The Herald vs. the Facts: Fatality Data the Herald left out

THE REAL STORY OF CHILD ABUSE FATALITIES IN FLORIDA

Deaths of Florida children “known to the system” went down 12 percent in 2009 AND PLUMMETED AGAIN IN 2010. Deaths of children "known to the system" were reduced by almost half between 2008 and 2010.

Updated, May 27, 2012, November 12, 2015, and December 19, 2019

A NOTE ABOUT DATES: The annual reports from the Florida Child Abuse Death Review committee are published at the end of the year following the year studied by the committee. As a result, the report on deaths in 2010 is dated December 2011, the report on deaths in 2009 is dated December 2010 and so on.

Deaths of Florida children previously known to the Department of Children and Families declined by 12 percent in 2009 over the previous year, according to the Annual Report of the Florida Child Abuse Death Review Committee for that year. Those deaths plummeted another 40 percent in 2010 (See the report on deaths in 2010 here) - even though in 2009 and 2010 Florida took away the fewest children in more than a decade.

According to the report on deahts in 2010, 41 of the children who suffered deaths due to abuse or neglect had been the subject of previous reports to DCF, (P. 14) down from 69 in 2009, (P. 28). That was down from 79 in 2008. (See report on deaths in 2008, also p. 28). In fact, the 2010 figure is the lowest since 2003

Between 2008 and 2010, the number of children taken from their parents in Florida declined by nearly ten percent. Entries into care are down more than 30 percent since 2003.

We are not claiming that the ongoing Florida reforms, including the reduction in entries into care, actually caused the reduction in deaths. We note only that it is one more piece of evidence that the reforms have not compromised safety.

More significant evidence of this are the findings of the independent evaluations of Florida’s “child first” waiver from federal child welfare funding restrictions. These evaluations, which use far more reliable measures than fatalities – which easily can fluctuate due to random chance – find that child safety has improved.

Also, see the discussion of the limits on comparing fatalities from year to year or state to state on page one and page 24 of the Review Committee report on deaths in 2009.

In her February 27, 2011 story, Carol Marbin Miller arbitrarily tracks deaths of children “known to the system” in Florida only back to 1999. In fact, data both for such deaths and entries into care are available back to 1995, and when all of the data are viewed, in context, they tell a story very different from the one Miller told on the front page of the Herald. Yet Miller did the same in Innocents Lost.

The long-term trend, and key events in Florida child welfare, all the way back to 1995, are as follows:

CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT FATALITIES

AMONG CHILDREN PREVIOUSLY

KNOWN TO DCF:

Year Children taken from their parents Fatalities

1995 5,059* 19

1996 10,816 21

1997 11,046 34

1998 13,980 26

*1995 figure does not include kinship care placements, so real figure probably is 40 to 50 percent higher.

Average 1995-1998: 25

November 1998: Kayla McKean dies,

January 1999: Kathleen Kearney is named to run DCF. Kearney demands a “take the child and run” approach and the number of children taken from their homes skyrockets.

1999 21,118 29

2000 18,765 30

2001 18,673 35

2002 20,800 29

2003 20,549 35

2004 19,932 48

2005 22,147 54

Average 1999-2005: 37.1

2006: Under pressure from Major Connie Shingledecker, who chairs the state Child Abuse Death Review Committee, local authorities become far more likely to label deaths from causes such as drowning as maltreatment [1] rather than accidents. (For details see this entry on the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog)

Or as the 2009 Death Review Committee report itself puts it:

“Definitions and procedures may change within a state over time, as well as statutory requirements for reporting, as they have in Florida, resulting in data that is difficult to compare across years or states.

“Florida has a very active interdisciplinary State Committee administered by the Florida Department of Health. Committee members proactively work within local communities to educate the public and law enforcement on the importance of reporting to the Florida Abuse Hotline child deaths that may not have previously been regarded as the result of maltreatment.” [2]

Entries into foster care also continue to increase in 2006. But, for the reasons discussed above, figures from 2006 on are not directly comparable to previous years.

Entries Fatalities

2006 21,999 76

2007: Florida begins to implement the Child First waiver; entries into foster care start to decline.

2007 19,358 66

2008 15,838 79

2009 14,313 69
2010 14,356 41

On May 26, 2012 an Associated Press story suggested the decline in 2010 might be due to an attempt to undo the damage Shingledecker did in 2006. The story discusses a draft of a proposed common sense definition of when drowning and co-sleeping cases are due to neglect. But this was a draft proposal, never formally implemented. The AP story also neglected to mention that these definitions ever had been broadened in the first place. Details are in our March 27 update, on our Updates page here. Innocents Lost made similar mistakes.

As for what happened after 2010: It's very difficult to know. That's because Florida DCF has so vastly altered the way fatalities are measured and results are released that a comparison is almost impossible.

Florida now has come up with three different definitions of “known to the system” – and applied them to all child abuse deaths, including some categories that clearly are due to maltreatment, such as “inflicted trauma,” some that clearly are not, such as “natural causes” and some, notably drowning, that could be either.

But the available results are grim. Total child fatalities went up. Fatalities also increased in two of the three "known to the system" categories. They stayed the same in the third. In the years that followed, the number fluctuated, going down one year and up the next. In 2018 and 2019 there may be a decline in most categories. In those years, the foster-care panic eased and the number of children taken from their homes started to decline again.

Sources:

Entries:

1995-1998, Child Welfare League of America, National Data Analysis System. This online database no longer exists, but I will provide a scanned printout on request to anyone providing their real name.

1999-2001: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, AFCARS database, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/statistics/entryexit2002.htm

2002-2010: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, AFCARS database http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/statistics/entryexit2010.pdf

Fatalities:

1995-1998: Florida Department of Children and Families, Child Abuse and Neglect Deaths: Calendar Year 1999 (released March 2001).

