When Homeschooling Hides Abuse

Teresa Huizar: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, When Homeschooling Hides Abuse, I speak with Dr. Emily Putnam-Hornstein, professor at UNC Chapel Hill.  Now, you may be surprised to learn that homeschooling is one of the US’ fastest growing school settings. And while most homeschooling parents are focused on ensuring that their children’s unique needs are being met, what about that small but very important portion that might not have their best interest at heart?

What about those who remove their children from school to evade Child Protective Services or to isolate them from mandatory reporters?  Have we given enough thought to the ways in which our child protection system hinges on teachers, school counselors, and nurses to identify troubling situations? And what about access to prevention training, which is almost all school-based. Most importantly, how do we protect children in all the educational settings that they’re in, in home or not? I know you’ll be as interested in this conversation as I was. Please take a listen.

Hi Emily. Welcome to One in Ten.

Emily Putnam-Hornstein: Hi Teresa. Nice to see you.

TH: We should say, see each other again. Right. Since this is, I think, your third appearance on One in Ten, I really appreciate you coming back and I was so interested in the paper that we’re gonna talk about today on homeschooling because it’s a topic that we’ve covered a little bit previously, but not much in part because there’s so little research that really exists, especially quality research around this.

I’m just curious. You’ve researched lots of different areas of child maltreatment. What piqued your interest about homeschooling and its intersection with child abuse?

EPH: Well, it’s actually funny because the paper that I wrote, I did not set out to write a discussion piece. It initially began as a research paper, and I should certainly credit kind of my co-authors on that.

But what we initially were interested in doing was using California data to examine how many children who were homeschooled had earlier reports of alleged abuse or neglect, and were only then removed and homeschooled, so not kids who started off homeschooling. And because a lot of the work that I do is with the California Department of Social Services, and I had access to that data. We set out to kind of pursue a project with the California Department of Education, with the California Department of Social Services, both of whom were interested in the topic and what we discovered once we got the data was that we truly could not answer that question.

Obviously you mentioned there isn’t that much research out there and we discovered even with what we thought would be sufficient data, we could not answer it. And the reason for that is that we had access to all of the information from the child protection side.  But on the homeschooling side in California, they only collect the addresses of registered private schools, and that’s one homeschool are kind of one non-legal subset of those.

So I know that is a long answer, but the truth is I was interested in it as a research topic, discovered that despite my best interest, I couldn’t answer it with data. And that then took me down the path of, is this true everywhere that we truly don’t have good data to assess the kind of the nexus of homeschooling and child abuse and neglect?

TH: For listeners who may not be as familiar with this topic, can you just talk a little bit about how common is homeschooling in the US and what do we know about that?

EPH: So the best estimates are that around kind of 2 million children in the United States are schooled at home. That went up a bit during COVID, not surprisingly, and it’s anywhere from, in some states we’ve got estimates of around kind of 1% to, I believe, a high of 5%, but it becomes very difficult to get any super reliable numbers because one feature of homeschooling is that it’s outside of the state’s eye. There tend to not be many regulations around it, and without regulations you tend to not have much data.

TH: Yes, you really set up an interesting research challenge for yourself, right?  Let’s take a look at something that has lots and lots of hurdles. One of the things that interested me in this topic is that here in DC it is one of the fastest growing changes in educational settings, and you don’t really think of Washington, DC as a place where there would be lots of homeschooling.

We have a robust charter school system. We have plenty of private schools, we have lots of public schools. You know, we’ve got a very broad mix. I’m curious about, so what do you attribute this growth in homeschooling?

EPH: Can’t speak to exactly what’s going on in Washington, DC. What I will tell you, Teresa, the whole homeschooling topic is super political, as you know.

And I am not anti-homeschool. And actually my two youngest children, my husband and I ended up homeschooling them during COVID and found it to be actually a quite fulfilling and useful experience for both us and them. So I did wanna say that because I think it’s become so polarized. That you either support homeschooling or you don’t.

