Latest federal data show significant decline in child abuse fatalities, even as foster care entries fell

The latest federal compilation of data from the states concerning child abuse and neglect shows that known child abuse fatalities declined significantly in 2024 compared to the previous year. It’s also the second decline in a row, following a smaller decline from 2022 to 2023. Overall, known fatalities during the two-year period declined by 12%. 

That’s probably the most significant finding in the latest Child Maltreatment report released Friday by the federal Administration for Children and Families (and yes, 2024 is the latest). 

During that same period – 2022 through 2024 – entries into foster care nationwide declined by about six percent. 

Did the decline in foster care entries cause the decline in child abuse deaths? Almost certainly not. Correlation is not causation. But that’s also true when foster care entries go down and child abuse deaths go up – yet foster care apologists love to exploit those data points over and over – carefully picking and choosing among them. 

Foster care apologists also will rush to point out that, they claim, child abuse deaths are underreported. They may be right. There also are reasons to believe they can be overreported. 

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.

But whichever may be the case, there is no evidence that agencies were, say, 12% more likely to overlook fatalities in 2024 than in 2022. 

All this is all the more reason it’s a good thing a massive new study has settled the issue once and for all. The study looked at 3.4 million case records and more than 20,000 child abuse deaths over a period of 13 years. The result: No evidence whatsoever that increasing foster care reduces child abuse deaths. And no evidence that reducing foster care increases child abuse deaths. 

For a full discussion of why that might be, and a discussion of what actually can reduce child abuse deaths, see this earlier post to the blog and NCCPR’s Issue Paper on child abuse fatalities. 

And in contrast, let us never forget the new study from Sweden finding that, when compared to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes, children placed in foster care were more than four times more likely to die by age 20. 

Other notable data from the Child Maltreatment report: 

● For the first time since at least 2015, the number of calls to child abuse hotlines declined – ever so slightly. Perhaps the public is starting to understand that both underreporting the very rare cases of genuine, serious abuse and overreporting everything else harms children. Perhaps people are being a little more careful – and more willing to become, in Joyce McMillan’s phrase, mandatory supporters instead of mandatory reporters. 

● The rate at which caseworkers checked boxes on forms saying they believed it was at least slightly more likely than not that the allegation is true (that’s all a “substantiated” report of child abuse or neglect really means) declined for the sixth year in a row.

The “logic” behind America’s massive child welfare surveillance state is the equivalent of a house of cards. Thanks to a new study, it just collapsed.

KEY POINTS 

● For decades, we were told we have to take away more children to stop child abuse deaths. If you dare take fewer, it was claimed, then more children will die.  

● A study of 3.4 million records over 13 years finds it’s not true. The study concludes: “Child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates.” 

● In other words, huge numbers of children, whom family police agencies rushed to tear from their homes because supposedly it would reduce fatalities, suffered all the harm of needless foster care for nothing. 

● The very fact that this finding will surprise many is a testament to the success of the child welfare establishment in using “health terrorism” to craft a false narrative. 

● The finding is all-the-more alarming in light of another recent study, from Sweden, showing that children placed in foster care are more than four times more likely to die by age 20 than even comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. The most common cause of death: suicide; suggesting that much of the problem is related to the inherent trauma of removal.

 Consider once again the sheer size of America’s child welfare surveillance state – and all the misery it inflicts in the name of “child protection.” 

More than one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children, will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation – and make no mistake, the trauma often is huge – before they are 18. In some cases, the investigation is necessary – but overwhelmingly, the allegations are false and/or confuse poverty with neglect. 

Based on numbers from recent years, it is likely that more than 170,000 children will be torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care in 2026. Half a million children are likely to spend some time in foster care this year. As anyone who remembers the cries of children separated at the border knows, no matter who does it and no matter what the reason, this is one of the worst traumas anyone can inflict on a child. 

In a small number of horror story cases, it’s necessary because even this trauma is less than the trauma of remaining in a horror story home. But nationwide in 2024, in 78% of cases, children were thrown into foster care where there was not even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In 60% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse – not just no allegation of running a meth lab or overdosing on fentanyl, no allegation of any use of any drug.  

The creation of this omnipresent surveillance state was not the result of any systematic study to determine what would work. Rather, it is the result of “health terrorism” – that’s not my term, it comes from a group that admits to having practiced it for decades. It’s simple enough: Take the worst horror stories, stories of sadists and brutes who torture, rape and murder children. Then lead us to believe that all or most cases are like that. Then demand that ever more families be surveilled and ever more children be taken. 

