NCCPR news and commentary round-up, weeks ending June 26, 2024

● As noted last week, New York State again failed to pass “Family Miranda” legislation requiring the family police to tell families their rights.  So JMACforFamilies is continuing to do just that.  This photo is from  their latest campaign on New York City buses: 

●  For decades, we’ve said states grossly underestimate the rate of abuse in foster care – indeed they don’t even try to find out. Now, the Associated Press reports, the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirms it. (And be sure to read the last paragraph to see what HHS is going to do about it.) 

● No self-respecting journalist for a mainstream news organization would do a big story about the criminal justice system and not so much as speak to the accused or their lawyers.  But in “child welfare” it’s common to treat birth parents as too subhuman to talk to – especially in the child removal capital of America, West Virginia.  That’s one reason why a recent NBC News story about that state’s system failed badly.  I have a blog post about it. 

● It's almost as if the producer of this 20-minute New Yorker documentary about Black parents and children desperate to reunite had the NBC story in mind, when she entitled her documentary To Be Invisible.

● Among the issues NBC ignored: In West Virginia children have been taken from mothers not because of opioid abuse, but because they are getting medication-assistant treatment for opioid abuse.  To what should be the surprise of no one, a new study finds that the fear that exactly this will happen deters mothers from seeking treatment. 

● But the biggest reason for wrongful removal is the confusion of poverty with neglect.  The Imprint has a story about bipartisan legislation which would provide a small amount of additional federal aid to states providing concrete help to families to avoid foster care.

● ABC News reports on still another family tormented, and their children needlessly placed in foster care, because of a hospital’s misdiagnosis of child abuse. 

● New Hampshire is another state where, so far, the greed of the family police agency is taking precedence over the needs of the foster youth they’re supposedly protecting.  The New Hampshire Bulletin reports that the agency stalled a bill that would have stopped the state from swiping foster children’s Social Security benefits. 

● In Kentucky, the Legislature unanimously passed a bill to make it easier to place children with relatives instead of strangers when foster care allegedly is necessary.  It also would provide more aid to kinship foster parents. There may be no other state that needs this more, since Kentucky uses kinship foster care at one of the lowest rates in the nation – even as it continues to take children at a rate well above the national average.  But Spectrum News 1 reports that the state family policing agency – part of an agency with a budget of $3.5 billion – says it can’t afford to do this, so it’s just going to ignore the law. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● WFLA-TV reports: 

As each day passes, Zy’kiria Bell’s death is still a mystery. The 17-year-old girl died on May 29 at Lake Academy, a state-owned facility in Tampa. It’s sites like this one that are entrusted to care for our most vulnerable youth. … 

8 On Your Side has learned the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office has launched a criminal investigation into Zy’kiria’s death. It comes as the Department of Juvenile Justice shut down the site. 

● KOVR-TV, Sacramento reports: 

Young twin brothers drowned in a pool in Roseville last October. The Placer County Sheriff's Office on Tuesday said their foster caregiver has now been arrested in connection to their deaths. 

Schitara Victoria Page faces two counts of cruelty to a child by abuse, neglect or endangering health relating to the deaths of the 22-month-old boys. She faces two counts of special allegations of willful harm or injury resulting in death.

NBC News ignores the real cause of West Virginia’s child welfare catastrophe – so their story may make the catastrophe even worse

The journalists were so trapped in their own “master narrative” – their preconceived notions going in -- that of course they wouldn’t think of actually speaking to a parent whose child was wrongfully removed in the child removal capital of America.  But even when the former head of a state foster parent association tried to tell them, they weren’t interested.

When it comes to tearing apart families and consigning children to the chaos of foster care the extent to which West Virginia is an outlier is breathtaking. 

Compare entries into foster care to the total child population and West Virginia is the child removal capital of America – by far – tearing apart families at a rate five times the national average.  

              ENTRIES INTO FOSTER CARE 

           PER THOUSAND CHILDREN, 2022

But hey, West Virginia is a poor state, so you should really factor in poverty, right?  Agreed. Compare entries into foster care to the impoverished child population and West Virginia still is the child removal capital of America – tearing apart families at a rate more than four times the national average. 

ENTRIES INTO FOSTER CARE 

           PER THOUSAND IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN, 2022

Looked at another way: 

Right now, American family policing agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) take away about 186,000 children every year.  If every state were like West Virginia, American family policing agencies would take away 930,000 children every year.  

