NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 1, 2025

● Gotta give the Oregon family police agency credit for chutzpah. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting,  Disability Rights Oregon (DRO) charges that after a foster youth forced to live in a hotel committed suicide the Department of Human Services made false statements about key details and covered up its own culpability.  

● But that isn’t even the worst of the chutzpah: The Salem Statesman Journal reports that DHS actually is using the death as a reason to push legislation to make it far easier to resume shipping Oregon foster youth to sometimes hellacious out-of-state institutions, make it easier for institutions to make abusive use of “restraints,” and give lawmakers and the public less information about what they’re doing. DRO calls the bill “a kitchen sink full of known bad practices.” A foster youth asked: “Why would we open more possibilities for maltreatment when it’s already occurring in the system that we have now?” 

The answer is that DHS wants the legislature to believe the only options are parking children in hotels or warehousing them in institutions.  The bill – and that false premise – are discussed here. 

● To the extent that there is any good news out of Oregon, it’s that, as OPB reports, the legislature may extend a pathetically small program to allow some parents convicted of non-violent crimes to stay out of prison so their families can stay together. 

● Speaking of the harm of institutionalization, the Concord Monitor continues its series on that state’s obscene rate of institutionalization with a look at desperate families who voluntarily send their children to faraway institutions because New Hampshire has nothing to offer. At least New Hampshire doesn’t require the parents to surrender custody – but one reason for the lack of options is that beds are filled with foster youth who don’t need to be there in a state that tears apart families at a rate nearly double the national average. 

Referring generally to the shortage of options, one expert told the Monitor, in the newspaper’s words: “The state’s reliance on institutional care is a self-inflicted crisis.” 

● Still speaking of the harm of institutionalization, (where the problem I’m getting to now is worst) one of the greatest harms is the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medication. The Imprint continues its series on the topic – most notably in an installment called “Zombies No More: Former Foster Youth Reflect on Their Medicated Childhoods — and New Ways They Heal.” One striking example, a young woman who remembers: 

stumbling into the kitchen, barely able to walk, on one sunny Los Angeles County morning. Too tired to dish out a bowl of oatmeal from the stove, she brought the whole pot back to a La-Z-Boy recliner. Even then, her limbs leadened, it took several minutes of straining to lift the serving spoon to her mouth. Exhausted, she fell asleep after only a few bites.

● A good bill has made it through one house in Iowa. Iowa Public Radio reports that the bill would require that children in the system get actual lawyers who provide “expressed wishes representation” – that is, they fight for what their child client actually wants, not what they may happen to think is “best.” 

● And a bad bill has so far failed to make it through both houses in Washington State: a bill that would send the family police barging into the confessional.  It would have made clergy mandated reporters, forced to report even what they heard in confession.  As I explain in the Washington State Standard: Of course, it’s not a crime for lawmakers to rush into endorsing bad policy that doesn’t have a prayer of stopping actual child abuse because it sounds good in a press release. But it sure seems like a sin. 

The State Senate passed the bill, but passage in the state House of Representatives is now very unlikely this year. 

● The racism that permeates child welfare doesn’t stop at the northern border. Though Canada’s approach to many social policies is a lot better than ours, that does not apply to family policing. Now scholars at Canada’s most prestigious university, the University of Toronto, have issued a report on the causes of the problem in Ontario, and possible solutions. 

● Back in the United States, The Imprint reports, prosecutors have withdrawn charges of excessive, uh, handshaking, brought as a result of a complaint by a Member of Congress against a foster youth advocate 

● And finally: Our annual reminder on this Blog: If it’s April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month.

Our annual reminder: If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , MOST RECENT UPDATE:  MARCH 29, 2025.

Back in 2003, one of the groups most responsible for fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse came remarkably close to admitting that they did just that – and that it had backfired. 

Rather like Dr. Frankenstein admitting he’d created a monster, in a 2003 Request for Proposals concerning how to improve their messaging, Prevent Child Abuse America wrote: 

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities. 

In 2020, PCAA went further. They actually branded what they had done “health terrorism” – but refused to apologize for it. 

