News and commentary from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
concerning child abuse, child welfare, foster care, and family preservation.
We suggest that the National office for the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program use this item from The Daily Show as a training video
In 2018, responding to former Today Show anchor Megyn Kelly’s appalling attempt to justify blackface, (for which she has apologized) her colleague Craig Melvin noted that, as a CNN story put it, “this controversy is an opportunity to inform people — but [Melvin] said most people already knew how offensive blackface is.”
Most people, but apparently not one chapter of that most sacred cow in child welfare Court-Appointed Special Advocates. Oh, they’ve learned in the years since they included a blackface act in a fundraiser, especially since they apparently eventually apologized – but that is just one example of the racial bias that plagues CASA. And that, of course, raises fundamental questions about the role of CASA in deciding the fate of children who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately children of color. Even more questions are raised by the latest study of CASA's effectiveness. And there's much more about CASA in NCCPR's presentation at the 2021 Kempe Center conference. and in this 2024 story from The Imprint.
So every Halloween, I plan to reprint this post from 2017:
This Halloween, The Daily Show offers a useful history lesson. The topic: why it’s a really bad idea for white people to dress up in blackface:
But the lesson isn’t just useful for Halloween. It’s also something that anyone involved with that most sacred cow of child welfare – Court-Appointed Special Advocates -- needs to know.
CASA is a program in which minimally trained volunteers, overwhelmingly white and middle-class, are assigned to families who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite. Then they tell judges if the children should be taken from those families, sometimes forever. That, of course, raises problems of inherent bias. But some CASA chapters have made their biases depressingly obvious.
Consider what happened nine years ago in Arkansas City, Kansas. To raise funds for the local CASA chapter, they held a talent competition. The winning act featured the mayor of Arkansas City – dressed in blackface. The head of the local CASA chapter couldn’t understand why that was a problem. "It wasn't black black," she said. "It was all really just tan." That’s only the beginning. All the awful details are here.
It would be one thing if this were just an isolated example of racial bias. But it’s not.
● There was the CASA chapter in Marin County, California, which fell apart when the state CASA association merely asked that they strive for more diversity among the volunteers.
● There was the appalling racist rant by someone who says he volunteered in a scandal-plagued Washington State CASA program for 20 years.
● There’s the fact that the most comprehensive study ever done of CASA, a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that CASA volunteers spend significantly less time on a case if the child to whom they are assigned is Black.
● And then there’s the question of whether the very structure of CASA makes it, in the words of a law review article, “an exercise of white supremacy.”
Showing the Daily Show video won’t solve all these problems; not even close. But it might help prevent the worst excesses of racial bias in CASA programs.
● At long last, the United States has officially apologized
for 150 years of trying to use “child welfare” and children’s “best interests”
to eradicate Native America. You can watch President Biden issue the apology
here.
● The
Imprint has the reaction of tribal leaders, who praised the apology but
noted that the words must be followed by action. The story cites, among others,
Jonathan W. Smith, Sr., chairman of the Tribal Council for the Confederated
Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon:
“The true measure of these words will be in the actions
that come from them,” he said. “We look forward to working together on concrete
commitments that demonstrate a genuine redress of this deliberate pain.”
Indeed, Native Americans continue to be torn from their
homes at far higher rates than their rate in the general population, and there
are constant efforts by defenders of family policing to undermine the law meant
to curb such needless removal -- the Indian Child Welfare Act.
And see this reminder from Kevin Campbell, CEO and
Co-Founder of Pale Blue:
The First People of Australia say today, 16 years after the apology by Prime Minister Rudd, “Sorry means you don't do it again”, as indigenous children are being taken a record rates. What will be said in America 16 years from today?
● Even the boarding schools that were the heart of the
original systematic plan to use child welfare to eradicate Native America have
not entirely gone away.Seven modern
versions still exist.While they are not
the torture chambers of old, Lee
Enterprises newspapers report that at least two of them allegedly are the
scene of other forms of abuse – sexual assault and the misuse and overuse of
psychiatric medication.
