NCCPR news and commentary round-up week ending Nov. 19, 2024

● In North Carolina, court hearings in family policing cases are supposed to be open, with limited discretion afforded judges to close them.  But some judges have been abusing that discretion.  IndyWeek reports on a lawsuit from Civil Rights Corps seeking to stop those abuses. The story quotes Amanda Wallace, 

who spent a decade as a Child Protective Services investigator before founding Operation Stop CPS … “The majority of children coming into custody, it’s because of poverty-related concerns,” Wallace says. “If the public just came and sat inside the courtroom, they’d see—wait, so this child was taken away because the parent didn’t have childcare? Can we not figure that out without giving their child to somebody else?” 

● From Lenore Skenazy in Reason: 

It was dinnertime on October 30, 2024, when police handcuffed Brittany Patterson in front of three of her four children and drove her to the station in Fannin County, Georgia. She was then fingerprinted, photographed, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit.

 What was Patterson’s “crime”?  Her 11-year-old son had dared to walk from their rural home less than a mile to the nearest small town  - all by himself. 

● In Rhode Island three organizations, including Children’s Rights, have filed a class-action lawsuit to stop the state from needlessly institutionalizing large numbers of children.  To document that state officials have known about the problem for a long time, their press release, and this Boston Globe story cite NCCPR’s 2010 report on Rhode Island family policing. 

But what is most notable about this suit is the goal: It is not to make the institutions better, it’s to force Rhode Island to provide families with the help they need so they don’t need to be institutionalized in the first place. This is another welcome sign that Children’s Rights is changing its approach to litigation. 

● When Utah lawmakers first tried to incorporate the protections of the Indian Child Welfare Act into state law, the effort was stalled by legislators who wanted to wait and see if the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold ICWA.  Now that the Supreme Court has done just that, KUER Public Radio reports, those lawmakers are trying again. 

● Using child welfare to try to destroy native peoples is not unique to the United States, of course. 

"Big girl … I am so sorry, pack some things, they are coming." 

That’s how 10-year-old Aboriginal Australian Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts found out, from her father, that she was about to be taken by an Australian family police agency.  She survived multiple abusive placements, finally running away. Eventually, she became a human rights lawyer. Her memoir is the topic of this story from the National Indigenous Times. 

● I have a commentary in the Indiana Capital Chronicle about the failure of some counties in that state to apply for readily available federal funds to provide high-quality family defense for children and families. 

● Writing for the libertarian Reason Foundation, Layal Bou Harfouch says: 

The current standard of care in U.S. hospitals calls for screening a woman’s urine for drugs before she gives birth, despite the test itself being notoriously unreliable and easily manipulated by other substances. The results of these tests are used as grounds for social service investigations that can lead to newborns being unjustly taken from parents. Relying on flawed testing mechanisms to separate mothers from their children undermines parental rights and personal autonomy, and health agencies should implement better safeguards before turning to such drastic measures. … Furthermore, the performance of any test must be done with the informed consent of the patient. 

● And as “National Adoption Day” approaches I repeat our annual call to end child welfare’s public celebration of family executions 

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

The Fayetteville [N.C.] mother charged with murdering two of her adopted children was a licensed adoptive parent for years, WRAL Investigates has learned.  Avantae Deven was a licensed foster parent from 2007-2013 through a nonprofit called Grandfather Home. She later became a licensed adoptive parent.  Deven is charged with murdering Blake Deven and London Deven, two of the five children she adopted during the time span. 

From WHP-TV in Harrisburg: 

Over 60 additional cases involving the sexual abuse of children at Pennsylvania Juvenile and Residential Treatment Centers were filed on Wednesday.  The new filing brings the number of total cases alleging sexual abuse at these centers to over 200 victims.

Our annual call to end child welfare’s public celebration of family executions

Saturday, on “National Adoption Day, who will stop to remember that for some children and some young adults every mass adoption ceremony, every treacly feature story on the local news is an act of cruelty – ripping the scab off a wound that never fully heals?

 

Termination of parental rights is child welfare's "death penalty."  So why do
some of the very judges who order a family "executed" preside over
public celebrations of the aftermath?   


