Last
month I wrote a column called “Why the ‘Foster-Care-at-All-Costs’ Crowd Will Never Surrender Their Horror Stories.” I offered those wedded to a
take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare a deal: a mutual moratorium on the use of horror stories to
make our points.
But I also said those
favoring foster care at all costs would never take the deal. Because with all
the studies and data showing
that family preservation is the safer option for the overwhelming majority of
children the overwhelming majority of the time, they can’t afford to give up
broad-crush condemnation of family preservation based on horror stories. The
horror stories are all they’ve got.
So thank you, Marie
Cohen, for proving my point. Cohen’s latest attack on family preservation is based entirely
on a horror story. In this case, though, I don’t need one of my own in order to
respond. Instead, I’ll use the same story Cohen uses.
Because
this time Cohen tries to argue that a case in which a child was removed from
her parents, placed in foster care, adopted by the foster parent and then
allegedly severely abused by the foster/adoptive mother somehow is an example of
“family preservation at all costs.” She bases this on the fact that after
the child, Maliyia Knapp, 17, escaped from her abusive adoptive home, a judge
left her siblings with the adoptive parents.
If the
allegations are true, it is indeed a horror story. But it’s a horror story
that’s more about the blinders people in child welfare put on concerning foster
care and adoption than about family preservation.
A “Spate” of Horror Stories – All Involving Adoptions From
Foster Care
Cohen
neglected to mention that this actually is the third Iowa horror story to come
to light in recent months, all of them involving children adopted from foster
care. When birth parents are accused, this is almost always referred to as a
“spate” or “series” that “raises questions” about family preservation. So,
again, in the absence of a mutual moratorium, the same rules should apply.
Here
are some other things Cohen neglected to mention:
§ Iowa
takes away children at one
of the highest rates in America, far above the national average and vastly
above states that are national models for keeping children safe by emphasizing
family preservation. (By now we all know which ones, right? but for the record,
here’s that New York Times story about
one of them again.)
§ Maliyia
Knapp says she and her siblings were taken from their parents because of “drug
problems.” That covers a lot of possibilities. But surely, if Iowa really is
fanatical about “family preservation at all costs,” the state child welfare
agency wouldn’t have cared about the drug abuse. In fact, child welfare
agencies should care. But the better approach in most such
cases is neither doing nothing nor rushing to consign the children to foster
care – it’s drug treatment.
§ The same story from which Cohen quotes selectively
reported that as soon as the children were taken away, paternal grandparents
say they came forward and spent thousands of dollars trying to gain custody.
They were turned down. That doesn’t sound like family preservation at all
costs. It sounds like a state where the hostility to families extends to
extended families. That is contrary to the mass of research, including this study and this one and the studies summarized here and here, finding that kinship care is typically safer than what should
properly be called stranger care.
§ As far
as we know, abuse in adoptive homes is rare – as is abuse in birth parent
homes. But abuse in foster care is not rare. And the rate of abuse in group
homes and institutions – Cohen’s favorite options – is worst of
all.
But
here’s what all forms of substitute care have in common: The more you overload
the system with false allegations, trivial cases, cases in which family poverty
is confused with neglect and other cases where children never needed to be
taken from their parents, the greater the temptation to lower standards and
ignore signs of abuse in substitute care.
The
same overloading of the system leads to pressure to rush through adoptions. And
in those cases there’s also a financial incentive: a bounty of $4,000 to
$12,000 for every finalized adoption over a baseline number. If an adoption
goes horribly wrong, the state does not have to give back the money.
In
fact, they can place the same children again and collect another bounty for
each. That may contribute to a bigger problem than abuse in adoptive homes;
adoptions that fail.
For all
of these reasons, it is Iowa’s take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare
that truly makes children less safe. Failing to recognize that is the
worst horror of all.
