NCCPR news and commentary round-up week ending Nov. 12, 2024

● It’s always a good time to hear from Jerry Milner, who ran the federal Children’s Bureau during the first Trump Administration.  But it’s an especially good time now.  Fortunately, he’s the guest on The Imprint podcast.  His thoughts on policy begin at about 22:30 in. 

● President Biden has apologized for what “child welfare” did to Native Americans in decades past.  But an apology doesn’t end the suffering, which continues to this day. So now, The Imprint asks, what next? 

For some, the apology rang hollow. Others described it as an important first step. But they all said more specific action must follow: more funding for education, the return of buried children’s remains, and adherence to reforms called for by the U.S. Interior Department, which is led by the nation’s first Indigenous cabinet-level secretary, Deb Haaland. 

● In New Zealand, they’re confronting more recent horrors affecting nearly one-third of all institutionalized children in that country. (And those are only the ones we know about.) It didn’t matter if they were institutionalized by government or private faith-based agencies. As The Washington Post reports:

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon formally apologized on Tuesday for decades of “horrific” abuse by state, foster and faith-based care facilities that disproportionately affected Maori and Pasifika children and people with disabilities. 

A landmark government investigation released earlier this year estimated that at least 200,000 people out of 655,000 had been subject to abuse including rape, torture and medical experimentation in institutions across New Zealand between 1950 and 2019. … 

“The care system in Aotearoa New Zealand was a fully funded failure that enabled pervasive abuse and neglect,” [a royal commission] report said. “Almost every survivor who came forward to share their experience with the inquiry has endured irreparable damage to the quality of their lives.”

Does anybody seriously doubt what a similar commission would find here? 

● Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reports on still another way that, when we take a swing at so-called bad mothers the blow lands on their children – and what can be done about it: 

For decades throughout the opioid crisis, most doctors have relied on medication-heavy regimens to treat babies who are born experiencing neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome. Those protocols often meant separating newborns from their mothers, placing them in neonatal intensive care units, and giving them medications to treat their withdrawal. 

But research has since indicated that in many, if not most, cases, those extreme measures are unnecessary. A newer, simpler approach that prioritizes keeping babies with their families called Eat, Sleep, Console is being increasingly embraced. 

In recent years, doctors and researchers have found that keeping babies with their mothers and ensuring they’re comfortable often works better and gets them out of the hospital faster. 

● In Massachusetts, which year after year tears apart families at a rate far above the national average, a state audit finds misuse and overuse of dangerous psychiatric medication on foster children – and a state family police agency that bypasses even minimal court oversight (something to remember the next time you hear an agency say “The courts have to approve eeeevvverything we do”). 

But Alexis Williams Torrey of the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts told New England Public Media that even the audit itself misses the point: 

Williams Torrey said it’s critical to address the underlying problems that lead to the removal of children from their families, even aside from how DCF handles their care. 

“A lot of these children are having mental health issues. And that is actually the underpinning for why they're involved with the department,” she said. “So I think rather than diverting funds and auditing and oversight to the Department of Children and Families, I think the public needs to consider really answering the calls of families for more accessible mental health treatment, child care, stable and affordable housing – all of those supports that could prevent children from ending up being in the custody of the department to begin with.”

● A child is torn from her parents, possibly needlessly, in an Indiana county that refused to apply for federal funds to support high-quality family defense. The child died in foster care We’ll never know if those federal funds might have made a difference I have a blog post about it.

● In contrast, high-quality family defense is about to get a boost in Alameda County, California: 

Berkeley Law has announced plans to launch an in-house Family Defense Clinic, enabling students to represent indigent parents threatened by state intervention with the removal of their children. This new clinic will be the first of its kind on the West Coast, filling an urgent gap in free legal services in the East Bay. 

In some ways the faculty is catching up.  Students launched their own family defense project in 2022. That project

 assists parents facing investigations, creates know-your-rights training sessions, and conducts research to publicize bias in the family defense system.

