Analysis of a decade of national data shows no evidence that higher foster care placements correlate to a drop in child abuse- or neglect-related deaths
A new study published in JAMA Network Open, a journal of the American Medical Association, shows that there is no association between placing more children in foster care and reducing child abuse- or neglect-related deaths.
The research examines 14 years of data from all 50 states and finds that child deaths did not decrease when states placed more children into foster care, nor did they increase when fewer children entered care. The findings challenge claims that reducing foster care placements puts children at greater risk.
This pattern holds in NYC, where both foster care entries and child maltreatment fatalities have declined.
The study was led by Dr. Frank Edwards and Dr. Robert Apel, faculty members at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University–Newark, and Dr. Kelley Fong of the University of California, Irvine.
The common but unproven claim that reducing foster care placements puts children at greater risk frequently drives foster care panics — months and years when hotline calls jump and child welfare agencies and judges make politically safer decisions that can devastate families.
Research shows that dynamics of “zero tolerance” and “infinite jeopardy” driven by heightened media coverage and political grandstanding lead to a climate of fear, danger and dread and an environment of blame that influences decision-making.
Extreme outlier cases fuel social outrage that “significantly and directly influence child welfare worker decisions to: accept a referral of alleged maltreatment for investigation, substantiate reports of maltreatment, and place children out-of-home,” according to a 2017 study across all 50 states and the District of Columbia over 22 years.
The new study notes, “Despite public concerns that decreasing foster care entries have led to increases in child fatalities, we found no evidence to support claims of a negative association between rates of foster care entry and rates of child maltreatment mortality rates at the state-year level.” Of course, a population-level analysis cannot answer whether an individual child would be safer in foster care placement. The authors also state that these findings “do not rule out that there may be subpopulations of children for whom there is a negative association between foster care entry and fatality risk.” However, the study found “no evidence that an increase in a state’s rate of foster care entry is associated with a decrease in its rate of child maltreatment mortality and no evidence that a decrease in a state’s rate of foster care entry is associated with an increase in its rate of child maltreatment mortality.”
A 2016 national commission found that child deaths from maltreatment are difficult to predict. Many times, caseworkers will see no reason to consider foster care before an episode of rapidly escalating violence or, more often, parental neglect leads to a child’s death. While research has found common characteristics, the overwhelming majority of “high risk” families will never experience a fatality.
NYC has experienced recurrent panics that have increased investigations, court supervision and family separation, most recently after the 2016 death of Zymere Perkins. Perkins’ death was covered in NYC newspapers 242 times within six months – including 97 mentions in the Daily News and 75 in the New York Post. Seeking to limit family separations, the city child welfare agency, ACS, used court supervision filings as a strategy to limit its risk exposure, and judges approved it. In the three years following Perkins’ death, almost 12,000 more children and their families faced court monitoring than would have been typical. While avoiding extreme increases in family separations, NYC’s panic resulted in heightened and sustained intrusion in Black and Latino families’ lives.
Media coverage of child maltreatment fatalities significantly increased again in 2024 even though reductions in child welfare involvement from 2019-2024 did not come at a cost to children’s safety. Homicides of children under 10 committed by parents are rare in NYC and were no higher in 2024, according to police data. Deaths of any child “known to the system” through an investigation or other ACS involvement in the past 10 years also declined 18% 2022-24 compared to the previous 10 years, according to ACS, and were typical from 2019-2023, including for children under 6 months and under 1 year.
Ever since ACS began to reckon with the harm of family separation 20 years ago, media coverage has often raised alarms in ways reminiscent of the panic that surrounded coverage of crack cocaine in the 1990s. As New York Times Editorial Board Member Brent Staples wrote in a Pulitzer Prize-winning essay in 2018, “The appetite for stories of black depravity” encouraged crack’s bad science to be “swallowed whole, then regurgitated in a racialized form. News organizations shoulder much of the blame for the moral panic that cast [these] mothers…as irretrievably depraved and the worst enemies of their children.”