And I would put myself in that nice middle of, I absolutely support homeschooling and I also find myself shocked that it is so hard to get some basic regulations in place that I do believe would protect a real number of children.

TH: I think that it is interesting that it has become politically polarized and, you know, I think that our interest in this at NCA really just relates to the intersection between it and child abuse where that occurs.

And this isn’t to say that we think it occurs so very much more in homeschool settings. It’s to say that as we’ll talk, there are some unique challenges to the way our system is set up, which sort of assumed that all children would be in a school setting. So let’s talk a little bit about that. So reporting laws in the US are tied to mandatory reporters. And can you talk a little bit about why you know who those are comprised, knowing that it differs to some degree in some states, but why would that pose certain challenges as it relates to homeschooling and kids who are in that setting and ensuring that they’re safe as other kids?

EPH: Yeah, so when we think about mandatory reporters, we’re thinking about adults who interact with children. Teachers are certainly one group of mandatory reporters. You have healthcare professionals, psychologists, therapists, law enforcement, about 70% of calls that come into our child protection hotlines nationally are coming from mandatory reporters.

And so the challenge, if you want to frame it that way, or the potential concealment of abuse and neglect that may occur for children who are homeschooled is simply that they would have fewer interactions with some of those adults who would be able to identify if there were safety concerns. Teachers, of course, are kind of front and center. But what I will also say is that children who are homeschooled on average may also have fewer interactions with coaches and other adults through activities that occur outside of, but still connected to a school orbit. So I think that’s one of the challenges. There will just be fewer non-family members who are able to identify if there are problems.

TH: It was interesting in the paper itself because it talked about the differences in reporting between mandatory reporters and say family members, neighbors, that sort of thing. It’s a huge gap, you know, it’s not as though it’s two percentage points difference between the likelihood that a teacher will report that versus a neighbor, and so I think that is an interesting thing about our system that it hasn’t quite caught up to. It’s very reliant on these professionals to identify abuse, properly, identify it, and report it.  And the thing about it that I think about, Emily, is that your average parent, as we all know, and your average grandparent and neighbor are not trained in child abuse prevention.

I would bet if you ask most of them, if you did have a concern of abuse, where would you report that? I don’t know what they would say as an answer to that question. And so it isn’t just that you can imagine a situation in which a child maybe who’s abused by their parents is isolated further through this lack of contact with outside professionals.

But I also think, and in some ways, the system is not set up to train and support.  Homeschooling parents and knowing what they need to know to also protect their children from third parties who might also be abusive because where would they get that training? Where would they get that education? Where would they get that awareness?

EPH: It’s an interesting point. It’s not something that we talk about in the paper and not something frankly that I had thought about. I think I had primarily thought about the challenge and the concern that comes with parents who are removing their children from formal schooling as a means of concealing abuse or neglect.

But I think you raise a good point, which is not all sexual abuse and other forms of maltreatment necessarily occur within the kind of, you know, mom or dad. There can be an extended network of relatives or others who might be the perpetrators.

Do things get missed there? Because children in homeschooled environments are with parents who are functioning as their educators and may not have had that same exposure, that kind of mandatory reporters broadly would.

TH: I’m curious about how variable this homeschool experience is because one of the interesting charts in the paper, it looked at a variety of ways in which homeschooling is regulated or not regulated.

Some of those more directly aligned to things around child abuse reporting and that sort of thing than others. But altogether, the thing that I was so struck by in overall was just, first of all how little regulation exists, but overall, but even where it does exist, my gosh, every state seemed substantially different from another one.

Now, having said that, I was thinking, first of all, it’s a challenge, I’m sure as a parent educator too, to know what you should be doing and how it’s a challenge for professionals who are trying to make sure kids are safe to keep an eye on that. It’s also, I think, just a challenge to researchers who are already, as you say, challenged by the differing definitions of child abuse across 50 states and all that to also have this incredible variability and regulation. And one of the things you mentioned in your paper was that there have been some attempts, even recent attempts, often out of child torture cases to respond to this. And I wanna talk about that unique subset for a minute before we get to that kind of public policy angle, which is, as we’ve already mentioned, we’re not saying that homeschooling parents, by and large are doing it for any reason other than a positive reason.

