Most people have no idea what it’s like to be an elected official making laws and policies that shape the lives of abused and neglected children. Very few lawmakers come to office with a deep understanding of child abuse, childhood trauma, or what actually happens to children inside Child Protective Services (CPS). Even fewer have experienced either the trauma or the system firsthand. That gap in knowledge is not just unfortunate—it is expensive, dangerous, and deadly.

Very few elected officials arrive in office with a meaningful understanding of child abuse, childhood trauma and its lifelong consequences, or what happens to children once they enter CPS.  The public hears almost nothing about outcomes beyond a few shocking headlines. Because we don’t track or share meaningful results, how many children die or are re‑abused while known to CPS, how many drop out of school, cycle through emergency rooms, or end up pregnant or in jail by the time they’re 14 or 15.

Our blind spots let real harm continue while taxpayers quietly fund a system that is, in many ways creating exactly what it was designed to stop.

We are running a multibillion‑dollar child‑protection system while knowing shockingly little about how well it works. There is no national requirement for CPS agencies to track and publicly report the most basic child outcomes:

• What percentage of children leave CPS able to finish school and live productive lives?
• How many spiral into self‑harm, addiction, or the justice system?
• How many are returned to unsafe homes and later murdered or seriously injured by caregivers?

To my knowledge as a CASA guardian ad Litem volunteer, only a few states, including Minnesota, through the work of Safe Passage for Children have thoroughly investigated how many children have died at the hands of their caregivers while they were known to CPS.

Their child‑fatality reports show dozens of preventable deaths over less than a decade, many involving repeated warnings and missed chances to intervene. We only hear these stories when the tragedy is so horrific that the media can’t look away: child suicides like Kendrea Johnson, “house of horrors” cases, and abuse so extreme it briefly overrides our discomfort with this topic. The countless children who suffer quietly, or die without headlines, remain invisible.

Unlike police, prisons, schools, or healthcare systems which routinely report data like graduation rates, re‑arrest rates, or hospital metrics, most child‑protection agencies face almost no meaningful public‑reporting requirements.

There are federal summaries of abuse reports and removals, but very little about what happens to kids after contact with CPS, and almost nothing that is easy for the public or lawmakers to understand. Over‑cautious interpretations of privacy laws and an entrenched culture of secrecy mean critical information about deaths, re‑abuse, and long‑term outcomes is locked away. As a result, taxpayers are writing very large checks for a system we can barely see.

That ignorance has a price tag. Research on the lifetime cost of child maltreatment estimates that each new confirmed case can cost society well over a million dollars in medical care, child welfare, special education, lost productivity, and criminal‑justice expenses over the child’s life. When you multiply that by the almost eight million children reported to CPS every year and then add the many who are never reported the financial burden is staggering.

But because we don’t connect those downstream costs back to early trauma and the performance of our child‑protection systems, the bill simply shows up later as higher school budgets, more prison beds, emergency‑room crowding, homelessness, and mental‑health crises.

The human cost is even higher. Most of the children I served in CPS carried problems that followed them for a lifetime because they received more punishment than healing and skill‑building. They were suspended and expelled instead of supported, locked up instead of treated, and shamed instead of listened to. Most child abuse is never reported; most children never tell their stories and never find help for the trauma they live with. They simply grow up, carrying that pain into their own relationships, workplaces, neighborhoods and genetically onto their own children (epigenetics).

The U.S. is the only country on earth that has never ratified the United Nation’s Rights of the Child Treaty). That means American children lack the clear legal standing and enforceable rights that children in many other nations use to push their systems toward protection and accountability.

Think about what that means for a five‑year‑old: they may not even know that what is happening to them is wrong, and even if they do, they have no idea who they could tell, or whether anyone would listen.

Instead of treating childhood trauma as a public‑health and human‑rights emergency, our default response is blame and punishment. We expel traumatized children from classrooms, push them out of schools, and then fill jails and prisons when their untreated pain shows up as crime. This is not just ineffective; it is a very expensive way to guarantee that today’s abused children become tomorrow’s “problem adults,” still paid for by the same taxpayers who were told it was too costly to help them early.

Without greater community awareness and political will, a large share of the roughly millions of children reported for abuse and neglect each year will remain invisible, receiving too little healing and too much punishment.

Many will grow into adults who struggle with addiction, mental illness, unemployment, and violence, all of which become “public problems” that communities and taxpayers must manage. Until lawmakers see the full social and financial costs of unaddressed childhood trauma, we will keep paying for it in crime, prisons, healthcare, struggling communities and schools, and ever‑rising local taxes.

Negative narratives and polarized politics are making this worse. On one side, CPS is attacked for “over‑reaching” and “breaking up families”; on the other, it is condemned whenever a child dies after agencies missed warning signs. Legislators, afraid of backlash from either direction, often pass laws that add paperwork and fear of liability without adding the staff, training, and mental‑health resources needed to protect children safely. Workers face crushing caseloads and constant public criticism, pushing burnout and turnover even higher. This is how you get a system where headlines and politics drive quick fixes, instead of steady investment in what actually works.

Whether you look through a financial lens or an empathetic one, we are all paying for this. We can either invest in adequate safety and services for abused and neglected children now, with data and accountability, or we can keep paying more later in human suffering and public budgets. Adequate reform will take time and money.

Nothing changes until more lawmakers understand what is really happening inside CPS and how it connects to the crises in our schools, hospitals, streets, and jails.

ThIs is where you come in.

Share this article on social media. Send it to people in your circle who vote, teach, heal, or lead. Call or email your State Representative and ask them what outcome data your state collects on children in CPS, how many children known to the system have died in the last decade, and what they are doing to reduce both the human and financial cost of childhood trauma. It does make a difference when informed constituents refuse to look away.

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