PRESIDENT CLINTON'S BUDGET PROPOSAL FOR NEW FUNDING
FOR CHILD WELFARE SERVICES TARGETED FOR FAMILY SUP-
PORT AND PRESERVATION SERVICES.
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED THIRD CONGRESS
FIRST EDITION
APRIL 21, 1993
STATEMENT OF DEBORAH DARO, DIRECTOR, CENTER ON
CHILD ABUSE PREVENTION RESEARCH, AND RESEARCH DI-
RECTOR, NATIONAL COMMIITTEE FOR PREVENTION OF
CHILD ABUSE
Ms. DARO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You know, efforts to prevent child abuse and to support children
in this country are not new; they are not limited to small areas.
There are literally thousands of programs around the country that
have had success in reducing a child's risk for physical abuse, ne-
glect, emotional maltreatment, and sexual assault.
As a field, child abuse prevention has accomplished a great deal.
We have a very aware public. We have parents increasingly willing
to reach out and ask for assistance before they harm their children.
We have an increasing array of programs which they can reach out
to.
We have a widespread willingness on the part of people to get
involved, to do something to prevent child abuse. The fact is that
in this country, every year one in four of the general public, one
in three parents, do something to prevent child abuse. What do
they do? They help their neighbors, they help their friends get the
services they need. They volunteer in parent support groups. They
do parenting education classes. They give money to organizations
that help prevent child abuse.
And we have seen a change, I think, in the normative standards
of parenting in this country. We do repeated public opinion polls,
and since 1988, we have seen 11 percent fewer parents reporting
the use of insulting and swearing at their children; 12 percent
fewer report the use of spanking. Now, maybe they are lying to us
and they didn't lie to us m 1988; but even if they are lying, it rep-
resents a change in the normative standard, that people are under-
standing there are different ways to relate to your children other
than using physical force.
Despite these gains and encouragement, the prevention field has
failed a large number of families, and these are the families that
swell our protective service caseloads; these are the families that
are showing up in foster care, and the children that are showing
up as suicides, runaway youth, teen pregnancies, and a host of
other problems that plague our children.
I think the reason for this is twofold. As you have heard from
many witnesses, the current child welfare system is simply under-
funded, overwhelmed, and cannot get the job done. It is a system
that can't even begin to think about being preventive or protective
of children.
Second, the prevention field has failed. We have been too frag-
mented, too disorganized. We haven't provided services in enough
venues, in enough different settings, in order to reach those fami-
lies that are truly at risk.
I think President Clinton's initiative goes a long way toward pro-
viding the leadership and the resources we need to make preven-
tion work for all families and to bring child protective services on
as full partners for prevention.
Let me talk a little bit about the child protective service system
as we see it, and then talk about an initiative we have at the na-
tional committee called Healthy Families America. It is an initia-
tive that we hope will bring universal home visitation services to
all new parents eventually, but in the short run at least to those
parents that are in the moat difficult circumstances.
With respect to the child welfare system, things are not good,
and you have heard it from a number of speakers. Every year we
do an annual survey of child welfare administrators, and in 1992
the data were the same that we have seen for years. Overall, al-
most 3 million children were reported as suspected victims of mal-
treatment, 8 percent more than were reported in 1991, 50 percent
more than the number reported in 1985. Most tragically, for the
fifth consecutive year, three children a day have died as a result
of child abuse.
The case that Congressman Reynolds was talking about is not
that unusual. We would like to think it is unusual. But three chil-
dren a day die as a result of parental maltreatment.
The situation in Waco, TX, was awful. Twenty-four children died
in one fell swoop. But during those 52 days, when the Federal
troops surrounded that compound, over 150 children across the
country were killed by their parents. These are generally young
children; over 80 percent of them are under 5; almost 50 percent
of them are under the age of 1.
As reports go up and the deaths go up, we would like to think
that funding goes up. But this is not the case. There are only 13
States that had increases in resources allocated to protective serv-
ices last year, and the balance of States had stable or decreasing
funding.
Federal allocations to child welfare have gone up, but they have
gone up primarily for foster care. In 1985, for every dollar the Fed-
eral Government spent on services, $3 was spent on foster care.
Today that ratio is 1 to 10.
Clearly, we need to move to a system where there are additional
resources to provide services for child welfare. Last year we esti-
mate that over a half a million children, confirmed cases of child
abuse, received no therapeutic or supportive interventions. We are
very good at identifying children, investigating children, labeling
children, and then we seem to forget about them.
This imbalance between the demand and supply has created a
system that can only respond to crisis and extreme cases of mal-
treatment. It is a system unable to offer families any significant as-
sistance until they harm their children.
Now, certainly greater resources are needed, but beyond that, we
also need to be thinking more broadly about how to reach these
families in crisis.
Let me spend the remainder of my time talking about our initia-
tive at NCPCA. Healthy Families America represents a public-pri-
vate partnership and a new way of thinking about prevention. It
is a new way to deliver our services. Our goal, as I said earlier, is
to bring home visitation services to all new parents, particularly
those parents in difficult circumstances.
This is a recommendation that was raised certainly by the U.S.
Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect a few years ago, and
it is one that they came to based on their renew of the empirical
evidence. We know that home visitation can work. As Dr. Barnard
was saying, this isn't an unusual finding. Research has repeatedly
found that early intervention to high-risk parents, even parents in
general, can enhance parent-child interactions, result in less phys-
ical punishment and a greater use of alternative disciplines, de-
velop greater understanding about how children develop and what
children need, develop a more effective use of formal and informal
supports.
One of the wonderful byproducts of home visitation is it teaches
parents to be good consumers. It doesn't help to have a market and
a wonderful array of services if parents don't know how to access
them and use them.
We see among families that get these services fewer subsequent
pregnancies, better spacing between children, and in many fami-
lies, higher employment rates, less welfare dependency.
Prevention can save enormous money, not just in terms of its
saving to child protective services, but to the other health and edu-
cational systems that are certainly overburdened.
The program that we are basing our efforts on is located in Ha-
waii, As Dr. Barnard said, it is called the Healthy Start program.
The State of Hawaii today is screening 52 percent of all births.
Ideally, they would love to provide home visitation services to all
new parents. They can't afford to. So what they do is identify those
families that are most in need, and they will provide services up
to a 5-year period.
The evaluations of these programs have been very promising,
and we expect that if this system is put in place nationwide, we
can see a tremendous decrease in the number of cases coming to
protective service caseloads.
When we talk about Healthy Families America, we are not talk-
ing about another home visitation program. We are really talking
about a system, a system that will systematically assess families,
determine those families at greatest need, and reach out and pro-
vide services to them. Protecting children and preventing child
abuse is an enormous challenge, and no one has the magic answer.
It is a big job, and no one funding stream is big enough, no one
agency, be it a Federal agency or a State agency, to get the job
done. No public, no private agency can do it. It really is a joint
partnership, a venture that everyone needs to be on board with.
We welcome the initiative as the President has put it in this leg-
islation. We think it will go a long way toward building this kind
of cooperation, bringing child protective services into full partner-
ship with prevention. Until prevention becomes a primary objective
of this system, child abuse reports will continue to swamp a system
that is ill designed to deal with it, children will be unnecessarily
harmed, and as a society we will pay dearly for our lack of vision.