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. …