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| 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.
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 cracksBut 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.
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.)
