Increases in Child Maltreatment and Children in Substitute Care
Many other changes in child protective services have been driven by court action at both federal and state levels, and by state legislative bodies. While these reforms generally only directly affect case practice and programs within individual jurisdictions, their cumulative effects are often much broader--advocates, legislators, social welfare professionals, and child protective service system administrators are well aware of developments in other localities, and will often act to change practice in their community in response to changes in other areas. While many positive programmatic benefits have derived from such judicial mandates and case law, court-driven program reforms by nature unfold as a disconnected series of decisions, which compound the complexity of administration, decisionmaking, and service delivery in these systems, and pose significant barriers to improving system efficiency.
Increases in Child Maltreatment and Children in Substitute Care
While such characteristics as parental substance abuse, family poverty, or child health status have clear associations with risk for child abuse and neglect, the actual pathways through which any allegations are ultimately substantiated are quite complex and inherently subjective. For example, the percentage of cases in which allegations of child abuse and neglect are substantiated ranges from 11 to 83 percent across states (American Humane Association, 1995). Further, the types of maltreatment suffered by children can vary considerably across jurisdictions. As can be seen in Table 2, Los Angeles and the state of California attribute a relatively larger share of substantiated cases of maltreatment to abuse rather than neglect than is found in the nation as a whole. These patterns reflect important differences not only in the nature of risks facing children in dif-ferent communities, but important differences in case practice and in definitions of behavior considered abusive or neglectful.
Type of Maltreatment in Substantiated Child Abuse/Neglect
Cases
(in percentages)
Increase in Kinship Care
Limited federal funds are also available for non-AFDC children. This funding stream is currently a discretionary appropriation under Title IV-B (subpart 1) of the Social Security Act. States must match their Title IV-B federal funds at 25 percent. States generally provide additional foster care and adoption assistance to non-AFDC children using state and local revenues and a portion of their flexible Title XX Social Services Block Grant funds. In 1993, federal spending under Title IV-E was about $1.4 billion for foster care maintenance payments and about $235 million for adoption assistance. It is estimated that this uncapped entitlement covers only about 18 percent of states' total spending on foster care maintenance and adoption assistance payments. State and local revenues have been used to support some 68 percent of these payments, Title XX Social Service Block Grant funds have been allocated to cover another 12 percent, and Title IV-B funds have supported less than 2 percent.[3]
The conference committee agreement retains payments for foster care maintenance and adoption assistance as open-ended entitlements. Like the current Title IV-E programs, payments would be limited to children who are AFDC-eligible (for foster care) and to certain categories of "special needs" children (for adoption assistance). The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of these programs at $2 billion in 1996, with costs increasing to $3.7 billion by 2002.
The new Child Protection Block Grant would include two streams of funding--one a capped entitlement that would be $1.936 billion in 1996 and rise to $2.593 billion in 2002, the other a discretionary appropriation of up to $32.5 million. To receive maximum allowable federal funds from this block grant, a state must have in place a number of child protection procedures and standards that represent a maintenance of current standards. In addition, states must maintain their own spending on this program at 100 percent of their 1995 level in 1996 and 1997 and maintain their spending at a 75 percent level in 1998 through 2002.
The conference agreement reauthorizes the reformed CAPTA, with a discretionary funding stream of up $230 million set for 1996 and "such sums as needed" in 1997 through 2002. Of each year's total appropriation, 12 percent is to be set aside for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to use for research and demonstration projects.
In the past decade, as the demand for child protection services has increased, federal support for basic foster care maintenance and adoption assistance support has kept pace--both for payments to families and for increases in child protection staff and training to administer these services (Figure 1 shows growth in IV-E Foster Care Maintenance and Adoption Assistance). In the seven years between 1987 and 1993, federal payments to families for foster care and adoption assistance increased by nearly 200 percent, closely matching the 212 percent growth in the number of children served by these programs over the same period. The new conference agreement legislation would allow payments to foster and adoptive families to continue to expand or decline with need.