1999-2010: State Child Abuse Death Review Committee, Annual Reports, available online at http://www.flcadr.org/reports.html

2011-2018: Florida Department of Children and Families, Child Fatality Prevention: http://www.dcf.state.fl.us/childfatality/

1. The pressure, described as “training” is outlined in the committee’s 2006 report on page 1, available here: http://www.flcadr.org/attach/2007CADRrpt.pdf

2. See the committee’s 2009 report (released Dec. 2010) p.1, available here: http://www.flcadr.org/attach/2010CADRrpt.pdf

Why we're responding to Innocents Lost, and earlier failures at the Herald.

This post was updated on February 19, 2012 and November 12, 2015

This website actually began three years before the publication of the Miami Heraldseries Innocents Lost. That’s because the same distortions and misrepresentations that characterize the Herald series were apparent in earlier reporting as well. So in addition to our in-depth response to Innocents Lost, this website includes detailed analysis of that earlier reporting. This introduction also covers both:

About 15 years ago, the state of Florida was the national example of failure in child welfare. News organizations across the state flocked to Florida after it was revealed that a foster child had been missing for 14 months – and was presumed dead – before the state Department of Children and Families even noticed.

In fact, NCCPR had predicted the collapse of the Florida system in 1999, shortly after Kathleen Kearney, a former Broward County judge, was named to run it.

Kearney’s approach to child welfare could be boiled down to a single sentence: Take the child and run. During her first year as DCF Secretary, the number of children torn from their homes soared by 50 percent, the worst statewide“foster care panic”we’ve ever seen. And entries into foster care stayed at this obscenely high level for seven years.

NCCPR issued report after report on Florida’s failure. And ultimately those reports, and other factors had an impact.

A new governor, Charlie Crist, brought in new leadership. First Bob Butterworth and then George Sheldon reversed course and embraced safe proven approaches to keeping families together.Independent outside evaluations found that the reforms improved child safety.And during 2009 and 2010, the two years when Florida took away the fewest children since 1998, deaths of children previously known to DCF plummeted by nearly half.

In 2011, we noted that if anything, there is a need for more such reform. Even in 2010, Florida’s statewide rate of removal still was abovethe national average, and significantly above the rate in states that take, proportionately, far fewer children – including Alabama which the Heralditself says should be a model for Florida. So the notion that, during the Butterworth and Sheldon years, some kind of pendulum had swung too far toward preserving families was a myth.

But ever since Butterworth and Sheldon changed course, opponents – what we have come to call the “Kearney DCF-in-exile” - waited for a horror story in an attempt to discredit the reforms. There’s no literal organization by that name, of course. There are no secret handshakes or clandestine meetings. They’re just a bunch of people who either worked for Kearney or supported her policies; people who believe the destruction of all those families somehow made children safer – notwithstanding overwhelming evidence that it did nothing of the sort.

They found an eager ally in Carol Marbin Miller, the longtime reporter on the child welfare beat for The Miami Herald. Miller is a skilled and tenacious journalist. She’s as good at poring over documents as she is at ingratiating herself with sources and colleagues. She’s mastered the art of making everyone feel she is their friend. Indeed, her ability to make people want to like her also makes it hazardous for anyone to criticize her, since she has so many friends among Florida journalists.

But somewhere along the line Miller went from reporter to advocate – becoming a de facto spokeswoman for the “Kearney DCF-in-exile.” In her stories in 2011, she did exactly what she did in Innocents Lost: She distorted data, took information out of context, got time frames wrong, and systematically left out facts that contradicted her point of view.

That kind of reporting endangers children. In 2011 we wrote that it risked setting off another foster care panic, a huge sudden spike in needless removals of children from their homes. And that, of course is what happened – twice. There was a spike in removals in 2011 and then, just when things had gotten back to normal, Innocents Lost set off a foster-care panic that continues to this day.

Not only does this do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, it also overloads workers so they have less time to find children in real danger and are prone to take shortcuts.

Indeed, that first foster-care panic, under Kearney, may well have contributed to a key failure in the very case that made headlines in 2011, the death of Nubia Barahona, something made clear by the far superior reporting ofThe Palm Beach Post.

The fact that the child who died a hideous death, and her brother, who nearly suffered the same fate, allegedly are victims of a foster father who had adopted them didn’t matter. In a front-page story on February 27, 2011, Miller soon exploited the tragedy to attack reforms that have successfully reduced foster care and improved child safety in Florida; something she’d already tried to do late in 2009. In retrospect, it’s clear that this February 27, 2011 story was, in effect, the template for Innocents Lost

For a short time, it worked. During the first month after Miller's shoddy reporting, entries into foster care soared. But other media didn't buy the snake oil Miller was selling. Virtually every major news organization in Florida has been to this site. Their reporting set the record straight.

Sadly, as of December, 2011, entries into care were up about 13 percent compared with the same period in 2010. That's largely because of poor leadership from the DCF Secretary at the time.

Sadder still, it was just after things calmed down that Carol Marbin Miller and her colleagues engaged in the same kind of shoddy reporting, on a massive scale, and produced Innocents Lost. As we noted above, that started a foster-care panic that continues to this day.

On this website we attempt to set the record straight. This site includes:

● Our full response to Innocents Lost

●Key facts.

●An overview if the distortions and omissions in the 2011Herald story.

●The fatality data theHerald left out then and now.
●The errors line-by-line: Excerpts from the 2011 story with a detailed point-by-point rebuttal.
● The real roots of tragedy in the Barahona case.
● The trouble with “Kearney lite”.
● In search of solutions.

Pages

Fatality Data the Herald left out