It’s late November 2016, and I’m squeezed into the far corner of a long row of gray cubicles in the call screening center for the Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Families (CYF) child neglect and abuse hotline. I’m sharing a desk and a tiny purple footstool with intake screener Pat Gordon. We’re both studying the Key Information and Demographics System (KIDS), a blue screen filled with case notes, demographic data, and program statistics. We are focused on the records of two families: both are poor, white, and living in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both were referred to CYF by a mandated reporter, a professional who is legally required to report any suspicion that a child may be at risk of harm from their caregiver. Pat and I are competing to see if we can guess how a new predictive risk model the county is using to forecast child abuse and neglect, called the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), will score them.

The stakes are high. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately one in four children will experience some form of abuse or neglect in their lifetimes. The agency’s Adverse Childhood Experience Study concluded that the experience of abuse or neglect has “tremendous, lifelong impact on our health and the quality of our lives,” including increased occurrences of drug and alcohol abuse, suicide attempts, and depression.

Excerpted from Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, released this week by St. Martin’s Press.

In the noisy glassed-in room, Pat hands me a double-sided piece of paper called the “Risk/Severity Continuum.” It took her a minute to find it, protected by a clear plastic envelope and tucked in a stack of papers near the back of her desk. She’s worked in call screening for five years, and, she says, “Most workers, you get this committed to memory. You just know.” But I need the extra help. I am intimidated by the weight of this decision, even though I am only observing. From its cramped columns of tiny text, I learn that kids under five are at greatest risk of neglect and abuse, that substantiated prior reports increase the chance that a family will be investigated, and that parent hostility toward CYF investigators is considered high risk behavior. I take my time, cross-checking information in the county’s databases against the risk/severity handout while Pat rolls her eyes at me, teasing, threatening to click the big blue button that runs the risk model.

The first child Pat and I are rating is a six-year-old boy I’ll call Stephen. Stephen’s mom, seeking mental health care for anxiety, disclosed to her county-funded therapist that someone—she didn’t know who—put Stephen out on the porch of their home on an early November day. She found him crying outside and brought him in. That week he began to act out, and she was concerned that something bad had happened to him. She confessed to her therapist that she suspected he might have been abused. Her therapist reported her to the state child abuse hotline.

about the author About Virginia Eubanks is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY, a founding member of the Our Data Bodies project, and a fellow at New America.

But leaving a crying child on a porch isn’t abuse or neglect as the state of Pennsylvania defines it. So the intake worker screened out the call. Even though the report was unsubstantiated, a record of the call and the call screener’s notes remain in the system. A week later, an employee of a homeless services agency reported Stephen to a hotline again: He was wearing dirty clothes, had poor hygiene, and there were rumors that his mother was abusing drugs. Other than these two reports, the family had no prior record with CYF.

The second child is a 14-year-old I’ll call Krzysztof. On a community health home visit in early November, a case manager with a large nonprofit found a window and a door broken and the house cold. Krzysztof was wearing several layers of clothes. The caseworker reported that the house smelled like pet urine. The family sleeps in the living room, Krzysztof on the couch and his mom on the floor. The case manager found the room “cluttered.” It is unclear whether these conditions actually meet the definition of child neglect in Pennsylvania, but the family has a long history with county programs.

An Issue of Definition

No one wants children to suffer, but the appropriate role of government in keeping kids safe is complicated. States derive their authority to prevent, investigate, and prosecute child abuse and neglect from the Child Abuse and Prevention and Treatment Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1974. The law defines child abuse and neglect as the “physical or mental injury, sexual abuse, negligent treatment, or maltreatment of a child ... by a person who is responsible for the child’s welfare under circumstances which indicate that the child’s health or welfare is harmed or threatened.”