How North Carolina’s performative outrage over child abuse deaths is making everything worse

 

The North Carolina State Capitol, where performances are likely to resume this week

During a legislative hearing about the failures that contributed to the death of Dominique Moody, a six-year-old in North Carolina, State Rep. Allen Chesser said: 

“There’s a pattern here. A child dies and the Department of Health and Human Services investigates, finds a lack of oversight, poor decision-making, and poor management. The local Child Protective Services Office is put on a corrective action plan and the state takes over for a little while, but fundamentally, nothing changes.” 

He’s right. But that’s not the only pattern that follows such tragedies – it’s not even the worst.  The worst pattern is the one he’s a part of, the one playing out right now: Lawmakers pound tables, fulminate, and issue outraged press releases. They demand the ritual sacrifice of the child welfare agency chief, the firing, and maybe criminal prosecution of anyone who came anywhere near the case. And, of course, no such grand performance is complete without exploiting the child’s memory by putting the child’s name on some largely pointless (or worse) law. 

All this makes everything worse – because, almost always, the real cause of tragedies like the death of Dominique Moody is an overloaded system. In Mecklenburg County, where Dominique died, workers are carrying more than double the number of cases they should. That means workers rush from case to case, making terrible errors in all directions – leaving some children in danger even as they take other children needlessly from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help. 

The system is not overloaded because North Carolina is a cesspool of depravity, where suffering like that endured by Dominique is the norm. On the contrary, in 2025, of all the North Carolina children torn from their families and thrown into foster care, 83% did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 61% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” Indeed, nearly one-third of entries into North Carolina foster care were due to homelessness or inadequate housing. That’s well over twice as many as were taken for physical and sexual abuse combined. 

That helps explain the mountain of research showing that, in these typical cases, children left in their own homes do better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. One study found that the intrinsic toxicity of forced family separation is so great that foster youth are more than four times more likely to die by age 20, and the most common cause of death is suicide. All that is before we even reach all the other studies showing high rates of abuse in foster care itself. 

It is these false reports, trivial cases and poverty cases that overload workers, leaving them less time to find the next Dominique Moody before it’s too late. So when lawmakers do little more than shout the equivalent of “off with their heads!” it makes everything worse, and it makes all vulnerable children less safe. 

With the threat of dismissal and even criminal prosecution over their heads, the result almost always is a foster-care panic, a sharp, sudden increase in the number of children thrown into foster care. That only further increases caseloads. 

As for the proposed law with Dominique’s name on it, which already has passed the North Carolina House of Representatives unanimously, it’s going to increase caseloads even more. The bill’s main feature is a so-called “escalation team” which would add an extra level of review – meaning an extra push to remove a child or fail to reunify a family, in a whole slew of circumstances, including a prior placement in foster care or “three or more reports to Child Protective Services in a 12-month period.” This in a state that already reunifies families at one of the lowest rates in the country; less than half the national average. 

So, attention angry ex-spouses, aggrieved neighbors, vengeful landlords or anyone else with a grudge against a North Carolina family: When this bill becomes law, you can make those anonymous reports three times and voila! You’ve vastly escalated the chances of tearing the family apart! You’ve also contributed to vastly increasing caseloads for overloaded workers. 

Children would be far better off if North Carolina created a de-escalation team, to re-examine the case of every foster child and see if they really need to be in foster care and to re-examine typical cases and see if the case is really a poverty case. That would reduce caseloads and give workers time to investigate every case with care. 

It could get worse still if North Carolina buys into a proposal from North Carolina professor (and occasional LinkedIn troll – see below) Emily Putnam-Hornstein to add so-called “predictive risk modeling,” in which an algorithm “advises” caseworkers concerning who to investigate and which children to take away.

Prof. Emily Putnam-Hornstein on LinkedIn. She subsequently deleted her profile there.

Consider what keeps happening when objective evaluators look at the model she co-designed for metropolitan Pittsburgh. 

● Independent evaluators found it was racially biased. 

● So did the ACLU. 

● The Associated Press reports that the Biden Justice Department investigated whether it discriminates against the disabled. (We don't know what happened to this, but we presume the Trump Administration dropped it.)

