In “child welfare” the horror stories go in all directions – all year long (2024 Edition)

 

Part one of NCCPR’s news and commentary year in review for 2024

 Part two looks at some of 2024s finest journalism exploring wrongful removal and other harms to children caused by our current system of family policing. You can read it here.

America’s massive child welfare surveillance state was built on horror stories.  Stories about children murdered or tortured in their own homes stampeded us into building a gigantic system that destroys children in the name of saving them. The system has torn apart millions of families needlessly.  It’s also so overloaded the system that workers have no time to find the few children in real danger.

A system that attempts to make policy-by-horror-story makes all children less safe.  That’s why we’ve long extended an offer to the fearmongers in the child welfare establishment: a mutual moratorium on using horror stories to "prove” anything.

We can do that because we have actual evidence that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, family preservation is not only more humane than foster care or massive surveillance, it’s also safer. But the fearmongers will never give up their horror stories because horror stories are all they’ve got.

That’s why we’ve taken to reminding people that the horror stories go in all directions.  And when it comes to the high rate of abuse in foster homes, group homes, and institutions, the horror stories are backed up by study after study showing the rates of abuse in those settings are appalling.

So now, just a few examples from 2024:

 

ROTTEN BARRELS: THE HORRORS OF RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT

● There have been scandals involving residential treatment in Arizona, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah,  Oklahoma,  Washington State, Arkansas, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island – and that’s only a partial list. And yet, every time there’s another expose of a residential treatment center, defenders of institutionalizing children say the problem isn’t RTCs per se, just a few rotten apples.  But The Imprint reported this year on a Senate committee study that makes it abundantly clear: No, we’re talking rotten barrels.  Oh, and by the way, the report notes, the whole concept of residential treatment doesn’t work.  (Not that we’d ever say we told you so.) 

● The report focused on several of what should be called McTreatment chains. The Senator who chaired the committee, Ron Wyden, called on the Justice Department to investigate these chains for allegedly defrauding Medicaid and violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Imprint and The Hill have stories. 

But in both cases, Wyden is focusing on the fact that three of the chains the committee examined most closely are for-profit corporations. But, as I wrote for The Imprint, Nonprofit Residential Treatment Also Stinks.

● A Philadelphia Inquirer story also makes clear, it’s not just one institution in one state.  Consider what institutionalized young people told the Juvenile Law Center for their latest report on these places: 

“What should have happened in my story is that someone should have asked me why I was always late to school. Instead, no one asked me, and I was sent away.” 

“I felt like I was a prisoner there and I didn’t feel safe there.” 

“It messes with your head to be kept in a cage for so long.” 

“You go in there with one specific problem, and then you come back out with 30.″ 

JLC Senior Attorney Malik Pickett summed it up: 

“A lot of people tend to have this glorified view of what placement looks like, especially residential juvenile justice facilities. And they kind of picture it like this beautiful college campus where youth are getting treatment services, but they don’t really realize the horrors that are going on behind those walls. They’re so blind to what’s actually happening inside these facilities.” 

See also The Imprint’s story about the report. 

● Two other young people who endured institutionalization write in The Imprint about why such places need to be abolished. 

● The Philadelphia Inquirer also reported that: 

The Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Department of Human Services have agreed to pay $450,000 to settle a case brought by former students of the Glen Mills Schools, which closed in 2019 after an Inquirer investigation revealed decades of violence against boys sent to the reform school in Delaware County. 

The settlement also promises increased oversight – but only enough to raise the level of oversight from nearly nonexistent all the way to pathetic.  And “oversight” never works because abuse is practically baked into the institutional care model.  That’s one reason why institutional “care” should be abolished.

And 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.

 ● Longtime followers of family policing will recall when Maryville, a modern-day orphanage near Chicago, was cited as a national model – so wonderful, in fact, that it was the centerpiece of a 1995 60 Minutes story touting orphanages.  Seven years later it was exposed as rife with so much abuse that Illinois took all foster youth out of the place.  In 2016 the entire residential program was shut down.

Want to know how much Illinois learned from this?  

