EDITOR’S NOTE: The letter to the editor below was a rebuttal from a recent series of stories by Richland County Children Services director Patty Harrelson, which ran on Nov. 9, 10 and 11 in the Richland Source. As always, the Richland Source hopes to raise the level of conversation in the community and offer a balanced approach to the issues that most impact our readers.

There is a striking statement in the “About Us” section of the Richland Source. Under the heading “proportional in tone” it says: “We report all sorts of news (including hard news like crime), but we work very hard to make sure what we report matches the proportions of our community.”

Unfortunately, in her recent series of columns, the Director of Richland County Children Services, Patty Harrelson, takes the opposite approach. She seeks to shock us with horror stories of children brutally abused and killed – in other communities all over the country – and then seeks to pass them off as somehow typical.

They are not. What truly is shocking is Harrelson’s misrepresentation of the problem of child abuse and her call for “solutions” that would only do more harm to the children she wants to help. 

First she writes that back in the good old days “stories of children being terribly hurt or killed by their caregivers were few and far between. These were the exception, not the rule.” Then she recites her litany of out-of-county headlines to lead us to believe this is no longer true. Then she tells us “the toll keeps rising.”

Fortunately, she is flat wrong. The toll actually has been falling. 

The only acceptable goal for child abuse is zero – every act of abuse is a profound tragedy. But according to the federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment reports the rate of child abuse in America peaked in 1993 – it’s never been as high since. Those same reports show that the rate of child abuse fatalities declined 19 percent between 2009 and 2014, the most recent year for which data are available.

Harrelson ignores these data as she seeks carte blanche to remove more children from their homes, consigning the children to the chaos of foster care. 

So she tells us that “Yes, I am aware research trends toward removal being harmful. But I wonder if part of the reason is we wait so long to do it.”

In other words, forget the actual research, I’ll just speculate that if we tear apart families even sooner, foster care will work after all. 

In fact, the very research Harrelson glosses over suggests otherwise. Two massive studies, involving more than 15,000 typical cases compared outcomes for children placed in foster care to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. Typically, the children left in their own homes did far better in later life. A third, smaller study using different outcome measures found the same results.

Since the status of the two groups was equal to begin with, there is no evidence to support Harrelson’s speculation that if we just grabbed the children sooner, foster care would be better for them. 

All those problems occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population. Multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.

But even that isn’t the worst of it. The more that workers are overwhelmed with false allegations, trivial cases and children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger. So they make even more mistakes in all directions. 

These findings should come as no surprise. Because typical cases are nothing like the horror stories in which Harrelson chooses to wallow. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.”

Other cases fall between the extremes, the parents neither all victim nor all villain. Contrary to Harrelson’s claim that “the law won’t easily allow us to intervene,” Ohio’s breathtakingly broad definitions of neglect could be applied, at some point, to almost every impoverished family in the state. 

Harrelson also complains about actually having to show that parental drug abuse is harming a child before swooping in and tearing the family apart. Again, she appears unaware of what research tells us:

University of Florida researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another with birth mothers able to care for them. After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better. For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with addicted parents. But it does mean that in most cases, drug treatment for the mother is a better option than foster care for the child. 

Keeping impoverished, sometimes troubled families together is not a “misguided” goal as Harrelson claims. Rather, it is the best, and safest, option for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time.

Richard Wexler is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, www.nccpr.org