Imagine you read an
article that began like this:
“A
reckoning is coming in gerontology. New studies show that when a group of
95-year-olds is followed for five years, a greater proportion die than when
they are followed for only one.”
You’d probably think it
was a story from The Onion. You’d probably think
the same if you read a story saying that people followed for five years, versus
those followed for only one, are more likely to catch cold, fall in love, get
in an auto accident, take a dream vacation, or discover the presence of
gambling at a certain café in Casablanca.
And yet
we are supposed to be shocked – shocked! – when a study that follows children
for five years finds more of what authorities define as abuse and neglect than
studies focusing on a single year.
Aside from the reference
to gerontology, I didn’t make up that line about “A reckoning is coming…”
It’s straight from the first words in a Chronicle story about
a California study released by the Children’s Data Network (CDN), which matched
birth records to child abuse reports over a five-year period.
That
story also quotes this from the CDN website:
“[One-year] estimates give the impression that only a small share of children are maltreated or placed in foster care, whereas cumulative estimates demonstrate the true severity of the risks and the resulting public health burden.”
But no
one has ever suggested that one-year studies are meant to capture the full
extent of the problem. Rather, looking at a single year allows us to
return year after year to determine a trend.
Nevertheless,
the problem of child abuse is serious and real. And I agree with my fellow
tax-and-spend liberals that we don’t spend enough to prevent it.
Unfortunately,
the misuse of studies like this one to fuel the child abuse hype machine is
likely to prompt two outcomes:
Funding diverted from the
best options for curbing maltreatment, such as concrete help with housing and
day care, and evidence-based, intensive family preservationservices.
Money pouring into bad
options, such as investigating even more families – as the so-called Commission
to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities wants
to do – and more foster care and institutions.
The definitional quagmire
CDN’s
five-year study suffers from the same flaw as the one-year studies: a reliance
on official definitions of maltreatment, definitions that make it easy to
confuse poverty with “neglect.” And “neglect” constitutes the overwhelming
majority of maltreatment reports.
California’s definition states
that a child has suffered neglect if the child has suffered or is at risk of
suffering harm or illness as a result of, among other things: “the failure or
inability of the parent or guardian to adequately supervise or protect the
child.”
Translation: Mom has to work
and leaves the child home alone.
Or:
“The willful or negligent failure of the parent or guardian to provide the
child with adequate food, clothing, shelter, or medical treatment.”
Translation: The parents are
poor.
That’s
how you can wind up with cases like these from Los Angeles:
Gilbreania Wallace
was taken from her grandmother when the
pipes in their rented house burst, flooding the basement and making the home a
health hazard. Instead of helping them find another place to live, the
Department of Children and Family Services placed Gilbreania in foster care.
She died there, allegedly killed by her foster mother. (DCFS, which would spend
nothing to move the family, offered $5,000 for the funeral.)
Dakota
Prince, age 5, and Nehemiah Prince, age 3, were taken from their mother because
of what the DCFS deputy director at the time called “just an inability to
provide adequate care.” They were placed with a foster mother who could
afford the best – including a Cadillac Escalade.
One day she forgot that
she’d left the children in the Escalade in 100-degree heat where, a deputy
district attorney said, “they cooked inside the car and died.” The foster mother was convicted of
involuntary manslaughter.
Of course, a neglect
definition this broad also can encompass sadistic acts of extreme and even
fatal neglect. But since fatalities are, fortunately, a tiny percentage of all
cases, the oft repeated fear mongering about how “more children die of neglect
than abuse” tells us exactly nothing about typical neglect
cases.
And the
CDN study doesn’t just count cases where the allegation was true. When
this study finds that 15 percent of children born in 2006 were reported for
child maltreatment over five years, it means only that 15 percent of children
were subject to someone – anyone – picking up a phone and expressing
a suspicion that a child just might be maltreated under definitions as broad
and vague as those above.
This
also is why there is so much less than meets the eye to other study findings:
§ The
not-so-shocking finding that a lot of children are re-reported. If a
family is reported for being poor when the child is age one, there’s a good
chance the family will still be poor when the child is four, and it should come
as no surprise if the family is reported for being poor once again.
§ The
not-so-shocking finding that very few children subject to reports actually
received any “services.” This is partially because
we do not, in fact, spend enough on helping poor families. It’s partly because
the limited available funding tends to be scarfed up by a foster-care
industrial complex that feeds off a steady supply of children placed in
expensive foster homes, more expensive group homes and ridiculously expensive
institutions.
And it’s partly because
so many of those initial reports were, in fact, false
reports. (For reasons discussed above, the fact that many children are
reported again does not mean the initial report was valid.)
But
there is one finding in CDN’s study that truly has not gotten enough
attention. By the time a California child is just five years old, odds
already are one in ten that he’s been subjected to the trauma of a child abuse
investigation (based on the figures in the CDN study, minus the average
percentage screened out). In poorer neighborhoods in Los Angeles, it’s above
15 percent. Now imagine what the chances are throughout his entire childhood.
In short, what this study
really tells us is the extent to which child protective services has become a
terrifying – or to use Baltimore City Department of Social Services
Director Molly McGrath Tierney’s apt word – oppressive force in impoverished communities,
especially communities of color – harming the overwhelming majority of the
children subjected to their scrutiny.
The CalYOUTH study
My fellow columnist in
this series, Sean Hughes, also feels the world should pay more attention to
Chapin Hall’s CalYOUTH study.
I’m glad to oblige.
Some
people view this study as a child saver’s white middle-class rescue fantasy
come true: evidence that children are taken only from horrific circumstances
and consider themselves “lucky” to be in foster care.
About
one-quarter of these foster youth clearly did suffer serious physical abuse at
the hands of a caretaker. But other categories combine maltreatment that
is clearly serious with conduct that may or may not be serious. Still
other categories, such as “Youth missed school to care for family member or do
chores” can once again be an indicator of poverty, not maltreatment.
And in
reporting rates of sexual abuse, the study combines alleged abuse by a
caretaker with abuse by anyone.
The
study also depends on the recollections of the young people, which can cause
errors in both directions. Some may not know how bad things really were at home
when they were taken, sometimes a decade or more earlier. But others may
be basing their statements on what they’ve been told by a succession of
caseworkers.
Another column in The Chronicle of Social Change argues
that because 57 percent of those surveyed said they were “lucky” to be in
foster care, that means a majority of removals in California are justified.
There
are several problems with this assumption:
§ Ten
percent of the original random sample could not be interviewed because they had
run away, were in jail or had returned home. I think they would be less
likely to view placement as “lucky.”
§ The
remaining young people were interviewed while still in foster care. I’m
sure they were promised their individual answers would be confidential.
Nevertheless, after the interview, they had to return to the foster home or
group home and face the foster parents or staff. That’s an inherently
intimidating prospect.
One need only contrast
the CalYOUTH findings to a major study of young people questioned after they’dleft foster care, and two studies ofactual outcomes to see the problem.
§ Most
important: If children really are removed from their homes only when it is
absolutely, positively essential, shouldn’t the proportion considering
themselves lucky be closer to 100 percent? If we’re really going to use
perception as a sole guide to reality, then by that same logic this figure
“proves” that 43 percent of California foster children never should have been
taken away.
When it
comes to the prevalence of child abuse and whether we’re spending enough to
deal with it, the real question is one that Hughes and I were not asked, but
I’ll answer anyway.
Question: To
solve the serious and real problem of child abuse, do we need to spend more or
do we need to spend smarter?
Answer: Yes.