Right now, on any given day, nearly 369,000 children are stuck in officially-measured foster care.  (The figure does not include hidden foster care.)  If every state were like West Virginia, the officially-measured American foster care population would be more than 1.8 million! 

Human Rights Watch, a group best known for exposing human rights abuses abroad, singled out West Virginia and three other systems for scrutiny in a study of the human rights abuses of American family policing called “If I Wasn’t Poor, I Wouldn’t Be Unfit.” 

But when NBC News decided to take an in-depth look at the West Virginia system – or, more likely, was spoon-fed a “master narrative” by one of the groups that brings largely worthless McLawsuits all over the country – they implied that this massive exercise in family destruction was justified. 

The phrase “master narrative” was coined by the late William Woo, when he was editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It is not something handed down from above. It's not some kind of media conspiracy. (As a former editor of mine liked to say, "There are no media conspiracies; we're not that well organized.")  Rather, the master narrative is simply the preconceived notions reporters bring with them to a story.  The best reporters seek out a wide variety of sources, including those who might challenge their master narrative.  That did not happen here. 

Ironically echoing exactly what the West Virginia family policing agency would want the story to say, the website version of the NBC story presents a master narrative that boils down to: Well, what do you expect?  The parents must all be druggie moms doped up on opioids!  Or as the story put it: 

West Virginia has the country’s highest rate of children in foster care—a figure that’s four times higher than that of the U.S. as a whole. Ravaged by the opioid epidemic, the state has seen its foster care population balloon by 57% over the past decade, overwhelming an already strapped child welfare system. 

The version that aired on NBC Nightly News was even more blunt – and even more wrong.  According to that story: 

West Virginia’s foster care system is maxed out, largely because of the state’s intractable opioid epidemic. 

It’s not just that this facile claim assumes that any parent who uses opioids can’t raise a child  (though it didn't stop opioid abuser and alcoholic Betty Ford), it’s not just that NBC neglected to mention what Human Rights Watch found by actually talking to birth parents and looking at court records: that West Virginia also takes children if their parents are receiving medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction.  The story also fails to take into account some basic data. 

West Virginia claims that 53% of entries into care involved some form of substance abuse – not just opioid abuse (and, of course, this included those medication-assisted treatment cases).  This is only a claim, since children are routinely placed in foster care before a court decides if there really was substance abuse or any other reason to take the child.  But let’s assume the figure is correct.  Let’s even assume that these entries are justified. 

What about the other 47%?  West Virginia’s snatch-and-grab mentality runs so deep that these entries alone still would leave West Virginia tearing apart families at a rate double the national average. 

In other words, if the scourge of drug abuse magically disappeared from West Virginia tomorrow, the state still would be a huge outlier when it comes to tearing apart families. 

Or let’s look at it another way: NBC blames opioids for the fact that the state “has seen its foster care population balloon by 57% over the past decade,” implying that before the opioid epidemic West Virginia’s rate of tearing apart families was pretty typical. 

But it wasn’t. 

Ten years ago, again factoring in rates of child poverty, the proportion of children in West Virginia foster care already was double the national average.  The proportion torn from their families over the course of a year already was more than triple the national average.  (Past year figures are at this link by clicking on the “State Dataset.”) 

West Virginia isn’t the foster care capital of America because of opioids.  West Virginia is the foster-care capital of America because of a deeply ingrained culture of child removal that predates opioids and led to a knee-jerk response to opioids. 

No mention of racism 

The NBC News story also never bothered to examine the role of racism.  Yes, there are Black people in West Virginia.  Not very many, it’s true, but the state’s family police agency has effectively painted a target on the backs of every one of them.  

● According to a recent study, at some point during their childhoods, nearly one-third of Black children in West Virginia will be forced into foster care.  No other state even comes close. For the four states tied for second place, it’s 18% - which would seem appalling if not for West Virginia. 

● And 14% of Black West Virginia children will, at some point, be taken from their parents forever.  In the state with the second highest rate of termination of parental rights for Black children, it’s 6% - which, again, would seem appalling if not for West Virginia. 

And it’s not like nobody tried to tell the NBC journalists. 

Oh, no.  They didn’t actually speak to birth parents – of course not! (Or, if they did, they didn’t include them in the story.) 

Consider how that compares to covering other issues. 

