NOT SAFE FOR KIDS Fixing Our Broken Child Welfare System Naomi Schaefer Riley AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE Not Safe for Kids Fixing Our Broken Child Welfare System Naomi Schaefer Riley October 2018 AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE Contents Introduction 1 Can Big Data Help Save Abused Kids? 3 Reason, February 6, 2018 Why Child Abuse like the Turpin Family Horrors Is So Hard to Prevent or Halt 26 Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2018 Foster Kids, Wronged by the Courts 30 New York Daily News, April 20, 2018 This Is Us Gets Adoption and Foster Care Right 34 Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2017 The Challenge of Finding Homes for Rural America’s Foster Children 37 Atlantic, August 3, 2018 Opioid Abuse Isn’t “Victimless.” What About the Kids? 45 Bloomberg, March 30, 2018 Judicial Tough Love Helps Addicted Mothers Stay Clean 50 Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2018 What’s a Single Mom to Do During a Week in the Hospital? 54 Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2018 School and Home 58 Philanthropy Roundtable, April 2018 iii iv NOT SAFE FOR KIDS Will Placing Fewer Children in Foster Care Fix the System? 66 Institute for Family Studies, May 16, 2018 No, the Child-Welfare System Isn’t Racist 70 Weekly Standard, June 4, 2018 Reconsidering Kinship Care 80 National Affairs, Summer 2018 About the Author 101 Introduction aomi Schaefer Riley is an author and journalist who frequently Nwrites opinion pieces for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal. Like all good opinion writers, she informs her readers with solid reporting. She talks with the people who are involved in an issue and goes to the places where change is happening. For the past couple of years, she has applied her reporting skills to a topic that is not well understood by the American people—child welfare and foster care. Riley’s contributions to the literature on America’s most troubled families and children have shown us four things. First, our system for child protection is hardly foolproof. Second, the latest data tools and predictive analytics should be made available to child-welfare agencies to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their interventions. Riley reminds us that the early years of a child’s life are the most important to their development, and local agencies and courts must act in a more timely manner when deciding on a child’s fate. Third, when it comes to placing children removed from their homes, child-welfare workers and courts must reconsider the current practice of prioritizing blood relatives as caregivers. Riley reminds child-welfare stakeholders that providing a loving and stable home, irrespective of kinship, is the most important factor in protecting children. Fourth, her reporting demon- strates that the best solutions to our child-welfare problems must involve government, civil society, and partnerships between the two. Riley’s recent work confirms that child maltreatment continues to be a serious issue in the US. The long-term decline of stable two-parent families and the current spike in opioid addiction have put many more children at risk of abuse and neglect than there should be. The stakes are high. An estimated 1,750 children died because of maltreatment in 2016, up 7.4 percent from 2012.1 For the children who are removed 1 2 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS from their parents—more than 437,000 in 20162—the foster care sys- tem struggles to find, train, and keep suitable caregivers. Riley calls for more to be done to recruit and support foster parents who provide crucial aid to vulnerable children. In the broader world of poverty studies, we hear often from aca- demics with their narrow emphasis on data and from advocates and government practitioners who have their particular interests. Riley brings something different and important to the discussion, and that is why AEI is pleased to publish this collection of her work. Robert Doar Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies American Enterprise Institute Note 1. US Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau, “Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities 2016: Statistics and Interventions,” July 2018, https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/fatality.pdf. 2. US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Chil- dren and Families, “Number of Children in Foster Care Continues to Increase,” November 30, 2017, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/media/press/2017/number-of- children-in-foster-care-continues-to-increase. Can Big Data Help Save Abused Kids? Reason, February 6, 2018 t has been a little over a year since the death of 6-year-old Zymere I Perkins. The boy, who died in Harlem at the hands of his mother’s boy- friend, had been smacked as many as 20 times in a row in front of witnesses, beaten with a belt, placed under cold showers, and denied food as a punishment. In addition to bruises and broken bones, he was missing all of his front teeth. But apparently all his mother had to do was tell the city social workers that he had fallen—down the stairs, off a scooter, whatever—and they would close the case. According to a report released by the New York State Office of Chil- dren and Family Services in December 2016, 10 children died in the 12 weeks before Perkins, despite each being the subject of at least four abuse or maltreatment complaints.1 The New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) has since undergone an overhaul, installing a new commissioner and instituting greater measures of accountability for its employees. But to anyone who has been keeping track of such cases, the outrage and the plans for reform will sound sadly familiar. Ten years before Zymere Perkins, there was Nixzmary Brown, a 7-year-old girl from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brook- lyn who was tortured and murdered by her stepfather. In that case, too, ACS had been made aware of her situation at least twice before the fatal beating. Her school had reported her absent for weeks at a time. Neighbors said she sustained unexplained injuries, including a black eye, and that she seemed undernourished—weighing less than 45 pounds at the time of her death. 3 4 NOT SAFE FOR KIDS In the wake of that case, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the ACS to reopen numerous files. New York state legislators stiffened penalties to allow parents in such cases to be charged with first- degree murder. Efforts to publicize the city’s child-abuse hotline were expanded. Most metropolitan child-welfare bureaucracies have been through such a process at least once in the past two decades. From Gabriel Fernandez, the 8-year-old boy killed by his mother and her boyfriend in Los Angeles in 2013, to Danieal Kelly, the cerebral palsy–stricken girl who died in 2006 at age 14 after almost a decade of investigations by Philadelphia caseworkers into her mother’s failure to feed or bathe her, to 2-year-old Tariji Gordon of Sanford, Florida, who had been sent back to live with her mother after her twin brother suffocated, only to be found in 2014 dead and buried in a suitcase, there is always a shock- ing case that leads to a public outcry and then reform. But whether it’s pumping more money into the system or simply installing a no-nonsense leader at the top, few of these changes seem to make a difference. All too soon, things go back to the way they were. In Out of Harm’s Way, published in 2017 to much less fanfare than it deserved, sociologist Richard Gelles offers a devastating account of how little effect bureaucratic reforms usually have.2 More money, more staff, more training, more lawsuits brought against child protec- tive services, or the ever-popular convening of more blue-ribbon com- mittees—nothing has really moved the needle on protecting children in recent years. In some cases, reform amounts to little more than changing the name of the agency. Some three million children are the subject of maltreatment investi- gations each year, 700,000 of which are substantiated. There are about 2,500 child fatalities due to abuse or neglect by a parent or caregiver in the US annually, and about half of those are cases child-welfare agen- cies were aware of beforehand. “If [child protective services] agencies cannot protect the children they already know to be at risk,” Gelles asks in his book, “whom can they protect?”3 For too long, we’ve been asking undertrained social workers to make high-stakes decisions about children and families based on patchy data and gut intuition. The result is a system riddled with CAN BIG DATA HELP SAVE ABUSED KIDS? 5 the biases, inattention, bad incentives, error, and malice that plague all human endeavors, but especially massive government bureaucra- cies. Every day, some kids are forcibly taken from their parents for the wrong reasons while others are left to suffer despite copious warning signs. The children the system is failing are disproportionately poor and members of racial minority groups. In many cases, their families have been devastated by generations of family breakdown, unemploy- ment, drug abuse, and crime. But these cannot be excuses for leaving their fates to a system with such deep and abiding flaws. Conservatives have too often thrown up their hands, arguing that government cannot replace the family and there is not much to be done until the institution of marriage is repaired. Liberals, meanwhile, have suggested that these problems can’t be fixed until we end poverty and racism.