Decoded: Say Less on Safety

Say Less: Safety

By: Kimberly J. Martin, JD

Safety can be an outcome to strive for or a process judgment. How you define it drives the details of child welfare policy.

Safety is one of the most powerful words in child welfare. It justifies removals, drives federal funding, and shapes frontline decisions. 

It’s often treated as a moral finish line, but “safety” doesn’t just describe outcomes. It sets the terms for intervention, and it decides whose actions must change. 

The problem is: the definition isn’t fixed, and neither is the accountability it demands. 

Defining Safety

For families, “safety” often signals risk. Being labeled unsafe can trigger the loss of your children, even when the actual issue is poverty, housing instability, or a lack of child care.

In some cases, parents have faced investigation or separation simply for letting children walk home alone or play unsupervised at a park, scenarios that sparked bipartisan concern and gave rise to “free-range parenting” laws in states like Utah and Texas.

These laws reflect a shared discomfort with how subjective safety standards can override parental rights, particularly for low-income or marginalized families.

For systems, invoking safety can justify intervention while deflecting scrutiny. But what exactly are we measuring when we claim to measure safety?

Federal Funding for Oversight and Safety

Under federal law, every state’s child welfare system is evaluated through periodic Child and Family Services Reviews (CSFRs), a process designed to ensure compliance with national standards.

These reviews assess how well states are meeting core outcomes, including safety, permanency, and well-being, and are tied to federal funding under Titles IV-B and IV-E of the Social Security Act. 

One of the key safety benchmarks, Safety Outcome 1, asks whether children are protected from abuse and neglect. In Round 3 (2015-2018), very few states achieved substantial conformity on this measure. 

Most were required to develop Program Improvement Plans, particularly  around safety. But the indicators themselves, recurrence of maltreatment and response time, don’t tell us whether families are actually safer. When safety is defined this narrowly,  systems are held to reactive metrics, not substantive change.

What’s Lost When Making it Measurable

That’s the structural flaw: the system is better at documenting risk than reducing it.

Agencies record whether a visit was made within 24 hours, but not whether the intervention helped stabilize a family. They track whether services were offered, but not whether those services were relevant or effective. 

When child welfare is built to reward what gets written down instead of what gets resolved, safety becomes a bureaucratic goalpost, not a lived reality. 

It explains how a parent can complete every requirement and still lose their child, and how an agency can remain in noncompliance for years with no meaningful consequence. 

The safety plans developed in child welfare systems often reflect institutional priorities more than family needs.

This is because the system is designed to manage liability and demonstrate procedural compliance, not necessarily to respond to the underlying drivers of harm. 

Federal funding incentives, risk-averse agency culture, and the pressure to act quickly under scrutiny often result in standardized plans prioritizing box-checking over tailored support. 

Rather than providing trauma-informed, community-based resources tailored to actual risk factors, plans often fall back on bureaucratic routines, like mandating parenting classes regardless of parenting concerns, requiring mental health evaluations without signs of instability, or insisting on employment even when a parent is already the primary caregiver for multiple children.  

Families are bombarded with and burdened by duplicative documentation requirements and rigid service timelines that rarely account for transportation gaps, waitlists, or the time it takes to recover from trauma.

These requirements create a system that monitors more than it supports and punishes more than it protects. 

ASFA and Safety

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) also embeds a rigid timeline into the definition of safety.

Parents must address conditions that led to removal within 15 months or face termination of parental rights.

Courts have discretion to delay or decline termination, but in practice, that flexibility is rarely exercised consistently.

The timeline can overshadow structural realities: service waitlists,unstable housing markets, or the challenges of accessing care for mental health or substance use.  

The result? Families can be permanently separated not because they are unsafe, but because they couldn’t meet a deadline meant to measure the system. 

Thus, they were set up to fail – told they’d be safer as soon as they completed a service that wasn’t available, secured housing that didn’t exist, or proved stability while living in instability the system refused to address. 

Family First’s Safety Shift

The federal Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) was meant to redefine safety – keeping children safely with their families by funding evidence-based services. 

But even here, “safe” means something technical: a family must be on the brink of removal to qualify for help.

That’s not early intervention, it’s delayed triage. And what safety looks like still varies from county to county, with few mechanisms to ensure consistency or impact. 

Safe From What?

These policies were crafted with bipartisan support, rooted in the belief that children deserve to grow up in safe, stable environments. That belief is universal. 

But what counts as “safe” varies drastically.

And too often, it’s defined by proxies: income level, zip code, substance use history, mental health diagnoses, or even whether a family has prior system involvement. 

We rarely ask: safe for whom and from what?

A child removed from a parent may be physically safe, but emotionally destabilized. A mother working multiple jobs to stay housed may be considered neglectful, while a system that underfunds housing assistance escapes scrutiny.

Safety becomes a weapon when used against families but not applied to the systems meant to serve them. 

Most child welfare investigations are not about abuse; they’re about neglect, often driven by poverty. According to 2023 NCANDS data, more than 64 percent of duplicate victims experienced neglect only. But not all neglect is the same. 

This is where the safety paradox emerges: by treating all neglect as equally urgent, the system floods itself with low-risk cases that crowd out attention to the most dangerous ones. It casts too wide a net and pulls too few from real danger. 

In 2023, approximately 1,700 children died of maltreatment. Of those, 78% experienced neglect, more than physical abuse.

These are devastating numbers, but addressing them doesn’t require removing more children; it requires distinguishing real danger from conditions caused by poverty, and targeting support accordingly. 

If safety is the goal, we cannot afford false positives; they lead to false negatives. Every unnecessary investigation drains capacity from families in true crisis. The path to real safety isn’t more removals. It’s more precision. 

That kind of ‘safety’ response often reflects socioeconomic hardship, not imminent harm. But nuance gets flattened.

A parent struggling with poverty may be treated the same as one actively exposing a child to dangerous environments, like a home used to manufacture or sell drugs. These are not the same risks, but the system often uses the same playbook. 

Child welfare is structurally built to respond to acute, high-risk scenarios. But most cases don’t look like that. So when the same tools - removals, rigid timelines, compliance checklists - are applied to chronic need, they don’t just miss the mark. They backfire. 

The language of safety has become a silencer. Once invoked, the conversation shuts down, nuance disappears, and families pay the price.

If safety is the north star of child welfare, then we need a shared, rigorous definition that holds everyone accountable.

Safety can’t just mean the absence of harm. It must mean the presence of stability, support, and dignity for the whole family. That includes stable housing, access to mental health care, culturally relevant services, and a voice in decisions that affect them. 

Say less.

Kimberly Martin is a policy strategist whose work spans justice reform, equity, and systems accountability. She brings both legal insight and lived experience to the child welfare conversation.