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| The gravestone of Logan Marr |
First of two parts. Read Part Two here.
I have written many times on this Blog about the death of a little girl in Maine named Logan Marr. She and her sister, Bailey, were taken from their mother when the mother’s poverty was confused with neglect. They were placed with a foster mother who had once been a caseworker for the Maine child welfare agency.
I have written many times on this Blog about the death of a little girl in Maine named Logan Marr. She and her sister, Bailey, were taken from their mother when the mother’s poverty was confused with neglect. They were placed with a foster mother who had once been a caseworker for the Maine child welfare agency.
Logan herself tried to tell people she was being abused in
foster care. She can be heard disclosing the abuse on a video taken during a
supervised visit with her mother. But the child welfare agency wouldn’t listen.
One day in January, 2001, that foster mother took Logan down
to the basement, tied her to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape and left
her there to die of asphyxiation.
The case was so emblematic of what has gone wrong with
American child welfare that the PBS series Frontline
devoted three
hours of programming to the case and its implications.
Unlike many deaths in foster care, the death of Logan Marr
led to real reform. A new governor, John Baldacci, named new leadership to what
is now the state Department of Health and Human Services. They rebuilt the
system to emphasize safe, proven alternatives to foster care. They curbed needless removal of children and
made all of Maine’s vulnerable children safer.
By 2009, Maine’s child welfare reform was a finalist for an
Innovations in American Government award from Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government.
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| Maine Gov. Paul Lepage (Photo by Gage Skidmore) |
But none of that mattered to the next governor of Maine,
Paul LePage. That should be no
surprise. With his penchant for lying,
racism, vulgarity
and miscellaneous
cruelty, LePage has been aptly called “Trump before Trump.”
As with Trump, facts don’t matter to LePage. So he soon set
about getting rid of the child welfare reformers and backing away from the
child welfare reforms.
Maine already was well into a retreat from reform when two
children “known to the system,” Kendall Chick and Marissa Kennedy, died in late
2017 and early 2018. Instead of “raising questions” about the way the LePage Administration
had undermined safe, proven reforms, those deaths kicked the backlash into high
gear. LePage embraced the Big
Lie of American child welfare; the lie that family preservation and child
safety are opposites that need to be balanced.
This flies in the face of the track record of states –
including Maine itself – that improved child safety by embracing family
preservation.
A pre-Logan Marr mentality
A
year ago, Logan Marr’s mother made this
plea: “Don’t forget Logan’s voice. Just don’t
forget her voice.”
But not only her voice, but her story have been largely
forgotten.
Maine has term limits, so the state legislators who were
there when Logan Marr died, and who pushed for real reform are no longer in
office. And between the passage of time –
it’s been 17 years since Logan died – and the turmoil in the news business,
almost all of the Maine journalists who covered the death of Logan Marr are
gone. So there is almost no
institutional memory. In part two of this post, I've published two documents to refresh the memories of those who have forgotten and introduce Logan and her family to those who never knew about them.
All this leaves LePage and his DHHS free to revert to a
pre-Logan Marr mentality. It leaves them free to take actions that endanger all
of the state’s vulnerable children and make another tragedy such as the death
of Logan Marr – or the death of Kendall Chick or Marissa Kennedy - more likely.
So in a letter to lawmakers, LePage writes:
First, we will be recommending that Maine’s statutes are revised so that the priority is on what is best for the child, not family reunification. Placing the priority on family reunification forces the system and the courts to try to keep vulnerable children in a family when the best thing would be to remove the child from the situation.
The claim is echoed in a report issued by Maine DHHS. Neither LePage nor DHHS specify which Maine
law supposedly forces “the system and the courts” to keep children in dangerous
homes. That’s because there is no such law. It is, however, far easier for LePage
and DHHS to say “these tragedies happen because the law makes us do it” than to
say “these tragedies happen because we screwed up.”
Much of the harm LePage and DHHS are doing to children is obscured
by invoking a phrase that seems entirely benevolent: “what is best for the
child” – a variation of the classic “best interests of the child.” After all, who could be against that? In
fact, these are among the most dangerous words – for children – in the entire
child welfare lexicon.
An unchecked “best interests” test gives caseworkers and
courts free reign to impose their whims and prejudices on families. What is
“best” is whatever a caseworker happens to think is best. So it devolves into comparison shopping, in
which birth parents, often poor and disproportionately people of color, are
forced to compete with overwhelmingly white middle-class foster parents –
people with whom caseworkers can far more easily identify.
