“Reckless and ill advised public policy” are the words of Dee Wilson at the Casey foundation. Much of this article comes from the excellent reporting by Marie Cohen at the Child Welfare Monitor. Read her entire article here.
Marie Cohen may be writing about child death and near death due to bad public policy for kids in Washington State’s Child Protective Services (CPS) but this is happening in almost every state in America today.
This dangerous public policy is scaring the hell out of social workers, Guardians ad Litem, courts and others involved in keeping children safe in their homes. The policy we are speaking of is the overuse of “Family Assessment” as the primary tool for keeping at risk child safe from “imminent harm”. It means offering services to the family and leaving the child in the home instead of an conducting an investigation and placing the child in a safe home. I will not argue the comparative traumas involved in removal vs. assessment. This argument is physical death and near death when due to abuse and neglect to the child in the home.
The politics of Family First are on fire in America today. CPS is being attacked from all sides as it struggles to keep children safe. The COVID lockdown has increased the numbers of damaged children and the severity of damage done to them during the lockdown without access to mandated reporters and escape from a toxic home.
While we all want children to grow up in healthy families, children are dying and being horribly damaged because some families are unable to stop injuring their children.
For nonbelievers of this statement, please read this recent investigative report by Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota about MN children killed by their caregivers while in CPS. It is likely the only report of its kind in the nation. Most of the murdered children were under three years old. Please share this report widely. Every state should know how many children are dying at the hands of their parents while in CPS.
This CASA Guardian ad Litem knows that exponentially more children almost die and even more are left with physical and mental traumas that keep them from living a productive life.
Very few people understand the commonality of generational child abuse and how many families come in and out of the system over multiple decades. Almost 8 million children annually are referred to CPS. The U.S. is an outlier among other nations in how it treats children. This is largely because of little transparency exists in CPS. Instead of longitudinal studies demonstrating the depth and scope of the problems we speak of, CPS doesn’t keep long term data. Instead of tracking and reporting metrics that demonstrate the success and failure of children passing through the system, most reporting has to do with employee Key Performance Indicators.
Because America is the only nation in the world to not ratify the United Nation’s RIGHTS OF THE CHILD TREATY of the 1980’s, children have no standing in court and need help from the community to keep them safe (alive) when their caregivers become a danger to them. In many ways we are failing our children and our communities at a rate far higher than other nations.
This KARA report demonstrates what makes the lives of America’s at risk children so much more dangerous than that of other children around the world.
It saddens me that more people in the industry don’t speak out more openly about the harm they see being visited on children in need of Child Protection today. This is grueling work and we should recognize the need for training and better outcomes.
Who Will Speak For The Children?
Overwhelmed CPS systems; 8 states requiring caseloads of over 100 families per social worker (Utah174) is not keeping children safe (or alive). Turnover in the industry is very high and the reasons for leaving are many. Secondary trauma is real for workers, success and happy outcomes are less real. Support by the public is rare and the difficulty of leaving work at the office is common (and the pay is not near what it should be for the hours and stress involved).
BECOME THE CHANGE
WHEN YOU Share KARA’s reporting with FRIENDS, INSTAGRAM & FACEBOOK and most of all, your State Representative (find them here) change will come. When enough of us become informed and speak up for abused and neglected children, we will improve their lives and our communities! Please support KARA’s work with a small monthly donation:
Read key pieces from Marie Cohen’s article below:
Key Points From Marie Cohen’s article:
“B.B.” was born in 2022 and died of fentanyl poisoning in March 2023. During the ten years before B.B.’s death, DCYF had received 30 reports on B.B.’s family (many before B.B. was born) for issues including use of heroin, marijuana and alcohol in the home; lack of supervision of the children; domestic violence; an unsafe caregiver living with the family; an unsafe and unclean living environment unsecured guns in the home “out-of-control” behaviors by B.B.’s older siblings at school, with the mother described as “out-of-it” and unresponsive to school concerns; concerns about the children’s hygiene; and the mother driving under the influence of marijuana. An in-home services case that had been open since January 2023 was closed days before B.B.’s death.
On August 24, 2024, the Washington Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) proudly announced in a press statement that it had reduced the number of children in out-of-home care by nearly half since 2018.
