DENVER—The state human services director said Tuesday that the state needs to lay down clearer expectations of what’s expected of social workers investigating child abuse allegations while also stepping up to provide training for them.
Following an investigation into 13 child abuse deaths of children whose families had been contacted by social workers, Karen Beye acknowledged that there are limits to what the state can do to change a county-based social service system that’s only used by 12 other states.
“I’m not sure we can really provide as much consistency county-to-county as other states do,” said Beye, who took over last January after being appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter.
Beye said the department will be clarifying its rules, for example, by telling the counties that they must interview everyone who lives in a house that’s subject to a child abuse investigation. She also said counties will be asked to check two free Web sites that list registered sex offenders, even though they don’t list juvenile cases or people convicted of a misdemeanor. A more thorough program for checking for sex offenders will require funding and isn’t expected to be made available for another year.
Beye ordered the internal probe after a spike in child abuse deaths at the end of 2007.
The study found that more than 70 percent of the families involved in the 13 cases had a history of domestic violence and more than 50 percent had problems with substance abuse. All had involvement with social services in the previous five years.
Of the 13 deaths, 46 percent of the cases involved Hispanic families even though Hispanics account for only 27 percent of the state’s population. Overall there were 41 child abuse deaths in Colorado in 2007, including those where families had been contacted by social workers, with Hispanic children accounting for the largest share of the total for the first time; white families had the biggest share of the deaths in the previous four years.
The study found that communication between counties and between counties and the state continues to be a problem, a significant problem because many families that are investigated frequently move. It was also identified as a stumbling block during Gov. Bill Owens’ administration.
The problem is significant because three of the 13 families in the review had had child abuse reports filed against them in several different counties. One family had reports filed against them in five counties and another state for a total of 11 reports in 19 months.
The study said that counties must increase their use of a database shared by all counties—the Trails system—so that social workers elsewhere can do thorough investigations. It found that the state database and the county system weren’t even in agreement on how many children had died and that county departments are not consistently entering the date of death on fatality assessments. For example, about 38 percent of children listed as deceased in the state ACCESS system didn’t have a date of death listed in the county Trails system.
Beye wouldn’t comment on how the individual counties handled the 13 deaths the state examined to come up with proposed reforms.
While social workers complained of a large workload, the study didn’t assess whether that was the case because there haven’t been any in-depth workload studies.
Beye, however, said that reports of child abuse increased by 44 percent between 2000 and 2007 and that state funding for training was cut by about a third during that period. Because turnover has been so high among social workers, Beye said many start working as they wait in line to get state training even though their academic training isn’t enough to prepare them, for example, for how to deal with people living in a meth lab. She said she’s working to find $100,000 in funding before the end of the state’s fiscal year in June to pay for more training.
“I think competency increases with training, competency increases with oversight, competency increases with supervision,” she said.
