Child Abuse Deaths Drop but Agencies Still Fall Short

Child abuse in Los Angeles County declined slightly in 1997, but far too many children were abused or killed by their parents or caretakers--and they often fell through the cracks of a safety net that was too uncoordinated to protect them.

Those were some of the conclusions of the county’s Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, which is to release today its annual report on the status of child-protection efforts in Los Angeles.

The lengthy report’s findings, based on a year’s investigation by dozens of social workers, law enforcement authorities, child-abuse experts and elected officials, is a mixed bag of good and bad news.

It found that there were 45 children killed by parents or others entrusted with their care in 1997, down from 53 the year before. The 1996 figures were skewed, the authors noted, because they included an incident in which a man set fire to his house and killed his six children and his wife.

Otherwise, the number of child homicides has remained constant over the last nine years, said the council’s executive director, Deanne Tilton-Durfee. Almost all of those cases were perpetrated by parents or caregivers, as opposed to strangers, she and others concluded in the 356-page report.

Children died from myriad causes, the report said, including malnutrition and neglect, physical trauma, drug ingestion, drownings and suffocation.

There were 33 fetal deaths reported to the council from the various law enforcement and welfare agencies in 1997--a 10% increase that the report’s authors said was due largely to maternal drug use.

The report’s authors also found that drownings and other accidental child deaths jumped sharply--about 41%--from 61 reported in 1996 to 86 in 1997. But suicides among children and teens decreased by 44%, with 20 reported.

And the general incidence of child abuse and neglect appeared to be declining, with calls to a county hotline, to Department of Children and Family Services caseworkers and to the juvenile dependency court dropping by about 10%.

One council member, Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash, said Friday that those encouraging trends have, if anything, escalated over the last 18 months. That’s mostly due, he said, to Southern California’s robust economy and its low incidence of joblessness, and a successful assault against the crack cocaine “epidemic” that had left many children in the care of drug-addled biological or foster parents.

“It’s a real breath of fresh air for everybody, and we hope the trend continues,” Nash said. “We are not talking about the problem going away. Those are still significant numbers.”

Significant, perhaps.

But in a county as large as Los Angeles, some council members said they were more troubled by what was not in the report than by what it contained.

Child-abuse experts on the council said they believed there are potentially tens of thousands of children who remain at considerable risk of abuse and neglect on any given day, because school nurses, doctors, police officers and others don’t notice obvious warning signs and take steps to protect them.

“I strongly believe that we are missing a huge number of child-abuse cases,” said Tilton-Durfee.

Even after compiling such annual reports for 14 years, Tilton-Durfee said, “we can’t even be sure what the extent of child abuse and neglect is in this county.”

Like others, she blamed that on “an accountability system that is disturbingly inconsistent and woefully inadequate to confidently provide a true and credible picture of the nature and extent of child abuse, neglect and fatalities in Los Angeles County.”

Billie Weiss, a council member who tracks child violence and homicides for the county Department of Health Services, agreed.

“We came across cases this past year where a child died or was killed and there wasn’t any contact with any of the agencies that there should have been,” said Weiss. “It was noticeable.”

Tilton-Durfee, in fact, said the council concluded that the county’s vast and complex child-protection apparatus had come into contact with only one in three of the 45 children killed by their parents or caretakers, even though many had suffered chronic, repeated abuse throughout their short lives.

Another problem, she and others said, is that there are many different agencies tracking child abuse, many of them with incompatible reporting systems and computer databases.

One child-abuse “central index” operated by the state Justice Department lists 13 child homicides in the county for the year 1997. Another database, using vital statistics gleaned from death records, tallies 28 deaths for that year. And a “uniform crime” law enforcement repository lists 33 such deaths. “Their numbers are different and their cases are different,” Tilton-Durfee said.

For instance, she said, some county officials didn’t even know about three of the 13 cases that state Justice Department officials were aware of.

And law enforcement authorities knew about the case of one infant who was beaten to death and even prosecuted his caretaker--but county social workers were never notified so they could take steps to protect other children potentially in the care of the killer, Tilton-Durfee said.

The council arrived at the total of 45 child homicides by reviewing all of the various databases and pursuing leads that may have been contained in one but not another.

One of the report’s recommendations is that all of the law enforcement and social service agencies share information and use the same criteria. Tilton-Durfee said a bill in the state Legislature, sponsored by state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), would require them to do just that.

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, the newly appointed chairman of the child-abuse council, said he too is concerned that many cases are going unnoticed and unreported. He said he will ask all the council members to report back in the coming months on how to tighten the safety net for the county’s children.

“We cannot do our task of protecting children unless we have all agencies cooperating at maximum operating levels,” Garcetti said late Friday. “I can’t say that that is happening now.”