● A family suing over removal of their children, because of the parents' disabilities, said the caseworker told them their children were being taken because “the machine has labeled you high risk.” 

● In her landmark book, Automating Inequality, Prof. Virginia Eubanks called the algorithm “poverty profiling.” 

● And, in describing another of their proposed algorithms, even Putnam-Hornstein’s co-author said “Yes, it’s big brother…” but she argued we should use it anyway. When you begin a sentence with the words “Yes, it’s big brother…” the only ethical way to end the sentence is: “…so we won’t do it.” 

There is more about the dangers of Putnam-Hornstein’s approach in this NCCPR publication. 

If scapegoating workers won’t work, and a poverty-profiling algorithm won’t work, what will? We list a series of solutions here. But two changes are key: 

● Zero-in on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. Study after study has shown that even small amounts of concrete help go a long way to reducing abuse and neglect. 

● As the North Carolina Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recommended, provide every family with high-quality interdisciplinary legal representation, an approach proven to safely reduce foster care, not by getting “bad parents” off, but by finding alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” often dished out by child welfare agencies. 

Rep. Chesser says the problem is “the inaction.” That’s one problem. The other problem is action that makes everything worse. Lawmakers should learn what really works, even if it doesn’t make a good press release. 

NCCPR’s written statement to the North Carolina Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was cited more than a dozen times in the Committee’s report. You can read the full statement here.

Residential treatment: When the stories just speak for themselves

The promises to improve protocols and procedures that follow each new revelation of abuse [in group homes and institutions] are not only inadequate, they may be worse than nothing at all. By creating the illusion of progress, these never-ending “reforms” legitimize an intrinsically damaging institution.

--Commentary in The Imprint, June 15, 2026

Late Friday, when a troubled psychiatric facility outside Minneapolis was on the verge of being shut down for placing youth at “imminent risk of harm,” an agreement was reached with the state to keep its doors open.

 But under the settlement with the Department of Human Services (DHS) obtained by The Imprint, Nexus East Bethel Family Healing must scale back its offerings and submit to more rigorous oversight.

--News story in The Imprint, June 16, 2026

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 16, 2026

● In The Imprint, Charles Zeanah of Tulane University School of Medicine and Carole Shauffer, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Youth Law Center discuss the mountain of research showing that the real problem with group homes and institutions is that they are group homes and institutions. They write: 

The promises to improve protocols and procedures that follow each new revelation of abuse [in group homes and institutions] are not only inadequate, they may be worse than nothing at all. By creating the illusion of progress, these never-ending “reforms” legitimize an intrinsically damaging institution. 

● Unfortunately, lawmakers don’t seem to get the message. In Minnesota, The Imprint reports, in the wake of abuse allegations that dogged a residential treatment center since it opened, the state finally suspended its license. But legislators and state officials seem more concerned about losing a place to institutionalize children than they are about what happens to the children once they’re institutionalized – because the state promptly reached an agreement to allow the place to stay open. Presumably, they promised to improve protocols and procedures. [UPDATE JUNE 17: And sure enough ...]

● The Imprint also has two stories on the issue of drug testing and consent in New York. One story reports on inaction by legislators: 

A legislative fix in New York was first introduced seven years ago. The state attorney general has investigated. Lawsuits have been filed. And some hospitals in the state have changed their rules. 

But birthing mothers and their newborns are still routinely tested for drugs without consent, triggering CPS investigations and removals at the most tender of bonding times. And as this year’s legislative session ended Friday, the Maternal Health, Dignity and Consent Act — a bill to ban the practice — once again failed in Albany. 

● The other story reports on action by litigators. They’re suing to stop a policy that would allow judges to “ask” parents to submit to instant on-the-spot drug testing. Technically, the tests are voluntary, but … 

“When saying ‘no’ means unlawful separation from your child, that is coercion,” Trisha Trigilio, the [Bonrx Defenders’] director of impact litigation said in a press release. “Judges should not leverage the power of their offices to extract consent and circumvent the law. If the court wants a drug test, it can follow the law and issue a warrant based on probable cause.” 

