Recommendations from federal commission on child abuse deaths would take a bad system and make it much worse

• Recommendations now being finalized by the "Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities"  would create a regime of domestic spying that would make the NSA blush

Today, NCCPR releases a report analyzing draft recommendations from the federal "Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities."

The analysis responds primarily to two documents containing draft recommendations from the Commission, available here and here. Other parts of the analysis are based on recent public meetings of the Commission held via conference call. 

We realize some might wonder why we are responding to recommendations before they are final.  But we’re sure the Commission will understand.  After all, the entire theme of their work is the need to try to stop harm before it occurs.

Below, is the introduction to the report.  The full report is available here.

        

It is, of course the most noble of goals: eliminating child abuse and neglect fatalities.  But a commission created by a federal law and charged with recommending ways to achieve those goals is debating draft recommendations that, if enacted, are doomed to fail.  They would harm hundreds of thousands of children who were never maltreated and actually make it less likely that children in real danger will be found in time.

            We estimate that just one of the recommendations from the “Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities” probably would add more than 800,000 new child abuse investigations every year – a 44 percent increase. One Commission document appears to say that this recommendation alone would cost more than $1 billion, at another point it was suggested that the cost for all recommendations would be at least $4 billion per year – and even that may be just the amount the Commission wants the federal government to supply.  These funds would have to be taken from far better approaches to reducing child abuse.  And the additional 800,000 investigations would inundate the system, so overloading workers that they actually would wind up missing more children in real danger.

            Another recommendation, the one the Commission appears most proud of, would require Child Protective Services (CPS) to go back and reconsider every open case in which they decided to leave a child in her or his own home.  Some commissioners are calling it a “surge;” others prefer “accelerant.”  (There are a number of variations on this floating around – some say it would be every open case with certain risk factors – but all versions target only children left in their own homes.)  This appears to be based on the false assumption that at least if the child is in foster care, that child is safe.  The high rates of abuse in foster care indicate otherwise. 

This recommendation gives no weight to the enormous emotional trauma of foster care, trauma so great that two huge studies found that children left in their own homes fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

And once again it would divert time, energy and resources from far better options.  One state that tried this approach wound up with a huge increase in its foster care population – and an increase in child abuse deaths.

            Indeed, if the Commission’s top priority is child safety, it should be calling first and foremost for a review of every child in foster care to see if the child really needs to be there.

            Still another recommendation, discussed below, reveals the same sort of racial and class biases as permeate the child welfare system itself.

All of the members of the Commission have the best of intentions; some have an excellent track record as child welfare reformers. But strip away the rhetoric and the jargon and all that the Commission really is recommending is more of the same: a vast expansion of the current failed child protective services bureaucracy that already wreaks havoc in the lives of millions of innocent families even as it overlooks children in real danger. 

The Commission added a dystopian, 21^st Century twist.  They appear to justify the draft  recommendations based on the notion that science has advanced to the point where the same sorts of algorithms that Netflix uses to predict which movies you want to see also can tell us where CPS workers can barge into a home and, often, take away the children.

            It is much like the model depicted in the science fiction film Minority Report, in which people are arrested and jailed based on the predictions of three psychics in a bathtub.  But instead of seeing that film as a warning, the Commission seems to view it as a blueprint.

            But what the Commission does is even worse.  At least the algorithms are, in theory, tailored to individual circumstances (though anyone looking at their suggestions list from Netflix may question that).  The Commission is proposing wholesale changes in law, changes that would apply to millions of Americans, based on wild extrapolations from studies of individual risk factors.

The commission uses the same sort of fear-mongering as
Donald Trump to justify its recommendations.
Photo by Gage Skidmore

            In other words, the Commission takes the concept of “predictive analytics,” a fad that is questionable in itself – and perverts it.  The result is recommendations that add up to a regime of domestic spying that would make the NSA blush.

            The rationale behind these recommendations echoes the worst excesses of the so-called war on terror.  Terrorists kill innocent men, women – and children.  So demagogues like Donald Trump propose that we prevent all Muslims from entering America. Most of the members of the Commission probably found Trump’s proposal appalling.  But it is remarkable how often otherwise sensible people resort to Trump’s kind of fear-mongering and extremism when the topic is child abuse. 

In this case, the draft recommendations use the same justification as Trump – the killing of innocent children - to justify allowing CPS workers to barge into hundreds of thousands of homes where the evidence of maltreatment is so weak that child abuse hotlines did not even accept the call for investigation.  They use Trump’s logic to try to justify their proposed “surge” – with Trump-style disregard for the massive collateral damage it would cause.  And they use   Trump logic for what appears to be a call for changes in state law that would allow CPS workers to conduct traumatic investigations of children, have the children stripsearched, and consign those children to the chaos of foster care, all based on a hunch that and at some point in the future someone in that home might abuse or neglect a child.