This is especially worth remembering as we begin “Child Abuse Awareness Month” – a month, which, appropriately, starts on April Fools Day. 

So I’ve reprinted below our 2010 blog post on the topic – with some updates and links to newer data – since, unfortunately, aside from those data, little has changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under control.

If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op-ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse. 

There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fool’s Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real nature of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op-ed column follows a standard formula: 

1.  1. Take the most horrifying case to occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.

2.   2. Jump immediately from that story to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports" alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror story. Rather, they often involve the confusion of poverty with neglect. Or…

3.   3.  Use only the total number of cases that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed," giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on a form, far more credibility than they deserve. A major federal study found that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.

4.   4. Pile hype onto hype by reasserting the racist, discredited COVID-19 “pandemic of child abuse” myth.  (One hopes that, now that we know child abuse actually went down when COVID forced the family police to step back, they will knock it off, but that may be too optimistic.)

5.    5. Throw in huge lists of "symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be "signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number of other things.

6.     6. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of cautioning us about the harm of even well-meaning false reports and advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" actual maltreatment - not poverty -- the same standard theoretically used in law to guide "mandated reporters."  

      7. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity. 

Of course, given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, in recent years the usual op-eds have included token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as these establishment groups propose making a profoundly racist family policing system, one that will, at some point investigate the families of more than half of America's Black children, even bigger and more powerful.  But watch what they do, not what they say.  Are they proposing anything that would actually curb the power of the family police, or just tacking on the usual “prevention” programs and blathering about “more training."

All of this can do enormous harm to children.  

Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.  

Reality check 

NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions: 

·        -- Issue papers on Understanding Child Abuse Numbers, False Allegations: What the Data Really Show. The Failure of Mandatory Reporting,  and many more.

·        -- Solutions pages: Our Due Process Agenda and Doing Child Welfare Right.

·        -- Our presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health approach. And our warning to be cautious when you hear the phrase "child and family well-being system."

If the people behind "Child Abuse Awareness Month"  (also known as "Child Abuse Prevention Month") really want to prevent "child abuse" then how about campaigning to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty?  

Poverty increases the stress that can lead to actual abuse and, as noted above, poverty itself often is confused with "neglect."  This can be seen by the fact that study after study shows even small increases in income significantly reduce what child welfare systems call "neglect."

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness" campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems even worse.

If only there were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 26, 2025

● What happens when you tear apart families at a rate more than double the national average and find yourself with no place to put them? For starters, as this story from the Concord (N.H.) Monitor makes clear, you make sure to turn a blind eye to rampant abuse in the places where you’ve now forced the children to live. 

● Meanwhile in Oregon, which tears apart families at a rate “only” 20% above the national average, this is happening: The governor and some lawmakers are pushing legislation to make it easier to go back to the horrendous practice of shipping children to hellhole out-of-state institutions. (It’s the bill I wrote about here.)  Oh, but you see, they assure is, this time it will be different! Oregon Public Broadcasting does a good job of calling b------t on that. (Though, unfortunately, without mentioning the taking-too-many-kids-in-the-first-place part.) 

● But no place is worse than West Virginia, Child Removal Capital of America. In that state the bad bills keep on coming. One would, if enacted, send worker caseloads soaring by more than 48%. I have a blog post on it.  Another would force the state to open still another parking place shelter to dump some of the kids it never needed to take in the first place. I have a blog post about that one, too.  And WTAP-TV has an update to the story that was the subject of this post. 

● Once you’ve dumped children into group homes and institutions, how do you keep them docile for the overwhelmed strangers who oversee them? Dope the kids up on potent, sometimes dangerous psychiatric meds.  The Imprint this week begins a comprehensive series documenting how 

For decades, advocates, public health experts and foster youth … have expressed alarm about the child welfare system’s heavy, haphazard reliance on psychotropic medications for traumatized children. 

“They’re just not allowed to have a bad day,” said Cassandra Simmel, a social work professor at Rutgers University whose research has involved interviewing foster youth across the country about consent, mental health and medication. “‘We have a bad day, that means we get put on medication.’ Those kinds of stories I’ve been hearing for 30 years.” 

