Earlier this month, the independent watchdog monitoring Maine’s child welfare agency went before the legislature’s government oversight committee and admitted frustration. In recent years, she has repeatedly identified the same problems with the agency’s approach to child protection investigations, she said, yet little has changed.  

“I don’t enjoy, you know, essentially writing the same report every year,” Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman Christine Alberi said on Jan 10, presenting her latest annual report. “The practice issues the department is struggling with continue to be the same.”

The problems identified in the report included a cascading list of failures at the Department of Health and Human Services’ child welfare office: failure to conduct sufficient investigations, failure to recognize risks to children, failure to monitor safety plans, failure to identify neglect, failure to interview witnesses, failure to conduct drug screens, failure to file paperwork on time — or at all.

It also described problems with the office’s software system, a shortage of attorneys to represent parents and a lack of support services for families.

The report highlighted several cases in which allegations were not investigated quickly or thoroughly enough, children remained in unsafe situations after investigations, or children were placed in unsafe environments after removal. 

“I’ve sat here on this committee for four years,” said Sen. Jeff Timberlake (R-Androscoggin), the government oversight committee’s ranking Republican senator. “Everything the department has come forward and asked for, we have given, whether it was money or time.” 

Timberlake asked Alberi what she thought was preventing the department from improving its training and practices. 

“I wish I knew for sure,” Alberi said. “Lack of people to do the training and lack of time.”

The discussion at the hearing seemed focused on the idea that Maine needs to grow its child protection system, that it needs more workers and more training to remove more children from unsafe environments.

But a new federal report published earlier this month shows Maine is already reporting, investigating and finding abuse and neglect at a higher rate than most states, yet not necessarily keeping them any safer. 

The latest child maltreatment report from the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which covers 2023, aligns with previous federal reporting that showed Maine is moving against national trends, investigating more families and removing more children while child protective agencies in nearly all other states are moving in the opposite direction. 

The most recent federal foster care data showed that the national foster care population fell 15 percent between 2018 and 2022. In Maine, it rose nearly 40 percent over that same period. Last year, Maine had more children in state custody than at any other time in the last 20 years. 

The new federal report bolsters some advocates’ argument that Maine is failing to keep kids safe not because it is investigating too few families but because it is investigating too many, and failing to identify the true threats in the deluge of cases.

“I talked to policymakers, and they’re like, ‘Okay, we’ve added 100 case workers, and we’ve thrown all this money at the agency. Why are kids still dying?’” said Melissa Hackett, policy associate at the Maine Children’s Alliance. “It’s because we’re flooding the system.”

“If you’re flooding it, you’re going to end up with families being involved that maybe didn’t need to, and you might miss other families that do need to,” Hackett said. “So it’s about getting really laser-focused on the right size role for the agency.” 

The concept of taking in fewer cases is often called “narrowing the front door,” including with exemptions that acknowledge poverty is different from neglect. This argument was absent from the hearing at the statehouse, as was the fact that recent data shows Maine is moving in the opposite direction of most states.

Alberi told The Monitor reducing the number of investigations makes her “very, very uneasy.”

“The more important thing is to just make the correct decisions with the data you have at the time,” Alberi said, “not cut off the fire hose.” 

Defining maltreatment

A Maine Monitor analysis of the recent federal data found Maine has the second-highest rate of child maltreatment of any state in the nation, second only to Massachusetts. But the report’s authors cautioned against comparing states against each other, as different states define child abuse and neglect in different ways. 

Maine parents are not necessarily abusing and neglecting children more than those in other states, but DHHS’s Office of Child and Family Services is finding more of what it considers maltreatment. The department, advocates and parents’ attorneys agree that Maine is more likely than other states to define certain behaviors and situations as abuse and neglect. 

“It is OCFS’ understanding from conversations with other states that Maine is in the minority (if not unique) in that findings are made even if harm did not actually occur,” DHHS spokesperson Lindsay Hammes wrote in an email. 

Maine allows findings in situations that pose a “threat of” maltreatment, even though the maltreatment has not yet occurred, Hammes wrote. As an example, she described a hypothetical situation in which a parent was driving while intoxicated with a child in a vehicle. Even if the child is not harmed, the department could still make a finding of maltreatment. 

In addition, Maine is one of nine states that allows for two levels of findings: “substantiated” and the less severe “indicated,” depending on the level of evidence. Federal data shows that about 40 percent of Maine’s maltreatment findings are indicated.

Indicated findings of neglect are “where your poverty cases are brought in, more often than not,” said parent attorney Taylor Kilgore.

“I wholeheartedly believe that our definitions of abuse and neglect are just way too broad, and the ability to have an indicated finding kind of plays into how broad that is,” Kilgore said. 

Twenty-seven states have exemptions in their laws that acknowledge poverty is not the same as neglect. Maine is not one of them.

But Hammes told The Monitor that the department has convened a steering committee to look at the issue.

“A goal of this work is to ensure the right families are being referred to the Department based on OCFS’ statutory mandate and for others there are community pathways of support,” Hammes wrote. “Those groups are working on a possible statutory revision to clarify that poverty, in and of itself, is not neglect.”

Reporting practices

Mainers are more likely to report suspicions about abuse or neglect than many other Americans. Out of 44 states included in this particular data set, Maine had the fifth-highest rate of referrals to child welfare agencies in 2023, with 106.9 per 1,000 children, or more than one report for every 10 children in the state. 

Maine also had the third-highest rate of referrals that were deemed to not be worth an investigation.  

While many states require that mandated reporters make a report if they are aware of abuse or neglect, Maine also requires reports when there are suspicions that abuse or neglect is likely to happen in the future. 

Maine law requires a mandated reporter to “immediately report or cause a report to be made to the department when the person knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that a child has been or is likely to be abused or neglected.”

Even after referrals not worthy of investigations were screened out, Maine still investigated families at a rate higher than every state except Indiana, Arkansas and West Virginia. 

Maine is more likely than most states to investigate a report and find abuse or neglect, ranking 39 out of the 50 states. 

But after determining a child was victimized, Maine was less likely to offer what the report called “post-response services” than other states. Maine provided those services to 24.2 percent of victims, less than half the national average and higher than only Colorado and Pennsylvania. 

Maine’s poor results in that category are likely influenced by the fact that the state’s system does not capture services provided through contracted agencies, Hammes said. 

“Maine continues to work with contracted agencies and MaineCare service providers to better capture these services,” she wrote. 

Changing policies

Instead of looking across state lines, it’s worth looking at the situation before and after states make changes to their own laws defining child abuse and neglect, said Sarah Catherine Williams, a senior research scientist with Child Trends, a nonprofit research group focused on children’s well-being.

She pointed to Texas, which recently saw a 40 percent drop in the number of children taken into foster care after the state shrank its definition of neglect. The shift has allowed the state to provide “alternative responses” to families, instead of removing children, The Imprint reported.

If a state decides to remove poverty from its definitions of child neglect, it must also provide resources to help alleviate that poverty, said Jill Duerr Berrick, a professor of social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. 

“Telling the public not to report poverty (because it’s not maltreatment), or telling social workers not to substantiate only-poverty cases is important, but it’s equally important to give the public and — especially — to give social workers the tools they need to help parents whose children are suffering because of poverty,” Berrick wrote in an email.