You know, there are many parents of kids with disabilities or other things who decide to homeschool, and they really are, they have the absolute best interest of their kids at heart. But there is this small subsection which you note in your paper of cases that go, I mean, just it’s not even cases going horribly wrong, families going horribly wrong, and truly egregious cases where it appears that the child was homeschooled really for the purpose of hiding the terrible abuse and torture that occurred to them. I’m curious about several things. So lemme start with the first question, which is, do we know. Or have any idea, even a ballpark of sort of what percentage of these homeschool cases involve this kind of extreme abuse?

EPH: The Coalition for Responsible Homeschooling, which is a kind of a great nonprofit and tries to gather information on fatalities, has looked at this and they’re probably the best source of data, but I think even they would say that very difficult to know. The last time I was on your podcast, we talked about the Lives Cut Short Project where we’re trying to use media reports, medical examiner data, other sources to look at child maltreatment fatalities overall. And one of the things we’re doing right now to using Large Language Models to read all those materials and make some classifications around cases. And we are looking for indications where a child may have been homeschooled.

And we are also looking for cases that meet our definition of very chronic abuse/torture, but even those data I would not trust completely. So I think that we are increasingly able to assemble cases that allow us to characterize some commonalities in those torture cases, but certainly I don’t think we can speak to how many overall they are or how common those cases are in homeschooled situations versus formal schooling.

I hope I answered your question.

TH: Yes, you did. Emily. Emily, thank you. I’m, and to some degree the question can’t be answered, right? You’re still doing research to try to tease out these things in the way that you described it. What an interesting use of Large Language Models too.

But I also wonder, again, in your paper, you all point out that some of the critiques of looking at those have been. You’re sort of looking at the extreme end of things. You’re trying to take these isolated examples and draw conclusions that don’t apply to the larger group of homeschoolers. I’m wondering what you think about how should we approach thoughtfully the place of these types of cases and our understanding of them when they do intersect with homeschooling with what should be done policy-wise that might make it less likely to occur.

EPH: Yeah. So the way that I think about this, and I am hesitant to offer up any very specific policy prescriptions because I trust that while I can think about a lot of things on the child abuse and neglect side schooling and homeschooling, you know, kind of found my way there on a path, not because that is my area of expertise.

I think that a just very reasonable place to begin would be to say, this is not about or we should not be pursuing policy and regulations that are simply about homeschool. We should be pursuing policy and regulations that are about very specific populations of children who have known unique vulnerabilities and where ongoing state interest in their safety may be fundamentally different than other children. And I think if we started through that lens and we made it less about the environment in which the child was schooled. Even though of course we think that there are some unique risks to homeschooling for those most vulnerable children, and we instead kind of led with who are the children where we should have some concerns and it’s reasonable to regulate a bit more around them, then maybe we would get a little bit further in some of these conversations.

TH: I think that, well, I do think that there’s so much tension around the subject that people do get caught up a little bit in the setting as opposed to what we’re actually concerned about for kids. So for, as you say, so for example, if a child had a serious CPS report that resulted in a confirmed case of child abuse.

I would not necessarily want that child moved in a different school setting, whether it was homeschooling or something else. You know, a child suddenly appearing in a new school, even if that was outside the home, is something that would make me go.  Why? Because you know, CACs, I’ll just tell you one of the issues we have for all of those that are on the borders of a state are parents who are hopping back and forth across the border to evade any kind of CPS action, any kind of law enforcement intervention, you know, suddenly they disappear 10 miles on the other side and it’s like they’re lost.

