Dec 17, 2014 4 min read

It’s been said you can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its weakest members. If that’s the case, the United States appears to be falling well short in one critical area: protecting its most at-risk children.

According to a study conducted by the Associated Press and released today, more than 750 children died of abuse or neglect between 2008 and 2013 despite being under the supposedly watchful eye of child protective agencies. The AP said many of the children were “beaten, starved or left alone to drown while agencies had good reason to know they were in danger.”

This study wasn’t an easy undertaking. The AP said some states had problems coming up with the number of children who died at the hands of their caregivers, and “secrecy often prevailed.”

But the news agency persevered and came up with a total of at least 760 youngsters, most younger than 4, who died “even as authorities were investigating their families or providing some form of protective services because of previous instances of neglect, violence or other troubles in the home.”

The cases cited by the AP in its report are both heartbreaking and infuriating.

The sad story of Ethan Henderson is representative of what the AP found.

The boy was just 10 weeks old – and already was treated for a broken arm – when his father “hurled him into a recliner so hard that it caused a fatal brain injury.”

Child-protective workers should have known this could happen, and perhaps was even likely to occur. Abuse hotline workers in Maine, where the boy’s family lived, took more than a dozen calls warning Ethan and his siblings were being abused. Among the reports were allegations one of the boy’s older sisters was seen covered in bruises, she might have been sexually abused and she burned herself on a stove when left without adult supervision. And daycare workers said Ethan, himself, arrived on their doorstep with an arm covered in deep red bruises.

But even after all that, a caseworker, after an inspection of the family’s home, said Ethan appeared to be “well cared for and safe in the care of his parents.” Six days later, the baby was dead.

Cases like Ethan’s were found over and over and over again.

The reasons for the failures include a shortage of funds, caseworker overload and insufficient training for those who take complaints. The AP reports nearly 40 percent of complaints to child-abuse hotlines regarding abuse and neglect are “screened out” and never followed up.

There’s also one long-held philosophy that deserves some blame for this deadly epidemic: the idea that whenever possible, an overriding goal should be to keep families together. As we see all too often, some people are not capable of being even marginally acceptable parents. The first order of business has to be protecting the well-being of the child, and often that must include removing them from biological parents who are simply unfit.

At a time when a significant number of those in power in Washington, D.C., want to take food out of the mouths of needy children by cutting much-needed programs, it’s hard to believe that much help will be coming from that direction.

As such, it’s going to be largely up to each state to determine how much it’s worth to try to reduce these terrible numbers. To do nothing more is a signal what the AP found is acceptable, and if we fail to demand our elected officials take action, it would be an indictment of our level of caring about those who most need our help.