● The Chronicle of
Social Change is tracking
the issues child welfare agencies will have to deal with during the COVID19
pandemic. And family defender Amy Mulzer
has a tweet
thread predicting how those agencies will deal with it: Badly. UPDATE: And, as if to prove Mulzer right, a judge in Arkansas is cutting off in-person visits between foster children and their parents - just when they need the comfort of their own families the most:
● Late last year, the Kansas
City Star tracked down what happens to former foster youth by going to
where so many of them can be found: Jails.
Over and over they talked about what the system had done to them and,
often, about how they never
needed to be taken from their own homes.
It is a testament to the power of those stories that some in the child
welfare establishment, and right-wing allies such as Naomi Schaefer Riley (who
proudly compares her work to that of Charles Murray – yes, that Charles Murray), are desperate to try to undermine the findings.
Riley even tried to dismiss the lived
experience of foster youth themselves. I
have a blog post about it.
● But this issue doesn’t divide neatly along ideological
lines. Check out conservative commentator
and former Fox Business anchor John
Stossel’s commentary.
● A lawsuit in Pennsylvania illustrates so many of the
problems in child welfare, from the persecution of certain mothers who smoke
pot – or simply are wrongly accused of it – to how everything is made worse by
“predictive analytics.” I
have a blog post on it, with a link to the lawsuit.
● And there’s still
another story about still another “child abuse pediatrician” allegedly out
of control. This time it’s from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative
Journalism – but you really should
read it if you’re in Alaska.