So I think the fact that we know that that happens already  and we know that someone could essentially make their child essentially invisible, even if they were appearing in school, if they keep moving their school setting, I think is something that we should really think about. Whether there’s a public policy solution that’s self-evident or not, I don’t know, but I think it’s something that, at least internally  for those of us who are child abuse professionals, we should be flagging not as, oh, it must mean they’re doing something bad, but what about some heightened awareness around, gosh, this kiddo seems to have had six schools over the past year. Why?  You know, maybe it’s as simple as they’re being bullied or they’re homeless, or there could be any sort of answer to that. But I think to your point, it’s not just the sort of homeschool net. We’re using that as an example, but there are also other reasons why we should be concerned if we’re seeing that and maybe take the temperature down around the question of, well, it’s because they’re homeschooled. I mean, my gosh, if they’re being homeschooled, there must be something.

EPH: Yeah, I think that’s right. Well, I said I didn’t wanna be too prescriptive. Will say that this comes from a colleague and friend Marie Cohen, who has written on her child welfare monitor blog quite a bit about homeschooling and kind of her basic proposal, and I’d wanna give more thought to it, but I don’t, on its face, I think it seems quite reasonable is that when a parent files paperwork to indicate that they will be schooling at home. And it’s important to remember that, I believe there are still 11 states where there’s absolutely no required registration, so. You know, we’ll set those aside, but for the remaining states, one could imagine a process by which the school from which the child is being withdrawn would call up child protection.  To notify them not to initiate an investigation, but so that the Child Protection Agency is notified that this child will no longer be in formal schooling and the Child Protection Agency, which is the keeper of the history for that child and family would be able to do its own assessment as to whether there should be concerns that would warrant some kind of field screen. So basically whether the call from the school would effectively translate into a form of an investigation or not. And I do think that there should be a subset of children where if we know that we have extensive history with that family, that the child was in foster care in the past, there’s abuse and neglect, that there needs to be some additional ongoing, frankly, oversight because we know that that child will be so out of the public eye. Or perhaps we come up with a law and there are some kind of rules that says, you know, if you are an adult with a history of substantiated abuse, you are not allowed to homeschool.

Those to me, all seem like reasonable conversations that would not dramatically infringe upon the rights of parents and would protect kind of through that child-focused lens, given the history of abuse that we know. I will say that the pushback I’m sure would be that there seems to be a narrative that some families pull their child out of school because the school is effectively harassing them through calls to the Child Protection Agency that are unwarranted. So I’m sure that that would be the kind of the counterpoint I really have not seen any data to suggest that that is a real pattern or something that that would be justifiable.

But I guess if I were to go down the policy path, I think I’d probably start with that, that Marie suggestion there.

TH: I think that one of the challenges of this entire topic is that every single thing that we talk about is variable. So for example, there’s not one homeschool setting, right? There’s a whole variety of the ways that homeschooling plays out from a person. You know, I’m aware of someone, I wouldn’t call them a friend, but they are an acquaintance who, she was formerly a teacher. She decided to homeschool her children. She’s well qualified to do so. She’s connected to a homeschool association.  That’s a very different homeschool setting than someone who is plugged into sort of a virtual network, but it’s still a network and offers great material, a standardized curriculum, all of those.

But then there’s also much looser arrangements, right, for homeschooling, and it feels to me that all of these have risk and benefits and positives and challenges like anything would. But one of the things that I wonder, and perhaps like many areas within this, no research has been done yet, but I can imagine that suddenly having children at home to homeschool could also be very stressful in it of itself.

It could be possible that a parent would find it overwhelming. And so I just, I wonder about  the lack of supports that we provide for that and whether we’re creating our own problems as a society in that we’re permitting this, but at the same time, because we’re not providing, as we’ve already talked about, child sexual abuse prevention education, we’re not providing additional supports where they’re needed.

Whether that leaves a person who makes that decision in a precarious position that, I’m not gonna say it could yield more abuse, but we certainly, I’ll tell you, even on my block in Washington, DC.  When kids went back to school post COVID, all the parents stood out on the sidewalk and clapped.  It’s a lot to take on.

