In a comprehensive story about a new report from the Child Welfare Services Branch, Civil Beat posed an important question: Can the decline in the number of children Hawaii holds in foster care be attributed to a shortage of caseworkers? 

The answer is no. Because shortages don’t work that way.

Even at their best, family policing systems (a more accurate term than “child welfare” systems) are arbitrary, capricious and cruel. They routinely make terrible mistakes in all directions. They leave some children in dangerous homes even as they take many more from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help.

An overloaded system makes all of this worse. What should be an examination of a case becomes a look; a look becomes a glance.  There are more snap judgments, and they can go either way.

For example, there may be no field in which the adage “cleanliness is next to godliness” is taken more literally – and with worse consequences – than family policing. In the course of following these issues for nearly 50 years, I’ve seen case after case in which children died, particularly when they died in foster care, in which the caseworker says: “I never suspected anything because the house was so neat and clean.” Conversely, a dirty home sometimes is considered proof of “neglect” and grounds to take away a child.  

That kind of snap judgment is more likely when workers have no time to do more than glance at a home.

If anything, a shortage of workers may increase the number of children in foster care on any given day. That’s because overloaded workers have less time to arrange visitation and write their reports. So court hearings are delayed and foster care is prolonged.

So on one point, for once, CWS is right: The real reason for the decline in the number of children consigned to the chaos of foster care probably does reflect “a shift in mindset among staff.” It’s a recognition of the enormous emotional trauma inherent in tearing children from everyone they know and love, it’s a recognition of the research showing that typical cases are nothing like the horror stories – and in those typical cases children left in their own homes fare better even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.  And, though CWS will never admit it, it is a recognition that independent studies repeatedly find rates of abuse in foster care vastly higher than states report in their official figures.

If anything, this culture change hasn’t gone nearly far enough. National data aren’t available yet, but it’s likely that the number of children taken from their parents in Hawaiʻi in 2023 still will be above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

The Malama ‘Ohana Working Group did a superb job of explaining the enormous needless trauma CWS inflicts on children and their families, but then offered recommendations that are largely bland boilerplate.

So, for example, the report documents how many parents are afraid to seek help because they fear the helpers, who often are mandatory reporters of alleged “child abuse.” Those helpers might feel compelled to turn the parents in to CWS and CWS might take the children. Multiple studies show that, in part for this very reason, mandatory reporting backfires and makes all children less safe.

But the working group failed to recommend that mandatory reporting be replaced with permissive reporting, in which professionals are free to exercise their professional judgment.  Not only would this ease families’ fears about coming forward, it also would reduce the deluge of false reports that take up so much of the time of those overloaded, shorthanded caseworkers. 

Similarly, the burden on caseworkers and, more important, on children, would be reduced if Hawaiʻi narrowed its definition of “neglect.”  Current law says neglect “occurs when a child is not provided in a timely manner with adequate food, clothing, shelter, psychological care, physical care, medical care, or supervision.”  That’s practically a definition of poverty.

All of this means the best way to solve worker overload is not to hire more caseworkers to chase false reports and poverty cases. Instead, hire more workers who can provide concrete help to families to ease the worst effects of poverty, give community-based grassroots organizations the funding they need to help families in the ways they know are best, and create well-funded institutional providers of high-quality family defense – not to get “bad parents” off but to provide alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” so often dished out by CWS. This has been shown to reduce foster care with no compromise of safety.

In short, solve the overload problem not by increasing the supply of investigators who take away children, but by reducing the demand for them.