Last week, hundreds of child welfare advocates, researchers, and frontline workers attended the Child Abuse Prevention Awareness Webinar: Understanding and Preventing Child Maltreatment Fatalities put on by Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute. The three featured speakers were Dr. Emily Putnam-Hornstein, Dr. Rebecca Sokol, and Safe Passage founder and Executive Director Emeritus, Richard Gehrman.
Dr. Putnam-Hornstein is known for her groundbreaking work on child fatalities in California. She currently manages Lives Cut Short, a research effort out of UNC Chapel Hill that documents child fatalities for all 50 states.
Dr. Putnam-Hornstein’s presentation emphasized the need for transparency around child fatalities, the recentering of child safety as a major U.S policy priority, and the importance of strengthening secondary and tertiary prevention. While the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) documents roughly 2,000 child fatalities from maltreatment each year in the United States, Putnam-Hornstein’s team at Lives Cut Short believes the actual number is much higher, largely because of different reporting standards across states. It is impossible to know how many children are actually dying from abuse or neglect.
Dr. Sokol is a professor of social work at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on how adverse childhood experiences affect children long term– specifically trauma related to firearms. Dr. Sokol reported that 55.6% of children killed by guns died in their own homes. She called for stricter gun laws and broader social support to better protect children from gun violence.
Safe Passage’s own Richard Gehrman closed out the webinar with a presentation on the organization itself. Safe Passage was created to combine data with citizen advocacy in an effort to restore child safety as the chief policy focus for child protection in Minnesota. Rich described how Safe Passage’s Child Fatality Reports have made both the public and legislators more aware of the real plight of children in the child protection system.
In turn, Safe Passage has gained credibility using the reports as evidence that things must change at the state level. In our most recent fatality report published in January 2024, we found that 66.6% of cases were for children under 3 years of age. This year, our top legislative priority was a bill to strengthen mandated reporter training, a key to identifying children in need of protection from abuse or neglect. We were successful in this goal; the legislation was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz on April 30.
Without adult advocates, abused and neglected children have no voice. Safe Passage is dedicated to speaking up for Minnesota kids.