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.