            In Minority Report, this was known as “pre-crime.”

            Still another draft recommendation might expand the authority of CPS workers to remove children in one of the places where such removal hurts children the most – when a parent has been a victim of domesticviolence.

            And like the child welfare system itself, the recommendations reflect profound bias.  One recommendation calls for universal drug testing for pregnant mothers whose birth is paid for by Medicaid – in other words, mothers who are poor. The Commission member whose lobbying led to creation of the Commission, and who has been the strongest supporter of the most draconian recommendations, Michael Petit, once told a Congressional committee that, when it comes to preventing child abuse “the states that do the best overall are the ones that have smaller, whiter populations” [emphasis added].  During that same testimony, Petit perpetuated stereotypes about minorities and drug abuse.

A transcript of the December 3, 2015 Commission meeting reveals Petit still trying to minimize the role of racial bias in the disproportionate rate at which African-American and Native American children are taken from their homes.  Indeed, in a dialogue with another commissioner, Cook County Judge Patricia Martin, the presiding judge of the Court’s Child Protection Division, Petit seems to have difficulty even grasping the concept. (For details, see the previous post to this blog.)

            Even if one thinks it’s worth this massive undermining of civil liberties in order to reduce child abuse fatalities, there is another problem with this approach: It will backfire.  In fact, it already has.  All over the country, high-profile child abuse deaths have led to demands to investigate more cases and take away more children.  That’s led to foster-care panics – sharp sudden spikes in removals of children from their homes.  Over and over, these panics have been followed by increases in child abuse deaths.

            The draft recommendations are a formula for a nationwide foster-care panic, on a massive scale.

            The Commission recommendations involve a huge increase in the number of people to be investigated and spied upon by child protective services agencies.  We know that state and local governments aren’t going to raise taxes to pay the more than $1 billion per year or $4 billion per year or maybe much more that this will require.  Rather, they will turn to one of two alternatives: They will cut back on other human services programs – programs that are far more likely to curb child abuse – or they will simply increase the workload of existing staff.

            Indeed, at a time when Congress finally is giving serious consideration to allowing funds now reserved for foster care to be used for safe, proven prevention and family preservation programs as well, there are Commissioners who seem to have their eye on that pot of money as a way to fund child abuse investigations instead.  (There was a somewhat vague, general discussion of this during a Commission conference call on January 16.)

            Either way, it backfires.  If you cut effective child abuse prevention programs the result is obvious: more child abuse.  If you overload staff they have less time to investigate any case properly, so they make more snap judgments in all directions.  So even as more children are taken needlessly from their homes, more children also are left in danger.

Read the full report here

Read NCCPR's press release about the report here

The Keystone Kops of commissions holds another conference call: We listen, so you don’t have to!

The "Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities"
held a conference call Saturday.

● Commission chair suggests raiding scarce prevention funds to pay for more child abuse investigations.

● The Commission vs. the evidence base.

● Meet Michael Petit, born again fiscal conservative.

● One commissioner raises questions about keeping drafts hidden from the public.

 After NCCPR issued its comprehensive “pre-buttal” to draft recommendations by the “Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities” the Commission responded immediately – they stopped making their drafts public.  (See the discussion below concerning whether this is legal.)  So now they conduct long, drawn-out conference calls discussing later drafts and other documents that no one outside the commission can see.  It’s sometimes been necessary, therefore, to draw inferences concerning what, exactly the commission is talking about.

If any commissioner feels these inferences are inaccurate, the Commission is welcome to set the record straight – by releasing the documents and the tape recordings it makes of its conference calls.

When we last left the “Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities” they were debating a recommendation for a “surge” in which states would be forced to reopen thousands of cases of alleged child maltreatment in which children were allowed to stay in their own homes, in order to see which ones should be torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care after all.  There would be no comparable look at children already trapped in foster care to see if they could go home.

Another draft recommendation calls for prohibiting state child abuse hotlines from “screening out” any call alleging child abuse or neglect involving a child under age 5, no matter how patently absurd that call might be.  Even among calls that are screened in, 87 percent turn out to be false.  We estimate this recommendation would increase investigator caseloads by 44 percent, and almost all of that time will be spent spinning their wheels as they look where abuse and neglect are least likely to be found – stealing time and effort from finding children in real danger.

The Commission has been going around in circles debating which would scare Congress more: saying out loud that they want $1 billion in new funds just for the “surge,” or whether they should just say, in effect: “If you don’t throw gobs of money at our unscientific recommendation that has no evidence behind it, children will die!”

