NCCPR news and commentary round-up week ending Nov. 19, 2024

● In North Carolina, court hearings in family policing cases are supposed to be open, with limited discretion afforded judges to close them.  But some judges have been abusing that discretion.  IndyWeek reports on a lawsuit from Civil Rights Corps seeking to stop those abuses. The story quotes Amanda Wallace, 

who spent a decade as a Child Protective Services investigator before founding Operation Stop CPS … “The majority of children coming into custody, it’s because of poverty-related concerns,” Wallace says. “If the public just came and sat inside the courtroom, they’d see—wait, so this child was taken away because the parent didn’t have childcare? Can we not figure that out without giving their child to somebody else?” 

● From Lenore Skenazy in Reason: 

It was dinnertime on October 30, 2024, when police handcuffed Brittany Patterson in front of three of her four children and drove her to the station in Fannin County, Georgia. She was then fingerprinted, photographed, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit.

 What was Patterson’s “crime”?  Her 11-year-old son had dared to walk from their rural home less than a mile to the nearest small town  - all by himself. 

● In Rhode Island three organizations, including Children’s Rights, have filed a class-action lawsuit to stop the state from needlessly institutionalizing large numbers of children.  To document that state officials have known about the problem for a long time, their press release, and this Boston Globe story cite NCCPR’s 2010 report on Rhode Island family policing. 

But what is most notable about this suit is the goal: It is not to make the institutions better, it’s to force Rhode Island to provide families with the help they need so they don’t need to be institutionalized in the first place. This is another welcome sign that Children’s Rights is changing its approach to litigation. 

● When Utah lawmakers first tried to incorporate the protections of the Indian Child Welfare Act into state law, the effort was stalled by legislators who wanted to wait and see if the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold ICWA.  Now that the Supreme Court has done just that, KUER Public Radio reports, those lawmakers are trying again. 

● Using child welfare to try to destroy native peoples is not unique to the United States, of course. 

"Big girl … I am so sorry, pack some things, they are coming." 

That’s how 10-year-old Aboriginal Australian Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts found out, from her father, that she was about to be taken by an Australian family police agency.  She survived multiple abusive placements, finally running away. Eventually, she became a human rights lawyer. Her memoir is the topic of this story from the National Indigenous Times. 

● I have a commentary in the Indiana Capital Chronicle about the failure of some counties in that state to apply for readily available federal funds to provide high-quality family defense for children and families. 

● Writing for the libertarian Reason Foundation, Layal Bou Harfouch says: 

The current standard of care in U.S. hospitals calls for screening a woman’s urine for drugs before she gives birth, despite the test itself being notoriously unreliable and easily manipulated by other substances. The results of these tests are used as grounds for social service investigations that can lead to newborns being unjustly taken from parents. Relying on flawed testing mechanisms to separate mothers from their children undermines parental rights and personal autonomy, and health agencies should implement better safeguards before turning to such drastic measures. … Furthermore, the performance of any test must be done with the informed consent of the patient. 

● And as “National Adoption Day” approaches I repeat our annual call to end child welfare’s public celebration of family executions 

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

The Fayetteville [N.C.] mother charged with murdering two of her adopted children was a licensed adoptive parent for years, WRAL Investigates has learned.  Avantae Deven was a licensed foster parent from 2007-2013 through a nonprofit called Grandfather Home. She later became a licensed adoptive parent.  Deven is charged with murdering Blake Deven and London Deven, two of the five children she adopted during the time span. 

From WHP-TV in Harrisburg: 

Over 60 additional cases involving the sexual abuse of children at Pennsylvania Juvenile and Residential Treatment Centers were filed on Wednesday.  The new filing brings the number of total cases alleging sexual abuse at these centers to over 200 victims.