NCCPR family preservation news and commentary round-up for the year 2025, part two

For part one, which illustrates how the horror stories go in all directions, see the previous post to this blog.

POVERTY AND NEGLECT

●  The Nation zeroed in on one key part of the problem: families destroyed because parents can’t afford adequate housing. The story focuses on Missouri, where the problem is particularly acute and getting worse still, thanks to the horrifying approach taken by the new head of that state’s family police agency. 

● The Nation didn’t stop with what was wrong; they turned to places that are doing better: three counties in Wisconsin working to reduce needless removals because of housing. The story also cuts through the hype about the so-called Family First Act, pointing out that, particularly when it comes to providing families with the concrete help they really need, “Families First Act funding comes with so many strings attached it’s nearly impossible to use.”

● Hearst Connecticut Media did a superb job exposing the problem in one of the richest states in America.

Back in Missouri, the Missouri Independent did stellar work:

● The cruelty of the family police agency in that state is apparent in this outstanding story from the Missouri Independent.  It is a story about a family that, through enormous will and determination, marshaled meager resources to weave a safety net – only to have the family police come in, over and over, and rip it apart. It is a story as beautifully written as it is scrupulously reported. 

● Still, as this follow-up story makes clear, you’ve got to give the Missouri agency credit for this much: They united all sides in the abortion debate – everyone thinks the behavior of the family police agency in this case stinks. The story also includes NCCPR’s perspective and that of Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark study Investigating Families. 

● And I have a commentary column about the case in the Independent. 

● But it’s not just one case. In another example, the family police agency found all the allegations against Megan Knight to be unfounded. She even passed a background check to care for foster children in residential treatment. But her own children are still in foster care. That’s what can happen when families are literally defense-less. 

As the Independent reports, indigent parents in Missouri are not guaranteed an attorney at all – and when they get one, they’re often far too overloaded to do much of anything. Here’s what that means in the case of Ms. Knight: 

Her four-year-old daughter has been moved seven times since she was taken into foster care in April 2022. Knight said she’s developed behavioral issues Knight attributes to the trauma of separation and being tossed around from home to home. 

“When I was able to see her, she would always beg the caseworker, ‘Please, let me go home to my mom,’” she said. 

Now, her daughter is in care with a foster family and Knight doesn’t know where in Missouri they are or who the family is. Two of her kids are in another stranger’s home. 

In “child welfare” the horror stories go in all directions – all year long (2025 Edition)

Part one of NCCPR’s news and commentary year in review for 2025

 Part two, on this blog tomorrow, looks at some of 2025’s finest journalism exploring wrongful removal and other harms to children caused by our current system of family policing. 

America’s massive child welfare surveillance state was built on horror stories.  Stories about children murdered or tortured in their own homes stampeded us into building a gigantic system that destroys children in the name of saving them. This approach has torn apart millions of families needlessly. It’s also so overloaded the system that workers have no time to find the few children in real danger.

A system that attempts to make policy-by-horror-story makes all children less safe. That’s why we’ve long extended an offer to the fearmongers in the child welfare establishment: a mutual moratorium on using horror stories to "prove” anything.

We can do that because we have actual evidence that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, family preservation is not only more humane than foster care or massive surveillance, it’s also safer. But the fearmongers will never give up their horror stories because horror stories are all they’ve got.

That’s why we’ve taken to reminding people that the horror stories go in all directions.  And when it comes to the high rate of abuse in foster homes, group homes, and institutions, the horror stories are backed up by study after study showing the rates of abuse in those settings are appalling.

So now, some examples from 2025:

Our annual holiday reminder

 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 16, 2025

● You know how family police agency workers often claim they can’t throw children into foster care entirely on their own? Check out this story in The Imprint that makes clear, once and for all: Most of the time, they’re lying. 

● From Courthouse News Service: 

A former University of Minnesota pediatrician filed a federal lawsuit against the university, its associated medical groups and several doctors on Friday, claiming his June 2023 termination was retaliation for exposing a fraudulent scheme to maximize child abuse prosecutions. 

Dr. Bazak Sharon accuses the defendants — including the University of Minnesota’s governing board and child abuse specialist Dr. Nancy Sanders Harper, among others — of civil rights violations and racketeering. 

Sharon, who served at the university for 17 years, says the scheme was intended to maximize the identification and prosecution of child abuse cases to secure funding and increase the prestige of the university’s child abuse fellowship program. 

You can read much more about this case here.

● The Nevada Current is the latest publication to report on children torn from their families because their parents lack adequate housing.  I have a commentary in the Current on their findings. 

● In Lucas County, Ohio (metropolitan Toledo) the family police agency is blaming the federal Family First Act for the fact that residential treatment centers are jacking up rates so the county has to spend more money (because it’s not like you could actually stop dumping all those children into institutions, right)? As I explain in a letter to the Toledo Blade (subscription required) the real problem is the agency’s own lack of guts and imagination. 

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

● From the Boston Globe: 

The family of a girl who was repeatedly raped at a Springfield group home when she was 14 years old sued the state Thursday, alleging state agencies failed to protect her from terrible conditions at the facility.

● From the City News Service via Times of San Diego: 

The city and county of San Diego, along with two private entities, have agreed to legal settlements totaling more than $31 million in the death of an 11-year-old Spring Valley girl. The settlements resolve a lawsuit brought on behalf of Arabella McCormack’s two younger sisters. All three girls were allegedly abused by their adoptive parents and grandparents. 

● From KLAS-TV, Las Vegas: 

Mom says daughter was forced to fight another child in Las Vegas group home; state revokes licenses 

The state of Nevada revoked the licenses of four group homes for children and teens after several reports by the 8 News Now Investigators. 

