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| Photo by Gage Skidmore |
● The number of
children separated from their parents at the border since April is almost equal
to the number taken by U.S. child protective services (CPS) every three days.
● Yes, there
are differences: The people at CPS
almost always mean well. And some of the
children taken by U.S. CPS agencies really needed to be taken. But many more didn’t.
● For a young child,
no matter who takes him away and no matter what the reason, the trauma is the
same. We inflict that trauma needlessly
over and over. Now that we’re finally
facing up to that needless trauma at the border, shouldn’t we face it, and stop
it, wherever it occurs?
***
“I’m sorry! I’m
sorry! I’m sorry!”
The cries of the three-year-old girl filled the night. She didn’t know what she’d done wrong, but it
must have been something awful – how else to explain why a big man in a uniform
had just wrenched her from her mother’s arms and was carrying her away into the
night?
Her five-year-old brother thought the same thing: I’ve been
a good boy, he said, so he should be able to go home.
This didn’t happen last week at a detention center on the
U.S. – Mexico border. The man in the
uniform was not a Border Patrol agent.
It happened many years ago in California. The man in the uniform was a sheriff’s deputy
taking away children in response to what would turn out to be a false
allegation of child abuse.
The story of the little girl crying “I’m sorry!” is the story
I used to conclude my book, Wounded Innocents. I
closed with that story because the cries of that little girl were the cries of
almost every young child taken from a parent, no matter where it happens, no
matter why it happens.
Now, suddenly, thanks to Donald J. Trump, such stories are
all over the news. Now everyone, it
seems, is speaking out about the horrible effects of tearing children from
their parents.
What separation does to children
“This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly
separated from their parents,” begins a
story in The Washington Post:
Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.
“The effect is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”
But people do it all the time. In fact, it happens more than 270,000 times a
year. We just don’t usually notice.
The number of children the Trump Administration admits to
tearing from their parents at the border since April – about 2,300 – is nearly
as many as the average number U.S. child protective services agencies take away
from their parents every three days.
But are there really parallels to what Trump is doing and to
the American child welfare system? Is it fair to suggest such parallels? The answer, I think, is no. And yes. And sort-of.
And sometimes.
Where there is no comparison
Let’s start with where any such comparison is unfair.
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| Kellyanne "alternative facts" Conway. (Photo by Gage Skidmore) |
● What Trump is doing is a cold, calculated act of
hostage-taking. Administration officials have said as much. They are using these captive,caged
children as bargaining chips to get
the immigration law they want. No one is
even pretending that these actions are meant to help the children. (Well, no
one but Kellyanne “alternative facts” Conway who seemed to suggest as much on
Meet the Press on June 17.)
So on one level a comparison is unfair to the people who
work in child protective services agencies, to hundreds of thousands of foster
parents, and even to many of the people who staff group homes and
institutions. I think many of them get
it wrong. But most of them are trying to do the right thing.
● The level of sheer cruelty on the part of Trump and those
doing his bidding is so mind-boggling that drawing an analogy to the routine
workings of child protective services in 21st Century America risks being
seen, mistakenly, as minimizing what is being done to children at the border.
● The number of children who really needed to be torn from
their parents by Donald Trump and those acting on his behalf is exactly
zero. The number of children who need to
be taken from their parents by child protective services is not zero. Even if the number of children taken away
each year could be cut by two-thirds to three-quarters – and I think it could –
that still would leave tens of thousands of times when child protective services
agencies do the right thing when they take away a child. In those cases, even
the enormous trauma of removal is less than the trauma of remaining in their
own homes.
Where a comparison is valid
● Some might argue that what Trump is doing is different
because there is no due process for the families at the border. The children
are simply seized on the spot; the family gets no hearing and no lawyer. In
some cases, the children just disappear, and no one seems to know where they
are. Is that identical to what happens when CPS takes a child? Of course not. But there are more
parallels than people in child welfare want to admit.
For starters, CPS workers and/or law enforcement can and do
act like the border patrol in the sense That’s
what that deputy in California did all those years ago. Yes, there’s a hearing,
anywhere from a few days to a week or more later. And sometimes there is a
lawyer. Occasionally, there is
high-quality defense counsel and genuine due process. So sometimes, it’s very
different from what’s happening at the border.
But most of the time, it’s an overwhelmed, unprepared lawyer who just
met her or his client in the hallway just before the hearing. Similarly, one could argue that child welfare
is different because we have a law requiring child welfare agencies to make
“reasonable efforts” to keep families together.
But that law routinely is broken
with impunity.
So here’s the difference: In the case of what Trump is doing
there is no due process. Most of the
time, when child protective services does it there is the Potemkin Village version
of due process.
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| Charles Loring Brace |
● It’s worth remembering that the American child welfare
system as we know it today actually began as an assault on immigrant
families. The system is rooted not
in benevolence but in bigotry. It began with the Donald Trump of his day, a
19th Century Protestant minister in New York City named Charles
Loring Brace. He so hated and feared New York City’s Catholic immigrants that
he set up an entire system of so-called “orphan trains” to take away their
children and ship them off to farms in the south and the Midwest. Many of the
children were not orphans. Some were treated little better than slaves.
● Child welfare also was used in an attempt to effectively
eradicate the one group of Americans who are not immigrants or their
descendants – Native Americans. First,
Indian children were confiscated and consigned to hideous orphanages in a
systematic attempt to, in the words of the head of one such school, “kill the
Indian, save the child.” Melissa
Harris Perry called the orphanages
an “explicit cultural extermination mission.”
