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
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| 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.
Let’s start with safety. We’ve spent decades building a child welfare surveillance state so massive that more than one-third of all American children and more than half of Black children, will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. We have forced millions into foster care where the rate of abuse is, in fact, vastly higher than in the general population and, independent studies show, vastly higher than agencies admit in official figures.
And
did it make children safer? Well, this
is a Kempe conference so let’s see what one of the original architects of this
system, Richard Krugman has to say. After all, he used to run the outfit that’s
running this conference.
Responding to a commentary defending the current system, Krugman wrote that he agreed with the commentary authors that …
“… just
ablating CPS agencies is the wrong approach. BUT we now have 40 years of
experience with this approach and have made no progress in reducing the
mortality from physical abuse of children (decades with 1500-2500 children
dying annually). … Doing the same thing for 40 years that doesn't seem (or
can't be shown) to be working was someone's definition of insanity. [Emphasis
in original; full
quote here].
By
the way in this context “ablating” is doctor-speak for abolishing.
Let me emphasize
that I do not mean to imply that Dr. Krugman would agree with my alternatives
or much else in this presentation – only that he has courageously acknowledged
the failure of the status quo.
That
failure should surprise no one. In
addition to the enormous emotional trauma inherent in needless removal – one of
the worst possible adverse childhood experiences -- and the high
rate of abuse in foster care, there’s the simple fact that all the time,
money and effort wasted on false allegations trivial cases and poverty cases
is, in effect, stolen from finding those few children in real danger.
So,
family policing flunks on safety.
But
what about permanence? (Or, if you prefer, permanency, since people in this
field seem to think adding an extra syllable makes them seem more important).
The
family police took the noble concept of permanence and confused it with
permanence in only one form – the paper permanence of formal adoption by
strangers.
So,
how did that work out?
Well
for starters, egged on by the so-called Adoption
and Safe Families Act, which, among its many horrors pays states bounties
for adoptions over a baseline number, we had a mad rush to terminate children’s
rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental
rights). This outran actual adoptions to the point that we estimate that at
least 127,000 more children aged
out of the system with no home at all, than would have been left to that
fate without ASFA.
And,
of course, we have no idea how many of those so-called “forever families” with
strangers actually are forever – because nobody keeps good data on how often,
for example, when that adorable Black toddler becomes a rebellious Black
teenager, those white middle-class strangers who adopted him decide to throw
him back.
We
do know that the state that rushed into that failed placement doesn’t have to
give back that bounty it got from the federal government under ASFA.
But
most important, we know that family policing actually has undermined real
permanence: It substituted an artificial limited white middle-class construct
of permanence for the real-life permanence that will be different in different
cultures in a diverse United States.
It
opted for the paper permanence of adoption, in which often a child is cut off
from Mom and Dad to the point of doing everything possible to eradicate them
from that child’s life.
In
one state, Minnesota, until very recently you know what the family police
agency did with those keepsakes? Locked them away in storage – the children
never received them.
Take a minute to contemplate the sheer cruelty of that. How much hatred must the family police have for these overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families, that they would simply assume that because they hold these families in contempt their children must, too. Or maybe they just think these poor nonwhite children are a little less than fully human.
Whatever the
explanation, that is the family police establishment’s version of permanence.
But
it doesn’t end with the loss of parents and keepsakes. The child may be cut off from siblings. He is
likely to be cut off from grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, friends,
coaches, classmates, mentors, ministers and on and on and on.
Under
this bizarre white middle-class concept of permanence, everyone else in a
child’s life is deemed so inferior that they count for nothing. So, again, what does that tell us about how
the family police really feel about the children themselves – especially the
Black, Brown and Native children?
True
permanence is relational permanence. True permanence means building a
system that builds and maintains a child’s ties to everyone in a child’s life
who loves and cares about him – instead of throwing them all away.
Instead,
the white people’s permanence of the family police says it’s better to place a
child in a formal adoption with, say, wealthy total strangers, some of whom
might even have an au pair to do a lot of the childrearing, instead of
in a guardianship arrangement with the child’s own grandparents because,
somehow, that’s not permanent enough.
In
short, the family police have created a system that prefers nannies to
grannies.
So,
the family police have screwed up permanence.
Now,
let’s see how that whole “well-being” thing is going.
First
of all, there’s the matter of figuring out what well-being is. You can mess up how to achieve safety, as
we’ve seen, you can get the definition of permanence wrong, as we’ve seen, but
at least one can come up with reasonably concrete definitions.
But what is well-being? According to the Oxford English Dictionary it’s “the state of being healthy, happy, -- or prosperous.”