And so I just, there’s a part of me that says, setting aside the sort of extreme ends of this, you know, what are we doing to support people who make that choice so that out of frustration or aggravation or whatever, that there’s not a line that gets crossed.  So that’s just rambling, Emily, but whatever you wanna do with that.

EPH: I think it’s always useful to say how can we better support parents, be better parents in all domains of parenting. As you know, I have several kids of my own and it is difficult. I will say, as you were talking, I was thinking about through my research. Typically I’m relying on big quantitative data, but I’m also involved in projects where you can think of them much more along the lines of quality assurance where I’m actually reading records.

I am facilitating a near fatality meeting for a county And I share that because recently I encountered a case where the child had very, very profound disabilities, nonverbal cerebral palsy, and had been in a school setting of sorts and then ended up being moved home and doing cyber schooling, which is a whole class of, it is schooling at home, but it is not technically homeschooling because there is a formal program.

But I was really struck, unfortunately a lot of harms occurred to this child, child. But I was also struck by the fact that it wasn’t clear to me that dad wasn’t totally doing his best. But was just completely overwhelmed and unsupported and that a lot of the, the services that this child was clearly entitled to were not being offered because of this kind of cyber, virtual schooling, environment. And so I think that’s another thing for us to keep in mind. I think a lot cyber schooling is really increasing in the country, I don’t have the specific numbers, and I think often the children who are moving to cyber schooling may have very specific behavioral and health needs, and it’s not clear to me that that our schools are able to provide all of the necessary supports over a camera.

And that a lot of those parents who may be very well intentioned are not able to meet the needs of their very kind of medically complex children. And so that’s, you know, you know, I guess you rambled a bit. I’m rambling a bit, but like, it’s another area where I think there are some opportunities to think about how we can both support parents and make sure that kids are protected and getting what they need.

TH: I think the point that you’re raising overall is that so many services are delivered within schools and around that school setting, and we know that’s really highly effective.  But we haven’t, as communities really thought about what happens when a child is not in that setting and not thinking about it in terms of critiquing the setting that they’re wind up in, but as a way of thinking about how the services might follow them that they need, and making sure that that actually happens as opposed to, well, if you want the services, you best be in public school. And so, you know, I bet that case was just heartbreaking because as you say, if the father was doing his best and the services weren’t available, then it was just, it’s so crushing to see that happen to a child and to the parent who then has to feel very responsible and guilty about what did happen.

Knowing your nervousness about talking about policy prescriptions, I’m wondering about what you think about why the various efforts, even including those that came from very bad cases, and where the regulation seems pretty minimal, have failed of late. Do you feel like it’s just gotten so hot politically as a topic that little good can be done or do you think that these were just not framed well? Because some of it, when I was reading through your paper, I thought a couple of them just seemed very common sense to me. I realize I’m a child abuse professional, so maybe my lens on that is biased about what’s common sense and what’s not. But they were curious failures, for example, something around background screening.

I mean, do we really wanna have somebody at home teaching children that is a convicted sex offender that’s just not really great? So things like that where it just, I think your average person would have a big question mark, Why do you think that these, even these that seem to us as child abuse professionals, maybe more obvious have just been doomed when they get to state legislatures?

EPH: I know that this will probably mean I suddenly have yet another target on my back, but the Homeschool Legal Defense Association has been incredibly well funded and frankly effective in their advocacy, so I do think that this topic is just fringe enough that the American public is not regularly engaging with what are some reasonable regulations.

As you pointed out, often bills or legislation are proposed when there’s a very high-profile case, and I think that there’s often short-term political support and then a lot of pushback from the kind of legal defense association. And to be fair, I think that they have probably been very, very useful and effective advocates for many homeschooling families who really do wanna make sure that their rights to educate their children as they see fit are protected. I just happen to think that they’re quite wrong on this one specific issue, but I believe that, I certainly don’t wanna speak for them, but my sense is they view it as kind of a slippery slope and you cannot allow any regulation, and so they will come in no matter how seemingly basic.

