News and commentary from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
concerning child abuse, child welfare, foster care, and family preservation.
● COVID taught us
that when the family police step back and community-based community-run support
organizations step up, child abuse is reduced.
Now the Family Justice Journal devotes an
entire issue to what that kind of support should look
like. (Remember, you can download it as a .pdf to avoid the #$%^& flipbook
format :-))
● And yes, there’s still another study
showing the value of providing concrete help to families in reducing child
abuse.
● A commentary in The Imprint
reminds us of something else that makes a huge difference in improving the
lives of children: good lawyers for them – and for their parents.
● Encouraged by a
dreadful federal law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, states have
long used the family police to persecute pregnant women who use drugs –
including, sometimes especially, marijuana – doing enormous harm to their
children.Now, Investigate West reports
on how the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is encouraging states to
ratchet up the harm.
The persecution of
pregnant women is triggered by mandatory reporting laws
which require huge numbers of professionals to turn them in.So I hope this Investigate West story is read
closely in the Investigate West newsroom itself, since they’ve been among the
worst offenders when it comes to crusading to expand mandatory reporting to one
of the few categories of professionals now often exempt.I wrote about that here.
● The problems are compounded when the drug tests used to justify tearing apart a family and holding a child in foster care are not even accurate. InvestigateTV, the national investigative arm of Gray Television, found serious problems with the accuracy of the tests in some cases.
● The Imprint reports
that, in its final days in office, the Biden Administration took a first step
toward involving the federal government in curbing the insidious practice of
states swiping foster youths’ Social Security benefits.
● Pridefully
progressive Vermont tears apart families and sends children off to the hell of
foster care at a rate that would make Donald Trump blush proud: the
second-highest rate in America, more than quadruple the national average, when
rates of child poverty are factored in. It’s been that way for decades.Yet this dismal record has largely gone under
the radar in family policing circles and in local media. I have a blog post about it.
Nationally,
little attention has been paid to how family policing functions in
Vermont. For whatever reason, the awful
system next door in New Hampshire gets plenty of attention. But Vermont is even worse; probably the worst
in New England and among the worst in the nation. Yet it goes largely under the radar.
A story
about foster youth getting access to their own records was a useful reminder
that Vermont needs more attention – and Vermont’s leaders need to feel ashamed.
I was
reminded when a story about access to records brought home a comparison between
two mothers and their children.One
lived in Vermont, the other lived near me in Northern Virginia.
Both begin
the same way.A mother’s injuries lead
to prescriptions for opioid painkillers which lead to a substance use disorder.
Vermont
Public recently
told the story of what happened to the son of the first mother, Nathaniel
Farnham, when the Vermont family police agency, the Department of Children and
Families, invaded his life. After two
weeks of supervised visits to the family, Farnham says,
“…one Saturday morning while I was watching cartoons with
my mom, knock on the door, and there’s a DCF worker with two state troopers.
And I’m getting put in the back of a car and off I go, start the 13 years of
hell.”
Farnham was
at the mercy of the DCF from age 7 until he aged out in 2018. He told Vermont Public he’d been in 35
different foster homes and at least eight placements in “residential
treatment.”
The mother in my Virginia
neighborhood was, if anything, in worse shape.She was hooked on prescription opioids and an alcoholic. "I liked
alcohol, it made me feel warm,” she would later say. “And I loved pills. They
took away my tension and my pain."This
addict also had serious mental health issues.
But unlike
Nathaniel Farnham, this mother’s children were not taken away. The local
equivalent of the Department of Children and Families never knocked on the
door. Instead of “13 years of hell” the children lived safely, first in their
suburban Virginia home and then in the White House -- with their mom, Betty
Ford.You
can get a glimpse of their idyllic life here starting at 0:50 in:
The
difference, of course, boils down to a single word: Money. Betty Ford had all
the help she needed to raise her children safely despite her many issues. How
much hell might Nathaniel have been spared, had anything like that kind of help
been offered to his mother?
What
happened to Nathaniel happens in every state, but it’s more likely to happen in
Vermont. Vermont is a top candidate for child removal capital of America.Pridefully progressive Vermont tears apart
families and sends children off to the hell of foster care at
a rate that would make Donald Trump blush proud: the second-highest
rate in America, more than quadruple the national average, when rates of child
poverty are factored in. It’s been that way for decades.
The result
is a system that makes all children less safe.
Most cases
are nothing like the horror stories of children tortured and murdered.In Vermont 93%
of the time, when children are thrown into foster care their parents are
not even accused of physical or sexual abuse.Most cases aren’t even like Nathaniel’s
mother, or Betty Ford.More than 60% of
the time, there’s not even an allegation of any kind of drug abuse at all.
