Child advocacy group commends LA County for sharply reducing child abuse deaths while taking away far fewer children

Data are more evidence that throwing more children into foster care after high-profile tragedies backfires, group says

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 9, 2026 — The nation's largest locally-run child welfare system, Los Angeles County, California, dramatically cut the number of child abuse deaths even as it also sharply reduced the number of children torn from their families and forced into foster care, a national child advocacy organization said today.

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform cited state and county data showing that, from 2015 through 2025, the number of child abuse deaths in Los Angeles County dropped by more than half. Even deaths among children previously known to the county child welfare agency, the Department of Children and Family Services, declined by 43%. During the same time period, the number of children known to have been taken from their families and forced into foster care also declined by more than half.

NCCPR provided full details and links to all data sources in this post to the organization's Child Welfare Blog.

"For decades, those wedded to what should be called a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare have exploited horrific cases of child abuse among children "known to the system" to persuade us to tear apart more and more families and consign more and more children to the chaos of foster care," said NCCPR Executive Director Richard Wexler. "But that backfires. It sets off foster-care panics, sharp, sudden spikes in children taken from their homes in cases that are nothing like the horror stories. Rather, these children often are taken when family poverty is confused with 'neglect.' That does enormous damage to the children needlessly taken, and overloads systems so they have less time to find the relatively few children in real danger.

"The take-the-child-and-run approach makes all children less safe," Wexler said. "The Los Angeles data are only the latest indication that there is a better way.

"Did the decline in foster care entries cause the lower number of fatalities? We don't know," Wexler said. "The best available evidence, from a massive nationwide study, shows no connection, one way or the other, between foster care entry rates and child abuse deaths. Even in a jurisdiction as huge as Los Angeles, we should be grateful that, while each is the worst imaginable tragedy, the number of fatalities is small enough to merit caution when it comes to drawing conclusions about system performance from fatality numbers.

"And we know Los Angeles still has plenty of room to improve. Even with the dramatic declines, it still takes away children at one of the highest rates among America's largest cities and their surrounding counties.

"But we know this: Those who exploit horror stories to claim that foster care declines lead to increases in fatalities are dangerously wrong, and their fearmongering endangers children," Wexler said.

Wexler said making children safer requires "a laser focus on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty," which is both a risk factor for abuse and something that, in itself, often is confused with neglect. "We agree with what those with lived experience have said for decades: 'take our poverty, not our children,'" Wexler said. To enforce such measures, families need high-quality defense counsel, a model that has been proven to reduce needless foster care with no compromise of safety. Details are in NCCPR's Due Process Agenda.

"The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero," Wexler said. "But we must pursue that goal knowing that our reach always will exceed our grasp, and by using approaches that don't backfire and make these tragedies even more likely. The Los Angeles County data offer some clues about how that can be done."

For further information, contact: Richard Wexler, Executive Director rwexler(at)nccpr(dot)info

SOURCE National Coalition for Child Protection Reform