● Things are far worse in New Mexico, where that state’s Supreme Court refused to stop a confiscation-at-birth directive issued by the Governor. I have a blog post about it. 

● Kentucky Lantern reports on another bizarre turn in the saga of former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s failed adoption of Jonah, a child from Ethiopia.  As the story reminds us: 

Jonah, who alleges he was abandoned by the Bevins at age 17 in an abusive facility in Jamaica, is seeking support and help in completing an education. 

Now, according to the story, an email that sounds like a Trump social media post … 

blasts lawyers for his estranged son, Jonah Bevin, for making “FALSE STATEMENTS” to the media and accuses Jonah of trying “TO SHAKE HIS PARENTS DOWN FOR MONEY.” 

The two-page email, mostly in capital letters, repeats attacks on Jefferson Family Court Judge Angela Johnson, who oversees the case in which Jonah, 19, seeks support from his divorced parents. It calls her an “ACTIVIST JUDGE” who “INSISTS ON MILKING THIS CASE PUBLICLY FOR THE MEDIA ATTENTION THAT IT BRINGS HER.”… 

The email statement is not signed by Bevin and the sender did not reply to multiple requests from the Kentucky Lantern for confirmation that the email was from him or respond to questions about its content.

Without ever intending it, New Mexico’s governor has made it more likely that vulnerable children will die – and used an Orwellian justification

A wealth of research suggests Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s
child-confiscation-at-birth directive will lead to more child deaths.
But she justifies the directive by saying, in effect, well,  they haven’t died yet.
A directive likely to cost lives is justified with a claim that it saves lives.
Orwell would understand.

This week, without explanation, New Mexico’s Supreme Court upheld Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s child-confiscation-at-birth directive. Under this directive, issued nearly a year ago, any child “born exposed to methamphetamines, fentanyl, polysubstance, or diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome” is taken away on-the-spot. 

Since Grisham issued her decree, more than 200 children have been confiscated, torn from their mothers during the most important hours of their lives, their first. Since then, says the governor, in a comment quoted in some form over and over: none has died. That claim has become a mantra, echoed by the take-the-child-and-run fan club among state journalists, which, sadly, seems to encompass a lot of major news organizations.

But Grisham’s claim is, at best, incomplete, and at worst, grossly misleading. 

What the governor should have said is None has died – yet. 

Because the evidence is overwhelming that, for all sorts of reasons, some of those children the governor and her allies claim to have saved will die prematurely. Others will suffer other grievous harm. It will happen because they were taken needlessly. But it will happen in ways that insulate Grisham, and the advocates and journalists who support the confiscation-at-birth policy from any accountability.  Was that the governor’s intent? Of course not. But it’s the likely result. 

Here are some of the things research tells us that the governor either doesn’t know or chose to ignore: 

● Some children will die because of the intrinsic toxicity of removal itself. I’m not even talking about the high rate of physical and sexual abuse in foster care; I’m talking about inherent trauma; the kind of trauma documented by that study I keep citing from Sweden – the one showing that, in typical cases, children placed in foster care were more than four times more likely to die by age 20 than even comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. The most common cause of death was suicide. The numbers aren’t small. Among children left in their own homes, 1.8% died before age 20. Among the foster children, it was 8.6%. 

This study is just one of so many showing so many horrible outcomes for foster youth – again, when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, that it’s now possible to calculate how many more children will suffer all sorts of grievous harm, including premature death, because of things like Grisham’s confiscation at birth policy and similar actions that encourage needless placement. 

I think this kind of intrinsic toxicity of placement is what New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar was getting at in what amounts to a message to her fellow journalists, a message many reporters in New Mexico seem determined to ignore.

● And there are other terrible consequences for children. As we pointed out in our rebuttal to a report from an even more clueless New Mexico politician, a clue to those consequences can be found in a study conducted during a previous “worst drug plague ever,” crack cocaine:

Researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them. After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. 

