● Who really gets caught in the net of child protective
services? Who pays the price for foster-care panic, a sharp sudden spike in
removals of children after a high-profile child abuse tragedy. Some answers in this outstanding ten-minute
video from BRIC TV in New York:
● They “lied, spied and withheld and destroyed evidence…” That’s how the
Everett Herald sums up the
behavior of the scandal-plagued CASA program in Snohomish County,
Washington. (You can read more about the scandal here.)
Part of the problem: Judges couldn’t hold
the program accountable because the CASA program was administered by the court
itself. Now that’s going to change. But
the larger problem with the CASA program is simply that it’s a CASA program.
Even when they behave honorably, bias is built
into the model.
● A New York State Senate task force examining opioids is
recommending a radically different approach to dealing with substance use,
including substance use and child welfare.
What’s so radical? It actually says we should follow the evidence
concerning what works and what doesn’t.
The Movement for
Family Power explains the benefits of the Task Force recommendations in this statement, which includes a link to
the report itself.
● A common excuse for using Orwellian predictive
analytics algorithms to supposedly predict who might abuse a child (or who
is safe to let out on bail, or who supposedly is cheating on welfare benefits,
etc.) amounts to: Sure, the algorithms are biased, but humans are biased
too! The
Correspondent has a good analysis of that issue.
● Two Colorado legislators have a
column in the Coloraro Sun about
their bill to narrow Colorado’s incredibly broad “neglect” law to allow “Colorado
parents to be able to give their kids the kind of independence almost all of us
over age 30 grew up with – the freedom to walk to school, play outside, come
home with a latchkey and so on.”
Yes, we really do need laws to allow this. One of the legislators recalled her own
experience:
“When I was widowed, I
had four kids under the age of 11. Parents know their children best and there
are children 8, 9, 10 that are perfectly capable of walking to school by
themselves. But the parents load them up and drive them because they’re afraid
to be charged with neglect, and I think I overcompensated out of fear, too.”
● Most states have raised the age in which youth are allowed
to stay in foster care to 21. A California lawmaker wants to extend it through
age 25. In the Chronicle of Social Change,
a backer of the original age increase, former foster youth Akin Abioye, says
the new proposal is a mistake. He suggests several better alternatives,
including “Stop removing kids from their family of origin.”
And there’s more about the dangerous blunders of so-called “child
abuse pediatricians.”
● Vivek
Sankaran writes in the Chronicle of
Social Change about how the kinds of tragedies exposed by Mike Hixenbaugh
of NBC News, in particular this
case from Wisconsin, stem from lack of transparency, lack of
accountability, and a refusal to admit mistakes.
● But Katie LaGrone, an investigative reporter for several
Florida television stations, has
a story (part of a series) about how Florida’s top child abuse pediatrician
has attacked the character of those who dissent from their findings and
instructs other doctors on how to counter alternative explanations for children’s
injuries. But don’t worry, he says,
those falsely accused in Florida can always get a second opinion – from him!