But on a conference call that lasted nearly three hours Saturday (about one-third of which was devoted just to figuring out whether there would be an up-or-down vote on all recommendations) Commission Chair David Sanders floated a new idea:

Either instead of, or in addition to, asking for more money, it’s not clear which, Sanders suggested that the Commission might want to recommend letting states use money from something called Title IV-B.  This is the meager pot of money the federal government now makes available, in part, for prevention and family preservation. 

Even though the evidence is clear that it is prevention programs, as well as broader anti-poverty efforts, that actually curb child abuse fatalities, Sanders is proposing allowing states to divert money from such efforts and pour it into investigating more families and taking away more children.

This is a bit like telling states: Hey, you know that federal money that now goes to food stamps for poor families – how would you like to spend it on hiring more cops instead?  It’s not hard to imagine the result. 

Actually, we know the result because it’s already happening: Many states already raid funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) – the program that replaced “welfare as we knew it” to fund child abuse investigations and foster care, now Sanders is proposing to rob poor families again.

At another point there was some discussion of making the far bigger program that funds foster care and adoption, Title IV-E available for these investigations as well.  And one time I would have thought that wasn’t so bad.

But, as it happens, right now, for the first time in decades there is serious discussion in Congress about actually allowing those foster care funds to be used for prevention and family preservation – soon there may even be legislation to that effect.  But some on the Commission already appear ready to swoop down and urge that some of that money be carried off to fund giant schemes for traumatizing thousands – maybe more than a million – children every year with needless child abuse investigations.

Ignoring the evidence base

Sanders made his suggestion at a particularly revealing moment in the deliberations.  He’d just finished admitting, in effect, that the Commission had failed.

He noted that after two years of searching the Commission had found exactly one approach to reducing child abuse deaths that met the standard for being “evidence based.”  (A few others were “promising.”  The terms are not just rhetoric, there actually are formal definitions.) 

But that one evidence-based practice had nothing to do with screening in more hotline calls or “substantiating” more cases or taking away more children.  No, the one and only evidence-based practice they found was a well-known, highly regarded home visiting program known as the Nurse Family Partnership.  In other words, a prevention program.  That’s exactly the kind of program that might be funded by, say, Title IV-B – if David Sanders doesn’t succeed in getting that money diverted into all those things that don’t work!

Indeed, Sanders even admitted that there’s “no evidence” that a “case review” – apparently the new euphemism for the surge – “will reduce fatalities.”

The new shade of lipstick

In a previous post about the Commission, I noted that changing the exact language in the surge

Graphic by Murdocke23 

recommendation is just putting lipstick on a pig.  Now, Sanders seems to have come up with a new shade of lipstick.

Michael Petit, the actual guiding force behind the Commission, and the person who, judging by the discussion at Saturday’s conference call, suddenly sprang the surge idea on the group late in its deliberations, has made clear that the purpose of the surge is to investigate more families and remove children who might be at risk.

But Sanders now is trying to reframe the surge – as a research project!  (After all, he admits there’s no evidence it will actually reduce fatalities.)  The theory is that by looking at all fatalities for the past five years (which, in small states, is likely to be an extremely low number) and finding common “risk factors” and then barging into every family that has at least one such “risk factor” we’ll somehow learn more about how to prevent child abuse deaths, even if we don’t actually prevent any.

Sanders offered no evidence that this approach to “research” actually works, nor did he cite any researchers who know how to study the issue who are clamoring for this approach to studying it.

Meet the new fiscal conservative

Michael Petit is the commissioner whose constant cry can be boiled down to “Spend more money!  Spend more money!  Spend more money!”  But on Saturday, he was singing a different tune.

That’s because the issue was a prevention initiative.  A subcommittee dealing with issues that include racial bias proposed a plan involving a special kind of court in which representatives of all the organizations providing services to families were right there at the courthouse, ready to step in immediately to provide the help a family needed to prevent abuse and neglect and stay together safely.  Instead of a collection of referral slips, the family would get immediate help with whatever was needed, perhaps housing, or job training, or drug treatment.

It’s not entirely clear how it would work – because the actual document under discussion is secret – but it sounds similar to this initiative in San Antonio.

Michael Petit was peeved.  He kept denouncing the idea – because it would cost too much money!  (He calmed down when assured the recommendation was only for a pilot project.) And, he argued, it wouldn’t stop fatalities.  “In terms of the immediacy of stopping child fatalities” he said, this was the wrong priority.  Yes, it’s a good idea “long term” Petit said, “But how much does this contribute to stopping children’s deaths now?”

