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What Child Protective Services Does Not Track and Why Lawmakers Need to Know

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Protection, Juvenile + Criminal Justice, Mikes Favorite Posts, Public Policy, Reporting and News - MN Specific, Reporting and News - US Based

Child Protective Services often measures reports, investigations, placements, reunifications, and case closures. But those numbers do not reveal whether children become safer, healthier, better educated, stably housed, or able to thrive as adults. KARA outlines the missing long-term outcomes lawmakers need to track and a privacy-protected framework for measuring whether public systems truly improve children’s lives.

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Remembering Young LGBTQ Lives & Moving Interview (guest post)

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child self harm and suicide, LGBTQ, Rebuttals & Guest Posts, Reporting and News - US Based

How did you come to terms with your identity?

Being queer and the sexuality part wasn’t as hard for me. I always knew I liked women. The journey was then finding out who else I liked and what I didn’t like. I feel like when you first join the community, you’re not always presented with how many identities there are. I feel like a lot of people tend to come in uneducated, and I think that’s definitively how I came in. I come from a very homophobic town, so we didn’t have that many people that were out. I didn’t know much. I started identifying as queer because I’m still not sure. My gender identity took a lot longer…

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The Economic Cost of Childhood Trauma in America

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Data, Reporting and News - US Based, Statistics

The Economic Cost of Childhood Trauma in America Important note about these figures Child abuse, childhood trauma, foster care, juvenile justice, crime, incarceration, health care, school failure, addiction, homelessness, and lost productivity are connected. They also overlap. The same child or adult may appear in child protection, special education, health care, foster care, juvenile justice,…

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Punishment Does Not Heal Childhood Trauma, Trauma-Informed Care Does

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child Protection

Punishing children who have been harmed in toxic homes does not heal trauma, improve learning, or make communities safer. It often deepens the pain that leads to school failure, mental-health struggles, justice-system involvement, and generational child abuse. This post explains why the ACEs, Adverse Childhood Experiences, healing model offers a better path: trauma-informed schools, health care, child care, law enforcement, and public policy that help children build the skills and safety they need to heal and thrive.

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A Modest Proposal (satire & similarities)

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Public Policy

Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satire, A Modest Proposal, used shocking imagery to expose the cruelty of public policies that treated poor Irish children as disposable. This post connects Swift’s warning to the realities faced by abused, neglected, homeless, incarcerated, and foster-care-involved children in America today. When society accepts policies that deny children safety, education, health care, stable housing, and meaningful support, it creates the very cycles of trauma, crime, poverty, and generational child abuse it claims to oppose. KARA shares this historic work as a call to replace indifference and punishment with prevention, protection, healing, and public accountability.

Back in the day, these writings were the modern equivalent of you tube or a precursor to Twitter and consumed voraciously by all who could read (or read them to others).

Public policy treated poor Irish more like animals than people and Irish children were doomed to lives of crime, prostitution, and abject poverty.

Was Swift’s underlying argument that death might be preferable to children doomed to disease, crime, prostitution, & the cruelties suffered by abandoned children of his time?

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What Governors Can Do: Executive Leadership for Child Safety, Healing, and Systemic Change

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, childabuse, Public Policy, What You Can Do

As a governor, you can move child protection from fragmented crisis response to coordinated, prevention centered, trauma informed systems that truly improve children’s lives. This article shows how executive vision, upstream budgets, transparent data, trauma informed and equity driven standards, foster care and juvenile justice reforms, and expanded mental health access can turn child safety and healing into core state priorities rather than side projects.

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What Attorneys General Can Do: Champion Child Safety, Systemic Reform, and Lasting Accountability

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, childabuse, Public Policy, What You Can Do

As an attorney general, you hold extraordinary power to shape whether abused and traumatized children are protected or abandoned to failing systems. This article shows how you can make child welfare and trauma a core priority, investigate systemic failures and enforce mandated reporting, litigate and regulate for transparency and reform, tackle disparities and overmedication, and lead policy, coordination, and public engagement. By using the full authority of your office, you can turn systemic child harm from a hidden crisis into a mandate for justice and healing.

