NEW YORK (NY)
Fox News
April 29, 2019
By Elizabeth Llorente
The children suffered in silence, their cries and pleas unheard and their injuries unseen beyond the walls of their homes, which the adults responsible for them had turned into torture chambers.
There was the Wisconsin father recently accused of turning a blind eye while his oldest sons sexually abused the younger siblings for years; the California couple who starved and shackled 12 of their children, feeding them once a day and allowing them to shower once a year; a Michigan mother who held her children captive at home, beat them and killed two of them months apart, keeping their bodies in freezers for years.
What they and scores of other children with similar fates have in common is that their abusers kept their crimes against them secret by keeping them out of school – where bruises, wounds or other signs of mistreatment likely would have drawn someone’s attention. The abusers kept authorities at bay by claiming that their children were being homeschooled.
Homeschooling in much of the nation tends to be loosely regulated. Nearly a dozen states have no real regulatory system in place, including no requirement that parents who decide to homeschool their children even inform anyone.
Most of the roughly 2 million children estimated to be homeschooled in the United States are properly educated and cared for by their parents or guardians, experts on the subject say.
But homeschooling unwittingly also provides a convenient and legal cover for families where children are living in squalor or are being neglected and abused.
The Coalition of Responsible Home Education, a national nonprofit, told Fox News that it has tracked nearly 400 cases that have drawn public attention – often through news outlets – since the year 2000. The cases tracked had children whose parents reported them as homeschooled but who were fatally abused or had survived severe abuse and neglect.
Because of the lack of oversight in much of the country, experts say, the scope of abuse and neglect among children who are listed as homeschooled is unknown.
After the 2017 death of an autistic teenager, Matthew Tirado, who suffered starvation, dehydration and injuries — weighing 84 pounds when he died at the age of 17 — the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate analyzed data of families that had records of child abuse and cross-checked them with homeschool data. The agency found that more than one-third of the children who were taken out of schools purportedly to be homeschooled were from homes that had been investigated by child protection officials.
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