● As
you read this New York Times story about children still traumatized
years after they were torn from their parents at the Mexican border during the
Trump Administration, please remember: When children are torn from their
parents by U.S. family police agencies, their motives may be different, but the
trauma is the same.
● The
Colorado Trust reports on the way housing isn’t just the reason for so many
needless removals of children from their families, it’s also the trigger for so
many of those “other reasons” family police agencies love to talk about to
divert attention from the confusion of poverty with “neglect” …
● … while the Santa
Fe New Mexican reports that the New Mexico Supreme Court has curbed the
ability of that state’s family police agency to confuse poverty with neglect.
● For decades, as the massive American child welfare
surveillance state grew, the response to anyone who objected was: “We have to
do this, children are dying!You don’t
care if children die!”So the
surveillance state grew – and children kept right on dying.
Two of the nation’s leading supporters of a
take-the-child-and-run approach to family policing have refined the claim.Now they claim we don’t want to talk about
fatalities.On the contrary, as
I explain in this column for The Imprint, we talk about fatalities
all the time – the take-the-child-and-run crowd just doesn’t like what we have
to say.
● There’s a child welfare angle to the controversy over
owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times killing
editorials endorsing Kamala Harris.One
of those who resigned from the Times editorial board in protest is
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Robert Greene.He
understood “child welfare” issues better – and sooner – than any other
mainstream editorial writer I know. He did the right thing, of course,
but it’s still a big loss. I wrote about him here.
In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All
Directions:
● There is no indication anyone accused the parents of
one-year-old Nova Bryant of beating her, or starving her, or torturing
her.Instead, according
to WRTV in Indianapolis
Bryant relied on a feeding tube and [her mother, Celena]
Conkright has disorders, including ADHD and ADD.Conkright said DCS removed Bryant from her
care two months after she was born.“They
said I wasn’t capable of taking care of her, they said I wasn’t learning fast
enough,” Conkright said.
Here’s what happened in the last of the three foster homes
in which Bryant was placed:
The Indiana Department of Child Services is taking action
to revoke a Brazil woman’s foster license after the drowning death of her
1-year-old foster daughter, Nova Bryant.
Bryant's foster mother, Hailynn Volpatti, is charged with
Neglect of a Dependent Resulting in Death, a level 1 felony. Volpatti pleaded not guilty Friday and her
jury trial is scheduled for April 15.
In a recent column,
Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Sarah Font claimed that “there remains strong
resistance among child welfare scholars, advocates and national leaders to
discussing maltreatment fatalities.”
I have
followed these issues for nearly 50 years, first as a reporter and for the past
34 as an advocate. I coordinate one listserv for grassroots family advocacy
organizations and another for professionals in the field, and I participate in
the discussions of three other advocacy coalitions. We talk about fatalities all the time. It’s just that people like Font and Putnam-Hornstein
don’t like what organizations such as mine have to say. So they cherry-pick data to try to make a case for a
surveil-and-remove approach that has failed for decades. Sometimes they even
contradict themselves. …
● Dr. Sharon McDaniel, a pioneer in doing kinship foster
care the right way, speaks out about the enormous harm of doing it the wrong
way – through the subterfuge known as “hidden foster care.” In
a commentary for The Imprint, she writes:
I want to be clear that while I believe hidden foster
care should be eradicated, the path to doing so is not to simply place all of
those children in the formal foster care system instead. Through an upstream
preventative lens that narrows the front door and addresses poverty through
support and not victimization, I assert fewer children will need any form of
formal care as their parents will have the necessary community support and
resources to care for their children without child welfare intervention. …
But when children really must be taken from their parents,
Dr. McDaniel writes:
I have spent my career pushing for relatives to be the
solution. But they cannot be prioritized on the cheap and with less rights.
They must be supported and provided the appropriate legal protections in place
for any placement through the formal foster care system. Anything less is a
disservice to the families and children we claim to protect.
● The
Imprint has a story about an encouraging trend in high-quality legal
representation for families: providing that representation before a case goes
to court.
● In Michigan, there are counties that barely provide even
the most minimal “representation” to children or parents. The Detroit Free Press reports on recommendations
from a Task Force addressing that issue.
