PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Tazmir Ransom lived a short, painful life and died at his mother’s hand in 2020, his undernourished, 7-year-old body covered in bruises and bite marks.
Ransom was one of 17 child fatalities in Philadelphia that pandemic year, a sharp increase over the nine fatalities reported in 2019. Near fatalities were up from 21 to 29.
Pennsylvania saw a similar increase. Child fatalities went from 51 in 2019 to 73 in 2020.
The figures make Pennsylvania and Philadelphia outliers, nationally.
Early in the pandemic, child welfare officials warned that, with children staying home, unseen by mandated reporters, abuse might increase. However, in most of the country, the opposite happened. A recent federal report shows that abuse and neglect deaths fell by 4% nationally.
City and state officials say much of the increase they saw involved a lack of supervision, rather than actual abuse.
“Whether it was children getting into medication and drugs, whether it was a fall from a window, or into a pool, these were the kinds of things that happen to children when they’re at home,” Deputy Pa. Human Services Secretary Jon Rubin told KYW Newsradio.
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Advocates, though, worry that the increase signals systemic problems.
“It really raises red flags about decisions that were made to insure the safety of children,” Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, said in an interview. “It’s breathtaking and it’s depressing and it suggests we are not at the cutting edge when it comes to protecting children who are abused and neglected.”
Cooper says the numbers show that a 2012 redesign of Philadelphia’s child welfare system is not working to meet its goal of Improving Outcomes for Children.
“I don’t agree with that,” said the city’s Human Services Commissioner Kimberly Ali. “I believe the [new] system is doing great work.”
Ali notes that most of the children who died or were injured in 2020 had no prior involvement in the system. She says the city conducted campaigns to encourage community involvement in monitoring child safety and to prevent the kind of injuries that the city was seeing. Like the state, Ali says most of the increase was ingestion of opioids containing fentanyl. There were also more deaths and injuries involving gun accidents. She says the numbers for 2021 will be lower.
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Frank Cervone of the Support Center for Child Advocates thinks the numbers show more resources are needed.
“To ameliorate poverty, to treat mental health conditions, to provide family visitation sites, family counseling, and none of those are available at anywhere near the level there is need for,” he said.
He also said the system is also feeling the effect of workforce issues that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.
“We didn’t have sufficient workers, or sufficient quality workers, to meet the needs that children and families were presenting,” he said.
He said high employee turnover is a larger problem in child welfare than in most services.
“There’s a loss of case memory, what this child or family needs, what services were delivered or not, where the dangers are and certainly where the strengths are,” he said. “All of that goes out the window when workers leave and then when they leave in a serial fashion — we’re on our third or fouth therapist for a kid—you can’t expect that healing is going to happen in any effective way. And that’s a problem down the road for the well-being of the community and for all these individuals.”
Both Ali and Rubin say their departments continue working to improve services. The city conducts a full review of every fatality and near fatality, making recommendations for how to prevent such occurrences in the future.
Rubin says the state has also convened a trend analysis team to examine the factors behind the increased child fatalities and near fatalities in 2020.
“We do hope to use that analysis to influence policy and practices moving forward,” he said.
Cervone hopes it’s successful.
“These numbers are screaming for our attention,” he said. “It wouldn’t just be imprudent to ignore them. It would be perilous.”