Figure 1--Federal Spending on Child Protective Services, 1983-1995
A significant departure from the past, however, is that under new legislation, federal support for child protective services such as abuse/neglect investigation, preventive services, professional development, foster parent training, and recruitment and administration would be capped and allowed to increase by only 34 percent over seven years. In contrast, between 1987 and 1993 federal support for child protection staff and their training grew by 289 percent (see Figure 1). If the incidence of reported child maltreatment and resulting demand for child protective services continue the recent upward trend, states will face shrinking federal support for many core child protection services. A leveling-off of growth in caseloads, on the other hand, will give states a stable federal contribution to the child protective system. Because both federal mandates to meet high standards of child protection and local judicial mandates for child protective services will continue to exist, it will fall to the states to fill the gap created by potential future increased demand for services, or to challenge their child protection systems to do more with existing resources. The investigative capacity of many child protective systems is already tightly stretched or inadequate (Zellman and Antler, 1990). While increased demand without increased resources may result in increased system efficiency, it is more likely to result in a poorer-functioning child protective system (e.g., higher rates of inadequate investigation and more misjudgments regarding risks to children).
As in the past, the conference agreement budget continues to provide discretionary and capped funds for other child welfare services. Historically, discretionary funds for these services (including services to rehabilitate families with the goals of preventing out-of-home placement and returning children to the family, and to promote the permanent placement of children and assist teens' transition to independent living) have not kept pace with the increase in the number of children requiring assistance from child protective systems. As shown in Figure 1, federal funds available under Title IV-B Child Welfare Services increased only 32 percent in seven years between 1987 and 1993 (from $223 million to $295 million), and Title IV-E Independent Living Services, originally funded in 1987, increased 55 percent (from $45 million to $70 million). As a result, over the past decade states have had declining federal support to provide these types of services to a growing caseload. Unless the incidence of child maltreatment flattens, this trend is likely to continue.
It could be argued that one advantage of the new legislation funding these supportive child welfare services is that it combines a number of existing programs into a single funding stream, providing states with broad flexibility in how to spend these funds. Relative to current legislation, however, little additional flexibility will be gained, for two reasons. First, state flexibility will continue to be limited, both in program design and disposition of individual cases, by legal precedent and local court orders that have had an important role in shaping the delivery of supportive services independently of congressional legislation. Second, states have had considerable flexibility within current federal programs to design specific services to be provided; welfare reforms do relatively little to expand this flexibility.
How would features of the congressional conference agreement increase child abuse and neglect? Many low-income families and children will have fewer resources to lift them out of poverty. Limits on the number of years that families can receive AFDC and restrictions pertaining to teen mothers, families who have additional children, and legal immigrants are intended shrink the size of the AFDC population from what it is under existing eligibility criteria. In addition, new pressures for welfare mothers to work are likely to increase the stress experienced by these families, particularly when child care resources and options are limited. Such financial stresses are likely to exacerbate the pressures already facing these families, increasing the likelihood that abusive or neglectful behavior might take place, while simultaneously making it more difficult for children already served by the child protection system to be reunified with their parents.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has estimated that full implementation of Senate welfare reform provisions affecting benefit levels and taxes would result in an addition 1.2 million children falling into poverty.[4] Using 1994 population data, this represents an increase from 10 to 11.2 million children in poverty, raising the poverty rate among children from 14.4 percent to 16.2 percent. Beyond its impact on families near the threshold of the poverty line, the broader impact of the congressional budget plan on low-income families was also estimated. For families with incomes less than $30,000 a year, reductions in benefits (including cash, in-kind, and health coverage) would average $252 per family, while tax burdens would increase by an average of $53 per family. Although the assumptions underlying these projections are open to argument,[5] the estimates are not overly dour predictions of the likely impact of welfare reform on increases in poverty, at least in the short term; in some cases they may be quite optimistic. For example, the projections assume that 40 percent of parents reaching the AFDC benefit time limit will find employment. In addition, they do not appear to take into account new restrictions on assistance to legal and illegal immigrants, which may have a particularly dramatic effect on reducing eligibility for welfare benefits among poor families in California--in 1994, approximately 15 percent of California families receiving AFDC were noncitizens (California Department of Social Services, 1995). Finally, they assume that states will maintain their current level of effort in funding welfare programs.