No journalist for a mainstream news organization, particularly none who is part of a national news
organization’s “investigative unit” would do a story on the criminal justice system and speak only to crime victims, prosecutors and judges, while ignoring the accused and defense attorneys.  But in child welfare, journalists treating birth parents as too inherently subhuman to speak to is common.  This is especially true in West Virginia, where NBC News is simply following the lead of local media. 

Since all birth parents are stereotyped as bad, the producers reached out to the kind of parent stereotyped as good – a foster parent.  Specifically, the former head of the West Virginia Foster Adoptive and Kinship Parents Network, Marissa Sanders. 

But what Sanders said apparently came as a surprise.  So much so, that NBC chose not even to make clear who she is.  Buried deep in the website version we find what journalists call the “to be sure graf” the token paragraph that contradicts the journalist’s master narrative. After noting the high rate of terminations of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) but making no mention of the mindboggling figures specific to Black children, the story gives us this one to-be-sure graf: 

Marissa Sanders, a foster care reform advocate, said she thinks Child Protective Service workers are overburdened in part because they are investigating too many families that don’t need to be investigated. “They are chasing poverty cases about kids with dirty clothes or someone who forgot lunch and then they don’t have time to deal with cases where a kid is being sexually abused,” she said. 

But having given that a token mention, it’s then forgotten.  And in the broadcast version seen by millions on NBC Nightly News this isn’t mentioned at all.  

Enter the McLawsuit 

So it's no wonder the story goes on to extoll all sorts of wrong answers – starting with, yes, a McLawsuit. 

But you see, according to NBC News, this isn’t just any lawsuit.  It’s a “sweeping class-action lawsuit” that means “West Virginia faces a legal reckoning.” 

Not likely. 

The track record of these particular McLawsuits (essentially the same suit brought all over the country) is that it will lead to years of litigation, a consent decree, court-appointed monitors, court monitoring reports on failure to abide by the consent decree, hearings on the failure to abide by the consent decree, lectures by the judge, more monitoring reports, more failure to abide by the decree, more hearings, more lectures, a modified decree, failure to adhere to the modified decree, more lectures, a modification of the modified decree and finally, after five or ten or 20 years or more, exit from monitoring with a system that is no better and may well be worse. 

That’s not because the description of the conditions in these systems found in these lawsuits is inaccurate.  On the contrary, the systems are every bit as horrible as the McLawsuits allege.  The problem is the same as the problem with NBC’s story: They ignore the fundamental cause of everything that’s gone wrong – needless removal of children often when family poverty is confused with neglect. 

Two groups bring most of these McLawsuits.  Both were founded by Marcia Lowry.  First, she founded “Children’s Rights,” then she left to form “A Better Childhood.”  Marcia’s departure was good for Children’s Rights.  It’s taken a while, but Children’s Rights appears to have become disenchanted with the McLawsuit approach.  First their rhetoric and now, their most recent litigation, is zeroing in on needless removal and racial bias.  But not Marcia.  Her McLawsuits are the same old same old.  

They don’t always fail.  But the rare successes all involve situations in which Marcia briefly flirted with groups interested in taking fewer children or in which agencies themselves said, in effect, to hell with Marcia’s micromanaging, we’re going to focus on keeping families safely together.  You can read all about the organizations, the McLawsuits and the track record of this kind of litigation here. 

To be clear: the West Virginia “child welfare” system absolutely deserves to be sued.  But the children of West Virginia deserve better litigation. 

They also deserve better journalism.  But the journalists at NBC News don’t seem to have checked Marcia’s track record, just as they didn’t check the facile explanation for West Virginia’s extreme outlier status. 

So it’s no wonder the NBC story claims that 

One of the state’s underlying issues is a lack of foster parents to take in all of the children who have entered the system over the past decade. 

Technically that’s true.  But the real problem is that so many of those children never needed to enter the system.  Were West Virginia not so fanatical about tearing apart families, the state would have plenty of foster homes for the children who really need them. 

And so, when the NBC story goes on to expose another West Virginia horror – the state’s obsession with using the worst form of “care” – institutionalization – the story itself gives the state the perfect excuse: It’s not that we want to do this, they can say, but you said yourself we have a shortage of foster parents because we simply had to take all those kids because of opioids! 

A real investigative story would have asked if perhaps West Virginia would have plenty of room in good safe foster homes right now, if it simply reduced the rate at which it tore apart families to, say, the national average (The national average is, itself, too high, by the way – but it would be huge progress in West Virginia.) 