And this gives an excellent sense of just how lackadaisical states are when it comes to protecting children from this kind of abuse: 

Kansas Department for Children and Families spokesperson Erin La Row said her agency “does not have specific policies for the use of psychotropic medication with children in foster care.” But she pointed to other protections, such as the state Medicaid agency’s “prior-authorization” rules that apply to all pediatric patients and best-practice guidance manuals for doctors treating foster youth. 

La Row added that “it’s possible” additional oversight is conducted by private foster care providers contracted by the state that “may have their own policies.” 

Teresa Woody, litigation director for the nonprofit Kansas Appleseed and co-counsel on the 2018 lawsuit, reacted to the state’s response: “What does that tell you? In other words, ‘We have no idea what our contractors are doing on this issue’ — right?”

Among the states with no policy at all on the use of these meds: West Virginia.

● Speaking of West Virginia, this horror ended there but, in fairness, the blame rests primarily with Minnesota, where, this Associated Press story reports, the children were first adopted. (If the story sounds eerily familiar, it’s because it’s so similar to another adoption horror out of Minnesota (among other states), the one described in Roxanna Asgarian’s book, We Were Once a Family. 

● On the legislative front, there is better news from Kansas, where, The Beacon reports, the legislature is considering a bill to make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect. 

● And also Alabama, where, the Alabama Reflector reports, the legislature is considering a “Family Miranda” bill. 

● And also Georgia, the latest state to pass a Reasonable Childhood Independence law.  

● In New York, the Legislature is considering a bill to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting – much as Texas has done. The New York City Family Policy Project breaks down the data on anonymous reports and why they’re so harmful.  

● And in Texas, The Imprint reports on children who are not taken directly by the family police but are relinquished by desperate parents: 

Now, two pieces of legislation calling for expanded mental health services in Texas offer lawmakers an opportunity to assist families early on — before desperation and thin hope push parents toward the drastic decision to relinquish custody just to get help. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

In addition to the story above from Minnesota and West Virginia: 

● From the Honolulu Star-Advertiser 

A lawsuit has been filed on behalf of the estate of Geanna Bradley against four adults living in the Wahiawa house where the 10-year-old girl was found dead from years of abuse and starvation, and against the state of Hawaii, including the Department of Human Services and its employees. 

● From Arizona Public Media:

 The San Carlos Apache Tribe wrote to Governor Katie Hobbs, the state Legislature, and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, calling for an investigation into the death of 14-year-old Emily Pike. Pike was found in multiple garbage bags on a forest road northeast of Globe after missing from her group home in Mesa starting in late January. Investigating authorities have yet to arrest or name a suspect in her case. 

According to the Tribe, over three years, about 30 children have run away from Sacred Journey, the group home where Pike stayed. “What happened to these other children?” Chairman Terry Rambler said. … 

● Texas Public Radio reports 

An 11-year-old girl living in a hotel under the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) care as part of its Children Without Placement (CWOP) program was abducted and nearly trafficked by a 42-year-old man on Valentine’s Day, according to a police report. … 

Police reported a possible sexual offense occurred, a weapon was used and that the child suffered minor injuries. Police collected video footage, images and DNA evidence. The child said she escaped the man after hours and returned to the hotel. It was not clear if CPS workers knew she was gone. …

In West Virginia, the bad bills keep on coming

First came the bill that would send caseloads skyrocketing. Now, there’s another well-intentioned bill that would produce horrible results.

ENTRIES INTO FOSTER CARE PER THOUSAND IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN, 2022

This is what we mean by "Child Rremoval Capital of America

Of all the options for placing children torn from their homes, among the very worst are so-called “shelters.” These are first-stop dumping grounds where children are parked while agencies that took too many children needlessly in the first place try to figure out where to put them all. 

Of course, that’s not how they are described by backers of such institutions and the “providers” who usually run them (and often are paid per day per child for every day they hold children in them). Nope. It’s always treacly rhetoric about how “loving, warm, inviting” they will be, and of course how “home-like.” 

