< 'Deluged' child welfare systems struggle to protect kids amid calls for reform

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

Out of more than 3 million reports of child abuse or neglect in a single year across the U.S., child welfare agencies say fewer than 1 in 5 were substantiated. As our colleague Olivia Hampton learned, the child welfare system has tremendous power over a family's future and few checks and balances.

OLIVIA HAMPTON, BYLINE: Experts say good intentions can't make up for an overburdened system that often gets it wrong. Richard Wexler directs the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

RICHARD WEXLER: The systems are deluged with these false reports and trivial cases, so they don't have time to find the very few children in real danger. Those cases are needles in a haystack.

HAMPTON: The government says more than 3 out of every 4 reports to child welfare hotlines involve neglect. Those are allegations of insufficient food, clothing, shelter or supervision.

WEXLER: Well, with a definition like that, there's hardly an impoverished family who couldn't be deemed to have neglected a child.

HAMPTON: It's an upside-down world where poverty can be misconstrued and punished. As a result, researchers say investigations disproportionately drag poor families into a net that's incredibly difficult to disentangle.

WEXLER: And make no mistake, this is not some benign social work investigation. They can come to the home in the middle of the night, demand entry. They will poke and pry into every room. They may very well strip-search the child looking for bruises, even if the initial allegation was simply neglect. Depending on the situation, they might just walk out again, leaving everybody terribly traumatized, or they might walk out with the child.

HAMPTON: A 2017 study found that more than a third of all American children, and more than half of all Black children, became part of a child abuse or neglect investigation. Wexler says regional studies have found similar or worse numbers.

JOYCE MCMILLAN: What I'm working to do right now is to narrow the front door to make it more difficult for children to be separated from their parents, especially for reasons that are related to poverty or not related to abuse.

HAMPTON: Nearly 25 years ago, Joyce McMillan's two children were taken away from her, a baby and an 8-year-old. A neighbor had called the child welfare hotline, and the caseworker demanded a drug test during a search of her home. It took two years to get them back. Now, she wants Congress to reduce punishment and surveillance and put more emphasis on family care and resources.

MCMILLAN: Sometimes parents just don't have some of the necessities, and that should not be a reason to take a child out of their home, traumatize them, shuffle them about and set them up for failure.

HAMPTON: A 2018 federal law tried to enact some of those changes, but now McMillan's group, Just Making a Change for Families, wants guaranteed legal representation and a Miranda-style warning so caregivers can hear their options if a caseworker knocks on the door.

MCMILLAN: Any system that purposefully withholds the rights of families from them is a system that is looking to take advantage of those rights.

HAMPTON: There are nearly a thousand child advocacy centers across the country that deal with cases involving the maltreatment of children. Teresa Huizar is CEO of their accrediting body, the National Children's Alliance. They're seeking more education for the professionals, like teachers and doctors, who are required by law to report anything they even suspect might be neglect or abuse.

TERESA HUIZAR: If you don't educate people and they're uncertain about what they're seeing and how a child might need help, then they're going to err on the side of caution and make that report.

HAMPTON: She'd like more people to have information on how to assess harm, especially in states where all adults are required to report their suspicions.

HUIZAR: And that needs to be done at the scale of the sort of anti-smoking campaigns of the past.

HAMPTON: For McMillan, the ability to make an accurate assessment is key.

MCMILLAN: If you have the item, like food, and you're purposefully withholding it, then that would be abuse. But if you don't have it, how can that be neglect? It makes no sense because ultimately harming a child that you claim you want to protect by snatching them away from everything and everyone they know and love.

HAMPTON: Racial and ethnic minorities are so disproportionately affected, even the federal agency responsible for child abuse prevention points to the potential for systemic and structural racism, bias and discrimination.

HUIZAR: Implicit bias is real, and we can't in any way avoid talking about that giant elephant in the room.

HAMPTON: And Huizar says the core issues rest more in social justice than public health.

HUIZAR: Children of color are much more likely to live below the poverty line than white children. So is it, therefore, that surprising that we have systems in place that also are tragically replicating the sort of inequality that is driven by income inequality and poverty in this country?

HAMPTON: Some states address bias by masking the names, race or ethnicity of people targeted by an investigation and remove references to irrelevant interventions from the past. New York credits the city's reforms for lowering the number of kids in foster care by nearly half over the past decade. And this year, Texas passed laws to curb anonymous reporting. It started a pilot for family defense, and it became the first state to require caseworkers to notify families of their rights. Wexler says there's a lot more to be done.

WEXLER: It took the worst of left and right to create the system we have now. It will take the best of both to fix it.

HAMPTON: Olivia Hampton, NPR News.

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