Even Bill
Young, who used to run Vermont’s child welfare agency, is appalled.After the Vermont Center
for Parent Representation documented case after case of families wrongly listed
on the state´s blacklist of alleged child abusers, Young said:
“After about two months, I realized oh my god, it’s
true. These stories are true … [We] have a situation where people begin to
think, you know, in the interest of protecting a child, you can skew the
evidence a little bit, something that people who raised me would have called
lying.”
Consider how
this culture harms children.
Vermonters were appalled when Trump
tore apart families at the Mexican border – we
all remember those children’s cries.And The New York Timesjust
reminded us of the legacy. Yes, when DCF does it, there’s a difference: DCF
workers almost always mean well.But the
trauma of being torn from everyone they know and love is identical.Vermont children cry out the same way for the
same reasons.
No wonder study
after study finds that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes
typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster
care.And yes, that includes cases where
the issue is substance use.
The harm
isn’t just emotional. Multiple
studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes. The
rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.
And all the
time, money and effort wasted on false allegations, trivial cases and poverty
cases is, in effect, stolen from finding those few children in real danger.
To its
credit, the Vermont Legislature enacted
modest reforms. But far more needs to be done.For starters, the model of high-quality
family defense pioneered in Vermont by VCPR must be available to every family.
This approach is
proven to reduce foster care with no compromise of safety.In some cases, the federal government will
reimburse half the cost. Between that and the savings from reduced foster care,
this approach pays for itself.
And
lawmakers need to become laser-focused on ameliorating the worst stresses of
poverty.Startlingly
small investments in cash assistance, housing aid and childcare can
dramatically reduce not only neglect but even severe abuse.And when the issue really is substance use
that compromises safety, apply the Betty Ford standard to any Vermonter who
needs treatment.
Is it
really too much to ask that Vermont take a more humane approach to child
welfare than Donald Trump?
We suggest that the National office for the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program use this item from The Daily Show as a training video
In 2018, responding to former Today Show anchor Megyn Kelly’s appalling attempt to justify blackface, (for which she has apologized) her colleague Craig Melvin noted that, as a CNN story put it, “this controversy is an opportunity to inform people — but [Melvin] said most people already knew how offensive blackface is.”
Most people, but apparently not one chapter of that most sacred cow in child welfare Court-Appointed Special Advocates. Oh, they’ve learned in the years since they included a blackface act in a fundraiser, especially since they apparently eventually apologized – but that is just one example of the racial bias that plagues CASA. And that, of course, raises fundamental questions about the role of CASA in deciding the fate of children who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately children of color. Even more questions are raised by the latest study of CASA's effectiveness. And there's much more about CASA in NCCPR's presentation at the 2021 Kempe Center conference. and in this 2024 story from The Imprint.
So every Halloween, I plan to reprint this post from 2017:
This Halloween, The Daily Show offers a useful history lesson. The topic: why it’s a really bad idea for white people to dress up in blackface:
But the lesson isn’t just useful for Halloween. It’s also something that anyone involved with that most sacred cow of child welfare – Court-Appointed Special Advocates -- needs to know.
CASA is a program in which minimally trained volunteers, overwhelmingly white and middle-class, are assigned to families who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite. Then they tell judges if the children should be taken from those families, sometimes forever. That, of course, raises problems of inherent bias. But some CASA chapters have made their biases depressingly obvious.
Consider what happened nine years ago in Arkansas City, Kansas. To raise funds for the local CASA chapter, they held a talent competition. The winning act featured the mayor of Arkansas City – dressed in blackface. The head of the local CASA chapter couldn’t understand why that was a problem. "It wasn't black black," she said. "It was all really just tan." That’s only the beginning. All the awful details are here.
It would be one thing if this were just an isolated example of racial bias. But it’s not.
● There was the CASA chapter in Marin County, California, which fell apart when the state CASA association merely asked that they strive for more diversity among the volunteers.
● There was the appalling racist rant by someone who says he volunteered in a scandal-plagued Washington State CASA program for 20 years.
● There’s the fact that the most comprehensive study ever done of CASA, a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that CASA volunteers spend significantly less time on a case if the child to whom they are assigned is Black.
● And then there’s the question of whether the very structure of CASA makes it, in the words of a law review article, “an exercise of white supremacy.”
Showing the Daily Show video won’t solve all these problems; not even close. But it might help prevent the worst excesses of racial bias in CASA programs.