So,
with the inclusion of well-being in the mandate of the family police we now
have a mandate for police-enforced happiness.
And if that sounds like some kind of nightmare out of science fiction –
there really was an
episode of classic Doctor Who with that plot. It didn’t go well.
But
notice also the part about “prosperous.”
That is what the expansion of the mandate of the family police into
well-being is really all about. It’s a
way of justifying the destruction of poor families and the transfer of their
children to more prosperous families.
But
don’t take my word for it. Just ask the
child removal fanatic whose work was most responsible for this vast expansion
of the mandate of the family police: Elizabeth Bartholet.
Bartholet
has long 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.
A centerpiece of her 1999 book Nobody’s Children was a plan so extreme it would make the authors of Project 2025 blush: She called for what amounts to a government spy in every living room. She called for a home visiting program that would be mandatory, not voluntary. In this world, government agents are sent into your home from pregnancy until your child is old enough for preschool. They can demand entry at any time, and you must let them in. Their job is to conduct – this is her term - “surveillance” of 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.
Throughout the
book, Bartholet argues for taking children away from their parents at the very
least in cases of serious maltreatment. She also maintains there are three
million such cases every year.
How do you get a
figure that high? Well, it helps if your
definition of abuse includes anything that might affect a child’s
well-being. Particularly when you
consider Bartholet’s definition of well-being.
A 1980 federal
law, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, requires states to make “reasonable
efforts” to keep families together.
This provision of law has never been enforced and is almost universally
ignored. Some judges in at least one
state, Michigan, have even admitted to lying and certifying that reasonable
efforts have been made when they didn’t believe it themselves, just to keep the
federal money flowing.
But that wasn’t
enough for Bartholet and her allies.
Hard on the heels of the 1995 crime bill and the 1996 welfare bill both
of which targeted poor people of color, they got Congress to pass ASFA,
targeting the same population.
That law blew
huge holes in the “reasonable efforts” requirement by allowing that requirement
to be ignored whenever a family police agency thinks it might jeopardize a
child’s “health and safety.”
But Bartholet said
that wasn’t 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, ASFA should have declared reasonable efforts
null and void whenever they might jeopardize a child’s “well-being.” [p.27].
Bartholet says
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, it is needed only if the goal is to accomplish a massive reallocation of children from the poor to the rich.
And indeed, 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].
And
Bartholet is not alone.
Precisely
because the concept of well-being is so broad and so easily abused, it’s
important to understand just how extreme some of those pushing hardest for it
really are – however well-meaning they may be and however much they believe
they are advancing children’s well-being.
That’s why I’m
going to talk about a couple of those individuals.
Take, for
example, Prof.
Sarah Font of Penn State. She
teaches at Penn State’s so-called Child Maltreatment Solutions Network. But a more accurate name would have been the
Penn State Penance Institute. The whole
place was set up after the scandal involving former football coach, former foster
parent and former group home operator Jerry Sandusky.
But of course,
the lesson from that scandal wasn’t to beware of abuse in foster care and group
homes. Nope, Penn State set up the
penance institute to show that nobody’s going to be tougher on child abuse than
Penn State.
Given that history, it’s no surprise that, in a paper claiming that families in Pennsylvania get too much due process, when Prof. Font included a flow chart about the process of determining if someone is or is not guilty of child abuse, no matter what the finding, no matter how many levels say they’re innocent, the accused was and always remains “the perpetrator."
And
it's no surprise Font has tweeted her disgust with the Indian Child Welfare Act,
a law passed to prevent the use of child welfare to eradicate Native America.
But
I was surprised when Font out-Bartholetted Bartholet and actually suggested
that no
home at all might be better for an older foster child’s well-being than
reunification or even guardianship with a relative. She writes:
Did you catch that? According to Font, what has long been
viewed as the worst option of all – “aging out,” in which a young person exits
at age 18 or age 21 with no family whatsoever, and for which it’s
well-documented the results are dismal,
may be better not just than reunification with birth parents (the ones who
always are perpetrators); it also may be better than guardianship with extended
family, better than loving grandparents or aunts or
uncles. Why? Because aging out might provide the foster
youth with financial benefits.
That’s putting a lot of weight on the part of well-being
that mentions “prosperous.”
Notice also the one exception: In Font’s view, the only
thing clearly better for older foster youth than aging out with no family at
all is adoption. What’s the difference between adoption and those
other options? Adoptive homes tend to be more prosperous.
So here again the question arises: Which is more
important for children’s well-being, love, or money?
And by the way, that whole spies-in-the-living room idea
isn’t dead either. In fact, it’s been modernized for the 21st
century.
