New Jersey: Deaths of Children in Foster Homes – Will the Cover Up Continue?
The New Jersey Office of the Child Advocate wants to stop issuing information on individual cases of children killed in foster homes, preferring to focus on “annual reports on trends” instead, through their Child Fatality and Near-Fatality Review Board.
New Jersey’s State Department of Children and Families apparently intends to continue to release details about cases in which children are killed when under supervision of the state child welfare system.
There have been some terrible, mind-bending deaths of children in foster homes in New Jersey, including starvations. You can search the FightCPS archives for more New Jersey foster child death information.
Source: Clarification: Child welfare deaths story published on August 3, 2009 at Philly.Com.
The Cover-Up
Back when I started investigating child protective services, it was rare to hear about children killed while in foster homes. It seemed foster child deaths were covered up, white washed, and forgotten. In one California county a series of file cabinets full of reports of children abused in foster homes were found in a back room, the reports uninvestigated.
Child abuse in foster homes didn’t warrant investigations because there was no federal money to be made by taking children from bad foster homes. It still seems to be low-priority to many CPS social workers.
Federal funding is only given for taking children from their natural family homes, not from foster homes.
Things have changed in the last twenty years. Now foster child deaths are being reported on in newspapers more often, and those media businesses are demanding access to child welfare records about foster children killed while in state custody.
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