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What State Lawmakers Can Do: Turning the Tide for Children’s Safety, Healing, and Well-Being

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, childabuse, Public Policy, What You Can Do

As a state lawmaker, you have enormous power to shape whether vulnerable children experience systems as punitive and chaotic or protective and healing. This article lays out a roadmap for making child safety a statewide priority, mandating transparency and equity, investing in prevention and early intervention, embedding trauma informed standards across systems, reforming foster care and juvenile justice, and guaranteeing mental health care and strong aftercare. By grounding your statutes, budgets, and oversight in ACEs science and lived experience, you can turn the tide for children’s safety, healing, and long term well being.

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What Mayors and County Administrators Can Do: Building Safer, Healthier Communities for Children

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Public Policy, What You Can Do

As a mayor or county administrator, you cannot police your way to safe childhoods. When children grow up in toxic homes, criminalizing trauma driven behaviors only fuels future crime and broken families. This article offers a governing blueprint that shows how you can lead with a child centered civic vision, fund prevention and wraparound help, reform public safety and policy, and build trauma informed systems that truly protect children and strengthen your community.

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City and County Lawmakers: Local Government as a Child Protection Engine

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Public Policy, What You Can Do

You sit on the front line of child protection. Your choices about housing, policing, schools, public health, and mental health determine whether children are shielded from preventable trauma or left to face it alone. By investing in upstream prevention, trauma informed policies, accountable justice and housing systems, and strong community supports, you can transform your city or county from a crisis response machine into a true child protection engine.

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Why Police Can’t Fix Toxic Homes: Rethinking How We Protect Children

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Day Care and Education, Juvenile + Criminal Justice, Public Policy

There is no shortage of disturbing stories about violent children & authorities using violent means to control them. Today, the U.S. expels more children from daycare than any other industrialized nation and the levels of violence in our schools is frightening and harmful to all of us.

There is nothing more disturbing than watching a video of an armed 200 pound police officer twisting the arms of a 50 pound special needs child into a painful behind the back steel handcuffed position as the boy cries uncontrollably in his classroom, unless it is reading about the St. Louis Sheriff’s deputy tasering an 11 year old boy and threatening to sodomize him (Sheriff Mulch “nothing out of the ordinary…, followed protocol)

These stories and recent horrific police shootings of juveniles are a signal of overwhelmed institutions unable to deliver the most basic protection and safety services to the communities that employ them. Don’t blame service providers -it is lawmakers and administrators defending archaic policies that just don’t work anymore. Neither police nor teachers are able to nor should they be required (with the training we give them) to handle the deep and troubling behaviors of very disturbed children). Traumatizing five and six year old children because they have behavioral problems is just awful and it makes things so much worse for the child (and our society).
This story out of Texas, demonstrates how the police might better deal with troubled youth with an approach that recognizes the significance of mental health issues impacting police/child interaction. We need to do a 180 on dealing with mental health issues. Now.

The sooner we the people recognize that this is all about mental health and that schools and police departments are not mental health service providers, the safer our schools and city streets will become.

All adults are the protectors of all children.

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The Child Placement Crisis: Why Kids Are Living in Hotels Instead of Homes

Adoption, Foster and Kinship Care, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Protection, Reporting and News - US Based

Child welfare systems across the country are facing a deepening placement crisis. As group homes, residential treatment centers, and detention beds have closed without real alternatives, older youth with high-intensity behavioral and developmental needs are being warehoused in hotels, emergency rooms, and psychiatric hospitals. KARA presents Judith Schagrin’s essential article on how we got here and why policymakers must rethink residential care, remedy the unintended consequences of the Family First Prevention Services Act, and build safe, humane options for children who cannot live at home.

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How I Can Help: Protecting At‑Risk Children in My Community

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Mikes Favorite Posts, Reporting and News - MN Specific, What You Can Do

Child protection systems too often expose children to continued abuse and neglect instead of keeping them safe. This article explains what that means and offers concrete “what I can do” options for any reader who wants to help at risk children in their community from sharing investigative reports with state reps, to raising awareness, inviting speakers, supporting nonprofits, and exploring direct volunteer roles in my community.

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What the Future Holds For At-Risk Children In America

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Education, KARA News and Events, Public Policy, Reporting and News - US Based

America’s children are living through a historic experiment: what happens when a president dismantles the programs that feed them, teach them, heal them, and protect them. Under this administration, at risk children face more hunger, less health care, fewer early education opportunities, harsher immigration enforcement, and weaker child protection. This post explains what the future holds for America’s at risk children and what we must do now to change that.

