Child welfare professionals care deeply about the families they serve. Every day, child welfare caseworkers are called upon to make decisions that have a tremendous impact on families, children and their future. And any caseworker will tell you, there is no worse day than when a child fatality occurs on their watch.
They don’t take this responsibility lightly. They make these safety-critical decisions with an eye to family preservation – helping families navigate crises by connecting them to supports – because child welfare research tells us that kids do better when families stay together.
The research around safety science is also clear. When it comes to work like child safety, where any tragedy is unacceptable, child welfare systems must have the freedom and wherewithal to critically analyze mistakes and patterns in an open dialogue.
We must shift away from a blame-and-shame response that places the onus for safety decisions on a single individual who is only one part of a very complex system. And we must also understand that child protective services (CPS) alone does not have all the necessary tools to keep children safe.
The National Partnership for Child Safety (NPCS), a quality improvement collaborative of more than 35 state, county and tribal child-serving jurisdictions, has been working since 2018 across jurisdictions to focus on applying safety science and sharing data to develop strategies in child welfare that will improve safety and prevent child maltreatment fatalities. As an evidence-based field of discipline, safety science expands the scope of learning beyond an individual case to a systemwide comprehensive analysis.
Because critical injury incidents and fatalities occur so infrequently with children, it can be challenging to identify from them the opportunities to strengthen child protection systems in ways that can genuinely prevent future incidents. In other workplaces that are characterized by safety-critical decisions and low base rate events, such as health care settings and the airline industry, psychological safety plays an important role in helping workers identify and address systemic factors.
Psychological safety is defined as feeling safe to speak up, to disagree openly and to share concerns without fear of negative repercussions. In the context of child welfare, a lack of psychological safety can contribute to risk-aversion behaviors and decision-making that in turn can harm families, such as:
- A fear of liability and retribution on the part of child welfare workers can lead to more family surveillance and/or less comprehensive family engagement;
- Systemic biases baked into safety and risk-assessment tools and algorithms can create a disproportionate and negative impact on marginalized communities; and,
- Subjective decision-making resulting from implicit bias can have a disproportionate impact.
Unfortunately, the child welfare workforce faces a number of stresses that can impede psychologically safe learning and systems accountability, including high caseloads, and work-related traumatic stress, often exacerbated by media scrutiny that offers sensationalistic coverage of child welfare only when tragedy occurs.
A study from Berkeley Media Studies Group found that a majority of reporters cover the child welfare system solely through a crime lens. According to the study, “News about the child welfare system was driven by tragic stories of individual cases of harm and death, painting a picture of a system that is failing, inadequate, or, at best, overwhelmed. When solutions to issues in the child welfare system were discussed, the focus was on punitive, after-the-fact measures in response to high-profile incidents.”
There is a common cycle in child welfare coverage: the tragic story of a child death known to the child welfare system makes headlines in local media coverage (and sometimes national coverage depending on the facts of the case). Local politicians are moved to act and child welfare agency leaders either lose their jobs or depart under the intense scrutiny. The leadership changes but the system stays the same.
That is not to say that scrutiny, even media coverage, in the face of a child death is not warranted. In fact, the opposite is true, but with the caveat that scrutiny and stories about what went wrong should be accompanied by a focus on solutions. Too often, coverage lacks any context for improving child welfare systems, leaving readers to believe that these child deaths are simply inevitable.
This punitive and reactive finger-pointing has led to increased rates of family separations, which can cause a child to suffer worse outcomes, including lifelong emotional and psychological trauma, even as rates of child fatalities do not decrease. That fear of scrutiny or “getting it wrong” may lead some professionals to leave child welfare work altogether, and the prevailing narrative of child welfare work through a crime lens means many young students, who are interested in social work, ultimately chose other professions.
The average tenure of a child welfare system leader is 18 months. Studies show that almost half of child welfare staff leave their jobs within two years. Schools of social work are also reporting drops in enrollment, which means the pipeline for future child welfare workers is also shrinking.
Safety science offers the child welfare field a different way to identify the factors that influence decision-making with a goal of ultimately preventing critical incidents. NPCS utilizes a standardized critical incident review process, coupled with data analysis across multiple jurisdictions to identify systemic challenges that are barriers to child safety. This approach then shifts the focus to system improvements that will have a greater long-term impact on saving lives, as opposed to relying on single-use strategies like hitting the reset button on a trained workforce.
Media outlets can play an important role in helping us achieve our greater goal of an improved child welfare system and effective workforce by widening the lens with which they view child welfare and by focusing on not just the aftermath of tragedies, but on ways in which child welfare systems are supporting the shift to a preventative, population-level health approach. This includes advancing safety culture and promoting evidence-based, family-preserving practices such as home visiting and increasing access to economic supports for families.
We all share the goal of strengthening families and keeping children safe. Safety science can play an important role in helping us achieve that goal, and most importantly, reduce and potentially prevent future tragedies from child maltreatment.
