A new study debunks not only the “pandemic of child
abuse” myth but myths about abolition as well.
When COVID-19 forced New York City's family policing agency to step back, mutual aid organizations,
such as Bed-Stuy Srong in Brooklyn, stepped up - and child safety improved. |
It should have been obvious from the beginning: The pandemic of child abuse claims
were bull--it. It also should have been obvious
that such claims are, uh, racist.
So I’m pessimistic about how much good it will do to point
out the findings of a new study
by Prof. Anna Arons of New York University School of Law, looking at actual
data from before, during and the transition-to-after COVID-19 in New York City.
And I’m pessimistic about how much good
it will do to point out that NCCPR’s own check of similar data in Florida
produced similar results. But let’s give
it a try.
The data show that none of the dire predictions of the
fearmongers came to pass. And the new
study shows more: In New York City, when the family
police agency – the city’s Administration for Children’s Services – was forced
to step back, community-based, community-run mutual aid organizations stepped
up. That, plus direct cash payments to
individuals included in federal stimulus bills, made children safer.
The study has lessons not only when it comes to
fearmongering about COVID-19 and child abuse, but also about the word that
strikes terror in the heart of the “child welfare” establishment: abolition.
The study is only the latest challenge to the “master narrative”
about child abuse and COVID-19 that emerged as soon as the pandemic began. You remember the claims (hard to forget, since
they still haven’t stopped): As soon as mostly white middle-class mandated
reporters – especially teachers and other school personnel – no longer had
their “eyes” constantly on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite
children due to COVID-19 school closings, the children’s parents would unleash
upon them a pandemic of child abuse.
So of course, the fearmongers claimed, there would be a huge
surge in child abuse reports once the kids were back in school and their
teachers could see what their parents had done to them. There even were calls
to recruit more foster parents because, inevitably, so many more children would
need to be taken away.
But even after several national news organizations challenged the fearmongering,
local reporters across the country accepted the myth as fact. Even after that bastion of child welfare
establishment scholarship, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, challenged
the claims, the stories continued.
That’s partly because of the racism that permeates all
aspects of society – even if many in child welfare claim
immunity. But it’s also the result
of 50 years of “health
terrorism,” decade after decade of suggesting that extremely rare horror
stories were common and there’s a child abuser under every bed.
But the COVID-related claims are especially dangerous. In
addition to the dangers of needlessly destroying families and overloading the
system with false reports, giving workers less time to find children in real danger,
the mythology risks increasing the spread of COVID-19 among families and
caseworkers alike.
These claims also fuel calls for premature full reopening of
schools – in order to get those white middle-class eyes back on the kids -
based on the idea that Black and Brown parents are a greater danger to their children
than a deadly disease. That was always
dangerously wrong – all the more so as we are learning how the more dangerous “UK
variant” of COVID-19 is spread.
Measuring safety
In the paper, Prof. Arons offers several measures of safety,
three of which stand out to me:
Fewer alleged child abuse fatalities. Like everything else in the family policing
system, child welfare’s pandemic of fear has been driven by lurid stories of
child abuse deaths. The message has
been: If you don’t peek inside the door when you’re supposedly helping a neighbor
by dropping off food and report anything that your “gut feeling” or “intuition”
says is wrong today, that child might be dead tomorrow. At least two recent
stories have speculated that a child who died of abuse might have been saved
had the schools been open. They went on
to draw sweeping conclusions about how such a case supposedly shows the need
for what amounts to a massive child welfare surveillance state.
But deaths also are the hardest form of child abuse to hide. And when Prof. Arons compared reports
alleging child abuse fatalities between February and June 2019 – before COVID
-- to the same period in 2020, during the pandemic, Prof. Arons found that
reports to New York’s child abuse hotline alleging fatal child abuse in New
York City declined by 25 percent, from 63 such reports to 47.
One always should be cautious in citing fatality data to as
evidence for anything – for a reason for which we all should be grateful:
Though each is the worst form a tragedy, they also are extremely rare, so rare
that they might rise or fall year-to-year due to random chance.
But remember – the fearmongers told us to expect a big increase
in such fatalities, and the fearmongers will use any one case they can find
to “prove” that we desperately need that massive child welfare surveillance
state.
