The Peabody Award winning team of Brandon Stahl and A.J. Lagoe produced this gripping KARE 11 Investigates account of child protection decisions leading to Eli Hart’s gruesome murder.
The team was thorough. They asked several experts to review 1,200 pages of documents related to the case. But child protection insiders felt that the journalists cherry-picked facts and presented an incomplete and unfair picture of staff and court actions. Conversely, advocates, academics, and the public felt that nothing could explain away obvious errors in judgement.
We believe the underlying problem is that child protection standards have deteriorated insidiously over time from child safety and well-being, to safety alone, to just considering imminent safety concerns while ignoring long-term risk.
Everyone will benefit from restoring historical child protection standards and practices, and aligning them with public expectations and the true risk to children.
It is important to build a system that is responsive to the needs of children and their safety. When a child is in the care of a caretaker with a history of psychotic behavior, anger or addiction it is important to address safety needs of the child first.It’s a challenging concern but we need a system that is able to provide safety and respond to complex environments.
This is not a new issue 13 years ago as a foster parent my attempts to protect my Foster’s were ignored. The system tried to silence me and did not protect the children in my home. I now have some fantastic workers but we have a long way to go! Brandon Stahl is a amazing voice for change.