The “irresponsible media megaphones” of child welfare

Friday’s Reliable Sources newsletter from CNN’s indefatigable media reporter Brian Stelter was all about the way many journalists still cover child welfare – though I’m sure Stelter didn’t realize it. In fact, the column says not a word about the “child welfare” system or, as it should be called, the family policing system. 

Rather, the column was devoted to politicians who exploit horror stories to boost the power of the traditional police. He cites this example: 

We can see it happening this week in the sudden storyline about Trump increasing federal law enforcement in DC while fear-mongering about crime being "totally out of control."

 

Responsible news outlets keep pointing out, as PBS "NewsHour" did, that "contrary to the president’s claims, violent crime in Washington, DC, last year hit a 30-year low." Nationally, as well, there is clear FBI data "showing crime down in every category," anchor Geoff Bennett said. …

 

But irresponsible media megaphones are engaging in argument by anecdote. They're citing highly visible crimes … to justify Trump's desire to exert more control in DC. For example, Fox's story about the show of force asserts "a concerning surge in violent crime" with no mention of data to the contrary. [Emphasis in original – it’s Stelter’s style.]

 

This has, of course, been the “child welfare” establishment playbook pretty much forever. There’s even a name for it: “health terrorism.” Take a horror story, generalize from it (argue by anecdote), and use it to demand a vast increase in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love in cases that are nothing like that horror story. Instead of making children safer, it traumatizes thousands of children with needless foster care, exposes them to the high risk of abuse in foster care itself and so overloads the system that workers have even less time to find those few children in real danger.

 

But, as Stelter points out, while mainstream news organizations aren’t falling for it when it comes from Trump, often they still fall for it in “child welfare” when it comes from extremists who happen to have “professor” in front of their names, or cushy posts at extremist think tanks. Or they fall for it when it comes from a grandstanding local pol or the head of the local so-called “child advocacy” organization.

 

The good news: Journalists are falling for it a lot less than they used to. When they still fall for it, politicians are less likely to respond with knee-jerk demands to tear apart more families. And when they fall for it, it’s usually just that; a blunder based on the revulsion we all feel when adults do horrible things to children and a failure to seek more context and a wider variety of sources, rather an reporters being irresponsible.

 

Oh, by the way: Look through back editions of the federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment report, and you’ll find that the rate of child abuse in America peaked in 1993. It’s declined more than 50% since then, reaching a record low in 2023. During the first few years of this time period, foster care numbers went up. For the rest, they went down.

 

So here’s a suggestion to reporters covering child welfare: The next time anyone tries to exploit a tragedy to stampede us into demanding that we tear apart more families, imagine that Donald Trump is uttering those words.  Then fact-check accordingly.

Child welfare loses two heroes

There are not many true heroes in child welfare. Recently, we lost two of them.

Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent died on July 25. Paul led the child welfare division of the Alabama Department of Human Resources when it was the subject of a pioneering class-action lawsuit that demanded the system rebuild to emphasize keeping families together. (A member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors, Ira Burnim of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.) Paul welcomed the suit and worked hard to make it succeed.  And it did. For a while, Alabama was the unlikely leader in doing child welfare right – to the point that it made the front page of The New York Times. 

Paul also served on the “Marisol Panel,” an advisory group that grew out of a class-action lawsuit settlement in New York City. The group was strictly advisory. But because of who was on it, and because the head of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, Nicholas Scoppetta, surprised almost everyone by taking a lot of the panel’s advice, it did a lot to set in motion some of the changes for the better in  New York City. 

Then Paul founded the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, which issues outstanding reports on systems across the country, including Iowa, Indiana and Philadelphia. You can read more about Paul here. 

Karl Dennis 

Karl Dennis, the "father of Wraparound” -- or, as he preferred to call it, Unconditional Care -- died in June.  In a tribute to Dennis in Youth Today, David Osher writes: 

Karl also understood that each person and each context was unique and that settings, programs and even systems had to adapt to the youth and family rather than the opposite. Just as Karl never wrote off a young person, he never wrote off families even though most or perhaps all Kaleidoscope youth had experienced trauma, and agencies claimed the parents were hard to find and would not comply. He believed in family ties and understood that family included aunts, uncles, grandparents, even close friends, neighbors, and the whole tribe. Because Karl viewed families as valuable resources — and Kaleidoscope worked hard to find them — when they found them they treated them with respect and worked to earn trust, believing that wraparound should be family-driven. 

Karl understood the toxic impacts of language on people, worker-youth/family alliance, and organizational behavior. Karl insisted that his staff never applied the pejorative clinical language of “dysfunction” to families; rather, he saw systems that did not provide appropriate support to families and youth as dysfunctional. 

