NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Sept. 24, 2024

● Often children are taken when their poverty is confused with neglect only to face actual abuse in foster care.  But rarely children really do face horrific abuse in their own homes.  This story from The Press-Enterprise in Riverside describes a case in California in which that happened – and then the children faced horrific abuse in a foster home overseen by a private agency. 

● I mention the item above because right now, California’s private foster care agencies are rushing to make sure it never happens again – no, no, not the abuse, the lawsuits.  They’re pushing for legislation that would make them almost immune from such suits. You can read about it in this NCCPR column for WitnessLA.  The column asks if would make more sense to stop pouring billions of dollars into a system – foster care – that is so unsafe it is becoming uninsurable. 

● The research arm of the Maine Legislature produced a series of reports on recent child abuse deaths.  The reports were careful, nuanced assessments – far better than what’s spewed forth from certain politicians, and the state’s child welfare “ombudsman.”  In addition to summarizing the reports, this story from the Maine Monitor points out what isn’t covered – making the last 11 paragraphs particularly valuable. 

● Those last 11 paragraphs are an indirect reminder of how, in less than 25 years, Maine child welfare went from national scandal to national model to national disgrace.  In the Maine Morning Star I have a more direct reminder – and what can be done about it. 

● The New York Daily News reports on an initiative by the city’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, to bring resources into schools that, in theory, may help the process of what Joyce McMillan calls turning mandated reporters into mandated supporters. (McMillan’s vision for this is, of course, considerably more comprehensive.)  But the story also cites this caution: 

“ACS has a reputation as being the agency that can take your kids away from you,” said Nora McCarthy, director of New York City Family Policy Project. “It’s the right idea to expand support options for families, but having a feared agency being the one contracting and providing that support may be a problem. It might deter families from accessing the services.”

● There are plenty of mandated reporters who want to be mandated supporters and chafe at what the family policing system forces them to do.  In the authoritative British medical journal The Lancet, two US pediatricians write:

[W]e have often felt complicit witnessing our physician and other health-care colleagues dismiss an abuse diagnosis easily within middle-class white families while over-evaluating and subsequently reporting Black and Brown children for, say, accidental falls from bed. If the mandate of paediatrics in general, and child abuse paediatricians in particular, is protecting the young, it has become clear to both of us that the current system is not working as it should. 

● Stateline reports on something some in the medical profession are doing about it: 

Some states and hospital systems have updated their policies on drug testing for pregnant women and newborns, aiming to better support patients’ treatment and recovery from substance use disorder and combat racial disparities in testing and reporting. 

● For some more comprehensive ideas, check out this webinar from Pale Blue:

● Responding to a New York Times column by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy about the enormous stress faced by parents, Kathryn Icenhower C.E.O. of SHIELDS for Families, writes a letter to the editor (the second one down when you click on this link) about a major stress Murthy left out: 

Most families experience economic anxiety at some point. For many, it’s passing. But for Black families, economic anxiety is compounded by the justified fear that they are at a higher risk for having their children taken away. That stress can never fully go away. 

● In his Substack column, Play Makes Us Human, Peter Gray discusses what it is that often takes away the human right to play.  It’s what you think. 

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

● Another state is playing a sick game of whack-a-mole with children’s lives.  Responding to horrific abuse in a Rhode Island residential treatment center, did the Rhode Island family police agency finally stop tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in America?  Of course not!  Instead, the Boston Globe reports, they did exactly what we’ve come to expect from family police agencies.  As the Globe explains: 

Dozens of youths and young adults in the state child welfare system are being sent to residential treatment facilities outside of Rhode Island — including some places accused of abuse, neglect, and dysfunction. 

These were the same types of problems that led the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families to stop sending youths to St. Mary’s Home for Children in North Providence last fall — and then remove them entirely in June. 

● In Nevada, the Nevada Independent reports: 

A January legislative audit identified seven care facilities for children that failed to adequately protect those in their care, with complaints ranging from children self-administering medication to substance abuse issues. 

● And KWGS public radio in Tulsa reports that 

A state committee has granted law enforcement leeway to investigate the Department of Human Services after a parent accused the agency of negligence in handling his son’s abuse report. 

Stillwater parent Darrel Dougherty testified before the Oklahoma Legislature’s House Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee on Monday that DHS investigators covered up his son’s abuse while his son was in state custody. DHS staff said Dougherty complained too much and refused to investigate allegations. 

And finally … 

● The University of Pennsylvania has, at long last, disciplined self-proclaimed “race realist” law professor Amy Wax.  What does that have to do with “child welfare”?  Check out this NCCPR Blog post from last year about Wax and some of those in a group allied with her.