The front-page headline asked the difficult question: “Can the system always prevent tragedy?”
Anyone who read it had to be pulling for the answer to be yes, children can be protected from abuse and maltreatment, all the time and every time. But we knew better even before digging into the lengthy report in Sunday’s News Tribune, a story that painted a clear picture of a child-
protection system fighting a sincere but never-ending and uphill battle against evil and the unpredictability of substance abuse, mental illness, bad parenting, absent parents and more.
It’s a system with cracks. If it wasn’t, a 14-month-old Duluth girl, barely a toddler, wouldn’t have died this summer. In her bed - which should be the safest of all places for a child - she allegedly was suffocated by her father. He wanted her to be quiet so he could go smoke marijuana, according to criminal filings in the case. He told authorities that causing her to pass out had worked in the past.
In the days that followed the News Tribune reported that social workers had been contacted about the girl and suspected abuse seven months earlier and that county workers had met with her family on several occasions. To no avail.
“Did a breakdown in the child-protection system play a part?” News Tribune reporter Brady Slater asked in his excellent story. He put that question to St. Louis County Initial Intervention Unit Supervisor Mark Wilhelmson.
“I wish social work was an exact science, but people have to make judgments,” Wilhelmson said. “We’re in the risk-management business.”
Even the best of judgments don’t come with guarantees. Through August, St. Louis County fielded 882 reports of child abuse or neglect, Slater reported. That’s about on pace to continue an upward trend. Last year the county received 1,350 reports. In 2012, the number of reportedly maltreated children in St. Louis County was 1,098. Social workers are juggling 30 cases at a time.
Also, St. Louis County owns one of the highest rates in Minnesota for determining maltreatment: Seven out of every 1,000 children were the victims of abuse in 2012 in St. Louis County. The state average was 3½ per 1,000.
The system does have its successes. More than 500 children were reunited with their families between 2009 and 2012 after their families worked with social workers, the courts and others to make changes in the name of safety. In 98 percent of those cases, Slater reported, no reoccurrence of abuse or neglect was reported.
“Everyone (in the child-protection system) does their absolute best. There are things one cannot reasonably predict,” Pat Schaffer, the public health and human services division head in the St. Louis County Attorney’s Office, said in Sunday’s story. “It was an incredibly tragic outcome for that child (in Duluth this summer). Does that mean something’s wrong? Or was it just a tragic set of circumstances? People want to find blame, but there’s a lot of really great work being done by (child protection).”
No question there is. And that work can continue, and must continue, with lessons learned from tragedies like the one this summer and from tragedies averted that thankfully we never hear about. Changes to the system can be made on an ongoing basis with a goal of better handling all cases.
“My whole career in child and family services, the whole staff has worked based on the belief that we can avoid child abuse and neglect. That’s what drives our work with families. That’s really what’s behind what makes social workers work so hard,” Holly Church, St. Louis County’s health and human services’ children and family services director, said in Sunday’s story. “But we cannot do it alone. We cannot act on information we don’t know. We aren’t always in control.”
No system can be 100 percent effective, especially not when human nature is a huge factor. But our child-protection system can work toward that 100 percent of the time.
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