The committee concludes that yes, New York, your family policing system is racist, and offers ways to fix it. (And please keep in mind: New York probably is less bad that most states.)
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has advisory committees in every state. Each year they do a deep dive into a government entity in their state and make recommendations. In 2022, New York´s committee decided to examine the child welfare system – or as it should be called, the family policing system. After months of rigorous research and extensive public hearings they released their report last week. It´s a blockbuster.
The committee found that in New York, where counties and New
York City run family policing systems under something vaguely resembling
supervision from the state, these systems are permeated with both racial and
class bias. They have a series of
outstanding recommendations to begin to fix this. But perhaps most important is simply this:
Right at the outset, they rejected the Big Lie of American child welfare, the
false claim that family preservation and child safety are opposites that need
to be “balanced.” On the contrary, the
committee found,
Our investigation revealed that what is often framed as a binary choice between protecting children and preserving family integrity is often a false dichotomy. Involvement in the child welfare system as it currently operates has been shown to inflict its own harms on children, and separation from family and placement in foster care generally has a profound, long-term negative impact on the child that can follow them for life.
In fact, this report is a blueprint for child safety.
If its recommendations are enacted, thousands of children will be spared
the agony of needless investigations, the worse trauma of needless foster care
placement and the high
risk of abuse in foster care itself. But also: With all those false
allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases out of the system, workers will
have more time to find the relatively few children in real danger.
Among the recommendations (With thanks to Angela Olivia
Burton of RepealCAPTA who first
highlighted many of them):
● Because poverty so often is, indeed, confused with
neglect, emphasize concrete help for families.
● Revise
definitions of neglect to prevent or avoid
conflating the attributes and consequences of poverty with child maltreatment. Prohibit the treatment of poverty-related circumstances, lack of financial resources, or parental/pregnancy substance use as factors that, standing alone, can justify or trigger child welfare interventions.
This revision includes a call to:
Limit ‘abuse and neglect’ justifying child welfare system involvement to situations involving imminent and demonstrated risk of serious harm to the child; remove educational neglect from the definition and address the latter largely via the school system, which is best situated to handle such issues.
● Repeal the Adoption
and Safe Families Act, which has done enormous harm to millions of children
and their families.
● Repeal or drastically curb the so-called Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act,
which neither prevents nor treats child abuse.
Instead, it creates the framework for family policing in which states
are required to implement harmful policies such as mandatory reporting laws in
exchange for tiny amounts of federal money.
● If not repealed outright, then at least shift funding from
Title I of CAPTA – where you have to do all sorts of awful things to get the
money – to Title II, where you don´t (and which generally funds better options
than what can be funded under Title I).
● Either drastically curb, or repeal outright, mandatory
reporting laws, which have been shown to drive
families away from seeking help, while flooding the system with so many
false reports and poverty cases that workers have less time to find the
relatively few children in real danger.
● If not repealed, then mandatory reporting laws should be
curbed both in terms of who is required to report and what they are required to
report.
● And mandatory reporters should have an “off ramp” (My term,
not the committee´s). If mandatory reporters provide actual help to families,
or connect families with those who can help, they would not be required to call
the family police.
● Provide high-quality
family defense counsel to families from the moment the family police show
up at the door. This has been shown to
significantly curb needless foster care with no compromise of safety.
● Enact Family Miranda legislation
– requiring family police agencies to tell families their rights.
● Once and for all define the requirement in federal law to
make “reasonable
efforts” to keep families together.
It was passed 44 years ago, and ignored ever since. The definition
should require
active, effective
efforts to avoid family separation and promote expeditious return of children
who have been taken from their families, ...
● Replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting of
alleged abuse and neglect. The accused
still wouldn´t know who accused them, but the family police would, so they
could better weed out false allegations.
The committee´s charge was to look specifically at New
York. But data on entries into care suggests
that most states are even worse than New York. The Committee recommends that
the Civil Rights Commission itself examine these issues nationwide. The Comittee also urges its counterparts in
other states to examine child welfare systems in their states. Committees in at least two states reportedly
are considering it.
Those opposed to this report will do what those wedded to a
take-the-child-and-run approach always do: throw horror stories at us. But
please consider: None of those horrors occurred under the system this report
recommends – because that system doesn´t exist. All of them occurred
under the system we have now; the system we´ve had for decades. So we can
keep right on doing the same thing and watch as children die and families are
destroyed, or we could start down a new path, by embracing this committee´s
blueprint for child safety.
