Yesterday Safe Passage for Children released its year-long study of Minnesota child fatalities from maltreatment from 2014 to 2022.
The report reveals a number of concerning patterns related to child welfare and the courts including:
- Repeated inappropriate assignment to Family Assessment.
- Inaction on chronic maltreatment.
- Neglect cases with numerous chances for parents to address problems.
- Returning children home too soon.
- Missed red flags by medical providers.
- Children killed in kinship foster placements.
- Child torture cases.
- Children returned home to seriously mentally ill parents.
- Sentencing differences between parents and non-parents.
- Issues raised by plea deals.
- Inconsistent mandates and protocols among the courts.
- Ineffectiveness of no-contact orders in domestic violence cases.
With your help this report can spur positive improvements in Minnesota’s programs to protect children.
Clearly a lot of time and effort was put into this much needed report. Thank you to everyone who was involved with this effort.
Is it accurate for me to think that children are dying from maltreatment at about the same rate after the governor’s task force as before?
The flaw in the system, to my way of thinking, is the largely unexamined belief that the system has the ability to fix the hidden defect in parents that allows them to physically or sexually abuse their own children, neglect them, abuse alcohol or drugs, or hear voices telling them to hurt their children. Fortunately, most of the parents who get caught up in the system truly love their children and they do honestly work on improving their parenting. Those who don’t either figure out how to keep the system out of their lives while they go on hurting their children or they get caught up in the system over and over again while finding ways to convince the system that they’re doing better or getting better. The system goes on believing them because people in the system want to believe they fixed them.
If we could ever admit that we honestly have no way of knowing when parents have healed themselves and when they’ve just faked it with us, we could let go of trying to fix them and focus instead on making sure there’s an effective network around vulnerable children that can keep them safe and make sure their needs are met.
Dan, thanks for the comment and apologies for my slow response. It’s good that you are still tracking. One academic person commented that this report is more about the misuse of Family Assessment than an attack on the system per se, which I think has some truth to it and bears thinking about. I agree it is hard to know where parents are at, but the case studies in our report – and remember they are examples of patterns we saw throughout, not just cherry-picked anecdotes – were of situations that generally went on for long periods of time or were quite severe, so whether the parents were trying or not we thought it was clear that the children were at high risk. That said, I think everyone agrees that more intense family support earlier in the situation would help a lot of them avoid long term involvement with child protection.
Rich, thanks for your response. So basically your unalterable position is that the misuse of Family Assessment is the reason that there are just as many children dying from maltreatment now as there were children dying from maltreatment before Family Assessment existed?
I completely agree that the pattern in need of a solution is one where repeated or severe maltreatment is sometimes allowed to continue. This pattern doesn’t just happen in child welfare, but in criminal justice, politics, and even employment where certain people repeatedly get by with stuff the rest of us don’t.
When the State implemented SSIS in about 2000, they migrated the placement database from CSIS, and I was able to create a report that showed children with multiple placements in order from most to least. At that point, one child had been in more than 30 placements. By tracking this data over time, just a few years later the child with the most number of placements was 6. Still far too many, but better than 30+.
Before I left public child welfare in early 2016, I created a report that shows children with multiple reports, from most to least but also including the identity of the reporter. Just as soon as I had this report, I wished we had it sooner, but there was no prior data from CSIS and even after your advocacy got me working on the report, I wasted a lot of time trying to create the report by family before realizing I could only get it to work by child. We found we had about a dozen children who had been reported on 10 or more times. Sometimes, it was the same non-custodial parent making the same report over and over again and we’d carefully examine how certain we could be that the reports were unfounded. When we saw that multiple different people were concerned about a child it seemed likely there was real cause for concern. In every case, we knew we needed to do something different so we would’t keep getting reports on these children.
You’re caught up in whether reports are screened in or out and whether they’re Family Assessment or Investigation, yet many of the case studies you reported on are a mix of all of these. So why didn’t the investigation save the child?
From my perspective, Assessments don’t always fail the children and Investigations don’t always protect the children. Also, you’re studying the times when children have been failed, not all the times when children have been protected. What if the cause of the chronic maltreatment that fails children so outrageously is about something completely different than screening and response tracks?
Dan, that’s a complicated reply so I don’t know if I can respond to everything.
I suspect Family Assessment is being used in high risk cases because of a resource problem. I understand from other states that FA cases take about half as much time. So we advocate for enough resources to do the job. I don’t know what the pre-, post-FA fatality numbers look like, but I think the cases and number in our report stand on their own as testament to the need for some changes.
I don’t think it’s so much which path a case is assigned to but letting situations go on much longer than they should without meaningful action, whether investigation, FA or a combination.
You were the only person I knew who could mine SSIS for meaningful reports, and your abiltity to use one of them to reduce repeat placement is an example of what that kind of info can do. Perhaps you should come back as a consultant and just help counties develop useful metrics.
I’m a bit skeptical about repeat reports from noncustodial parents. You shared one of those reports with me and it started with children who had been reported 25+ times, and there were quite a few in the 15, 14 13 etc. categories. I have seen data from federal HHS showing that a very small percentage of reports, like 3%, are disgruntled noncustodials, but I probably would be hard-pressed to dredge up that report.
Thanks for your work
I will send this report to several folks I know working in the courts system and education. I hope Safe Passage sends this to the press and the city council. It is appalling what is happening to the children in the state particularly since it is so preventable.
WOW! This was an incredible study and I sure wish more states (like WI) had an organization like yours. Thank you for the incredible work you do to try and improve the MN Child Welfare System. You are a beacon of light in a dark trend toward family preservation at the cost of the well-being and safety of these beautiful children.
Sandy, apologies for the slow response. Just this past week we did start talking with a couple of scholars about whether we could replicate this in other states. We believe our situation is not unique, it’s a result of the misuse of Family Assessment/Alternative Response, and there is plenty of evidence that this is happening in many states.