People That Know Child Abuse
We know that the punishment model does not facilitate healing or learning – It is responsible for most failed grade level reading, math and history scores. It is a primary reason for underperforming schools.
How I Can Help: Protecting At‑Risk Children in My Community
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.
How I Can Help: CASA Guardian Ad Litems (in their words)
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.
Children Are Dying On Your Watch (said the judge to CPS)
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.
What Physicians Can Do: Healing, Preventing, and Championing Child Safety
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.
Fixing Non Transparency in Child Protective Services (& why we should)
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.
A CPS Reality Check (good for admin – bad for children)
CPS reality check in the current political battle for community CASA guardian ad Litems in MN. To put it bluntly, what’s good for the administrators often may be bad for the children.
What Mandated Reporters Can Do: Turning Knowledge Into Protection, Action, and Healing
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.
Rana Plaza, Children, and Corporate Responsibility – KARA
This KARA article revisits the Rana Plaza factory collapse through the eyes of child workers and victims’ children, showing how weak corporate responsibility scars young lives long after the rubble is cleared.
Rana Plaza Disaster: Factory Collapse, Child Labour, and Corporate Responsibility
This article traces the Rana Plaza factory collapse, the political and corporate failures that enabled it, and post disaster responses like the Bangladesh Accord and Safety Agreement.
Family Assessment and Child Death from Star Tribune Child Abuse Reporting
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.
Who Will Speak For Abused & Neglected Children? video
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.
KARA Conversations – Growing Childhood Trauma Awareness Where You Live
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.
Parental Drug Use Killing Children in Pennsylvania at High Rates (investigative report)
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.
Global Value Chains and the Power of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs)
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.
Corporate Power, Global Value Chains and Child Labour in Bangladesh
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.
Child Protection in the Dark: How Our Blind Spots in CPS Are Costing Taxpayers, Children, and Communities
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.
Arizona’s Hidden Child Trauma: KARA Deep Dive Into Child Abuse
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.
Alaska’s Hidden Child Trauma: Beyond CPS Number
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
Invisible Hours: Child Labour in Bangladesh’s Toxic Informal Economy
Child labour in Bangladesh remains widespread, especially in the informal economy and leather industry, where children work extreme hours in toxic, hazardous conditions for less than US$2 a day. Drawing on a 2024 UNICEF report, a five year CLARISSA study, and a foundational ILO assessment of push and pull factors, this post explains why Bangladesh is a child labour hot spot and how poverty, poor health, and employer demand keep children trapped in dangerous work instead of school.
Excerpt
Child labour in Bangladesh has not disappeared—it has shifted into the informal economy, where children work long hours in toxic, unsafe conditions for very low pay. A 2024 UNICEF report shows that child labour rates remain significantly high, while a five year CLARISSA study reveals that 27% of workers in small leather enterprises are children handling chemicals, heavy loads, and dangerous machinery.
This post also revisits a key 1997 ILO assessment of push and pull factors that explains why poverty, poor health, disaster, and employer demand continue to drive children into hazardous work instead of school. Together, these findings show why Bangladesh remains a hot spot for child labour and why solutions must address both household poverty and the structure of informal labour markets.
Ending Meaningful Child Protection in America
A federal “bonfire of deregulation” and plans to erase “neglect” from child protection law are quietly dismantling Child Protective Services in America. Backed by the president and his base, these policies weaken legal protections, strip away thousands of pages of guidance, hide crucial government information, and slash funding—placing at‑risk children and families in even greater danger.
Join KARA’s Children’s Crusade: Making Life, Liberty, and Happiness Real for Abused and Neglected Children
KARA’s Children’s Freedom Crusade uses a Fourth of July freedom theme to demand real life, liberty, and happiness for abused and neglected children—and to build a national, child first movement that puts their safety and healing first.
Minnesota Children Killed By Caregivers While Known to CPS (& how to stop it)
2023 Investigative Report on MN Children Killed
by Caregivers While in Child Protective Services
Overwhelmed Institutions & Public Policy
To be fair, what does an overwhelmed institution do when caseloads double and budgets are cut in half? Rural counties will always be underfunded, understaffed and unable to provide the level of service larger urban areas can with their larger budgets giving them more options.