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How I Can Help: CASA Guardian Ad Litems (in their words)

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child Protection, Reporting and News - MN Specific, What You Can Do

CASA Guardian ad Litem volunteers stand beside abused and neglected children in court, offering time, continuity, and a purely child focused voice. Here, CASAs explain their role in their own words, and we outline how you can explore becoming a CASA volunteer yourself.

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Children Are Dying On Your Watch (said the judge to CPS)

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Abuse and Deaths, Mikes Favorite Posts, Reporting and News - MN Specific

A federal judge recently told Texas child welfare officials that “children are dying on your watch” and accused them of protecting their bureaucracy instead of children. Minnesota’s own record of child fatalities from maltreatment including the catastrophic failure that led to four-year-old Eric Dean and five-year-old Kendrea Johnson and so many others: https://safepassageforchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Safe-Passage-for-Children-Child-Fatality-Report_Year-2_2022-2023.pdf shows this is not just one state’s problem.

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Project 2025 and Children: How Federal Cuts Are Dismantling Supports Kids Need to Survive and Thrive

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Protection, Children's Rights, Education, KARA News and Events, Media, Public Policy, Reporting and News - US Based

Project 2025 and allied budget plans would slash or eliminate programs that children rely on for health care, nutrition, early childhood education, civil rights protections, and child welfare support. KARA summarizes CWLA and other advocates’ warnings, shows how child poverty and hunger are already rising, and urges you to share this information and call your lawmakers before more supports for kids disappear.

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If Lawmakers Only Knew: Why CPS Needs De‑Identified Longitudinal Family Records

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Protection, childabuse, Public Policy, Religion, Politics + the Law, Reporting and News - US Based

Most CPS reporting gives lawmakers only snapshots: how many kids are in care today, how many reports this year. KARA argues that counties must keep de identified, family level longitudinal records so legislators can see multi generational involvement, understand which interventions reduce repeat removals, and design policies that break cycles of trauma instead of just managing them case by case, year by year.

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Update: Minnesota’s Supreme Court Council on Child Protection and Maltreatment Prevention

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Protection, Public Policy, Reporting and News - MN Specific

Minnesota’s new Supreme Court Council on Child Protection and Maltreatment Prevention is building a statewide blueprint to prevent child abuse and improve how the system works for families once they’re involved. Safe Passage helped launch this effort and is now tracking early reforms from Family Resource Centers to better training, legal representation, and foster youth supports and highlighting ways stakeholders can give input.

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What Physicians Can Do: Healing, Preventing, and Championing Child Safety

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, childabuse, What You Can Do

Physicians are often the first and only trusted adults able to see the hidden injuries of child abuse and neglect. This post explains what physicians can do about child abuse: recognize red flags, use ACEs and trauma‑informed care, act on reasonable suspicion, and advocate so fewer children suffer in silence and more find safety and healing.

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Fixing Non Transparency in Child Protective Services (& why we should)

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child self harm and suicide, Featured Articles, Mikes Favorite Posts, Religion, Politics + the Law, Reporting and News - International, Reporting and News - US Based

Child Protective Services operates with a level of secrecy that would never be accepted in schools or law enforcement. This post explains how CPS hides outcome data even as children suffer and die in state involved cases, how other nations criminalize violence against children that we routinely tolerate, and why real transparency and metrics are essential if we want to protect at risk kids instead of producing more trauma.

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Closing Group Homes, Child Sex Abuse, Suicide & Costs (where you live)

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Rebuttals & Guest Posts, Reporting and News - US Based

Across the U.S., group homes and child treatment centers are under scrutiny for harming the very foster youth they are supposed to help. This KARA report brings together recent investigations, mental health data, and youth voices to show how unsafe congregate care deepens trauma, why some facilities are being closed, and what it would take to build real, family based alternatives instead.

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What Mandated Reporters Can Do: Turning Knowledge Into Protection, Action, and Healing

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child Protection, Education, What You Can Do

Mandated reporters: teachers, clinicians, social workers, childcare staff, clergy and others are often the only adults who see the hidden signs of child abuse and neglect. This article explains what mandated reporters can do: recognize red flags, act on reasonable suspicion, report and document clearly, push past institutional pressure, and stay emotionally supported while protecting children.

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What Childcare Workers Can Do: Building Safety, Trust, and Resilience from the Earliest Years

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Education, What You Can Do

Childcare workers are often the first adults outside the family to see what very young children cannot yet say in words. This article shows how they can recognize early signs of abuse and trauma, act as courageous mandated reporters, and create trauma‑informed classrooms that give infants, toddlers, and preschoolers a sense of safety, trust, and resilience from the very earliest years.