● LAist
reports on another new study, this one from UCLA’s Pritzker Center for
Strengthening Children and Families. This one concerns how survivors of
domestic violence are victimized by the family police. From the story:
“[The Department of Children and Family Services] was
asking the survivors, ‘Why don't you just leave?’ The courts were asking ‘Why
didn't you just leave? Why did you keep your kid in this situation?’ And what
we know is that it's not that easy to leave,” [Pritzker Center Executive
Director Taylor] Dudley said. … “They wanted to leave but they had nowhere to
go, and because of that their children were removed,” she said.
But notice how, even here, the focus is on making it easier
for survivors to flee – not on, say, removing the abuser from the home.
And, unlike the Illinois study, the recommendations in this
study, while not bad, tend to be vague and tepid, perhaps because Pritzker
partnered with DCFS to produce it.
● Rep. Gwen Moore, who has sponsored federal legislation to
make it harder for family police agencies to confuse poverty with neglect is
the guest on The
Imprint podcast this week.
● Imagine a world in which every pregnant woman was forced
to admit a "surveillance" agent into their home at any time, day or
night, to check on fetal “well-being.” Imagine if the surveillance continued
until the child was old enough for preschool. And imagine if the price for not
meeting the government spy’s standard for “well-being” were to have the child
taken forever. No, it’s not Project
2025. It was part of a proposal from someone who was once one of the most prominent
and influential self-proclaimed liberals in “child welfare.” We all need to
remember it. This
blog post is a reminder.
In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All
Directions:
● From
KABC-TV, Los Angeles: Another story about the civil lawsuit filed by
victims of horrific abuse both in their own home and then in foster care.They’re suing Riverside County and the
private agency that oversaw their foster care.So let’s remember, if the private agencies get their way, it
will be incredibly difficult for such children to sue in the future.Yet one California news organization after
another keeps writing news stories suggesting the real victims are the
agencies!
The state of Hawaii and Catholic Charities Hawaii have
settled a civil lawsuit for $690,000 involving the alleged repeated sexual
assault, molestation and abuse of a foster child by the foster mother's son and
his friend who both lived with them, plaintiff's lawyers said.
Self-proclaimed
liberal Elizabeth Bartholet wanted to force every pregnant woman to admit a spy
into her living room from pregnancy until the child was preschool age.
Image created by openart.ai
Last month I wrote a post about how what was once the Next Big Thing
in “child welfare” – “predictive analytics” increasingly is being seen for what
it really is: an Orwellian nightmare of computerized racial profiling that
bears an uncanny resemblance to some of the worst aspects of Project 2025 – the
right-wing vision for a second Trump presidency.
I included this
video from The Lincoln Project dramatizing what one aspect of Project 2025,
omnipresent surveillance of pregnant women, really would mean:
I noted that unlike
Project 2025, using predictive analytics once was embraced by many on the left.
It was the subject of gushy stories in mainstream media – even though one of
the designers of one of the most prominent algorithms actually said “Yes, it’s
Big Brother…”
But while preparing
my recent presentation for the Kempe Center’s virtual conference,
I was reminded that there was an old-fashioned analog scheme for mass
surveillance that was even worse.It,
too, was embraced by many on the Left at the time. In fact, the creator of this
scheme never tires of beginning her presentations by reminding everyone that,
at least in her own eyes, she’s a liberal.
The scheme comes
from Harvard Law School Professor-Emeritus Elizabeth Bartholet.She long has been one of America’s most extreme
devotees of taking away children.For
decades she led what should be called child welfare’s “caucus of denial” – that
group which insists practitioners of “child welfare” somehow are so much better
than everyone else that they have created the one and only field in American
life magically immune from racism.
Nothing in my
description of Bartholet’s scheme that follows constitutes inference on my
part.It is all laid out in depressing
detail in her 1999 book Nobody’s Children – see especially pages 164 to
171.It is a plan so extreme it
would make the authors of Project 2025 blush:
She called for a
spy in every living room.
