30 August 2023
The littlest victims of fatal child abuse in Minnesota aren’t old enough to count to 10 or tie their shoes and are often already known to child protection agencies.
Minnesota’s Child Maltreatment Report for 2021, released in June, says 17 children died of maltreatment in 2020 and 2021 in the state, all of them with previous contact with child protection agencies. There were 11 other children who died of maltreatment during that time period who had not previously been reported to child protection services.
The identities of those children and the counties where they live is unknown. The Echo Press has requested their identities from the Minnesota Department of Human Services.
The request is pending; however, the department already refused to provide the identities of children who died of maltreatment to Safe Passage for Children, a Minnesota child advocacy organization, which released a report earlier this year on child deaths due to maltreatment in Minnesota.
“I have a feeling that getting more transparency out of child protective services is the only way the public can become knowledgeable about the depth and scope of this problem,” said Mike Tikkanen, founder and president of Kids At Risk Action, a Minnesota nonprofit that advocates for abused and neglected children. “The numbers are horrific.”
What is known about the children who died are their ages, genders, and the manners of death. A 14-year-old boy died of neglect. An 11-year-old boy died of neglect and physical abuse, and a 10-year-old boy died of neglect.
The 13 others were all age 5 or younger, and most of them died of neglect. Five of them were babies under age 1, two of them were 1, three were age 2, two were age 3, and one was a 5-year-old girl who died of physical abuse. There was also a 2-year-old boy who died of neglect and physical and sexual abuse.
In their short, brutal lives, somehow they came to the attention of agencies tasked with the job of protecting them.
Yet still, they died. And the agencies involved often won’t discuss the decision-making that led to their deaths, which not only involves the agency, but also the judicial system. In some cases, they are prevented by law from releasing information they uncover during their investigation of child deaths.
When a child dies of maltreatment in Minnesota, three investigations take place, two at the state level and one at the county level. According to an Oct. 22, 2022, DHS bulletin, the emphasis is not to find fault or place blame, but to figure out how the system failed and to correct the failure.
The state’s critical incident review process makes it voluntary for staff to be debriefed when a child dies. Minnesota Children and Family Services Assistant Commissioner Tikki Brown said she has never heard of staff members declining to be debriefed.
“Any death due to maltreatment is devastating,” she said.
They focus their efforts on providing what families need, whether it’s help with child care, hunger relief, housing or rent, Brown said. Studies have shown that family stress can lead to higher rates of child abuse reports.
She also said the agency is considering whether race plays a role in preventing non-white children from being removed from their homes.
Reports have found that Black children have been reported to child protective services at higher rates than white children, and workers may be responding to criticism by keeping those families together, she said. She said the agency does not know that to be true, but it is one aspect they are looking into.
“It is an all-encompassing approach that we have taken,” Brown said. “It may be slow, but we do feel we are making progress.”
She conceded that the child protection system is not perfect and that it’s a complex system.
“Transparency is incredibly important,” she said. “It does enable public trust.”
The agency does everything it can to share policies and procedures, how the system operates and efforts to improve the system, she said. But state law prevents them from speaking about specific cases.
“This is such an emotional issue for everyone that I think it’s difficult to understand what is it that would make folks feel better about it,” she said. “There’s nothing good about a child’s death. … I think we do the very best we can.”
Meanwhile, Tikkanen said, the system is under immense stress, with workers juggling parental rights against the best interest of the children. He sees fresh college graduates wade into a system that will drive most of them out in a short period of time.
“The amount of trauma and damage done to these kids is going to go through our society over the next 20, 30 or 40 years like a wave,” he said.
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