Quite a lot, probably.  As noted above, and in our full report, there is no evidence at all that a surge or anything similar will prevent child abuse deaths.  David Sanders himself admitted as much.  In contrast, both ChildTrends (speaking of abuse in general) and the Center for Public Policy Priorities, speaking specifically about fatalities, found that serious prevention efforts are about the only things that do work.

Hiding behind secrecy

If there’s one thing child protective services agencies love to do it’s hide their errors behind “confidentiality.”  In fact, the Commission appears likely to recommend that Congress demand more transparency from state child welfare agencies when it comes to how they investigate child abuse fatalities.

But for the Commission, transparency does not begin at home.

On Saturday’s call, one of the commissioners, Theresa Covington, said people had complained to her about being unable to follow deliberations because the actual documents being discussed are now withheld from the public.  She asked in particular about written comments commissioners have circulated about the drafts.  It’s not clear if she was aware of the fact that even the drafts themselves are secret.

Sanders blithely assured her that the secrecy is just fine because the Commission regularly checks with the General Services Administration.  That is the federal agency which tells commissions like this one whether what they’re doing is legal under various statutes, including open government laws.

There are two problems with this:

● It’s not hard to get a government agency to tell another government agency what it wants to hear.  Look at the handstands the Bush Justice Department did to justify torture, for example.

● Even if, in fact, hiding the drafts and other documents is legal, that doesn’t make it right.  There is nothing in any law prohibiting the Commission from demonstrating the sort of transparency it appears ready to demand of others.

But apparently David Sanders, Michael Petit and some others on the Commission want to wait until they’ve found enough lipstick for the pig.

CECANF shocker: Commissioner blasts work of child abuse fatalities commission in scathing dissent

She publishes it herself after commission chair allegedly threatens to censor dissents.

● Read Judge Patricia Martin’s dissent

● Read NCCPR’s analysis of the Commission recommendations

●Read all NCCPR Blog posts about the Commission

One day before the release of the final report of the so-called Commission on Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities (or as we call it, the Keystone Kops of Commissions) one of the Commissioners has issued a scathing 24-page dissent that excoriates the Commission not only for some of its recommendations but for its chaotic process and wasteful spending.

Cook County Judge Patricia Martin, the presiding judge of the Court’s Child Protection Division, and one of only two African-Americans on the Commission (the other is Commission Chair David Sanders) published the dissent herself after, she says, Sanders threatened to edit or censor entirely dissents he didn’t like.

We don’t agree with all of Judge Martin’s recommendations, but her report adds vital context to the debate over child welfare – and crucial insight into the stumbling, bumbling way the Commission did its job.

Among the revelations:

● The final report includes major changes made after the Commissioners took their final votes.  “Those changes were incorporated into the Consenting [Majority] Report without being seen, deliberated or voted upon by the entire Commission.”  The report even went to the printer before Martin was allowed to see it, she says.

● Poor people paid for the Commission.  The Commission spent lavishly - $4 million over two years – traipsing around the country holding hearings and hiring a 20-person staff.  That would be less of a problem if the money had not come directly out of poor people’s pockets.  It turns out, Martin says, the funding was drawn from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) – the program that replaced “welfare as we knew it” in 1996. 

So money that was supposed to go to help poor families with things like day care – so they are less likely to have their children taken away on “lack of supervision” charges – was diverted to fund a Commission whose recommendations, if enacted, would lead to many more children being taken needlessly from their homes.

Sadly, this is only the most flagrant example of using TANF as a child welfare slush fund.  States have been doing it for years.

● Martin says the Commission “misrepresents or ignores” the experts who testified at the hearings.  One example she cites is the Commission’s embrace of the latest fad in child welfare, “predictive analytics.” Martin writes:

[T]he Consenting Commissioners recommend immediate implementation of “predictive analytics.” First, predictive analytics needs further testing and requires the building of a solid data infrastructure in order to work. Second, the expert testimony emphasized the inherent limitations of predictive analytics.

Martin then quotes the testimony of Prof. Emily Putnam-Hornstein of the University of Southern California School of Social Work, who told the Commission:

“[W]e would be mistaken to think about predictive risk modeling, or predictive analytics, as a tool we would want to employ with that end outcome specifically being [preventing] a near fatality or a fatality, because … I don’t think we will ever have the data or be able to predict with an accuracy that any of us would feel comfortable with and intervene differently on that basis.”

● Martin also blasts the process by which the Commission developed its signature recommendation – something it called a “surge” until it tasked its huge staff with coming up with a better euphemism.  Under the “surge” caseworkers would reinvestigate thousands of cases in which they already had decided to leave children in their own homes under supervision – disrupting the families all over again.