This post originally was published on November 15, 2020

             There was a time when, as a people, we were so uncivilized that executions were a form of entertainment – a public spectacle to be celebrated. 

In Canada, for example, 

Before they were banned in 1870, executions in public places could draw thousands of spectators, including families and young children. Boisterous behavior and a less-than-solemn attitude marked these macabre gatherings.  “When the day of a public execution arrived, the businessmen closed their factories and their stores and the people put on their holiday dresses,” noted an 1894 article in the Evening Star about hangings in early Toronto.   

The last official state-sanctioned public hanging in the United States drew a crowd of 20,000.  Even then, reporters condemned it as a “carnival.” (I probably don’t even need to mention that the man they hanged was Black.) 

Fortunately, nearly a century later, we have, of course, outgrown such practices. 

Except in "child welfare." 

Termination of parental rights (or, as it should be called, termination of children’s rights to their parents) often is described as child welfare’s death penalty.  It is the prerequisite to any adoption of a child from foster care. 

And every year, all over America, we celebrate these family executions with a joyous public spectacle.  It’s called National Adoption Day.  This year it’s happening on Nov. 18. 

You know the drill. Open the court on a Saturday, bring in ice cream, cake and balloons, finalize foster-child adoptions en masse – and reinforce every stereotype about how the system supposedly “rescues” children from horrible birth parents and places them with vastly superior adoptive parents.  The same judges who are supposed to decide impartially on termination cases often lead these celebrations.

            In 2020, when celebrations still often were virtual due to COVID, organizers of the Los Angeles County event added a particularly macabre 21st Century touch:  “A pool camera will be permitted at a pre-selected adoptive family’s home for coverage as the family’s virtual adoption ceremony takes place.”

  The whole spectacle also gets the courts and the local family policing agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare agency”) a guaranteed puff piece in the local newspaper celebrating what is, in reality, the aftermath of an execution.  And, of course, as with those other public executions, a disproportionate share of the families “executed” are Black. 

I’ve previously written that this day should be called National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day – since while "child welfare" systems always piously proclaim that their first goal is to reunify a family they’ve torn apart, the outcome that brings them true joy, the one they celebrate, is when that child, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite, is adopted by someone who often is neither. 

Unlike some of my friends in the family preservation movement, I am not opposed to all involuntary adoptions of children taken from their parents.  I am not opposed to all terminations of parental rights.  On those very rare occasions where this is appropriate, I am not opposed to an adoptive family having a private, quiet celebration.  But each of these things should take place far less often than they do now.

 So in that sense, my previous column was too kind.  It said adoption was sometimes an appropriate second choice after reunification and sometimes the appropriate first choice.  In fact, adoption should be farther down on the list, after not only reunification but also guardianship and perhaps other options as well, such as tribal customary adoption, a practice used by some Native American tribes that might well be adaptable elsewhere.  And while a private celebration is one thing, it should never be a mass public spectacle – it rubs salt into too many open wounds, and not just for parents. 

Prof. Christopher Church, senior director of strategic consulting at Casey Family Programs, has argued that using the term “civil death penalty” to describe the terminations that come before the cake, ice cream and balloons actually understates the trauma to the child.  Horrible as it is to lose a parent to physical death, losing a parent to termination of parental rights can be worse. 

“When a child knows somebody is out there but they have no way of connecting to them, that is ‘ambiguous loss,’” Church said at a recent conference.  “That is a more complex trauma for children than death loss.  … Death is finality and [children] can comprehend that better.” 

Church also reminds us that before the joyous public spectacle there’s sometimes another ceremony, if you can call it that.  It’s called the “goodbye visit.”  Children are told they will never, ever see their parents again, and now they all must say goodbye.  No cake and balloons here; just tears and anguish. 

The children are not always saying goodbye just to their parents.  If one child is adopted and the others are not, the sibling bond is severed forever.  If a parent later has another child whom s/he is allowed to keep, the child who was adopted amid the ice cream and cake may never know that sibling – unless, when they are adults, they find some way to find each other. 

