For too long, the dire conditions facing Minnesota’s State Ward children have remained almost invisible to the public and to lawmakers.
Abused and neglected children are rarely seen or heard amidst the violence and chaos we see in our media every day. Their suffering effects all of us every day.
Our community’s schools, healthcare, and public safety are impacted by the behavior of troubled children as they share their traumas as they live among us.
If we are to have safe and healthy communities,
we must find a way to have safe and healthy children.
These are children living in homes that are so toxic a judge has determined their safety and often their very life is being endangered, and they must be placed in State Care for their own safety.
To become safe and healthy these children need a community that wants to help them. That’s you and me and our public policy makers.
Recent investigative reporting by the nonprofit Safe Passage For Children of Minnesota has documented just how many of our at-risk children are dying at the hands of their caregivers while in Child Protective Services. About half these murdered children were under three years old.
All of them had been reported to CPS and returned to or left in the homes they had been abused in. Almost all of them had been abused over long periods of time.
This CASA guardian ad Litem would call what happened to these children torture. Most of them were too young to even know that what was happening to them was wrong – or criminal.
Can you imagine what it would be like for one of the children in your life be repeatedly raped, beaten or starved for long periods?
Trauma changes the brain. Repeated trauma causes biological and behavioral changes that can make normal life impossible without healing, skill building and considerable help from the community.
While being removed from a toxic home can end the abuse and save a child’s life, this carries its own trauma and does not make the child well or heal the trauma. That takes a village to know and support programs that heal and build skills and resilience.
More and more State officials are understanding the lifelong consequences of Adverse Childhood Experiences, and the lifelong suffering our state’s most vulnerable citizens are living with every day.
One MINNESOTA Supreme Court Chief Justice has stated that ninety percent of the youth in juvenile justice have passed through CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES.
Nationally, almost seventy percent of youth in Juvenile Justice go on to be convicted of felonies and sent into Criminal Justice a few years later. America’s prison recidivism at nine years has remained at about eighty percent for twenty years.
Many teen and preteen State Ward girls become mothers with a violent boyfriend, addictions, and no parenting skills. Many foster girls have multiple pregnancies before they are twenty.
Almost eight million children are reported abused in the U.S. annually. Over eighty thousand of them live in Minnesota. This is double the number of children reported in nineteen ninety-six – my first year as a CASA volunteer.
Remember that most child abuse is not reported because child abuse is invisible. It’s likely that twice that many children are experiencing child abuse and neglect and invisible to the system.
There are many reasons that so many children are abused and neglected each year – but there is one big reason. Meaningful child outcome information is missing.
Law and policy makers have only the information made available by our institutions to craft the programs that rule the lives of abused and neglected children and they can’t make sound policy with missing or bad information.
To find out what’s driving the increase in abuse and answer these hard questions we must discover what’s working and not working in child protection. To know this, we need the clarity that can only be delivered by tracking and reporting those metrics over time.
Privacy concerns today are conflicting and confusing and overused by our institutions in denying access to even sharable information. Much information that could be shared is not shared. It’s just safer that way for the institution. This is worse for the child and the community, but better for the institution.
Some states have required mandated reporters share egregious incidents and report child deaths while in child protective services. Minnesota does not. Getting this information today is like pulling hen’s teeth.
For example, in the Safe Passage Investigation just mentioned, four counties refused to cooperate at all and no county provided any information not already public.
Until privacy concerns can be standardized… and that does not seem likely, Minnesota lawmakers need to find a way to require that sharable information be tracked and shared to have any chance of making better policies and reversing the trends of child abuse and neglect in our state.
Until this happens, we will continue to know very little about how our children are faring in our child protection system.
When we know meaningful longitudinal child outcome metrics – not names or identifiable information – we will discover which programs and policies work and which ones are failing. This will bring understanding of the core issues to a higher level by the public and the policy makers who will then make better decisions.
Share this link with your circles and most importantly with your State Representative. If you need to find your State Representative, click here.
For clarification and answers to your questions about this post send an email to info at invisiblechildren.org with Transparency in the Subject line.
2000 years ago, Pliny the Elder stated that “what we do to our children, they will do to our society”.
Let’s keep that in mind
* KARA has been funding the Financial Literacy Project, INVISIBLE CHILDREN Campus Programs, public presentations, books, and social media for many years. We have had a really impactful 25 years thanks to our followers. But here’s the reality-as we are an advocacy group not providing service – we live on donations alone. We want to keep the momentum going but we need the funds to do so…
So, we are asking for your help as a way to support all our efforts going forward. Please consider a monthly donation of 5 or 25$ to sustain KARA’s ongoing efforts.
An additional choice, would be to sponsor a our new Spotify Social media platform for $500 and receive recognition for you or your organization. Thank you to those who have sponsored a KARA projects in the past!
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