Returning to Where it All Began

Last week was busy: some last minute requests at work, family visits, car breakdown in Maine, a 20-mile run, and on and on. In the midst of these activities, I learned that the Maine Government Oversight Committee was holding a public comment session about two tragic child abuse deaths in Maine - Kendell Chick and Marissa Kennedy. Both girls and their families were known to the state's child protective services.

This is where I come in. One of my main areas of expertise is children who die from abuse or neglect and the child welfare workforce. What a thing to specialize in, right? I know. Trust me. It's not something that you want to open with at a dinner party. It's best to be vague and say that I study "family violence" or the "child welfare system." That said, I once did have someone on an airplane offer to illustrate the book that I was writing on child maltreatment deaths. He was joking. And, I thought that I made dark jokes. 

Anyway, enough digressions. It was suggested by a staff member who knew about my expertise, that I might want to consider coming to Maine to provide some commentary. In truth, I was temporarily losing my mind at work that day and the idea of adding a trip to Augusta to my week didn't seem prudent. I talked to the staffer. She reminded me that it wouldn't be like a "regular testimony." This was an open public comment period and anyone could show up. For example, every single person who ever had a single complaint about child protective services. I am a friend of the child welfare profession, but I also know that the job is not easy and many parents and family members are rightfully upset when their children are removed. The line could be long. But, I committed on the phone to attending and the staffer committed to starting a sign-up sheet and putting my name near the front.

I arrived early and found two of my earliest mentors of the dark world of child maltreatment and the child welfare profession waiting to testify. I had returned to where it all began. I first started working in the area of maltreatment deaths in 2000, when I worked for the Maine Child Death & Serious Injury Review Panel. That panel, which still exists today--and there is some version of this in every state in the nation--reviews the deaths or serious injuries of children that are connected to or suspected to be connected to maltreatment. It's bleak work. I was in graduate school and every month I would prepare a single case, collecting records from child protective services, schools, law enforcement, health professionals, and the like and prepare a summary of what had happened with the child of interest and his or her family. Then, the panel of multidisciplinary helping professionals would gather in Augusta, Maine to review the case, make determinations where things might have gone "awry," and make recommendations for change. As I testified before the committee, Augusta is "where I first learned how compromised families can be, how well-intentioned service providers can miss opportunities to take protective action, and how children can fall through the cracks." (You can read my full testimony here.)

It was actually a banner day. It's awful to say that anything connected to children dying could be banner anything. But, it was a banner day for me. I had two mentors there and I had an opportunity to "pay back" to my home state. Further, one of the things that keeps me engaged in this depressing line of work is that it's an area that is truly important and everyone, everywhere cares about this issue. The governor showed up and talked about what it was like to grow up in an fbusive home, there was press coverage of the day (you can read about that here and here), and my full testimony was broadcast live. (If a reader is so inclined, one can listen to my full testimony and Q&A period with the legislative committee here. Just scroll to 1:38:00, which is about where my five-minute testimony begins. The public comment session was streamed on Facebook, but one doesn't need a Facebook account to listen.)

How do I close a blog post like this? It was a wonderful and important day for me, but it seems like  I should close with something a bit more substantive than my own experiences. I think there are a lot of myths out there about maltreatment deaths, so I'll leave my readers with information from research.

• About 1,500-2,000 children die every year from maltreatment. 
• Maltreatment deaths are rarely planned. Children fall out of windows while parents aren't paying attention, intoxicated parents roll over on infants and smother them while they sleep, parents leave children unsupervised in a home...a fire breaks out and the children cannot escape, parents attempt to discipline children for toileting accidents and things get massively out of control, frustrated parents violently shake infants who won't stop crying, and the list goes on. 
• More children die from physical neglect than from physical abuse. When children die from neglect, it is most often from supervisory neglect. 
• Neglect may be more common, but physical abuse is more lethal. 
• Most children who die are little. Really little. About 50% are under the age of 1 and about 75% are under the age of 3. 
• Children most often die at the hands or in the responsibility of their parents. 
• Mothers are more often "responsible" for children's deaths than fathers or mothers' boyfriends.  
• Children who die from abuse or neglect generally come from very compromised homes. 
• Other things that place children at risk? Parental unemployment, especially mobile families, parents with low knowledge of child development, children whose parents consider them to "difficult," domestic violence, having a disability, and parental mental health concerns. This isn't an inclusive list, but it's some of the big ones. 

I hope that you were sitting down when you started to read this blog post. Or, I hope you're sitting down now. I've been studying this stuff for almost two decades and sometimes I can barely remain upright if I read enough of these cases at once. 

To my original child welfare mentor - thank you for asking me to work on the child death panel two decades ago. It was a beginning of a career for me, an opportunity to develop a specialization, and to work on something that truly matters. That specialization got me to Congress and it got me a position on the Senate Finance Committee last year. How to prevent these deaths? How to intervene at the right time without limiting children's or parents' rights? We haven't figured that out entirely yet, but I like to think that we're getting closer. And, Maine is the most recent state in the line of fire to try to get closer. So honored to have played a small role in that part.