You may remember the headlines from 2002. Rilya Wilson, age 5, was missing from a foster home for 15 months before the Florida Department of Children and Families noticed her absence. An investigation revealed that the department had lost track of some 500 other foster children. The scandal and its aftermath hit home for Juliet Gainsborough.

At the time, she was teaching at a Florida university and serving on a citizen review panel to hear foster-care cases in the state.

“The Rilya Wilson case sparked my interest in finding patterns in how and when scandals like this shape child welfare policies and spend- ing decisions,” explains Gainsborough, an assis- tant professor in the Global Studies Department at Bentley since 2004. She outlines her findings in the book Scandalous Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the U.S., which is under contract with Georgetown University Press.

A Daunting Read

Gainsborough started by defining the term “scandal” for the purposes of her research: three or more media stories that reported a child’s injury or death, which was attributed to an alleged failure by the state’s child welfare agency. The definition allowed for consistent analyses across all 50 states.

She then identified the highest-circulation news- papers in each state, and searched for topical articles that appeared from 1999 to 2004.

“I spent many months reading very depressing newspaper stories,” says Gainsborough, who holds a PhD in American politics from Harvard University. Her research also looked at new child welfare-related programs, as well as changes in rules, funding levels and legislation.

It was sobering work. For example, she discovered that child welfare funding levels drop as a state’s African-American population rises. This pattern is common in social funding that targets economically disadvantaged groups,but Gainsborough had hypothesized that child welfare would buck convention.

“The politics around [social service] programs tend to focus on how ‘deserving’ the individuals are,” notes the professor, whose work was fund- ed in part by a 2008 fellowship from the Valente Center for Arts and Sciences at Bentley. “In the case of child welfare policy, the target — abused children — is extremely sympathetic,
so I thought the politics would be different. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.”

The volume of incidents was another surprise. More than half the states in Gainsborough’s study had at least one child welfare scandal between 1999 and 2004 — and some had many more.

Learning from Failure

Gainsborough’s qualitative analysis of child welfare scandals in three states — Florida, Colorado and New Jersey — suggests that good can come of well-publicized failures to keep kids safe. Certain factors, such as the presence of strong advocacy organizations, seem to contribute to positive results.

“These groups have a historical perspective,” she observes. “They can link a specific case to general problems that need addressing.”

For her part, Gainsborough aims to illuminate the politics that drive policy choices. “There is a lot of dissatisfaction among child advocates and those who work in child welfare about the political response to the death or injury of a child in state care,” she says. “Do policymakers respond with substantive changes that improve the child welfare system? Or is the response mainly symbolic? Perhaps my book can provide insights that produce better outcomes for abused children.”