I’lll also say that I’ve had at least one conversation with someone fairly senior in their leadership organization, and one of the things that they also seem to hold a position on is that a lot of the cases where very high-profile torture, you know, the cases we’re talking about, they actually say, well, that wasn’t really homeschooling, and I’m like, well,  they were,  you know what I mean?

Like if we don’t have any regulations, what it means to homeschool and the child was not in formal school, then I think it’s reasonable that we call it homeschooling. They seem to almost take issue with the fact that that would fall under the same umbrella of what they define as homeschooling, so.

TH: Okay, well clearly on the policy side, there’s lots to be of work yet to be done potentially. What do you think in the meantime, talking to child abuse professionals, how do you, how could they be helpful when interacting with parents who are in fact homeschooling their children? Children who come through that have parents who are homeschooling them around the things that we really care about, which fundamentally are keeping kids safe. It’s not engaging in policy debate, or, you know, trying to surveil parents. We want kids to be safe. So for all of these child abuse professionals out there, any particular words of advice,

EPH: What I would advise is to not be afraid to call your child protection hotline.

I know that there is a whole lot of messaging these days that one shouldn’t call that calling, that child welfare does more harm than good. But there was, you know, decided to look at a few more recent cases that had hit the media, and one in particular jumped out at me. It was a case from Utah where an 11-year-old boy was withdrawn from his school.

I think the teachers had already been concerned about him looking malnourished, et cetera, and he was removed and they did notify child protection and law enforcement, and they eventually got a warrant to go out and he was being horribly tortured, kept in a dog kennel, zip ties, hog tied with metal handcuffs.

I mean the worst of the worst, and they were able to save him, and they were able to save him for two reasons. One, people called.  And two, the way that child protection and law enforcement were able to follow up is that it was actually a state where there were requirements when a child is withdrawn and the parents hadn’t filed the right paperwork.

Now, there are some states where that would not have occurred, so I am a big believer that if you are concerned, it’s important to call. The reason that we have centralized hotlines is they are able to put together the pieces of information that may come in from various parties.  This feels like maybe perhaps a little bit of a tangential point, but since we did talk about mandatory reporters and the role that they play in our protection of kids in the US, I did also want to call attention to, you know, you may have read this, but your audience, that there seems to be a movement to also not allow calls from anonymous reporters. So New York State recently signed legislation saying that their hotline will no longer take calls if the individual is anonymous and important to keep in mind that child protection hotlines already keep things confidential, but anonymous calls are no longer allowed. And what occurred to me, Teresa, is imagine being a child who is homeschooled and being abused and not being able, not having much access with adults, and actually picking up the phone and making that call and being told, if you do not identify yourself as the caller, then we cannot accept it.

So I just think that this is one more kind of erosion of the system that is designed to protect kids. And I think it’s particularly meaningful when we think about homeschooling environments where it may actually be the child who needs to call.

TH: It’s a good point you’re making and one that I had not thought of and seeing that piece of legislation go through.

That’s so interesting. Also, you can think of a grandparent or something like that who would not want their name associated with it because of what that would do to relationships within the family, but they call because they’re genuinely concerned. That’s probably a whole other hour, Emily. But yes, I share your concerns about what it means for these types of cases and lots of others too. Is there anything else that we should have talked about and didn’t, any other question I should have asked you or anything else you wanted to make sure that we cover in today’s conversation?

EPH: No, I just have to say I think that you are a very good interviewer/podcaster.

TH: You’re too kind.  It’s really just practice with you, Emily, since this is your third time on, so thank you. Well. Come back anytime. Truly, you’re always doing fascinating research. I can’t wait to hear more about your use of Large Language Models and looking at big data sets.

I think that’s gonna be very, very interesting. But truly appreciate all that you’re doing and looking forward to the next time.

EPH: Thanks so much.

TH: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. For more information about this episode or any of our others, please visit our podcast website at oneintenpodcast.org.