If you don’t agree with that approach, they say, then you must not care if children die. Because if we don’t take more children, they imply, that’s exactly what will happen. 

In the more than five decades since this system began, nobody ever actually stopped to check and see if this was true. Nobody asked: If we keep taking more kids, will fewer die? Nobody asked: If we take fewer kids, will that lead to more deaths? 

Until now. And it turns out the answer is no. The “logic” behind America’s massive child welfare surveillance state is the equivalent of a house of cards. It just collapsed. 

A study just published in the authoritative JAMA Network Open examined 3.4 million records of children in foster care from 2010 to 2023 and 24,108 fatalities that states attributed to child abuse or neglect. The result might best be described as a clear pattern – of no pattern. Or as the authors put it: 

“Child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates.” 

It’s not just that correlation is not causation – there’s not even a correlation. 

The authors don’t offer any suggestions concerning why there’s no correlation. I will suggest one  possibility: 

Every child abuse death is the worst imaginable tragedy. They also are as rare as they are horrific. Even if you take the officially reported figure for child abuse deaths in a year – 2000- and double it, then compare it to the total child population, that still means that in any given year 99.995% of children will not die of child abuse. The odds of finding an impurity in Ivory Soap are greater than the odds that a child will die of abuse or neglect in the United States this year. 

Here’s how that looks on a pie chart:

 

Can’t see the part with the 0.005%? That’s the point. The line is really there (look very closely at about 3 O’Clock) but child abuse fatalities are needles in a giant haystack. 

So if you react to a horrible child abuse tragedy by making the haystack even bigger; suddenly sweeping a whole lot more children into foster care, the odds are extremely low that you’ll actually happen to sweep up a child who otherwise might die. The odds are excellent that you will expose many more children to the trauma – and worse – of needless foster care. 

And that’s where another recent study comes in. This one, from Sweden, is the latest in a long line of studies, the others almost all from North America, which compare what happens in typical cases – not the horror stories. Over and over, they find that, in these typical cases, children left in their own homes fare better on all sorts of measures even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. 

The latest study found the children left in their own homes fared better on the most important measure of all: surviving until adulthood.  The foster children were more than four times more likely to die by age 20. The major cause of death: suicide, which would appear to say something about the enormous trauma inherent in removal. 

So consider the implications of these two studies together: 

● Taking away more children will not reduce child abuse deaths.

● But the additional children taken will be a lot more likely to die by age 20 than if they were left in their own homes.

And then there’s that whole other set of studies showing horribly high rates of abuse in foster care itself. Indeed, when child welfare agencies react to tragedies by rushing to take away more children – foster-care panics -- the odds of a child needlessly taken being abused in foster care itself are far greater than the odds that the agency will happen to find a child who otherwise would die. 

This also explains another study finding: The researchers accounted for the claim that the number of child abuse deaths is understated. The authors ran a series of simulations. They simulated under-reporting of fatalities, assuming that as many as 75% of all deaths weren’t reported, and found even that wouldn’t change the result. 

What do we do instead? 

This doesn’t mean we give up. The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero; we strive for it even as we know our reach always will exceed our grasp. But bringing us closer to that goal requires rejecting the false narrative of health terrorism that’s only led us farther from it. 

Instead, we start with a laser focus on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. Study after study finds even small amounts of cash can go a long way.  And not just in curbing “neglect.” Remember the COVID pandemic when the health terrorists predicted a “pandemic of child abuse” because all those overwhelmingly middle-class, disproportionately white professionals didn’t have their eyes on children who are neither? Instead, the family police were forced to step back, community-based, community-run mutual aid organizations stepped up, and the federal government stepped in with no-strings-attached cash. The result, even severe child abuse declined. 

Yes, but what about when the problem isn’t poverty “alone”? Then the solution often still is money – so poor families can buy the help they need with those other problems, the same way middle-class families do, instead of forcing their children to endure the trauma of being confiscated by the state. 

Other solutions involve making the haystack smaller instead of bigger: These include replacing mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, leaving professionals free to exercise their professional judgments instead of flooding the system with false reports, and narrowing definitions of neglect, which often are definitions of poverty. 

All of this needs to be enforced – and that requires high-quality legal representation for families from the moment the family police are at the door. No, it’s not to get “bad parents” off; it’s to provide alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” often churned out by family police agencies. It’s been proven to reduce foster care with no compromise of safety. 

More details concerning these and other solutions can be found in the solutions section at www.nccpr.org 

But here’s step one: The health terrorists misled us for decades. Don’t let them do it again.

Federal report says child abuse deaths DECREASED during the pandemic – but an Associated Press reporter doesn’t seem to want you to notice.

