 |
| The "Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities" held a conference call Saturday. |
● Commission chair suggests raiding scarce prevention funds to pay for more child abuse investigations.
● The Commission vs. the evidence base.
● Meet Michael Petit, born again fiscal conservative.
● One commissioner raises questions about keeping drafts hidden from the public.
If any commissioner
feels these inferences are inaccurate, the Commission is welcome to set the
record straight – by releasing the documents and the tape recordings it makes
of its conference calls.
When we last left the “Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse
and Neglect Fatalities” they were debating a recommendation for a “surge” in
which states would be forced to reopen thousands of cases of alleged child
maltreatment in which children were allowed to stay in their own homes, in
order to see which ones should be torn from everyone they know and love and
consigned to the chaos of foster care after all. There would be no comparable look at children
already trapped in foster care to see if they could go home.
Another draft recommendation calls for prohibiting state
child abuse hotlines from “screening out” any call alleging child abuse or
neglect involving a child under age 5, no matter how patently absurd that call
might be. Even among calls that are
screened in, 87 percent turn out to be false. We estimate this recommendation would
increase investigator caseloads by 44 percent, and almost all of that time will
be spent spinning their wheels as they look where abuse and neglect are least
likely to be found – stealing time and effort from finding children in real
danger.
The Commission has been going around in circles debating which
would scare Congress more: saying out loud that they want $1 billion in new
funds just for the “surge,” or whether they should just say, in effect: “If you
don’t throw gobs of money at our unscientific recommendation that has no
evidence behind it, children will die!”
But on a conference call that lasted nearly three hours
Saturday (about one-third of which was devoted just to figuring out whether
there would be an up-or-down vote on all recommendations) Commission Chair
David Sanders floated a new idea:
Either instead of, or in addition to, asking for more money,
it’s not clear which, Sanders suggested that the Commission might want to
recommend letting states use money from something called Title IV-B. This is the meager pot of money the
federal government now makes available, in part, for prevention and family
preservation.
Even though the evidence is clear that it is prevention
programs, as well as broader anti-poverty efforts, that actually curb child
abuse fatalities, Sanders is proposing allowing states to divert money from
such efforts and pour it into investigating more families and taking away more
children.
This is a bit like telling states: Hey, you know that
federal money that now goes to food stamps for poor families – how would you
like to spend it on hiring more cops instead?
It’s not hard to imagine the result.
Actually, we know
the result because it’s already happening: Many states already raid funds from the
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) – the program that
replaced “welfare as we knew it” to fund child abuse investigations and foster
care, now Sanders is proposing to rob poor families again.
At another point there was some discussion of making the far
bigger program that funds foster care and adoption, Title IV-E available for
these investigations as well. And one
time I would have thought that wasn’t so bad.
But, as it happens, right now, for the first time in decades
there is serious
discussion in Congress about actually allowing those foster care funds to
be used for prevention and family preservation – soon there may even be
legislation to that effect. But some on
the Commission already appear ready to swoop down and urge that some of that
money be carried off to fund giant schemes for traumatizing thousands – maybe more
than a million – children every year with needless child abuse investigations.
Ignoring the evidence
base
Sanders made his suggestion at a particularly revealing
moment in the deliberations. He’d just
finished admitting, in effect, that the Commission had failed.
He noted that after two years of searching the Commission had
found exactly one approach to reducing child abuse deaths that met the standard
for being “evidence based.” (A few
others were “promising.” The terms are
not just rhetoric, there actually are formal definitions.)
But that one evidence-based practice had nothing to do with
screening in more hotline calls or “substantiating” more cases or taking away
more children. No, the one and only
evidence-based practice they found was a well-known, highly regarded home
visiting program known as the Nurse
Family Partnership. In other words,
a prevention program. That’s exactly the
kind of program that might be funded by, say, Title IV-B – if David Sanders
doesn’t succeed in getting that money diverted into all those things that don’t
work!