In 2019, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services touted the brand-new Aunt Martha’s Integrated Care Center as a national model.  Just five years later, amid a sexual abuse scandal, it was shut down.  But, as the nonprofit news site Injustice Watch explains, the abuse scandal was only the beginning: 

The list of alleged transgressions — many seemingly overlooked by state officials for years — includes: sex trafficking of minors; staffers who should never have been hired in the first place because of disqualifying prior arrests; overlooked claims of guards using sexual innuendos with children, sleeping on the job, and sharing pornographic videos among themselves at work; and thousands of reported violent attacks among young residents. 

Somehow in just five years, a facility with only 33 beds racked up 

3,850 unusual incident reports when young residents displayed “physically aggressive behavior” against their peers or staff, records show. 

Oh, and care to guess where the director of DCFS during most of this time used to work? 

See also this follow-up story from Injustice Watch. 

● And now over to Arkansas, where the Arkansas Times has done a deep dive into the harm caused by that state’s residential treatment industry.  The story quotes Reagan Stanford of Disability Rights Arkansas who told lawmakers: 

“Across Arkansas, facilities are rife with countless examples of abuse, violence and neglect.  The child is often seen as the failure, not the treatment facility. And because they are viewed as the failure, all too often the child gets cycled back into a residential placement.” 

● In Alaska, Mother Jones updates an expose of a residential treatment center where 

Despite the facility’s troubling track record of assaults, escapes, and improper use of seclusion, state officials have admitted what foster youth have long suspected: Foster children are warehoused at North Star when there’s nowhere else for them to go. 

● From NBC News, still another expose of still another residential treatment center, this one in Utah. 

And  speaking of Utah, The Salt Lake Tribune reports that

A Utah treatment center for “troubled teens” has been sued by two parents who say their daughter was sexually assaulted by other girls at the facility after staff failed to conduct regular bed checks. …

From the Santa Fe New Mexican 

A 9-year-old boy suffered physical restraint and food restrictions and was secluded in his room during a 2022 stay at a Los Lunas center for children with mental and behavioral health issues, a new lawsuit alleges.  The suit, filed in state District Court in Santa Fe earlier this month, alleges staff at the privately run Sandhill Center abused and neglected children, including the boy, who is now 11. 

The center was understaffed and more interested in the profits from enrollment, and the state Children, Youth and Families Department, which licensed and oversaw the center, was aware of issues at Sandhill and allowed the abuse to happen, the suit alleges. … 

●VT Digger reports that 

In the past two years, two Florida residential facilities experienced outbreaks of violence that left multiple youths injured. Vermont’s human services agency continued to send teens there — even after the incidents. 

Yeah; that’s going to happen when in a state like progressive little Vermont, which keeps tearing apart families at the second highest rate in America – more than quadruple the national average. 

● WFLA-TV reports: 

As each day passes, Zy’kiria Bell’s death is still a mystery. The 17-year-old girl died on May 29 at Lake Academy, a state-owned facility in Tampa. It’s sites like this one that are entrusted to care for our most vulnerable youth. … 

8 On Your Side has learned the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office has launched a criminal investigation into Zy’kiria’s death. It comes as the Department of Juvenile Justice shut down the site. 

● The Columbus Dispatch reports that

Children sent to a state-licensed facility for mental health care are subjected to chokeholds and slaps, being pinned to the ground and verbally abused, and are regularly leaving the campus, according to an investigation conducted by Disability Rights Ohio.

Disability Rights Ohio Director Kerstin Sjoberg said neither Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services nor the center, Youth Intensive Services, are working to correct the problems. …

● MLive reports that 

The CEO of Wolverine Human Services says her agency is taking seriously a lawsuit alleging staff at a now-closed facility routinely sexually abused its minor wards.

● In Rhode Island the headline on this Providence Journal story about a “residential treatment center” sums things up well: Overdoses, assault and restraints: Inside a damning report on St. Mary's Home for Children

● The Arizona Mirror reports teenagers in foster care in that state told a legislative committee why they run away: The group homes in which they are placed are so horrible that, at first, even the streets seem like a better alternative. 