Although in the immediate future welfare reform is likely to lead to a substantial deepening of poverty for families, longer-term effects are more difficult to predict. These will be influenced by broader trends in economic growth, supply of jobs in low- skilled occupations, and out-of-wedlock birthrates among poor women. Over time, some features of welfare reform may contribute to reductions in poverty by providing stronger work incentives and services to assist the transition to work, and by discouraging births among teens and poor families. However, existing literature on the ability of government programs to change the earning capacity of poor families and decrease single motherhood suggests that these goals will not easily be attained (Edin and Jencks, 1992).
Given the long-recognized association between poverty and child maltreatment, welfare reform will almost certainly place upward pressure on the incidence of child abuse and neglect in California and the nation. Unfortunately, there has been insufficient research to predict the magnitude of this effect. Whatever its size, however, this effect will be overlaid upon a long-term upward trend in demand for child protection services. In the best of all worlds, positive trends such as economic recovery in California could cancel out or minimize the impact of welfare cutbacks on the incidence of child maltreatment. More realistically, the effects of welfare cutbacks will heighten recent trends of steady annual increases in child protective cases.
Kinship placements may also be stimulated as AFDC eligibility limits tighten and benefits are reduced. Some families currently caring for children of relatives in informal arrangements may seek to become approved relative caregivers as a means of gaining access to a restricted welfare benefit. Other families may respond to reduced AFDC access by attempting to have their children removed from their care and placed with relatives who then receive foster care benefits.
Shifting child protection resources from family support services to maintaining children in substitute care is a false economy when viewed from a total cost perspective. It costs considerably more in cash payments to support a child in substitute care (in California, $1100/month) than to support a child who remains with an AFDC-eligible family ($250/month). Furthermore, costs for foster care are the same for each additional child added to the foster home, while AFDC payments decrease with additional children. The added costs of increasing the size of the population that is maintained in foster care will be borne not only by the federal government as part of the continuing uncapped entitlement for these services, but also by states, which must match these expenditures to qualify for the entitlement. The high costs of substitute care, then, may justify a sizable investment in time-limited supportive services (such as mental health counseling and drug treatment) that could prevent out-of-home placement or hasten children's return to their natural parents, even when such investments are not federally supported.
The direct fiscal impact of welfare reform on the capabilities of the child protective system to deliver services is unlikely to be great in the first year or two, since block grant funding levels will be based on the level of recent federal expenditures. Only over a longer period will federal contributions to child protective services under block grants be expected to fall considerably short of the federal share under current legislation. In the first year or two, therefore, the state should anticipate some increased demand for services and stabilized levels of federal support to provide these services.
Intermediate (2-5 years). The congressional legislation on child protection would keep growth in block grant caps low for the next five years. Growth of block grant funds is not likely to keep pace with growth in demand for child protective services if the trends of the last decade continue in subsequent years. The absence of federal dollars will be most acutely felt in the resources available for child protective service staff. States and counties may step in to fill the gaps[7]--indeed, the state will have flexibility to transfer up to 30 percent of their block grant for cash welfare assistance to child protection. However, cash welfare and other social service programs may also be strained and may compete heavily for discretionary state and federal dollars.
Unless child protective services compete effectively for funds commensurate with growing caseloads, the ability of the child protective system to prevent out-of-home placement, triage children into least-restrictive settings, and arrange for permanent placements will decline. Although the child protective system will in principle have flexibility to spend resources on family support services, in reality little flexibility will exist when resources are severely constrained. Priorities will be driven by court mandates to protect the safety of children and by specific court rulings determining the disposition of individual cases.
