Molly Tierney: First, what’s your point of view on child welfare as primary prevention?
Wendy Henderson: Other social services agencies are better suited to delivering primary prevention. Child welfare should provide secondary prevention. Too often, though, child welfare removes children from their homes because their families are in poverty. In Wisconsin, we’re focusing on making sure the system involves the “right” families—those that come to us truly because of an allegation of abuse and/or neglect. We want to keep the “wrong” families—the ones who are simply struggling with poverty—out of the system.
Tierney: What guided your thinking about where it might be possible to divert the “wrong” kids from secondary prevention?
Henderson: We always start with data, and a couple of powerful data points kicked off our thinking. First, we analyzed what we call our “short stayers,” the kids we remove from their families for 30 days or less. On paper, that’s a short separation, but it changes that child and family forever. The damage is difficult or impossible to undo.
Second, we looked closely at the overlay of poverty and child welfare. In Wisconsin, as in many places, there’s a straight line between poverty, race and child welfare. They’re just inextricably intertwined.
We started to ask, What can we grab hold of? That’s when housing came to the front. It became even clearer as we looked at the relationship between the COVID-19 eviction moratorium and the reduction in removals based on housing.
We challenged ourselves to find new ways to work with families who shouldn’t be in the child welfare system. At the same time, we’re revising our safety model since that’s the mechanism for starting the process.
