NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Aug 27, 2024

● Reveal, the documentary series from the Center for Investigative Reporting begins its story about a powerful Utah family and a Native American child this way: 

In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child. 

Actually, “startling” doesn’t begin to describe it. 

● In one of the most important changes in federal family policing regulations in decades, the federal government now offers partial reimbursement for the costs of providing family defense – a move designed to encourage the kind of high-quality representation proven to reduce foster care with no compromise of safety.  The reimbursement comes from Title IV-E of the Social Security Act.  

But in Indiana, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reports, one in five counties isn’t bothering to seek reimbursement.  Some say it’s just too darn much paperwork.  Now, as it happens, Title IV-E is where federal reimbursement for foster care and adoption come from – and there’s far more paperwork involved in obtaining those funds.  But I’ll bet no one in Indiana leaves that money on the table. 

None of this should be surprising considering that year after year (notwithstanding the spin you hear from their family police agency at conferences), Indiana tears apart families at a rate roughly 60% above the national average.  

Lenore Skenazy of Let Grow has two important stories in Reason:

● One involves still another child abuse pediatrician.  In this case, a family brought their five-month-old to the hospital.  After four days of repeated medical tests due to a potentially life-threatening genetic condition, 

seven rib fractures became visible on the X-rays. These were all new, non-calcified fractures that had not appeared on earlier X-rays. Rib fractures are viewed by medical profession as evidence of possible abuse. 

The Bruckers immediately suspected that the fractures had occurred during the hospital stay itself, possibly due to the extensive handling and exams Aiden had endured. The lack of any signs of these injuries at admission certainly suggested that they had appeared during Aiden's inpatient care. And yet as soon as the fractures were detected, a child abuse hotline call was placed to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) naming the Bruckers as suspected abusers. 

The family ultimately was cleared – and someone else was “substantiated” for abuse.  But DCFS won’t say who! 

As for the child abuse pediatrician, she now also is president of the board of directors for the trade association for the nation’s “child advocacy centers” which interview and assess alleged victims of child abuse.  You may recall this group was the one that did the most to spread the false “pandemic of child abuse” hysteria in the early days of the COVID pandemic. 

● The other story, from July, involves giving the old practice of using child abuse hotlines to harass people you don’t like a 21^st-century twist.  There’s a group online that, Skenazy writes, “makes fun of people it believes are Christian fundamentalists.”  It appears someone in the group did far worse than that to a family that was on a road trip through Florida. 

● Since roughly the 1990s, Britain has imported many of the worst features of American family policing – including harassing families for allowing their children reasonable independence.  The Guardian has a case in point.  Lenore Skenazy of Let Grow has a commentary on that case, too. 

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

KOTV in Tulsa reports: 

A Green Country mother filed a lawsuit against the Oklahoma Department of Human Services after she said the agency put her daughter in the care of a foster home where the girl was abused. 

The lawsuit says both of the toddler's biological parents told DHS Case workers about the abuse, but their concerns were ignored.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 20, 2024

We start off this week with updates on two stories illustrating the biases and double standards of family policing:

● The Albany Times Union has more about an Upstate New York case in which it appears the family police agency went out of its way to ignore warning signs about abuse in a foster home – to the point of firing a case aide allegedly because she repeatedly tried to alert them.  Now the child is dead.  And it all happened in a case where removing the child may have been unnecessary and, after the removal, relatives seeking custody were turned aside in favor of strangers. 

● Remember that case in Tennessee in which children were torn from their parents after a traffic stop – essentially because the parents were Driving While Black? The parents are suing and now, Tennessee Lookout reports, a judge has ruled the caseworkers are not covered by immunity. 

And speaking of double standards: 

● Determining if a child fatality is due to neglect or an accident is more subjective than it may seem.  I often use a hypothetical about a toddler who unlatches the back door early one Saturday morning, wanders into a body of water and drowns.  Accident or neglect?  If it’s the pool behind a McMansion it’s likely to be ruled an accident.  If it’s a pond behind a trailer park, it’s more likely to be neglect. 

And this is no hypothetical: As the Topeka Capital-Journal reports, if it’s a foster parent’s backyard fish pond, it’s an accident.  Or, as the county sheriff put it in an earlier story: “We can’t be with them (children) all the time. That’s just part of parenting and growing up. It just takes a split second for something to happen.” 

● Think you know all of the insane financial incentives that encourage the needless separation of children from their families? Wanna bet?  Allow Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan to introduce you to another one, in this essay for The Imprint, excerpted from his article in the current Family Justice Journal.

● WIFR-TV reports that Illinois is launching what it says is “the nation’s largest guaranteed income pilot program for families involved in the child welfare system.” 