The plan is a
bizarre extrapolation from something that has gained wide favor among advocates
for traditional child abuse “prevention” – home visiting.The idea is that a professional (in the most
promising of these programs, a nurse) would offer to come to the home of
pregnant women and new parents, perhaps once a week, to offer advice, support
and, at its best, concrete help.
The key words there
are support and offer.The
purpose of the visits is help – though anyone choosing to let them in would
have to consider the fact that the visitors probably would be mandatory
reporters of “child abuse.”(This is a
classic example of how mandatory reporting backfires.)
But the visits
would be strictly voluntary.Parents
would be free to just say no.
When these programs
first were proposed the only real opposition came from some on the extreme
right.They charged that the plan was
really just a subterfuge by liberals to put an agent from Big Government into
every American home. It was easy to dismiss that as a paranoid delusion – until
Elizabeth Bartholet, (who wants to be sure you know she’s a liberal) came along
and proposed almost exactly that.
She called for a
home visiting program that would be mandatory, not voluntary.The starting line would be even earlier than
predictive analytics algorithms. As with Project 2025, the spying would begin
with pregnancy.(Bartholet doesn’t say
if women would have to self-report their pregnancies or if their doctors or
maybe their neighbors would turn them in.)
But however it
would be done, once your pregnancy became known, government agents (presumably
from private “helping” agencies, but contracted by government) would be sent
into your home and every other such home in America - from pregnancy until your
child was old enough for preschool (at which point, presumably, teachers could
take over the spying).
Under Bartholet’s
plan, the visitors can demand entry at any time, and you must let them in. Yes,
they’ll try to help.But their primary
job is to conduct – this is Bartholet’s term - “surveillance” of your pregnancy,
your child-rearing practices and environment. If they believe any of those
practices, or anything else, endangers your child’s “well-being” they must turn
you in to the family police who can -- and Bartholet maintains, should -- whisk
away your children and set in motion the process for taking them away forever.
That
brings us to Bartholet’s definition of “well-being.”
Bartholet
says having those spies in the living room watch out only for things that
threaten children’s health or safety is not enough. She said the system should
be willing to remove children “even if physical safety is not an issue,”
[p.204, emphasis in original]. Indeed, Bartholet says, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act,
which blew huge holes in earlier federal law theoretically requiring
“reasonable efforts” to keep families together, should have gone further.ASFA should have declared reasonable efforts
null and void whenever they might jeopardize a child’s “well-being.” [p.27].
Bartholet
said this is essential because, in large numbers of neglect cases, a child’s
physical safety really isn’t in danger.
And
we should stop right there for a moment.Bartholet and her disciples, then and now, invoke the worst horror
stories to justify the massive over-policing of families and over-removal of
children.But in her own book, Bartholet
effectively admits she knows better.
In
large numbers of “neglect” cases, she admits, children are not in danger at all
– except materially.One needs a
“well-being” standard only if the real target is any case in which a parent’s
poverty is preventing a child from having all the same opportunities rich
children
have. In short, you need a spy in every living room to police “well-being” only
if the goal is to accomplish a massive reallocation of children from the poor
to the rich.
Repeatedly
in her book, Bartholet equates “well-being” with “well-off.” She indicates her
strong preference for adoption by strangers is based in part on the fact that
prospective adoptive parents “are generally relatively privileged in
socioeconomic terms … and live in neighborhoods with better schools and
community facilities, which are relatively free from drugs, crime and violence”
[p.89]. She complains about kinship foster care in part because relatives “live
on the economic margins” [p.157].
She
quotes with approval a researcher who says entire poor communities often are
“almost unsalvageable” and the system should look for placements that provide
“physical … and environmental advantages … even if they require some
discontinuities to achieve them”[p.185].
Fortunately,
both on the Left and the Right, people are catching on to the enormous harm of
child surveillance and child confiscation schemes, whether it was former House
Speaker Newt Gingrich’s proposal to shovel poor people’s children into
orphanages or Bartholet’s spy-in-every-living room scheme.
But
still, there are too many of my fellow liberals who forget everything they
claim to believe about civil rights and civil liberties as soon as someone
whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears.
