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51 Chapter Three States, Scandals, and Child Welfare Policy In 2000 the Connecticut Department of Children and Families was criticized when a three-year-old was killed by his out-of-state foster parent. The agency had sent the child to live with a pre-adoptive foster family in Florida without following established procedures, including completion of a background check on the prospective parents. The boy, who suffered from cerebral palsy, died of suffocation when his foster father wrapped him tightly in a blanket and left him in a bed to punish him for soiling his pants. He had only been in the foster home for a week. In 2001 in Wisconsin, the child welfare system came under scrutiny when a four-year-old girl was severely beaten by her foster parent. The child had previously been removed from the foster home when the foster mother lost her license after striking a five-year-old boy in the head in the presence of state workers. The mother’s license had been reinstated, however, and the girl returned to her care. The state and the county traded charges over who was to blame for the incident. In 2003 the Georgia Department of Children and Family Services came under fire when a two-year-old boy was beaten to death by his stepfather. During the two months prior to his death the toddler and his older brother had been removed twice from the home because of suspected abuse and later were returned home. The case was closed after the mother, a private in the Army, promised to bring the children to live with their grandmother while she returned to her base in South Carolina. The Department of Children and Family Services did not follow up on that promise, and the children were left with their stepfather, who killed the two-year-old a month later. In 2004 the state of Washington’s Child Protective Services faced significant criticism when two babies, one six weeks old and another sixteen months old, were found dead of starvation and dehydration next to their passed-out alcoholic mother. Their two-and-a-half-year-old brother was found alive but seriously malnourished. Child Protective Services had received more than five previous complaints of child neglect against the mother that were either not investigated or only minimally investigated. 52 Chapter Three Between 1999 and 2004 thirty-one states experienced at least one child welfare scandal, and ten states experienced three or more scandals.1 As discussed in chapter 1, anecdotal evidence suggests that scandals like these shape child welfare policy. At the same time, the literature on policymaking suggests there are limits on the extent to which a potential focusing event, like a child welfare scandal, results in observable policy outcomes. This chapter systematically analyzes the link between scandal and policymaking across the United States, controlling for other factors that might affect state behavior.2 I consider two different measures of state policy activity that might be shaped by scandal: spending and passage of legislation. The next two sections of the chapter describe these measures in greater detail. I then develop two statistical models to explore whether scandals are related to changes in child welfare spending and passage of child welfare legislation . These models include other state characteristics that might also be expected to affect spending and legislating. For example, has the state recently entered into a consent agreement in response to a lawsuit involving its child welfare system? Is there a strong administrative role for county government in the state’s child welfare system? Has the state’s child welfare system been recently reviewed by the federal government? What political party controls state government? How liberal is the state population? What is the median income in the state? What percentage of the state population is African American? How professionalized is the state legislature? By including these characteristics of states and their child welfare systems, I am able to look at the impact of scandals, while taking into account other ways in which the state environment might shape policy outcomes. After a detailed discussion of the regression analysis, the final section of the chapter discusses the results of the analysis in terms of their broad implications for understanding when and how scandals might shape child welfare policymaking in the states. Spending on Child Welfare One possible outcome of child welfare scandals is that spending on child welfare programs increases. Collecting this information is not straightforward , because states...

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