In a recent column, Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Sarah Font claimed that “there remains strong resistance among child welfare scholars, advocates and national leaders to discussing maltreatment fatalities.”
I have followed these issues for nearly 50 years, first as a reporter and for the past 34 as an advocate. I coordinate one listserv for grassroots family advocacy organizations and another for professionals in the field, and I participate in the discussions of three other advocacy coalitions. We talk about fatalities all the time. It’s just that people like Font and Putnam-Hornstein don’t like what organizations such as mine have to say. So they cherry-pick data to try to make a case for a surveil-and-remove approach that has failed for decades. Sometimes they even contradict themselves.
In June, Putnam-Hornstein told the Raleigh News and Observer “We’re not able to even remotely begin to track in any real way whether [child abuse deaths] are trending up or down.” But now, in this column, she and Font claim there “appears to be a real, and sustained, national increase in deaths due to child abuse and neglect.”
On paper, there does appear to be such an increase, but it goes back a long way. Nationwide in 1998, for example, the federal government reported 2.8 million calls alleging abuse and neglect. (They don’t give the number of children involved in those calls, but if it’s the same proportion as 2022 then it would be 5.2 million children.) That year, the same federal report estimated that there were 1,100 child abuse and neglect deaths.
In 2022 there were 4.3 million such calls, involving more than 7.5 million children, an increase of more than 40 percent. Indeed, as many have noted, the child welfare surveillance state has reached the point that more than one-third of all children and more than half of all Black children will have to endure a child abuse investigation at some point during their childhoods. And yet that same report estimates that, in 2022, there were 1,955 child abuse deaths.
So making the child welfare surveillance state more than 40% bigger doesn’t seem to have helped.
Yet Font and Putnam-Hornstein want to make it bigger still, proposing that every parent whose child is not otherwise seen by a mandated reporter be required to produce their children for a child abuse investigation when reapplying for public benefits (so we know which families are being targeted).
But more likely, Putnam-Hornstein was right in June when she said we don’t know how many children die of maltreatment every year. The on-paper increase may be a result of more reporting of fatalities, and/or changing definitions. Consider the assessment of one of the builders of the current system, Dr. Richard Krugman. He used to be director of the C. Henry Kempe National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect. But while opposing anything like abolition, even he’s having second thoughts. Says Dr. Krugman:
“[W]e now have 40 years of experience with this approach and have made no progress in reducing the mortality from physical abuse of children (decades with 1,500-2,500 children dying annually). … Doing the same thing for 40 years that doesn’t seem (or can’t be shown) to be working was someone’s definition of insanity.”
In their column, Font and Putnam-Hornstein cherry-pick state data in an attempt to show a correlation between reduced use of foster care and increased child abuse deaths. Pick the right pair of years and you can “prove” exactly that. Pick a different set of years and you can “prove” the opposite.
They cite news accounts about a report in Washington State that showed an increase in child abuse deaths in recent years as foster care declined. But take a look at the actual report. The chart on Page 5 shows the highest number of fatalities was in 2013 – when Washington State was taking away far more children. In between, as foster care declined in most years, child abuse deaths also declined; in some years, they increased.
Similarly, consider Tennessee. In 2023, fatalities increased by 30% over the previous year. But 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 Font and Putnam-Hornstein make no mention of Texas, where a series of laws curbing the family police and leading to reduced foster care was followed by a reduction in child abuse deaths.
And while seeming to favor foster-care panics — sharp, sudden increases in removals of children following high-profile tragedies — they fail to mention the many times the panics were followed by increases in child abuse deaths, such as in New York City in 1995 and 2006, Illinois in 1993 and 2019 and Florida in 1999.
Whether the federal data are accurate or not, we all should be grateful for the fact that child abuse deaths are so rare that it makes no sense to try to extrapolate from them to shape policy. As Dr. Krugman points out, it hasn’t worked. There is a better option: random sampling — in which independent reviewers examine a large sample of cases, and assess what went wrong, and what went right. That would yield more productive intelligence, and reveal errors in all directions.
Child abuse deaths are indeed needles in a haystack, and you are not going to find the needles by constantly making the haystack bigger. Pointing out that these deaths are rare does not mean we don’t care about them. Rather it tells us the limits of what we can learn from them and how we can come closer to attaining the only acceptable number for such fatalities: zero.
Similarly, Font and Putnam Hornstein set up a straw man when they claim family preservation advocates don’t want to “overreact” to child abuse deaths for fear of setting off foster-care panic. Our concern is not overreaction – it’s mis-reaction: the knee-jerk assumption that an ever-bigger regime of surveillance and child removal will reduce fatalities.
Font and Putnam-Hornstein also take issue with Utah responding to a child abuse tragedy by bolstering anti-poverty efforts. But that’s because, unlike foster-care panic, anti-poverty efforts actually do reduce child maltreatment.
In one respect, the need for transparency, Font and Putnam-Hornstein don’t go far enough. I, too, don’t want Jess Dannhauser deciding what I have a right to know about the failures of the agency he runs, the New York City Administration for Children’s Services. But Font and Putnam-Hornstein call for transparency only about child abuse deaths – which, in isolation, reinforces the impression that the failures of family policing go in only one direction: encouraging foster-care panic.
In contrast, for decades my organization has supported not only open courts but a strong rebuttable presumption that almost all records in all cases are open – so agencies can’t try to hide behind “confidentiality” when they wrongfully remove a child and people can see how this arbitrary, capricious and cruel system errs in all directions.
There is no silence about child safety. But after decades of talk that got us nowhere, people are speaking out, loudly and often, about better ways to make children safe. What really seems to bother Font and Putnam-Hornstein is that, at long last, people are listening.