● The Indianapolis Star exposes the warehousing of
Indiana children in state family police agency offices, sometimes for
weeks. The story includes NCCPR’s take
on why this happens – it’s what you think. This
link goes to a summary which has a link to the full story, which is behind
a paywall.
● In words and pictures, The
Imprint documents an oral
history project that’s also an oral healing project for survivors of the “boarding
schools’ that were part of the systematic attempt by “child welfare” systems to
effectively eradicate Native America.
● The
Imprint and Spectrum
News 1 have stories about a New York State Assembly hearing examining the
failings of the state’s child abuse “hotline.”
I’ve updated
my blog post about the hearing. Video
of the hearing includes a helpful index.
Scroll down the right-hand column to the list of witnesses. Click on any
name and the video will go straight to testimony from that witness.
There is searing testimony from victims of false reports,
particularly from survivors of domestic violence. But you may want to start
with the testimony of Melissa Friedman. She is attorney in charge of legal
strategy and training for the Juvenile Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society
in New York City. They don’t represent parents in these cases. They represent the children. She began her testimony in support of this
bill by saying: “I’m here to express to you, from the child’s
perspective, the harm of over-investigation…”
●
Earlier this year Oregon Senator Ron Wyden released a comprehensive report on
the enormous harm done to children in residential treatment – focusing in
particular on four McTreatment chains.Now he wants the Justice Department to investigate these chains for
allegedly defrauding Medicaid and violating the Americans with Disabilities
Act. The
Imprint and The
Hill have stories.
Once
again, though, Wyden is focusing on the fact that three of the chains are
for-profit corporations. But, as I wrote earlier this year for The Imprint,Nonprofit
Residential Treatment Also Stinks.
● OK, I admit it. As this
story in the Harvard Crimson makes clear occasionally more training
is a good idea -- when family defenders are doing the training.
● Newark
Patch reports that we can add New Jersey to the list of states where
legislation is passed or pending that would stop family police agencies from
stealing foster children’s Social Security benefits.
● The
Imprint reports on a series of meetings in which families and their
advocates told some of New York City’s biggest names in family policing –
private agencies that have been around in some cases for a century or more -
how much harm they have done. No
surprise there. Here’s the surprise: The agencies’ response boiled down to –
well yes, you’re right. Here’s how the
story begins:
A pediatrician imploring fellow physicians to stop
wrenching newborns from their mothers. A social worker who doesn’t want to
report kids in dirty clothes to CPS. A case planner living with regrets that he
failed to avoid a family separation through foster care.
These rare, firsthand stories from the frontlines of the
child welfare system are not often shared with the public. But they’re examples
of the remarkable testimony presented over three sessions in New York City this
year, gatherings titled The Reckoning: Transforming Systems to Achieve Family
Justice and Integrity. More than 600 social workers, nonprofit executives and
staff, legal experts and advocates for parents’ rights have joined the
hours-long convenings that began in March. …
● Longtime followers of family policing will recall when
Maryville, a modern-day orphanage near Chicago, was cited as a national model –
so wonderful, in fact, that it was the centerpiece of a 1995 60 Minutes
story touting orphanages. Seven years
later it was exposed as rife with so much abuse that Illinois took all foster
youth out of the place. In 2016 the
entire residential program was shut down.
Want to know how much Illinois learned from this?
In 2019, the Illinois Department of Children and Family
Services touted the brand new Aunt Martha’s Integrated Care Center as a
national model.Just five years later,
amid a sexual abuse scandal, it was shut down.But, as
the nonprofit news site Injustice Watch explains, the abuse scandal
was only the beginning:
The list of alleged transgressions — many seemingly
overlooked by state officials for years — includes: sex trafficking of minors;
staffers who should never have been hired in the first place because of
disqualifying prior arrests; overlooked claims of guards using sexual innuendos
with children, sleeping on the job, and sharing pornographic videos among
themselves at work; and thousands of reported violent attacks among young
residents.
Somehow in just five years, a facility with only 33 beds
racked up
● Of course, as
a Philadelphia Inquirer story makes clear, it’s not just one
institution in one state.Consider what
instututionalized young people told the Juvenile Law Center for their latest
report on these places:
“What should have happened in my story is that someone
should have asked me why I was always late to school. Instead, no one asked me,
and I was sent away.”
