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A story in The New Yorker notes that “A.C.S. acknowledges that many of its caseworkers have
‘experienced the toddler whose little fingers have to be pried off of her mother.’” |
There is a standard line used by those most fanatical about
tearing apart families and throwing the children into foster care. It comes
from the worst of the advocates and politicians, and it’s eagerly quoted by the
worst of the journalists. You hear it in an effort to roll back even the most
modest reforms, and to justify foster-care
panics, sharp, sudden increases in children torn from everyone they know
and love in response to high-profile tragedies.
The exact wording varies, but it’s some version of: Foster
care isn’t perfect, but at least the children aren’t dead.
The first thing to understand about this kind of statement
is: It’s inaccurate. In typical cases, not the horror stories, children placed
in foster care actually are more likely to die, and suffer severe, debilitating
illness, than comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. I’ll get
to the details about that, and links to the various studies that prove it, below.
But first, I want to turn to the part about “foster care
isn’t perfect…” Anyone who uses that phrase is inherently unqualified to talk
about foster care, because it is, in itself, an act of emotional abuse, a way to
diminish and dismiss the inherent severe pain and trauma of removal as a mere
imperfection. I don’t just mean the
high rates of abuse in foster care itself. I mean the kind of routine
trauma documented in a
story published last week by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker.
The story deals with a
class-action lawsuit against the family police agency in New York City, the
Administration for Children’s Services, challenging their routine abuse of
“emergency” power to literally, take-the-child-and-run, tearing children from
the arms of their parents and throwing them into foster care without asking a
judge for permission first. What do I mean by “literally”? As the story itself
notes: “A.C.S. acknowledges that many of its caseworkers have ‘experienced the
toddler whose little fingers have to be pried off of her mother.’”
As The Imprint points out in
its own story on the lawsuit, the practice isn’t limited to New York City.
In fact, it’s probably worse elsewhere. There's also a good story in the New York Daily News.
But perhaps the most important contribution the New
Yorker story makes, and what makes it so relevant everywhere, is the way it
brings home the inherent trauma of removal, trauma that lasts long after the
children are back home. Here’s what it
did to the children in the family of one of the named plaintiffs in the suit,
children who never should have been taken away in the first place:
They stayed in foster care for almost three years. The
first set of foster parents found Jasmine too difficult to handle, so she was
sent to another home without her brothers, then to a third home, and then a
fourth. The various parents found her so troublesome that they repeatedly
called 911. She was forcibly medicated; on about ten occasions, she was sent to
psychiatric wards, something that had never happened when she lived with her
family. Her mother was not allowed to visit her in the hospital. …
The three years of separation and foster care will leave
a permanent mark on the family. Daevon, who is five, fearfully apologizes to
his mother if he does something wrong. … Jasmine withdraws much of the time.
While she was away, she once threatened to hurt herself and said that she
wished she were dead. She blames herself for things that happened to her in
care. When Jeremiah, the middle child, who is seven, was in his foster home, he
started pulling out his eyebrow hairs and wetting the bed. He now tells his mom
that she is not a bad mother.
And this is what happened to the children of the other named
plaintiff; again, children who never should have been taken away in the first
place:
After A.C.S. conducted its emergency removal of Lorimer’s
children … they were taken to the Children’s Center in Manhattan, a holding
place for kids who have entered the system. The children were separated from
each other and assigned to dormitories by age. It felt to them like a jail.
(Many children say they have been assaulted there.) Zoe arrived carrying a
spiral notebook that contained years of drawings; it was taken away because
wire wasn’t allowed, and she never got it back.
Although the most recent removal was shorter than the
first, [Larimer] sees that her kids have been changed by it. The girls cling to
her. Kayden cries when she leaves. Zoe fills her book bag with as many things
as she can carry—extra clothes, her sisters’ stuffed animals. …
Now imagine pain like this inflicted up to 175,000 times
every year. That’s how often children are thrown into foster care – officially.
It does not, of course, count hidden
foster care* placements. It is a
tsunami of children’s suffering, routinely dismissed by the child welfare
establishment and its enablers in politics and journalism.
What does it really mean when they dismiss this pain as
“foster care is not perfect” or (inaccurately, it turns out) some version of
“well, at least they’re not dead.” Can you
imagine any of these same people being so sanguine if the family police pounded
on their door and said: “We’re taking your children tonight. A child died on
this block, so we’re just going to take every child on this block – just in
case. After all, we don’t want your children to wind up dead.”
But the enablers of foster-care panic, and those who oppose
any effort to curb needless removal, are overwhelmingly middle-class
professionals and disproportionately white. So they know full well that their
children are largely immune from the harm caused by their own advocacy. It is
extremely unlikely a family police agency caseworker will show up at their door
at all, much less walk off with the children.
What this really suggests is that, deep down, the
overwhelmingly middle-class professionals who run these systems, govern these
systems from statehouses, and write about them from newsrooms, don't really
view these overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite children, or their
families as fully human. They are something less. The suffering of children
like theirs somehow doesn’t count the way the suffering of children like
ours counts.
It reveals itself in so many ways:
● The casual cruelty of never giving Zoe back her notebook –
and the fact that even worse acts of cruelty, denying children whose parents
were taken from them forever even mementos of their former lives, sometimes
is routine.
● The behavior of journalists in West Virginia – child
removal capital of America - who can write
10,000 words about foster care with not one of those words coming from a
parent whose children were taken, or from children saying they never needed to
be taken. You can find similar behavior among some journalists in other states
as well.
● Or someone like Prof. Sarah Font, who’s
actually suggested that older foster youth may be better off “aging out” with
no home at all than being reunified or placed in guardianship with relatives,
because, if they age out, they’ll get more financial benefits.
As I’ve noted before, this
attitude, that poor children, especially poor nonwhite children, don’t really
suffer when taken from their parents, or at least not enough for it to matter,
and all these suggestions that somehow love means less to them than to our
children, reminds me of nothing so much as a notorious
comment by Gen. William
Westmoreland about Asians during the Vietnam War: “'The Oriental
doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” Westmoreland
said. “Life is cheap in the Orient."
For the worst of the child welfare establishment, and their
political and journalistic enablers, the lives of poor, nonwhite children and
their parents are cheap indeed.
Where are children more likely to die?
That also may explain why this same establishment, and those
same enablers, can’t even face up to the simple fact that their approach not
only doesn’t save lives, it makes it more likely that more children will die.
For starters, recall the
massive study which found that tearing apart more families does nothing to
curb child abuse deaths, and reducing foster care does nothing to increase
them.
But it’s even worse than that. An honest version of the
statement about deaths in foster care would be: “…at least they’re not dead yet.”
Because, as I’ve noted in previous posts, there is now
a
vast body of research from around the world showing how, in typical cases,
children placed in foster care typically fare worse even than
comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes on all sorts of measures
– including premature death.
So, for example, a
Swedish study found that in typical cases, among maltreated children left
in their own homes, 1.8% died by age 20. Among children facing the same level
of maltreatment at home, when placed in foster care, 8.6% died by age 20. The
foster youth were more than four times more likely to die. The most common
cause of death: Suicide.
And we’re not talking about dying at age 70 instead of age
80 – as though that wouldn’t be bad enough. We’re talking about dying before
turning 21.
Premature death is just the tip of the iceberg. Many more
will suffer from serious illness and disability.
There are so many similar studies measuring so many rotten
outcomes for foster youth that it’s actually possible to project how
many more children will die and will suffer such illness and disability due
to a foster care panic, like the one in Santa Clara County, California right
now, and how
many lives have been saved in places such as New York City and New Jersey
that have safely reduced needless foster care.
So I wonder if Larissa MacFarquhar was really speaking to
some of her fellow journalists when she wrote this:
In the lawsuits against A.C.S., a legal victory may
actually be less important than changing public perception, because the law as
written isn’t the main problem: the problem is that A.C.S. isn’t following it.
A.C.S. isn’t following it because public pressure is pushing it in only one
direction. Insofar as most people know anything at all about child-protective
services, they know that its caseworkers are people who rescue children from
danger. They hear about A.C.S. only when this mission fails and a child ends up
dead. Therefore, A.C.S. follows the mantra of “better safe than sorry,” where
“safe” often means preventing the kind of harm to a child that A.C.S. might be
blamed for, while discounting the harm of separating children from their
families. An unpublished report in 2020 found that some A.C.S. staff “described
an internal culture that operates on fear and intimidation. . . . This
frequently means that staff err on the side of safety for themselves, by
seeking removal.”
This means sending into foster care thousands of children
who would be better off with their parents. … The litigators hope that the seizure lawsuit
will bring public attention to unwarranted A.C.S. removals, because, if
sufficient outrage can be generated, then “safe”—both for children and for
A.C.S. staff—can be redefined.
*=Some official placements and many hidden foster care
placements are with relatives. Those typically inflict less pain. But those
most extreme about tearing apart families also are among those most hostile to
these kinship foster care placements.
Illustration by ChatGPT
