Just last week, a 2-month-old baby was found not breathing in a bloodied Minneapolis hotel room. Sadly, headlines like this have become too common. So have unanswered questions: How and why did this happen? What could have prevented this child’s death? What warning signs were ignored?
Earlier this month, the Safe Passage for Children team started work on its 2023-2024 Fatality Report. This report will be the latest in a series of such studies (read the earlier installments here). The fatality reports are an important tool we rely on in working with legislators to better protect children from preventable tragedies.
In our first report, we wrote about how child protection agencies appear to overuse a service-focused track designed for low-risk situations, called Family Assessment, too often leaving children vulnerable to more harm. In our second report, we wrote about the major increase of fentanyl poisonings among child fatalities. Fentanyl deaths jumped from 1.1% of cases in our first report to 42.8% of cases in our second report.
Due to the ongoing opioid crisis, our current report will most likely document a tragic number of fentanyl related deaths. We hope this report will shed even more light on the collateral effects of the opioid crisis.
Research is still in early stages, but with the help of Lives Cut Short, a research body out of UNC Chapel Hill, we are hoping that in our new report we can identify children who would have otherwise been missed due to how their deaths were categorized (or possibly miscategorized).
Every number in our report is a tragic loss of an innocent life. We hope to bring their stories to light to protect other children.