Research & Data

KARA SIGNAL is our independent data platform: federal child-welfare figures, state-by-state accountability tracking, and a 21-year investigative blog.

We keep the data platform architecturally separate from this site so it can hold to its own trust contract. No tracking, no donation asks, nothing but the record. This page won’t reproduce SIGNAL’s figures directly; it exists to point you there.

Explore KARA SIGNAL

Looking for KARA posts on the reporting behind the data? That lives in the blog.

Reports

Standalone investigative and fatality-review reports KARA has surfaced or contributed to. Each links to the primary document at its original source.

Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota · 2023

Minnesota Child Fatalities from Maltreatment, 2014–2022

Gehrman & Karrow’s fatality review of 88 Minnesota child deaths tied to maltreatment. 72% of the deaths reviewed involved children already known to CPS. Anchors much of KARA’s state-level accountability work.

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Resource library

Two ways in: browse every source KARA has cited across 21 years of reporting (more than 12,000 links, filterable by category, topic, and state) or the curated Airtable base of organizations, reports, hotlines, and reading.

Browse cited sources Browse the Airtable base

Forthcoming

America’s Children in 100 Charts

A forthcoming KARA book: a hundred charts on how the U.S. treats its children, drawn from the same federal and state data that anchors SIGNAL. Pre-orders and release details will land here first.