But hey, don’t let that spoil the party. 

I can imagine some readers thinking: But wait. We have to do this, don’t we?  After all, if a case goes to termination of parental rights, the parents must have been the worst of the worst, right? 

Wrong. The termination phase is as arbitrary, capricious and cruel as every other decision-point in child welfare.  As Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan, has written: 

[C]ourts seem to terminate parental rights out of a sense of convenience. A child has been in foster care for 15 months, so let’s terminate. A foster parent prefers to adopt a child, so let’s terminate. A parent hasn’t fully complied with services, so let’s terminate. 

            Still another indication of what’s really behind termination cases can be seen in how different the outcomes are by age.  Among children torn from their parents during their first year of life, only 36% are reunified; 46% are adopted.  Then, year after year, reunification rates inch up almost every year until age 14. Nearly 54% of children taken at age 14 were reunified. 

            So are parents of infants vastly worse than parents of 14-year-olds?  Or do caseworkers have their own rescue fantasies triggered by a child about whom they can gush, “Awwww, he’s so cute!” 

            No, we don’t need adoption and the attendant spectacle of mass public family execution to give children “permanence.”  In fact, we don’t know how often adoption does that.  Child welfare systems don’t like to ask questions to which they don’t want to know the answers, so we don’t know how often, when, say, that cute baby becomes a teenager, the adoptive parents change their minds.  

            But even when the adoption doesn’t fall apart, and even when a child really can’t live safely with her or his own parents, the obsession with adoption still hurts children.  As Prof. Sankaran explains: 

Families, and the relationships within them, are far more enduring and resilient than we want to acknowledge. In our quest for legal permanence, we forget about a child’s need for relational permanence, often defined as a child’s lifelong connection with caring adults. For example, too often, we ratify adoptions with the hope of providing a child with a legally permanent home. But in doing so, we cut off the child’s ability to have permanent relationships with those who have – and will always – matter to him. A mother. A sibling. A grandparent. Hence the countless number of stories of adopted children searching for their kin.

           Other options, such a guardianship, don’t require a child to sacrifice any relationships. 

So this time, when National Adoption Day rolls around, remember that for some children and some young adults every mass adoption ceremony, every treacly feature story on the local news is an act of cruelty – ripping the scab off a wound that never fully heals. 

Again, that doesn’t mean adoption by strangers and termination of parental rights are always wrong.  But it needs to be moved much farther down on the list of options for children.  And while, on rare occasions, we still need to impose child welfare’s death penalty, can’t we at least have the decency to stop celebrating it? 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up week ending Nov. 12, 2024

● It’s always a good time to hear from Jerry Milner, who ran the federal Children’s Bureau during the first Trump Administration.  But it’s an especially good time now.  Fortunately, he’s the guest on The Imprint podcast.  His thoughts on policy begin at about 22:30 in. 

● President Biden has apologized for what “child welfare” did to Native Americans in decades past.  But an apology doesn’t end the suffering, which continues to this day. So now, The Imprint asks, what next? 

For some, the apology rang hollow. Others described it as an important first step. But they all said more specific action must follow: more funding for education, the return of buried children’s remains, and adherence to reforms called for by the U.S. Interior Department, which is led by the nation’s first Indigenous cabinet-level secretary, Deb Haaland. 

● In New Zealand, they’re confronting more recent horrors affecting nearly one-third of all institutionalized children in that country. (And those are only the ones we know about.) It didn’t matter if they were institutionalized by government or private faith-based agencies. As The Washington Post reports:

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon formally apologized on Tuesday for decades of “horrific” abuse by state, foster and faith-based care facilities that disproportionately affected Maori and Pasifika children and people with disabilities. 

A landmark government investigation released earlier this year estimated that at least 200,000 people out of 655,000 had been subject to abuse including rape, torture and medical experimentation in institutions across New Zealand between 1950 and 2019. … 

“The care system in Aotearoa New Zealand was a fully funded failure that enabled pervasive abuse and neglect,” [a royal commission] report said. “Almost every survivor who came forward to share their experience with the inquiry has endured irreparable damage to the quality of their lives.”