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What School Boards Can Do: Trauma Informed Policies That Protect Students and Improve Schools

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Protection, Education, Mental Health + Over Medication, What You Can Do

School boards decide whether schools become trauma informed, healing environments or systems that deepen harm. This chapter explains what boards can do: make trauma and child safety central to district strategy, fund early identification and support services, reshape policing and discipline around healing and equity, protect relationship-based learning, and demand transparent, equity focused metrics and community partnerships so vulnerable students are seen, supported, and able to succeed.

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What Teachers Can Do: Trauma Informed Classrooms That Transform Students’ Lives

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Education, What You Can Do

Teachers are often the only steady adults who see what traumatized students live through. This chapter explains what teachers can do: recognize trauma as common and real, teach and discipline through a trauma informed lens, build trust, adapt academics with flexibility, report concerns, collaborate with school and community professionals, create healing classroom climates, and care for their own wellbeing so they can keep changing students’ lives.

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Working With Childhood Trauma (what parents can do)

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Mental Health + Over Medication, What You Can Do

Working with childhood trauma is hard, but parents are not powerless. This chapter explains what childhood and family level trauma mean today, how they show up as “behavior,” and what parents can do: recognize patterns in their own histories, focus on safety and emotional regulation at home, seek trauma informed help, partner with schools and community supports, and deliberately build resilience and new, healthier family traditions.

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Students engaging actively in a classroom setting with the theme 'ACES Impact in the Classroom'.

What You Can Do Series – School Principals

Adoption, Foster and Kinship Care, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Education, Mikes Favorite Posts, Public Policy, Reporting and News - US Based

School principals and administrators are on the front lines of childhood trauma and healing. This chapter explains what they can do: create trauma informed school climates, implement early screening and embedded support services, reshape discipline away from zero tolerance, build robust mental health and wellness systems, engage families and community partners, and advocate for policies and funding that keep vulnerable students safe and help them heal.

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Youth Tried as Adults: Life Sentences, Trauma, and the Failure of America’s Juvenile Justice System

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Public Policy, Reporting and News - US Based

Children in the U.S. are still being tried as adults and sentenced to die in prison. This post explains how juvenile life sentences work, the trauma and racial injustice they reflect, what adult prisons do to kids, and where real reform is finally beginning to take hold.

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Family Assessment and Child Death from Star Tribune Child Abuse Reporting

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Abuse and Deaths, Featured Articles, Mikes Favorite Posts, Reporting and News - MN Specific

Star Tribune investigations reveal how Minnesota’s Family Assessment track allowed severe child abuse to continue and sometimes end in child death. KARA unpacks what went wrong, why it matters, and how you can help protect children and support CASA guardians ad litem.

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Who Will Speak For Abused & Neglected Children? video

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Abuse and Deaths, Featured Articles, KARA News and Events, Videos

Abused and neglected children cannot speak for themselves. Watch KARA’s award‑winning video and learn how CASA volunteers and informed adults can speak up, protect kids, and push lawmakers to improve child protection systems.

Volunteer CASA Guardians ad Litem spend their days with abused and neglected children that have been raped, neglected, beaten, and tortured by other means. 

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KARA Conversations – Growing Childhood Trauma Awareness Where You Live

Aces and Trauma, Adoption, Foster and Kinship Care, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child Protection, KARA News and Events, What You Can Do

KARA Conversations brings experienced child advocacy speakers to your classroom, congregation, nonprofit or civic group for short, powerful Zoom sessions on child abuse, childhood trauma and how Child Protective Services really works. Choose a 30 minute overview with Q&A or a customized 60 minute event, and help the people where you live move from concern to concrete action for children.

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Parental Drug Use Killing Children in Pennsylvania at High Rates (investigative report)

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child Protection, Children's Rights, KARA News and Events, Public Policy, Reporting and News - US Based, Stunning Statistics

An investigative report from Pennsylvania’s TribLive found that nearly 30% of 845 child deaths and near-deaths from 2018–2022 were tied to parental drug use—often in families already known to Child Protective Services. Similar patterns are emerging in Minnesota, Allegheny County and other states. This KARA article shares real children’s stories, shows how CPS and child-fatality systems are failing to track the true scale of drug-related child deaths, and calls on adults everywhere to demand better data, oversight and protection.