● From NBC Connecticut: 

Another teenager has filed a lawsuit claiming she was sexually assaulted by an employee at a state Department of Children and Families facility in Harwinton last year. … 

While she lived there from March of 2023 to May of 2023, the lawsuit said the 14-year-old female was raped and sexually assaulted by a facility employee. As a result, she reportedly suffered significant physical and emotional harm. 

This lawsuit comes after other allegations of sexual assault at the facility. 

From CBS News Detroit: 

One Republican Michigan state representative says she's been working on getting answers to disturbing allegations of abuse at state-run mental health facilities for children but says her party affiliation is preventing her from gaining much traction. 

State Rep. Jamie Thompson called for action on how state-run mental health facilities operate. Thompson's latest attempt comes after a lawsuit alleges that a 9-year-old patient at the Hawthorn Center was assaulted and employees did not intervene. 

WLNS-TV also has a story about this.

● The Nevada Independent reports: 

A January legislative audit identified seven care facilities for children that failed to adequately protect those in their care, with complaints ranging from children self-administering medication to substance abuse issues. 

 

THE OTHER HORRORS

● Some of the strongest backers of tearing apart even more families point to West Virginia as a model – not only because it takes away children at the highest rate in America, but also because that state has what the take-the-child-and-run crowd sees as an exemplary record of rushing to terminate children’s rights to their parents and dump them into adoptive homes.  NBC News has a story about how that worked out in one recent case. The headline on the story is: “White West Virginia couple accused of adopting Black children and forcing them to work ‘as slaves.’”

● Also in West Virginia, West Virginia Watch reports that 

A federal judge says Child Protective Services failed to respond and perform an adequate investigation in a high-profile case where Kanawha County children were found last fall locked in a shed without access to water or a toilet. 

“As a result, the children were left to suffer at the hands of their adoptive parents for months, until law enforcement officers eventually found the children locked in their house or in a detached shed, deprived of food, water, bathroom facilities, hygiene products and beds,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Cheryl Eifert wrote in an order.

● The Enterprise in Patrick County, Va., reports that the family policing system in that small county is failing so horrendously that “It would be impossible for children to have not been hurt” in foster care – according to the county’s juvenile court judge. 

● Family police agencies love to tout figures purportedly showing that when they, in effect, investigate themselves they find very little abuse in foster care. Next time that happens, please keep this in mind: In Texas, the Texas Tribune reports, the family police agency is so willfully blind to such abuse that a federal judge tried to fine the agency $100,000 – per day.  But the nation’s most right-wing federal appellate court stayed the fines   -- and ultimately removed the judge who tried to impose them.

● Among the many ways the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act fosters adoption-at-all-costs is a national Adoption Excellence Awards program. (That’s in addition to the bounties the law pays for every finalized adoption over a baseline number, even if the adoptions later fail.)  

 In 2024, Wyoming News Now reported, the winners of one of those awards were in the news for a different reason: 

Natrona County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Steven Marler, a formally nationally recognized foster parent.  Over the years, Marler and his wife, Kristen, have fostered over 60 children at their home on Casper Mountain. Now, Steven Marler is facing 26 felonies, including counts of child endangerment. 

Cowboy State Daily reported that one of those counts of endangerment is for allegedly kicking a child off a roof and not getting him medical attention.  The charges also include 20 counts “related to alleged sexual abuse of minors involving four children.” 

● From KABC-TV, Los Angeles: A story about a civil lawsuit filed by victims of horrific abuse both in their own home and then in foster care.  They’re suing Riverside County and the private agency that oversaw their foster care.  So let’s remember, if California private agencies get their way, it will be incredibly difficult for such children to sue in the future.  Yet one California news organization after another keeps writing news stories suggesting the real victims are the agencies! 

