● and less likely to be reunified from a system that, best case, may not make things worse means we need to put the champagne away; there really is racial bias in child welfare after all. 

Equally revealing are the reasons Barth offers in his slide presentation for child welfare’s supposed amazing success. 

For starters, he appears to be in denial about the idea that the system is anything but helpful.  Consider this slide outlining an argument he seeks to challenge - in which, by the way, he dismisses the arguments of those who think there is a racism problem in child welfare as mere "assumptions": 

First, of course, the slide refers to “abused” children when, in fact, most of the time the accusation is neglect and that often means poverty.  But also notice how “coercive” is in quotation marks.  

That’s because the self-image of the child welfare field, cultivated by social work schools, is of friendly helpers who are merely bringing “services” to those in need.  In fact, child protective services is about as coercive as a system can get.  It is a police force that has more power than the police. Police can stop a Black child on the street, throw him against a wall and frisk him. Child protective services can march right into the home, stripsearch a Black child and walk out with him, consigning the child to the chaos of foster care. 

No, CPS workers don’t always do that; but neither do the cops. 

Perhaps we should pause for a moment to consider the implications of giving this vast, unchecked power to the same profession that includes so many who believe that profession has eradicated racism. 

Barth makes a similar error in another slide when he seeks to imply that Black children are taken away more often because they are more often victims of “confirmed” child “maltreatment.”  This claim is built on two weasel-words. 

“Confirmed” is not a legal term; it’s a term coined originally by those who have spent decades fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse to make subjective guesses by caseworkers sound more definitive.  “Confirmed” does not mean a court found anyone guilty.  It doesn’t mean a neutral factfinder heard both sides.  “Confirmed” means only that a caseworker checked a box on a form stating s/he thinks it is at least slightly more likely than not that “maltreatment” occurred. 

The second weasel word is “maltreatment.”  Overwhelmingly “maltreatment” means neglect, which, as noted above, often means poverty.  Since Black people are more likely to be poor, if you confuse poverty with neglect and then call the neglect “maltreatment,” of course you’ll get the result cited by Barth. 

What Barth really is offering here is the ultimate in circular reasoning: The results of subjective, biased caseworker guesses about “maltreatment” are used to “prove” there is no bias! 

Of course, having performed the miracle of eradicating racism from child welfare, Barth knows we mere mortals will want to know how they did it.  He offers two explanations. The first is the equivalent of the old “some of my best friends are …” line. Says Barth: 

“CWS has a diverse workforce.” 

That’s certainly true at the lowest levels – frontline caseworkers – in big cities.  But that’s also true of the police.  In Philadelphia 43% of police officers are nonwhite. In New York City 49% of police are nonwhite. In Chicago it’s 52%  and in Los Angeles it’s 55%  So by Barth’s logic, there’s no racism on big-city police forces either. 

Academic social work is notably less diverse.  In 2016, fewer than one-third of full-time social work professors were from “historically underrepresented groups” according to the Council on Social Work education.  And those who seem most prominent in child welfare’s caucus of denial have long been almost exclusively white.  So either Black professionals and academicians in the field don’t understand the research, or they know something Prof. Barth does not. 

Talk, talk talk 

Barth’s other explanation for child welfare’s astounding success is that “CWS has been in conversation about race equity for 50 years.”  There are several problems with this:  

● Talking about a problem doesn’t solve it – particularly when racism is the reason the system in question was created in the first place. 

● Though the first effort to start the conversation dates back to 1972, little attention was paid until 30 years later, with the publication of Prof. Dorothy Roberts’ landmark book, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.  Even then, as another social work school dean, Alan Detlaff, and his co-authors explain in the very article that got Barth so upset, talking about racism in child welfare made the field so uncomfortable that the caucus of denial managed to sidetrack the issue until demands for racial justice became impossible to ignore in 2020. 

If Barth really does believe that 50 years of endless social work conferences have solved the racism problem, presumably he can pinpoint exactly when that happened.  Presumably, it wasn’t 49 years ago – even child welfare couldn’t have wiped out racism in a single year!  But the “caucus of denial” has been around for awhile, so apparently it didn’t just happen yesterday, either. 

So, Prof. Barth: When did it happen?  When was the last vestige of racism eradicated from child welfare?  December 20, 1987?  March 11, 1992?  November 10, 2004?  February 25, 2014?  Tell us the date so we can make it a national holiday and use it as an example for all those other, less enlightened professions! 

While he doesn’t say exactly when it happened, Barth does go on to say that child welfare has been so successful that “Additional diversity training of the CWS workforce may not be needed.” 

Though there is debate over the effectiveness of such training, the evidence of the need is overwhelming.  But don’t wait until the caseworkers are on the job. 