● One defender of the take-the-child-and-run approach to “child welfare” claims that even “aging out” of foster care can be better for foster youth than reunification – because of all the wonderful financial benefits they get!  Even of one shares this fundamentally dehumanizing view that money is more important than love, we might also want to see how this really plays out. In The Imprint, one of those who aged out has a reality check. 

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

● KOVR-TV in Sacramento reports that  A former foster parent in Rancho Cordova was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison for sexually assaulting multiple children and being in possession of child pornography, prosecutors said Friday. Kevin Baker, 43, pleaded no contest to four counts of committing lewd acts on a child and possession of child porn back in early October, the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office said. Prosecutors said Baker admitted to having multiple victims and befriending children with the intent of molesting them. …

“Child welfare” in Indiana: the contempt of courts

Indiana counties’ refusal to accept federal funds for family defense shows disdain for overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately Black families 

            The federal government will reimburse family policing agencies and/or the courts for part of the cost of providing lawyers to indigent children and parents when the agency wants to investigate those families for alleged child abuse. Thanks to some excellent reporting by the Indiana Capital Chronicle we now know that in one of the states where families need this help the most, Indiana, one in five counties won’t even apply for the money. 

            ● In Indiana, the family police agency, the Department of Child Services, is an oppressive, omnipresent fact of life for poor families, especially poor Black families, to a degree that boggles the mind.  Nationwide, on average, 37% of all children and 53% of Black children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  But in Indiana, it’s half of all children – and nearly four out of every five Black children. 

            ● Year after year, Indiana tears apart families at one of the highest rates in America, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. DCS brags incessantly about modest progress, but in 2022 Indiana still took away children at a rate 65% above the national average.  There is no evidence that Indiana children are 65% safer than the national average.  And again, Black children are hit hardest, taken into foster care at a rate 50% above their rate in the Indiana child population.

            To all this, many readers, conditioned by decades of horror stories about parents brutally beating torturing or murdering their children, may say: “So what?”  Indeed, that may be why so many Indiana counties are not bothering to get that federal funding to bolster legal representation for families.  Overloaded lawyers often have so little time and so many clients that families are almost literally defense-less.  Perhaps these counties want to keep it that way. 

            The problem with this is the problem that has plagued America’s entire war against child abuse for decades: Every time we take a swing at “bad parents” the blow lands on their children. 

            That’s because most cases are nothing like the horror stories.  In Indiana in 2022, 85% of the time, when children were thrown into foster care their parents were not even accused of physical or sexual abuse.  Forty percent of the time, there wasn’t even an allegation of drug abuse - not just no allegation of, say, overdosing on fentanyl – no allegation of so much as smoking a joint. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.  

            Consider all the ways all this hurts children: 

            ● Anyone who recalls the anguished cries of children torn from their families at the Mexican border knows how much it traumatizes children to take them from everyone they know and love. Yes, DCS caseworkers mean well.  But the children they take cry out the same way for the same reasons. No wonder study after study finds that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  And yes, that includes cases where the issue is substance use. 

            ● The harm isn’t just emotional.  Multiple studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes – a point I will return to below. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse. 

            ● And 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. That’s almost always the real reason for the horror stories that, rightly, make headlines. 

            There are so many ways to do better: One of the most effective is high-quality family defense.  Under this model, families get a lawyer with a reasonable caseload, their own social worker, and sometimes a parent advocate who’s been through the system herself.  

            No, it’s not to get “bad parents” off; it’s to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter no-real-services “service plans” often dished out by agencies like DCS.  Once again, the research is clear: This kind of defense reduces foster care with no compromise of safety.  That’s a key reason why the federal government now allows partial reimbursement for it.  Between the reimbursement and the reduced foster care costs, this approach also pays for itself.   

Some Indiana counties reportedly whined about the paperwork required to get the
reimbursement.  In fact, the paperwork is minimal, but it does offer clues to how well, or badly, courts are providing defense for the defenseless.  Perhaps that’s why some counties don’t want to fill out those forms. 