● LAist reports on efforts to train mandatory reporters in Los Angeles on a change in California law that modestly narrows the definition of neglect. But even if the training is good – and that’s a big if – it doesn’t change the fact that there still are penalties for failing to report, so even mandatory reporters who may know better still may well make a CYA report.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 13, 2024

● When family police agencies try to treat substance addiction as a moral failing instead of as a disease, some of us have said: Well, you wouldn’t treat cancer as a moral failing, would you?  Of course not.  Except in North Carolina, that is. Check out this story from NC Newsline.

● There’s another story on the Interior Department report documenting the horrors inflicted on Native American children when they were kidnapped, sometimes at gunpoint, and forced into so-called boarding schools where they were beaten, raped and tortured.  The horrors afflict Native America to this day. 

Prominent proponents of tearing apart families today sometimes suggest that some parents simply choose to be drug addicts and that’s what makes them poor. I recalled those cruel comments when I read this part of the story, from The 74: 

The final report, released last week, also documented how the boarding school system negatively impacted genetics and health outcomes for Native families, who for generations have had the nation’s highest rates of substance abuse, suicidal ideation and chronic illnesses, such diabetes, arthritis, and cancer. 

“As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland wrote in the report’s opening letter. “Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.”  

● Family policing apologists also have taken to acknowledging, grudgingly, that, well yes, foster care can be traumatic, but, they claim, what happens in children’s own homes must be worse.  Abundant research says otherwise.  And before you buy the apologists’ claims, read this story from Oregon Public Broadcasting.  

There are two important research summaries out this week: 

● ChildTrends summarizes the research on what works, and what does not, when it comes to pregnancy and substance use. Bottom line: the family policing approach makes everything worse.  As ChildTrends explains: 

Data show that certain policies are associated with positive and negative outcomes. For example, in states that consider prenatal substance use to be a crime, the policy is associated with a 45 percent increase in overdose deaths among pregnant women, following implementation of this criminalization. Among all policies that involve child welfare and/or law enforcement, data suggest these policies are associated with no decrease in prenatal substance use, less use of prenatal care and addiction treatment, a 10-18 percent increase in babies born exposed, and more children entering foster care. 

In contrast, policies that fund treatment for prenatal substance use are associated with a 45 percent decrease in overdose deaths for pregnant women, and those that prioritize treatment access in cases of prenatal substance use are associated with more prenatal care use and healthier birth outcomes. 

● And that’s why the Colorado Legislature was right to change state law as described in this story from Colorado Politics. 

● One of the most promising approaches to curbing child abuse and “neglect” is providing families with a guaranteed income.  Even a little bit of no-strings-attached cash can go a long way.  The New York City Family Policy Project has a new report on the various guaranteed income experiments across the country and what we can learn from them. 

● Idaho is going in a somewhat different direction.  From now on, if a child is taken away because a working parent couldn’t provide adequate supervision, and that child is placed in the foster home of a state employee the foster parent can get paid parental leave. 

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

KTVF-TV in Fairbanks, Alaska, reports: 

A 60-year-old Fairbanks man will serve 30 years in prison after forcing underage boys to have sex with him, sometimes giving the minors cigarettes or alcohol as part of the exchange. 

Paul Michael Worman pleaded guilty Tuesday to first-degree sexual abuse of a minor as part of an agreement reached between his attorney, Emily Cooper, and State Prosecutor Kathryn Mason. 

Trooper investigators discovered in 2020 that Worman had been a state-licensed foster care provider for more than two decades until allegations arose in 2017, saying that Worman was grooming the minors for sexual favors.

NCCPR in the Albany Times Union: Commentary: Foster care agencies should not get a taxpayer bailout

New York must not absolve these institutions of responsibility for actions alleged in Child Victims Act lawsuits.

To hear the private agencies that institutionalize foster children in New York tell it, the rampant abuses that went on in their facilities, abuses that have led to more than 800 lawsuits under the Child Victims Act, are “sins of the past,” so they shouldn’t have to pay for them.  Instead, they argue, taxpayers should pay, in the form of a bailout of up to $200 million.

If they don’t, the institutions warn they may go broke and shut down — or at least take away children’s birthday parties. 

None of it holds up to scrutiny. 

Sins of the past?  Everyone from foster youth to a committee of the U.S. Senate begs to differ. …

Read the full column in the Albany Times Union

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 7, 2024

● Last week’s round-up included a New York Times story about a lawsuit that aims to stop the New York City family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services in its infinite arrogance, from harassing battered women and their children. I have some additional context in this blog post. 

● ACS’ arrogance is on full display when it claims that, as long as it manages to institutionalize a child for at least 60 days, it has carte blanche to keep the child institutionalized – and judges have no power to stop them.  Their argument boils down to: We always get it right, so you’ll just have to trust us!  Fortunately, as The Imprint reports, an appeals court disagreed. 