After nearly 50 years of following these issues, I am so sick of people describing their institutions as “home-like.” I’ll bet not one of the people who casually call their institution “home-like” would tolerate having their own children dumped in such places for so much as a minute.  Children damn well know the difference between “home-like” and home. 

And no matter how “inviting” they seem at first, shelters have a horrendous history of deteriorating – as with this shelter and this one, and this one, and all of these. 

All of which brings us back to the Child Removal Capital of America, the state that tears apart families at a rate more than quadruple the national average:West Virginia. 

As in many states, West Virginia takes so many children it has no place to put them all.  So some wind up sleeping in hotel rooms or campgrounds.  According to West Virginia Watch, Jonathan Pinson, a member of the state House of Delegates who also is a foster parent, declared:  “I cannot fathom losing my child to a hotel room.” 

But apparently he can fathom institutionalizing them in shelters – because he’s introduced a bill to require the state family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) 

on its own or through a contract, a “central reception center” and emergency resource homes for foster children for up to 72 hours. 

And here comes that gooey rhetoric, about how, magically, this shelter is going to be different: 

“As s children are being taken into custody, there’s a loving, warm, inviting atmosphere for them to have as their first stop in this very emotional journey,” Pinson said while presenting the bill on Thursday in the House Committee on Health and Human Resources. 

A representative of an agency that says it will gladly run such a place did the rest: 

The space would be home-like, he explained, with medical staff and therapists on site. 

The West Virginia family police agency, which already runs emergency shelters warehousing 156 children, opposes adding another.  Again from the story:

Lorie Bragg, interim commissioner for the state Bureau of Social Services, told lawmakers this bill wasn’t addressing the overall lack of appropriate child placements, something she said the agency is currency working on. A center like the one outlined in the bill could put children at risk because the center may shelter in one room both a toddler and a teenager with an aggression issue, she said. 

“Making a temporary housing or shelter doesn’t really fix the problem of having a placement for these children,” she added. 

But neither does anything Bragg mentioned – which apparently consisted largely of telling the lawmakers that they’re holding lots and lots of planning meetings, with the idea being ultimately to create better institutions. 

As usual in West Virginia, no one is talking about the only thing that works: Stop taking so many children needlessly at the highest rate in America. Odds are West Virginia Watch is never going to tell readers about that, or about how it can be done, or about how other states do better – not in this story or any other – since it is wedded to the myth that West Virginia’s horrible distinction is mostly because of drug abuse.  It isn’t.  

And Pinson is quick to buy into and amplify vile smears about any parent who loses a child to foster care, telling MetroNews that when the West Virginia family police rip apart a family it’s

oftentimes for excellent reasons — these children are at risk of danger, they’re at risk of harm, they’ve already been harmed. 

So let me repeat a few things West Virginia lawmakers probably don’t know – because neither the family police agency nor media focusing on these issues is likely to tell them. 

● West Virginia takes away so many children that if all drug abuse disappeared in West Virginia, and only West Virginia, tomorrow, the number of children taken for reasons unrelated to drug abuse still would leave West Virginia tearing apart families at a rate double the national average. 

● 85% of children torn from their homes in West Virginia were taken in cases in which there was not even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of sexual abuse. 

● 51% of children torn from their homes in West Virginia were taken in cases in which there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse. 

● Not all drug abuse compromises parenting.  Not every case of drug abuse involves a fentanyl overdose.  West Virginia even tears apart families when a parent is on medication-assisted treatment for drug abuse. 

● In 14% of cases, the family police agency admits it tore apart a family because of housing.

So now imagine what would happen if West Virginia stopped being worst in the nation.  If West
Virginia could reduce its rate of removal to only double the national average that would mean 2,235 fewer children taken in a typical year.  If West Virginia cut the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day in half, that would mean 3,450 fewer children in foster care. 

That would open up lots of spaces in family foster homes, so no child would need to be institutionalized anywhere, let alone parked in a shelter. 

