By Dan Hurley, The New Yorker, December 12, 2019
Tanner Bivins was declared dead on January 5, 2018, at a hospital in Paducah, Kentucky, the week before his sixth birthday. As the Louisville Courier-Journal reported, Tanner was emaciated and dehydrated, and his scalp was covered with sores. Authorities later found his home strewn with garbage and vermin. The house had no utilities and no heat; the temperature had dropped to eleven degrees the night that Tanner died.
According to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (N.C.A.N.D.S.), an arm of the Administration for Children and Families, an estimated 1,720 children in the United States died due to abuse and neglect in the fiscal year 2017, the most recent year for which national statistics are available. But a death like that of Tanner Bivins would not have been included among them, because the medical examiner’s autopsy lists Tanner’s cause of death as “undetermined.” (As a state review panel noted in 2017, “Neither child maltreatment nor homicide is typically entered as the cause of death on the death certificate . . . because investigations necessary to make those determinations have not been completed at the time the death certificate is filed.”) The “undetermined” finding means that Kentucky’s social-service agencies will not report Tanner’s death as being the result of maltreatment.
In part because of such cases, it is virtually impossible to find anyone who is both well versed in national child-abuse statistics and has faith in their accuracy. “The numbers could easily be three times or four times higher than what’s reported,” Emily Putnam-Hornstein, the director of the Children’s Data Network in California, said. “Whatever’s being reported to [N.C.A.N.D.S.] is an undercount.” In 2016, Kentucky reported that fifteen children died of abuse or neglect, for a rate of 1.48 per hundred thousand. (The national average is 2.32 per hundred thousand, while two states next door to Kentucky, Indiana and West Virginia, report death rates of 4.96 and 4.87, respectively.)
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