● The agency’s arrogance is nothing compared to the arrogance of the private agencies that institutionalize children and oversee many of the foster homes in New York. Faced with hundreds of lawsuits from children abused while in their “care,” their latest excuse for demanding a huge taxpayer bailout is a claim that they are the real victims! They say they’ve fixed everything now, and they shouldn’t have to pay for “sins of the past.” In a column for the Albany Times Union I discuss the evidence that actually, the sinning has never stopped.

● In just the past week we got fresh reminders of the horrors inflicted on institutionalized children  The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that: 

The Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Department of Human Services have agreed to pay $450,000 to settle a case brought by former students of the Glen Mills Schools, which closed in 2019 after an Inquirer investigation revealed decades of violence against boys sent to the reform school in Delaware County. 

The settlement also promises increased oversight – but only enough to raise the level of oversight from nearly nonexistent all the way to pathetic.  And “oversight” never works because abuse is practically baked into the institutional care model.  That’s one reason why institutional “care” should be abolished.

● The U.S. Department of the Interior has released a report on the ghastly scope of the effort to eradicate Native America by tearing apart native families and institutionalizing children in hideous “boarding schools.”  

As The Imprint reports, 

The atrocities occurring within school walls range from abusive to culturally genocidal, with matrons, priests and other school employees using various methods to erase the cultures and identities of tribal children. … 

In a rare and sweeping admission, the federal agency that oversaw [the boarding schools] is now calling for a formal national apology to the descendants of those who died or suffered rampant abuse and trauma in this system. 

Somehow, that doesn’t seem like enough.  Especially because, as the story explains: 

“The most important thing is that our work to tell the truth about the Federal Indian boarding school system be paired with action,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, noted in the report. “As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past. Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.” 

● One person who claims to recognize this suffering is the head of Washington State’s family police agency -- but only, it seems, as a way to pit Native Americans against Black Americans and other oppressed groups, and doing nothing to help any of them.  I have a blog post about it.

● There’s an excellent new issue of the Family Justice Journal, this one devoted to “relational health.”  Among other things, it exposes how ludicrous it is to build a system around depriving children of any and all contact not only with their parents but also grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, mentors, and classmates  - all in the name of putting the “paper permanence” of adoption by strangers ahead of the relational permanence children really need. 

● They’re fanatical about paper permanence in Los Angeles. WitnessLA looks at the meaningless hoops the Los Angeles County family police agency forces parents to jump through before their children can get them back, and the rush to terminate children’s rights to their parents if they don’t jump through every one.

The head of Washington State’s family police agency explains his agency’s approach to families.

 

Washington State DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter

It boils down to: We don’t do a damn thing to keep families together and you can’t make us!

Here’s the thing about Ross Hunter, secretary of Washington State’s family police agency, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families. He’s not good at sugarcoating the cruelty of some of his actions. 

● Recall how, when the COVID pandemic began he rushed to pander to the state’s worst, most selfish foster parents, at children’s expense. 

● Recall his callous response to KING-TV’s expose of how workers were treating some children in ways international human rights organizations describe as torture. 

● Recall how a majority of his own unionized employees said they want Hunter fired but they fell short of the two-thirds required to initiate a formal no-confidence vote.  (The state advisory board on juvenile justice also wants Hunter fired.) 

And now, in an interview with The Imprint he makes clear that his response to legal requirements to try to keep families together is the equivalent of giving those families the middle finger.  And while he’s at it, he makes a not-so-subtle effort to set one oppressed group against another. 

At issue is how much of an effort his agency should have to make to spare children from the chaos of needless placement in foster care, the high risk of abuse in foster care itself and, of course, the occasional allegation of conduct equivalent to torture.  Hunter’s answer: Almost none. This in a state that tears apart families at a rate 30% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

To understand what’s required we need to go back 46 years. 

In 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act.  Among its many excellent provisions is one that requires states to make “active efforts” to keep Native American families together before resorting to foster care.  The term is not defined in the law itself.  There is a definition in federal regulations, but it’s vague, with lots of wiggle room for family police agencies, a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies. 

But the law does NOT say that you only have to make active efforts if you can afford it.  It does NOT say you only have to make active efforts if you already have the services available.  It says make active efforts, period.  If you don’t have the services it’s your job, state and/or local governments, to create them and fund them. 

Two years later, Congress passed the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act.  That law applies to all families, but it doesn’t go as far as ICWA.  It requires only “reasonable efforts” to keep families together.  Once again the term is not defined in law, and this time not in regulation either. 