There's some big news in this report.
Unfortunately, the Associated Press buried the lead.

UPDATE: APRIL 29, 2022: Because of the reporting discussed below, I had very low expectations when I learned that the same reporter was examining the use of "predictive analytics" in family policing.  I was wrong.  That story is excellent.

For a far more nuanced take than was offered by AP, check out this story from The Imprint. Their bottom line: 

It all points to the notion that in the early months of the pandemic, as lockdowns began and schools were closed, there was not the kind of unseen surge in abuse and neglect that some feared.

Remember all those scare stories about how, because COVID-19 prevented overwhelmingly white disproportionately middle-class “mandated reporters” from constantly having their “eyes” on children who are neither, their parents would unleash upon their own children a “pandemic of child abuse”?

As with so much bad child welfare journalism, this false narrative only hurt the children it was intended to help.  It risked deterring families from seeking help when they needed it most, encouraged putting even more families under constant, oppressive surveillance, increased the likelihood of needless placement in foster care, reinforced stereotypes about nonwhite families – and, particularly before vaccines, risked spreading COVID-19 among families and caseworkers alike. 

Given that, you’d think it would have been big news when the federal government released its annual estimate of child abuse fatalities and found that, in the year ending Sept. 30, 2020 – including the first six months of the pandemic – child abuse deaths actually decreased. 

The decline in child abuse deaths may add a little bit to a wealth of data and studies, most recently from JAMA Pediatrics, but also much more, showing that there was no “pandemic of child abuse” – and journalists should think about how quickly they bought into stereotypes about nonwhite families when they rushed to write those stories. 

But what if you're as deeply committed to the “pandemic of child abuse” myth as Associated Press reporter Sally Ho seems to be?  She wrote one of the big fearmongering stories last year, a story quoting, unrebutted, an official with an association of school social workers suggesting it’s a good idea to call a child abuse hotline “if a child seems dirty." (No, I won't link to it, but it's still pinned it to the top of her Twitter feed.)  Well, then apparently you don't let data, or studies, or JAMA Pediatrics spoil a good “master narrative.” 

Instead, Ho’s latest story on the topic is headlined: 

Child abuse report: Deaths of Black children up in pandemic 

Then this subhead: 

The latest national child welfare report shows an increase in the number of Black children who died, even though fewer abuse-related fatalities were investigated in the yearlong period that included the first several months of the pandemic 

There is nothing in the story to support that subhead.  There were fewer reports alleging child abuse and therefore fewer investigations, but that does not mean fewer “abuse-related fatalities” were investigated.  The subhead seems to be based on the assumption that, thanks to the pandemic, Black parents were more successfully killing their children without anyone knowing about it.  (Reporters don’t generally write the headlines and subheads, that may well have been some copy editor making an inference – understandable, since that is what the story implies.) 

In the story itself, the decline in total child abuse deaths not only isn’t the lead, it is barely mentioned in the 8^th paragraph of a 12-paragraph story. 

Similarly, when family policing agencies were forced to pull back, one of the first stories debunking the "pandemic of child abuse" myth noted that, in poor communities of color, parents say it feels like "the pollution lifting." Note that the comment is attributed, not an editorial position by the reporter.  In contrast, the AP story simply declares that the decline in investigations is "a troubling trend." That's fine (albeit wrong) in an editorial. It has no place in a news story.

But what about that increase in child abuse deaths of Black children? 

Ho cites an estimate of 504 such fatalities in 2020, an increase of 73 compared with 2019.
She neglects to mention that the 2019 figure was a significant decrease from 2018, when there were 470 such deaths. The increase between 2018 and 2020 was 34; less than half the increase than if you choose 2019 as the base year. (On the other hand, the 2018 figure was a significant increase from 2017 – even though there was no pandemic. This very volatility further indicates something discussed in detail below, that fatalities are an unreliable way to draw conclusions of any kind about child welfare systems.) 

But since that’s what AP has chosen to use without context, here’s the context: 

We’re looking at an increase of 73 (or 34) in a universe of more than 8.5 million Black children.  That means, relative to the total number of Black children in America, between 2019 and 2020 the number said to have died of child abuse increased by 0.0009%. 

And, for reasons discussed below, some of the supposed increase might be an artifact of subjective decision-making – and bias – in determining cause-of-death. 

All this illustrates the primary reason one can draw no sweeping conclusions of any kind from child abuse death numbers.  It is a reason I’ve repeated often on this blog, a reason for which we all should be grateful: Though each is the worst imaginable tragedy, the number is too low to draw sweeping conclusions.  The number can fluctuate easily due to random chance -- or simply errors in reporting statistics as they are passed from police departments (in some cases) to county child welfare offices to state child welfare agencies to the federal government.  