Then comes more standard master narrative stuff.  According to the story: 

The problem with the system, experts say, begins with overburdened Child Protective Services workers. While the state has hired more workers and raised salaries, it’s not unusual to have caseloads of 100 cases, three former CPS employees told NBC News. 

No. The problem begins with the state screening-in and investigating too many false reports, trivial cases and, as Sanders said, “chasing poverty cases about kids with dirty clothes or someone who forgot lunch.” Then they take the children in too many of those cases.  That overburdens the caseworkers.  So a caseworker hiring binge won’t fix it.  It will do just what the McLawsuit is likely to do: leave West Virginia with the same lousy system only bigger. 

But NBC News discovered none of this.  They never got past that master narrative.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, weeks ending June 18, 2024

● You know how every time there’s another expose of a Residential Treatment Center, defenders of institutionalizing children say the problem isn’t RTCs per se, just a few rotten apples?  The Imprint reports on a Senate committee study that makes it abundantly clear: No, we’re talking rotten barrels.  Oh, and by the way, the report notes, the whole concept of residential treatment doesn’t work.  (Not that we’d ever say we-told-you-so.) 

● Earlier this year Minnesota lawmakers refused to be stampeded by the Minneapolis Star Tribune into fostering another foster-care panic.  Now there’s another example of lawmakers getting smarter: Remember how the Massachusetts “Child Advocate,” Maria Mossaides, spent more than a year propagandizing a commission she chaired in an effort to get it to recommend further expanding mandatory child abuse reporting?  Remember how, after hearing what Mossaides didn’t want them to hear, the commission rebelled and recommended nothing?  Well, now Massachusetts legislative leaders are actually proposing to narrow mandatory reporting.  As the Boston Globe reports: 

Massachusetts House leaders are pushing a proposal that would free doctors, hospital officials, and others from requirements to report suspected neglect to child welfare officials solely because a baby is born exposed to drugs, offering a dramatic shift in the state's approach to child welfare reporting. … 

The measure marks a rare instance in which lawmakers are seeking to pare back, instead of expand, the state's mandated reporter law, under which critics say Black and Latino families are disproportionately the target of abuse and neglect allegations. 

Even Mossaides now claims to be for it.  Funny, though: She never mentioned supporting this idea in all that time she was running a commission on this very topic. 

● Though the journalism of child welfare is generally improving, there still are some monumental failures.  A case in point: Four years ago, Sen. Tom Cotton´s appalling, extremist rant on the New York Times op-ed page prompted outrage inside and outside the newspaper, and ultimately led to the resignation of the editorial page editor. But apparently, as long as the topic of your fearmongering is child abuse, the Times will let you get away with anything.  I have a blog post about it.

● Colorado is making it official: codifying in law a rule change that bans the family police from forcing parents to pay part of the cost when their children are thrown into foster care – payments that properly should be called ransom. 

● In Nevada, even the family police agency in metropolitan Las Vegas wants to stop having to take calls for so-called “educational neglect.”  As the Nevada Current explains the director of family services for that agency told a legislative committee 

“What we’re finding is that in a system that is overtaxed and overburdened where workers are getting sometimes two or three reports a day, getting an educational neglect report is adding to a workload that is really, in our view, taking them away from being able to do the work they need to do.” 

● At the federal level, legislation has been introduced to modestly strengthen the Indian Child Welfare Act. 

● Things have not gone as well in New York this year.  The Imprint reports on a series of excellent bills that failed to pass.  But just a few years ago, these bills never even would have been introduced.   

● By now we all know about how governments sometimes swipe money that rightfully should go to foster youth in the form of Social Security Disability and Survivor benefits. But governments aren’t the only ones who sometimes cash in. The New York Daily News reports on efforts to close a loophole in New York State law that lets adoptive parents keep collecting subsidies for older foster youth who’ve decided they can’t stand living with them - and leave. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

● Hawaii News Now reports that 

A new lawsuit accuses the state and Catholic Charities Hawaii of negligently placing another child in the same home where a little girl was allegedly tortured to death. 

● And WMUR-TV in New Hampshire reports that 

Olivia Atkocaitis claims … said she was subjected to years of abuse, slavery and torture at the hands of her adoptive parents when she was a child.

The New York Times platforms the Tom Cotton of child welfare

Four years ago, Sen. Cotton´s appalling, extremist rant on the Times op-ed page prompted outrage inside and outside the newspaper, and ultimately led to the resignation of the editorial page editor. But apparently, as long as the topic of your fearmongering is child abuse, the Times will let you get away with anything.

