While doing genealogical research, I unassumingly clicked on an article from the 1970s covering a homicide with child victims. I was appalled when the page loaded and I was met with an uncensored picture of the crime scene upon discovery, bodies and all.

This unsettling discovery relates to bigger questions I’ve been reflecting on that surround our organization’s work with the Homeschooling’s Invisible Children (HIC) database. The database documents publicly documented cases of severe child maltreatment in homeschool settings with the goal of better understanding – and stopping – the abuse and neglect of homeschooled children. CRHE launched HIC in 2013, and since then, the database has amassed over 530 cases that have tragically resulted in over 220 fatalities. We’ve put a lot of work into HIC, including many dedicated discussions of the ethics of finding, analyzing, sharing cases, and how we remember and memorialize victims.

This work, however, is not done. I believe that projects like this require constant and transparent reflection, something social scientific researchers call “reflexivity.” Reflexivity isn’t a one-off task or a box to check. It’s an ever-present responsibility, and privilege, that comes with doing research in service of social change. 

As I reflect on the HIC database now, in 2026, when growing awareness of fatal homeschool abuse cases has actually resulted in meaningful policy reform, I am sitting with the heavy ethical implications of staking our advocacy work on accounts of grave trauma and harm.

Journalistic practices for covering crimes against children (and violent crime more generally) have changed over the years, and most certainly for the better. As we grow more aware of the realities of retraumatization and victims’ entitlement to privacy, journalists have largely adopted more trauma-informed approaches to documenting the details of a case. A tension, however, sits at the heart of their coverage: they must delicately balance their duty to honor the dignity of victims and families and their journalistic duty to inform the public of the horrors of child maltreatment. 

This tension looms large in our organization’s work on the Homeschooling’s Invisible Children (HIC) database. While HIC is primarily an academic project, it does serve an educational function similar to journalism: we communicate our findings in plain language so that researchers, policymakers, and the public can learn about abuse and neglect in homeschool settings and the structural gaps that are responsible for abuse going undetected. This is sorely needed given the state of current homeschooling debates. In fact, one motivation behind starting HIC was to demonstrate that it is, in fact, possible for homeschool to play a role in abuse, a reality that anti-regulation advocates still refuse to acknowledge openly. To do so, we have to give readers a sense of what children suffer from, which involves sharing distressing details about the severe harm they experienced.

In particular, many of our cases involve caregivers pulling children from school to “homeschool” in order to isolate them from anyone who may notice and report abuse. The totalistic social isolation achieved in these scenarios creates conditions for very specific forms of extreme, often fatal abuse to escalate. Educating the public, policymakers, and child welfare professionals about these horrors is crucial for developing solutions to stop abuse from ever happening in the first place.

This educational work is worthwhile. It’s indisputable that the power of story is paramount in instigating conversation that leads to policy action. The stories of Raylee Browning in West Virginia, and Mimi Torres-Garcia and others in Connecticut, for example, have inspired lawmakers to patch gaping holes in homeschool welfare safety nets, which will save lives.

And yet, in sharing these stories, we run the risk of violating victims’ privacy, and reducing their lives to their worst moments. For living victims, the more detail we include, the higher the chance we threaten victim anonymity, which is more delicate than ever as social media continues to erode our privacy. For all victims, detailed accounts of abuse can invite a voyeuristic, true-crime-style posture toward children’s stories, turning them into spectacles that fascinate and shock, instead of real, human tragedies with real, human impact that demand change. 

Or, we go too far the other way. One of the reasons that story is so poignant is because stories invite us not only to empathize, but to identify with their subjects – in this case, homeschooled children experiencing harm. This can be a double-edged sword. No doubt there is immense power in understanding our lives as intertwined, something our individualist culture has discouraged. As indigenous activist Dr. Lilla Watson famously reminds us, “[i]f you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” We should never forget that, if we truly care about preserving our own human rights, we need to protect children’s rights.

However, identification with child victims can introduce a sense of ownership over their stories. For homeschool alumni in particular, there is an understandable temptation to see HIC victims as “ours”; in fighting for them, we fight for the younger versions of us. I understand this impulse completely, and have felt it myself in the course of doing this work. But note how Dr. Lilla Watson distinguishes between “yours” and “mine”; our liberations are bound but not blurred. If we lose our sense of separateness, we risk speaking over, instead of for, children. I understand that, in the case of alumni-led activism, “yours” and “mine” may have significant overlap in some cases, and that speaking of a “we” can be a sweeping generalization when the homeschooling community is far from uniform. However, it is true that alumni activism has historically been led by mostly white alumni recovering from homeschooling motivated by various forms of Christian nationalist ideology. This segment of the homeschooling world remains dominant in many ways, and my homeschool experience also fits this description. However, the threat of religious extremism notwithstanding, if we uncritically assume that all homeschool abuse cases are products of the same systems, we will misinterpret not only the root causes of some cases, but will also block ourselves from being appropriately nuanced in our proposed solutions.

For example, the kind of proactive, insistent CPS intervention that may well have rescued white homeschooled children raised in abusive, neglectful, religiously oppressive households might have an altogether different impact on poor children of color and their communities — children who are overrepresented among HIC cases due to heightened surveillance. In Torn Apart, activist Dorothy Roberts recalls attending a child welfare reform roundtable in which she was the only Black contributor. Roberts pushed back on a white woman’s proposed solution for improving the lot of foster children, who are disproportionately Black, to which the woman replied “these are our children.” The naive arrogance on display here has underpinned child welfare interventions that have caused grave harm, however well-intentioned they may have been.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we dispense altogether with using the child welfare system to protect homeschooled children—it is currently the only government system centrally dedicated to protecting children. But, if we truly seek to advocate for the children and families at the heart of homeschool policy, we need to consider whether we’re advocating for the children as they are, or if we’re superimposing our wounded child selves onto them. Homeschooling is not a monolith when it comes to experiences nor outcomes; the interventions and support that children and families need will vary. An approach to protecting children that prioritizes accurately perceiving and responding to children’s needs as they are is as essential for today’s children as it would have been for earlier generations.

What is necessary is an open and rigorous examination of what stories actually reveal about the source of harm, which is ultimately what is our business as concerned citizens and advocates. This is why we’ve been changing our approach. We are shifting to a more birds-eye approach in our public analyses. In particular, we’re finding it increasingly necessary to shift attention away from sordid individual case details and memorials to the upstream, systemic issues that allow for cases to occur in the first place (such as the fact that a vast majority of states allow caregivers to withdraw their children from school to homeschool during active CPS investigations). I’m proud to report that our team has spent the better part of two years developing a protocol for case narratives that shares details necessary for understanding how lack of safeguards allowed a case to happen, while minimizing the sharing of personal details. This process will, of course, be ever-ongoing, and we are open to feedback on our approach. I hope, though, that these changes will better align our work with our organization’s staunchly child-centered approach to homeschooling, something that currently distinguishes us in the homeschool space.  

Honoring victim dignity not only entails telling their stories with care, but a commitment to telling their stories as theirs. Children’s rights includes victims of abuse and neglect in the context of homeschooling, too. I hope to keep this commitment central to our work as we gain momentum in protecting children’s rights to safety and an education.