Does anybody seriously doubt what a similar commission would find here? 

● Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reports on still another way that, when we take a swing at so-called bad mothers the blow lands on their children – and what can be done about it: 

For decades throughout the opioid crisis, most doctors have relied on medication-heavy regimens to treat babies who are born experiencing neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome. Those protocols often meant separating newborns from their mothers, placing them in neonatal intensive care units, and giving them medications to treat their withdrawal. 

But research has since indicated that in many, if not most, cases, those extreme measures are unnecessary. A newer, simpler approach that prioritizes keeping babies with their families called Eat, Sleep, Console is being increasingly embraced. 

In recent years, doctors and researchers have found that keeping babies with their mothers and ensuring they’re comfortable often works better and gets them out of the hospital faster. 

● In Massachusetts, which year after year tears apart families at a rate far above the national average, a state audit finds misuse and overuse of dangerous psychiatric medication on foster children – and a state family police agency that bypasses even minimal court oversight (something to remember the next time you hear an agency say “The courts have to approve eeeevvverything we do”). 

But Alexis Williams Torrey of the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts told New England Public Media that even the audit itself misses the point: 

Williams Torrey said it’s critical to address the underlying problems that lead to the removal of children from their families, even aside from how DCF handles their care. 

“A lot of these children are having mental health issues. And that is actually the underpinning for why they're involved with the department,” she said. “So I think rather than diverting funds and auditing and oversight to the Department of Children and Families, I think the public needs to consider really answering the calls of families for more accessible mental health treatment, child care, stable and affordable housing – all of those supports that could prevent children from ending up being in the custody of the department to begin with.”

● A child is torn from her parents, possibly needlessly, in an Indiana county that refused to apply for federal funds to support high-quality family defense. The child died in foster care We’ll never know if those federal funds might have made a difference I have a blog post about it.

● In contrast, high-quality family defense is about to get a boost in Alameda County, California: 

Berkeley Law has announced plans to launch an in-house Family Defense Clinic, enabling students to represent indigent parents threatened by state intervention with the removal of their children. This new clinic will be the first of its kind on the West Coast, filling an urgent gap in free legal services in the East Bay. 

In some ways the faculty is catching up.  Students launched their own family defense project in 2022. That project

 assists parents facing investigations, creates know-your-rights training sessions, and conducts research to publicize bias in the family defense system.

● One defender of the take-the-child-and-run approach to “child welfare” claims that even “aging out” of foster care can be better for foster youth than reunification – because of all the wonderful financial benefits they get!  Even of one shares this fundamentally dehumanizing view that money is more important than love, we might also want to see how this really plays out. In The Imprint, one of those who aged out has a reality check. 

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

● KOVR-TV in Sacramento reports that  A former foster parent in Rancho Cordova was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison for sexually assaulting multiple children and being in possession of child pornography, prosecutors said Friday. Kevin Baker, 43, pleaded no contest to four counts of committing lewd acts on a child and possession of child porn back in early October, the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office said. Prosecutors said Baker admitted to having multiple victims and befriending children with the intent of molesting them. …

“Child welfare” in Indiana: the contempt of courts

Indiana counties’ refusal to accept federal funds for family defense shows disdain for overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately Black families 

            The federal government will reimburse family policing agencies and/or the courts for part of the cost of providing lawyers to indigent children and parents when the agency wants to investigate those families for alleged child abuse. Thanks to some excellent reporting by the Indiana Capital Chronicle we now know that in one of the states where families need this help the most, Indiana, one in five counties won’t even apply for the money. 

            ● In Indiana, the family police agency, the Department of Child Services, is an oppressive, omnipresent fact of life for poor families, especially poor Black families, to a degree that boggles the mind.  Nationwide, on average, 37% of all children and 53% of Black children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  But in Indiana, it’s half of all children – and nearly four out of every five Black children. 

            ● Year after year, Indiana tears apart families at one of the highest rates in America, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. DCS brags incessantly about modest progress, but in 2022 Indiana still took away children at a rate 65% above the national average.  There is no evidence that Indiana children are 65% safer than the national average.  And again, Black children are hit hardest, taken into foster care at a rate 50% above their rate in the Indiana child population.

