How Minnesota’s take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare makes all children less safe
UPDATE, MARCH 2023: This report originally was released in 2018, in the form of two Issue Briefs responding to the harm done to children by a foster-care panic in Minnesota. The panic was unleashed by news coverage of child abuse fatalities that misrepresented the problem, and by a Governor’s Task Force which issued a series of misguided recommendations that made those problems even worse. Both the news coverage and the Task Force report were based on a series of false premises.
In recent years there have been small improvements. Starting in 2018, for the first time in seven years, the number of children torn from their families in Minnesota over the course of a year declined. While these declines are an encouraging first step, what is progress for Minnesota would still be seen as an obscene rate of family separation in many other states. Minnesota still tears apart families at a higher rate than all but seven other states when rates of child poverty
are factored in.