The purpose of foster care is to keep children safe when they cannot be protected at home. So the essential question is whether the reduction in foster care placements has occurred without any cost to children. Trends in child fatalities and “near fatalities”1 due to child abuse or neglect can provide a clue. These deaths and serious injuries are the tip of the iceberg of abuse and neglect. For each child who dies or is seriously injured, there are many more that are living in fear, pain, or hunger, and incurring lifelong cognitive, emotional, and physical damage. There are troubling signs of an increase in child fatalities and near fatalities over the past several years. In its most recent quarterly update, DCYF reports on the number of “critical events” or child fatalities and near fatalities that met its criteria for receiving an “executive review.” These include the deaths of any minor that had been in DCYF custody or received services within a year of the death that were suspected to be caused by child abuse or neglect.2 They also include near fatality cases in which the child has been in the care of or received services from DCYF within three months preceding the near fatality or was the subject of an investigation for possible abuse or neglect. DCYF reports that the number critical events it reviewed increased from 23 in 2019 to 51 in 2023 and projects that it will increase to 61 in 2024.3
There has been a chorus of voices alleging that DCYF is abdicating its child protection responsibilities. One foster parent told the Seattle Times that “she and other foster parents are finding children who now come into their care are in worse shape than they used to be, with more serious mental health conditions or greater exposure to lethal drugs like fentanyl.” She contends they’ve been left too long in unsafe conditions because of the heightened legal standard for removal. In The Erosion of Child Protection in Washington State, Toni Sebastian and Dee Wilson have cited the weakness of the management of Family Voluntary Services, which is often employed as an alternative to foster care.
A survey of executive reviews of 2023 and 2024 child maltreatment child fatalities with DCYF involvement within a year provided examples of problems with screening, investigations, and case management, including the following:
- Hotline issues. Reviews documented multiple intakes screened out on the same family even when the family had been the subject of multiple calls. The reviews also suggest that too many cases may be assigned to the Family Assessment Response (FAR) pathway, an alternative to a traditional investigation designed for lower-risk cases. In FAR cases, a social worker assesses the family and refers it to voluntary services. There is no finding about whether maltreatment has occurred and no child removal unless the case is transferred to the investigative track.
- Premature closure of FAR cases. Reviewers noted instances in which FAR cases were closed after parents failed to cooperate, without caseworkers considering a transfer to the investigative track or before determining that the parent had followed through with services.
- Assessment failures: Reviewers noted multiple failures to adequately assess parents for domestic violence, mental health, and substance abuse; failures to contact collaterals (relatives and friends) and instead relying on parental self-reports; lack of recognition of chronic maltreatment; ignoring evidence of past problems if not included in the current allegation; and failing to anticipate future behavior based on historical patterns.4
- Inadequate understanding of substance abuse: Reviewers noted the failure to conduct a full assessment of substance abuse including history, behavioral observations, and collateral contacts; disregarding the unique danger to children posed by fentanyl; downplaying the significance of marijuana use, particularly as an indicator of relapse from harder drugs; and disregarding alcohol abuse because it is legal.
- Failure to obtain information from treatment and service providers. The failure to communicate with service providers about clients’ participation in services like drug treatment and relying on clients’ self-reports was noted by more than one review team. Sometimes the providers refused to cooperate. Staff told the team reviewing one case about a substance abuse treatment provider that routinely refuses to cooperate, even when parents sign release forms, and routinely tells clients not to cooperate with DCYF.
- Lack of subject matter expertise. Reviewers pointed to the lack of deep knowledge about domestic violence, substance use disorder, and mental health among staff doing investigations, assessments, and case management and the need to provide access to subject matter experts when needed.
- Failure to remove a child despite safety threats. The team reviewing the case of a four-year-old who died after ingesting fentanyl reported that there were at least two different times where an active safety threat was present that would have justified filing a petition in court to place the child in foster care. However, the staff believed, based on past experience, that the court would have denied the petition and therefore did not file.
- Delayed Reunifications: “P.L,.” a toddler allegedly beaten to death by his mother, was in foster care for over three years but his mother’s rights were never terminated. He was on a trial return to his mother for just over five months when he was found dead with bruises and burns all over his body.
Fentanyl is particularly dangerous to young children because it takes only a tiny amount to kill a baby or toddler, who can mistake the pills for candy or put straws or foil meant for smoking the drug in their mouths. The number of fatalities and near fatalities reviewed by DCYF that involved fentanyl climbed from four in 2019 to a projected 35 in 2024. Since 2018, Washington’s Office of the Family and Children’s Ombuds (has observed an annual increase in child fatalities and near fatalities involving accidental ingestions and overdoses. Fifty-seven (or 85 percent) of the 67 incidents examined in 2023 involved fentanyl. Over half of these incidents involved children under three years old and a shocking 14 out of the 85 infants were 12 months old or less. As Dee Wilson and Toni Sebastian point out, the limited mobility and motor skills of infants suggests that some of these infants may have been given a small amount of fentanyl as a means of sedation.
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