But while West Virginia Watch and another online site, Mountain State Spotlight, stereotype the parents, Bragg, from the Bureau of Social Services, stereotypes the kids. Again from the story: 

“These kids are not the kids that foster parents are willing to take in,” Bragg said. “These are your autistic kids, nonverbal, [children with intellectual and development disabilities], physically aggressive teenagers, kids that may be doing self-harm, the kids that are difficult to place. That’s the kids [who] are ending up in a hotel.” 

That’s the standard party line from the shelter/group home/residential treatment industry.  And while it’s true the most difficult kids are likely to end up in a hotel, it’s not true that few families will take them.  Few families will take them without help. 

But if West Virginia actually focused on providing the help, that would change dramatically. 

● First, the family police agency could focus on intensive help to birth parents so the children never need to be taken. 

● When children really must be taken, they could provide that kind of help to extended families providing kinship foster care, so more of them can step forward. (West Virginia actually has a good record of finding such families but a lousy record of supporting them. Even Mountain State Spotlight, which seems to view all birth parents on a continuum from unperson to sick person to monster, is ok with extended families.) 

● When kin aren’t available provide the intensive help to stranger family foster homes. 

You do it with intensive Wraparound services.  Want to know how that works? Watch this short video of remarks by the father of wraparound, Karl Dennis: 

But in West Virginia, lawmakers don’t know it, most media don’t want to tell them, and the family police agency doesn’t seem interested. 

And don’t believe for a second that if West Virginia builds still another parking place shelter the children will be there for only 72 hours.  

Because here’s the first rule about what usually happens with a parking place shelter: If you build it they will come.  If you keep it open they will stay.  If it stays open long enough it will become a hellhole.

Just what West Virginia child welfare doesn’t need: A 48.7% INCREASE in “child welfare” investigator caseloads

West Virgina State Capitol (Photo by O. Palsson)

But that’s what West Virginia is likely to get if a well-meaning, but ill-thought-out proposal by one legislator becomes law. 

It’s entirely reasonable that West Virginia Del. Adam Burkhammer is horrified by the fact that some children who are horribly abused are overlooked by the state’s family police agency. All of us should be. Given that in some cases, there are plenty of seemingly obvious warning signs, It’s entirely understandable that he would propose a solution that is simple and obvious. 

Unfortunately, that solution is simple, obvious and disastrously wrong. 

Indeed, were his proposal to become law, I estimate that it would lead to a 48.7% increase in the number of allegations caseworkers would have to investigate over the course of a year.  That estimate is rough; based on multiple assumptions. But it’s also conservative. (The full methodology for deriving it is explained at the end of this post.) 

Every state child abuse hotline screens out a certain percentage of “reports” that operators believe are clearly false reports or don’t meet the threshold in law to be considered abuse or neglect. But Burkhammer wants to prohibit West Virginia’s family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) from screening out any report from a “mandated reporter” – and they make the overwhelming majority of reports. 

If there’s one thing everyone following West Virginia child welfare agrees on, it’s that caseworkers already are terribly overloaded. We disagree profoundly on why that is happening and what to do about it, but no one doubts that there’s an overload and this has terrible consequences for West Virginia’s children. 

Earlier this month Mountain State Spotlight, one of the two worst offenders in falsely stereotyping families wrote an editorial disguised as a news story called “5 ways lawmakers could help foster kids right now.” West Virginia is the child removal capital of America, tearing apart families at more than quadruple the national average even when rates of family poverty are factored in. But none of those “5 ways” involved not taking so many children in the first place or returning more children to their own homes.  The first two recommendations were: Hire more caseworkers and lower caseloads. 

But instead of lowering caseloads, the no-screening provision of Burkhammer’s bill would send them skyrocketing.  That means less time for every investigation and more snap judgments – in all directions. So even more children will be needlessly torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care.  More will emerge years later unable to love or trust anyone. More will be abused in foster care. 

But it also means something else: With workers making judgments that are even more rushed, more of those few children in real danger will be missed.  Burkhammer told The (Wheeling) Intelligencer that the legislation was 

borne from several incidents over the years where child abuse and neglect cases fell through the cracks

But this approach won’t seal the cracks.  On the contrary, this proposal would turn those cracks into fissures.