Clearly, it needs to begin in the social work schools. 

*-In the presentation CWS seems to be used interchangeably to stand for Child Welfare System and Child Welfare Services

NCCPR releases new report on child welfare's failed response to COVID-19

 Child Welfare's Pandemic of Fear examines the false, racist master narrative about child abuse and the coronavirus, a narrative that has done enormous harm to children. Read the full report here.

Here's the Executive Summary:

CHILD WELFARE’S PANDEMIC OF FEAR

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

 

The impulse is understandable.  For generations, we’ve read horror stories about parents beating, raping and murdering their children. The stories often are followed by statistics leaving the impression that there’s a child abuser under every bed.  No wonder people would assume that a decline in reports alleging child abuse, because “mandatory reporters” don’t have their “eyes” on children due to COVID-19, is cause for alarm. 

But the claim is built on a foundation of myth. Accepting it risks scaring vulnerable families away from seeking assistance, it risks deluging caseworkers with false reports, stealing time from finding children in real danger. It even risks increasing the spread of COVID-19. 

At the root of the problem is what’s been called “health terrorism,” an ends-justify-the-means approach to advocacy that says it’s o.k. to distort the true nature of a problem in the name of “raising awareness.”  (The phrase did not originate with us. It was used by a group that admits to having engaged in it.)  So when we hear that reports alleging child abuse are down, we assume that thousands of children are being tortured – just like in the horror stories. 

In fact, pore over the federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment report and you find that nationwide, of every 100 calls to child abuse hotlines 91 are either so absurd they are screened out or they are found to be false after an investigation – even though in most states, all that is required to “substantiate” an allegation is a caseworker’s guess that it is slightly more likely than not that abuse or neglect occurred. 

Another six calls involve “neglect.” On very rare occasions neglect can be horrific. Far more often it simply means a family is poor.  If a family doesn’t have enough food that is not a reason to call a child abuse hotline.  It’s a reason to call a foodbank. Housing instability should be dealt with through housing vouchers. 

Three of every 100 calls have even the potential to be the kinds of horror stories we think of when we hear the words “child abuse.”  

Although child protective services agencies like to portray themselves as benevolent helpers, that is not how they are seen in poor communities – especially poor communities of color.  In those communities, they are just another police force.  At best, they put families under constant surveillance, adding enormous stress and sometimes driving families deeper into poverty. At worst, they take the children and consign them to the chaos of foster care. 

RACIALLY-BIASED MESSAGING 

Even as we are supposed to be in the midst of a racial justice reckoning, we have not stopped to consider the bias that underlies the messaging about COVID-19 and child abuse.  What we’re really saying is: Now that fewer mostly white middle-class professionals have their “eyes” constantly on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children, their parents will unleash brutality upon them in pandemic proportions. The racism in that message should be obvious.

Yes, the pandemic is putting more stress on everyone.  But why do we rush to assume that for poor people in general and poor Black people in particular the only way they’ll cope is to beat up their children? 

The myth continues to spread, even after news organizations such as the Associated Press, The Marshall Project and Bloomberg CityLab challenged it. So has Chapin Hall, the child welfare think tank at the University of Chicago. 

Of course, some might argue even all this damage to poor families of color is worth it to find those very few children in real danger.  But the deluge of false reports only steals worker time from finding those children. And now, there are new dangers:  If a poor family has to worry that the person dropping off a food basket also is peeking through the door looking for “symptoms” of child abuse, will they ask for help when they’re hungry?  Will they accept a neighbor’s offer of respite via a Zoom call with the kids if the neighbor thinks s/he somehow should be sensing if the child on the screen is really being abused and calling a child abuse hotline?   

If the fearmongering encourages more frivolous calls that means more caseworkers inspecting homes, looking through cupboards and closets, and sometimes stripsearching the children looking for bruises. That increases the risk of spreading COVID-19 to families and caseworkers alike.  And, of course, the fearmongering can lead politicians to suggest it might even be worth risking increased transmission of COVID by prematurely reopening schools for in-person learning. 

The challenge of COVID-19 brings with it a rare opportunity to rethink our approach to so many aspects of our lives. It’s a chance to rebuild child welfare in a way that makes all children safer.  But only if we finally free ourselves from the grip of health terrorism.

Read the full report here.

Another sign of progress at Chapin Hall

For a bastion of the child welfare establishment
such as Chapin Hall, this is a big change.

Their latest Issue Brief debunks the dominant, racist media myth about child abuse and COVID-19

 In September I wrote a post for this blog wondering if there’s been an epiphany at one of the most regressive forces in American child welfare  -- Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. I wrote that

 For decades, Chapin Hall has been a bastion of 19^th Century-style “child saver” ideology and advocacy dressed up as “scholarship.”  You can read some examples of their track record here and here. But Chapin Hall has probably been at its worst concerning the whole issue of race. 

