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| Photo by Gage Skidmore |
This post
originally appeared at the Chronicle of
Social Change
Last month, author and political commentator Jeff Greenfield
wrote an essay for Politico on the politics of fear – and how Donald Trump exploits
it. He wrote:
History teaches us lessons of what can happen when genuine public fears are co-opted by the demagogues, fear-mongers and over-reactors. There was a reason to fear crime in the 1960s and 1970s, because violent crime in America was increasing by leaps and bounds, but that didn’t mean the only response [had to be] four decades of over-incarceration, driven by politicians’ fears of looking soft on crime. There was a reason to fear a Soviet espionage network looking for military secrets during a Cold War waged in the shadow of countless nuclear weapons, but that didn’t require McCarthyism as a response.There was a reason to fear where Al Qaeda might strike next after 19 men with box cutters killed 3,000 people in the heart of two great cities, but that didn’t mean we had to invade Iraq.
Let me add one to Greenfield’s list: There is a reason to fear
that a small number of parents are brutally abusive and will do terrible things
to innocent children if they are not stopped. But that doesn’t mean we
needed to create a system that puts millions of children through frightening
investigations every year, and casts thousands of them into a chaotic system of
foster care, traumatizing some of them for life.
Yet that’s what we’ve done. Some of the same people who probably
are horrified by Donald Trump seem to have no problem using his tactics in the
fight against child abuse.
Case in point: Suppose someone tried to set up a role-playing
exercise concerning international relations. But every Muslim character
was a terrorist and they all said things like “death to America” and “kill the
infidels.” The furor at this blatant bigotry would be enormous.
Yet a column in the Chronicle of Social Change recently sang the praises of a role-playing exercise about foster care in an
article that begins with the script for those taking the role of birth parent:
The birth parent leans in and whispers horrific things to her child.“I don’t want you.”“I can’t protect you.”“Don’t tell anyone our family secret.”
Everyone playing a birth parent is instructed to “choose an
addiction” – since, of course, every parent who loses a child to foster care
must be an addict.
In fact, the problem of drug abuse, like the problem of child
abuse, is serious and real. But both also have been subjected to enormous
hype, and inflated figures.
Where in this role-playing exercise are the birth parents who
lost their children because their poverty was confused with neglect? Where
are the mothers who were beaten by their husbands and then had their children
taken away because they “allowed” the children to “witness domestic violence”? And where are the ones who lost their
children because of a false positive drug test, or whose “drug problem”
consists of smoking marijuana?
This same role-playing exercise features only “enlightened
foster parents.” There are many of these. But since multiple studies
have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, they can’t all
be enlightened.
And where are the caseworkers who immediately jump to
conclusions about families because they are poor, and especially if they are
poor and African-American? has shown that
to be a common problem.
Yet this exercise in stigma and stereotyping not only isn’t
condemned, it is honored. The guy who came up with it, David White, won and
“Angels in Adoption” award.
Donald Trump would be proud.
Or suppose Donald Trump were asked which states were doing the
best job at solving a social problem. Suppose he replied that it’s
complicated, “but I will tell you the states that do the best overall are the
ones that have smaller, whiter populations” [emphasis added].
Even Trump never actually said that - but Michael Petit did,
when asked which states are best at preventing child abuse. He’s the
founder of the group that calls itself Every Child Matters, and he said it at a
Congressional hearing.
And then there is this,
from a former social worker for the Washington, D.C. child welfare agency. She
laments the fact that a judge would not let foster parents adopt a child, and
instead awarded custody to
The 19-year-old father, jobless and a high school dropout. … He had not abused or neglected Davon. Nevertheless, it was clear that Davon would do better with his foster parents.
In other words, why do we need actual maltreatment to take away
a child forever? And why help a birth father with employment and
child-rearing? Let’s have a society in which mostly white, middle-class
caseworkers descend upon impoverished communities and take black children from
parents because they would be “better off” elsewhere!
Perhaps she should send the idea to the Trump campaign. I’m
sure they’d love it.
None of this is new. In the 19th Century, Protestant Minister
Charles Loring Brace snatched away the children of poor Catholic immigrants
whose parents he deemed genetically inferior and threw them onto “orphan
trains” even though many were not orphans. Brace knew how to whip up a
crowd with scare stories.
Other child savers, as they proudly called themselves, hid their
agenda of fear and loathing of the immigrant poor – and their efforts to
confiscate their children -- behind horror stories of brutally beaten children,
complete with “before” and “after” pictures for the media.
They, and their latter-day counterparts, could be Donald Trump’s
role models.
If there is a difference between Donald Trump and today’s child
savers it is this: The child savers mean well. They want to help children
and they really believe their “solutions” will work.
But Greenfield wrote something else in his Politico
column on the politics of fear:
The dilemma, of course, is that in every one of these examples, the lunge toward useless, or foolish, or dangerous, or deplorable responses seems almost built into the political system.
In child welfare, we have a system that subjects millions to
needless investigations, traumatizes thousands with needless foster care – and
still overlooks children in real danger.
Useless, foolish, dangerous and deplorable seems like a pretty
good description of that system. If we’re ever going to change that,
America’s latter-day child savers need to stop playing the Trump card.
More about the
impact of Trump-style paranoia, and the implications for child welfare, in
this post.
