Have you heard the one about how the
Family First Prevention Services Act supposedly isn’t really about prevention?
The claim is based on the fact that the bill would require a child to be at
“imminent risk” of foster care placement before federal Title IV-E funds could
be used to fund prevention services for that family.
In fact, while the
Family First Act has many problems, the “imminent risk” clause makes perfect
sense – and yes, it is about child abuse prevention.
Despite including the word “prevention” in its title, by only providing an entitlement to supportive services when families have reached that level of crisis, the bill isn’t really funding prevention at all.
The
goal of prevention should be to prevent abuse and neglect, not just prevention
of entry into foster care.
Schwartz
argues that the Family First Act doesn’t do this because “prior statutes”
define imminent risk of foster care as something that happens only after a
child has been a “substantiated victim” of abuse or neglect.
Let’s
assume, for the moment, that the Department of Health and Human Services would
choose to define “imminent risk” the same way in regulations implementing the
Family First Act, were it to become law. Schwartz and Hughes are still wrong.
Their statements reflect a basic misunderstanding of what it means to be a
“substantiated victim” of child abuse or neglect.
It does not necessarily
mean that the child was abused or neglected. For starters, state
definitions of neglect often are so broad and so vague that they are synonymous
with poverty. So this was a “substantiated” case of “neglect” that, in
fact, led to removal. So was this. And this. And several of the cases discussed here. None of these cases reflects actual
neglect.
In Washington, D.C., in 2012, social services
officials actually used the threat of reporting families to
the child welfare agency to discourage them from seeking help with their housing
problems.
In at least 28
states, statutes say explicitly that a case can be
“substantiated” if the child is at risk of abuse or neglect – most often
“substantial risk” – it doesn’t even have to be imminent. One place where the
“imminent risk” language does appear: the federal definition of child abuse and
neglect in the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.
Given
that it is entirely possible to be “substantiated” as a child abuser without
having committed an act of child abuse, it is entirely reasonable to target
federal aid for child abuse prevention services to such cases.
Were
there a law that allowed the use of federal Title IV-E funds for emergency cash
assistance, or rent subsidies, or child care, that would indeed be child abuse
prevention since it would prevent cases such as those noted above from
escalating to the point where a child actually was harmed.
Preventing Foster Care Prevents Abuse in Foster Care
There is one other way
in which prevention of foster care also prevents child abuse – and this is what
the take-the-child-and-run crowd most hopes everyone will forget: All
those studies that
keep finding that many foster children were abused in foster homes. The record
of group homes and institutions on this subject is even worse.
So in many cases,
preventing foster care is preventing child abuse.
The
real problem with the “prevention” piece of the Families First Act concerns
another point raised by Schwartz: It is way too limited in the kinds of
prevention for which IV-E funds could be used.
The
bill would reinforce the worst instincts of child protective services agencies,
paying largely for the kinds of help that make the helpers feel good, such as
endless “counseling” and “parent education,” instead of what families really
need. It’s not clear from the article discussing Schwartz’s concerns whether
Schwartz is concerned about the lack of such funding for such services for
birth parents; she’s clearly concerned about the failure to fund them for
grandparents and other relatives who provide kinship foster care. In fact, both
are a problem.
Why targeting “imminent risk” makes sense
Of
course, some would argue for both: funding more types of services and dropping
the “imminent risk” clause. Indeed, that seems to be Schwartz’s position, at
least for grandparents.
There
are two problems with this. One is the obvious, practical problem that if
you create an open-ended IV-E entitlement for “prevention” and say it can be
applied to pretty much any family in America, the cost of the bill would
skyrocket and it would never pass.
But
there’s another problem: An entitlement of this kind that is too broad will
vastly expand the net of coercive intervention into families. Instead of
providing genuine help to families that really need it, an entitlement that is
overly broad will lead to governments dragging many more families that don’t
need “help” into a forced march through counseling and parent education that
will only add stress to families, and harm their children.
So
if and when the Senate takes up the bill, Senators should leave the “imminent
risk” provision alone.