            To all this, many readers, conditioned by decades of horror stories about parents brutally beating torturing or murdering their children, may say: “So what?”  Indeed, that may be why so many Indiana counties are not bothering to get that federal funding to bolster legal representation for families.  Overloaded lawyers often have so little time and so many clients that families are almost literally defense-less.  Perhaps these counties want to keep it that way. 

            The problem with this is the problem that has plagued America’s entire war against child abuse for decades: Every time we take a swing at “bad parents” the blow lands on their children. 

            That’s because most cases are nothing like the horror stories.  In Indiana in 2022, 85% of the time, when children were thrown into foster care their parents were not even accused of physical or sexual abuse.  Forty percent of the time, there wasn’t even an allegation of drug abuse - not just no allegation of, say, overdosing on fentanyl – no allegation of so much as smoking a joint. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.  

            Consider all the ways all this hurts children: 

            ● Anyone who recalls the anguished cries of children torn from their families at the Mexican border knows how much it traumatizes children to take them from everyone they know and love. Yes, DCS caseworkers mean well.  But the children they take 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 – a point I will return to below. 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. That’s almost always the real reason for the horror stories that, rightly, make headlines. 

            There are so many ways to do better: One of the most effective is high-quality family defense.  Under this model, families get a lawyer with a reasonable caseload, their own social worker, and sometimes a parent advocate who’s been through the system herself.  

            No, it’s not to get “bad parents” off; it’s to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter no-real-services “service plans” often dished out by agencies like DCS.  Once again, the research is clear: This kind of defense reduces foster care with no compromise of safety.  That’s a key reason why the federal government now allows partial reimbursement for it.  Between the reimbursement and the reduced foster care costs, this approach also pays for itself.   

Some Indiana counties reportedly whined about the paperwork required to get the
reimbursement.  In fact, the paperwork is minimal, but it does offer clues to how well, or badly, courts are providing defense for the defenseless.  Perhaps that’s why some counties don’t want to fill out those forms. 

            Among the defenseless: 22-month-old Nova Bryant.  There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but news accounts give no indication that Nova’s parents beat her or tortured her or abused her in any way.  Rather, Nova had a whole lot of medical needs, her mother had ADHD and there apparently were concerns about the condition of the home.  DCS apparently figured Nova’s parents couldn’t take care of her.  

            But apparently, neither could her foster mother.  After leaving the 22-month-old in the bathtub (and allegedly changing her story concerning how long the child was left there) Nova drowned.  The foster mother has been charged with Neglect of a Dependent Resulting in Death. 

            We don’t know who represented Nova’s parents when she was taken away.  Perhaps they had a great lawyer with a great team and they did everything they possibly could.  But the odds are against that.  Because Nova lived, and died, in Clay County – one of the counties that has not bothered to apply for that federal aid. The odds of even a great lawyer having the necessary resources are slim.

            So stop and consider: What if Clay County had applied for the money and used it to provide high-quality interdisciplinary family defense?  Maybe the outcome would have been no different.  Or maybe the defense team for Nova’s parents would have demanded that DCS follow federal law, which requires “reasonable efforts” to keep families together, and provide the family with the help they needed to take care of Nova.  Maybe the defense team would have demanded that DCS look harder at Nova’s large extended family as a resource.  Perhaps she’d be alive today. 

            And yet, in another county that turned down federal aid for legal assistance, Johnson County Court Administrator Shena Johnson said: “[T]he system we have works well.” 

            There are a whole lot of children who would disagree.  Nova Bryant surely would have been one of them – had she lived long enough to speak.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending November 5, 2024

● 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.

Progressive little Vermont tears apart families at a rate that would make Donald Trump proud

The Vermont State Capitol

            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.  

            Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.  

            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 Times just 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?

#CASAsoWhite: Our annual Halloween reminder to CASA: No, it’s not a good idea to raise money by holding a talent show with a blackface act. (And yes, one CASA chapter actually did that.)

 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.

Originally published, Oct. 30, 2017