Another key factor is the potential for bias.  One might think that nothing would be more straightforward than determining if a fatality is due to abuse or neglect.  

But what about a case in which, say, a three-year-old wakes up early one Sunday morning.  Mom and Dad are asleep.  They didn’t know how adept their child had become at opening the back door.  He wanders away, falls into a body of water and drowns.  Accident or neglect?  If the body of water is the pool behind the McMansion it will probably be labeled an accident.  If it’s a pond behind a trailer park: Neglect. 

So, what do you think?  Which racial or ethnic groups are more likely to be involved when a death is mislabeled neglect?  

Selective about “experts” 

The Associated Press story ignores all that. It leaves the impression that the increase is because as soon as mandated reporters turned away, Black parents unleashed savagery on their children.  The story includes the same boilerplate that became standard in stories pushing the pandemic of child abuse myth: 

The federal data confirm a drop by hundreds of thousands in documented cases of child abuse reports, investigations, substantiated allegations and support for at-risk families. But experts say that’s not necessarily good news — children were out of the public eye during the pandemic, and some cases likely weren’t reported until they became more severe, if at all. 

Experts say?  There are plenty of experts who say that is b.s.  But those experts are ignored. 
They don’t even get the usual “to be sure graf” (as in “To be sure, not everyone agrees with the thesis of our story, [insert token quote or statistic here] but, [return to the reporters’ thesis]…”

Two government officials are quoted, but they do nothing to challenge the story’s thesis – in fact, they say pretty much nothing at all. And even then, one of the officials JooYeun Chang, was taken out of context.  The Imprint has what the AP story left out. 

Instead, the story cites just one alleged “expert,” who, in the long, ugly tradition of “health terrorism” offers up the fill-in-the-blanks quote the reporter seemed to want: 

The numbers on fatalities in particular are concerning, because such cases are notoriously underreported, said Amy Harfeld, of the Children’s Advocacy Institute. Social workers often investigate a child’s death only if the family had already been involved with a child welfare agency. 

Even if one assumes that such cases are underreported and, in fairness, given all the failures I’ve just described, it’s reasonable to believe that, this is not a new phenomenon.  There is nothing to indicate that the number of missed cases increased in 2020, so this does nothing to support the “pandemic of child abuse” theory.  In fact, it is no less possible that, without as many false allegations and poverty-confused-with-neglect cases clogging the system, workers found more cases when children were in real danger, and that’s why total child abuse deaths went down.  

But the weirdest part of the quote is the implication that a child abuse death doesn’t make it into federal data unless it’s investigated by social workers.  A death determined to be child abuse is reported and counted whether it’s investigated by social workers or by law enforcement. And I’m sure even Amy Harfeld doesn’t believe that, upon discovering a suspicious death of a child, the cops say “Nah, don’t bother to investigate; they were never reported to child protective services.” 

Yes, this should cut both ways 

But wait: Does that mean we also can’t draw sweeping conclusions from the overall decline in child abuse deaths?  

Yes, it does.  I’ve suggested before that I would be glad to negotiate a mutual moratorium on the use of horror stories to make a point, I also would be glad to negotiate a mutual moratorium on drawing sweeping conclusions from child abuse death statistics.  So far, reporters don’t seem to be interested. 

More important, none of the evidence debunking the pandemic of child abuse myth depends exclusively on fatality numbers.  But none of that evidence, and none of the experts who disagree with the story’s premise got even a word in edgewise.

Child abuse fatalities: The little red needle in the big blue haystack

If you want to get people to surrender fundamental civil liberties you’d better scare the hell out of them. 

Donald Trump understands this; it’s been his m.o. since he began his campaign. So when his administration started tearing apart families at the Mexican border he justified it with hype and horror stories.

The child welfare establishment gets it, too.  For decades they’ve used horror stories – and hyped, misleading statistics - to justify tearing apart families all over America. No, it’s not identical, but there are more similarities than differences.

As early as 1993, under the headline “Damned Lies and Statistics,” Time magazine called out what was then one of the worst offenders – Prevent Child Abuse America (as well as other groups crusading for other causes) for using “flagrantly flimsy figures.”  

Ten years later, PCAA itself admitted to this:

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities.

It’s not that the numbers themselves are necessarily wrong – but crucial context often is missing.  So we are often told that there are more than three million reports alleging child abuse every year. But we’re not told that more than 80 percent of them turn out to be false and most of the rest involve “neglect” – which often means only that the family is poor.

