BY NICOLE GOODWIN

	Art by Natanael Aguilar

When child welfare systems are forced to cut their budgets, often it’s preventive services that are hit the hardest, while child protective investigations and foster care remain funded. The belief is that family support services are nice if the government can afford them, but it’s investigations that prevent child deaths. But a new study of 20 years of child deaths in Sacramento, Calif., has found that cutting preventive services puts children at risk—and wastes money.

Sheila Boxley of the Child Abuse Prevention Center, who headed the team that did the study, explains the findings:

Q: What connection did your report find between child deaths and funding for preventive services?

A: What we found was an almost perfect match between increased funding for preventive services and decreased child deaths due to abuse and neglect, and vice-versa. Between 1999 and 2003, when funding for preventive programs was relatively high, child deaths due to abuse and neglect went down by 2.6 children a year. From 2003 to 2009, when many family support programs were cut, deaths from abuse and neglect went up by approximately one child per year.

In Sacramento, child welfare funding has been cut by almost one-third. With fewer resources, the department has had to continue to do the things they are legally mandated to do—such as investigations and foster care placement—and they have stopped being able to do much prevention.

Since 2009, early family maintenance programs and early intervention services have all but disappeared. A network of family resource centers with a whole array of services—from parent education to home visits to weekly support of families—has been cut significantly. Visiting nurses have taken quite extreme hits. The Black Infant Health Program has also been extremely cut.

Non-profits have begun providing more of the kinds of services that child welfare agencies used to provide, and they seem to be doing it quite effectively and for much less money than similar services delivered through the child welfare system. One major problem is that the non-profits have absolutely been hurt as well, particularly in the areas of mental health and substance abuse services, which we know have a very significant impact on child abuse and neglect. As a result, there are just not enough services to meet the needs of children and families in Sacramento County.

Q: Are you asking for all preventive programs to be put back in place?

A: No, what we’re saying is, let’s spend wisely on programs that we know impact child well-being and prevent outcomes that include the death of children. We would like Sacramento County to look very carefully at programs that have been demonstrated to work and to reinstate those programs.

We want to do that for humanitarian reasons. Insuring the well-being of our children is a moral imperative. There are also solid economic arguments for it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that a child abuse case ends up costing the government about $100,000 over the course of that child’s life. We know we can provide good preventive services for $1,200-$1,500 per year per child. That’s a huge economic argument.

Particularly in the area of child abuse prevention, when we make cuts to programs that work, we wind up paying more. I don’t mean we pay more just in the future, but also in the very same year that we make those cuts, we wind up paying more for investigations, for foster care placements, and for hospitalizations. It’s really pretty clear that, at least in California, when families who need supports don’t get them, they are very likely to return to the child welfare system within the same year with very serious situations.