In 2016, about one out of every 10 children in the country were reported as suspected victims of abuse or neglect. After an investigation, fewer than a tenth of those reports were substantiated. Our child welfare system, most seem to agree, touches many more children than is necessary. So how do we protect the 1 in 100 kids who are being abused or neglected while at the same time keeping government from intervening in the private lives of innocent families?
In Diane Redleaf’s new book, They Took the Children Last Night, the lawyer and family advocate suggests that our system has tilted too far in the direction of keeping children safe at all costs and too far from the idea that removing children from their families for any length of time also comes with its own set of risks. “Proof beyond a reasonable doubt may be too high a threshold,” she writes, “but operating under a principle of ‘when in doubt, take them out’ is, if anything, worse.”
For more than two decades, Redleaf has had a front-row seat from her practice in Chicago to watch as social workers investigate calls made to child abuse hotlines and forcibly separate innocent parents from their children for weeks or months at a time. Take the story of Ben and Lynn, a middle-class, white, suburban couple, who took their infant son to the hospital when they noticed that his leg was swelling up. When it turned out that he had a fractured femur, the hospital called the state’s child abuse hotline. A doctor at the hospital who worked for the state and was training to become a specialist in child abuse determined that the injury was the result of abuse.
The couple had no history of abuse, the baby and the other children seemed completely healthy, the parents had plenty of character witnesses, the mother was a social worker, the grandmother was a federal judge. But the fact that they couldn’t explain how this fracture occurred meant that all three of their children were removed from their custody during the investigation. They were allowed to remain with grandparents, but for weeks the parents could not be with their children without other adult supervision, even when breastfeeding the infant. And Ben and Lynn were among the lucky ones whose children weren’t sent to a shelter or to live in the home of strangers. Even after the couple was officially exonerated in court, Child Protective Services put their names on a public registry of child abusers, rendering Lynn unemployable as a social worker. It took several more months for Redleaf and her colleagues to end that nightmare.
In Redleaf’s experience, Ben and Lynn are only the tip of the iceberg. “For each family in this book, I know dozens more with similar experiences.”
But the truth is that most CPS cases look nothing like Ben and Lynn’s case. For one thing, most children are taken from parents for reasons of neglect, not abuse. And for every five incidents in which a child is removed from his or her home, two to four of them have to do with a family member’s substance abuse. Incidences of abuse and neglect are much more likely to occur in single-parent homes.
Redleaf acknowledges this, of course, noting that the system is much more likely to initiate investigations of families who are poor or members of racial minority groups. “These already disadvantaged families are especially vulnerable to the State’s use of its authority to remove children and have many fewer resources to fight back.” Which leads her to what is perhaps the most striking observation in the whole book. In explaining why it is that the state continued to pursue its case against Ben and Lynn, despite all evidence pointing to them being loving, stable parents, Redleaf writes: “Making middle-class white parents like Ben and Lynn out to be child abusers would establish the State’s evenhandedness.”
In other words, in an effort to escape the charge that the system is racist, child welfare workers may be going out of their way to find innocent white families to investigate and charge. Here is a startling unintended consequence of crying “racism” at every sign of unequal outcomes.
Redleaf is working to change some of these laws. But ultimately, she doesn’t seem to conclude these are the primary issue. “Incompetence explains most of the problems,” she writes. “Bad decisions result from having caseworkers who are not competent to do the job assigned to them.”
Indeed, the field does not seem to attract the most capable candidates and the training offered seems to focus more on social justice and racial sensitivity than on the investigative skills necessary to understand what is really happening inside a family.
Whether you believe that we are removing too many kids from their homes or too few, the operation of CPS outside of the bounds of regular law enforcement and without the same kind of judicial oversight is a serious problem.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat.