The most misleading statistic in child welfare

But the single most misleading figure in all of child welfare is the one I discussed recently in connection with the Orange County Register’s descent into “crack baby” journalism – the one about the proportion of child abuse deaths “known to the system.”

It is a figure built around the worst possible tragedy – child abuse fatalities.  The only acceptable goal for such tragedies is zero.  But if one really believes that even one such death is one too many, then there is no need to distort data to leave a misimpression about how often such tragedies occur right under the noses of caseworkers.  And that very distortion makes it harder to reach the goal we all share.

The more one favors a take-the-child-and-run approach, the more one harps on this figure – because the impression it leaves for the casual reader is vastly different from what the number really means.

So we read that “Of all the children who died in [name of state or locality] [fill in percentage] were previously ‘known to the system.’”

Typically, the percentage will be anywhere from one-third to two-thirds; the Register gave an even higher percentage, but did not explain how it came to that conclusion.

So one might read in a news story: “Half of all child abuse deaths involved children previously known to child protective services.”  Wow. That sounds like half the time, children known to CPS die.  Of course the figure means nothing of the sort.  The real meaning becomes clear when you add one crucial bit of context: The actual number of children who become “known to the system” over the course of a year.

So now, let’s look at the numbers nationwide.

According to the latest Child Maltreatment report from the Department of Health and Human Services, there were an estimated 1,720 child abuse deaths in 2017.  Of that total, 27.3 percent were previously known, in some way, to authorities.

Those who promote hype and hysteria are always saying that every figure they want to hype is an underestimate.  But this time, let’s assume they’re right.  Just for the sake of argument, let’s double the number of child abuse deaths and double the proportion “known to the system.”  That would give us a total of 3,440 deaths, of which 1,878 involved children “known to the system.”

Adding the missing number

Sounds like children often, even typically, die right under the noses of child protective services workers, doesn’t it?  But now, let’s add the missing number – the total number of children who become “known to the system” every year.  In 2017 that number was over seven million children - 7,508,000 to be precise.  So now we’re talking not about 1,878 out of 3,440 – but 1,878 out of 7,508,000.

So every year, CPS agencies are expected to figure out which of the 7,508,000 children will die if they don’t intervene in time.  It looks a bit like the graphic at the start of this post. This one:

 A tiny red needle in a big blue haystack.

But even that representation understates the difficulty involved for frontline caseworkers. In the graphic, all of the deaths are in one place.  In real life, they are much smaller needles scattered all over the haystack.

Even showing the needles in a different color can be misleading. Because while some of the case files turn out to have more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade, in many others there was no way to predict the tragedy that would follow.  As one former child welfare official put it: “For every one of these [death ‘known to the system’] cases, I can show you ten with identical circumstances where nothing went wrong.”

And then there is the whole definition of “known to the system.”  Again, some of those deaths were in cases where, in fact, the family was extremely well known to authorities, the problems were obvious and anyone should have seen the danger.  But most were not.  Sometimes “known to the system” means only that a report several years earlier had been screened out at a child abuse hotline.  So CPS investigators didn’t really know the family at all.

Where do we put 7.4 million children?

So what do we do? Investigate the families of all 7.4 million children?  Even if that could be done logistically – and it can’t – that would traumatize millions more children for no reason.  And, of course, the overload would be such that all the investigations would be sloppier and even fewer needles in that giant haystack would be found.

Or should we skip the investigating and just take away all 7.4 million children?  That way we know we won’t miss the needles because we’ve vacuumed up the entire haystack.  But where, exactly, would we put all those children?  And what would we do about placing so many of them at high risk of abuse in foster care itself?

So what’s the point of the most misleading statistic in child welfare? It’s not to get us to take away all 7.4 million – but it is an effort to get us to take away more of them, and traumatize more families with needless investigations, and beat back any attempts to impose openness, accountability and due process on the system.

But openness, accountability and due process are exactly what we need.  Because only a system that relies less on coercive intervention will have the time and resources to find those needles in the haystack, before it’s too late.

We know that because of something I’ve written about before, a study done by a liberal Texas think tank, the Center for Public Policy Priorities.  The study looked at what does, and does not, contribute to reducing child abuse deaths.

Let’s start with what doesn’t contribute to more child abuse deaths. The study found:

● The rate at which people report child abuse does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state takes children from their parents does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state screens in reports for investigation does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

Here’s what does contribute to more child abuse deaths:

● High rates of poverty

● High rates of teen pregnancy

● Low rates of services to prevent child maltreatment.

