[THIS PARAGRAPH WAS
UPDATED IN FEBRUARY, 2018] In 2016, I had an opportunity to debate child
welfare finance with Sean Hughes in the Chronicle
of Social Change. Of course I knew
that, wince I was writing for the Fox
News of child welfare, the deck would be stacked. And sure enough in his introduction to one
latest installment, Daniel Heimpel chose to repeat what I view as The Big Lie
of American child welfare – the idea that child protection and family
preservation are at odds. (Later, Heimpel proved to be so afraid of any dissent
that he moved this column behind the Chronicle's paywall. So I moved it here.)
In his discussion of our columns on the foster care
“entitlement” under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, Heimpel tells us:
If you believe that the mandate of child welfare agencies should go beyond child protection, and focus on keeping families together, then these dwindling dollars tied predominantly to caring for children only after they have been separated from their families is a real problem.
If you believe that the child welfare system is really about child protection, and that keeping families together is the provenance [sic] of other agencies, then the entitlement is acting how it should.
This is the philosophical debate within the field …
No, Daniel, it’s not.
I believe
the child welfare system is about child protection. So does every family
preservation advocate I know. But we don’t equate child protection with
child removal. Focusing on keeping families together is not “go[ing] beyond
child protection,” it’s how you achieve child
protection in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The real philosophical debate is: Which works better to keep
children safe: Foster care or family preservation?
Obviously,
I believe the answer, backed up by a mountain of research, is that for the
overwhelming majority of children, in the overwhelming majority of the
instances, family preservation isn’t just more humane than foster care and less
expensive than foster care, it’s also safer than
foster care. Links to that mass of evidence can be found here.
It is equally obvious that Heimpel disagrees. We can
and should debate that. (As noted above, Heimpel turned out to be afraid to do that.)
But neither I, nor anyone else I know in the family preservation
movement, take second place to anyone in our concern about keeping children
safe. It’s why we became advocates for family preservation in the first place.
In my case, it didn’t happen all at once. It’s been almost
exactly 40 years since I did my first major story about foster care, a radio
documentary while I was a journalism student. I interviewed a woman who was, at
the time, 21.
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:
My bitterness is not that I went through what I did. My bitterness is that I don’t think it should have had to happen. There was no reason why my family’s life should have been destroyed.
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 very glad I’d chosen journalism as a career.
Second, I knew I would keep coming back to the story.
And third, we could fix this if we just got all those rotten
birth parents out of the way and got all these children adopted.
Hey, two out of three isn’t bad!
But as I
did keep coming back to the story, I kept finding that the facts on the ground
were not matching what the most widely-quoted, so-called “experts” were saying.
I kept hearing “child abuse crosses class lines,” but all I kept seeing in the
system were families who were poor, and the “neglect” for which they lost their
children often looked just like poverty itself.
When the
dichotomy became too much to bear, I wrote a book about it called Wounded
Innocents. Working on the book led me to lots of experts who usually were
ignored. And that led me to the research showing family preservation to be the
safer option, a body of research that just keeps growing.
So after
40 years of following this issue, 26 of them as an advocate, I’ve about had it
with seeing people who invent outstanding alternatives such as the Homebuilders IntensiveFamily Preservation Services program, and people who put their careers on the line every day fighting
to transform child welfare systems being stigmatized and stereotyped as being
less concerned about child protection than all those people who built the
terrible system we have now. The kind of people who gave us this hellscape, and this one, and this
one; people who almost always mean well but nevertheless keep right
on destroying in children “whatever it is that makes people human.”
