NCCPR Issue Paper #8
They are the cases that horrify us the most – as they should: children killed by their own families in cases that were, in some way, “known to the system.” The knee-jerk response: Children known-to-the-system are dying so the answer must be to take away more children. In fact, that makes everything worse.
The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero. The question is: How do we get closer to that goal? The answer is, as usual, counterintuitive, but the data are clear: Tearing apart more families does nothing to reduce child abuse fatalities and, as can be seen during foster-care panics, may well increase them. But targeting poverty; even just ameliorating it a little, reduces child abuse fatalities.
That’s because though each is the worst kind of tragedy, compared to the number of children in America, the number of such fatalities is infinitesimal. They are needles in a haystack. That makes them no less horrifying and the need for action no less urgent. But it also means that knee-jerk response from the child welfare establishment only makes the haystack bigger. Instead, we need better ways to find the needles.
The limits of current data
The first thing to know about child abuse fatalities is how little we know. For starters, we don’t know how many there really are. The skill or lack of skill of coroners and medical examiners, changes in definitions, the failure to report fatalities to a given database and the fact that deciding if a death is due to maltreatment or accident is surprisingly subjective all contribute to the inability to determine a figure.
This often is cited as evidence that the “real” number of fatalities is higher than official figures. But this ambiguity can cut both ways.
Consider a hypothetical example: Early one Sunday morning, while his parents are asleep, a three-year-old wakes up, manages to unlatch the back door of the family home and wanders away. He falls into a body of water and drowns. Accident or neglect? The history of American family policing suggests that if the body of water is the pool behind a McMansion it will be labeled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a trailer park it will be labeled neglect.
But here’s something we do know: The federal government reports that in 2022, the most recent year for which national statistics are available, there were 1,990 child abuse deaths. For the sake of argument let’s assume the “real” figure is twice that. Also in 2022, there were more than 73,500,000 Americans under age 18, and therefore potentially under the jurisdiction of family policing agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies). In other words, in 2022, 99.99% of American children did not die of abuse or neglect.
We know even less about trends in child abuse fatalities. Advocates of a take-the-child-and-run approach love to cherry-pick data. They’ll selectively cite certain years and say: Look! Fewer children were taken away and child abuse deaths went up! But one can just as easily select another pair of years and say: Look! Fewer children were taken away and child abuse deaths went down.
Case in point: Tennessee. In 2023, child abuse fatalities allegedly increased 30% over the year before. But between 2018 and 2020 even as entries into foster care in Tennessee declined by 15% child abuse deaths also declined by about 15%. And if Tennessee’s apparent increase in fatalities in 2023 is evidence of the need to take away more children, why did fatalities drop dramatically in Texas after they passed new laws that reduced foster care?
Furthermore, particularly when looking at a single year, we don’t even know if claims of an increase – or decrease – are accurate, much less what may have caused a change. That’s because of all the reasons mentioned earlier, and a simple fact for which we all should be grateful: The numbers often are low enough to rise or fall in a single year due to random chance.
So instead of looking at just a single year, a massive new study looked at 13 years of data. They looked at 3.4 million records and more than 20,000 deaths. The researchers even ran simulations that assumed the number of deaths was far higher than official estimates. They found that increasing the number of children taken away does nothing to reduce child abuse deaths. And curbing foster care does not increase such deaths.
Better measures
There are ways to measure changes in child safety that, while also flawed, are better than trying to measure fatalities. One of them is to compare over time rates of what state family policing agencies deem to be all forms of child abuse or neglect. This time let´s start with the long view. The number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year peaked in 2006. It has, mostly, slowly and steadily declined since (though it has not declined nearly enough). Overall rates of child abuse also have, mostly, slowly and steadily declined ever since.[1]
Did taking fewer children make children safer? We would argue yes, because it gave workers more time to find the relatively few in real danger. Of course we can’t be sure. But we can be sure of is that reducing foster care did not lead to more child abuse. Supporters of destroying more families divert us to the unreliable measure of fatalities because they are so gut-wrenching – and because they don’t want us to notice what´s really happening.
