The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

Author:Anya Kamenetz [Kamenetz, Anya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781541700987
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

A DIFFERENT KIND OF SYSTEM

It’s perfectly possible to imagine a drop in child abuse reports that doesn’t conceal a hidden epidemic of abuse. That’s because an estimated 80 to 90 percent of child abuse and neglect reports are not ultimately substantiated.

Rates of substantiated child maltreatment have been falling at least since the early 1990s.

By far the most common cause of a child welfare report is neglect, which usually ties in some way to poverty: children outside without shoes or no car seat when it’s time to bring a baby home from the hospital. And child poverty has been on the rise. In 2018, one in four children entered the system because of neglect alone.

And yet state Child Protective Services agencies typically have more money to spend investigating and monitoring families and removing children than they do on assistance to families. A foster parent gets a monthly child support payment from the state, but that kind of payment historically hasn’t been available to parents to support their own children.

A fascinating paper looked at trends in child removal in Florida from March through the end of June 2020, compared with previous years.

Overall, the number of children placed in foster care fell by more than one-fifth. Proportionately fewer Black children were taken away for what the researchers termed more discretionary reasons, such as neglect, inadequate supervision, or parental substance abuse. Meanwhile, proportionately more white children were removed because of serious, substantiated claims of maltreatment, such as physical and sexual abuse.

This is one study in one state. But it paints a picture of a system that could be less racially disproportionate and more focused on the most serious cases.

Can we make families and communities safer, without over-policing? This question goes to the heart of the debate over the child archipelago.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.