In a recent column, Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Sarah Font claimed that “there remains strong resistance among child welfare scholars, advocates and national leaders to discussing maltreatment fatalities.”
I have
followed these issues for nearly 50 years, first as a reporter and for the past
34 as an advocate. I coordinate one listserv for grassroots family advocacy
organizations and another for professionals in the field, and I participate in
the discussions of three other advocacy coalitions. We talk about fatalities all the time. It’s just that people like Font and Putnam-Hornstein
don’t like what organizations such as mine have to say. So they cherry-pick data to try to make a case for a
surveil-and-remove approach that has failed for decades. Sometimes they even
contradict themselves. …