Kudos to Wisconsin for Tracking Child Death and Egregious Harm
Wisconsin’s public website for child death and egregious CPS incidents shows what honest tracking can look like. Minnesota’s Safe Passage child fatality report revealed children murdered by caregivers while known to CPS, but near deaths and egregious harm are still invisible. Until we count those cases, Minnesota will continue to tolerate extreme child abuse as a hidden human rights violation.
Child Abuse Prevention In America (videos & articles)
KARA reports on the issues of at risk children by curating a wide lens on child abuse and child protection. This post pulls together recent coverage from newspapers, universities, public health departments, UNICEF, the White House, and frontline advocates around National Child Abuse Prevention Month. You’ll see how childhood verbal abuse carries an estimated $300 billion global economic burden, how violence and neglect are rising in communities from Erie County to the Sahel, and how leaders are calling for better collaboration, stronger families, and more transparent systems to protect children. At the heart of the post is a simple call to action: choose one KARA podcast, article, or video that speaks to you and send it to your state representative or county commissioner, joining a growing movement to give voice to voiceless children.
Best and Worst States for Very Young Children in CPS: New Data on Risk, Failures, and Hope
This article uses NCANDS data to identify the best and worst states for very young children in CPS, highlighting where infants and toddlers face the greatest risk of severe harm or death and how troubled, overwhelmed child protection systems are struggling with heavy caseloads and too few resources. It points lawmakers, advocates, and communities toward more transparent CPS reporting, stronger early childhood support, and data driven reforms that can actually protect kids and support families.
Childhood Trauma and Lifelong ACES Impact
Children’s mental health crisis post COVID is no longer invisible. California’s Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris has declared adverse childhood experiences a public health threat, while foster children across the nation are being overprescribed psychotropic drugs and suicide has become the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10 to 24. In Minnesota and beyond, emergency rooms are filling with suicidal children because there are too few pediatric mental health beds, rural facilities are closing, and communities fight against group homes instead of embracing trauma informed care. At the same time, teachers are leaving the classroom in high numbers as ACES driven violence and chaos make schools feel more like mental health wards than places of learning. This KARA post brings together data, frontline stories, and policy examples—from New Jersey’s “Road Forward” plan to the federal Mental Health Services for Students Act—to show how deeply our systems are failing abused and traumatized children, and why embracing early intervention, honest reporting, and real support for educators, families, and kids is critical now.
2 year-old Lylah Koob’s Death & Why (from the Safe Passage Report)
This is one of the 88 stories of children dying at the hands of their caregivers reported in the recent Safe Passage For Children investigation of child death in Minnesota. The report suggests why this tragedy is happening in our state and how we can make life safer for at risk children (in the read more at the end of the article). Lylah Koob, Goodhue County
Child Abuse and Child Protection Stories & Statistics Arizona & Arkansas
Child Abuse and Child Protection Stories & Statistics Arizona & Arkansas
2 Year-Old Sophia O’Neill Death & Why (from the Safe Passage Investigative Report)
This is one of the 88 stories of children dying at the hands of their caregivers reported in the recent Safe Passage For Children investigation of child death in Minnesota. The report suggests why this tragedy is happening in our state and how we can make life safer for at risk children (in the read more at the end of the article). Please share this with your contacts and State Representative. Sophia O’Neill, Hennepin County
Impossible Questions & Painful Statistics
Are children property of their parents even if those parentsre violent, addicted, severely mentally ill or dangerously criminal?
CPS Intake Notes (what it’s like from the inside)
Intake notes from County CPS
These are a tiny sample of County intake notes
social workers and guardians ad Litem are assigned each week;
Invisible Children: The 200 Lives Lost in Child Protective Services
Jamie and Alex delve into the harrowing issue of children dying within the Child Protective Services (CPS) system. They discuss a groundbreaking report revealing that 200 children have died while within the CPS system,
Fear and Firing of Mandated Reporters (KARA podcast)
Fear and Firing of Mandated Reporters (KARA podcast)…professionals being punished, losing their jobs, and facing lawsuits for fulfilling their duties
How One Letter Saved a Child (KARA Podcast)
Josh and Maya share a powerful story of a young boy on the brink of being locked up, not because he was dangerous, but because the system lacked transparency
When Is Child Abuse a Crime
Child abuse in the home is still too often treated as a private family issue instead of a crime. Drawing on years as a CASA guardian ad Litem, this post exposes how Child Protective Services keeps abuse hidden, why children have no standing in court, and what must change so kids are truly safe in their own homes.