Indeed, Sanders even admitted that there’s “no evidence”
that a “case review” – apparently the new euphemism for the surge – “will reduce
fatalities.”
The new shade of
lipstick
In a previous
post about the Commission, I noted that changing the exact language in the
surge
 |
| Graphic by Murdocke23 |
Michael Petit, the actual guiding force behind the Commission,
and the person who, judging by the discussion at Saturday’s conference call,
suddenly sprang the surge idea on the group late in its deliberations, has made
clear that the purpose of the surge is to investigate more families and remove
children who might be at risk.
But Sanders now is trying to reframe the surge – as a
research project! (After all, he admits
there’s no evidence it will actually reduce fatalities.) The theory is that by looking at all fatalities
for the past five years (which, in small states, is likely to be an extremely
low number) and finding common “risk factors” and then barging into every
family that has at least one such “risk factor” we’ll somehow learn more about
how to prevent child abuse deaths, even if we don’t actually prevent any.
Sanders offered no evidence that this approach to “research”
actually works, nor did he cite any researchers who know how to study the issue
who are clamoring for this approach to studying it.
Meet the new fiscal
conservative
Michael Petit is the commissioner whose constant cry can be
boiled down to “Spend more money! Spend
more money! Spend more money!” But on Saturday, he was singing a different
tune.
That’s because the issue was a prevention initiative. A subcommittee dealing with issues that
include racial bias proposed a plan involving a special kind of court in which
representatives of all the organizations providing services to families were
right there at the courthouse, ready to step in immediately to provide the help
a family needed to prevent abuse and neglect and stay together safely. Instead of a collection of referral slips,
the family would get immediate help with whatever was needed, perhaps housing,
or job training, or drug treatment.
It’s not entirely clear how it would work – because the
actual document under discussion is secret – but it sounds similar to this
initiative in San Antonio.
Michael Petit was peeved.
He kept denouncing the idea – because it would cost too much money! (He calmed down when assured the
recommendation was only for a pilot project.) And, he argued, it wouldn’t stop
fatalities. “In terms of the immediacy
of stopping child fatalities” he said, this was the wrong priority. Yes, it’s a good idea “long term” Petit said,
“But how much does this contribute to stopping children’s deaths now?”
Quite a lot, probably.
As noted above, and in our full report,
there is no evidence at all that a surge or anything similar will prevent child
abuse deaths. David Sanders himself
admitted as much. In contrast, both ChildTrends
(speaking of abuse in general) and the Center for Public
Policy Priorities, speaking specifically about fatalities, found that
serious prevention efforts are about the only things that do work.
Hiding behind secrecy
If there’s one thing child protective services agencies love
to do it’s hide their errors behind “confidentiality.” In fact, the Commission appears likely to
recommend that Congress demand more transparency from state child welfare
agencies when it comes to how they investigate child abuse fatalities.
But for the Commission, transparency does not begin at home.
On Saturday’s call, one of the commissioners, Theresa
Covington, said people had complained to her about being unable to follow
deliberations because the actual documents being discussed are now withheld
from the public. She asked in particular
about written comments commissioners have circulated about the drafts. It’s not clear if she was aware of the fact
that even the drafts themselves are secret.
Sanders blithely assured her that the secrecy is just fine
because the Commission regularly checks with the General Services
Administration. That is the federal
agency which tells commissions like this one whether what they’re doing is
legal under various statutes, including open government laws.
There are two problems with this:
● It’s not hard to get a government agency to tell another
government agency what it wants to hear.
Look at the handstands the Bush Justice Department did to justify
torture, for example.
● Even if, in fact, hiding the drafts and other documents is
legal, that doesn’t make it right. There
is nothing in any law prohibiting the Commission from demonstrating the sort of
transparency it appears ready to demand of others.
But apparently David Sanders, Michael Petit and some others
on the Commission want to wait until they’ve found enough lipstick for the pig.