● At long last, the United States has officially apologized
for 150 years of trying to use “child welfare” and children’s “best interests”
to eradicate Native America. You can watch President Biden issue the apology
here.
● The
Imprint has the reaction of tribal leaders, who praised the apology but
noted that the words must be followed by action. The story cites, among others,
Jonathan W. Smith, Sr., chairman of the Tribal Council for the Confederated
Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon:
“The true measure of these words will be in the actions
that come from them,” he said. “We look forward to working together on concrete
commitments that demonstrate a genuine redress of this deliberate pain.”
Indeed, Native Americans continue to be torn from their
homes at far higher rates than their rate in the general population, and there
are constant efforts by defenders of family policing to undermine the law meant
to curb such needless removal -- the Indian Child Welfare Act.
And see this reminder from Kevin Campbell, CEO and
Co-Founder of Pale Blue:
The First People of Australia say today, 16 years after the apology by Prime Minister Rudd, “Sorry means you don't do it again”, as indigenous children are being taken a record rates. What will be said in America 16 years from today?
● Even the boarding schools that were the heart of the
original systematic plan to use child welfare to eradicate Native America have
not entirely gone away.Seven modern
versions still exist.While they are not
the torture chambers of old, Lee
Enterprises newspapers report that at least two of them allegedly are the
scene of other forms of abuse – sexual assault and the misuse and overuse of
psychiatric medication.
● As
you read this New York Times story about children still traumatized
years after they were torn from their parents at the Mexican border during the
Trump Administration, please remember: When children are torn from their
parents by U.S. family police agencies, their motives may be different, but the
trauma is the same.
● The
Colorado Trust reports on the way housing isn’t just the reason for so many
needless removals of children from their families, it’s also the trigger for so
many of those “other reasons” family police agencies love to talk about to
divert attention from the confusion of poverty with “neglect” …
● … while the Santa
Fe New Mexican reports that the New Mexico Supreme Court has curbed the
ability of that state’s family police agency to confuse poverty with neglect.
● For decades, as the massive American child welfare
surveillance state grew, the response to anyone who objected was: “We have to
do this, children are dying!You don’t
care if children die!”So the
surveillance state grew – and children kept right on dying.
Two of the nation’s leading supporters of a
take-the-child-and-run approach to family policing have refined the claim.Now they claim we don’t want to talk about
fatalities.On the contrary, as
I explain in this column for The Imprint, we talk about fatalities
all the time – the take-the-child-and-run crowd just doesn’t like what we have
to say.
● There’s a child welfare angle to the controversy over
owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times killing
editorials endorsing Kamala Harris.One
of those who resigned from the Times editorial board in protest is
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Robert Greene.He
understood “child welfare” issues better – and sooner – than any other
mainstream editorial writer I know. He did the right thing, of course,
but it’s still a big loss. I wrote about him here.
In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All
Directions:
● There is no indication anyone accused the parents of
one-year-old Nova Bryant of beating her, or starving her, or torturing
her.Instead, according
to WRTV in Indianapolis
Bryant relied on a feeding tube and [her mother, Celena]
Conkright has disorders, including ADHD and ADD.Conkright said DCS removed Bryant from her
care two months after she was born.“They
said I wasn’t capable of taking care of her, they said I wasn’t learning fast
enough,” Conkright said.
Here’s what happened in the last of the three foster homes
in which Bryant was placed:
The Indiana Department of Child Services is taking action
to revoke a Brazil woman’s foster license after the drowning death of her
1-year-old foster daughter, Nova Bryant.
Bryant's foster mother, Hailynn Volpatti, is charged with
Neglect of a Dependent Resulting in Death, a level 1 felony. Volpatti pleaded not guilty Friday and her
jury trial is scheduled for April 15.
In a recent column,
Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Sarah Font claimed that “there remains strong
resistance among child welfare scholars, advocates and national leaders to
discussing maltreatment fatalities.”
I have
followed these issues for nearly 50 years, first as a reporter and for the past
34 as an advocate. I coordinate one listserv for grassroots family advocacy
organizations and another for professionals in the field, and I participate in
the discussions of three other advocacy coalitions. We talk about fatalities all the time. It’s just that people like Font and Putnam-Hornstein
don’t like what organizations such as mine have to say. So they cherry-pick data to try to make a case for a
surveil-and-remove approach that has failed for decades. Sometimes they even
contradict themselves. …
● Dr. Sharon McDaniel, a pioneer in doing kinship foster
care the right way, speaks out about the enormous harm of doing it the wrong
way – through the subterfuge known as “hidden foster care.” In
a commentary for The Imprint, she writes:
I want to be clear that while I believe hidden foster
care should be eradicated, the path to doing so is not to simply place all of
those children in the formal foster care system instead. Through an upstream
preventative lens that narrows the front door and addresses poverty through
support and not victimization, I assert fewer children will need any form of
formal care as their parents will have the necessary community support and
resources to care for their children without child welfare intervention. …
But when children really must be taken from their parents,
Dr. McDaniel writes:
I have spent my career pushing for relatives to be the
solution. But they cannot be prioritized on the cheap and with less rights.