Martin calls this recommendation “another example of this practice of selective citation and arbitrary creation…”  She writes:

Not one witness recommended nor intimated such an approach to eliminate fatalities. Instead, Commission leadership unilaterally decided to include it as a “signature recommendation.” More troubling is that this recommendation encourages foster care placements despite expertise and research that demonstrates that the better path for our children is providing services in home. While purporting to “save lives immediately,” this signature recommendation corrupts theConsenting Report.  … The Consenting Report reads like a tabloid or infomercial relying on sensationalism to convince Congress and the Administration to eschew their good sense and spend an additional $1 billion annually on this recommendation. [Emphasis added.]

● Martin also blasts “The unorthodox process for editing the Consenting Report…”  She writes:

Commissioners have been allowed to submit changes and additional materials after the final vote. Those changes were incorporated into the Consenting Report without being seen, deliberated, or voted upon by the entire Commission. Moreover, the final report incorporating those changes was not released to this Commissioner prior to submission for printing. A simple comparison of the voted upon draft and the final report reflects substantive changes. Thus, the full Commission was deprived of information to perform its duties and/or select commissioners were granted favor to privately shape the report devoid of deliberation. … Therefore, it is this Commissioner’s position that the validity of the Consenting Report must be viewed with trepidation. [Emphasis added.]

And Martin describes what she had to do to get her report published:

[T]he independent submission of this Dissenting Report is yet another reflection of the flawed process. As the reader may be aware, there were two dissenting commissioners. The process was structured such that the opinions of individual commissioners were limited to two page letters to be printed with the Consenting Report. No commitment was made for dissenting opinions. Instead, the Chairman of the Commission stated that he would review dissents and then decide unilaterally whether to exclude the dissent, to edit the dissent, or to include the dissent without alteration in the Commission’s official submission to the President and Congress. As a result, this Commissioner chose to submit the two page letter and to absorb personally the costs of printing and distributing this official document.

We're doing our part to get the word out.  We've posted Judge Martin's dissent here.

Child abuse fatalities: The Keystone Kops of commissions tries to polish its image

Remember the Keystone Kops of Commissions?  Its official name was the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities.  But its entire process was marked by secrecy, chaos, anger, racial bias and a proclivity for making decisions based on newspaper horror stories. So instead of studying the child welfare system, the commission essentially recreated the child welfare system.

Now a member of the commission, Teri Covington, is trying to salvage the commission’s reputation by essentially giving the commission credit for almost anything that anyone is doing, or planning to do, that might have something to do with reducing child abuse deaths.

So Covington declares in The Hill that, thanks to the commission “a tremendous amount of progress and change” has occurred.

Normally when one reads that “a tremendous amount of progress and change” been made in dealing with a problem, one expects evidence that the problem actually has been solved – or at least ameliorated.

But for the Commission the standards are far lower. In lavishing praise on her own work Covington cites no evidence that there are actually fewer child abuse deaths.  The most recent federal data, while not terribly reliable, and only from 2016, actually suggest an increase in such deaths.

Instead, Covington devotes her column largely to bragging about how states are throwing paperwork at the problem.  Some places have prevention plans!  One even has a strategic plan!

The good news: Few seem to take the commission seriously

In one sense this really is good news. Because if states were implementing the worst of the actual recommendations of the Commission, (and, sadly, here and there that is happening) our child welfare system would be even worse than it is now.

The Commission assumed that child abuse fatalities could be isolated from larger problems and predicted in advance.  As Child Trends, among others, has explained, they can’t. The reason for that is one for which we all should be grateful. Though each is the worst imaginable tragedy, the number is too small to detect meaningful patterns.

Even if you double the officially-reported number of child abuse fatalities you get 3,400 – out of 73,600,000 Americans under age 18. That’s a tiny number of needles in a gigantic haystack.

Yes, you can try to isolate this or that “risk factor” – but where that risk factor exists it means only that the chances of a child dying go from infinitesimal to ever-so-slightly less infinitesimal. And you risk wreaking havoc in an enormous number of families who happen to have the same "risk factor" but are not about to harm any children.

You'll never find the needles by trying to vacuum up the haystack

Though couched in the soothing rhetoric of prevention, the Commission recommendations are all about trying to vacuum up the haystack - scarring far more children who were never actually abused by inflicting traumatic investigations and, often, stripsearches and creating a regime of domestic surveillance that would make the NSA blush.  All that would only further overload child welfare systems, actually increasing the chances that children in real danger will be missed.

It also would further overload foster care, filling more foster homes with children who don’t need to be there, notwithstanding the two massive studies that found that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes fared better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. And it would further lower the quality of foster care, where already study after study has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even higher.