Severely constrained resources will undoubtedly affect the quality of services provided to maltreated children--the time that staff spend investigating reports of abuse and neglect and managing the cases that are founded will be spread across a larger number of cases. Although court mandates and local oversight of child protective services may pressure the system to operate at maximal level, requirements for the state to be accountable to a federal authority will be reduced. This reduced accountability may additionally contribute to a decline in the quality of child protective services, increasing the risk of harm for some children. Such decline may also lead caseworkers to favor removal of children from their homes as a quick way to ensure the safety of a child when risk is uncertain. Finally, decline in quality is likely to lengthen periods of out-of-home placement, given reduced resources for reunification efforts and permanency planning.
Longer-term. The long-term outlook for child protective services under welfare reform will depend on the success of the reform in changing work and fertility behavior among poor families and on broader economic and social trends unrelated to welfare per se. The new welfare legislation endeavors to create greater incentives for families to work, and to encourage families either to assume the financial burden of raising their children or to defer child-bearing. The long-term effectiveness of these legislative incentives, and the effectiveness of specific programs that the state will undertake to achieve such goals, are major unknowns. Past evaluations suggest that it is no easy matter, even when AFDC recipients work, to raise their wages sufficiently to lift a family out of poverty, and costs of living in major urban areas such as Los Angeles and San Francisco are an added challenge to transitioning welfare families to jobs that can provide them with living wages (Edin and Jencks, 1992). Only time will tell, then, whether dramatic changes in welfare program incentives and innovations in work and child care programs will have their intended effects.
The effects of any new welfare incentives and work programs will be laid upon broader economic and social trends. These broader trends may be much more important than welfare incentives for promoting work and decreasing single-parent families. Factors that will be important include the availability of jobs and wages for unskilled workers, overall levels of poverty, educational attainment, fertility and marriage patterns in young cohorts, the size and characteristics of the immigrant population, and patterns of drug abuse. While it is unlikely that welfare reform will have considerable influence on these broader trends, its success will undoubtedly depend upon them.
Whether or not the child protection system fares well under welfare reform will depend on long-term trends in the incidence of child maltreatment. Maltreatment incidence will be fueled by deepening poverty and unemployment, greater homelessness, escalating drug abuse, and higher rates of unwanted births. Thus, the same economic and social factors that could make welfare reform successful will also ameliorate demand on child protective systems.
The reforms also raise important questions regarding the quality of care offered to maltreated children and their families, and the systems of accountability currently in place to ensure that adequate services are provided. The federal government currently provides oversight of child protective agencies through performance audits and other monitoring systems.[8] As this oversight diminishes with the transfer of greater authority for child protective services to the states, the states should consider whether current oversight mechanisms are sufficient. Particularly when agencies are required to serve more children with fewer resources, early warning of unacceptable compromises in the quality of care provided to children and families is needed.
Evaluate the mix of services needed to protect children and promote their well-being. Child protective systems walk a delicate balance between protecting children from risks imposed by their natural families and ensuring that children will be transitioned to a safe, nurturing, and permanent family situation (either the original or an adoptive family) as soon as possible. Decisions to leave children in their homes or take them into custody, where to temporarily place them, and what type of permanent family arrangements should be sought for them are seldom straightforward. Over time, agencies have developed and increased their range of services, to better balance their mandate to protect children with a preventive mission that supports families in adequately caring for their children. These supportive services include family preservation and reunification programs that target the natural family, kinship programs that provide extended family options, training and services for foster and adoptive families to improve their effectiveness as parents, and independent living programs to assist teens' transition from substitute care to independence. Collectively, these services provide child protective systems with options to deal with the various shades of gray that exist between the extremes of ignoring a report of child maltreatment and stranding a child for years in temporary substitute care arrangements.
When child protective agencies have severely constrained resources, family support services will suffer as resources become increasingly devoted to core protective services. As we argued earlier, this imbalance may actually cost more in total since it is more expensive to support children in foster care and group homes than to support them with their natural families. In addition, the overall welfare of children may suffer with too great a shift in favor of protective over supportive services.