So, at a minimum, since the predicted
surge in fatalities hasn’t happened it is at least as likely, and probably more
likely, that forcing the family police to step back saved children’s lives,
rather than contributing to children’s deaths. I’ll discuss possible reasons for this below.
No “rebound” in numbers or severity. Perhaps even more significant is what
has happened as schools have reopened in New York City. If the fearmongers were right, thousands of
battered and bruised children would be limping back into their classrooms and
shocked teachers, seeing the welts and scars would be rushing to call the
hotline – a “rebound” in calls that supposedly was going to swamp child
protective services and foster homes. If
the fearmongers were right, there would be far more such calls than in a
typical fall (when reports always go up as children return to school) and the
proportion alleging physical and sexual abuse would be higher.
Instead, from September through November 2020, the rate of
increase in hotline calls from New York City was about the same as the previous
(pre-COVID) year. And the proportion of
such reports alleging anything like the stuff of horror stories remained
unchanged. Both years, the proportion of reports alleging only neglect – which usually means poverty – was the same, about 75
percent.
This is all-the-more remarkable given the power of
suggestion: From March 2020, when schools shut down, until their reopening in
September, New York City teachers, administrators and other school personnel
heard the same messages as the rest of us: Just wait until the kids come
back! You’ll see how horrible those
parents were! But even though they were
primed to see a surge in physical and sexual abuse that supposedly had gone
undetected, they didn’t. Because it
wasn’t there.
Different state, similar results
Of course, desperate apologists for the family police might
try to claim that the New York results are because not enough children are
learning in person yet. But data also
are available for one of the states that has been most fanatical about trying
to force children back to in-person education – a
state where the governor has been among the most demagogic about pressuring
schools to reopen by exploiting the false narrative of a pandemic of child
abuse: Florida (of course).
From September through November 2019, before COVID,
Florida’s child abuse hotline received
84,985 calls. During the same period
in 2020, after Gov. Ron DeSantis was pushing all schools to reopen, the number
was 81,688, a difference of 3,297 in a state with more than 4.2 million
children. Each year, the proportion of
calls “screened in” for investigation was nearly identical.
When Florida breaks down reports by type of abuse alleged,
it reports the data for the month an investigation was closed, not when it was
opened, so that makes comparisons more difficult, but it’s clear that even with
all those kids pushed back into in-person instruction there was no surge in
reports alleging abuse as opposed to neglect – even though, again, the governor
himself was issuing dire warnings.
Back in November, Prof. Robert Latham, associate director of
the Children & Youth Law Clinic at the University of Miami (and probably
child welfare’s foremost data nerd) wrote
this:
I wrote last month that if there wasn’t a big jump in the
number of kids being removed by October (the typical high-point in Fall
removals) then I was going to call the COVID prophecies bunk. And here we are
with the October data and…nothing. The October removal numbers came in lower
than expected.
What went right?
Prof. Arons cites two factors: The first was the emergence
of a network of more than 60 mutual aid organizations throughout New York City.
Mutual aid projects mobilized to provide an extraordinary
array of services to community members who requested aid. Nearly every group
organized grocery deliveries and provision of essential items like diapers, but
others focused on more specialized services, like childcare for workers or
mental health care and support groups. Rather than the exacting intake
procedures required by charities and government social services, groups kept
their barriers for entry low, requiring only that community members complete
online request forms or call intake lines, and removing eligibility
requirements that judged moral worthiness.
Families stayed safely together
not because of the family regulation system but because of its absence.
Even in the midst of the nonstop trauma of 2020, community members
worked for and with each other, providing their neighbors food, diapers,
childcare, mental health services, and redistributing government wealth.
[Emphasis in original].
Mutual aid projects had one other crucial feature: The
people running them are not “mandatory
reporters” of alleged child abuse or neglect – so no one had to be afraid
to go to them for help.
Families had a safe way to ameliorate the poverty that is so
often confused with neglect. They had a
community-based support system to ease the stress that, in rare cases, might
have prompted a parent to lash out and abuse their child. At the same time, as Prof. Jane Spinak of
Columbia University Law School predicted at the start
of the pandemic, the reduction in calls may have given workers more
opportunity to find the very few children in real danger in time – which might
have contributed to the decline in reports alleging fatal child abuse.