Bartholet and Font are huge fans of the brainchild of another member of the caucus of denial, Prof. Emily Putnam-Hornstein. She’s the nation’s foremost advocate in child welfare of “predictive analytis” – or, as it should be called computerized racial profiling.
She is the co-author of the notorious Allegheny Family
Screening Tool, which was found to be biased by independent evaluators and
which, the Associated Press reports, is now under investigation by the U.S.
Department of Justice for bias against the disabled.
Another of her Pittsburgh Algorithms stamps an invisible
scarlet number risk score on every child at birth, unless the parent happens to
notice that
one postcard they get in the mail,
during those hectic first weeks of a child’s life, offering them the chance to
go online and opt-out – but only if they meet a deadline specified on the
postcard.
Still another algorithm Putnam-Hornstein is helping to
develop would provide no opt-out at all, stamp that risk score on every child –
and it explicitly uses race as a risk factor.
That’s all OK, Putnam-Hornstein says, because they promise that those
using the algorithm will use it only for “prevention.”
The co-designer of these algorithms has said: “Yes, it’s Big Brother. But we have to have our eyes open to the potential of this model.”
We do indeed, and the potential is scary as hell. When you begin a sentence with “Yes, it’s Big
Brother …” I think the only ethical way to end it is: “… so we’re not going to
do it.”
I don’t want someone who doesn’t get that helping to decide
where a child will live based on their definition of well-being.
And in case anyone thinks algorithms somehow are more
objective than humans, an algorithm is only as good as the humans who design
it. Putnam-Hornstein has repeatedly
denied that there is any racial bias in child welfare. And she has stated
explicitly that "I think it is possible we don’t place enough children in
foster care or early enough.”
So the 21st Century version of a spy in every
living room is an algorithm in every living room. But they haven’t completely given up on the
spies.
Bartholet, Putnam-Hornstein, Font and others in the
caucus of denial all signed on to this idea: Anyone whose children are not
otherwise seen by a mandated reporter of child abuse should be forced to
produce their child for a child abuse inspection – whenever they reapply for
public benefits.
After all, if our standard for whether to destroy a
family includes whether they are sufficiently prosperous, surely such targeting
makes perfect sense.
Of course, back when Bartholet first pushed for making
well-being a criterion for whether children are ever allowed to live in their
own families, this isn’t how it was sold to much of the family police
establishment. No, it was a simple
appeal to ego: Talk about a white middle-class rescue fantasy come true! You will take charge and bestow upon them the
counseling and parent education, or whatever, they supposedly need to be
well!
And so, without actually changing any laws --
even ASFA barely mentions well-being, much to Bartholet’s distress –
this vast expansion of the scope of family policing became embedded in family
police agencies.
Of course, not everyone who wants to emphasize well-being
wants to do it the way Bartholet or Font or Putnam-Hornstein want to do it.
Many of those who say they want to create a child and
family well-being system actually advocate good ideas: things like concrete
help for families, for example. And some
of them are among of the wisest people I’ve encountered in my nearly 50 years
following these issues. They’re the ones
who understand the essential prerequisite for a child and family well-being
system that I’ll discuss at the end of this presentation.
Others, as I also discuss later, are just embracing the
rhetoric to make people forget how much harm they’ve done for decades. I won’t name names now, but I devoted an
earlier presentation at this conference to one of them - the one that actually described
their past behavior as health
terrorism; fearmongering in the name of
raising awareness.
So is the phrase “child and family well-being system”
just a way to disguise health terrorism? Not necessarily. But here’s the problem: Even good ideas are dangerous
in the hands of the wrong people – in this case a police force with vast power
and no accountability.
There is one simple test to see if those who say they are
promoting a child and family well-being system are sincere, and I’ll get to it
at the end of this presentation.
For now, though, let’s take an example often touted by
those who say they want a child and family well-being system: Drop-in centers
in poor neighborhoods. They’re one-stop
centers where families can just relax, maybe play some games, or use a computer
to polish a resume, or get actual concrete help like food, clothing, diapers,
or get linked to help with childcare.
Done right, it could be an excellent idea. But there’s a huge problem: These places are
either run directly by the family police
or by an organization the family police have hired to do it. And that means while the family police agency
might want to think of such a place as a drop-in center, in poor communities,
no matter how pretty it is and how nice the staff, it’s a precinct house.
Because even if they don’t work directly for the family
police agency, all those staff are mandated reporters. That means before going anywhere near such a
place, poor people have to go through the incredibly draining mental balancing
act they must go through before interacting with any helping professional: Do I
dare talk to this person? How much dare
I say? No matter what I say, if I utter
a wrong word, will they call the family police agency and launch an
investigation?