But the law does NOT say that you only have to make reasonable efforts if you can afford it.  It does NOT say you only have to make reasonable efforts if you already have the services available.  It says make reasonable efforts, period.  If you don’t have the services it’s your job, state and/or local governments, to create them and fund them. 

To some extent the entire debate exists only in the realm of the theoretical – because neither law has ever been seriously, systematically enforced. 

We document the failure to make reasonable efforts extensively in this NCCPR Issue Paper.  But I’ll highlight one example: 

A survey of Michigan judges found that 20 percent of the judges said they always concluded that reasonable efforts had been made – in other words, their child welfare agencies were perfect.  Another 70 percent said they rarely concluded otherwise. 

But even more significant: 40 percent of judges admitted that they lied and said the state child welfare agency made “reasonable efforts” in cases where the judges really didn’t believe it.  In half of those cases, the judges admitted they lied because, if they didn’t, the state would not get federal aid for holding the child in foster care, and their counties would have to pick up the extra costs. 

And if that’s the proportion who will admit it on a survey … 

As for “active efforts,” the failure to follow that provision of ICWA can be seen in the extreme racial disproportionality in American child welfare when it comes to states with significant Native American populations.  

In Minnesota, Native children enter foster care at 14 times their rate in the general population.  In South
Dakota Native Children are 12% of the child population – and 57% of the foster child population.  The appalling treatment of Native children by the state’s family police agency was exposed by NPR in 2010, and again by South Dakota Searchlight and the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader in 2024. 

The extent to which family police agencies have gotten away with ignoring these laws can be seen in the extent to which even proponents of helping families have lowered their standards.  

And that brings us back to Washington State, where, as The Imprint explains,

three years ago, the Washington State Supreme Court Commission on Children in Foster Care recommended draft legislation “to require active efforts for all children” before and after they were removed from home. The commission described active efforts as necessary to ensure social workers take extra steps, and provide services in a “trauma responsive manner.” As an example, they stated that rather than just giving parents a service provider’s phone number, a CPS worker would offer assistance in scheduling appointments necessary to keep the family intact.  

So just to be clear: In Washington State, as far as this Commission is concerned, you can meet the "reasonable efforts" requirement by giving parents a service provider’s phone number!  In other words, you can meet the standard without doing a damn thing for a family. 

Even the Washington State Commission’s definition of "active efforts" is pretty lame.  What if the family doesn’t need an “appointment” for anything? What if they need someone to repair their home so a child isn’t taken because of unsafe housing?  What if they need a voucher to pay for child care so the child isn’t taken due to “lack of supervision”?  And if they really do need an appointment what good is scheduling if they have no car (or don’t have the money to repair their car) and there’s no public transportation? 

"Reasonable efforts," let alone "active efforts" should require the family police to deal with all of this – because that’s what’s most likely to keep children safe and promote their “well-being.” 

But Ross Hunter wants no part of any of it.  His excuse is cost.  He says making "active efforts" on behalf of all children at risk of foster care 

would be very expensive to do, and would require a service array that is much larger than what we have today … [Y]ou have to do it in a way where you’re not requiring something you don’t have the services to provide.” 

No, Ross, you’ve got it backwards. Whether it’s “reasonable efforts” or “active efforts,” these laws require you to do whatever is necessary to create the services and provide them. 

He’s also wrong about the cost.  The great paradox of child welfare is the worse the option the more it costs.  Safe proven alternatives to foster care cost less than foster homes (often, as in the case of rent subsidies and childcare vouchers) a lot less.  The foster homes cost less than group homes which cost less than institutions. 

The reason Washington State hasn’t followed the law requiring "reasonable efforts" or the law requiring "active efforts" is simple.  Contempt for birth families, especially nonwhite birth families, runs so deep in Washington State (and much of the rest of the country) that many people either don’t realize or don’t care that when the family police take a swing at so-called “bad parents” the blow almost always lands on their children. 

But that isn’t even the worst of  Hunter’s behavior on this issue.  There is some nervousness among some – though not all – Native American leaders about what has been called “ICWA for all” legislation.  But it takes a powerful white guy to exploit it. 

Because it sure sounds like Ross Hunter is attempting to play off one oppressed group against another.  As he told The Imprint: 

“Before we will do active efforts for all, I want to make sure that we’re 100% delivering active efforts for the children who have experienced unbelievable historical harm as a result of child welfare practices in the past.” 

That sure sounds like setting the descendants of survivors of genocide against descendants of survivors of slavery – while doing virtually nothing for either. 

And since right now Washington State doesn’t appear to be delivering active efforts for Native families at all – they enter foster care at triple their rate in the state child population -- waiting until they’re  “100% delivering active efforts” for Native families means waiting forever. 

That seems to be just the way Ross Hunter wants it.