So even as family policing apologists
run around yelling about how the sky will fall if we abolish the child welfare
surveillance state, something very much like it happened in New York City – and
children wound up better off. Prof.
Arons calls her study, “An Unintended Abolition.”
But what about Florida? I know of only one mutual aid group
in that state, though of course there may be many more. But if, in fact, mutual aid wasn’t as much of
a factor in Florida, what was?
For starters, there is the simple fact that the kind of
child abuse we think of when we hear those words – the beatings, torture and
murder that the fearmongers revel in – is, in fact, extremely rare, but we’ve
been conditioned by health terrorism to think otherwise. Overwhelmingly, families love their children
and cope with whatever stress the world dishes out.
But there also was a second factor in Prof. Arons’ analysis,
one which applies nationwide:
Money.
As Prof. Arons writes:
Together with the increase in mutual aid came a rare
influx of government aid with few strings attached. The CARES Act, passed in
early April 2020, provided a one-time stimulus payment of $1,200 per adult for
individuals earning less than $75,000 annually, with an additional $500 payment
for each child under the age of 17, and an extra $600 per week in unemployment
benefits, through the end of July 2020. Together, these measures represented a
transfer of funds from the government to the people larger than all other
non-retirement programs combined.
This real-world experience adds to the wealth
of studies showing that even small additional amounts of cash dramatically
reduce what family policing agencies call “child neglect.” This additional cash,
and the help of mutual aid organizations to which families can turn without
fear also prevent problems from escalating, reducing the already low
probability that families will lash out at their children.
The new danger in believing the fearmongers
All of this takes on even greater significance as our
knowledge of COVID-19 and its variants grows.
At least as early as March 19, one of the nation’s leading infectious
disease experts, a member of the Biden Transition Team’s COVID task force was
explaining why he’d changed his mind about the safety of a full reopening of
schools. Here’s what Dr. Michael
Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at
the University of Minnesota, told a
Boston television station:
“I, for one, was a strong supporter of opening schools,
particularly K through 8, saying the epidemiology here is compelling, that
there’s just very little transmission -- to kids, from kids, by kids and that
we could open schools,” Osterholm said. “Well, B.1.1.7 [The U.K. variant] has
totally turned that on its head.”
“I think school openings today are going to greatly
enhance transmission of B.1.1.7 in our communities,” Osterholm said. “And I
predict that within weeks we will be revisiting this issue -- unfortunately,
after we’ve had substantial transmission.”
Yet the fearmongering stories remain a staple of local news.
Three days after Dr. Osterholm spoke, a newspaper published
a story (no, I won’t link to it) in which Dr. Rachel Berger, one of the foremost
proponents of a massive child welfare surveillance state, someone who's
gone out of her way to minimize
the harm of tearing apart families said this:
“I can’t emphasize enough the need to get back in school.
… At least, get them into a classroom.
Get a teacher seeing these kids. … At this point, we know you can open schools
as long as you do it well.”
The same story includes a similarly panicky quote from a
local district attorney – and, again, all of this was published three days after
Dr. Osterholm’s warning.
The fearmongers’ false, dangerous message,
is unmistakable: Poor parents, especially poor parents of color are a greater
danger to their children than a deadly disease.
Time for an intended abolition?
What really endangers children, of course, is the extent to
which America’s family policing establishment has dehumanized the Black and
Brown families it professes to want to help.
The family policing establishment finds it inconceivable that families
who always have had to cope with far more than their white middle-class
counterparts also can cope with the stress of a pandemic without taking it out
on their kids. They find it unimaginable
that these parents love their children – just like white people do! They find it
incomprehensible that the children and families will do better without the “counseling,”
“parent education” and, worst of all, foster care, they seek to inflict.
But now we’ve seen it happen. We don’t have to ask what abolition would do
– we’ve seen an unintended abolition make families safer.
So imagine how well an intended abolition could
work. Imagine how much the safety and
well-being of America’s impoverished children would improve were there a phased
transition from agency-inflicted “preventive services” and foster care to a
system that emphasized concrete help provided by community-based agencies. Imagine if we phased out mandatory reporting
laws, so no one ever need fear asking for such help. Imagine if we drastically scaled back the
family police.
COVID-19 didn’t teach us exactly what that would look
like. But it taught us it would look a
hell of a lot better than what we have now.