Which means, of course, the real solutions are pretty obvious.

In contrast, the misuse of the most misleading statistic in child welfare only makes things worse.  It encourages overloading caseworkers with even more false allegations, more cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect” and more children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love.  And that leaves the workers even less time to find those very small needles in that very large haystack.

Child welfare and substance use: The Orange County Register’s exercise in statistics abuse

Photo by Gage Skidmore

The Orange County Register uses horror stories about child abuse deaths in exactly the way Donald Trump uses horror stories about crimes committed by immigrants.

Were there a hotline to which one could report “statistics abuse,” the reporters who wrote the Orange County Register series “Born on Drugs” would have their rights to the calculator apps on their phones terminated.

The Register’s misleading use of data, combined with the resurrection of long-discredited claims about drug use and child welfare, amount to “crack baby journalism” – a revival of the sorts of hype and hysteria that reappear whenever the nation is hit with a new “Worst Drug Plague Ever.”

As it happens, The New York Times published an outstanding eight-part series of carefully reported editorials debunking such myths – at almost exactly the moment the Register published its attempt to revive them – something I discuss in detail on the Southern California online news site WitnessLA.

But the Register also has trouble coping with numbers.  The statistics it cites come without links, so sources can’t be checked and context can’t be verified.  Even the descriptions of sources often are vague, crucial terms are not defined and time spans covered can be unclear.

Most of the statistics revolve around child abuse fatalities. Each is the worst form of tragedy and the only acceptable goal for such fatalities is zero. But hyping the numbers only takes us farther from that goal. Similarly, the goals of the Register journalists were noble.

But by encouraging a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, the Register’s journalism increases the likelihood that there will be more such horrors.  That’s because the real reason for the horrors almost always is an overloaded system and a rush to remove more children needlessly only overloads it more. 

Those of us who are truly committed to child safety know that the real numbers are bad enough, but real solutions often are counterintuitive.

The Big Lie of American child welfare

The Register takes almost every number out of context, and almost every assertion about those numbers is wrong.  It’s all done in the service of the Big Lie of American child welfare: the claim that leaving children in their own homes, or returning them there, is inherently risky while foster care, for all its other problems, at least is safe.

So the Register claims:

A parent’s right to rear children without state involvement is in constant play with a child’s right to be free from maltreatment. The … conflicting mandates have been debated by those inside the system for decades.

None of that is true.

In fact:

● Family preservation is almost always the better option because it is in the best interests of children; it is not a matter of “parents’ rights.”

● The “mandates” do not “conflict.”  There is no conflict with child safety, because in typical cases family preservation is the safer option – as can be seen by multiple studies and by California data the Register ignored.

So let’s go through the Register stories, statistic by statistic

Misleading statements about what happens

The Register tells us:

More than 2,200 children have suffered fatal and near-fatal incidents in California since 2009. 

Can you find the needles?

Why use a figure that covers at least nine years? Because it sounds worse than saying: In a state with 11 million children, an average of 244, or 0.002 percent suffer fatal and near fatal incidents each year.  Putting it that way also tells us that the number of children who suffer such “incidents” – a term the Register never defines – are both 244 too many and also needles in a gigantic haystack. So figuring out which 244 children are in that sort of danger is not nearly as simple as the Register stories imply.

Notice also that the Register has moved, without explanation, from discussing deaths allegedly linked to parental substance abuse to all forms of fatal and near fatal “incidents” – leaving readers to assume that all these incidents were caused by drug using parents.

(Later, when the Register offers an estimate of the number of children under 5 who are said to have died due to “drug exposure” it averages out to about than nine per year – in a state with at least 2.4  million children under age 5. That’s 0.0004 percent.)

Misleading statements about where it happens

The Register continues:

The overwhelming majority of these tragedies — more than 90 percent, according to a Southern California News Group analysis of data from California Department of Social Services — occurred while the children were in the care of their own parents and legal guardians.

Wow, sounds like a child’s own home must be the most dangerous place in the world, doesn’t it?

But what the Register doesn’t tell us is that at least 95 percent of California children live with at least one parent or a legal guardian.  So this statistic really tells us that, when it comes to children who suffer “fatal and near fatal incidents” they are probably safer in their own homes than elsewhere.

And in fact, this is confirmed by the mass of research showing that foster care itself has a terrible track record for safety, with study after study finding abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The record of group homes and institutions is even worse.

The Register offers up its misleading statistics about safety right after telling us something else:

While the number of kids in California’s child protection system plunged almost 50 percent between 2000 and 2018, the number of infants — younger than one year — shot up more than 9 percent.