“I felt like I was a prisoner there and I didn’t feel
safe there.”
“It messes with your head to be kept in a cage for so
long.”
“You go in there with one specific problem, and then you
come back out with 30.″
JLC Senior Attorney Malik Pickett summed it up:
“A lot of people tend to have this glorified view of what
placement looks like, especially residential juvenile justice facilities. And
they kind of picture it like this beautiful college campus where youth are
getting treatment services, but they don’t really realize the horrors that are
going on behind those walls. They’re so blind to what’s actually happening
inside these facilities.”
● And now over to Arkansas, where the
Arkansas Times has done a deep dive into the harm caused by that
state’s residential treatment industry.The story quotes Reagan Stanford of Disability Rights Arkansas who told
lawmakers:
“Across
Arkansas, facilities are rife with countless examples of abuse, violence and
neglect.The child is often seen as the
failure, not the treatment facility. And because they are viewed as the
failure, all too often the child gets cycled back into a residential
placement.”
● Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in Congress
concerning hidden foster care – essentially blackmail placements in which
parents are coerced into “voluntarily” placing their child in foster care. The Imprint reports that the bill would not
regulate the practice, but it would force states to reveal how often it happens
– so we’ll finally know how many children really are torn from their homes
every year.
● After the New Jersey Attorney General sued a chain of
hospitals for testing all pregnant women for drug use, often without their
knowledge or consent, NJ
Spotlight News reports the hospital chain is modifying its
approach.But the new approach may just
lead to new forms of discrimination.
● And the text of NCCPR’s presentation to this year’s Kempe
Center conference is
now available on this blog.It’s
called Attn: Family Police: Children’s “Well-being” is None of Your Damn
Business.”
This is the text of the NCCPR’s
presentation at the 2024 Kempe Center International Virtual Conference: A Call
to Action to Change Child Welfare
What the cover says
How
many times have we heard it or read it? “Safety, permanency, well-being.” It’s practically the slogan of everyone in
the family policing establishment, from the federal government’s Administration
for Children and Families to the smallest county family police agency.
We hear family
police agencies even claiming they want a “child and family well-being system.”
In a truly Orwellian touch, San Diego County California even makes its family
police part of its new “Department of Child and Family Well-being.”
And
yet, when it comes to safety, permanency and well-being the family police have
managed to screw up all three.
Family
police is a term I will use throughout this presentation, since it’s when it
comes to an agency with the power to march into any home in America, search it
top to bottom, stripsearch
children, walk right out with them and consign them to the chaos of foster
care, that is a vastly more accurate term than “child protection” or “child
welfare” agency.
And
it’s important to draw a distinction between that one element of government –
the family police – and government as a whole.
I
am a lifelong tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. I’m old enough to have
cast my first vote in a presidential election for George McGovern and my last
vote in a contested presidential primary – 2020 -- for Elizabeth Warren.I think government can play a huge,
constructive role in promoting the well-being of children.
But
the family police cannot.
After
all, they’ve screwed up stuff that’s a lot easier to define.
● This just in:
America’s foremost scholar on the intersection of racism and family policing
(and a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors) Prof. Dorothy Roberts has received
a MacArthur Fellowship -- the awards that are commonly known as “genius grants.”
Another fellow,
Dorothy Roberts, a legal scholar and public policy researcher focused on racial
inequities in social services, said she appreciated receiving the fellowship
after spending decades writing about topics — such as the prosecution of
pregnant Black women for using drugs, which she argues is inherently unjust —
that other scholars considered inappropriate.
“I started this
work in 1988,” said Roberts, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s
law school and the author of books including “Shattered Bonds” and “Torn
Apart,” both about institutional racism in the child welfare system. “To get
this kind of recognition is very gratifying. Not only for me personally, but
for all the people, especially Black women, who’ve been devalued in these
systems.”
This story from The Imprinthas a good summary of Prof. Roberts' work and a link to their interview with her for their podcast.