Were there a hotline to which one could report "statistics abuse"
Naomi Schaefer Riley of the American Enterprise Institute 
would have her rights to her pocket calculator terminated.

On May 14, after The New York Times published an extremist rant calling for tearing apart more families, I sent a long email to the newspaper´s op-ed editor, Vanessa Mobley.  On May 17 she sent a terse reply, saying: “I will read it carefully and share with colleagues here.” On May 31, I followed up.  I have heard nothing.

Mine was not the only letter.  At least 11 other scholars and advocates sent letters to the Times and/or Mobley.  Three were published.  I am not aware of Mobley responding to them.

 So I ´m sharing it with a wider audience.  Aside from cleaning up some typos and clarifying some terms, this is the letter as sent.  The letter is followed by a specific example of how the author of the op-ed abuses statistics.

NATIONAL COALITION FOR CHILD PROTECTION REFORM

www.nccpr.org / info(at)nccpr(dot)info

 May 14, 2024

 Dear Ms. Mobley: 

Nearly six years ago, the New York Times Editorial Board took a bold, courageous step on a fundamental issue of stereotyping, stigmatizing and racism: It acknowledged the enormous harm done to poor families, particularly poor families of color, by media-fueled myths concerning so-called “crack babies” and their mothers in the 1980s. In particular, the Times commendably singled out its own failures and, in effect, apologized: 

The Times amplified the “damaged generation” theory, too. This editorial page argued in 1989 that it would cost more than $700 million to prepare fewer than 20,000 children for school in the state of Florida alone — a figure that was clearly drawn from myth. The former executive editor Abe Rosenthal, in a column entitled “The Poisoned Babies,” urged the authorities to suspend the parental rights of crack-addicted women, a course of action that had already been shown to drive women away from treatment and provide substandard care for many children. 

But apparently memories are short.  On May 9, the page you edit indulged another round of stigma and stereotype about poor families of color.  This time the racism was outsourced – to someone who proudly compares her book attacking family preservation to the work of Charles Murray, to someone whose racial bias is so extreme she was kicked off a place as a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, to someone who dismisses and demeans the lived experiences of the very youth she claims to want to protect, and someone who, when writing virtually the same commentary for a far right think tank headlined it “Wokeness has come for Child Protective Services.”  (Would you have been so willing to consider it if she hadn´t been slightly more subtle when submitting it to the Times?)  In short, the author Naomi Schaefer Riley of the American Enterprise Institute, is the Tom Cotton of child welfare. 

Yes, in the column in question, in the obligatory “to-be-sure graf,” Riley says that “there was a sense” that authorities “overreacted” to crack – a sense she apparently does not share.  And then she plunges right back in. 

As is discussed below, such writing doesn´t just damage the fabric of family life in poor communities of color.  It doesn´t just encourage more use of traumatizing foster care.  Commentaries like this make all children less safe.  I hope that at some point you will reconsider and retract it. At a minimum the scholars and advocates who were shocked to see this get past the fact-checking apparatus at the Times would like to meet with you and others on your team to set the record straight. Such commentary is all the more damaging given the Times rule that any rebuttal must be confined to letters to the editor that typically don´t go over 200 words. 

Although I am going to go into great detail below about the misrepresentations in Riley´s commentary, I have to think you already know – and have known the real story of how these systems work for longer than most.  Your bio mentions that the books you have edited include one by Prof. Dorothy Roberts, a member of my organization´s Board of Directors: Shattered Bonds.  Did Prof. Roberts’ trenchant analysis not give you pause or a willingness to check further into Riley´s claims? 

The issue involves fact, not opinion 

Let us be clear at the outset. I and the advocates and scholars with whom I have worked for decades know the difference between an editorial, a news story and an oped/guest essay.  We respect the concept of giving voice to a broad range of views grounded in fact.  The problem with Riley´s column, however, is that it is rife with distortion and misrepresentation of fact.  

Child abuse fatalities

 In a remarkably imprecise sentence when it comes to time frame, Riley tells us that “In recent years, the number of children in foster care fell by nearly 16 percent while the fatality rate from abuse and neglect rose by almost 18 percent.”  But she doesn’t say what happened when the number of children torn from their families was increasing year over year.  In those years, child abuse deaths also went up.  And then there are the years when foster care went down and child abuse deaths went down. 

