Vulnerable kids are dying while adults worry about racial disparities
The 45-minute online training for mandatory reporters of child abuse in Minnesota leaves participants with one overriding (and shocking) conclusion: You should be more concerned about adding to racial disparities in the child welfare system than you are with protecting children from abuse.
The training is heavily weighted toward “critical thinking” when it comes to reporting child abuse. Throughout the training, participants are encouraged to “pause” and examine their biases as they ask the question, “Would I be reporting if this family looked like mine.” If a child is being abused, the answer should be a resounding “YES.” But in woke Minnesota, the mandatory reporter training is more concerned about the racial makeup of families in the system than they are with protecting children. It’s shameful.
The Training
The training is offered through Minnesota Child Welfare Training, which is part of Gov. Tim Walz’s new Department of Children, Families and Happy Thoughts. The University of Minnesota is also involved.
State law requires people who regularly come in contact with children such as teachers, doctors, coaches and law enforcement officers to be “mandatory reporters” of abuse of children. In other words, they have to be on the lookout for six different categories of child abuse and immediately make a report if they believe a child is in danger. The six categories are neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, threatened injury, mental injury and substantial child endangerment.
The training offered by the state is focused almost entirely on the idea that implicit and explicit bias plays an over-sized role in deciding whether or not to report possible abuse of children. Before they even explain what abuse is, the training warns:
Despite our best intentions and our belief in evidence-based practice, mandated reporters experience challenging circumstances that can yield decisions that negatively impact families and children. Reporting requires a professional to utilize critical thinking to look beyond their perceived legal and ethical obligations to support families. In addition, pausing to apply critical thinking helps to incorporate all that we know about bias, trauma, and racial disproportionality in child welfare.
They immediately frame reporting as something that can “negatively impact families and children,” setting aside the fact that child abuse also negatively impacts children. Throughout the training module the term “critical thinking” is used, a buzzword that means don’t believe your lying eyes, there is another explanation for those bruises.
The course starts out on the right foot by explaining the different types of people who are considered mandatory reporters under the law. But before even describing what abuse looks like, they introduce a critical thinking tool with the acronym PASS.
The self-reflection piece involves “asking questions to check your bias.” And encouraging reporters to “support” families by connecting them to resources instead of reporting them to child welfare exposes the inconvenient truth about the system: Poverty, not race, is the strongest indicator of potential child abuse. A mandatory reporter witnessing neglect doesn’t have the luxury to ponder the societal causes — they need to help that specific kid, immediately. But that’s not the belief of those in charge of Minnesota’s training program.
Pause, analyze, check your bias, connect the family to resources, but by all means don’t report them to the “system,” especially if the family “doesn’t look like yours.”
One video in the training scares potential reporters away from adding to the racial disparities in the system, warning: “We may unconsciously be either more vigilant or lenient towards groups of people, settings or types of behavior and this can skew how we assess whether we need to report.” The video cites research showing disparities for children in certain minority groups.
In a bizarre twist of logic, the child welfare system becomes the enemy, not child abusers. One slide in the training shockingly characterizes native infants as facing a “risk” of being investigated by child protective services.
At “risk” of being investigated?
Next the training devolves into a discussion of possible cultural differences in parenting and how those might impact reporting. The “norms, values and traditions” of some cultures may be different than ours, so “be curious” before filing a report of abuse. Again, they encourage reporters to pause and reflect:
They also fight back against what looks like a counter-narrative in reporting: When in Doubt, Make a Report. The attitude in Minnesota is the report itself can do more damage than the underlying neglect or abuse.
At this point in the training, we haven’t even learned what abuse looks like. The bias training is clearly the most important topic and receives the most time and emphasis.
Just as David Zimmer points out in his latest crime report, there is a difference between racial “disproportions,” which do exist in data, and unwarranted racial “disparities,” which do not exist in Minnesota’s criminal justice system. The fact that racial disproportions in the child welfare system exist should not force a change in policy and definitely should not discourage mandatory reporters to hesitate before protecting children. As mentioned earlier, poverty plays a much bigger role than race.
Walz policy making it worse
Instead of putting children first, Gov. Tim Walz and his trifecta Democratic government went the opposite direction in 2024 by passing the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act. The new law tips the scales against protecting children in favor of keeping families together, even when the family is the source of abuse. Considered the most radical child-welfare-reform bill in the country, the new law makes it harder to remove “disproportionately represented” children from homes where they may have been neglected or abused, keeping black and minority kids in unsafe environments in the name of racial equity.
Meanwhile, kids are dying. Safe Passages for Children is a Minnesota nonprofit working to keep kids safe in the child welfare system. They produce an annual report of Minnesota child fatalities from maltreatment that should be required reading for any policymaker hung up on equity over child safety. The report tells the horrific stories of Minnesota kids who have died from maltreatment after being placed back in dangerous homes, sometimes in the name of equity. The stories are made more horrific by the fact that they were preventable. Most of the kids who die of maltreatment are “in the system,” but Minnesota’s system is set up to protect society from embarrassing racial data, not protect children from abuse and death.
Safe Passages is leading the fight in Minnesota to change the mandatory reporter training in Minnesota. They featured a horrific example of abuse in a recent email:
Children are often abused behind closed doors. That’s why it’s so important to speak up for them.
Just this week, a woman from St. Joseph was arrested for malicious punishment of a child. In addition to abusing the toddler in her care, she told the child to defecate on the floor and eat it.
No child should be subject to repeated physical and emotional scars. No child should have to live in fear of what may happen when they’re alone with an adult
Yet nearly 6,000 children in Minnesota – yes 6,000 children – have endured “substantial child endangerment” since the beginning of this year, warranting a visit from counties within 24 hours, which happened only 82 percent of the time.
We need to get over ourselves as Minnesotans and stop seeing every issue through a racial lens, especially when children’s fundamental rights are at stake. The entire goal of the mandatory reporter training is to lower the number of child abuse reports among minority groups in Minnesota, not protect children. This training needs to be scrapped and replaced with something that will encourage mandatory reporters to actually file reports to protect children.