An accidental experiment during COVID suggests too many children are removed to foster care:
COVID changed things.
With children home from school and routine doctors’ appointments and other activities canceled, the number of maltreatment reports fell by half.
The New York state child welfare agency waived the requirement that caseworkers visit children’s homes and directed them to conduct remote check-ins instead, unless the caseworker was unable to reach the family by video call, or if a remote visit raised concerns.
And the family court no longer allowed ACS to file petitions for court-ordered supervision; it would consider only requests for removal.
“For the first time, ACS was forced to triage the cases it filed, no longer able to seek court intervention for less severe cases,” Friedman and Rohr wrote. “On every level — reporting, investigation, monitoring, and court intervention — New York City’s child welfare apparatus dramatically shrunk its footprint.”
As a result, the numbers of children placed in foster care dramatically decreased: from April through June 2020, roughly half as many children were removed from their families compared with the same period the previous three years, according to Friedman and Rohr’s analysis.
If these plummeting numbers of reports and removals had obscured a wave of abuse, the authors point out, one would expect signals of that abuse to emerge, for example, in an increase in children with suspicious injuries at city emergency rooms. But as David Hansell, the ACS director at the time, testified at a city council hearing in June 2021, there were no significant changes in ER visits for children during the lockdown, as “you might think would happen if there were more children suffering any kind of serious physical abuse,” he said.
If the pandemic hid a wave of abuse, one would also expect a surge in substantiated reports of abuse once schools and courts reopened, as previously undetected signs of maltreatment were finally discovered. But that didn’t happen either, Friedman and Rohr found.
I’m pretty sure child services is evil, but since many kids do not seem to have come back to school (see chronic school absenteeism), maybe the maltreated were just never noticed? Maybe putting fewer kids in foster care also reduces maltreatment?
Child Services is Human Trafficking, and, yes, for money, and for some decades.
How else would they reliably source children?