For anyone who wants to really understand this constant, wearying balancing act, I hope you will read Prof. Kelly Fong’s brilliant book, Investigating Families. Prof. Fong combines a scholar’s rigor with a journalist’s eye. I can’t imagine anyone coming away from reading it without having doubts about any so-called “well-being system” under the auspices of the family police.
Another author, Stephane Land, author of Maid and Class writes about her years of poverty:
“I couldn’t admit to [my child’s] teacher or the principal that
we sometimes didn’t have enough to eat. I was scared someone might report me to
child protective services and I might lose custody.”
And though whatever is the current worst-drug-plague-ever is
typically invoked by family police apologists to justify mandatory reporting –
and anything else the family police do-- mandatory reporting makes that problem
worse, too. Rather than face clandestine drug testing and suspicion
from medical professionals who are mandatory reporters, pregnant people stay away from prenatal care and
giving birth in hospitals.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We know that because we saw a genuine, highly
successful child and family well-being system spring up almost overnight in
2020. It was
part of the response to COVID-19.
Family police agencies were forced to step back. Community-based, community-run mutual aid
organizations – with no connection to family police agencies – stepped up, and
the government did exactly what it should do to genuinely ensure the well-being
of children – it gave their families money.
And voila! Child abuse declined. It wasn’t just a decline in the confusion of
poverty with neglect. One of the most
serious forms of abuse of all, abusive head trauma, also declined.
So yeah. A child and family well-being system is a great
idea! Government has a crucial role to
play. And we know how to make it work.
Step
one: Keep the family police out of it.
And that
means more than just don’t let the family police agency run the drop-in
center. It means curbing their power in
a series of ways I’ll discuss later.
But most
of all, in this context, it means eliminating what may be the biggest single
barrier to a true child and family well-being system: Mandatory reporting.
Before termination of children’s rights to their parents, before
children are torn from the arms of their families and consigned to the chaos of
foster care, before someone from the family police agency pounds on the door in
the middle of the night, demands entry, interrogates and sometimes
stripsearches the children as part of a traumatic investigation – before any of
that, there is a call to a child abuse “hotline.”
In rare cases, there is good reason to make that call. In many
more cases, there is not. And in some cases the people who make these
calls know how much harm they will do, but feel they have no choice.
Because they are “mandated reporters.”
Every state has a law requiring most professionals who work with
children to report any suspicion of “child abuse” or “child neglect.” In
18 states all adults are mandatory reporters.
Now please consider:
For even longer than “child and family well-being system” was a
buzzphrase in the family policing lexicon there was that buzzword:
“evidence-based.”
But if we really demanded evidence for interventions there would be no
mandatory reporting. It’s not
evidence-based.
Mandatory reporting laws were rushed into place more than 50 years
ago, evidence-be-damned. Mandatory reporting was a well-intended guess,
born of hype and health terrorism. And after the first wrong guess, we
guessed wrong over and over again as we constantly expanded mandatory reporting
beyond anything even its original proponents intended.
It’s all had terrible consequences for children.
● The original proponents of mandatory reporting wanted a narrow requirement in which a few health professionals would be
required to report suspicions of sexual abuse or abuse causing serious physical
injuries.
But today, of every 100 calls to hotlines – most of which are made by mandated reporters – 97 turn out not to be “substantiated” cases of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse.
Ninety-one percent of calls either are so flimsy they don’t meet the
minimal requirements to be screened in for investigation, or they are found to
be false after investigation. And before
anyone regurgitates that old bullshit line about “They’re not false, the
caseworker just couldn’t prove it” – no proof is necessary. A caseworker need merely check a box on the
form indicating she or he thinks it’s slightly more likely than not that the
abuse or neglect occurred.
The only study I know of to second-guess these decisions is quite old,
but it found that workers were two-to-six times more likely to wrongly
substantiate an allegation than to wrongly label it unfounded. So if anything, that 91 percent figure is
low.
Most of the rest are “neglect” and, at long last, we’re
realizing that this usually means poverty.
Instead of a way to target horrendous cases of abuse -- what now make
up, at most -- three percent of hotline calls, mandatory reporting metastasized
into the foundation of our giant child welfare surveillance state, with terrible
consequences for children.
● That has made all children less safe. As one study explained:
More reports made but without sufficient evidence can
divert valuable but limited resources from endangered children who are actually
in need of protection.
So it’s no wonder that in the years since mandatory reporting was
enacted child
abuse deaths probably have increased –
and states in which the rate of reporting is lower have proportionately no more
child abuse deaths than where the rate is higher.
