The Children's Aid Society

What We Know About Child Abuse

April 12, 2006

by C. Warren Moses, CEO of The Children's Aid Society

Here are some things we know about child abuse:

Prevention of Abuse and Neglect for Vulnerable Families Requires an Array of Supportive Services.

* Preventive Services - We know that if there is a goal of keeping a fragile family together, then each vulnerable family will require carefully designed preventive services that are competently delivered in a timely fashion. Because some components of preventive services programs are difficult to deliver promptly - due to necessary approval requirements or because of inadequately resourced programs, children have been left in danger. So if we're going to utilize preventive services to keep families together, we need a serious commitment to fund and deliver high quality preventive services promptly that truly have an effective child protective component.

* Homemaker Services - We know that one of the most important child protective programs is one of the programs that is used the least - Homemaker Services. There is no more protective service, or early warning device, about children who are in danger, than a well-trained Homemaker, who works under the supervision of a social worker. Homemakers spend 20 to 40 hours, or more, with a family each week, and are in the best position to see early signs of trouble. In the Children's Aid model, Homemakers are backed up by a team of social workers to make sure that complex family needs are responded to thoroughly.

* Substance Abuse Services - We know that many children are in danger due to the abuse of alcohol and substances by their guardians and we also know that there is an inadequate supply of substance abuse treatment programs. We need to expand the availability of these programs. We also need to recognize - as child protection specialists - that substance abuse treatment sometimes involves relapse an expected and predictable interruption on the way to recovery. Therefore, in order to keep children and families who are experiencing substance abuse treatment together, we need to ensure that the children are safe. This requires us to significantly increase the intensity of services to families who are in recovery; including the previously mentioned provision of the use of Homemakers for as many hours a week as is required to assure that should relapse occur, we know it within hours and not weeks, as could be the case if we were waiting for a social worker's periodic visits to discover the relapse.

Foster Care is Sometimes the Best Child Protective Strategy.

We also know that as we expand preventive services to fragile families, we will get to know more of these families more intimately. One of the important outcomes of this process is the discovery of a number of children who are in serious danger and need to be removed from their homes. While it seems paradoxical that an increase in preventive services could also precipitate an increase in the number of children coming into foster care, it is simply mathematical: as we get to know more fragile families well, we recognize that some children in those families are in serious danger or in need of removal. Therefore, when a preventive services worker whose orientation is family preservation and support, identifies a child as "at serious risk," we must move within hours to intensely evaluate the situation in order to remove the child, if necessary, to prevent serious harm.

I'd like to add one other observation. The City of New York measures, to some degree, child safety by the reduction of numbers of children in foster care. The presumption is that if more children receive preventive services, fewer will enter foster care. As I just pointed out, the opposite is often the case. Preventive services are financed, in part, by future savings from the reduction of children in foster care. While this sounds sensible, it is in fact unworkable and is an inadequate and inappropriate measure of child safety. The measures of child safety are, to a greater degree, associated with the number of reports that are filed and the number of child abuse reports that are "founded" upon investigation to indicate abuse; therefore, the financing of preventive services should not be linked to reductions of children in foster care.