Illinois has spent decades promising to professionalize child protection investigations. Yet the state is back to sending interns and minimally trained social workers to conduct what should be rigorous fact-finding.

The same organization whose officials once admitted its workers had “not the vaguest notion” of how to investigate is now defending “no experience necessary” interns who make life-altering decisions for families facing allegations of abuse or neglect.

When the Legislature created the Division of Child Protection within the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) in the mid-80s, the promise was simple: separate investigation from social services, with one group conducting fact-finding while another managed services and treatment. In practice, DCFS has quietly walked back that promise, turning investigators into caseworkers and, in some instances, handing investigative authority to interns who are not even fully certified.

This is the opposite of what lawmakers thought they were buying in the mid-1980s when they created a specialized Division of Child Protection and later mandated that certified investigators be used.

Recently, Rep. Jed Davis alleged that DCFS violated the Child Protective Investigator and Child Welfare Specialist Certification Act by allowing uncertified interns to conduct abuse and neglect investigations and to participate in decisions that can result in children being taken from their homes.

DCFS insists that everyone conducting investigations is “properly trained.” Still, its own advertisements describe these positions as requiring no prior experience, making the intern program look less like a professional apprenticeship and more like a desperate attempt to address severe staffing shortages.

The result is a system in which the person knocking on the door has far less investigative preparation than a first-year journalism student. Yet that intern or minimally trained worker is expected to decide whether allegations are unfounded, whether a matter is criminal, whether a child should stay with a parent, or whether a family should be broken up.

In the early 1980s, the Legislative Investigating Commission found that DCFS caseworkers “had not the vaguest notion of how to gather and document evidence, how to conduct a fact-finding interview, or how to report their observations.” Case files were so poorly documented that they were virtually unusable in court, and nearly 40 percent of investigations failed to meet the 24-hour contact requirement.

Forty years and countless announced reforms later, the Auditor General reports that DCFS failed to complete child abuse investigations within the required time in 83 percent of cases, a deterioration from the very failures the Commission documented.

The current vacancy rate in investigative positions—over 21 percent—is the same chronic understaffing the Commission described 40 years ago, and DCFS itself admits that unprecedented turnover undermines the “accuracy, comprehensiveness, and consistency” of risk and safety assessments.

What has changed is not the quality of fact-finding but the rhetoric surrounding it. The agency now claims that “trauma-informed care” and “family preservation” are needed to explain why front-line personnel are social workers and interns rather than trained investigators. Ignoring the annoying, faddish lingo, the underlying problem remains the same as in 1983: those making life-altering decisions lack investigative training, supervision, and a mindset suited to investigation.

The Commission’s straightforward recommendations were to form multidisciplinary teams with genuine decision-making authority, train investigators in evidence gathering, and separate the roles of investigator, social worker, and advocate. DCFS instead preserved the dominance of the social work model and rebranded it as an investigative system.

True investigation requires:

A neutral fact-finder determines what happened rather than managing services.

Clear standards for gathering evidence, interviewing witnesses, documenting observations, and preserving records that can withstand judicial scrutiny.

A defined handoff point: once the facts indicate a crime, the case moves to law enforcement and the State’s Attorney; once the facts suggest the child is unsafe, a separate caseworker assumes custody and services.

Instead, Illinois has created a hybrid role in which the same person is expected to serve as investigator, social worker, and sometimes de facto courtroom advocate, all while being evaluated on caseload numbers and policy compliance rather than on investigative quality. When that “investigator” is in fact an intern or an inexperienced worker learning on the job, the result is inevitably superficial.

Child Advocacy Centers were intended to address a specific problem the Commission identified: the serial re-traumatization of child victims through multiple interviews by different strangers. On that narrow point, they largely succeeded, creating child-friendly settings in which a single interviewer conducts a recorded interview while law enforcement, prosecutors, DCFS, and medical staff observe.

But CACs have followed the same path as DCFS—captured by the social work and advocacy culture and pulled away from neutral fact-finding. National standards, drafted largely by social work professionals, emphasize “coordination” and “victim advocacy,” but never clearly assign decision-making authority to law enforcement or prosecutors when there is disagreement over witness credibility or the direction of cases. It appears that the CAC typically supplies the team coordinator, controls the agenda, and effectively functions as a gatekeeper, deciding which cases move forward and which die.

In practice, this means a CAC forensic interviewer, often with a social work or counseling background but no law enforcement investigative training, can decide that a child’s account is “not credible” after a single intimidating interview—and the case ends.

The Commission warned against precisely this: a single professional class controlling child abuse investigations, combining advocacy with investigation, and excluding or marginalizing law enforcement. CACs have solved the multiple-interview problem while recreating, in a private, nonprofit form, the same biased, social-service-dominated structure that crippled DCFS investigations in the 1970s and 1980s.

The investigative failures would be bad enough in a robust child-care environment. They are catastrophic in a state where the supply of safe placements and competent care providers is shrinking. The Commission called for shelters, prevention programs, and community-based supports so that children who were removed received proper care.

Where are these services?

Today, unions, advocates, and even former DCFS workers acknowledge that the agency operates under a permanent staffing crisis, with chronic shortages of foster homes, residential beds, and specialized placements for high-need children. Major charitable organizations that once ran children’s homes and shelters have either exited the field or dramatically reduced their footprint, leaving DCFS to warehouse children in inappropriate settings or place them in homes that would have been considered unacceptable even by the standards of 1983, which were much higher than they seem to be today.

In that context, the quiet shift from professional investigators to overburdened caseworkers and uncertified interns is no accident; it is a survival strategy. A system that lacks places to place abused children and organizations willing to care for them creates a powerful incentive to find fewer “indicated” cases and to treat investigative doubt as an excuse to leave children where they are.

Illinois replaced one defective child protection model with another that looks better on paper but rests on the same foundation—social work control of investigations, inadequate training, and chronic understaffing—now compounded by the use of interns and minimally prepared workers as de facto investigators. The state did not move from bad to good; it moved from bad to cosmetically improved while hollowing out the investigative core. In other words, from bad to much worse.

In future articles this year, I plan to conduct a more in-depth examination of our child protection system. Currently, I’m investigating the system of Child Advocacy Centers in Illinois and around the country. National accreditation standards and state funding have produced advocacy-driven, social‑service-dominated centers that act as gatekeepers rather than neutral fact‑finders, even as they carry out one of the Commission’s central recommendations—a single, non-repetitive interview for child victims.

In addition, I am examining the broader problem of placement shortages, the diminishing availability of genuinely charitable providers, and the shortage of professional investigators. These shortages drive DCFS’s staffing shortages and, thus, its reliance on interns and its persistent refusal to build the multidisciplinary, law-enforcement-anchored fact-finding system the Legislature ordered more than forty years ago.

Until Illinois reverses that central mistake—substituting social work judgment and intern-level labor for real investigation—no amount of new acronyms, blue‑ribbon panels, or accreditation certificates will change the outcome for abused children.

Instead of waiting on the government, maybe our churches should start looking for solutions as well.

Too many religious organizations that purportedly help protect and rescue children do very little to protect children from abuse in their own houses. They may conduct basic background checks, but very little else, and background checks screen out fewer than 2% of predators.

Every organization, every person needs to contribute to solving the challenge of protecting children. Leaving the solution to someone else, especially to the government, is not working.