It’s tough to verify a
story when a child welfare agency won’t talk or release records. But it can be
done. At the end of this post I’ve included links to 23 24 examples.
This post has been updated to include a link to some excellent reporting by the Kansas City Star in 2019.
One of the reporters calls the White House for comment. A
spokesman (or as reporters might derisively call him, a “flack”) for President
Nixon replies: “You’ve got it all wrong, but we can’t say anything – it’s all a
matter of national security.” To which
Woodward and/or Bernstein reply: “Oh, well, in that case we’ll just forget the
whole thing.”
Of course that would never happen – except in child welfare,
where it seems to happen a lot.
A family complains that their children were needlessly taken
by child protective services. They tell their story to a reporter. The reporter
calls the child welfare agency and is immediately referred to their flack who
says: “Oh, well, there’s really so
much more to the story and we wish we
could tell you but we just can’t; confidentiality, you know.” And, of course, they won’t share any records
either.
Over and over I’ve seen journalists who would never let
other agencies get away with this give up when told this by a child welfare
agency. Or worse, knowing that the records are secret, they won’t even try.
Most of the time, reporters won’t admit it. But one newspaper reporter did recently
during an email exchange. I won’t penalize her for her candor by naming her.
This reporter wrote that she would not write an in-depth
story about a child welfare case unless she had access to the actual child
protective services documents in the case or access to the relevant court
hearings.
Double standards
In fact, neither she nor most other reporters seem to apply
this to all cases. This reporter has written
many stories about deaths of children “known to the system” even though the
child welfare agency stonewalled. But those are the kinds of cases reporters
tend to be comfortable with. The heroes are people reporters can identify with
– middle-class foster parents, and/or “child advocates.” The villains are presumed to be birth parents
– people who almost never have anything in common with reporters – different
backgrounds, different life experiences, different class and, often, different
race.
That also helps explain why cases in which a family alleges
the children were needlessly taken are another matter entirely. They make a lot of reporters queasy right
from the start.
What all this means is that when it comes to cases alleging
wrongful removal, child welfare agencies have a de facto veto of silence. All they have to do is stonewall and the
story will go away. So even as
journalists who cover child welfare regularly, and rightly, complain about
agency secrecy, they enable and encourage that secrecy. I’ve long thought that every time a reporter
refuses to override the veto of silence, somewhere an agency flack gets his
wings.
A distorted picture
And, of course, this leaves the public with a distorted
picture of how and when child protective services agencies err; that is, they
seem to err only in the direction of leaving children in dangerous homes
because that’s almost all that ever gets into the newspapers, online, or on
television.
Among the reasons the newspaper reporter who emailed me
recently gave for caving in to the veto of silence: “People lie.”
Well, yes. But case records also sometimes lie. So do
caseworkers. Occasionally, caseworkers even assert what amounts to a
right to lie – in court. But somehow that doesn’t stop reporters from
writing story after story about cases in which, supposedly, agencies bent over
backwards to coddle abusive families – often based on nothing more than an
unsupported claim by the reporter’s favorite “child advocate.” Because when it
comes to who’s telling the truth, people like us always get the benefit of the doubt over people like them.
No, that does not mean a journalist can or should simply
take a family’s word for what happened.
And yes, getting at the facts in a case of wrongful removal can be
difficult.
Of the many people who claim a child welfare agency acted unjustly
some are, in fact, guilty as sin. Some are crazy. Some have been driven crazy by what has happened to them. Some have a good point on some issues while
others involve many shades of gray. And
some are absolutely right.
But even when the stories are true, because most victims of
child welfare agencies are poor, they often are less educated. So they may be
less able to gather their thoughts – and their documents – and compose a clear,
coherent narrative. So it takes a lot of work to understand the story at all,
even before trying to check it.
All that is why, when journalists do focus on wrongful
removal a disproportionate amount of the coverage is devoted to those rare
times when the long arm of child protective services reaches into the middle
class – as
in this case and this
one.
And yet, for all that, it can be done.
Some families have enough copies of documents to bolster
their case. They may have lawyers or other witnesses. And good reporters know that when an agency
truly is being treated unfairly and can’t talk on the record, usually someone
will still leak their side of the story. If they won’t give specifics, even off
the record, odds are they don’t have a good case.
The honor roll
All over the country, good reporters are finding ways to
override the veto of silence and tell families’ stories. They’re not doing it
nearly enough, but some very important stories make it into print and on the
air. A previous
post to this blog cited five examples, four published over a period of less
than two weeks.
Here are some more:
● NPR’s LatinoUSA overrode the
veto of silence in this half-hour documentary about a typical child welfare case.
● The New York Times got past the veto of silence to report on how fostercare has become the new “Jane Crow.”
●The Times
got past the veto of silence again to report on how parents
can lose their children for smoking pot.
● NPR refused to let stonewalling stop them from exposing
what South Dakota child welfare does to Native American children.
● There’s this
from the Houston Chronicle.
● For a brilliant examination of a case filled with shades
of gray, check out this
series from The Boston Globe.
When it was published, more than half of the hundreds of comments – and most
were surprisingly civil – disagreed with my own point of view. But it’s on this
list because it is comprehensively reported, beautifully written, and gives
readers the information we need to make up our own minds.
But you don’t have to be a big news organization to override
the veto of silence:
● The Kansas City Star
produced this
brilliant series. They overrode the veto of silence by starting where so
many former foster children wind up: in jail.
● The Philadelphia
Daily News, a small paper in a big city, did this story. And
this one. And
this one.
● The reporter who would go on to expose the Flint water
crisis did this story for Detroit’s alternative weekly Metro Times about what
typical child welfare agencies do in typical cases.
● And this
series from the Sun News in
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
It’s not just print reporters who do good work.
● There’s this story from WXYZ-TV in
Detroit. (There were many more from WXYZ, but broadcast websites tend to be
less good about keeping their stories online.)
And then there’s what happened when the Biloxi, Miss. Sun-Herald ran into the veto of silence.
Instead of backing down they made how secrecy harms families the
theme of a six-part series.
When reporters cave in to child welfare’s veto of silence
it’s usually not because there’s no way to get around it. Usually, it’s because they don’t want to get around it.