Material poverty is easy to see – the love between an
impoverished child and her or his parents is harder to see. So the child is
needlessly consigned to the chaos of foster care – because the caseworker can
impose her arbitrary, capricious and cruel vision of “best interests” on the
child.
A phrase filled with hubris
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| Because of term limits, the Maine lawmakers who fought for reform after the death of Logan Marr are no longer in office. |
“Best interests of the child”
also is a phrase filled with hubris. It
says we are wise enough always to know what is best and capable always of
acting on what we know. In fact, those
are dangerous assumptions that can lead us to try to fix what isn’t broken or
make worse what is.
More than forty years ago, three
scholars, Albert Solnit, Joseph Goldstein, and Anna Freud, proposed an
alternative phrase. They said “best
interests of the child” should be replaced with “least detrimental
alternative.”
“Least detrimental alternative”
recognizes that whenever we intervene in family life we do harm. Sometimes we must intervene anyway, because
intervening is less harmful than not intervening. In
other words, foster care, even when done well is not “good for children.” But
sometimes it is less bad than any other option.
The phrase “least detrimental
alternative” is a constant reminder that we must always balance the harm that
we may think a family is doing against the harm of intervening. It is exactly
the shot of humility that every child welfare system needs.
It is exactly the shot of humility that was missing when the
Maine child welfare agency first intervened in the life of Logan Marr.
● When Logan Marr was torn from her loving mother, largely
because that mother was poor, it was done in the name of her “best interests.”
● When Logan Marr’s complaints that she was being abused in
foster care were ignored, it was because workers were convinced that her
placement in foster care was in her “best interests.”
● And when Logan Marr’s foster mother tied her to a high
chair with 42 feet of duct tape and left to die of asphyxiation, that happened,
in part, because caseworkers were convinced the placement was in her “best
interests.”
When anecdotes collide
Of course one could argue that Logan Marr’s tragic death is
a horror story and shouldn’t be the basis for policy. But the current undermining of reform in
Maine also is rooted entirely in horror stories – the deaths of Kendall Chick
and Marissa Kennedy.
When anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data. As
I have written before, I would be glad to negotiate a mutual moratorium on
the use of horror stories and stick strictly to what research and data tell us
about what happens in typical cases.
● It is the data that tell us that in typical cases, not the
horror stories, children do better when
they are left in their own homes.
● It is the data that tell us that, while extremes like the
death of Logan Marr are, of course, rare, abuse
in foster care is not.
● It is the data that tell us that when Maine reformed to
emphasize family preservation, there was no compromise of child safety.
So it is the data that tell us that the best way to really
promote the best interests of the child is to do more, not less, to keep
families together.
Other bad ideas
LePage’s second bad idea is to create criminal penalties
for mandated reporters who don’t report when they have “any reason to suspect”
abuse or neglect.
But the real reason for most tragedies involving deaths of
children “known to the system” almost always is that caseworkers are overwhelmed.
Penalizing mandated reporters for not calling in anything and everything will
deluge the child abuse hotline with even more false reports and trivial
cases. That will do
enormous harm to the children needlessly investigated. But it also will further overwhelm workers,
leaving them even less time to find children in real danger – so more such
children will be missed.
Indeed, although we have had mandatory reporting laws for
more than 50 years, there is not a
shred of evidence that they make children safer. Even some of the biggest
original proponents of mandatory reporting laws are having second thoughts. But there is abundant evidence that they make
politicians happy because they can issue press releases about how they “cracked
down on child abuse.”
Though not mentioned by LePage, still another DHHS
initiative undermines the state’s differential response program, known in Maine
as “alternative response.” Differential
response has become a favorite scapegoat for those wedded to a
take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare – despite more
than two dozen studies showing it is safe.
Tyranny of Personal experience
There is one more complication in Maine: As he notes in his
letter, Gov. LePage himself was abused as a child. So even beyond his
Trump-like disdain for facts, the governor also is a victim of the tyranny
of personal experience – an inability to recognize that other people have
very different personal experiences, and no one personal experience can be a
rational basis for policy.
After all, what if Logan Marr has survived and grown up to
be governor of Maine. What would her
personal experience have told her to do?
Of course, we’ll never know. Because Logan Marr never survived Maine’s
strenuous efforts to protect her “best interests.”
In part two of this post: A letter from Logan Marr's mother, and a college admissions essay from her sister.