The basic fact that the numbers of fatalities are so low compared to the child population, explains why tearing apart more families never works. Almost always, when a child “known to the system” dies it’s because the worker didn’t do a sufficiently thorough investigation. That’s because they are drowning in false reports, trivial cases, and cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” They don’t have any time to investigate any case properly. There is no time to find the needles in a haystack. As we noted above, responding to child abuse tragedies by rushing to investigate more families and take away more children only makes the haystack bigger. So of course children in real danger are more likely to be overlooked.
But what about when they’re “known to the system”
News accounts often tell us that a large percentage of children who died, typically between one-third and two-thirds, were in some way “known to the system.” The statistic is repeated over and over by those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach because it is probably the most misleading statistic in all of child welfare. It creates a false mental image – an impression that a vast proportion of children known-to-the-system die.
Add just a little context and the story changes radically.
Nationwide, the number of children “known to the system” is astoundingly large: More than 7.5 million children in 2022 alone. Assuming that two-thirds of known child abuse deaths involved children “known to the system” that would be 1,327 fatalities. In other words, in any given year, even among children “known to the system” 99.98% do not die of child abuse or neglect. Once again, we’re talking needles in a gigantic haystack.
The other reason to reject the usual knee-jerk response is that we’ve tried it for more than 50 years – and it’s obviously failed. Over that time we’ve created a giant child welfare surveillance state in which more than one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18 — almost always in response to a false report or a case in which family poverty is confused with neglect. It’s forced hundreds of thousands of children to endure being torn needlessly from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care. And it hasn’t done a damn thing to make children safer.
As Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark book Investigating Families explains:
Research finds that following high-profile child fatalities, child welfare agencies respond by removing more children from their homes in a “foster care panic.” There’s no evidence, however, that this makes children safer. Instead, such panics leave more children and their parents traumatized by family separation, and spread child welfare workers even thinner.
As for fatalities: Dr. Richard Krugman helped build the system. He’s the very personification of the child welfare establishment. He used to be director of the C. Henry Kempe National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect. But even he’s having second thoughts. Says Dr. Krugman:
[W]e now have 40 years of experience with this approach and have made no progress in reducing the mortality from physical abuse of children (decades with 1500-2500 children dying annually). … Doing the same thing for 40 years that doesn’t seem (or can’t be shown) to be working was someone’s definition of insanity.
In other words, every time proponents of tearing apart families point to a tragedy and say “See? We need to take away more children!” They’re actually pointing to their own failure. All these tragedies are occurring under the system we have now, not under a system that reduces family policing in favor of better alternatives. Where else but in child welfare do people point to their worst failures and say “See? We need to do even more of this!”
And we know that reducing family policing in favor of better alternatives really works. Some of the studies are cited here.
And then there’s what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The fearmongers said there would be a “pandemic of child abuse.” On the contrary: Because of COVID family police agencies had to step back, community-based community-run mutual aid organizations stepped up and the federal government stepped in with the best “preventive service” of all: no-strings-attached cash. The result: all forms of child abuse declined – including one of the most serious: abusive head trauma.
It all boils down to this, as reported by another bastion of the child welfare establishment, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. Chapin Hall estimates that every additional $1,000 per person living in poverty invested in public benefits, whether for medical care, housing, food or child care, causes a a 2.1% reduction in foster care placements, a 4.3% reduction in abuse and neglect reports – and a 7.7% reduction in child maltreatment fatalities.
So after decades of responding to child abuse fatalities by enacting middle-class rescue fantasies at the expense of poor children’s lives, isn’t it time to finally follow the research and do what really works?
Updated January 9, 2026
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[1] Confirming these trends requires combing through federal reports over decades. The trends in foster care data can be verified from 2013 to 2022 by going to this link and clicking on “State Datasets.” Ealirer years are no longer online, but available from NCCPR. The trend in rates of child abuse can be found by going through the federal government’s “Child Maltreatment” reports. This link covers 2015 to 2021, but a Google search will turn up previous years. NCCPR has compiled these data as well.
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