Throughout the spring, child welfare agencies across the country were warning about a precipitous decline in reports made to child abuse hotlines. Massachusetts saw a drop of 55%. In New York City, it was 51%. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, the Division of Children and Family Services received 1,486 complaints of abuse or neglect in April and May, down from 2,934 during those months in 2019.
No one thinks the reports are the result of children being subjected to less maltreatment. Rather, it’s that children are not being seen. More than a fifth of maltreatment reports in 2018 came from teachers.
There is always a cycle to such reports. During a typical year, the summer usually sees the lowest number, and when children return to school in the fall, there is a spike. But with the fifth month of lockdown upon us and many schools planning to continue remote learning in the fall, there is no telling when other adults will lay eyes on these children. Physicians, who are another major source of reports regarding abuse and neglect, have also not seen many children for their regular visits. A recent study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that 70%-80% of children were missing their regular doctor’s appointments.
Bill Baccaglini, the president and CEO of the New York Foundling (the city’s oldest foster care agency), said he is “very concerned that once the clouds lift, that we will see a spike in reports.” He told me, “I have a bunch of friends in the domestic violence world. They are already seeing it now.” The Foundling also runs a school in the Bronx that serves children who have spent time in foster care and who are at risk in other ways. Baccaglini said the “stressors of the last four to five months will hit those kids’ families harder than your family or my family. And sometimes, the reaction is to strike out at the most vulnerable. Those tend to be kids.”
The children who are in greatest danger are actually not in school at all. A third of child maltreatment fatalities occur in children under the age of 3. These are the children who are least able to fend for themselves, of course, or tell another adult when there is a problem. But younger children can still be reported for neglect or abuse by employees at daycare facilities, which have also been closed. And if an older child is reported by a teacher, a younger sibling could also reap the benefits when someone is sent to investigate what is going on in a family.
So, what is going on behind closed doors? The field of child welfare suffers most from a problem of information. Contrary to the claims of some critics, we do not engage in regular surveillance of families, and so we don’t know how parents are treating their children at home. While the cases most likely to make the news are the ones that involve forced detention or torture, as in the case of the Turpin parents in California, who shackled and beat their 13 children over the course of more than a decade, these are not the typical child welfare cases.
The category of child neglect is actually listed more frequently than physical abuse when child welfare workers decide to remove a child from a home. But many people don’t understand what neglect actually entails. In 2018, 31% of children were listed as having a drug-abusing caregiver as a risk factor, and 12% were listed as having a caregiver who abused alcohol. This doesn’t even include mental illness or an “inability to cope,” which is often listed by investigators instead of substance abuse.
The abuse of alcohol and drugs has had an enormous impact on child welfare. Children who live in homes where addiction is a problem are often not well supervised. Parents in such homes cannot ensure that small children don’t run into the street, touch a hot stove, or drown in a bathtub. These parents often leave children alone in order to procure drugs. Or mothers will allow a nonrelative male to live in the home with their children in exchange for access to drugs or allow drug sales to be made out of the house. Parents with these kinds of problems find that their children are removed from their care either temporarily or permanently. Some go to live with other relatives, and others are sent to foster care. A recent paper by three economists at Notre Dame concluded that “if drug abuse had remained at 1996 levels, 1.5 million fewer children aged 0-16 would have lived away from a parent in 2015.”
Baccaglini notes that while there’s not much evidence the pandemic is driving people to abuse drugs or alcohol if they didn’t already have an issue, there is no doubt that stress about getting sick, caring for children, and losing one’s job can trigger addiction issues. “If you do have a problem, you’re more likely to use more often and more intensely.” When people do use, they “strike out at folks less likely to be able to defend themselves.” He concludes: “I’m worried about the kindergartner who has no options.”
When children are in school, we can see some signs of neglect: Children come to school not having eaten all weekend. Their clothes are not washed. The children have not bathed. They may show signs of physical abuse as well. Absent their attendance at school, we may have no way of knowing something is going wrong.
One might have assumed that families that were already on the radar of child welfare officials before the lockdown began would at least continue to be monitored after it continued. But a recent investigation in the New York Times cast doubt on that.
According to the article, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, under pressure from the union that represents child welfare workers, relaxed requirements about in-person visits to children who were reported for abuse or neglect during the pandemic, as well as children who were already receiving “services” from the state in response to previous reports. Newsom, who reversed the decision in July, noted that he was acting to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
As the New York Times reported, at least one child died as a result of his edict. An infant who should have been visited after the mother tested positive for drugs at his birth, and already had other children removed from her custody, died at the age of 6 weeks. The authorities actually only learned of his death and moved to remove his twin brother after the mother posted about the boy’s death on Facebook.
Sarah Anne Font, who researches issues related to child maltreatment and the child welfare system at Pennsylvania State University, found California’s policy “bizarre,” particularly for families that are already known to child welfare services. “We know they have already abused and neglected kids. The visits should be nonnegotiable.” While we should obviously be providing protective equipment to these workers, Font said, “if staff are refusing to come to work, they should be fired. They’re emergency responders. That’s not acceptable.”
While reporting abuse and neglect is obviously not the primary job of teachers, it is an important one. Jedd Medefind, the president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans (an umbrella organization for foster care and adoption nonprofit organizations), noted that “schools provide much more than education, particularly for the most vulnerable kids.” In addition to “a wide range of support services,” Medefind said schools provide “critical relationships and social networks.” He called this a “caring watchfulness” that is “either diminished or entirely missing when at-risk youth aren’t able to attend school.” Even if they are not being neglected or abused, Medefind said that “kids with thinner social networks and frayed family ties are at higher risk of isolation and loneliness.”
Obviously, local and state leaders will have to weigh whether or not to open schools for in-person instruction. At least a hybrid model would require children to show up some days, allowing teachers to see how they are faring. If they don’t, though, it’s time to start thinking of other ways for adults to see at-risk children. Child welfare workers need to continue in-person visits. Especially if reports of abuse and neglect are down, they should have the manpower to make all the in-person visits they need (even if a significant chunk of the workforce is not showing up).
Second, schools that are not opening in-person should ask parents to bring their children to pick up meals or even send teachers out to visit these children, however briefly, at a social distance. We should also explore whether caseworkers providing families with food or cash assistance could be doing more to check in with families to find out whether they need any other support. Automatically refilling a family’s debit card means one less point of contact for at-risk children.
The “national tug of war between opening and not reopening schools is framed as making a choice between health and the economy,” observed Medefind. This, he said, is “a mistake in framing.” Rather, he suggests: “On one side is one particular form of health” — not getting a particular virus. “But on the other side are other kinds of health” — the health you get from preventive visits to the doctor or from relationships with other people or from the provision of social services or from being able to keep an eye on children who may be abused or neglected. The trade-offs regarding schools are “not simple,” he said. “But we need to see them for what they are.”
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