But it’s best to let Karl Dennis speak for himself, as he did in this presentation in 2009: 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 5, 2025

● All over the country, private foster care agencies are fearmongering in a desperate attempt to get taxpayer bailouts and/or near immunity from liability – because now that victims of child abuse on their watch can sue, there are so many lawsuits that the agencies can’t afford insurance. In Youth Today, NCCPR suggests a better idea. 

● In a column for The Imprint, one of a series documenting what it takes to stop families from being torn apart when their poverty is confused with neglect, Sarah Winograd of Together With Families writes about a case in Georgia which began with this ultimatum: 

Child Protective Services gave Maurice a deadline: fix your home, or your granddaughters will be placed in foster care. 

That’s pretty amazing, since foster care apologists keep telling us such cases don’t exist. The column documents how much it took to cobble together the support this grandfather needed to save his children from foster care. It reminded me of the question I posed concerning a similar example from Missouri: Why is foster care so easy and everything else so hard? 

● Also in The Imprint, Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, documents the enormous harm of anonymous child abuse reporting, and why New York Gov. Kathy Hochul should sign a bill to replace it with confidential reporting. 

● If we must have offices of Child Advocate/Ombudsman, then at least let's structure them to be unbiased and recognize error in all directions. In a column for the Maine Morning Star about what is currently one of the worst such offices, I suggest ways to do that. 

● The American Law Institute periodically issues what it calls “Restatements” of aspects of American law. They are massive undertakings, and until now ALI had not tried it with child welfare law. Now that they have, Prof. Martin Guggenheim has written a commentary on the Restatement for Family Court Review that also is an assessment of the current state of family defense – and the current state of the teaching of family defense in law schools.  

In the same issue, Prof. Shanta Trivedi writes that 

The family policing system separates families every day. As a result, children and their parents suffer lifelong, irreversible trauma and a host of other negative consequences. The Restatement acknowledges these harms and directs courts to consider the harms of removal throughout court proceedings when deciding whether a child should be removed from their parents or in determining if reunification is appropriate.

NCCPR in Youth Today: Seize the foster care insurance “crisis” as an opportunity — to curb foster care

As California faces a $12 billion budget deficit, here are some of the programs that were proposed for cuts: 

● Crisis services for foster youth

● Services for the homeless

● Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for the poor 

But one group not only isn’t being cut, they’re in line for a great big increase. They’re getting a $31.5 million taxpayer bailout for private agencies that operate group homes and institutions and oversee some family foster homes. There are far better answers, including not taking so many children needlessly in the first place. ...

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in the Maine Morning Star: Who watches the watchdog? Fixing the office of the Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman will take radical restructuring

We all know the cliché: Knowledge is power. The corollary, though, is that anyone who has a near-monopoly on knowledge will have enormous power to shape public perception. That enormous power brings enormous potential for abuse. 

Child welfare systems tend to be more secretive than the CIA. So whoever becomes a state’s ombudsman or child advocate often has enormous power. But while such offices are conceived as a way to watch over state child welfare agencies, lawmakers tend to forget a crucial question: Who watches the watchdog? 

So instead of simply further boosting the power of the Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman, which was among the oversight reforms proposed last legislative session, lawmakers need to restructure the office. …

Read the full column in the Maine Morning Star

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 29, 2025

● Can a total stranger really show up in your hospital room days after you’ve given birth and hand you a contract in a foreign language letting them take your child? Well, not if you’re affluent. But if you're poor …  And that’s not even the worst of the abuses uncovered in this story by Sandy West in the Texas Observer. I discuss some of the other horrors in this NCCPR Blog post. 

● The Texas Observer story focuses on alleged abuses by private agencies, but it also illustrates what happens when public agencies that are supposed to regulate them are willfully blind. For another example of willful blindness, check out the story from The Beacon in Kansas that is the subject of this NCCPR Blog post. 

● Some of the best research in child welfare is coming from scholars who are able to embed with the key actors and those who are acted upon – Kelley Fong’s book, Investigating Families is  one of the finest examples.  

Now there’s another. The Imprint interviews Katie Gibson, a post-doctoral fellow who embedded with the people who decide if foster youth will be given psychiatric meds, and those who review the decisions. From the story: 

In her dissertation research, she came away impressed by the professionals she observed, and grateful for their transparency. But she also began to question the medication “audit” oversight model. Gibson argues that while audit programs like the one she observed can contribute to improving some prescribing practices, they also deepen the foster care system’s reliance on stigmatizing mental health diagnoses that center children as the problem — instead of the troubled institutions that house them. 