They must be supported and provided the appropriate legal protections in place
for any placement through the formal foster care system. Anything less is a
disservice to the families and children we claim to protect.
● The
Imprint has a story about an encouraging trend in high-quality legal
representation for families: providing that representation before a case goes
to court.
● In Michigan, there are counties that barely provide even
the most minimal “representation” to children or parents. The Detroit Free Press reports on recommendations
from a Task Force addressing that issue.
● LAist
reports on another new study, this one from UCLA’s Pritzker Center for
Strengthening Children and Families. This one concerns how survivors of
domestic violence are victimized by the family police. From the story:
“[The Department of Children and Family Services] was
asking the survivors, ‘Why don't you just leave?’ The courts were asking ‘Why
didn't you just leave? Why did you keep your kid in this situation?’ And what
we know is that it's not that easy to leave,” [Pritzker Center Executive
Director Taylor] Dudley said. … “They wanted to leave but they had nowhere to
go, and because of that their children were removed,” she said.
But notice how, even here, the focus is on making it easier
for survivors to flee – not on, say, removing the abuser from the home.
And, unlike the Illinois study, the recommendations in this
study, while not bad, tend to be vague and tepid, perhaps because Pritzker
partnered with DCFS to produce it.
● Rep. Gwen Moore, who has sponsored federal legislation to
make it harder for family police agencies to confuse poverty with neglect is
the guest on The
Imprint podcast this week.
● Imagine a world in which every pregnant woman was forced
to admit a "surveillance" agent into their home at any time, day or
night, to check on fetal “well-being.” Imagine if the surveillance continued
until the child was old enough for preschool. And imagine if the price for not
meeting the government spy’s standard for “well-being” were to have the child
taken forever. No, it’s not Project
2025. It was part of a proposal from someone who was once one of the most prominent
and influential self-proclaimed liberals in “child welfare.” We all need to
remember it. This
blog post is a reminder.
In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All
Directions:
● From
KABC-TV, Los Angeles: Another story about the civil lawsuit filed by
victims of horrific abuse both in their own home and then in foster care.They’re suing Riverside County and the
private agency that oversaw their foster care.So let’s remember, if the private agencies get their way, it
will be incredibly difficult for such children to sue in the future.Yet one California news organization after
another keeps writing news stories suggesting the real victims are the
agencies!
The state of Hawaii and Catholic Charities Hawaii have
settled a civil lawsuit for $690,000 involving the alleged repeated sexual
assault, molestation and abuse of a foster child by the foster mother's son and
his friend who both lived with them, plaintiff's lawyers said.
Self-proclaimed
liberal Elizabeth Bartholet wanted to force every pregnant woman to admit a spy
into her living room from pregnancy until the child was preschool age.
Image created by openart.ai
Last month I wrote a post about how what was once the Next Big Thing
in “child welfare” – “predictive analytics” increasingly is being seen for what
it really is: an Orwellian nightmare of computerized racial profiling that
bears an uncanny resemblance to some of the worst aspects of Project 2025 – the
right-wing vision for a second Trump presidency.
I included this
video from The Lincoln Project dramatizing what one aspect of Project 2025,
omnipresent surveillance of pregnant women, really would mean:
I noted that unlike
Project 2025, using predictive analytics once was embraced by many on the left.
It was the subject of gushy stories in mainstream media – even though one of
the designers of one of the most prominent algorithms actually said “Yes, it’s
Big Brother…”
But while preparing
my recent presentation for the Kempe Center’s virtual conference,
I was reminded that there was an old-fashioned analog scheme for mass
surveillance that was even worse.It,
too, was embraced by many on the Left at the time. In fact, the creator of this
scheme never tires of beginning her presentations by reminding everyone that,
at least in her own eyes, she’s a liberal.
The scheme comes
from Harvard Law School Professor-Emeritus Elizabeth Bartholet.She long has been one of America’s most extreme
devotees of taking away children.For
decades she led what should be called child welfare’s “caucus of denial” – that
group which insists practitioners of “child welfare” somehow are so much better
than everyone else that they have created the one and only field in American
life magically immune from racism.