That didn’t stop a century ago. A successor policy with
similar goals, this time involving the forced removal of Indian children for adoption
by white families, lasted until the late 1960s. Even now, the federal law to prevent such
abuses from happening again, the Indian Child Welfare Act, is
under constant attack from latter-day successors to Charles Loring Brace.
● The parallels are not just historic. Racial bias pervades American child welfare today. That
bias is compounded by the arrogance of many in child welfare who insist that
their field is so special and they are so wonderful that such bias does not
even exist. When a New York Times story called foster care the
new “Jane Crow,” the story wasn’t talking about the Mexican border, it was
discussing the system in New York City.
● Just as rich people don’t have to flee their countries on
foot to reach the U.S. border, rich people are not targeted by child protective
services. The system regularly confuses poverty with neglect and tears
children from their mothers’ arms because those mothers are poor. It doesn’t do it with the same malicious
intent, but that’s no comfort for the child.
Taking children from battered mothers
● Among the targets of the Trump administration: migrants seeking
asylum after fleeing
domestic violence in their home countries. In other words, the Trump policy
calls for tearing apart families where the mother’s sole “crime” is to be a
victim of domestic violence. That one is
standard
operating procedure in some
American child protective services agencies right now. It took a class-action lawsuit to curb it in
one state – that leaves 49 where the children of domestic violence victims still
can be fair game.
Read the stories of some
of the plaintiffs in that lawsuit (for which the co-counsel was NCCPR's Vice President) and see if they sound any different from the
stories we’re hearing now at the border.
● The conditions in which children are held can be
appalling. Think holding children in
cages is unique to the current crisis? Hardly.
Year, after year after year, American journalists expose hideous conditions in group homes “residential
treatment centers” and other institutions used by American child protective
services agencies. Sometimes, they’re even literally parked in cars. There is an entire
industry of parking place shelters that actually claims it’s a good idea to
place children in their institutions right after they’re removed from their
homes.
In an
otherwise excellent story, the Associated Press declared that “…the
nation’s child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about
the lasting trauma to children…” But they didn’t. They’ve just been rebranded.
UPDATE: NOW WE
KNOW THE TWO SYSTEMS
HAVE SOMETHING
ELSE IN COMMON:
Here’s
what Matt Smith and Aura Bogado the Center for Investigative Reporting just
reported concerning the immigrant detention system:
President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy is creating a zombie army of children forcibly injected with medications that make them dizzy, listless, obese and even incapacitated, according to legal filings that show immigrant children in U.S. custody subdued with powerful psychiatric drugs.
And here’s what an investigation of the California child welfare system by Karen de Sa, then with the San Jose Mercury
News (and now continuing her excellent work at the San Francisco Chronicle) found in 2014:
With alarming frequency, foster and health care providers are turning to a risky but convenient remedy to control the behavior of thousands of troubled kids: numbing them with psychiatric drugs that are untested on and often not approved for children.
Yes, a foster family is the first choice when American CPS
agencies intervene, but some young children continue to be
institutionalized. And placing a child
in a foster home, even a very good one, doesn’t erase the pain. Some of the children separated at the border
are, in fact, in foster homes. They
are still in anguish. “The first few
nights, he cried himself to sleep,” the foster mother of one such child told The New York Times. “Then it turned into
‘just moaning and moaning.’”
“Home-like” is not the same as home
To the extent that any good may come from this horror it’s
the simple fact that journalists may be waking up to the fact that separation
of a child from a parent is an inherent trauma; period, end-of-story.
This can be seen by the fact that journalists and others
finally are refusing to be suckered by what a shelter happens to look like. Over more than 40 years I’ve read scores of treacly
stories about group homes and shelters which go on and on about how great they
look, as though somehow that’s a substitute for love. Inevitably, in these stories, someone says
“How can you call us an institution? We’re so home-like!”
This
Washington Post story started out
exactly the same way; but then veered off in an entirely different and far more
accurate direction, describing the torment of children who were not comforted
in the least by the pretty surroundings. The Times
story about the child in a good foster home made the same point. Finally, it
seems, we’re learning the difference between “home-like” and home.
For the infant or young child suddenly taken away by a
stranger, it doesn’t matter if the stranger works for child protective
services, a local sheriff, or the Border Patrol. It doesn’t matter if the reason she was taken
is that her mother just crossed the U.S. border after fleeing poverty and
persecution abroad, or if the mother is an impoverished American citizen
struggling here at home, or even, research
tells us, if the mother has
a drug problem.
For the child, the trauma of removal is the same.
Their heart rate still goes up. Their body still releases a
flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones
still can start killing off dendrites. And in time the stress still can start killing
off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term
damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.
In short, the effects are catastrophic.
Surely if you’re going to inflict that much catastrophe on a
child, you’d better be damn sure that what you’re taking the child from really
is worse, and there is absolutely nothing less traumatic that you can do
instead. Child protective services
agencies flunk that test every day.
ProPublica has published audio, smuggled out of a detention
center. The children are crying for their mothers and fathers.
All over America, in foster homes, group homes and
institutions, American children taken from their parents by American child
protective services workers are crying the same way. Some of them probably are calling out “I’m
sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
It would be ironic if it was the sheer evil of a policy
enacted by Donald J. Trump that finally made us really listen – and do
something about it.