700,000 more useless investigations

Consider just one recommendation: Right now, child abuse hotlines screen millions of calls every year. The standards for screening-in calls are incredibly low, yet, after investigation 83 percent of screened-in allegations turn out to be false. (And you know that oft-repeated claim that the reports aren't false, child protective services just couldn't "prove" abuse or neglect? That's also false.)

Yet, as we discuss in our analysis of the Commission report, the Commission recommended that every call about a child under age 3, no matter how absurd, be investigated with no screening at all. That would add at least 700,000 additional investigations per year – a 39 percent increase for the average caseworker.

Still another recommendation, which the commission called a “surge” or an “accelerant” until they realized that wouldbe bad p.r., would reopen thousands more cases based on the flimsiest criteria.  Again, as we discuss in our response, the one time a state actually tried this it backfired; child abuse deaths increased.

The commission also rushed to embrace the latest fad in child welfare – predictive analytics.  Think of it as Big Brother meets the movie Minority Report. It’s already in use in criminal justice – and, in a comprehensive investigation, ProPublica already has found it rife with racial bias. 

The commission itself was willfully blind to the massive problem of racial bias in child welfare – voting down one recommendation after another to deal with it. The recommendations came from one of only two African-American members of the commission, Judge Patricia Martin.

That should be no surprise. Michael Petit, the commissioner who came up with the idea for the commission, and who was most fervent in advocating what amounts to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, once told a Congressional committee that the places doing the best jobs of preventing child abuse are the ones with “smaller, whiter populations.”  During commission deliberations his condescension toward Judge Martin was deeply disturbing.

The digital poorhouse

In child welfare, predictive analytics is one pillar of what Prof. Virginia Eubanks, in her book Automating Inequality, calls “the digital poorhouse.” Ultimately, many of those pushing the use of predictive analytics in child welfare want to assign a risk score to every child at birth. Eubanks’ devastating critique of what is actually the least harmful version, in Allegheny County, Pa. was just excerpted in Wired.

The model the Commission endorsed, called Rapid Safety Feedback, may well be worse. Covington brags that seven states adopted it. She neglects to mention that one of them, Illinois, already has dropped it, after it failed spectacularly.

Even the agency that invented Rapid Safety Feedback never claimed it could predict who would kill a child. And one of the nation’s leading proponents of predictive analytics specifically warned the commission that no predictive analytics model could do that.

The commission left that out of its report. To find it you have to look in the scathing dissent published by Judge Martin, after, she says, the commission chair threatened to censor any dissents he didn’t like – still another example of how the commission proved to be at least as dysfunctional as the child welfare system itself.

Better solutions

The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero. But approaching that goal requires a radically different approach than the one recommended by the commission.  It requires learning from a study of what does and does not reduce child abuse deaths. That study found:

●The rate at which people report child abuse does not change the number of child abuse deaths.

●The rate at which a state screens reports for investigation does not change the number of child abuse deaths.

●The rate at which a state takes children from their parents does not change the number of child abuse deaths.

The same report found three key factors that do correlate with higher rates of child abuse deaths:

●High rates of poverty

●High rates of teen pregnancy

● Low rates of services to prevent child maltreatment.

That means, of course, if we take some of the millions of dollars states waste investigating false reports, initiating “surges,” and consigning children to needless foster care whenever there is a high-profile tragedy, and spend it instead on proven prevention programs that focus on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty, then, finally, we might see a decline in child abuse deaths that’s significant and sustained. (And no, a new federal law, the Family First Act won’t really do that.)

We might also reduce the burden on caseworkers caused by chasing down all those false allegations and poverty-confused-with-neglect cases, giving them a better chance to find the needles in that giant haystack, reducing child abuse deaths still further.

WELCOME TO CAMP RUNAMOK!

● Commission studying child abuse deaths holds public conference call – but keeps the draft they’re debating secret.

● Michael Petit desperately tries to put lipstick on a pig.

● Republican Commissioners fight over who cares more about kids.

● There’s another conference call tomorrow afternoon.

The lipstick isn't helping.
Graphic by Murdocke23 https://www.flickr.com/photos/murdocke/4404795276

It’s chaotic, it’s angry, it’s dysfunctional, it’s secretive and it makes its decisions based on newspaper horror stories.  Yes, the federal advisory commission tasked with studying the child protective services system has devolved into a microcosm of that very system.

It would be funny – if not for the fact that the “Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities” is about to put forth recommendations that, if enacted, would do enormous harm to children.

Apparently, some members of the commission were embarrassed when NCCPR disclosed the wretched state of their draft recommendations, and the lack of logic behind them, in our “pre-buttal” to the commission released last week.  A story about internal dissension on the commission also probably was not something they wanted the world to know about.