What gave me hope was a commentary in The Imprint by Chapin Hall’s executive director Bryan Samuels and also the fact that they’ve apparently withdrawn an “Issue Brief” from 2010 making the case that child welfare practitioners are so wonderful, so pristine in their lack of bias, that it is the one field in America that is immune from racism.

Now there is further reason for encouragement. It comes in the form of a new Issue Brief, published in September, this one about COVID-19 and Child Welfare. The paper lends the gravitas of Chapin Hall, long a “Godsource” for journalists covering child welfare, to debunking the widespread media-fueled myth that with fewer white middle-class “eyes” constantly watching overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite kids, their parents will unleash upon them a “pandemic of child abuse.”

 In doing so, they join the Associated Press, The Marshall Project and Bloomberg CityLab in pointing out the flaws in this racially biased mythology.

 

The Issue Brief does not say COVID-19 will do no harm at all.  The stress of increased poverty probably will lead to some increase in child abuse.  But to deal with that they suggest a novel approach – well, novel for Chapin Hall: Target the poverty, not the parents.

 In fact, they suggest carving out a large portion of cases, and apparently taking them out of the jurisdiction of child protective services agencies. I say apparently, because they’re a little vague about this. According to the Issue Brief:

 Child maltreatment categories should be refined to distinguish and address poverty-related neglect from child endangerment or abuse. … [H]otline reports of “neglect only” may be a phenomenon distinct from child endangerment. While lack of supervision, food, clothing, or shelter can surely jeopardize the safety of children, addressing these directly through concrete supports may be more efficient and effective than initiating a child welfare case that punishes families for living in poverty.

To which the proper scientific response is: Ya think????

Even more interesting is Chapin Hall’s analysis of that whole “pandemic of child abuse” myth, and the related claims that there will be a surge in child abuse discovered as more children return to school, and with that, a surge in the number of children placed in foster care. 

The Issue Brief points out that a sharp decline in reports from teachers and other school personnel is not unusual – it happens every summer.  It is not followed by a surge in actual child abuse in the fall.  If anything, these cycles suggest that, overwhelmingly, what’s really “missed” during the summer are false reports. 

And no wonder. When teachers are on the job reporting “child abuse” they’re almost always wrong.  Only 11 percent of their reports meet even the incredibly low standard for “substantiating” an allegation – it can be no more than a caseworker’s guess that it’s slightly more likely than not that the abuse or neglect occurred. 

But let Chapin Hall explain: 

Education personnel report the most cases of suspected maltreatment, but detect the smallest percentage of cases that reach the threshold for substantiation … Additionally, historical seasonal fluctuations in reporting that occur in response to school attendance largely affect the rate of unsubstantiated cases. Typical drop-offs in reports relate to concerns that do not reach the threshold of substantiated maltreatment; teacher reports in summer months that do result in substantiation remain steady. This suggests that in the current context, the number of reports that result in substantiated maltreatment is unlikely to fluctuate due to reduced teacher/school contact. 

Thus, it is unlikely that the dramatic reduction in hotline reports due to school closures will produce a rebound of substantiated maltreatment. Instead, those concerned with the well-being of children should shift their focus to the community drivers and economic stressors that elevate the risk for child maltreatment. Rather than focusing on how to increase mandatory reporting, efforts should be redirected to support and stabilize families to prevent child maltreatment. 

The danger of self-fulfilling prophecy 

Unfortunately, there is one factor this doesn’t take into account that may, in fact, make the return to school going on now different: self-fulfilling prophecy. 

As I explained in a previous post: 

If you tell teachers over and over again that while their students were out of school, they were abused in pandemic proportions, then the bruise that last year would have been seen for what it was, an accident, suddenly is child abuse.  The hungry child for whom they might have called a food bank now becomes a call to child protective services. 

So if there is a surge in foster care placements, it’s more likely to be the result of a generation of journalists who grew up on “health terrorism” – the deliberate distortion of the nature and extent of child abuse by advocacy groups supposedly seeking to “raise awareness” – buying into a fundamentally racist myth about child abuse and COVID-19. 

That Chapin Hall has made a modest contribution toward countering this myth is welcome.  But they could do a whole lot more.  As I noted in my previous post about Chapin Hall, in addition to once promoting the myth that there is no racial bias in child welfare, just two years ago they threw gasoline on the fires of foster-care panic in Illinois, contributing to skyrocketing needless removals of children in that state. 

They need to apologize, loudly and publicly, for both. 

And even now, the current Issue Brief shows an unfortunate, lingering fondness for the latest dangerous fad in child welfare, predictive analytics. 

But hey, I said epiphany – not miracle.