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Global Value Chains and the Power of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs)

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child Protection, Guest Posts, INTERNATIONAL CHILD ABUSE NEWS, Reporting and News - International

Global value chains and fast‑fashion business models do not just “reflect” child labour in countries like Bangladesh – they help design it into the system. Research by Eshanee Singh, Michael Nielsen and the CLARISSA programme shows how multinational buyers, through relentless pressure for lower prices and faster production, push risks and costs down onto informal workshops and necessity‑driven family businesses, where employing children often becomes the only way to survive. Instead of treating child labour as a distant cultural problem, this work makes clear that it is a predictable outcome of corporate decisions in boardrooms and purchasing offices, and that real change will come only when citizens, consumers and investors demand supply chains that value children’s lives more than shareholders’ dividends.

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Corporate Power, Global Value Chains and Child Labour in Bangladesh

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, childabuse, Children's Rights, Guest Posts, Public Policy, Religion, Politics + the Law, Reporting and News - International

Global value chains and multinational enterprises hold enormous power over labour practices in Bangladesh’s garment and leather industries. As responsibility for working conditions shifts from the state toward corporate social responsibility, under resourced labour inspectorates and export dependent strategies leave child labour embedded in business models.
This post uses Michael E. Nielsen’s 2005 analysis and CLARISSA’s research to show how precarious contracts, foreign loans, rising material costs and fragmented supply chains push informal enterprises to cut labour costs by relying on children. It argues that corporate acceptance of “that’s just the way things are done over there” hides the real drivers of child labour and that both nation states and corporations must change how they structure production if they are serious about ending exploitation.

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Child Protection in the Dark: How Our Blind Spots in CPS Are Costing Taxpayers, Children, and Communities

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, CASA, GAL and Child Protection, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child Protection, Mikes Favorite Posts, Reporting and News - US Based, Videos

Child Protective Services is one of the least understood and least transparent systems we fund, even though childhood trauma drives enormous costs in education, health care, crime, and prisons. This KARA article argues that taxpayers, children, and communities are all paying for our blind spots around CPS, shows how negative narratives and politics are pushing the system into crisis, and calls on readers to demand real data and trauma-informed reform.

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Childhood Trauma, Suicide, and a CPS System Flying Blind

Aces and Trauma, Adoption, Foster and Kinship Care, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child self harm and suicide, Mental Health + Over Medication, Reporting and News - US Based

Repeated childhood trauma does cruel things to children. Things that never go away. Those things (behaviors/thoughts/self-harm/suicide) can be managed with help. Without help, depression, pain and sadness often become overwhelming. 

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Arizona’s Hidden Child Trauma: KARA Deep Dive Into Child Abuse

All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child Protection, childabuse, DEEP DIVE, Reporting and News - US Based, The States

Arizona rebuilt its child welfare agency in 2014 after 6,554 child abuse reports were marked “not investigated,” but new audits, deaths, and lawsuits show the same failure patterns emerging under a different name. This KARA deep dive consolidates Arizona’s own data, fatality reviews, and court records to expose how delays, documentation gaps, group home overreliance, and chronic turnover are still putting children at risk—and what that means for real reform.

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Alaska’s Hidden Child Trauma: Beyond CPS Number

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Child Abuse and Deaths, Child Protection, childabuse, DEEP DIVE, Public Policy, Reporting and News - US Based, Statistics, The States

The Alaska Children’s Alliance warns that Alaska has “some of the highest rates of child abuse and neglect in the nation,” noting research that 38% of children born in Alaska will be reported to child welfare before age 10 and nearly 1 in 7 will face an allegation of sexual abuse before age 12

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When Trauma Walks Into Class: Student on Teacher Violence, ACEs, and the Cost of Ignoring Childhood Abuse

Aces and Trauma, All Posts from Kids at Risk Action, Education, Mental Health + Over Medication

Student‑on‑teacher violence is rising in Minnesota classrooms, and trauma is walking through the door long before the school bell rings. Children who grow up with beatings, sexual abuse, and neglect often bring survival‑brain reactions into class, turning ordinary directions into perceived threats. Without trauma‑informed support, teachers are being injured, driven from the profession, and left to “just deal with” a crisis they did not create.

Uncooperative often violent response to authority figures is normal for traumatized children. It’s driven by repeated pain and terror visited upon a child that has been unable to escape repeated trauma and abuse.

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