Recent reports reveal that the number of Illinois children who died because of child abuse or neglect reached 82 last year, an increase of 49 percent from the year before. In a quarter of these cases the family involved had been investigated for child abuse or neglect by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

Anyone familiar with protective service work knows how extremely difficult it can be to make good decisions when faced with suspicious or hostile parents, frightened or uncommunicative children, uncooperative relatives and neighbors, large workloads and a flood of paperwork. But no one can deny that sloppy investigation, supervisory mismanagement and judicial bungling appear to have contributed to the deaths of some children.

However, citing mistakes and errors in judgment made by individuals and institutional systems is not enough if we are to explain how children die violently in their homes. The main reason they die from child abuse is that our community accepts two tragically false propositions about family life: