Did a media-fueled foster-care panic contribute to a child’s death in Silicon Valley?

Source: California Child Welfare Indicators Project

KEY POINTS

 ● After two children known-to-the-system died in Santa Clara County, California in 2023, Julia Prodis Sulek, a reporter for The Mercury News and Sylvia Arenas, a member of the county Board of Supervisors, rushed to scapegoat recent efforts by the county to keep families together. Arenas and Sulek had no evidence and no interest in any contrary point of view. The claim was false. 

● The result was what may well be the worst foster-care panic in decades anywhere in America. The number of children torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care nearly doubled in a single year, and increased by another 50% the year after. 

● In addition to the enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, the panic instigated by Arenas and The Mercury News plunged the entire system into chaos (something one of Sulek’s own stories even acknowledged – while taking no responsibility for it). That left workers no time to investigate any case, or any potential caretaker, carefully. 

● Now another child is dead. And, however unintentionally, Arenas’ demagoguery and The Mercury News’s reporting – and the shutting out of all dissent – may have contributed to that death. 

● The Imprint reports that, as a result of the skyrocketing caseload the contracted provider of family defense in Santa Clara county has decided they can no longer do quality work - so they're shutting down. That means even more children are likely to endure the trauma of needless placement.

● But instead of learning from their horrendous blunders, Arenas is doubling down – now joined by County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. Sulek’s stories are cheering them on.  Rosen is threatening prosecutions and County Executive James Williams is warning that any or all of ten child welfare agency employees placed on paid leave might be fired. Yet no scrutiny has been directed toward the role of Arenas, Rosen or The Mercury News. 

● Through it all, Arenas has reveled in humiliating the leadership of the child welfare agency, with every humiliation chronicled almost gleefully in The Mercury News. 

● This risks setting up an endless cycle of child death, foster-care panic, public humiliation, more panic, and another death. And while it was never their intent, Arenas, Rosen and The Mercury News share responsibility for the terrible consequences.

In a story on February 26, 2025, The Mercury News in San Jose and its sister papers in the Bay Area News Group quoted caseworkers describing the chaos in the county’s child welfare system: 

“The workers and supervisors are in crisis mode, triaging cases and doing the minimum when it comes to child abuse investigations,” said one worker.  Said another: 

“We have children who are placed in foster care who are not able to visit their families … We have children who are placed hundreds of miles away from their communities. We have children and families who are not adequately served because we don’t have language capacity to meet their needs. Court matters are being delayed, continued for weeks, if not months due to the influx of cases, and we don’t have any staff to handle that.”

What The Mercury-News did not tell readers is which county institution is most responsible for this chaos:

The Mercury News. 

Aided and abetted by a grandstanding member of the County Board of Supervisors, The Mercury News has set off, and continues to fuel, what is probably the worst “foster-care panic” in America in decades, perhaps ever. In the time since The Mercury News blamed the horrific deaths of three-month-old Phoenix Castro and six-year-old Jordan Walker in 2023 on a supposed fanatical desire to keep families together, the number of children torn from their families and consigned to the chaos of foster care in Santa Clara County nearly doubled in a single year, and surged another 50% in the following year. Now another child is dead – and while it was never their intent, the foster care panic that the newspaper and the politician started may well be one of the reasons why. 

● The Imprint reports that, as a result of the skyrocketing caseload, the contracted provider of family defense in Santa Clara county has decided they can no longer do quality work - so they're shutting down. That means even more children are likely to endure the trauma of needless placement.

And let’s be clear about which children are suffering most: In Santa Clara, the child population is 35% Black and Latino. The foster care population is 81% Black and Latino.    

A once-great regional newspaper hollowed out by a hedge fund appears desperate to recapture its former glory by falsely scapegoating efforts to keep families together for high-profile child abuse deaths, no matter how many children suffer in the process. Children endure the enormous inherent emotional trauma of needless separation. As a result, in typical cases, not the horror stories in which The Mercury News revels, study after study finds that children left in their own homes typically fare better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. One recent study from Sweden found that, again in typical cases, when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, children placed in foster care were four times more likely to die by age 20. The most common cause of death: Suicide. There’s also the high risk of abuse in foster care itself. 

How many children torn needlessly from everyone they know and love during the Silicon Valley Foster Care Panic will be dead by age 20? Who will be held accountable then? 

The other price of panic 

At the same time, “triaging cases and doing the minimum” only makes it more likely that children in real danger will be overlooked. 

Now, more than a year later, the worst may have happened for that very reason. The media-fueled politician-aided Silicon Valley Foster-Care Panic may have contributed to the death of Jaxon Juarez, a toddler allegedly killed by his cousin. Everyone should have learned the obvious lesson – that tearing vast numbers of additional children from their families does not curb child abuse deaths (a lesson reinforced by a recent massive study). Instead, The Mercury News, led by reporter Julia Prodis Sulek, and grandstanding politicians, led by County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, are doubling down, joined by a new ally, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. 

In its coverage, The Mercury News has been the ultimate no-dissent zone. Other than one early story, good luck finding the voice of an older child wrongly taken, the parent of such a child, or an attorney for such a parent or child.  

Something else has been missing as well: The current foster-care panic followed several years of effort to reduce needless foster care. The Mercury News has failed to tell readers that, rather than creating what the newspaper proclaims is a “child safety crisis,” the reduction in entries into foster care was accomplished with no compromise in safety, according to the standard measure used by the state and federal governments. 

A throwback to an ugly era

There was a time when this kind of news coverage was common.  A child “known-to-the-system” dies. The casefile has more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. Everyone rushes to blame a supposed overemphasis on family preservation. Whether driven by the news media itself or politicians whose false message they amplified, the result was a foster-care panic – a sharp, sudden surge in children needlessly torn from their families and thrown into foster care. It’s happened in Los Angeles, of course, and also New York, Chicago, and many places in between.  

But children known-to-the-system keep suffering horrendous abuse; sometimes deaths increase because workers are now so overwhelmed they have even less time to notice the red flags. The failed, take-the-child-and-run response to the deaths of Phoenix Castro and Jordan Walker may well have contributed to the death of Jaxon Juarez. In that case, though, of course, it was never their intent, Arenas and The Mercury News share responsibility for this latest tragedy. 

In much of the country, the journalism of child welfare has matured.  At one time, The Mercury News even was a leader in getting these issues right. But now, what’s left of the newspaper has sunk to a pathetic pursuit of cheap glory.  

As a result, in the five decades I have followed child welfare, first as a journalist and author and now as an advocate, the worst foster-care panic I’ve ever seen, by far, is the one underway in Santa Clara County. When rates of child poverty are factored in, Santa Clara County now takes children from their loved ones at a rate double that of New York City and quadruple the rate of metropolitan Chicago. It’s even surpassed Los Angeles, a county once notorious for its take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. But just days ago Arenas said that still wasn’t enough! 

Caseworkers are rushing to take away children not to protect the children, but to protect themselves from the wrath of the cheerleaders for panic, Arenas, Sulek and District Attorney Rosen, who has pledged to investigate who, besides the actual killer, “is responsible criminally, civilly, morally, ethically, and systemically for what happened in this case…” 

If that isn’t enough to terrify workers into taking almost every child in sight, ten employees who came anywhere near the latest case have been put on paid leave. County Executive James Williams declared that “Depending on the findings of our investigation, staff may face disciplinary action up to and including termination.” 

Over and over, almost from the moment Phoenix Castro died, Sulek wrote that “a Bay Area News Group investigation found that county policies favored family preservation over child safety.” And despite the mind-boggling increase in the number of children torn from their homes since then, Arenas repeated the same false claim just days ago. 

The data on child safety outcomes – data The Mercury News never shared with readers – show that the claim is false. In place of evidence, The Mercury News demonizes families the way Donald Trump demonizes immigrants – they rely on horror stories. 

They also cite a report in which the state Department of Social Services said sometimes the county got it wrong – while omitting any quotes from the county’s response. The state report made no claim that the county was putting family preservation ahead of child safety; Sulek, Arenas and their allies dreamt that up themselves. 

The Mercury News and Arenas assume that, since children are dying in cases that sure seem obvious, what else could it be other than some sort of Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy? The fact that now another child has died, even after entries into foster care skyrocketed, has not dimmed their enthusiasm for this theory. 

But most of the time, the tragedies occur because workers are overwhelmed. They must rush from case to case, so they make terrible errors in all directions. A foster-care panic only makes that worse. 

In the most recent tragedy, Jaxon was placed with a relative who had been convicted of felony child endangerment related to a DUI arrest in 2014. Her son is accused of killing Jaxon. Why might workers place a child in such a home? One possibility is that they all gathered in a conference room to brag about how they didn’t care if Jaxon was safe because all they care about is family preservation. 

A more likely possibility: With the number of children torn from their families soaring from 149 in SFY 2023 to 276 in 2024 to 421 in 2025 – they simply had no time to carefully examine the record of the relative with whom Jaxon was placed when he died or to weigh the merits of alternative placements. 

For example, other relatives, in Arizona, had said they would take Jaxon, but that would make it impossible for his father to visit. Did the workers in this case have time to weigh that option or engage in the complex process of interstate placement? At one point, Jaxon’s grandfather had custody, but couldn’t get him to visits with his father. An agency that wasn't drowning in needless removals of children could have provided the transportation, instead of changing the placement. If the foster care panic is the reason none of these alternatives was considered, then the foster care panic itself was a key factor in Jaxon’s death. 

The typical cases 

Most cases are nothing like the horror stories.  In Santa Clara County, fewer than ten percent of foster children are there because of allegations of physical or sexual abuse. More than 85% are there because of “neglect.” Sometimes that’s extremely serious. More often, it means the family is poor. 

That explains what we know thanks to the data about what happened to child safety when Santa Clara started emphasizing family preservation. The key measure used to evaluate safety is the percentage of children left in their own homes who are allegedly abused or neglected again. During the time Santa Clara County reduced foster care, that measure stayed the same.  The evidence shows that Santa Clara County saved hundreds of children from the trauma of needless separation – and the high risk of abuse in foster care itself – with no compromise of safety. 

Reveling in “an epic takedown” 

The journalism of foster-care panic is nothing new – though happily, across the country, there is less of it. But what sets the behavior of Sulek (and Arenas) apart, even from the worst examples in other cities, is what appears to be a willingness not only to see families torn apart, but an obliviousness to the consequences. The Mercury News seemed almost to gloat about getting its foster care panic – while Arenas complained early on, and again just days ago, that it still hadn’t gone far enough.  

They also seem to share a compulsion to humiliate those they see as standing in their way. Look at their behavior toward one of the few Black men to hold a position of power in Santa Clara County government – the now former director of the Department of Family and Children’s Services, Damion Wright. 

Consider the scene at a Board of Supervisors meeting in 2024, as Arenas both literally and figuratively looked down on Wright and his boss, Department of Social Services Director Daniel Little. 

As Sulek gleefully reported at the time and then reminded readers months later: 

Last summer, after an epic takedown of Wright and Little during a board meeting, Supervisor Arenas demanded they each write a “letter of reflection” about their leadership failures that led to the child safety crisis. 

Little did it. Wright, to his credit, did not, allowing him to leave with some dignity. But Sulek wasn’t through trying to strip him of that dignity. In two stories, she lamented the lack of firings, noting that 

Only Wright has resigned, and he did so on his own accord, announcing the day after Christmas that his father’s recent death — not any pressure related to the investigations — led to his departure.  

Apparently, for The Mercury News, nothing short of tarring and feathering will do. 

Arenas seems to take a Trump-style pleasure in humiliating anyone she can. A few days ago, she drove Wright’s successor, Wendy Kinnear-Rausch, to tears, suggesting Kinnear-Rausch didn’t care if “brown children” died. The Mercury News loved it. 

Through it all, Arenas has never indicated how many children must be torn from their homes before she will be satisfied. She implies that the criterion is that no child will ever die of abuse. That is always the only acceptable goal. But with nearly two million people, Santa Clara is the 18^th most populous county in America – it’s bigger than 11 states. I know of no jurisdiction of that size that has ever achieved that goal. And, as we’ve seen with the death of Jaxon Juarez, while it was never their intent, the behavior of Arenas herself, and The Mercury News, may have moved Santa Clara County farther from that goal. 

The harm to the public officials Arenas and The Mercury News have scapegoated and humiliated pales compared to the harm it’s all done to children. 

Now, Santa Clara children cry themselves to sleep hundreds of miles from everyone they know and love, others may bounce from home to home, increasing the chances that they will emerge years later unable to love or trust anyone – or die at their own hand before they turn 20. That’s even if they defy the odds – at least one in four, and probably greater – of being abused in foster care itself.  And what evidence there is, from the few jurisdictions large enough to measure, is that the odds of children in real danger being overlooked have increased – as we may have just seen in Santa Clara County itself. 

Perhaps Arenas and Sulek, and their respective colleagues, should take some time to reflect on that.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 21, 2026

● New Mexico’s Attorney General has issued a report on the state’s “child welfare” system that combines the Donald Trump approach to fearmongering with the RFK Jr. approach to science. The result is a document likely to make New Mexico’s children less safe. That’s why NCCPR has issued an in-depth rebuttal. For the tl;dr version, see our column in Source NM. 

● Speaking of dangerously wrong, over the next five years, Maryland plans to spend $1.2 billion on 637 group home and institution beds. For that kind of money, they could give more than $190,000-per-year-per-child in of help to every Maryland family from whom a child was taken away in 2024. I have a blog post about the state’s misplaced priorities. 

● I don’t know if the Maryland facility exposed in this story from WBFF-TV in Baltimore is among those getting the contracts, but it does give a good idea of what states get for all the money they lavish on “residential treatment.” 

● The Imprint reports on a survey offering new evidence that predators go where the prey is. From the story: 

In a newly released survey of attorneys working in child welfare and juvenile justice systems across the country, only about 19% said they “never or rarely” represent children who have been commercially sexually exploited. … 

“The findings are jarring: exploitation is not limited to an occasional foster child,’’ write the authors of the report. “It is embedded within the everyday work of child welfare and juvenile justice systems across the country.’’

● For decades those fanatical about tearing apart families have been obsessed with paper permanence – a narrow vision in which only formal adoption, usually by strangers, “counts” as permanence. In this version of “permanence,” children are cut off entirely from not only parents but often siblings, friends, extended family, and every other supportive human being in their lives.  Even their birth certificates are changed. Among the many awful consequences: Tens of thousands of young people who age out of foster care each year with no home at all. 

Now, current and former foster youth are leading the chorus of voices who are fighting back, and trying to teach the child welfare establishment that real permanence is relational permanence, in which every human connection that can help a child succeed is nurtured rather than severed. And now, The Washington Post reports, some of those young people have adapted a concept pioneered in Kansas into legislation pending in Washington, DC. From the story: 

The legislation, called the Soul Act — for Support, Opportunity, Unity and Legal Relationships — is part of a burgeoning national movement to transform the foster care system by allowing older teens to create a legally binding network of support. Without having to sever legal ties to birth parents, they could choose their own family by drawing on a variety of guardians, blood relatives and other trusted adults — teachers, pastors, family friends — who agree to care for the young person in specific ways. …

“One of the beautiful things about Soul is it opens up a much broader, more dynamic vision of what a family is,” said Tami Weerasingha-Cote, policy director at Children’s Law Center, which along with the Family & Youth Initiative helped the D.C. teens and young adults craft the legislation.

A Soul family also counters still another of the hideous financial incentives that a family-hating child welfare establishment has built into the system: 

Many foster teens chose to age out to take advantage of state or federal money — such as a tuition assistance or savings program — that they could not access if they were adopted or had a guardian. Under Soul, teens would not have to choose between family or benefits. They could have both.

● Mya Martinez describes herself as “a sexual assault survivor, an aged-out foster youth, a mom, a wife, and a truth teller.” Here’s some of the truth she told in The Imprint last week: 

Let’s just be honest, the foster care system never cared for children’s well-being and mental health. This made-up narrative that the system has to try and make themselves seem great and undeniably precious is fake. I, for one, am sick of it. 

● amNY and  Courthouse News Service report that advocates for children and families caught up in the system in New York are asking the state’s highest court to put a stop to a particularly insidious form of hidden foster care – or, as it should be called, sugar-frosted foster care. 

● The New Jersey Monitor reports that New Jersey is the latest state that’s going to be paying a lot of money to survivors of abuse while in the state’s “care” – as it should. 

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

● Keep this story from WDIV-TV Detroit in mind the next time you read about private foster care agencies seeking legislation to make it much harder for victims of abuse on their watch to get justice: 

In a lawsuit filed against Vista Maria, an all-girls facility that Local 4 began investigating over a year ago, six women and girls said the respected Dearborn Heights nonprofit that was meant to protect children instead became a “house of horrors.” 

The lawsuit -- filed April 13, 2026, by former residents and some family members on their behalf -- accuses Vista Maria and its staff of psychological and physical abuse, “sexual abuse, including sexual assault, molestation, and nonconsensual touching and harassment,” along with unsafe conditions and negligence. 

All were placed there as minors, many through the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) and court orders, the suit said. … 

“The allegations laid out by these survivors are not isolated … they reflect a long pattern of abuse and systemic failure involving young women who were placed in an environment that was supposed to protect them.” 

● From the Altoona Mirror: 

An out-of-court settlement has been reached in a case involving six children from an Altoona family who were removed by authorities from their parents almost 18 years ago and placed in foster care. The foster parents, Timothy and Barbara Krause of Houtzdale, eventually adopted the children and the youngsters were never returned to their Altoona roots. … 

Tim and Barbara Krause in 2020 were found guilty of 22 counts that included endangering the welfare of children, simple assault, terroristic threats and reckless endangerment for their treatment of all six children while in the foster home. 

The foster parents, according to the Superior Court in its review of the Krause cases, used racial slurs in referring to the children, forced the children to stand against a wall, knees bent, for long periods of time, deprived them of food for lengthy periods of time, and threatened and beat them.

Our full rebuttal to the New Mexico Attorney General's dangerously wrong report on "child Welfare"

The report on uses ugly, Trump-style tactics to stereotype families caught up in the system, shows an RFK Jr.-style disregard for science, misunderstands basic data and is likely to worsen the very failures it highlights.

Here's our full rebuttal

NCCPR in Source NM: New Mexico AG Torrez’s report on CYFD is dangerously wrong

One year ago, just as New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez was beginning his investigation of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, I wrote a column for Source NM published under the headline “Torrez’s CYFD investigation will fail if it leaves people out.” 

He left people out. The investigation failed. 

The result is a report that is likely to worsen problems it highlights; it may even trigger events that lead to more children dying. … 

Read the full column in Source NM

And see our full rebuttal here

Maryland’s $1.2 billion "child welfare" blunder

It turns out this agency has an enormous amount of money to spend
on institutionalizing children

That’s how much the state is likely to spend over the next five years institutionalizing kids, instead of helping their families

The tragic death of Kanaiyah Ward, a foster youth filed away and forgotten in a hotel, called attention to the fact that Maryland was dumping scores of children in similar makeshift placements. 

Kanaiyah was not in the system because her mother abused or neglected her. Her mother was desperate to get her help with her mental health problems. But because she was poor, she couldn’t go out and buy therapy the way affluent parents do. So her mother had to surrender Kanaiyah to the family police agency – a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency. 

Kanaiyah’s death could have been a wake-up call; a chance to rethink the state’s entire failed “child welfare” system. Instead, the state has come up with the worst possible response: A $1.2 billion blunder that’s bad for taxpayers, and far, far worse for children. 

The state has signed contracts with a plethora of “providers” to spend $744 million over three years to buy 637 beds for foster children, an expansion of 37 over the current number. There’s an option to spend another $496 million to extend the contracts two more years, for a total of $1.24 billion. 

The financial cost is high: 

I’m a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. I have no problem with the mind-boggling sum of money. But we all should have a problem with spending that money on what is almost certain to be, by far, the worst form of placement – institutionalizing children at an average cost of $675,749 per bed per year. 

That’s the financial price of institutionalizing children in group homes and so-called “residential treatment centers.” Here’s the state’s breakdown of exactly what type of beds they are:

 

Source: Maryland Dept. of Human Services

 And here’s how much the state is paying, per day, per child, to warehouse children in these places:

Source: Maryland Dept. of Human Services

The human cost is much higher:

Now consider the much greater human cost. These are places that have been shown to be rife with abuse in state after state; places where a U.S. Senate investigation found “The risk of harm to children … is endemic to the operating model.” 

Even when there is no physical or sexual abuse, they are the kinds of places that have been found to be inherently harmful to children. Study after study has found the entire approach is a failure. As the Senate investigation put it: 

[Residential treatment facilities] are costly, not as effective as community-based behavioral health treatment options, and often harmful to youth in their care. 

So what could Maryland do with all that money instead? In 2024, Maryland authorities took 1,268 children from their families and consigned them to the chaos of foster care. For that same $744 million, it could spend $195,583 per year per child on every one of those children. 

How might one spend all that money? 

Consider who these children and families really are: Of all the children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in Maryland in 2024, 87% did not involve even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In 60%, there was no allegation of any form of drug abuse -- not just no allegation of opioids or meth, no allegation of any abuse of any drug or alcohol. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” You could go a long way to solving those poverty problems with $195,583 per child per year. 

But what about all those cases in which, the providers love to tell us, the children have such complex needs that no family could possibly handle them? In fact, there is nothing an institution can do that can’t be done better by bringing intensive Wraparound services right into a family home or, when placement really is necessary, a foster home. Once again, here’s a video offering a classic example. 

 

 That intervention almost certainly cost a lot less than $195,583. So imagine what the full $195,583 could do. It might not be quite enough to provide a live-in therapist for every child 24/7, but it comes pretty close – and it sure can buy a lot of intensive therapy for children and families. 

Had Kanaiyah Ward’s mother been given that kind of help, she never would have become so overwhelmed that she felt she had no choice but to surrender her daughter to the system that let her die. 

Maryland has shown it has a whole lot of money to spend on child welfare. But when it comes to guts, vision and imagination, the system is bankrupt. 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 14, 2026

● A depressing number of journalists fall for the fearmongering of private foster care agencies when they say the sky will fall if they can't get insurance. Honolulu Civil Beat took a closer look, including NCCPR’s perspective. 

● In California, The Imprint reports, abuse survivors are rallying against legislation that would make it much harder to sue the agencies.

From the story: 

Angela Arroyo, 20, spoke at the rally outside the county’s Hall of Administration and called the effort “a direct attack on survivors.” 

“Don’t take away our voice and our chance at justice,” Arroyo told the crowd of about 40 people. 

Another speaker at the rally, La Defensa Executive Director Ivette Alé-Ferlito said a yes vote on proposed immunity legislation is "choosing to protect institutions over survivors.” 

In addition to proposals to curb survivor access to justice, private foster care agencies in California already have received one taxpayer bailout, and as I discussed in Cal Matters, they’re trying for another.

● There’s been some improvement in Maine. The number of children trapped in foster care has declined – from obscene to merely outrageous. I have a blog post about it. 

● The New York Daily News has an excellent story about how … 

After Mayor Mamdani passed over their top choice to lead the city’s child welfare system, New York parents whose lives were upended by foster care want answers on how he plans to help keep Black families together. 

● Also in the New York Daily News: Joyce McMillan of JMAC For Families is co-author of an oped column that begins this way: 

In creating a new mayoral Office of Community Safety, Mayor Mamdani has taken a major step toward reshaping policing. The office will respond to certain non-violent emergencies and strengthen the social safety net to prevent crises before they happen. 

That same approach is exactly what we and many other advocates have called for in “family policing” — how the city intervenes in families with the intention of keeping children safe. 

That’s why McMillan and other advocates want to see New York 

create an Office of Family Well-Being to help enhance family safety and security, improve children’s health and wellness across their life span, close gaps that lead to family crises and reduce ACS intervention, and contribute to community safety. The office would focus on neighborhood-based supports that keep children safe by preventing family challenges from becoming crises. 

But perhaps most interesting is McMillan’s Co-author: Kimberly Watson, president and CEO of Graham – formerly Graham Windham – a 220-year-old private child welfare agency. For at least 200 of those years, they were part of the problem. Now they’re becoming part of the solution. That’s one more for my mental list of “I never thought I would see it in my lifetime” moments. 

● In New Jersey, a task force has issued a series of recommendations to curb mandatory child abuse reporting.  As Advocates for Children of New Jersey explains: 

The report examines how current reporting and response practices can unintentionally harm children and families by confusing poverty with neglect. Using national research, data, and lived experience, it provides a roadmap for aligning child welfare policy with evidence-based approaches that support family stability, child wellbeing, and community strength. 

The recommendations are far too modest, but there was a time when ACNJ was the biggest cheerleader for a take-the-child-and-run approach in that state. So the fact that ACNJ is behind this makes for still another one of those “I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime” moments. 

And speaking of such moments: 

● Fifty years ago this month, I turned in to my professors my final project for the “Broadcast Workshop” at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism – a radio documentary about foster care. I didn’t know it would set the course for most of my professional life. Some reflections, 50 years later.

A personal note: Reflecting on 50 years following “child welfare”

That original J-School project

By Richard Wexler

Fifty years ago this month, I turned in my final project for the Broadcast Workshop at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism: a radio documentary about foster care. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but that project would set the course for my professional life. 

In the course of my reporting, I interviewed a 21-year-old college student. By the time she was nine years old, she had been in nine different foster homes. She told me she survived by keeping the rage inside, “unlike my five brothers who have been in every jail in New York State.” 

This is some of what she said: 

“When you spend your life going from place to place and knowing you’re not going to be in any place for very long, you learn not to reach out, not to care, not to feel. … 

“The people that I’ve seen, the kids that have emerged [from foster care] are dead.  Their hearts are functioning.  The ‘ol heart’s pumping the blood around.  But they’re basically dead inside.  It’s been killed.  Either they had to kill it to survive physically, or somebody else killed it in them – whatever it is that makes people human.” 

After speaking to this woman for two-and-a-half hours, I reached three conclusions: 

First, I was really glad I’d chosen journalism as a career. 

Second, I knew I would keep coming back to the story. 

And third: If we just got rid of all those no-good birth parents and got all these kids adopted, everything would be fine! 

Two out of three is not bad. 

That wasn’t my only mistake. Almost everything for which I now criticize reporters is a mistake I made in that documentary – most notably, whom I left out. In addition to the former foster child, I spoke to the head of an advocacy group for foster parents. I spoke to the head of an advocacy group for adoptive parents. I spoke to the head of a trade association for private agencies. And I spoke to Marcia Lowry, then just starting to bring what I would later call McLawsuits while at the New York Civil Liberties Union. 

I did not speak to a parent whose child was needlessly taken away. I did not speak to anyone who represented such parents, either as a lawyer or an advocate. It never occurred to me. It never occurred to the faculty who critiqued the documentary either – in fact, they were quite keen on it. That’s because my one professor who would have spotted and called out the omission, the late Phyl Garland, was not involved in overseeing it. 

A letter of complaint from a foster care agency trade association

Not long after, I adapted the documentary for the New York public television series Inside Albany. The next year, portions aired on what was then a relatively new NPR program, All Things Considered.  The editors there didn’t notice my omissions either. 

(I got some things right – notably the pernicious role of those private agencies and their financial
incentives, something first reported a year earlier by the New York Daily News. I still have in a scrapbook a letter from the head of the private agency trade association complaining about my interview for Inside Albany.) 

But I did keep coming back to the story.  And I kept finding that the facts on the ground were not matching what the most widely-quoted so-called “experts” were saying.  Over and over in the 1970s and 1980s, you would hear: “Well, you know child abuse crosses class lines.” But why, then, were the only people I was seeing in the system poor? 

As I kept asking questions, I found that the spectrum of expertise was far wider than the “usual suspects” quoted in news stories. The professional community had been divided about these issues all along. In those pre-Internet days, it took longer to find that out.  

But when the dichotomy between conventional wisdom and the facts on the ground became too much to bear, I wrote an article about it for The Progressive called “Invasion of the Child Savers.” That was in 1985. My wife kept encouraging me to write a book. A few years later, I listened to her and started working on Wounded Innocents, which my wife edited. It was published in 1990. 

The next year, I was contacted by the late Betty Vorenberg, whom I’d known when she was deputy director of the Massachusetts Advocacy Center, and I was a reporter in Springfield, Mass.  She asked if I wanted to try to form an organization around the principles in my book.  I said, “Sure!” Betty brought together a group for an initial organizing conference at Harvard Law School, a group that included the founding father of the modern family defense movement, and now president of NCCPR, Prof. Martin Guggenheim. A mere eight years later, we got sufficient funding for me to make NCCPR my full-time job, which it has been for most of the years since. 

From the beginning, we set out to fill one particular niche: changing “child welfare” systems by changing media coverage of child welfare systems. Because these systems are more secret than the CIA, they are enormously susceptible to media pressure. And for decades, the easiest and most appealing story for media to tell was the one about the death of a child “known to the system” in a case that had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade.  It was the only story that systems couldn’t hide. 

That made it easy to use “health terrorism” – exploitation of horror stories – to persuade reporters. Their stories would persuade the public to sanction a child welfare surveillance state so huge that, over the past decades, millions of children have been confiscated and consigned needlessly to the chaos of foster care; a system so gigantic that more than one third of all children, and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. 

Because of the secrecy, and because that’s all they ever read in a newspaper or saw on television, plenty of my fellow liberals, people who never would be conned by Donald Trump’s horror stories about immigrants, were suckered by the same sorts of horror stories about parents – cases that were, and are, real, but are every bit as unrepresentative of who gets caught in the family police net. Sometimes they’re still fooled. 

The story AJR rejected

At first, when it came to that one niche – changing child welfare systems by changing media coverage - we were almost alone. We started monitoring and responding to news coverage. (Today, NCCPR has a database of at least 60,000 child welfare news stories dating back to 1997.) We did outreach, one letter to a reporter, one op-ed column, one editorial board meeting at a time. We issued reports on state systems and compiled the data and the studies that told the story the media largely wasn’t telling, sometimes because they didn’t want to hear it, more often because they didn’t know it.  I wrote my first critique of media coverage of child welfare for Nieman Reports in 1993 and my first critique of local coverage for the Chicago Reader in 1995. (Actually, that one was originally for the now-defunct American Journalism Review; the Reader ran it when AJR would not.) 

We banged our heads against the wall a lot. But it turns out that, if you do that enough, sometimes the wall moves. Eventually, we even changed some of the language of the discussion, putting terms like foster-care panic into the “child welfare” lexicon. 

Now an entire movement pushes back against media failure. There are grassroots groups led by those with lived experience, a family defense movement, founded and almost willed into being by Prof. Guggenheim, whose practitioners understand the need to practice in the court of public opinion. Thanks especially to the work of Prof. Dorothy Roberts (another NCCPR Board member), the field no longer can credibly deny the extent to which racism pervades the system (though that hasn’t stopped many from trying). 

Prof. Roberts' work is one example of the explosion of rigorous scholarship exposing the harm of the system and revealing better options. 

I have an ever-growing mental list of “I never thought it would happen in my lifetime” moments as mainstream advocacy organizations change direction. Yes, for some it’s just reputation laundering, but for others the change is real and substantive, such as the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law. In the 1990s, they had a project to teach family police agency lawyers how to expedite termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate description of the stakes than termination of parental rights). Today, the ABA Center on Children and the Law has a project that seeks to end the termination of children’s rights to their parents. And check out what’s happening at Children’s Rights and the National Association of Counsel for Children.

How much has it all accomplished? An enormous amount – and not nearly enough. 

The officially-acknowledged number of children torn from everyone they know and love and forced into foster care has declined by more than 42% from its peak in 2006, though some of that probably means only moving children to hidden foster care and not recording the placements. 

For those who still are taken, the worst form of placement, group homes and institutions, is down, while the percentage in the least harmful form of placement, kinship foster care, is up. 

One of our early goals was to “inoculate” media and government against foster-care panics – responding to high-profile tragedies by rushing to tear apart even more families. We’ve partially succeeded. While it’s still possible for a particularly demagogic politician or a reporter who either is clueless or what David Simon would call a “Pulitzer-sniffer” to set off such a panic, it’s a lot harder than it used to be. But this sort of inoculation requires regular booster shots. 

We still haven’t seen much of a dent in the child welfare surveillance state – the massive apparatus in which caseworkers for what should be called the family police pound on doors in the middle of the night, demand that children be awakened, and then are asked traumatic questions and often stripsearched. Almost always, the report that led to it was false or a case in which family poverty was confused with neglect. 

That, too, may finally change as more states pass laws raising the standard for intervening in families and bolstering their due process protections.  And it may change as states at least change their messaging around when to call a child abuse hotline. They should, of course, go much further and replace mandatory reporting with permissive reporting and replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. 

In part, this progress is a result of a dramatic change for the better in media coverage, particularly at the national level. Many major regional publications also have transformed their approach. 

But, particularly among smaller news outlets, there are still too many who continue to fall for health terrorism and continue to view birth parents as somehow too sub-human even to speak to. 

At a reunion of my J-School class ten years ago, each of us told the group what we’d been doing since graduation. My answer then still applies: My final project for the Broadcast Workshop was about foster care. It’s not finished yet.