The federal government has been measuring both figures since at least 1999 (though doing a poor job of it). Cherry-pick the years you want and “prove” the point you want!  That long has been Riley´s approach.  I would be glad to supply other examples in which she has done the same, along with data sources and context. [I’ve added one example at the end of this post.] The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal find Riley´s kind of statistics abuse acceptable, I am surprised to see it in the Times. 

Making the figures even more suspect: The way child abuse fatalities are counted varies enormously from state to state, reliability among those states and criteria for labeling a death abuse or neglect vary – and they can be surprisingly subjective.  Was a death due to an accident or “neglect”?  That may depend on the race and income of the child and family and the biases of the child protective services agency. 

And then there is the reason to use better measures for which we all should be grateful: Though each is the worst possible tragedy, the numbers of child abuse fatalities are small enough to be strongly affected by all these variables of whim, prejudice and competence and even by random chance. 

However, if you want to insist on using this measure, you can filter out some of the bias if you can find a single state that is consistent in its approach to measuring – and large enough to, maybe, detect a pattern.  There is such a state: Texas.  By overwhelming bipartisan majorities, that state passed a series of laws curbing the power of child protective services.  Entries into foster care went down.  And so did child abuse deaths. 

Over the past 50 years or more America has built a massive child welfare surveillance state, even bigger than the one Prof. Roberts described 22 years ago in Shattered Bonds.  One-third of all children and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  Can you really be surprised that child protective services agencies don’t find every child “known to the system” in time in a system where seven million children become “known to the system” in some way every year? 

That´s why one of the most distinguished scholars in the field, an early architect of this system is having profound second thoughts. Dr Richard Krugman, former director of the C. Henry Kempe National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect wrote: 

we now have 40 years of experience with this approach and have made no progress in reducing the mortality from physical abuse of children (decades with 1500-2500 children dying annually). … Doing the same thing for 40 years that doesn't seem (or can't be shown) to be working was someone's definition of insanity. 

Still another example of the failure of Riley’s logic is revealed by the localities she singles out: Santa Clara County, California and the state of Minnesota. 

The cherry-picked national data are the thin reed Riley uses to justify extrapolating from a horrible death in Santa Clara County.  See? They reduced foster care and look what happened!  But then she turns our attention to Minnesota, and seeks to make the same claim.  But what she doesn´t say is that for decades, Minnesota has torn apart families at a rate vastly above the national average. 

So the lesson from Riley´s own examples boils down to: Take away fewer children and sometimes children die.  Take away more children and sometimes children die.  

So why in God´s name should we keep taking away more children? 

Better measures 

There are ways to measure changes in rates of child safety that, while also flawed, are better than trying to measure fatalities.  One of them is to compare over time rates of what state child protective services agencies deem to be child abuse or neglect,.  This time let´s start with the long view.  The number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year peaked in 2006.  It has, mostly, slowly and steadily declined since (though it has not declined nearly enough). Overall rates of child abuse also have, mostly, slowly and steadily declined ever since.  Did taking fewer children make children safer? We would argue yes, because it gave workers more time to find the relatively few in real danger.  But at a minimum Riley simply diverts us to the unreliable measure of fatalities because they are so gut-wrenching – and because she doesn´t want us to notice what´s really happening. 

There is special irony in Riley pulling the wool over the eyes of  readers now – just when a gigantic real world experiment is proving that curbing the coercive power of child protective services and bolstering concrete help to families really does make children safer.  The experiment goes by the name COVID-19.  

Remember all those predictions, at the start of the pandemic that it would be followed by a “pandemic of child abuse”?  On the contrary, one study after another has found that when CPS agencies were forced to step back, community-based community-run mutual aid organizations stepped up and government stepped in with no-strings-attached cash, child safety improved. 

When looking at individual systems there are two standard measures of child safety: Reabuse of children left in their own homes and the percentage of children returned to foster care after reunification.  If you’ve read this far you can probably guess what happened to those measures when Santa Clara County curbed needless foster care.  But here’s the link. (I'd be glad to walk you through the data tables.) 

Who really is in the system 

All this is not as surprising as it may seem.  It comes down to something else Dorothy Roberts explained decades ago, but Riley dismisses in another “to-be-sure graf” – the confusion of poverty with neglect.  When scholars and advocates point out that the overwhelming majority of cases involve the broad, vague category of “neglect” we often hear – “Oh but maybe it wasn’t just neglect.”  The answer to this can be found by looking at what the allegations that lead children into the nightmare of foster care placement are not.