There is no approach that will find and rescue every child in genuine danger. It is true that as long as states have screening mechanisms some children in real danger will be missed. And when that happens, news accounts lead to demands for less screening. That backfires, there’s another tragedy and the cycle repeats. 

That’s because without screening, even more children will be missed. 

There will always be screening in child welfare: The choice is between rational screening by a hotline or irrational screening by overloaded workers based on which case floats to the top of the pile among the deluge on a worker’s desk or what looks worst at first glance. 

The way to make sure fewer children “fall through the cracks” is to go in the opposite direction from what Burkhammer proposes. 

● Mandatory reporting itself has been shown to backfire, overloading workers and driving families away from seeking help.  It should be replaced with permissive reporting.  Allow professionals to exercise their professional judgment in determining when a family should be reported to the family police. That would be the safest and most effective screening mechanism of all. 

● Revise the training for what would now be permissive reporters to help them better distinguish poverty from neglect, as New York and Washington State are doing (though they’re not doing it all that well). 

● Bolster basic, concrete help for families and teach permissive reporters how to help families get the help – in other words, as Joyce McMillan puts it: turn mandatory reporters into mandatory supporters. 

● Improve the screening protocols at the hotline, to help hotline operators better distinguish poverty from neglect – and help them explain to people who have reported when it’s a poverty case – and how they might help the family. 

● Narrow West Virginia’s breathtakingly broad definition of “neglect” which currently encompasses any child 

Whose physical or mental health is harmed or threatened by a present refusal, failure, or inability of the child's parent, guardian, or custodian to supply the child with necessary food, clothing, shelter, supervision, medical care, or education. 

But Del. Burkhammer has no reason to know any of this. I’m sure he reads the same constant de facto demonization of families from Mountain State Spotlight and West Virginia Watch (the only places that “cover” these issues regularly) as anyone else. Both sites systematically shut out dissent from their skewed master narrative. 

West Virginia Watch, for example, repeatedly claims that the state’s foster-care-capital-of-America status is mostly because of drug abuse.  That is demonstrably false. 

So once again, a failure of child welfare is worsened by a failure of journalism. 

See also our post about still another bad bill in West Virginia.

How we calculated the increase in investigations that the Burkhammer bill would cause

 

Unless otherwise noted, all data for this section come from the federal government’s most recent Child Maltreatment report, which covers 2023. In some cases, where the 2023 report doesn’t have the relevant statistic, we used the report for 2022. In both cases, a search for “West Virginia” will lead to the relevant tables. One caution: Among the reasons to consider this a rough estimate: submitting data for this report is voluntary, and so prone to error.  And in some cases, though not the items discussed below, what is being measured is, itself, subjective.  As a result the report rightly urges caution when comparing states. 

As noted above, investigations of alleged child abuse or neglect typically start with a call to a child abuse hotline. As with every other decision point in child welfare, from initial call to termination of parental rights, West Virginia has a hair trigger. West Virginians probably call the hotline at one of the highest rates in the country. Given that West Virginians are drenched in false media stereotypes about child abuse and neglect, it’s no wonder. 

That makes it even more important in West Virginia than in most states that the hotline does a careful job of screening out reports that obviously are false or obviously do not constitute abuse and neglect. Every state does this. Given the extreme rate at which the hotline is deluged with calls, West Virginia should screen out at a rate above the national average. Instead, it is probably below that average. In 2023, the last year for which comparative data are available, West Virginia’s family police agency says it screened out 41% of calls.  The national average probably was about 50.5%) 

In 2023, West Virginia says it screened in 20,873 reports – 59.3% of all reports. That means 14,327 reports were screened out. 

Of course, not all of those 14,327 reports were from mandatory reporters.  We could find no figure specific to West Virginia, but nationwide, 71% of reports come from mandatory reporters.  If that also is true in West Virginia, it would mean that, if Burkhammer’s bill becomes law, an additional 10,172 reports would have to be investigated every year – 48.7% more than are investigated annually now. (By early 2025, according to the state’s own dashboard, the screen-in rate had fallen to 53%, still above the national average.  But that means even more reports would automatically have to be investigated under the Burkhammer bill.)

