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, ...

Mississippi has just declared a public health emergency involving an alarming rise in infant mortality rates. Between 2023 and 2024, deaths of children under age one rose to 9.7 per 1,000 live births from 8.9 per 1,000 in 2023. “Every single infant loss represents a family devastated, a community impacted and a future cut short,” State Health Officer Dan Edney said in a statement. Public officials in Mississippi don’t seem to ...

Last month I wrote about the death of 10-month old Kemy Washington late in 2024 or early in 2025. She died of starvation and dehydration, trapped in her Northwest apartment with the body of her mother, who had died after consuming a cocktail of drugs. But comments on the Washington Post’s story revealed something even more shocking. Kemy was one of four children who died between February 2023 and January 2025 in voucher-funded apartments located ...

Last month, a mother and her 17-year-old son were sentenced in events related to the accidental shooting of an unnamed 11-year-old boy. By sheer “dumb luck”, according to the judge sentencing the shooter, the 11-year old survived and is expected to fully recover. But this was no ordinary gun accident: the 17-year-old, Hendricks, shot his younger brother while firing at another man during an altercation. The shootings took place at ...

Illinois 18-year-old Mackenzi Felmlee was tortured and, in May 2024, killed by her long-term foster parents. A year later, after the state issued criminal charges, it was revealed that Mackenzi had been beaten, deprived of food and water, and subjected to cruel and degrading punishments for incontinence. She was ultimately left to die of an untreated blood clot, as the foster family watched, laughed, and recorded her suffering. Deaths in foster ...

On January 18, 2025, two police officers accompanied a worried grandmother to an apartment in a Northwest Washington high-rise. There they found 38-year-old Ebony Washington and her 20-month-old daughter, Kemy, dead. Ebony had overdosed on a mix of MDMA, cocaine, ethanol and the animal sedative xylazine, called “tranc” on the streets. Kemy had died of starvation and dehydration. Mother and daughter had been dead for days or even weeks, as ...

“We’re Not Protecting Children. We’re Recycling Their Trauma.” That was the title of a recent opinion piece by policy researcher Mathangi Swaminathan on the education news website The74, explaining why teachers should think twice before reporting suspected abuse or neglect to child-protective services. Swaminathan’s suggestion is part of a growing chorus alleging that educators only contribute to the problems of vulnerable children when they contact child-protection agencies. A paper released earlier this year from ...

“Today marks an important step in our efforts to prevent child abuse. Madam President, today also marks the important work and collaboration in this General Assembly by our Members who are committed to keeping our children safe, and when we fail, we make sure of what we can do the next time to prevent the abuse from happening in the future.”[i] Those words were spoken on the floor of the ...

A new Minnesota law will make it harder to protect children from abuse and neglect. In May 2024, 2-year-old Niindonis Goodman died of fentanyl poisoning in a Minneapolis homeless shelter, with her mother passed out nearby. Born with drugs in her system to a mother with a long history of drug addiction who had relinquished custody of other children, Niindonis spent less than 2 months in foster care after birth ...

Jess Dannhauser, commissioner of the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is doing a bang-up job—at least according to his defenders. In a recent article, “Why New York’s child welfare system is in capable hands under Commissioner Jess Dannhauser,” Sr. Paulette LoMonaco, former executive director of Good Shepherd Services, and Bill Baccaglini, CEO of the New York Foundling, wrote that, under Dannhauser, “we have witnessed a dramatic improvement ...

This week’s harrowing Arcadia, CA, case—where 21 children were removed from a couple’s home amid evidence of abuse, exploitation, and possible human trafficking tied to a surrogate “baby‑factory”—is a chilling indictment of what happens when oversight is absent. What we know: A 2‑month‑old with a traumatic brain injury wasn’t taken to the hospital for two days—a sign of neglect that triggered wider investigation. Surveillance and physical evidence revealed multiple toddlers ...

A drop in the number of children entering foster care and fatalities due to abuse in Texas is, on its face, welcome news, and some stakeholders in the well-being of children are heartened. “There have been more net positives than any negatives that show up,” Brandon Logan, executive director of the Texas nonprofit One Accord for Kids, said about recent changes to the state’s child welfare policies. Touting a massive drop in ...

