According to the Child Welfare Outcomes State Data Review Portal for Minnesota, the incidence of sexual abuse in child protection cases has been increasing over the years. The reported percentages for sexual abuse were 17.9% in 2014, 20.9% in 2015, 23.7% in 2016, 24.9% in 2017, and 26.4% in 2018 1
These figures indicate a concerning upward trend in the incidence of sexual abuse among children within Minnesota’s child protection cases.
2 Things about last week’s Child Protection hearing at the Capital: I was unable to listen to the whole session, but did hear an important falsehood that I beg you to consider what this means to a very young child stuck in a toxic home with no avenue of escape.
I did not catch the speaker’s name (she was speaking at about 10am) at last week’s Legislative Hearing on Child Protection shining a light on the importance of tracking and transparency in CPS. Legislative Task Force on Child Protection – 02/09/24 youtube.com
As she made laid out an honest and significant racial disparity reality within the system, she stated that only three percent of children in CPS cases were sexually abused.
This has never been true. Her statement hits at the very heart of the failures due to the issue of non-transparency in CPS. Both State and Federal reporting over the years have remained consistent between 12 and 20 percent of children sexually abused in the system. In my 12 years and fifty children I’ve helped remove from toxic homes as a CASA volunteer. Half of my caseload kids were sexually abused, most of them from a very young age (the oldest child for four years before being removed).
I’ve had multiple conversations with mandated reporters that do not report child sexual abuse for fear of “not being believed”, not “getting any of that on me”, and “fear of pushback that comes with this reporting”. The more accurate estimate of child sex abuse would be 30 to 40 percent and I think this is conservative.
If intake notes were made available (they are a short, nameless description of what happened to the child) we would know how false and misleading her statement is and how common child sexual abuse is in these cases. The State of Wisconsin files “Egregious Incident Reports” that could be adapted for MN to report the nature of “egregious” harm.
In the end, the safety of abused and neglected children depends on our knowing more about the conditions these children are coming out of (what is life like in a toxic home) and the results our CPS system is achieving.
Until we know the realities of what it is like for children coming into the system and conditions facing these children after leaving the system, broken children will continue to become broken juveniles that fail in school and life. Our schools will suffer and communities remain troubled by the troubled children within them.
Today, an argument can be made that
CPS is creating
(adolescent felons and preteen mothers)
what it was designed to stop.
With well-funded parental rights and lawyers/law schools
working to diminish child rights
these children are at a greater risk than they have ever been.
Forward this to your State Rep (find them here) with a note from you
about how this reporting will save lives and
interrupt the abuse and trauma MN children.
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Email your State Rep – It just takes a few minutes.
You could save a life.
Is CPS creating what it was designed to stop?
better tracking and reporting
of outcomes-based metrics in Child Protection
will save abused children from early death,
more trauma, more punishment and a
lifetime of dangerous behavior
KARA reports on the issues of invisible children
This article submitted by Former CASA Guardian Ad Litem Mike Tikkanen
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