Two cases involving Michigan’s child welfare system have been in the news lately. So far, Michigan lawmakers are ignoring one and learning the wrong lessons from the other.

At least eight times, educators reported to Child Protective Services that the children of Arturo and Dulce Bazan looked like they had been starved and beaten. Only when one nearly died were they rescued. The Bazans have been charged with starving and torturing the children. So State Sen. Jeremy Moss has introduced a bill to “prioritize a written report from a member of the staff of a school in the online reporting system and place the written report on a priority list for investigation.”

But in the case of the Bazan children, it appears the reports were investigated; the problem was the failure to act afterwards. Had Moss’ bill been law, it would have changed nothing — except possibly to make things worse.  Under this bill, had there been a report from a doctor who saw the abuse and starvation of the Bazan children, it would have gotten a lower priority than, say, a report from a teacher who said a child had inadequate winter clothing.

That’s already the kind of confusion of poverty with neglect that deluges child welfare systems and steals time from finding children in real danger. In Michigan, even among children forced into foster care, 74% of cases did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse; 55% didn’t involve an allegation of any form of drug abuse. But more than one-third involved housing issues.

Stealing time is the lesson Michigan lawmakers should learn from the other case in the news: the false, malicious, anonymous report against former transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Buttigieg writes that even in a situation where child protective services and law enforcement did everything possible to minimize the trauma to his 4-year-old children,

“I worry about any unseen effects this had on our kids, on Chasten and me, and on the rest of our family. Even though the accusation was absurdly and obviously false, and was promptly rejected by law enforcement, I still worry about the harm it has done.”

The overwhelming majority of the falsely accused, almost always poor and disproportionately nonwhite, don’t necessarily get the same kid-gloves treatment. Their trauma is likely to be far worse.

But even that may not have been the worst of it. As the Michigan State Police point out:

“False reports are dangerous and divert law enforcement officers and Child Protective Services workers from responding to legitimate emergencies and protecting vulnerable children and families.”  

So now let’s go back to the case of the Bazan children. Almost always, in such horrific cases, it turns out that the caseworkers were so deluged. They were overloaded with false reports, like the one against Buttigieg, or cases in which family poverty was confused with neglect, or “CYA referrals” from teachers and other mandated reporters afraid not to report even when they don’t really believe there’s abuse. So they had no time to investigate any case properly.

No system will find every genuinely endangered child. But if we want to find more of them in time, there are real solutions:

• Replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. Two states, New York and Texas, have done that. This does not mean the accused gets to know who accused them; it means only that Child Protective Services has to know, in order to discourage false, malicious reports, while protecting reporters who genuinely fear retaliation or other harm.
• Replace mandatory reporting, which research shows has backfired, with permissive reporting. Let professionals working with children exercise their professional judgment, so they don’t deluge the system with reports called in just because they were afraid not to.
• Bolster screening at the Michigan child abuse hotline. Under state law, if what is alleged even “minimally” meets the statutory definition of abuse or neglect, it must be screened in and investigated – there is no discretion. 

In an attempt to ensure that no child in danger is missed, we have created a massive child welfare surveillance state. More than one-third of all children and more than half of Black children will endure what the Buttigieg children endured; for many, if not most, the experience will be far worse. And yet, we still miss children in real danger.

Isn’t it time to try a better way?

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