Nevada Health Authority’s Health Care Purchasing and Compliance Division sent notices of revocation to four psychiatric residential treatment facilities operated by Moriah Behavioral Health, also known as Ignite Teen and Eden Treatment, on Dec. 11, citing safety concerns, a lack of cooperation from the business and a lack of compliance with state and federal laws.

NCCPR in the Nevada Current: The real problem is housing. The desperate search for “other reasons” homeless kids wind up in foster care says more about the system than the families

More than 20 years ago, the journal of the Child Welfare League of America devoted an entire issue to the problem of children removed to foster care or trapped there because their families didn’t have adequate housing. The issue noted that three separate studies found that at least 30% of foster children could be home right now if their families had adequate housing. 

A fourth was even more disturbing. If found that child protective caseworkers were, to use one of their own favorite phrases, in denial, concerning the extent of the problem. The study found that workers “may tend to ignore housing as a problem rather than deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by the recognition that they cannot help their clients with this important need.” 

Perhaps that’s why, in the Current’s stories on this issue, while I read comment after comment about how it might be a “filthy house” that may lack heat or air conditioning and may have “toddlers crawling around the floor,” never once was such a comment followed by “so we sent in a cleaning crew” or, “so we bought them an air conditioner.” After all, what would be the point if the “real” problem is mental illness or substance abuse? ...

Read the full column in the Nevada Current

NCCPR in the Toledo Blade: County Children Services won’t do its own heavy lifting

 The increased costs facing Lucas County Children Services are not the fault of a federal law or state stinginess. They’re the fault of the county’s own lack of guts and imagination. ...

Read the full column in the Toledo Blade (subscription required)

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 9, 2025

● I’m not sure how to talk about this first item without sounding all clickbaity, but what happened in a New York appellate court late last week really did play out almost like the climactic scene in a Hollywood movie. It was oral argument in the latest in a string of cases concerning the New York City family police agency harassing survivors of domestic violence and their children.  Fortunately, it’s all on video. I have a blog post about the case, with a link to the video.

● New York State’s highest court is sending a similar message. I’ve often written that, in much of the country, families would get about as much “representation” from a cardboard cut-out in a three-piece suit as they get from the overloaded court-appointed lawyers who may meet them for the first time five minutes before the court hearing. That can happen even when it’s a hearing to terminate children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate description of the stakes than “termination of parental rights”). The Imprint reports on a case in which the New York State Court of Appeals said that’s not good enough. 

Perhaps most notably, when a lawyer defending the termination tried to play the bonding card, the court didn’t buy it. From the story: 

“There is no question that it is very important and imperative that these cases be resolved in a speedy fashion,” [Judge] Troutman said during the appeal proceedings. “But we cannot throw the Constitution in the garbage with respect to people’s rights in order to get there.” 

● One hopes the message all these judges are sending will reach all across the nation, or at least across New York, including to Rochester, where, writing in the Rochester Beacon, a mother describes what happened when she fought for a better education for her son, and the school retaliated by calling the family police agency: 

As a Black parent, I do not feel safe asking for the support I need. I fear I will be met with accusations and racialized surveillance. For Jeremiah, he becomes very anxious when asked personal questions—especially from those in authority positions. He fears threats of being removed from his environment. The reality is, we were both traumatized by our interactions with CPS. 

● Study after study keeps showing that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes fare better even than children alleged to be comparably maltreated but placed in foster care.  Most recently, there was that Swedish study showing that, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to have died. But there’s an even more fundamental question: Why have we allowed foster-care apologists to reverse the burden of proof? My column in The Imprint: Safer Compared to What? Foster care apologists set an incredibly low bar — and still can’t clear it 

● Remember the expose of horrible conditions in residential treatment in Arizona and Kentucky and Tennessee and Indiana and Utah and Iowa and Oklahoma and Rhode Island and Washington State and Arkansas and New York and Connecticut, and Idaho? 

Now, thanks to excellent reporting from The Marshall Project – Cleveland, add Ohio. In the follow-up story, in which various officials shoveling children into the institution tell us how shocked – shocked! -- they are, a spokesperson for metropolitan Cleveland says that now, after all the abuse has been exposed, and they need to find someplace to put all those children, “reunification also is a priority.”

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

In 2003, Dewey Sloan, then the chief juvenile prosecutor in an Iowa county where Native American children were in foster care at a rate seven times higher than the rate for white children told the Des Moines Register, "I don't think there's anything in any of these cases that points to something positive about Indian culture, except the culture of drugs and the culture of poverty and the culture of abuse." 

Five years later, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reports, Sloan’s office got a judge to terminate the rights of a family of Native American children to live with their mother. Here’s what happened next, according to a lawsuit filed by one of the children, now an adult: 

In 2009, when [Mikalla Starr] Winkel was 4 years old, she and two of her siblings were placed in the foster home of Norman and Cammie Winkel of Sioux City – a couple who had no connection to the Santee Sioux Nation or any other Native American community. 

According to the lawsuit, at the time of the foster-home placement Norman Winkel was a former prison inmate who “had an extensive drug-related criminal history with five drug convictions, including a felony for which he received a 25-year prison sentence.” 

In 2010, Winkel was legally adopted by the couple. The lawsuit alleges that while Mikalla lived in the home, Norman Winkel “began to exhibit grooming behaviors toward Mikalla,” and then, as she matured, the “grooming escalated to sexual assault, including fondling, mutual touching, and sexual assault in the foster home.” The alleged sexual abuse “continued for multiple years,” according to the lawsuit.