● Mandatory reporting is where the racial bias that permeates family
policing begins. Mandatory reporters are more likely to suspect abuse or
neglect if a family is nonwhite – even when everything else is identical.
And, perhaps most important for purposes of this discussion:
● Mandatory reporting laws terrify impoverished families, driving them
away from seeking help.
● Among those who suffer most: children of domestic violence survivors. Terrified that their children will be taken under laws labeling them bad parents for “allowing” their children to see them being beaten, a national survey found that domestic violence survivors fear seeking help – often for good reason. As one mother said, after exactly that happened: “I should have just let my ex-husband beat my ass.”
Almost from the start, former proponents of mandatory reporting
had second thoughts
● 1983: Dr. Eli
Newberger of Children’s Hospital in Boston writes that “had
professionals, like me, known then what we know now, we would never have urged
on Congress, federal and state officials broadened concepts of child abuse as
the basis for reporting legislation.”
● 1998: The
National Research Council concludes that
“Mandatory reporting requirements were adopted without evidence of their
effectiveness” and says they should not be expanded.
● 2011: In the
wake of the Sandusky scandal, there are calls to vastly expand mandated
reporting. But another one-time proponent of these laws, Prof.
David Finkelhor says:
Maybe it’s better that people use discretion … If
everybody obeyed the letter of the law and reported a suspicion of abuse, the
agencies would be completely overwhelmed with reports.
What can be done instead?
For starters, please don’t say “more training.” “More training” is the all-purpose cop-out the family police always propose to avoid real change. Most existing training for mandatory reporters is horrendous – in fact, it’s not really training at all, just never-ending exhortations to report! Report! Report! But even less awful training, as has been initiated in New York State, can accomplish very little. That’s because, while there are no penalties for false reports if made in “good faith,” there are civil and criminal penalties for failure to report. So mandated reporters make “CYA referrals.”
Here’s what should be done:
● Abolish mandatory reporting. Abolishing mandatory reporting does not mean abolishing
reporting. Professionals would remain free to exercise their professional
judgment and report when they felt it was genuinely necessary.
● Provide an “off-ramp.”
If states are unwilling to repeal mandatory reporting outright, they should at
least provide an alternative to professionals who prefer to be what activist
Joyce McMillan calls mandatory supporters instead of mandatory reporters.
So, for example, a teacher who tried to make sure a hungry child got
food, or a child without warm clothing in the winter got clothing would be
relieved of any obligation to confuse that child’s poverty with neglect by
calling a child abuse hotline.
● At a minimum, exempt witnessing domestic violence from grounds to report “child abuse” or “neglect”
and exempt professionals who primarily deal with domestic violence survivors
from mandatory reporting requirements. Social workers and other professionals
who work as part of family defense teams also should be exempted.
There’s also a need to deal with another aspect of reporting:
● Replace anonymous reporting – by far the
least reliable source of reports – with
confidential reporting. The accused
still wouldn’t know who accused them, but the family police would have to know,
in order to curb the use of the hotline for harassment. Texas has largely done this.
The constant use of the term child and family well-being system is
part of another phenomenon we’ve seen ever since the death of George Floyd: Reputation
laundering by the family policing
establishment: groups that have harmed Black families for decades rushing to
slap a Black Lives Matter statement on their websites; that sort of thing.
As I’ve said there are some brilliant, compassionate people proposing
some very good ideas in the name of a child and family well-being system; there
also is a whole lot of window-dressing.
And there’s a fairly simple test to tell the difference:
Is there anything in an organization’s call for a child and family
well-being system that actually reduces the power of the family police?
A proposal that says: Better train mandatory reporters is window
dressing, a proposal that says abolish mandatory reporting -- or at least curb it – is the real
thing. Similarly, does your child and
family well-being system include high-quality
interdisciplinary family defense, which
has been proven to safely reduce foster care?
Does it raise the standard for substantiation? Does it include what are called family
Miranda laws that require the family police to tell families their rights? Does it include real due process concerning
how families get on – and how they can get off – central registries of
so-called child abusers – because making it impossible for a parent to get a
job because they were unjustly blacklisted on such a register really isn’t good
for a child’s well-being.
And does it call for repealing failed laws that helped create and
support the monstrous system we have now, such as the Child Abuse Prevention
and Treatment Act and the Adoption and Safe Families Act.
Enact an agenda like that and we’ll be well on our way to creating a
genuine child and family well-being system – one in which communities get all
the help and support they need to promote their own well-being, and the family
police stay the hell out of it.
One last thing: The Administration for Children and Families needs to
underscore that well-being is not a police function: It should change its
slogan and its goals for family police agencies to safety and relational
permanence. Period.
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| What the cover SHOULD say |