● 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.