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 18, 2025

● Remember when Tennessee pulled over a couple for no good reason and then took away their children? In that one, the offense was Driving While Black.  We don’t know the race of the couple in this case reported by Tennessee Lookout; but in every other respect, it’s eerily similar. 

● And there was this in Washington State, as reported by the Seattle Times: 

Concluding a federal lawsuit that has spanned nearly a decade, a jury found Tuesday that the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families wrongly removed an autistic boy from his immigrant parents’ home and awarded the family $7 million. 

● Courts in New York, Texas, Arizona and at least 11 other states demand that fathers control the mothers of their children, punish fathers who don’t and, worst of all, deprive children of loving parents who have done them no harm. New York’s highest court is being asked to put a stop to what amounts to Handmaid’s Tale jurisprudence. I have a blog post about it. 

● What might it look like if mandatory reporters really did become mandatory supporters? In The Imprint Sarah Winograd, co-founder of Together With Families, offers an example from Georgia. Most notable: All the necessary resources were mobilized without so much as a call to the family police agency. But it’s disturbing that the school that referred the mother to Together With Families even threatened to make such a call. 

Still, as this story, also from Georgia, reminds us, it’s a hell of a lot better than what happens when the family police do get involved. 

● The Colorado Legislature named a “task force” to study why children run from “residential treatment” and what could be done about it. I have a blog post about the disconnect between what the young people themselves said and the proposed solutions. The young people said they run because they want to go home. The task force said: Fence ‘em in and lock ‘em up! 

● And I have a blog post about whether this is what it’s going to take before we ever again see basic federal data about foster care:

"Psst. Hey, bud. Ya wanna see an AFCARS report?"

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From KPNX-TV, Phoenix, concerning a 14-year-old murdered after she ran from her group home: 

Mesa PD records show over the past three years, police have been called at least 89 times to the group home where Emily Pike lived before she was murdered.

 Watch the video here: 

● From KTUL-TV, Tulsa: 

A woman who started a foundation to help foster kids aging out of the system was arrested on charges of child endangerment, child abuse, and neglect.

Colorado task force’s solution to stop children from running from residential treatment: Fence ‘em in & lock ‘em up!

 

When NCCPR released a comprehensive report on Colorado “child welfare” in September 2023, we included a section called “Tapeworm in the System.”  It’s about Colorado’s love affair with the worst form of “care” for children – group homes and institutions.  At the time, we noted that, as of 2021, Colorado was using them at a rate 33% above the national average.  By 2022, use of group homes had fallen, but Colorado was using the worst of the worst, institutions at a rate 40% above the national average.

We wrote this about a “task force” the legislature created, overseen by the state's child welfare "ombudsman," to spend two years

determining “the root causes of why children run away from out-of-home placements” and figure out how to stop them from running.

Allow us to save the state a little money and a lot of time: Children run away from out-of-home placements because they are in out-of-home placements. You stop children from running away from awful places by not putting them in awful places.

Alas, the “task force” did not take us up on this offer.

Ignoring lived experience

They did, however, meet with adults who, as children, had run away from placements.  According to the task force report:

All the panelists … recalled their desire to return to their home of origin and/or parents, regardless of circumstances

They also commissioned a study which found that

Youth stated that they feel disconnected from family, friends and experiences while they are in residential care. They stated a strong desire to remain connected to family and friends and to remain connected to familiar environments or places. This desire to feel connected is often a reason for running away from care.

But these young people were ignored. The task force report says nothing – nothing – about reducing the “need” for residential treatment, shortening time in care or even increasing “connectedness” for the inmates residents.

Instead, recommendations include this:

[M]embers agreed that residential facilities should not resemble jails or prisons and should remain inviting for children or youth. … However, the task force also noted that perimeter security is essential for keeping dangers out. There was unanimous agreement that fencing could be an effective method for preventing children and youth from running away from care.

Presumably, they mean inviting fences – painted in pretty colors perhaps?

If you’re wondering why fencing also might be “needed” to “keep dangers out” – it illustrates another reason why residential treatment is so harmful.  When you bring a lot of troubled, vulnerable children into one institution it becomes a magnet for predators – because predators go where the prey is.