A 9-month-old female child nearly died on March 1, 2024, as a result of physical abuse. Luzerne County Children and Youth Agency indicated the report on May 24, 2024, naming the victim child’s mother’s paramour as the perpetrator. On the date of the incident, it was reported that the victim became unresponsive, and emergency medical services were contacted. The child presented to the hospital and was found to have abusive ...

Last month, the Baltimore Banner reported on an alarming rise in the number of child fatalities due to maltreatment in Maryland, as shown by a federal report. The number of child abuse and neglect deaths reported by Maryland to the federal Children’s Bureau was 83 for Fiscal Year 2023, up from 27 a decade before, a rate higher than any state but Mississippi. After initially responding with confusion, the Maryland Department of ...

One of the most important things a state can do to ensure transparency about child maltreatment fatalities, near fatalities and egregious incidents is to notify the public when such an incident is reported. Without such notifications, legislators, advocates, and the general public will know if an incident has occurred only if it is covered in the press. Press coverage is usually triggered when criminal charges are filed in court. But ...

Born in 2022, “B.B.” died of fentanyl poisoning in March 2023. During the ten years before B.B.’s death, the Department of Children, Youth and Families had received 30 reports about B.B.’s family (many before B.B. was born) for issues including use of heroin, marijuana and alcohol in the home; lack of supervision of the children; domestic violence; an unsafe caregiver living with the family; an unsafe and unclean living environment; ...

In a press release, announcing the publication of data on child maltreatment in Federal Fiscal Year 2023, the U.S. Administration on Children and Families reported that the number of child maltreatment deaths decreased slightly in Federal Fiscal Year 2023 versus 2022.  But the reality is we don’t know how many children died of maltreatment – in either year. Because of restrictive definitions, failure to consult all available sources, and the ...

In February 2021, residents of Racine learned that 17-year-old Shavale J. Powell was facing homicide charges in the death of his 1-month-old son. The child suffered blunt force trauma to the head, chest and extremities. The Racine Journal Times reported on the case and noted that there was also a “1-year-old child with a bruised, injured eye.” Powell was arrested and the children’s mother, Javian Clark, was named as a co-defendant in court documents. ...

On January 17, 2020, eight-year-old Thomas Valva died of hypothermia in the freezing garage at the home of his father and his father’s live-in fiancée. It soon came out that school staff had made multiple calls to the  state child abuse hotline during the 16 months before Thomas’ death, describing how he and his brother were starved, beaten and forced to sleep in a garage and urinate upon themselves. Almost ...

On October 6, 2024, police found five-year-old DeAndre Pettus nude and unconscious in a squalid, trash-filled apartment in the Northwest section of the District of Columbia. Paramedics tried to revive him before he was declared dead at the scene. There were bruises and abrasions on his body. A witness reported that the boy’s father, also named DeAndre Pettus, admitted that he had been punching his son at full force in ...

On October 10, the Utah Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) finally released a statement summarizing its involvement with Gavin Peterson, who died on July 9, 2024 at the age of 12.  Gavin’s father, stepmother, and older brother are awaiting trial on reckless child abuse homicide, among other charges.  The much-awaited “CAPTA statement” from DCFS (named for the federal law requiring that states have a policy to disclose “information ...

The Kansas State Child Death Review Board (SCDRB) has issued its 2024 Annual Report.  The report examines the circumstances surrounding the deaths of all Kansans aged birth to 17 years old, as well as non-resident children, who died in Kansas in 2022. The inclusion of all 2022 child fatalities, as well as use of data from the previous four years to allow for more granular analyses, make this report exemplary ...

At least 1,800 children die from abuse and neglect every year, and the total is probably considerably greater. Between a third and a half of these deaths may involve families that were already known to Child Protective Services through previous reports of maltreatment. In addition, an unknown number of children are severely injured due to maltreatment every year. Legislators, advocates, and the public need timely information about the circumstances leading ...

Jahmeik Modlin was found in a skeletal condition in a Harlem apartment stocked with food. He died the next day, and his three older siblings were hospitalized with severe malnutrition. The family had been on the radar of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) since 2019, before Jahmeik was born. But the agency closed its last case with the family in 2022 after determining that the children were safe, a ...

The CDC calls the infant mortality rate — which measures how often children die before their first birthday — “an important marker of the overall health of a society.” So when the rate increased in 2022 for the first time in 20 years, national media and the public took note. Increases in child and adolescent deaths due to drug use, suicide and gun violence have also received significant attention and ...