● Apparently, it was the must-have fashion accessory at the
Prescott office of the Arizona Department of Child Services: T-shirts
emblazoned with the words “Professional Kidnapper.” So many staff wore them, the
Arizona Republic reports, that
when word finally got out and they were fired, the office was left with only
one investigator. All of which raises
one obvious question: How many other child protective services caseworkers –
the child abuse police – all over America share the sentiment but aren’t dumb
enough to put it on a T-shirt?
Indeed, the rate of removal in Yavapai County, Arizona,
which includes Prescott, though obscenely high, is actually only a little
higher than metropolitan Phoenix and lower than the rate in metropolitan
Tucson, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. And while the rate of removal in Yavapai
County is more than 60 percent above the national average, again when rates of child
poverty are factored in, the average rates of removal in 14 states are even
higher. But no one’s been fired in Tucson, or all those other states -
presumably because they make better fashion choices.
So this seems like a particularly good time for a reminder
of just how much tragedy is caused by workers who take the destruction of
families as some kind of joke:
● In The Nation, Sylvia
Harvey tells the heartbreaking story of the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds
of thousands of families needlessly destroyed by the so-called Adoption and
Safe Families Act through
the story of one such family.
● In Filter, Elizabeth
Brico writes about another family under siege because of ASFA: her own.
● Still another story, this one from
Wesley Muller in the Louisiana
Illuminator calls into question the dominant – and frankly racially
biased – master narrative about child abuse and COVID-19, the one about how,
when white people aren’t looking Black parents will unleash a “pandemic of
child abuse” upon their children. Add
that to the excellent stories challenging this narrative in Bloomberg Citylab, The Marshall
Project and the Associated
Press
● In an editorial, the Los
Angeles Times goes beyond a controversial court decision in a single
high-profile case. It poses questions about the functioning of child welfare
that are almost never asked in Los Angeles. From
the editorial:
County child welfare departments are indeed police of a sort, possessing the stunning governmental power to take children
from their parents even without court orders. Without doubt they remove kids disproportionately
from Black and Latino families. For all their good intentions, and the good intentions of a
citizenry that demands more aggressive child protection, critics say that child
welfare agencies operate from a racially and culturally ignorant perspective
that sees poverty as child abuse. Beware calls to defund police
in favor of funding social welfare agencies, they argue, when those agencies are also steeped in a
racist and harm-causing framework. Their proposed solutions can be too extreme,
but their argument is interesting and warrants serious debate.
● The editorial cites the work of NCCPR Board Member Prof.
Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the recent report from
the Movement for Family Power. Prof. Roberts and MFP co-director Lisa
Sangoi discuss Black Families Matter:
Ending Family Regulation Systems in
this podcast.
● The American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law
sponsored an
excellent webinar, “A Conversation about the Manifestation of White
Supremacy in the Institution of Child Welfare.” Since I don’t imagine everyone
will have time to watch all of it, I’ve cued the video to the presentation of Clinical
Consultant Maleeka Jihad. She discusses
the racist underpinnings of the system’s constant attempt to describe social
justice problems as mental health problems – and how this dates all the way
back to efforts to justify slavery.
● Unfortunately, too many political leaders don’t get the
basic fact that in child welfare the caseworkers are the police. This
misunderstanding can be seen in part of one of the proposals to pour money into
child welfare in response to COVID-19. As
I note in this Blog post, that proposal could have an unusual side effect.
● Call it the new, improved audit of Oregon child welfare.
Unlike a previous audit by the Oregon Secretary of State’s office, this one
zeros in on the problem driving all the others: Oregon’s obscene rate of
tearing apart families. I have an
op-ed about it in the Salem Statesman
Journal and I discuss it in more detail in
a blog post.