It will be important, then, for California and its counties to consider what the ideal mix of core child protective and family support services should be, both to keep substitute care costs from becoming excessive and to optimize the quality of care provided to maltreated children. Maintaining an ideal balance of protective and family support services may require an increased investment of state and local discretionary funding to expand family support services. Greater reliance on family support services can in some cases avoid the higher cost of cash payments to families for foster care and adoption assistance.
Consider the implications of the state welfare program on child maltreatment. As the state takes the reins of the welfare program for families and designs specific eligibility criteria, cash assistance levels, in-kind contributions, work programs, and child care programs for needy families, it should consider the consequences of alternative designs on the incidence of child abuse and neglect. More generous benefit design in some aspects of the child welfare program (for example, child care for working parents) may translate into savings in child protection costs if it results in less child neglect. Research to investigate the impact on children of welfare changes (such as time limitations, denial of benefits to later-born children, and child care programs), and specifically to what extent these changes increase the risk of child maltreatment, would greatly inform the design of the state's welfare program and suggest ways that the welfare and child protective systems could be more effectively integrated. Integration could be facilitated by linking information systems on services provided to families by a diverse range of health and human service providers.[9]
California Department of Social Services, Aid to Families with Dependent Children Characteristics Survey, Study Month of October 1994, Information Services Bureau, Health and Welfare Agency, 1995.
Curtis, P.A., and C. McCullough, "The Impact of Alcohol and Other Drugs on the Child Welfare System," Child Welfare, 72, November-December 1993, pp. 533-542.
Edin, K., and C. Jencks, "Reforming Welfare," in C. Jencks (ed.), Rethinking Social Policy, University Press, Cambridge, 1992,pp. 204-235.
Halfon, N. et al., "National Health Care Reform, Medicaid and Children in Foster Care," Child Welfare, 73, March-April 1994,pp. 99-115.
Pear, R. "Many States Fail to Meet Mandates on Child Welfare," New York Times, March 17, 1996, p. A1.
Pecora, P. J., J. K. Wittaker, A. N. Maluccio, R. P. Barth, and R. D. Plotnick, The Child Welfare Challenge: Policy, Practice and Research, Aldine De Gruyter, Hawthorne, NY, 1992.
Pelton, L., "Not For Poverty Alone: Foster Care Population Trends in the 20th Century," Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Vol. 14(2), June 1987, pp. 37-62.
U.S. House of Representatives, Ways and Means Committee, 1993 Green Book.
Wulczyn, Fred H., "Home Rebuilders: A Family Reunification Demonstration Proposal," Family Preservation Conference, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington DC, March 10-11, 1992.
Zellman, G., and S. Antler, "Mandated Reporters and CPS: A Study in Frustration," Public Welfare, Winter 1990, pp. 30-41.
[2] These cases include the 1979 Supreme Court case Miller v. Youakim based in Illinois, and the Eugene F. Consent Decree in New York.
[3] U.S. House of Representatives, Ways and Means Committee, 1993 Green Book. These data are based on reports from 31 states in 1991.
[4] The same report estimated that the House welfare reform proposal would increase child poverty by 2.1 million. The report was issued before the compromise proposal emerged from the conference committee, so similar projections for this proposal are not available.
[5] OMB projections are sensitive to assumptions made for expected program growth rates in the absence of welfare reform and for the expected number of AFDC recipients who, upon reaching the proposed time limits for benefits, will find employment. In addition, they do not take into account changes in overall economic growth or levels of unemployment, changes in out-of-wedlock birth rates, or changes in state funding for welfare programs.
[6] If recipients are given some "grace period" for time limits to take effect (for example, the time-limit clock starts after the legislation is passed), then some of the impact will be delayed.
[7] In California, the governor's proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year allocates an additional $31.5 million to partially backfill for a reduction in federal aid. The total impact on the state was estimated by the governor's office to be $45 million; county and local governments would have to assume responsibility for any gap between reduced federal aid and the increase in state backfill funds.
[8] A recent audit revealed substantial problems in the quality of child protective services offered in many states (Pear, 1996).
[9] See Wulczyn, 1992. This program has recently been substantially expanded in New York.