Fewer NC children dying at the hands of a parent or caregiver, new report shows
By Jennifer Fernandez
Fewer North Carolina children are dying at the hands of a parent or caregiver, according to a new report by a retired leader of the state’s health system whose career focused on the well-being of children.
The report also showed an even larger decline over the past decade in the rates of child deaths among military families when compared with civilian families. The improvement can be traced to the military’s focus over the past two decades on aiding families with Military and Family Support Centers and other programs, report author Tom Vitaglione said.
“They really did a really nice job that has made a difference,” said Vitaglione, a Cary resident who in a more than 50-year career worked for three decades in what is now the Department of Health and Human Services. He spent another 20 years working for advocacy organizations such as NC Child before retiring.
Seeing reports of a rise in homicides in youth — fueled largely by gun violence among teens — he wanted to see if deaths were also on the rise among children through age 10. He analyzed data from 2011 to 2022, replicating two earlier studies he took part in before retiring, using data from the State Child Fatality Prevention Team and the North Carolina State Center for Health Statistics.
In all, 884 children were killed by a parent or caregiver in North Carolina over the past nearly 40 years.
“So, although the numbers have gotten wonderfully smaller, the total aggregate is still scary,” Vitaglione said.
Vitaglione said he’s not sure if one specific support service has had a bigger impact than the others in reducing rates.
“I’m hoping that younger researchers will pick up on this and try to figure that one out,” said Vitaglione, who had a hand in the creation of the state’s Child Fatality Task Force, NC Child’s Child Health Report Card and North Carolina’s implementation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
‘Very encouraging’ report
Vitaglione’s report found that 255 children through age 10 died between 2011 and 2022.
Rates for Onslow and Cumberland counties — two counties with heavy military presence — declined during the latest study period. Onslow’s rate was 3.26 deaths per 100,000 children and Cumberland’s was 2.96, but both remained well over the state rate of 1.55 deaths per 100,000 children.
Vitaglione called the report’s findings “remarkably good and very encouraging” considering what the data showed when he and Marcia Herman-Giddens first began looking into child deaths by a parent or caregiver more than two decades ago.
That initial 2002 report found that 378 North Carolina children were killed by parents or caregivers from 1985 to 2000. That amounted to 2.2 deaths per 100,000 children statewide. For military families, the rate was 5 deaths per 100,000 children during that same time period.
They noticed that the high numbers in Cumberland and Onslow counties seemed to be outliers and realized that those counties were home to four of the state’s military installations.
Officials at Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, were concerned about the data, Vitaglione said. They responded by adding more supports for military families.
The second study, in 2012, examined data from 2001 to 2010. The overall fatality rate dropped 13.6 percent, to 1.9 deaths per 100,000 children. The rate for military families dropped by a similar 14 percent, but it remained much higher than the state rate at 4.3 per 100,000 children.
“The collaboration between the military and local agencies, as well as the almost exponential growth in family support services available to military families, was obviously having a positive effect,” Vitaglione wrote in his report
Military adds family supports
The Department of Defense expanded its Family Advocacy Programs at installations to include parenting education, home visiting for parents of newborns, family violence prevention and interventions, and many others, Vitaglione wrote. In addition, “a growing group of Family Readiness Officers were specifically assigned to this effort.”
NC Health News reached out to officials at Fort Liberty, who initially agreed to be interviewed after reading the report. They have not responded to multiple follow-up attempts to set up an interview.
Sharon Hirsch, president and CEO of Positive Childhood Alliance North Carolina, called the report “so encouraging.”
Seeing the big drop in fatalities among military families has Hirsch wondering how communities can replicate what the military is doing to support its families.
“They have access to things like home visiting for young families and other supports that aren’t available in other communities,” she said.
Hirsch said a growing body of research shows that child maltreatment and fatalities from abuse decrease when families have their basic needs met and they have financial stability.
She said it is vital to have access to family resource centers where families can get a variety of support, from parenting classes and child care to access to diapers, food and financial help.
A state earned income tax credit that is refundable would be a huge return on investment, she said. Paid family leave would also have a big impact, especially for young families. And affordable child care is crucial, she said.
“It’s easy to forget that when we’re preventing child abuse we’re preventing child fatalities,” Hirsch said.
Higher risk factors
Families face a lot of obstacles — housing, child care, finances — that can add to the stress of raising children, according to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Some parents struggle when those stressors pile up, and that can lead to children being abused or neglected.
The vast majority of child welfare cases involve neglect, and studies show that is correlated to poverty, Hirsch said.
“We need to be providing support to their family and not necessarily removing [a child] from their family to keep them safe,” she said. “Separating children from parents is an adverse childhood experience, and really deeply traumatic.
“We should be doing all we can to keep them together (to) make sure those families are successful.”
Along with the typical stressors affecting civilian families, military families also have to deal with long absences due to deployments. They are often young couples who have been stationed far away from family and friends who would normally provide support, Vitaglione said.
“They’re not a problem group,” he said. “They just have a lot of risk factors.”
More Coverage of Children’s Health
‘Not an intractable problem’
Over the past three-plus decades, the overall rate of North Carolina children dying at the hands of a parent or caregiver has declined by 30 percent, according to Vitaglione’s analysis. For military families, that rate has declined by 74 percent.
“As it turns out, it’s not an intractable problem, and that’s great news,” Vitaglione said.
He credits the drop in deaths to a variety of societal changes that better support families: Depending on the state, parents now have access to child tax credits, wages are higher across the board and women have better maternity and postpartum care.
Prior research also showed that families where a parent is deployed have rates of child neglect up to four times higher than when parents are at home. The military scaled down deployment to Iraq in 2011 and until the final withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, there were fewer members of the military deployed there than at the height of that conflict.
North Carolina also has expanded its network of Child Advocacy Centers, which provide services like parent education, counseling, support groups and child victim advocates to work with children who have been abused. Today, more than 50 centers and provisional centers work with families across the state.
While state funding for the centers was recently increased, federal funding has been decreasing, NC Health News has reported. The decrease in federal funding has led to a loss in mental health services for children and has reduced the number of victim advocates who help connect families to needed services, according to the National Children’s Alliance.
Deana Joy, executive director of Child Advocacy Centers of North Carolina, told NC Health News last year that these services are vital, because the need for supports has kept growing in the state.
“What we do know for Children’s Advocacy Centers is that they have been proven to be best practice in trauma-informed response to child abuse,” she said. “In their absence, children are not getting the services that they need in order to properly heal and move forward from adverse childhood experiences.”
Vitaglione said society can provide added supports to prevent the types of deaths he studied in his report—things like “higher wages, paid family leave, access to reproductive health care, and a greater attentiveness to our neighbors in stress.”
“The wonderful news is not happenstance,” Vitaglione said about the report’s findings. “And that’s good news because it means maybe we can do even more. I hope that that will happen.”
KEEP UP WITH THE LATEST
The post Fewer NC children dying at the hands of a parent or caregiver, new report shows appeared first on North Carolina Health News.
