Majority would pay higher taxes

Residents in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene say they are concerned about child abuse and neglect, but are they ready to put their money where their mouth is? Yes, a pair of surveys suggest.

More than half – three out of five – say their communities should spend more to help reduce child abuse and neglect locally. Of those who support more spending, three out of five would be willing to pay higher taxes to do it.

“I’m amazed,” said Dee Wilson, director of the Northwest Institute for Children and Families. “The issue ‘Are we concerned about child abuse?’ is not the same as ‘Are you willing to pay more taxes?’ “

This can be considered good news for agencies looking for more money to support an array of programs to help victims of child abuse and neglect, and prevent new victims in the future. But the poll results are not really something agencies can rely on, said Del Ali of Research 2000, which conducted the poll.

That would still require a concrete plan and a good campaign.

“We don’t give them a particular amount, so the question is, ‘How much more of a drop-off (in support among respondents) would you see?’ ” said Ali, who managed the poll for a media partnership of The Spokesman-Review, KSPS, KHQ and KXLY.

Still, Joan Sharp, executive director of the Children’s Trust Fund of Washington, called the survey results good news and a bit surprising, because asking people to pay higher taxes is always difficult and maybe more difficult now, with the prospect of a recession looming. Public support to spend more overall on child abuse and neglect is also encouraging, she said, because it might help sway another constituency: the state legislatures. Lawmakers are always balancing the demands to spend more money on a wide range of programs and “are not always terribly receptive to child abuse prevention,” Sharp said.

The poll results could provide ammunition for that kind of budget fight, Ali agreed. In a situation in which lawmakers are deciding how to divide money among different priorities – or in those rare cases when a state or community has extra money – the fact that people think child abuse and neglect are serious problems, and more should be spent on them, could bring about a change.

“It’s easy to go to the lawmaker and make the case: ‘Hey, these are our children. Something has to be done for them now,’ ” he said.

But even if the case is made, that’s only the beginning of a serious, sometimes heated, debate over how to spend new money, some familiar with the child welfare system said.

It’s a debate that Wilson, of the child and family institute connected to the University of Washington, said often comes down to a choice between new programs and the existing system of enforcement and foster care.

“If you have more tax money, where would it be smart to spend it: on prevention or on the current system?” Wilson said. “To me, it’s not an either/or situation. … We should be able to get some kind of balanced approach.”

But when lawmakers try to decide how to spend money on child abuse, that’s often where the lines are drawn, Wilson and others said.

The current system involves enforcement of child welfare laws and the foster care system, which require a significant and ongoing investment in state tax dollars.

Programs to prevent child abuse could bring future savings by reducing the need for those services, Sharp said. “But we don’t want to abandon children who have already experienced child abuse and neglect. We can’t play one against the other.”

Lawmakers also want to see proof that these investments will pay off, she added.

But that’s difficult when talking about prevention programs, said Roy Harrington, of Washington State University-Spokane’s Area Health Education Center.

“We have done such an abysmally bad job of getting our arms wrapped around prevention that we don’t know what prevention is and what prevention looks like,” Harrington said. “Prevention happens before a child is accepted into the system; 75 percent of families who experience these issues of child maltreatment and family violence are never known to the system.”

Child abuse prevention involves better education, reducing drug and alcohol abuse, helping families out of poverty, treating mental health problems and improving parenting skills, Harrington said.

When poll respondents said the community should spend more to prevent child abuse and neglect, it’s not clear they’re willing to do that by addressing all these conditions, said pollster Ali.

“Are they calling for more ‘Great Society’ programs? How far do you want to take prevention?” he asked, referring to President Lyndon Johnson’s programs in the 1960s.

But if the public is willing to spend more on protecting children, how to spend the money is a debate worth having, said Dorothy Roberts, an expert in family law and fellow at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research. “It opens up the possibility for changing the way the nation has defined child welfare,” said Roberts, author of the 2002 book “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” which points out that minorities and poor children are more likely to be removed from their families and put into foster care. “It’s the question at the heart of the child welfare system for centuries: How do you best protect children: keeping them with their parents or taking them away from parents?”