 Of all the children forced into foster care in 2022 (the most recent year for which data are available) 83% did NOT involve even an allegation of physical abuse or sexual abuse.  Nearly two-thirds (66%) did NOT even involve an allegation of drug abuse.  

In publishing Riley´s column, do you think you left readers with an honest impression of who is in the system and why? 

Why do you publish reruns? 

The Times and other national news outlets insist that commentary submissions be original and exclusive to them.  While this commentary does not violate the letter of that rule, it seems to violate the spirit.  Riley has published the same commentary over and over and over again.  It´s always the same formula: Find horror story (check), cherry-pick a stat (check) smear family preservation (check).  Why did your readers need to see in the Times what Rupert Murdoch’s publications and other like-minded media have allowed Riley to dish out so often before? 

Who really advocates for safety? 

When Riley claims that those of us who want to finally do things differently favor family preservation “at almost any cost” she is repeating the Big Lie of American child welfare – that child safety and family preservation are opposites that need to be balanced. 

On the contrary, it is Riley´s take-the-child-and-run approach that makes all children less safe.  And that´s not just the because of the enormous emotional trauma of foster care, which she fleetingly acknowledges in another “to-be-sure graf.” It´s also because of the high rate of abuse in foster care itself.  And it´s because all that time, money and effort wasted destroying families is, in effect, stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger. 

I am surprised and disappointed that the Times would help a disciple of Charles Murray try to steal the concept of child safety and use it as a smokescreen for a racist not-so-hidden agenda built on the idea that, after all, wouldn’t those Black kids be “better off” with affluent white people? 

The Times looked back at its crack coverage and reconsidered.  I hope you will do the same now. 

I would be pleased to discuss this further with you at any time.

Sincerely,

Richard Wexler

Richard Wexler

Executive Director

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

 

Riley's M.O.

 In this excerpt from NCCPR’s 2023 testimony before the New York State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, we analyze Riley´s abuse of statistics.  

New York data 

            You would never know from Riley’s presentation that child abuse deaths due to homicide in New York City reached a ten-year record low in 2020.  But they did.  Here’s how Riley avoided facing facts. 

            She cites what is said to be an increase in child abuse and neglect fatalities, statewide, from 69 in 2019 to 105 in 2020  She rushes to suggest this was caused by too much concern about racism and too much desire to keep families together.  Or as we have noted above, in her words: “Wokeness has come for child protective services.” 

Riley got the data on child abuse fatalities in New York State from the federal government’s 2020 Child Maltreatment report, specifically this table on page 60:

The part of Child Maltreatment 2020, Table 4-2 that Riley wants you to see: 

                      2019                        2020

 

 Even if you could draw any conclusions from the data, Riley left out some context.   Take a look at the entire line for New York on that same page in that same table, which goes back all the way to 2016. 

The part of Child Maltreatment 2020, Table 4-2 that Riley does not want you to see:

                                 2016         2017         2018       2019         2020

 So the actual trend from 2016 to 2020 was mostly down.  In 2021, the New York figure increased again to 126, but that’s still lower than 2017.  (Riley didn’t know that, since the 2021 report had not yet been released.  I’ll share that here because, as I noted above, we’re not afraid of context.) 

In fact, the relatively low numbers and their volatility mean it’s impossible to draw sweeping conclusions.  Often, you can make a trend look any way you want just by picking the  start date and end date you prefer. 

As for that outlier in 2019: A lot has to happen for these data to reach the federal government. In New York, individual counties and New York City must report their data to the state Office of Children and Family Services, which reports them to a federal database.  Reporting to this federal database is voluntary; there is no penalty for failing to report data or reporting them in error. 

So it’s entirely possible that the 2019 figure means only that someone copied the number from the wrong box on a spreadsheet.  In addition: 

● These data are totals for New York State, not just New York City.  That means they represent results from scores of different systems with widely differing approaches and, probably, significantly different rates of child removal. 

● These data are for all fatalities allegedly due to abuse or neglect, not just those where the child was “known-to-the-system.” 

In contrast, the New York City Administration for Children’s Services does have such a breakdown in its own annual reports on child abuse fatalities, the most recent of which is from 2020. 

These data show that child homicides among children known to the system have fluctuated between 6 and 11 in every year since 2011 – with an increase to 15 in 2012.  But in 2020, the same year Riley cites as having a huge spike in fatalities, homicide fatalities among children “known to the system” in New York City fell to a ten-year record low of five.