West Virginia: Child removal capital of America

In 2022, West Virginia took away proportionately more children than any other state — even when rates of child poverty are factored in. (Getty Images)

I have followed the harm done to children by America’s child welfare systems for nearly half a century, first as a journalist, now as an advocate. In all that time I have never encountered a state so mind-bogglingly fanatical about tearing apart families that even foster care agencies think it’s too much – until now .

Yes, even agencies typically paid for each day they hold a child in care say West Virginia is taking away too many children. They’re right. Year after year, West Virginia is the child removal capital of America.

In 2022, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, West Virginia took away proportionately more children than any other state — even when rates of child poverty are factored in. West Virginia’s rate of sundering families was more than quadruple the national average .

Looked at another way: In 2022, 185,600 were taken from their homes and 366,400 were stuck in foster care on any given day. Had every state been like West Virginia, 930,000 children would have been torn from their parents in 2022 alone.

So it’s no surprise that West Virginia uses what is, by far, the worst form of placement, group homes and institutions, at a rate more than 50% above the national average .

In West Virginia almost every Black child is born with a target on his back. Nearly one-third will be placed in foster care at some point before they turn 18. (It will happen to 17% of white children) and 14% of Black children will have the right to live with their own parents taken from them forever.

All this is not because West Virginia is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than anywhere else.  In fact, 85% of children in foster care were placed there in cases that did not involve even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. Fifty-five percent did not even involve an allegation of substance abuse.  Vastly more common are allegations of neglect, inadequate housing or a child’s behavior problem — conditions which often mean simply that a family is poor .

The oppression of impoverished families by child protective services in West Virginia is so extreme that Human Rights Watch, a group probably best known for condemning the human rights records of foreign dictators, singled out West Virginia’s child welfare system for condemnation.

The justification for all this is the Big Lie of American child welfare — that tearing apart huge numbers of families is necessary to protect children. So, does anyone think West Virginia has the safest children in America? On the contrary, West Virginia’s take-the-child-and-run mentality makes all children less safe.

Because typical cases are nothing like the horror stories, study after study finds that children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. And yes, that’s even true when the issue is substance use.

The harm occurs even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.

Even that isn’t the worst of it. The more that workers are overwhelmed with false allegations, trivial cases and children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger. That’s almost always the real reason for the horror stories about children left in dangerous homes.

But while agencies are right to urge West Virginia to finally stop its obsession with tearing apart families are right, they’re wrong to suggest that everyone must sit around waiting for this to happen before curbing the institutionalization of children.

For starters, stop taking these agencies at their word when they tell you how wonderful their own institutions are and how supposedly there’s no alternative — and start looking at the research . You’ll find that even when these institutions are not rife with abuse, they are inherently harmful to children.  There is nothing a so-called “residential treatment center” can do — including schooling — that can’t be done better and at less cost with wraparound programs.

But as long as residential treatment is an easy dumping ground, the sea-change in approach West Virginia needs will never happen. We need those community-based programs, but if you keep the institutions open, those new programs will simply further widen the net of needless intervention into families. Fat-and-happy residential treatment providers will get fatter and happier — at children’s expense.

So if the question is: Should West Virginia curb needless foster care or close needless institutions? The answer is: Yes.

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