● One mother ate a poppy seed bagel, another was given morphine for pain relief by the hospital where she gave birth. But in both cases, based on a single positive drug tests, the hospitals turned them in to the family police. Watch the joint investigation by The Marshall Project and CBS News Sunday Morning: 

● It’s not just the wrong bagel that can get you reported to the family police.  From Abortion, Every Day: 

And B’s arrest? It happened after she went to the hospital for medical care—and someone there called child protective services. 

That’s right, apparently in South Carolina, a miscarriage is cause for a child abuse investigation. As If/When/How attorney Farah Diaz-Tello told AED, “Once law enforcement decides they want to punish somebody, they're going to try to find a way to do it.” 

● It’s not all bad news. Law 360 reports on a big victory in New York City for survivors of domestic violence and their children. 

● Sadly, the reporting staff at the Minnesota Star-Tribune often has been clueless, or worse, about these issues for a little over a decade.  But at least one of the interns got it right, in this story about the appalling treatment of Native American families by county family police agencies. 

● There’s a new study out about foster parents feeling, as the headline puts it, “Undervalued, misled, & isolated.”  That’s probably true. But wouldn’t it be great if some of them stopped and thought: They really need me, If this is how they treat me, how are they treating the birth parents? And is all that bad stuff they told me about the birth parents really true? 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From Law and Crime, a story with the headline: “'Careful not to leave a mark': Florida family of 4 abused 'illiterate' foster and adopted children who don't even know their own birthdays, police say” 

A Florida family of four is behind bars after subjecting their adopted and foster children to myriad forms of abuse, law enforcement in the Sunshine State allege.

● From Capitol News Illinois:

A caseworker assigned to monitor Illinois foster child Mackenzi Felmlee — who later died in May 2024 — had a troubling past, including an arrest for a violent crime and orders of protection filed against her by eight women for alleged threats, harassment and abuse, court documents show.

In child welfare, possession is 9/10 of the law – if you know the loopholes

 

There is so much in this brilliant story by Sandy West in the Texas Observer that it’s hard to know where to start. 

The centerpiece of the story involves representatives of private agencies, sometimes licensed, sometimes not, sometimes nonprofit, sometimes not, suddenly showing up and offering contracts to new mothers, sometimes just days after giving birth. The contracts, may or may not be in a language the mother actually can read. They involve the mother giving temporary custody to someone chosen by the agency.  At least it’s supposed to be temporary. 

But that isn’t the worst of it. 

The worst is how easy it is for middle-class foster parents handed these children to exploit legal loopholes, go into court and say, in effect: “We’re better people than this child’s parents, so we should get to keep the child!” They can do it even when the private agency objects. They can do it even when the state family police agency objects. 

It’s one more example of the ugliest of family policing realities: attempts by those with enough money to step right up and take a poor person’s child for their very own. 

In one of the two cases examined in the story, this happened: 

At the hearing, [Judge] Fisher said the Louisiana couple would be ineligible to sue again for custody based on their time caring for the child while the state sought another placement. 

“If that were the case, I could go kidnap a child from the playground and keep it for six months and then file for adoption,” Fisher said, per the court transcript. “They don’t have permission to have the child, so they don’t have standing.” …

But the Phillipses have continued their efforts to terminate the teen’s parental rights and adopt her daughter ever since, court records show. 

Texas is not even the worst. Many states formally allow foster parents to “intervene” if they’ve had a foster child for long enough, a practice exposed by ProPublica and The New Yorker.  This year, Indiana lawmakers even made this odious practice easier.

The Texas Observer story points to other issues: 

● This is still another form of hidden foster care. Such placements have even less in the way of due process protections than official, openly-acknowledged foster care. And these placements are not counted as entries into care, making a state’s foster care numbers look artificially low. 

This is at least the second form of hidden foster care discovered in Texas. The placements described in the Texas Observer story are in addition to the many so-called “parental child safety placements” in Texas.  Were “parental child safety placements” counted as foster care, which, for all intents and purposes they are, they would nearly triple the number of children reported torn from their parents in Texas every year. 

● This also illustrates the danger of various forms of what should be called sugar-frosted foster care.  That’s when private organizations, such as Safe Families for Children, offer to help impoverished families by finding volunteers to take in their children, as opposed to, say, finding volunteers to help ease their poverty. There is nothing nefarious in it. Those running the program have the best of intentions and they don’t try to trick or coerce anyone. But it’s open to the same sorts of abuses if a volunteer “safe family” decides they want to keep the child for their own and either goes to court or simply calls child protective services.