            Among the defenseless: 22-month-old Nova Bryant.  There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but news accounts give no indication that Nova’s parents beat her or tortured her or abused her in any way.  Rather, Nova had a whole lot of medical needs, her mother had ADHD and there apparently were concerns about the condition of the home.  DCS apparently figured Nova’s parents couldn’t take care of her.  

            But apparently, neither could her foster mother.  After leaving the 22-month-old in the bathtub (and allegedly changing her story concerning how long the child was left there) Nova drowned.  The foster mother has been charged with Neglect of a Dependent Resulting in Death. 

            We don’t know who represented Nova’s parents when she was taken away.  Perhaps they had a great lawyer with a great team and they did everything they possibly could.  But the odds are against that.  Because Nova lived, and died, in Clay County – one of the counties that has not bothered to apply for that federal aid. The odds of even a great lawyer having the necessary resources are slim.

            So stop and consider: What if Clay County had applied for the money and used it to provide high-quality interdisciplinary family defense?  Maybe the outcome would have been no different.  Or maybe the defense team for Nova’s parents would have demanded that DCS follow federal law, which requires “reasonable efforts” to keep families together, and provide the family with the help they needed to take care of Nova.  Maybe the defense team would have demanded that DCS look harder at Nova’s large extended family as a resource.  Perhaps she’d be alive today. 

            And yet, in another county that turned down federal aid for legal assistance, Johnson County Court Administrator Shena Johnson said: “[T]he system we have works well.” 

            There are a whole lot of children who would disagree.  Nova Bryant surely would have been one of them – had she lived long enough to speak.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending November 5, 2024

● COVID taught us that when the family police step back and community-based community-run support organizations step up, child abuse is reduced.  Now the Family Justice Journal devotes an entire issue to what that kind of support should look like. (Remember, you can download it as a .pdf to avoid the #$%^& flipbook format :-)) 

● And yes, there’s still another study showing the value of providing concrete help to families in reducing child abuse.  

● A commentary in The Imprint reminds us of something else that makes a huge difference in improving the lives of children: good lawyers for them – and for their parents. 

● Encouraged by a dreadful federal law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, states have long used the family police to persecute pregnant women who use drugs – including, sometimes especially, marijuana – doing enormous harm to their children.  Now, Investigate West reports on how the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is encouraging states to ratchet up the harm. 

The persecution of pregnant women is triggered by mandatory reporting laws which require huge numbers of professionals to turn them in.  So I hope this Investigate West story is read closely in the Investigate West newsroom itself, since they’ve been among the worst offenders when it comes to crusading to expand mandatory reporting to one of the few categories of professionals now often exempt.  I wrote about that here. 

● The problems are compounded when the drug tests used to justify tearing apart a family and holding a child in foster care are not even accurate. InvestigateTV, the national investigative arm of Gray Television, found serious problems with the accuracy of the tests in some cases.  

● The Imprint reports that, in its final days in office, the Biden Administration took a first step toward involving the federal government in curbing the insidious practice of states swiping foster youths’ Social Security benefits. 

● Pridefully progressive Vermont tears apart families and sends children off to the hell of foster care at a rate that would make Donald Trump blush proud: the second-highest rate in America, more than quadruple the national average, when rates of child poverty are factored in. It’s been that way for decades.  Yet this dismal record has largely gone under the radar in family policing circles and in local media. I have a blog post about it.

Progressive little Vermont tears apart families at a rate that would make Donald Trump proud

The Vermont State Capitol

            Nationally, little attention has been paid to how family policing functions in Vermont.  For whatever reason, the awful system next door in New Hampshire gets plenty of attention.  But Vermont is even worse; probably the worst in New England and among the worst in the nation.   Yet it goes largely under the radar. 

            A story about foster youth getting access to their own records was a useful reminder that Vermont needs more attention – and Vermont’s leaders need to feel ashamed. 

            I was reminded when a story about access to records brought home a comparison between two mothers and their children.  One lived in Vermont, the other lived near me in Northern Virginia. 