So while they continue to meet via public conference call, they’ve stopped putting drafts of their report on their website.  It turns out there’s an entire new draft of the Commission’s report.  They discussed it for two hours last night.  But the document itself is secret.  As a result, no one who is new to the Commission would have much idea what was going on.

That seems to be how the leaders of the Commission -- its official chair, David Sanders, and its actual driving force, Michael Petit, want it.  Just as child protective services agencies desperately try to hide their mistakes behind “confidentiality” Sanders and Petit seem to want to do the same with the blunders of the Commission itself.

There is a special irony here since one commission draft recommendation – at least in the earlier drafts – is that states be required to be more transparent about child abuse deaths.

Refining the recommendation about the “surge”

Much of the discussion concerned refining Petit’s pet recommendation, something he calls a “surge” and other commissioners have called, with no sense of irony, an “accelerant.”

The wording was always vague, but the original surge proposal seemed to call for sending a “multi-disciplinary team” out to re-investigate every case that already had been investigated – but only those in which children were left in their own homes, in order to see if those children should be taken away.  There would be no examination of cases where children were consigned to the chaos of foster care to see if they could go home.

This would needlessly traumatize thousands of families, cost a fortune, and so overload workers that they would wind up with less time to find children in real danger.  Indeed, the one time I know of where this kind of surge was tried, in Connecticut in 1995, that’s exactly what happened.

In the new version, the process would be a little different.  First, child protective services agencies would be required to pull records for every child abuse death over the past five years.  They would study the files and look for common “risk factors.”  Then they would send those “multi-disciplinary teams” out to re-examine every case that had the same risk factor.

So, for example, if the vast majority of deaths studied (which, in a small state might mean four child abuse deaths out of a total of six) involved alleged drug abuse, every case with such an allegation would have to be re-investigated.  So for example, a mother like this one, who drank drank marijuana tea to ease the pain of labor, had her infant taken away as a result, and got the infant back after media coverage, might have her child put through that entire ordeal again, thanks to the surge.

Or, if the common factor was that the cases had at least one “screened out” referral – that is someone called the hotline, said there was abuse in the home, but the call was not accepted for investigation – then every screened out case would have to be screened in, with the multi-disciplinary team sent out to pry into the family, and quite possibly, leave with the children.

This is another example of the fundamental false premise underlying the Commission’s work, and discussed in detail in our “prebuttal,”  the idea that if you just find the magic risk factor, we can rush in and, in Petit’s words, figure out “who among these children is going to be killed,” [emphasis added]. 

But even if you double the official figure for child abuse fatalities, roughly 99.9967 percent of all parents or caretakers do not kill a child in any given year.  Therefore, very close to 99.9967 percent of parents or caretakers with a given “risk” factor also don’t kill a child in any given year.  So the surge will wind up harassing huge numbers of innocent families and stealing time from better ways to find children in real danger.

Foster care cases still effectively excluded

Cook County Judge Patricia Martin, the presiding judge of the Court’s Child Protection Division, again raised her concern that the “surge” targets only children in their own homes, not children in foster care.  She noted that she’s raised this often, Petit keeps promising to change the wording, but it never seems to change.

Petit promised that this time it really would change, and there would be no explicit language targeting only children in their own homes.  (The fact that he keeps forgetting to do this tells you all you need to know about his mindset.)

But changing the formal language is putting lipstick on a pig.  A set of laws that can never be repealed require that this kind of surge target only children in their own homes: the laws of mathematics.

Here we come back to the part of this story for which we all can be grateful. Though each is the worst kind of tragedy, and the only acceptable number is zero, there are too few child abuse fatalities to detect a pattern.

Here’s why: As noted above, even if you double the official figure, roughly 0.0033 percent of children die at the hands of a parent or caretaker each year.  Since a surge could look at only known cases, they’ll be looking at deaths caused by perhaps 0.00165 percent of parents or caretakers.

When looking at children in their own homes you’re looking at 0.00165 percent of 73.5 million – the number of children in America on any given day.  But if you’re looking at deaths in foster care, you’re looking at 0.00165 percent of somewhere between 400,000 (the number of children in foster care on any given day) and 650,000 (the number who pass through foster care for even one day in a given year).  That means you wind up with perhaps nine deaths in foster care in the entire country.  And given the double standards, written and unwritten, that permeate the process of deciding when a child is abused, the official figure is likely to be lower.

That doesn’t mean foster care is safe.  Study after study shows high rates of abuse in foster care, and a recent court decision from Texas documents that abuse in foster care there isn’t just common, it’s rampant.

But because in any setting, abuse that rises to the level of a fatality is very rare, many states will have no actual deaths in foster care and most will have too few to find a common “risk factor.”