“Safety” at Home, Rape in Secret: The Long Shadow of Caregiver Sexual Abuse
Sexual abuse of a child is rarely a single “incident” or the act of a stranger in the dark; for many children, it is years of rape by the caregivers who are supposed to protect them. Most child sex abuse occurs in the home. This CASA Guardian ad Litem has experience two four-year-olds coming into…
America’s Child Abuse Emergency: 546,000 Victims, 2,000 Deaths, and a System That Chooses This
Child abuse in the United States is not rare or random — it is the predictable outcome of policy choices. In 2023, about 546,000 children were confirmed victims of abuse or neglect and an estimated 2,000 were killed, roughly five children every day. Most are hurt by their own parents, often after prior contact with Child Protective Services. These numbers vary wildly by state, proving that our systems can choose to protect children — or not.
The War on Fosters: How America’s Foster Care System Fails Youth
Emma and Daniel highlight the systemic issues of foster care in America, focusing on how foster youth struggle due to funding misallocation and harmful policies
Child Endangerment (Star Tribune “IN HARM’S WAY”)
Minnesota’s child protection system is repeatedly returning severely abused children to unsafe homes — and some are dying as a result. Drawing on the Star Tribune’s “In Harm’s Way” investigation, Safe Passage’s child fatality data, and my experience as a CASA guardian ad litem, this post exposes how opaque CPS practices, ignored warning signs, and a lack of accountability keep kids in danger. Learn what’s going wrong, why it matters for every Minnesotan, and how you can help push lawmakers to finally put children’s safety first.
Silent Crisis – Child Protection & Systemic Reform KARA Podcast
systemic issues within Child Protective Services (CPS) that have led to the tragic deaths of children, even after CPS involvement
Tip of the Mental Health Iceberg (podcast)
Kids at Risk Action, the hosts address the growing mental health crisis in child welfare, particularly in emergency rooms and foster care systems. They reveal alarming statistics, such as the significant rise in ER visits for children’s mental health crises and the systemic failures that leave many without proper care.
Northeastern University Study on the Child Welfare Crisis With Projections
Official child welfare numbers may capture only part of the crisis. This analysis explains how poverty, Family Assessment practices, underreporting, misreporting, and weak transparency can hide the true scale of harm to children—and why future projections must account for what the system fails to record.
Foster Child Self-Harm & Suicide June 2025
Childhood trauma, suicide and self-harm among American youth are at historic highs, with alarming increases among fosters, preteens, girls, LGBTQ+ youth, and children of color. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death for ages 10–24, and nearly one in five high school students has seriously considered suicide in the past year. Rates of self-harm, especially among young girls and LGBTQ+ youth, have surged, with emergency room visits for self-injury rising dramatically since 2020
What Teachers Can Do: Trauma‑Informed Classrooms and Child Protection
TRAUMA INFORMED TEACHING, TRAUMA INFORMED CLASSROOMS Teachers as Mandated Reporters and Frontline Defenders – Teachers are uniquely positioned—they often spend more awake hours with children than any other adult, especially for those from troubled homes. They are confidants, first responders, and witnesses to the silent suffering of abused, neglected, or traumatized students.
Very Young Children, Suicide, and Abuse: What We, CPS, and Lawmakers Must Do
Very young children are showing up in emergency rooms after suicide attempts and self‑harm, often with histories of abuse, neglect, and other trauma. When CPS and lawmakers lack transparent, child‑outcome data and trauma‑focused resources, these children slip through the cracks until it is too late.
Why We Hide Child Abuse Data
Social workers face secondary trauma and burnout in a child protection system that hides basic child outcome data. When CPS agencies use HIPAA as a “red herring” to block even de identified information, lawmakers and communities can’t fix what’s broken—and children and workers continue to suffer in the dark.
Recruiting Child Soldiers (yes, we do)
This article from 2013 is still true today with no signs of changing. It needs to be shared with your states lawmakers: The United States is the only nation that has not signed the United Nation’s International Rights Of the Child Treaty of the 1980’s. A primary reason we refuse to sign the treaty is…
KARA’s Plea For Children (a call to action)
There is no shortage of well-meaning volunteers and workers dedicated to improving the lives of the children they are serving as teachers, Guardians ad Litem, social & healthcare workers, law enforcement and adoptive/foster parents.