The best way to reduce child abuse fatalities is to reduce poverty
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The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero. But how do we come closest to achieving that goal?
Some have suggested that because child abuse deaths may have increased by 30% in 2023, Tennessee is doing too much to keep families together so we should tear apart even more families. That would only make everything worse.
For starters, there is no evidence for the claim that Tennessee is bending over backwards to keep families together. On the contrary, even when rates of child poverty are factored in, Tennessee takes children from their families at a rate nearly 50% above the national average. And it’s easy to take the years you want to prove whatever you want. Between 2018 and 2020 entries into foster care in Tennessee declined by 15%. During that same period child abuse deaths also declined by about 15%. And if Tennessee’s apparent increase in fatalities is evidence of the need to take away more children, why did fatalities drop dramatically in Texas after they passed new laws that reduced foster care?
But what about the fact that more than two-thirds of these children were previously known to the Department of Children’s Services? How could all those warning signs be missed? That’s easier to understand when one looks at the sheer number of children on DCS’ radar.
As the Lookout reports, in FY2023 DCS received 100,000 calls and investigated 66,000 cases. Assuming an average of 1.84 children per family that means, depending on how you define it, somewhere between 124,000 and 184,000 children were known to DCS in some way. Of that number, about 127 died. That means of all the children DCS encountered 99.89% did not die. Nor is it reassuring that of those 127, 11 were already in DCS custody when they died.
Those deaths in custody are just the tip of the iceberg. Multiple studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes and the rate in group homes and institutions is even higher.
The take-the-child-and-run approach practiced in Tennessee is typical of America’s response to child abuse deaths for 50 years. It’s given us a giant child welfare surveillance state in which 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 before they turn 18 — almost always in response to a false report or a case in which family poverty is confused with neglect. It’s forced hundreds of thousands of children to endure being torn needlessly from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care.
All those false reports, trivial cases, and poverty cases cascade down upon DCS workers, overwhelming them so they don’t have time to investigate any case properly. So it’s no wonder they miss that one-tenth-of-one percent of children who subsequently die. Remember the children torn from their loving parents because the parents committed the “crime” of Driving While Black? In addition to what that did to those children, all the time, money and effort spent tearing this family apart was, in effect, stolen from one of those children in that one-tenth-of-one percent.
So what can we do to bring the number of fatalities closer to zero?
Become laser-focused on the #1 cause of actual abuse and the #1 issue confused with neglect: Poverty. In Tennessee, 88% of children who enter foster care do so in cases where there is not even an accusation of physical or sexual abuse. In 60% there isn’t even an allegation of drug abuse.
So it’s no wonder that study after study finds that even small amounts of additional money will reduce not only neglect, but even fatalities. (Such investment also costs less than foster care, and far less than group homes and institutions.) The child welfare think tank Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago estimates that every additional $1,000 per person living in poverty invested in public benefits, whether for medical care, housing, food or child care, causes a a 2.1% reduction in foster care placements, a 4.3% reduction in abuse and neglect reports – and a 7.7% reduction in child maltreatment fatalities.
For 50 years we’ve responded to tragedies that are needles in a haystack by making the haystack bigger. The result has been more tragedies. Isn’t it time to start shrinking the haystack to make it easier to find the needles?
Richard Wexler is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform in Alexandria, Va., www.nccpr.org
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