Children who have already been victimized should never be placed in another abusive or neglectful home by the state. Yet several recent cases raise alarms about the safety of guardianships and adoptions.
Last year in Arkansas, after 29 reports of maltreatment to the state hotline spanning more than a decade, an unnamed 15-year-old boy was discovered locked in a bathroom, naked and malnourished. His legal guardians, an aunt and uncle, have been charged with his abuse and imprisonment.
This was a voluntary guardianship, originally made in 2013 with the consent of the biological parents. However, concerns emerged almost immediately when the guardians prevented visitation with the parents. The parents unsuccessfully sought to appoint a different guardian less than a year after the guardianship began. By 2016, the guardians stopped submitting their annual reports accounting for the children’s health and living arrangement; after several contempt citations were issued, the court dismissed the contempt case and took no further action.
These egregious failures of guardianship are not limited to Arkansas.
Last September in Detroit, 9-year-old Owen Rosario died after being found underweight, with “an extremely protruding stomach, and sustained fractures to several areas of his body.” Owen’s guardians were also voluntarily chosen by his biological mother; she chose a couple who had been licensed foster parents for at least six years. This means that even though Owen was not in state custody at the time of his death, caseworkers should have been checking in at least once a month on any foster children in the home. And Owen’s injuries were reported to child protective services (CPS) at least a year before his death.
Earlier this year in Fayette County, Pa., 9-year-old Renesmay Eutsey was placed in a black bag and thrown in a river before being reported missing by her legal custodians, both female cousins of Renesmay’s biological parents. The custodians have since been charged in her murder. Conflicting media reports described one of Renesmay’s caregivers as her adoptive mother, but it appears, according to the Fayette County District Attorney, “These children were voluntarily placed with family, which is what we typically prefer.”
The biological mother reports being encouraged by the county child welfare agency to place each of her children born after Renesmay in the custody of relatives.
In each of these cases, the guardians made efforts to avoid detection by moving across counties, keeping the child out of school, or avoiding medical checkups. Agencies have faced reasonable scrutiny over their responses leading up to the children’s deaths, but perhaps a better question is: How were these children–and likely many others–ever placed in such dangerous homes?
Guardianships, like adoptions, are supposed to involve extensive home studies: criminal and child abuse background checks, gathering references, reviewing family history and finances, inspecting the home environment, and observing the caregiver and child’s interactions. It is surprising that people capable of such horrific abuse passed these hurdles without raising any red flags.
The vast majority of foster parents, adoptive parents, and guardians are ordinary adults doing their best to care for children with traumatic pasts. The problem is that, for that subset of dangerous people who seek to become state-sponsored caregivers, there should be no confidence that the child welfare system or the courts will reject their applications.
In each of these cases, the guardianships involved caregivers related to or selected by the biological parents. Whether these arrangements were given equal or less scrutiny than foster care placements or adoptions is unclear. However, given that one of Renesmay’s guardians was the adoptive parent of another child, and Owen’s guardians were licensed foster parents, those standards probably wouldn’t have protected these children either.
Foster-home licensing standards are weak and eroding, excluding almost no one. Federal law precludes licensure of individuals with a small number of violent felonies or recent drug felonies. National advocacy groups have sought to ensure that no other automatic exclusions apply to relatives, thus encouraging approval for children (with corresponding monthly subsidies) to be placed with caregivers who have committed domestic violence, child abuse, or other misdemeanor criminal acts, or have a substantiated history of child abuse or neglect.
The definition of “relative” has been expanded too, so that lower licensing standards can now be applied to “fictive kin” identified by biological parents. Many kinship placements that eventually become guardianships were never licensed to begin with, so even these lax criteria may not apply. Under a misguided interpretation of disability law, federal guidance issued in 2023 also requires that states license applicants with substance use disorder, so long as they are nominally in recovery. If these are the standards for foster homes, it is hard to believe that voluntary guardianships are subject to any standards at all.
When children are harmed in guardianships (or any other setting), the quality of many states’ CPS investigations is so poor that few children receive the protection they deserve the first time they are harmed.
In states like Pennsylvania, expungement laws that delete records of “unsubstantiated” investigations make it easier for perpetrators to evade detection and allow individuals with repeated allegations of abuse or neglect to be approved as state-sponsored caregivers.
Even when those records are retained, state laws typically treat unsubstantiated reports–a designation applied to over 85 percent of all reports–as false allegations. Until law enforcement arrested the guardians of the Arkansas teen, none of the previous 29 reports would have prevented them from taking in another vulnerable child.
More intensive screening or more rigorous follow-up or better investigations won’t prevent every case of maltreatment by guardians. But our current policies don’t just fail to prevent harm. They create conditions that encourage it.
Sarah Font, a child welfare researcher and co-lead of the Lives Cut Short project on child maltreatment fatalities, is a professor of social work at Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.
Originally published in Arkansas Democrat Gazette with the title “Welfare policies don’t prevent harm”