So once again, Michael Petit has engineered a “surge” that gives the horrors of foster care a free pass.

Finding the right euphemism

Judge Martin also objected to the use of the term “surge.”  She noted that it conjures up images of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  “I’m not at war with my parents and families,” she said, referring to those who come through her courtroom.  But Michael Petit is at war with parents and families.  His entire record makes that clear.

So “surge” is the appropriate term (“accelerant” is even better).  But the commission p.r. staff has been tasked with coming up with a euphemism.

Horrors!

The way the Commission is going about its task reminds me of a Doonesbury cartoon from the 1980s.  I’ve been unable to find the cartoon, so I’m working from memory here, but it went roughly like this:  President Ronald Reagan is asked what research he’s relying on for his proposals to slash assistance to the poor.  “This, right here,” he says, holding up a New York Daily News front page with the headline: “Welfare Queen Owns Six Cadillacs!” 

The commission is behaving the same way.

There was debate last night over whether to lard the report with horror stories from news accounts.  Apparently the draft contemplates sprinkling them all over the report, not just as introductions but even in the margins – a technique much-beloved by Petit.

There is a reason for this: Horror stories are what “child savers” -  the term they gave themselves in the 19^th Century – have used ever since that time to stampede Americans into tearing apart families.  It served to obscure the real agenda: taking children from impoverished immigrant families whom these “child savers” feared and loathed.  Unfortunately, not has much has changed as we’d like to think.  And in this case, the horror stories are a way to distract readers from the lack of scholarship and lack of logic in the Commission recommendations.

At one point one Commissioner suggested that the horror stories stay in, but that the report specify that those horror stories were not the basis for the Commission recommendations.

Unfortunately, that’s not true.

The horror stories appear to the primary method the Commission used to reach its conclusions. Commissioners reference them constantly, and last night Petit vouched for what splendid sources they are.

Wade Horn

Indeed, at last night’s meeting, when Commissioner Wade Horn, a conservative Republican who once was the top child welfare official in the George W. Bush Administration, was asked why he’d changed his mind and now was willing to rcommend spending $1 billion on things like the surge, he explicitly stated that it was the horror stories that prompted him to want to spend the new money.

The dangers in this are spelled out well in a current story in The New Yorker.

In fact, if tough cases make bad law, horror stories make worse law.  One need only look at how this kind of reporting prompts foster-care panics, huge spikes (or “surges”) in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love and forced into foster care.  They also overload caseworkers, so they have less time to find children in real danger so more children wind up dying.

These panics fail because the overwhelming majority of children caught in the child protective services net are nothing like those in the horror stories.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.  That’s one reason why two massive studies of typical cases found that children left in their own homes fared far better in later life than those consigned to foster care.

Now, the Commission is relying on those same sorts of stories to push a series of recommendations that would set off a nationwide foster-care panic.

Hey, big spender

Horn’s explanation for his turnaround did lead to two interesting moments.  Twice he spoke of how amazed people supposedly would be that a conservative Republican would advocate more government spending.

In fact there’s nothing surprising about that at all.  A lot of conservative Republicans love to spend more – as long as it’s on some kind of war.  A surge of caseworkers rushing in to see of more children need to be taken away resonates with this branch of conservatism every bit as well as a surge of troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.  After all, it was former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who proposed consigning poor people’s children to orphanages.  (There is a similar problem on the Left.)

Cassie Bevan

But Horn’s statement also led to a remarkable confrontation with another conservative Republican on the commission, Cassie Bevan.  Bevan, a former aide to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, was once described as “the velvet glove holding DeLay’s hammer.” She is one of the authors of one of the most harmful pieces of child welfare legislation of the 20^th Century, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  (Another force behind this law: Hillary Clinton.)

Bevan does not want to recommend spending more money – in part because, she argues, the Commission has done nothing to evaluate all the existing programs and figure out which, if any, actually work.  It’s a good point, actually, though there is so much bias in child welfare scholarship, that there would need to be extraordinary safeguards to ensure that any such evaluation was truly objective.

When Horn talked about how the horror stories persuaded him to embrace more spending, Bevan exploded.  She accused Horn of somehow suggesting that she didn’t care just as much about children as he did, and insisted that no one cared more than she.

Horn replied that he was speaking for himself, and did not mean to imply that anyone cared less than anyone else.

Tune in tomorrow

There is another conference call scheduled for tomorrow at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time.  Though there is no published agenda, it appears that at the meeting, Judge Martin will be trying to explain the issue of racial bias in child welfare to people like Petit, who once said the states doing the best job of protecting children “have smaller, whiter populations.”