Similarly, consider what The New York Times found when it looked at the best way to treat infants born with opioids in their systems. According to the Times: 

[A] growing body of evidence suggests that what these babies need is what has been taken away: a mother.  Separating newborns in withdrawal can slow the infants’ recovery, studies show, and undermine an already fragile parenting relationship. When mothers are close at hand, infants in withdrawal require less medication and fewer costly days in intensive care. 

“Mom is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent babies. 

● On top of that, as the ACLU and two courageous legislators, State Sen. Linda López and Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena, pointed out when they sought to stop this anti-child policy, that policy poses direct threats to children’s lives and health: 

The directive causes the very harm it purports to prevent. Stigma and criminalization drive families away from care — parents may avoid prenatal appointments, travel out of state to give birth, or conceal their health history from providers, leaving both mother and child worse off. 

As the drug policy experts at the Reason Foundation put it in a critique of the confiscation-at-birth policy 

Decades of public health evidence show New Mexico’s new mandate is a superficial fix that undermines effective, long-term solutions. 

As the ACLU also notes, the point is not that no child ever should be taken under these circumstances. Odds are there are some among those 200 children for whom removal, while extremely harmful, still was less harmful than leaving them in their homes. But, as the ACLU explains, 

A decision to remove a newborn from their mother should not be determined by a blanket policy. Instead, it should be made through an individualized assessment of the particular circumstances of each child. The right to due process of law requires that every family be treated as an individual family unit –– not treated as a category. New Mexico children deserve the chance to grow up with the people who love them and for decisions made about their wellbeing to be grounded in law, medicine, and their actual circumstances.” 

But while the directive is enormously dangerous for children, it’s perfect for politicians and their enablers. Because, assuming the governor is correct, none of the children has died yet. 

By the time that happens, it may be years from now. By then, the child might be in her or his third foster home, or maybe institutionalized, or trapped in some awful makeshift placement and driven to suicide – as, of course, happened in New Mexico, twice in 2025 alone. 

By then, Grisham will be long out of office. The journalists will have collected their little awards and moved on, after proudly pointing to Grisham’s policy on the part of the award entry form that says, “What did the stories accomplish?” So when that child needlessly confiscated at birth suffers lifelong debilitating illness, or injury – or dies prematurely – no one will hold any of them accountable. 

Meanwhile, a policy that makes it more likely that more children will die is justified on grounds that none has died yet. George Orwell would have understood.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 9, 2026

● In a case involving what is alleged to be rampant lying by both foster parents and a family police agency supervisor in Alaska, a judge sanctioned the entire agency for needlessly tearing a newborn from her mother, who was herself a foster child. According to the Anchorage Daily News:

In a scathing 23-page order, the judge said the in-court testimony of an unnamed [child welfare agency] supervisor was “anything but truthful to this Court and either attempted to deceive or trick this Court and the parties,” suggesting the person may have lied under oath. 

● Gothamist reports on some of the nine – yes nine – separate lawsuits, including a major class-action, challenging how the New York City family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, routinely abuses its power to remove children in so-called emergencies without so much as asking a judge first. From the story: 

Melissa Friedman, an attorney in charge at the Legal Aid Society who represents children in family court, said emergency removals often traumatize the children she and her colleagues represent. Younger children may experience more bedwetting, nightmares, tantrums and self harm, she said, while older kids often act out. At least one child compared the experience to being kidnapped, she said. 

As for why there are so many such suits in New York City: It’s not because the city’s family police agency is worse than others across the country, it's because the city’s network of legal representation for children and families is better. 

● Nebraska has long torn apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation. Compounding the problem, KETV reports, the state is vastly increasing the number of those children it institutionalizes. 

● The Colorado Sun reports that Colorado’s child abuse hotline accepts for investigation 26% of calls – unless the call involves abuse in a residential treatment center. Then, over the past five years, only 8% were accepted for investigation. 

Some better news in two other states, where some good legislation is progressing: 

● In Illinois, WGLT Public Radio reports: 

Illinois lawmakers unanimously passed a bill during the spring legislative session that gives more transparency and tools to parents to defend themselves in child abuse cases. 

