Today’s Star Tribune reporting on the civil rights lawsuit for abused children (by reporter Chris Serres) validates my belief that child rape and other crimes against children are the most ignored and cruelest reality in our community. We hate the conversation so we avoid it and children suffer continued awful traumas because of us. I…
This year local media have covered five child murders and one near-fatality at various stages of resolution. Links to the stories are here.
In only one case is there public information about whether county child protection was involved.
State law requires each county to review its child abuse related fatalities and near-fatalities, and to submit their findings to the Department of Human Services (DHS) in a report that is publicly available. Counties have either ignored our requests for these reports or sent cautiously worded summaries in their place.
More accountability and transparency are needed.
DHS is currently deciding whether to immediately release these reports to the public when they receive them from counties. We encourage them to do so. If not we will propose legislation to make this a requirement.
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Brandon Stahl’s reporting (September 2014) on the tortured death of 4 year old Eric Dean and his powerful Star Tribune articles about tortured children & the “catastrophic failure” of child protection in Minnesota (Governor Dayton’s words), shine light into the invisible world of child abuse that is so hard to talk about and so…
Anyone interested in the real politics and machinations of child protection policies and services in MN needs to know about Rich Gehrman/Safepassage For Children studies and recommendations. They set a gold standard for information and instruction that I am most happy to see on board at Governor Dayton’s Task Force On Child Protection.
Based on in depth research of child protection cases Safe Passage reported how well/not well MN children and families are being served with current policies. Most notable among their studies observations were;
* Caregiver compliance was often predicated more on attendance than changing bad behaviors
* A third of the children continued to be abused while under court supervision
* Access to child protection records is critical to understanding and changing public policy for abused and neglected children
* 60% of child abuse reports in MN are screened out (4 counties screened out 90% of abuse calls)
* The average abused child is placed in four different homes
Rich’s latest Public Radio interview (listen here)
The Metric that Matters
I have a friend who thinks government can always cut more staff. I told him when child protection investigators get more than 4-5 new cases a week they become ineffective.
He grudgingly conceded “I guess there have to be some metrics”.
Minnesota tried to keep this caseload ‘metric’ manageable last year by only responding to 28% of maltreatment reports, compared to 62% nationally. This means 21,960 children didn’t get a needed visit from a child protection worker.
Sorry, but fixing this will require adding staff, because decisions to investigate families and potentially even remove children can’t really be privatized.
We have to put aside reservations about ‘big’ government and help counties excel at this work so we can achieve the metric that matters: as many safe children as possible.