The task force also called for a study of

the use of delayed locks, fencing and alarms. Funding should also be provided for the implementation of these mechanisms, if the study finds their use to be appropriate.

The alarms they have in mind include “motion sensing alarms” for when children leave their rooms at night.  According to the report: “This was also presented as a way to support facilities working with minimal staff.”

The report notes that these recommendations are not meant to apply to family foster homes – not because the idea of fencing a foster home necessarily appalled them, but because of

the diverse needs of children and youth in foster home placements and the large volume of foster homes located throughout the state.

The false premise at the heart of it all

Part of the problem is that the task force started with a fundamentally false premise. The report claims that

Colorado’s state-licensed residential treatment facilities provide critically important services to some of the state’s most high needs children and youth, including those with severe behavioral health needs.

That is not true. 

On the contrary, as a U.S. Senate Committee report points out:

[Residential treatment facilities] are costly, not as effective as community-based behavioral health treatment options, and often harmful to youth in their care.

The report added:

The risk of harm to children in RTFs is endemic to the operating model.

There is much more documentation concerning why residential treatment is worthless, how there are alternatives that are far better and far less costly, and why the usual excuses for using group homes and institutions don’t hold up to scrutiny in the Colorado report excerpt below.

Stacking the deck from the start

The reason the task force ignored all this evidence – and the young people whose time they wasted – is clear when you look at the makeup of the task force; who was on it, and who wasn’t. That, too, is discussed below. Suffice it to say that Colorado’s residential treatment task force was like a task force to study climate change that included no environmentalists but lots of representatives of the fossil fuel industry.

Worst of all, the task force exploited two of the members, parents of two children who died after
running away from such places. Of course, a parent whose child ran from an institution and died would want a fence. But surely even more they would want the kind of help that would have made it unnecessary for their children ever to be institutionalized in the first place.*

And on that score, if anything, NCCPR’s 2023 prediction about the task force was too optimistic. We wrote:

The residential treatment industry will make sure that when the task force issues its report it will include claims that the industry is all for Wraparound and they love foster families and they really, truly want to keep children in their own homes “whenever possible.” They’ll say they just want a “full continuum of care.”

But what stands in the way of a full continuum of care is – the residential treatment industry. 

We were wrong. Apparently, the residential treatment industry is so confident that Colorado lawmakers and media will buy anything they sell that they don’t even have to pretend to support alternatives. The word “wraparound” does not appear in the task force report even once.

Two bills

So far, the Colorado Legislature has not gone as far as the Task Force. But there is a bill “sailing through the legislature” to build a fence around a new residential treatment facility scheduled to open in Denver next year. In other words, a plan to make a facility the state doesn’t need in the first place even worse. It requires legislation because under current law you can’t force youth to be institutionalized behind a fence if they haven’t committed a crime.

Another bill, (also "sailing through the legislature) based on another task force recommendation, calls for creation of a standard pre-admission “risk assessment tool” to predict how likely it is that a given child will run. 

And then what?  The task force says a consultant should draw up the tool and determine “how the information obtained from the tools may be used to adjust a treatment plan for the child or youth while they are in out-of-home care.” 

And what, exactly, does that mean? Even more restrictions, more onerous “treatment” for any child the assessment tool thinks might run away?

The report makes no mention of the fact that, in other child welfare contexts, such tools have an ugly history of bias.  According to the report “several members cautioned” that objective criteria are necessary and that the assessment of risk can vary “depending on the professional performing the assessment” but there was no mention here of racial bias – something that might have come up had the task force itself been a bit more diverse.

And, what happens if, despite the assessment tool, and the alarms, and the fencing, children still run away? The task force has an answer: Create a whole new type of institution just for them! Or at least a whole new name: “Short-term stabilization units.”

In short, the Task Force did exactly what we thought it would do: pander to the residential treatment industry at the expense of the children. They’re feeding the tapeworm in the system  Because, remember …

 *-The institutions serve two populations, foster children taken from their own parents by force of law, and children placed voluntarily by desperate parents unable to cope, and who have no other option.