The bill requires child abuse pediatricians — investigators at the hospital who look at medical records to determine if there is potential child abuse — to state who they are to parents as they start an investigation. It also allows parents to get a second opinion and use that during court hearings. 

● And in Pennsylvania, CapitolWire reports 

The House Children and Youth Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved two bipartisan measures designed to reform child welfare and strengthen protections for parental rights. … 

House Bill 133 allows Pennsylvania courts to restore parental rights in certain cases when a parent has successfully rehabilitated and a child has not been adopted, giving families a second chance. … 

House Bill 138 also protects the rights of incarcerated parents by ensuring incarceration alone cannot be used to terminate parental rights. It requires courts to consider a parent’s efforts to stay involved in their child’s life while incarcerated. 

● Writing for the Center for New York City Affairs, Angela Burton and Joyce McMillan note that 

Mayor Zohran Mamdani's create[ed]… the Office of Community Safety – based on the idea that early interventions can increase safety before policing becomes the only available strategy. 

They call for doing the same to curb family policing by creating an Office of Family Well-Being. 

● And in Kentucky, a judge has ordered the arrest of former Gov. Matt Bevin for allegedly failing to produce documents the court demanded in connection with a child support case pursued by the son he adopted from Ethiopia. But, as WKYT reports, that’s only the latest twist in a story of an adoption gone horribly wrong. There’s more about the case here and here.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 2, 2026

● A lawsuit challenging the New York City family police agency’s misuse of its power to tear apart families without even going through the pro-forma process of asking a judge first was the subject of stories in The Imprint, the New York Daily News, and some extraordinary journalism in The New Yorker. I have a blog post with links to all of those stories, with particular attention to what The New Yorker published. I want to highlight just one part of that story here: 

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 of the same groups that brought the lawsuit about emergency removals won a victory in an earlier suit involving that kind of separation. As The Imprint reports: 

A federal appeals court has revived a closely watched lawsuit brought by a Bronx father who alleges that New York City’s child welfare agency violated his family’s constitutional rights by taking custody of his infant son without a court order and without adequate justification. The two were separated for nearly three years even though the father was accused of no wrongdoing. 

● Last week, I highlighted a story from Abortion, Every Day that begins this way: 

Child Protective Services (CPS) has targeted mothers in multiple states who helped their daughters seek out abortions. In one case, CPS removed a teen from her home—and threatened her mother with murder charges—to stop her from getting an abortion. 

After forcing that girl to give birth, “CPS opened up an investigation into the teen for being a young mother.” 

On MS Now, Ali Velshi recaps the story and discusses the implications with Prof. Dorothy Roberts, author of Shattered Bonds, and Torn Apart (and a member of NCCPR’s Board). Media Matters for America published this video excerpt and has a transcript of Prof. Roberts’ interview. 

          

● The Associated Press has the latest in a long line of superb exposés of the “troubled teen” industry - this time focusing on a subset of “residential treatment centers” that specialize in institutionalizing adopted children. In addition to exposing allegations of widespread, horrific abuse, the AP story examined the business strategy of Embark Behavioral Health, the for-profit firm that runs many such institutions. From the story: 

“DOING EPIC SH$T” was printed on the cover of the August 2020 “Embark Academy Sales & Marketing Conference” handbook. It featured a session on how to “overcome objections” with sales tactics to “build your client base and keep your pipelines full!” 

Attendees were urged to touch hearts to help “assure a doubting child or resentful spouse.” In a session that touted admissions as a vital part of the treatment team, the handbook noted: “The admissions person sells hope when the family is at their lowest and most hopeless, scary, and vulnerable time.” 

A sidebar looks more closely into how the industry exploits loopholes and lax supervision by governments, who appear just fine with having the children out-of-sight and out-of-mind. 

(One footnote: The story also inadvertently exposes something else: The idiocy of management at the AP. Because in the very last line, Sally Ho, one of the authors of this story, and so many other great stories, including exposing the harm of Pittsburgh’s predictive analytics child welfare algorithm, is listed as "a former Associated Press reporter.")

What happens when the family police and their enablers in politics and journalism treat impoverished children and their families as sub-human? A story in The New Yorker has some answers.

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