Nothing in my
description of Bartholet’s scheme that follows constitutes inference on my
part.It is all laid out in depressing
detail in her 1999 book Nobody’s Children – see especially pages 164 to
171.It is a plan so extreme it
would make the authors of Project 2025 blush:
She called for a
spy in every living room.
The plan is a
bizarre extrapolation from something that has gained wide favor among advocates
for traditional child abuse “prevention” – home visiting.The idea is that a professional (in the most
promising of these programs, a nurse) would offer to come to the home of
pregnant women and new parents, perhaps once a week, to offer advice, support
and, at its best, concrete help.
The key words there
are support and offer.The
purpose of the visits is help – though anyone choosing to let them in would
have to consider the fact that the visitors probably would be mandatory
reporters of “child abuse.”(This is a
classic example of how mandatory reporting backfires.)
But the visits
would be strictly voluntary.Parents
would be free to just say no.
When these programs
first were proposed the only real opposition came from some on the extreme
right.They charged that the plan was
really just a subterfuge by liberals to put an agent from Big Government into
every American home. It was easy to dismiss that as a paranoid delusion – until
Elizabeth Bartholet, (who wants to be sure you know she’s a liberal) came along
and proposed almost exactly that.
She called for a
home visiting program that would be mandatory, not voluntary.The starting line would be even earlier than
predictive analytics algorithms. As with Project 2025, the spying would begin
with pregnancy.(Bartholet doesn’t say
if women would have to self-report their pregnancies or if their doctors or
maybe their neighbors would turn them in.)
But however it
would be done, once your pregnancy became known, government agents (presumably
from private “helping” agencies, but contracted by government) would be sent
into your home and every other such home in America - from pregnancy until your
child was old enough for preschool (at which point, presumably, teachers could
take over the spying).
Under Bartholet’s
plan, the visitors can demand entry at any time, and you must let them in. Yes,
they’ll try to help.But their primary
job is to conduct – this is Bartholet’s term - “surveillance” of your pregnancy,
your child-rearing practices and environment. If they believe any of those
practices, or anything else, endangers your child’s “well-being” they must turn
you in to the family police who can -- and Bartholet maintains, should -- whisk
away your children and set in motion the process for taking them away forever.
That
brings us to Bartholet’s definition of “well-being.”
Bartholet
says having those spies in the living room watch out only for things that
threaten children’s health or safety is not enough. She said the system should
be willing to remove children “even if physical safety is not an issue,”
[p.204, emphasis in original]. Indeed, Bartholet says, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act,
which blew huge holes in earlier federal law theoretically requiring
“reasonable efforts” to keep families together, should have gone further.ASFA should have declared reasonable efforts
null and void whenever they might jeopardize a child’s “well-being.” [p.27].
Bartholet
said this is essential because, in large numbers of neglect cases, a child’s
physical safety really isn’t in danger.
And
we should stop right there for a moment.Bartholet and her disciples, then and now, invoke the worst horror
stories to justify the massive over-policing of families and over-removal of
children.But in her own book, Bartholet
effectively admits she knows better.
In
large numbers of “neglect” cases, she admits, children are not in danger at all
– except materially.One needs a
“well-being” standard only if the real target is any case in which a parent’s
poverty is preventing a child from having all the same opportunities rich
children
have. In short, you need a spy in every living room to police “well-being” only
if the goal is to accomplish a massive reallocation of children from the poor
to the rich.
Repeatedly
in her book, Bartholet equates “well-being” with “well-off.” She indicates her
strong preference for adoption by strangers is based in part on the fact that
prospective adoptive parents “are generally relatively privileged in
socioeconomic terms … and live in neighborhoods with better schools and
community facilities, which are relatively free from drugs, crime and violence”
[p.89]. She complains about kinship foster care in part because relatives “live
on the economic margins” [p.157].
She
quotes with approval a researcher who says entire poor communities often are
“almost unsalvageable” and the system should look for placements that provide
“physical … and environmental advantages … even if they require some
discontinuities to achieve them”[p.185].
Fortunately,
both on the Left and the Right, people are catching on to the enormous harm of
child surveillance and child confiscation schemes, whether it was former House
Speaker Newt Gingrich’s proposal to shovel poor people’s children into
orphanages or Bartholet’s spy-in-every-living room scheme.
But
still, there are too many of my fellow liberals who forget everything they
claim to believe about civil rights and civil liberties as soon as someone
whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears.