            Both begin the same way.  A mother’s injuries lead to prescriptions for opioid painkillers which lead to a substance use disorder. 

            Vermont Public recently told the story of what happened to the son of the first mother, Nathaniel Farnham, when the Vermont family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, invaded his life.  After two weeks of supervised visits to the family, Farnham says, 

“…one Saturday morning while I was watching cartoons with my mom, knock on the door, and there’s a DCF worker with two state troopers. And I’m getting put in the back of a car and off I go, start the 13 years of hell.”

             Farnham was at the mercy of the DCF from age 7 until he aged out in 2018.  He told Vermont Public he’d been in 35 different foster homes and at least eight placements in “residential treatment.” 

The mother in my Virginia neighborhood was, if anything, in worse shape.  She was hooked on prescription opioids and an alcoholic. "I liked alcohol, it made me feel warm,” she would later say. “And I loved pills. They took away my tension and my pain."  This addict also had serious mental health issues. 

            But unlike Nathaniel Farnham, this mother’s children were not taken away. The local equivalent of the Department of Children and Families never knocked on the door. Instead of “13 years of hell” the children lived safely, first in their suburban Virginia home and then in the White House -- with their mom, Betty Ford.  You can get a glimpse of their idyllic life here starting at 0:50 in: 

            The difference, of course, boils down to a single word: Money. Betty Ford had all the help she needed to raise her children safely despite her many issues. How much hell might Nathaniel have been spared, had anything like that kind of help been offered to his mother? 

            What happened to Nathaniel happens in every state, but it’s more likely to happen in Vermont. Vermont is a top candidate for child removal capital of America.  Pridefully progressive Vermont tears apart families and sends children off to the hell of foster care at a rate that would make Donald Trump blush proud: the second-highest rate in America, more than quadruple the national average, when rates of child poverty are factored in. It’s been that way for decades. 

            The result is a system that makes all children less safe. 

            Most cases are nothing like the horror stories of children tortured and murdered.  In Vermont 93% of the time, when children are thrown into foster care their parents are not even accused of physical or sexual abuse.  Most cases aren’t even like Nathaniel’s mother, or Betty Ford.  More than 60% of the time, there’s not even an allegation of any kind of drug abuse at all.  

            Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.  

            Even Bill Young, who used to run Vermont’s child welfare agency, is appalled.  After the Vermont Center for Parent Representation documented case after case of families wrongly listed on the state´s blacklist of alleged child abusers, Young said:  

“After about two months, I realized oh my god, it’s true. These stories are true … [We] have a situation where people begin to think, you know, in the interest of protecting a child, you can skew the evidence a little bit, something that people who raised me would have called lying.”

            Consider how this culture harms children.  

Vermonters were appalled when Trump tore apart families at the Mexican border – we all remember those children’s cries.  And The New York Times just reminded us of the legacy. Yes, when DCF does it, there’s a difference: DCF workers almost always mean well.  But the trauma of being torn from everyone they know and love is identical.  Vermont children cry out the same way for the same reasons.  

No wonder study after study finds that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  And yes, that includes cases where the issue is substance use. 

            The harm isn’t just emotional. Multiple studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse. 

            And 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. 

            To its credit, the Vermont Legislature enacted modest reforms. But far more needs to be done.  For starters, the model of high-quality family defense pioneered in Vermont by VCPR must be available to every family. This approach is proven to reduce foster care with no compromise of safety.  In some cases, the federal government will reimburse half the cost. Between that and the savings from reduced foster care, this approach pays for itself. 

            And lawmakers need to become laser-focused on ameliorating the worst stresses of poverty.  Startlingly small investments in cash assistance, housing aid and childcare can dramatically reduce not only neglect but even severe abuse.  And when the issue really is substance use that compromises safety, apply the Betty Ford standard to any Vermonter who needs treatment. 

            Is it really too much to ask that Vermont take a more humane approach to child welfare than Donald Trump?