● Sometimes one
small detail from a government document tells a huge story – especially when a
good reporter adds a little context. Rolling Stone has published a superb
deep dive that begins as an
exploration of needless family destruction because a pregnant mother smoked
pot, then expands into an in-depth look at the confusion of poverty with
neglect. It includes this paragraph:
Some
states practically name poverty in their child separation policies: If “family
finances are insufficient to support unusual need[s],” child separation could
be justified, Arizona’s DCF policy reads. (Using data from 2022, the Federal
Reserve reported that 43 percent of parents — more than 14 million families —
did not have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense.)
● Among the he
consequences of this kind of thinking in Arizona: tearing apart families at a
rate far above the national average, so children are dumped into substandard
placements.Like that time a child with
Type 1 diabetes, needlessly taken from a loving home, died in an Arizona group
home.What, you think you already saw
that story? No. ABC15’s investigation
concerns another child in another Arizona group home – including some
harrowing police bodycam video.
● One state moving
in the right direction on these issues is New Jersey. In a move that would have
been unheard-of just a few years ago, New Jersey Spotlight News reports that the state Attorney General is suing a
chain of hospitals to stop them from performing clandestine drug tests on pregnant
women and then reporting the results to the family police.According to the story:
Patients were
referred to state child welfare officials even when the positive test resulted
from prescribed medication, over-the-counter drugs or a poppyseed bagel,
according to the state’s lawsuit …
And if you’re
wondering which neighborhoods these hospitals serve, it’s the ones you think.
● And from 2023: A reminder from this blog that not all pot-smoking moms are treated
horribly. Some even are celebrated.
● Harvard Law Today looks at the Medical-Legal Partnership
forged by the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau’s Family Defense Practice and Boston
Medical Center.
There are several
interesting new laws in California:
● Gov. Gavin Newsom
signed a bill to stop county
family police agencies from stealing foster youth’s Social Security survivor benefits.But they will remain free to steal their
disability benefits. (A bill that would have barred both was vetoed by Newsom
last year.)
● He also signed a
bill concerning residential treatment, The Imprint reports
the new law
requires the
state Department of Social Services to publicly report how often and why
children have been physically restrained or sent to seclusion.
The law does not
require the RTCs to stop doing any of it.
But their trade association says even reporting when it happens is
unnecessary because, really, everything is just fine in California institutions
already.
● And Native News Online reports
on a law strengthening protections for California’s Native American children.
● But efforts to undermine
the rights of Native children continue. The Imprint reports
there’s another challenge to the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, with
opponents apparently trying to use a state court and a similar state law to
worm their way back to the U.S. Supreme Court, even though that court upheld ICWA
last year.The challenge is taking place
in Minnesota – the state with the worst record in America for separating Native
American families.
In more examples
of how The Horror Stories Go in All Directions:
“A literal nightmare,” Alexis Fridenberg called her
childhood foster, and ultimately adoptive, home. At four years old, Fridenberg said she was
placed into a home of “career” foster parents. “That is what they got out of it, the money,” she said. …
Alexis said her adoptive brother, the parents’ biological
son, Sammy Fridenberg, sexually assaulted her daily from age 7 to 18. He now
faces multiple charges. Court documents show other relatives have come forward
alleging abuse as well.
In the past two
years, two Florida residential facilities experienced outbreaks of violence
that left multiple youths injured. Vermont’s human services agency continued to
send teens there — even after the incidents.
Yeah; that’s going
to happen when in a state like progressive little Vermont, which keeps tearing
apart families at the second highest rate in America – more than quadruple
the national average.
Police in a
small town near Wichita have publicly identified the child whose decomposing
body was found in a backyard after officers were called to a home for an
unrelated matter earlier in September.
Rose Hill police
chief Taylor Parlier on Friday identified the girl as Kennedy Jean Schroer, who
is believed to have been about 6 years old when she died. Kennedy was born July
14, 2014, and was adopted in November 2018. Police believe she died in late 2020. ...
Once again, none of
this should be a surprise in a state that, while not as bad as Vermont, still
has, for decades, overloaded its system by tearing apart families at one of the
highest rates in the nation.
