LUCIEN FRAUD/SHUTTERSTOCK
Even as we finally come to grips with the racial bias that permeates so many aspects of American life, some people in New Mexico, as in much of the country, promote a narrative about child abuse and COVID-19 that is, at its core, riven with racial and class bias.
What are we really saying when we spread fear about how, supposedly, the moment mostly white middle-class professional “eyes” are taken off children who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite, their parents will unleash savagery upon them? We’re saying that poor people and nonwhite people are too uncivilized to raise their own children without white professionals constantly spying on them.
It was bad enough when this fearmongering was promoted at the start of the pandemic. But now, major national news organizations, Bloomberg Citylab, The Marshall Project and the Associated Press have all found little evidence for such claims.
Citylab reports that:
“Some parents living in neighborhoods with historically high rates of child welfare investigations say the dramatic dip in maltreatment reports [due to COVID-19] feels more like the pollution lifting — a much-needed respite from the intense and relentless surveillance of low-income moms, and especially those who are Black and Latinx. …”
That’s not as surprising as it may seem. Decades of horror stories have conditioned us to believe there is a child abuser under every bed. But of every 100 calls to child abuse hotlines nationwide, 91 are screened out as too absurd for investigation or, after investigation, found to be false. Another six cases involve neglect, which often means poverty. Multiple studies have found, for example, that 30% of America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing. The remaining cases are needles in a haystack. We’re not going to find the needles by constantly expanding the haystack.
Domestic spies
On the contrary, as Children, Youth and Families Department spokesperson Charlie Moore-Pabst points out, now workers may well be doing a better job finding children in real danger because they have more time to investigate each case.
Richard Wexler
So the last thing New Mexico’s vulnerable children need is constant exhortations to spy on neighbors and “training” for teachers to do the same. Recent research shows that our system of massive child abuse reporting overloads child welfare with false reports while discouraging families from seeking help for fear they’ll be reported to agencies such as CYFD. The child abuse surveillance state makes all children less safe.
If you were trying to cope with poverty and COVID-19, would you accept a food basket from someone who’s been instructed to spy on your family when he drops it off? Would you risk having a neighbor do a virtual visit with your children if you know they’re being urged to use the visit to look for so-called signs of child abuse?
At its worst, all this leads to more children needlessly consigned to the chaos of foster care. Precisely because most cases are nothing like the horror stories, study after study finds that in typical cases children left in their own homes typically do better even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.
New Mexico already has an unfortunate history of over-reporting. As soon as New Mexico’s statewide hotline opened in 2011 it was deluged with false reports and CYFD begged people to stop. But they didn’t. Today, according to Searchlight New Mexico:
“We don’t want our agency to be used as a mean guard dog” to bully parents, said [State Central Intake] manager Paul Williams. “But I see it all day long.”
The hotline is plagued with false reports from school personnel seeking leverage in disputes with parents — yet now CYFD is “training” schools to “keep tabs on behavioral changes, the background environment and participation levels” in online schooling. But surely few things are more likely to change a child’s behavior than coping with a pandemic. And low “participation levels” often just mean a family is poor and has more difficulty getting online.
New Mexico also has an unfortunate present when it comes to racial bias and child welfare. ProPublica reports that one Albuquerque hospital “implemented a secretive policy in recent months to conduct special coronavirus screenings for pregnant women, based on whether they appeared to be Native American,” leading to needless separation of newborns from their mothers within the hospital.
America is now being challenged to rethink old assumptions about policing. In poor communities, child welfare agencies are seen not as benign helpers, but as what they really are: a police force. If we learn the right lessons from COVID-19 we can discard old, racist assumptions, lift the “pollution” of needless, stressful surveillance and replace it with a genuine safety net for vulnerable children.
Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
