What We Learned From 1212 (Nothing)
My first visit to a four-year-old was in the suicide ward of a local hospital.
Four. Not fourteen. She was in a locked unit because the adults responsible for her had done something to her that made a child that young want to stop existing. I was her Guardian ad Litem. She was one of about fifty children I helped remove from life threatening danger during my years as a CASA volunteer.
I have told that story for thirty years now and it still stops rooms. What I have never been able to tell anyone is how many other four-year-olds were in locked units that same year in Minnesota. Nobody knows. Nobody counts it.
Hold onto that. I want to take you back eight hundred years first.
1212
In the spring of 1212, children began walking across Europe.
The story, as it comes down to us, is that they were going to the Holy Land, that the sea would part for them, and that their innocence would accomplish what armies of grown men with money and weapons had failed to accomplish. Thousands of them moved south through France and Germany. They were poor. Most of them had nothing and no one looking for them.
Adults watched them go. Some fed them. Some cheered. Very few stopped them.
When a group of them reached Marseilles, merchants offered them passage. The ships did not go to the Holy Land. Some children were sold. The merchants who did it are named in the chronicles. As far as the record shows, nothing happened to those men for a very long time, and nothing happened at all to the adults across an entire continent who watched thousands of children walk toward something everyone with sense knew was a lie.
That is the part of the story I cannot get past. Not the merchants. The bystanders.
We still cannot count them
Here is the thing that historians will tell you about the Children’s Crusade if you ask them. They do not know how many children there were. They do not agree on how many died. They are not even certain all of them were children – some scholars argue the marchers were landless teenagers and displaced poor, mislabeled by the Latin word for boy.
Eight hundred years of scholarship and we cannot produce a number.
Now tell me how many American children died, almost died,
attempted suicide or self- harmed last year in their homes
while their family was already known to child protection.
You cannot. Neither can I, and I have spent three decades on this. The federal figures arrive years late, they are assembled from state reports that use different definitions and different thresholds, and the states have every institutional reason to report conservatively. What gets published is a floor, not a count. Everyone inside the system knows this and almost no one outside it does.
Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota did one of the only thorough investigations I am aware of into children who died at the hands of their parents while known to CPS. Half of those children were under three years old when they died. It was the kind of work that should be routine in every state and instead is so rare that I can name the organization that did it.
And that investigation, as good as it was, could only look at deaths. There is still no reliable public count, much less investigations of American children who died while their families were already known to child protection.
We do not track child self-harm. We do not track child suicide attempts in maltreatment cases in any usable way. We do not track near-death violence between parent and child at all. A four-year-old on a suicide ward does not appear in any national number. A twelve-year-old who survives a beating that would have killed a smaller child does not appear either. If the child lives, the system records nothing that anyone can aggregate, compare, or hold a legislature accountable to.
So the real figure – invisible children in this country living in danger severe enough to put them in a locked psychiatric unit at four years old – is not a number we are debating. It is a number that does not exist.
You cannot fix what you refuse to count.
And at this point I have stopped believing the refusal is an accident.
Why you cannot see it
People assume the secrecy is protecting children.
Some of it is. Most of it is a thicket.
Federal confidentiality rules, state child protection statutes, HIPAA, FERPA, juvenile court records law, and a layer of agency policy on top all overlap and contradict each other. Ask a county worker what she is permitted to disclose about a child who died and she will give you an honest answer that a worker one county over will contradict, also honestly. Neither of them is lying. Nobody actually knows. And when nobody knows, the safe answer is always no. A reporter gets no. A legislator gets a redacted page. A grandmother trying to find out how her granddaughter died gets a form letter. The confusion itself does the work that a deliberate cover-up would do, and it does it without anyone having to decide to cover anything up.
That is what I mean by the merchants of Marseilles. It is not that someone is getting rich on a locked ward, though somebody is. It is that the structure protects the adults and the children pay for it, and nobody has to be a villain for it to work exactly that way.
The romance problem
The Children’s Crusade became a folk tale. Innocent pilgrims. The pied piper. The sea that did not part. A catastrophe got turned into a story people tell their own children, and the telling made it bearable.
We do the same thing now. Adoption day photographs. A governor at a podium. A local news segment about a foster family with seven kids and a trampoline. All of it true, none of it false, and all of it functioning the same way the folk tale did – making an unbearable thing bearable enough that nobody has to look at the ledger.
There is no ledger. That is the point of this whole piece.
What would actually change it
Two things that are not cheap or easy.
- Expand mandatory CAPTA child death reporting to reporting of near-fatalities, child self-harm, suicide attempts, and near-death parent-child violence and neglect, so the injured children exist in the data and not only the dead ones.
- And one clear rule on what may be disclosed when a child dies or suffers egregious harm in a system that was already watching. One rule, preempting the thicket, written so a county worker in Duluth and a county worker in Rochester give the same answer.
The Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota reporting is a solid example including information and metrics that should be tracked, reported, and made public by every state. We don’t need names we need numbers and descriptions of the violence and neglect these children die and almost die from.
You
The adults of 1212 were not monsters. They were simple busy people that believed what they were told, and they assumed their leaders were right. this is the one-part of this that is actually in your hands.
Do one thing this week. Ask your state legislator two questions: does Minnesota publicly report whether a child who died of maltreatment was already known to child protection, and how long after the death does that report come out. Ask your member of Congress the same two questions about the federal numbers.
You are not asking them to vote for anything.
You are asking them to find out.
Most of them do not know,
and the ones who go looking do not forget what they find.
Minnesota legislators – find yours by address: https://www.gis.leg.mn/iMaps/districts/
Full Minnesota House and Senate directory: https://www.leg.mn.gov/leg/legislators
U.S. Representative – find yours by zip code: https://www.house.gov/representatives
U.S. Senators – by state: https://www.senate.gov/senators/index.htm
If you would rather call, the Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121 and they will connect you to any House or Senate office.
Then tell me what they said. Forward the reply to KARA.
We are collecting them – send to: info@invisiblechildren.org with REPORTING in the subject line
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