Earlier this year, authorities found the remains of 11-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-García in a plastic container in New Britain, Connecticut. She had been abused and starved to death, according to court documents in the case. Her mother, aunt, and her mother’s boyfriend are charged with murder. The family had a history with the state’s Department of Children and Family Services, though the details of those investigations have not been released. Torres-García’s death occurred two months after her mother told the local school district that she would be homeschooling her daughter. This has renewed concerns that some abusers are using homeschooling as a way to hide the mistreatment of their children.
Another Connecticut case raised similar concerns just a few months ago. A man was found to be locked in his Waterbury home by his stepmother for 20 years. Beaten, starved, he was only permitted to leave his room for 15 minutes per day. The woman told the school district that he would be homeschooled after teachers raised concerns about his well-being.
There are similar cases across the country. One of the most egregious ones was that of 12-year-old Gavin Peterson of Utah, who died at the hands of his father, stepmother, and older brother in 2024. Peterson’s school raised repeated concerns about how he was searching through the garbage for scraps of food and that when a school employee started giving him food, his stepmother called school officials to demand they stop. The family decided shortly thereafter to pull him out of school completely.
To be clear, the vast majority of people who homeschool in this country do not abuse their children and never come onto the radar of child protective services. But there is also a pattern among some of the most egregious cases of child abuse and neglect, including those that end in fatalities or near fatalities, that parents withdraw their children from school and say they are going to educate them at home as a way to ensure that their misdeeds are not seen by other responsible adults. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has put together a database of child abuse and fatalities among children who were homeschooled. It includes 500 cases of abuse and 200 fatalities. But because many states are not transparent about their fatality reports, this is likely an undercount.
Because the coalition is made up of former homeschoolers, it can seem like the group has an ax to grind. But during research for Lives Cut Short, a project I help lead at the American Enterprise Institute that documents child fatalities, my colleagues and I have found homeschooling to be a surprisingly common factor in the cases we have documented as well. There are more than 2,000 such fatalities each year in the United States, and if we want to prevent more of them, we have to study the records we have and understand the risk factors.
The most sensible way to handle this problem would be to place extra scrutiny on parents who want to homeschool but have a prior history of child abuse or neglect, especially if they have been convicted of a crime involving harm to a child. Either we should bar these adults from homeschooling, or we should monitor them regularly for some period of time after they remove their children from school.
But that idea has provoked outrage among homeschooling advocates. In 2018, after the death of 8-year-old Raylee Browning, legislators in her home state of West Virginia proposed a law with her name, which would pause a parent’s application to homeschool their child if a report of abuse or neglect is called in by a teacher and substantiated by CPS within 14 days. In some ways, the case is actually not a very good argument for Raylee’s Law. The girl was actually abused and neglected for years while she was enrolled in her local public school. Reports were made by teachers and other officials numerous times about belt marks on her body, for instance. Teachers would sneak food to her in the bathroom, realizing, apparently, she was not being fed at home. But CPS continued to insist that she was not in any imminent danger. If the school makes the reports but child welfare authorities don’t do anything with the information, a child continues to suffer in silence at home, though at least she has a few hours a day away from the torture she was experiencing there.
At any rate, Raylee’s Law has been stuck in the West Virginia legislature for years, thanks to opposition from advocates such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, who fear that such a law will be used to restrict the ability of nonabusive parents to homeschool. And they worry that frivolous or malicious reporting will be used to interfere in their family lives. It is not that these concerns have no merit.
A recent article in New York magazine describes many of the complaints about homeschooling that have been launched over the years — that it is not teaching evolution, that some homeschoolers have turned out to be white supremacists or neo-Nazis, that some homeschool curricula teach Christian nationalism. Indeed, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education’s mission includes not just protecting children from abuse and neglect but from what they see as the poor education that many homeschooled children receive. The problem with this is that many children are also getting poor educations at their local public schools. Are homeschooled students worse off on average educationally? Probably not.
Other advocates have also blurred the lines between their complaints about the principle of homeschooling, what one called “24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18,” and actual child maltreatment that may happen while a child is ostensibly being homeschooled.
All of this raises concerns among advocates that if they open the door to extra scrutiny of certain homeschooling families, then the educational freedom that homeschoolers enjoy will be restricted. The Christian Home Educators of West Virginia wrote to legislators that Raylee’s Law would take “away educational freedom before conviction or even formal charges, in stark contrast to the constitutional presumption of innocence.”
This is true, and it is generally how the child welfare system operates. Only a small percentage of parents who are even found to have been abusing their children are ever charged in criminal court. Child abuse, especially of quite young children, is very hard to prove. Children cannot or will not tell us what is happening. We may know abuse is occurring, but not which adult in a home is responsible for it.
Fortunately, CPS has the power to intervene in a family when there is evidence suggesting a child is in danger, even if it cannot be shown beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal court. CPS can offer support services, mandate drug treatment, ask women to keep abusive men away from their children, and even remove children to foster care when circumstances warrant — all without issuing “formal charges” or “conviction.” Family court judges are the ones signing off on these steps, and they could be similarly involved in issuing temporary orders to prevent homeschooling while parents with CPS histories are investigated.
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But homeschooling advocates have become fierce opponents of CPS more generally, too — to the point where the HSLDA actually repeats the talking points of progressives who want to “abolish the child welfare system” the same way they want to “defund the police.” Quoting sources such as the Columbia Law Review or the American Journal of Public Health, not usually go-to experts for a group led by conservative evangelical Christians, the HSLDA website complains about issues such as racial disproportionality in the child welfare system.
Conservatives who believe in the principles of limited government, educational freedom, and the ability of parents to shape their children’s lives have good reason to be skeptical of child welfare agencies. But defending the rights of parents who have already abused their children to use homeschool statutes is not only shameful — it gives homeschooling parents everywhere a bad name.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on child welfare and foster care issues.