Thus, readers are left to conclude: Aha! Foster care plummeted and now all these children are dying.

Except: At no point does the Register offer data indicating that the rate of deaths and near deaths was lower back when California had so many more children in foster care.

In fact, it is almost impossible to reliably measure trends using child welfare fatality data. One reason is one for which we should all be grateful: Even in a state the size of California, the number of such horrible tragedies is low enough that is hard to draw conclusions.  Also:  Determining whether a death is due to abuse, neglect or accident is surprisingly subjective.  (But, just for the record, the only data I could find suggest that the figure fluctuates from year to year with no discernable relationship to the aggressiveness of child protective services.)

As foster care declines in California, child safety improves

But here’s what we do know: A far more reliable measure of safety is the rate of alleged recurrence of maltreatment.  That is, of all the cases in which workers declare an allegation of abuse or neglect “substantiated” in what percentage is there another “substantiated” allegation within 12 months.  During those same years in which foster care “plummeted” that measure improved in California by 28 percent.  So as foster care declined, California children got safer.

That is not as counterintuitive as it may sound. The more that workers are overloaded with false allegations, trivial cases, cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect and all the other cases that don’t belong in the system, the less time they have to find those needles in the haystack.  So again, it’s advocates of family preservation who are the true supporters of child safety.  In contrast, the hype and hysteria offered up by the Register is likely to make all children less safe.

As for the claim that from 2000 to 2018 “the number of infants — younger than one year — shot up more than 9 percent,” that’s an increase of about one-half-of-one-percent per year – a pretty weird definition of “shot up.”

False claims about reunification

Over and over, the Register stories suggest some kind of fanatical devotion on the part of the system to family preservation at children’s expense.

So a social worker tells the Register “California is a reunification state,” adding:

“That was embedded in me through my education process. They’re always going to work towards reuniting families, because there’s this belief that that’s better for the child overall. I don’t always agree with that.”

But it’s not just a belief; it’s a fact, documented in study after study showing that in typical cases, including cases involving substance use, children typically fare better in their own homes than in foster care.

But the social worker can stop worrying. The data belie the rhetoric. California is not “a reunification state.”

A record that is resolutely average

For starters, even with the “plummeting” rate of foster care placement since 2000, California’s record is resolutely average.  As of 2017, the most recent year for which comparative figures are available, the rate at which children were trapped in foster care in California was indeed below the national average – by all of five percent, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  And California’s rate of placement was more than 30 percent higher than New York, another large, relatively progressive state where individual counties run child welfare.

So in fact, it’s back when California had proportionately far more children in foster care, the time the Register seems to view as the good old days, that California was an outlier -- and children were less safe.

As for reunification: In federal fiscal year 2017, again the most recent year for which comparative data are available, nationwide 49 percent of the children who left foster care were reunified.  In California it was 51 percent – hardly suggestive of a fanatical dedication to reunification.  And again, California’s results have come with improvements in child safety.

The Register goes on to offer up a toxic mix of extreme horror stories and stats that have almost nothing to do with the horrors.

So after describing in detail the suffering of an infant “born on drugs,” the Register goes on to tell us that “Nearly 50,000 drug-exposed infants have been born in California since 2000, a parade of human suffering that has touched families, communities and taxpayers.”  They put the figure for 2017 at 5,050.  Again, they leave out context.  The figure is under two percent of all births in California that year.

And, of course, “drug exposed” is not defined.  We are meant to assume the worst, of course. But it actually can mean anything from giving birth in the middle of a home meth lab to smoking marijuana to ease the pain of labor. It also can include cases in which the mothers are prescribed legal drugs such as methadone and buprenorphine as part of a program to treat addiction to opioids.

But the clincher, the one journalists who seek to fan the flames of take-the-child-and-run hysteria love most, begins in the Register series with the subhead “Deadly benefit of the doubt?” and continues:

It’s unclear how often the push to keep families together ends badly.

Actually that’s not true.

As noted earlier, as California has done more to keep families together, the rate at which children “known to the system” are abused or neglected again has declined, indicating that whatever push there may be to keep families together actually has made children safer.

The most misleading statistic in child welfare

But the Register reporters ignore all that, and all those studies on how children in typical cases typically fare better in their own homes. Instead they rely on the single most misleading statistic in all of child welfare – the one about the proportion of horror stories involving children “known to the system.”  So the Register tells us:

[S]ome three-quarters of child deaths due to abuse and neglect tracked by the state of California – and some 60 percent of serious injuries – happened in families that had previous contact with the child welfare system. Examples of the system backfiring can be horrific.

Indeed they can. Examples of undocumented workers committing terrible crimes also can be horrific. That’s why Donald Trump uses them at every opportunity to draw broad, sweeping - and false - conclusions.

The Register does exactly the same thing.  As is discussed in the column for WitnessLA, the requisite horror stories are followed immediately by:

The wisdom of California’s goal – keep families together even when parents struggle with addiction – is called into stark relief by such tragedies.

No, it’s not.  No more than the wisdom of say “sanctuary cities” is “called into stark relief” by Trump’s horror stories.

In fact, the wisdom of California’s goal, assuming there is such a goal, is proven by the fact that overall, children are safer and more children are spared the horrors of foster care itself.

If every effort to keep families together is “called into question” by horror stories then no child ever should be kept in her or his own home – because no system can avoid every horror story.  And even that won’t work, because then you still have all the horrors of foster care.  In fact, if any approach that leads to a horror story is off the table, then there can’t be any foster care either – because sometimes children die in foster care.

But of course that whole 77 percent figure is meant to leave an impression of massive failure – almost as if 77 percent of the time reunification leads to death or near death.

That’s because this figure leaves out another crucial number.

In a typical year nearly 500,000 California children are “involved with the child protection system” as, at a minimum, subjects of investigations. That's the blue in the pie chart above.  Of that number, roughly 188 died or nearly died.  That’s 0.04 percent. That's the red portion of the pie chart.

If it's hard to spot on a pie chart, imagine what it's like for caseworkers.

What does “involved” with the system mean?

The Register also offers up a misleading description of families “involved” with the system, describing them as families “officials knew were problematic.”  On the contrary, many of these children were the subject of false allegations that were screened out at child abuse hotlines.  Not only did agencies not know the families were supposedly “problematic,” they didn’t know them at all. 

Most of the rest were determined to be unfounded.  (And before anyone dredges up that old canard about how “Well, unfounded doesn’t mean it was false, maybe the worker just can’t prove it” look again at the data: The only study I know of to second-guess these decisions found that, nationwide, workers are two to six times more likely to wrongly “substantiate” an allegation than to wrongly label it unfounded.  Oh, and workers don’t need proof to “substantiate” an allegation, their own guess usually is enough.)

When a system is deluged with false reports, whether by malicious spouses or neighbors, “mandated reporters” terrified of not reporting cases they know are absurd, or simply well-meaning people who confuse a family’s poverty with neglect or otherwise are mistaken, it is the system that’s problematic, not all those families.

Yet, among this huge number of allegations, The Register thinks that there’s a vast family preservation conspiracy because an average of 188 per year - four one hundredths of one percent - died.

Yes, some of those cases had files with more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. Most do not.  Many are indistinguishable from many of the other 499,812 children who come to the attention of the system in some way every year. 

So what, exactly, does the Register propose to do with the other 499,812 children? Take them all away – instead of just the 28,000 or so California takes in a typical year?  And where, exactly would the Register propose to put them all?

What the figure actually shows is that parents almost never kill or nearly kill their children.  Those who do are those needles in a haystack.  You are not going to find those needles by trying to vacuum up the haystack with more reporting, more investigation more foster care and assuming that every mother with a substance use problem is a likely killer.

Toward real solutions

So what can be done?

Nine years ago, a liberal think tank in Texas – and yes, there really is such a thing -- tried to answer that question.

Here’s what they found does not work:

● The rate at which people report child abuse does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state screens in reports for investigation does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state takes children from their parents does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

What actually does contribute to child abuse deaths?

● High rates of poverty

● High rates of teen pregnancy

● Low rates of services to prevent child maltreatment.

And when the issue is substance abuse, what works? Exactly what The New York Times suggested in those groundbreaking editorials: Drug treatment, including medication-assisted treatment, and help that is neither judgmental nor patronizing.  One more thing that would help: Not assuming that every parent who uses a substance, legal or illegal, is incapable of being a good parent.

One of the editorial writers who worked on the Times series Jeneen Interlandi, summed it up perfectly in a series of tweets.  She began with this:

 A mother or a pregnant woman takes hard drugs, and we immediately sharpen the knives. Hang her, shoot her, lock her up. At the very least, take her kids away. Because what kind of mother does that?

Eight tweets later she concludes:

What if the answer to the question, "What kind of mother does that?" is, "A mother who is just like you, except that she has substance use disorder."

It looks as though the reporters at the Orange County Register were too busy on their own righteous indignation high to consider that possibility.  They should be careful. That kind of high can be addictive.