● Hawaii, 2021: six-year-old Ariel Sellers was allegedly adopted to death.  Though relatives wanted to take her in, she was placed with strangers.  Ultimately, they adopted her and changed her name to Isabella Kalua.  The foster/adoptive parents have been charged with murdering the child.  She allegedly died trapped in a dog cage with duct tape covering her mouth and nose. Honolulu Civil Beat reports that 

For more than two years, the Department of Human Services has stonewalled in accounting for its actions in the horrific death of Ariel Sellers, the 6-year-old Waimanalo girl whose adoptive parents are accused of murdering her.  This, despite federal law and state regulations that require disclosure of at least minimal information when children die or nearly die as the result of abuse and neglect. 

Now DHS can explain itself to a judge. 

But now there’s even more the Hawaii family police need to explain:

● Hawaii: 2024: Because the family police agency is stonewalling, a lot still is unknown, but as Honolulu Civil Beat reports, ten-year-old Geanna Bradley appears to have been a foster child.  The presumed foster parents obtained guardianship status – and were paid $1,961 per month to “care” for her.  Then, police allege, they “restrained her with duct tape [and] confined her to a tiny space while they collected money for her care” and ultimately killed her.

According to Hawaii News Now  Prosecutors say Geanna’s death was “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, manifesting exceptional depravity.” KHON-TV reports she suffered “multiple injuries to her face including her ears, eyes, forehead, cheeks, lips and a road rash-type of injury on her chin. Part of her nose bridge was missing.” 

Another child, this one known to have been adopted, also was found abused in the same home. 

● Another Civil Beat story has more details on this horrifying abuse and a demand that the state family police agency tell what it knows about the case, including not only what happened to the child who died, but also what happened to the other child “mistreated in almost unimaginable ways” in the same home.  

● Still on the case, Honolulu Civil Beat reports it turns out it took incompetence – or worse – in two states for Geanna Bradley to be taken from loving relatives and wind up in the foster home where she died. 

● Hawaii Public Radio got comment from Prof. Dorothy Roberts, author of Shattered Bonds and Torn Apart and a member of NCCPR's Board of Directors who said:

"This is just one example of a child who was harmed after the system took her from her home. As far as I could tell from the father who was interviewed, she would have been better off in his care than in the care of these people who abused her." 

● In a related case, Hawaii News Now reports that 

A new lawsuit accuses the state and Catholic Charities Hawaii of negligently placing another child in the same home where a little girl was allegedly tortured to death. 

● And in still another case Honolulu Civil Beat reports that

The state has tentatively agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a lawsuit over the mysterious death of a 3-year-old boy in state foster custody in 2017 on the Big Island.

One other thing to know about Hawaii: The state takes away children at a rate nearly 30% above the national average.

● In still another case, Hawaii News Now reports: 

A circuit court judge has ruled that the state was “grossly negligent” when it placed an eight-year-old boy in a foster home, where he was then repeatedly sexually abused for years.

● Here’s how John Hill of Civil Beat summed it all up: 

If the Legislature can’t be persuaded to demand accountability from the child welfare bureaucracy for the sake of — you know — the welfare of children, maybe they could do it on behalf of taxpayers. 

Because the lawsuits, settlements and verdicts against the Department of Human Services for botching their life-and-death job just keep piling up. 

The latest: $600,000 to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging the state negligently placed a teenage girl in a Kailua-Kona home where she was sexually assaulted. 

Negligent, in the sense that a state social worker placed the girl in that foster home even after the girl’s older sister allegedly warned that she had been sexually assaulted and harassed by a man living there.

●In North Carolina, 

The Fayetteville 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. 

Two stories about death in Kansas: 

●The Kansas Beacon reports on two foster youth who died while being warehoused in state offices. 

●From the Topeka Capital-Journal:

 Police in a small town near Wichita have publicly identified the child whose decomposing body was found in a backyard after officers were called to a home for an unrelated matter earlier in September. 

Rose Hill police chief Taylor Parlier on Friday identified the girl as Kennedy Jean Schroer, who is believed to have been about 6 years old when she died. Kennedy was born July 14, 2014, and was adopted in November 2018. Police believe she died in late 2020. ...

None of this should be a surprise in a state that has, for decades, overloaded its system by tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation.

● NewsNation reports that 

A northwest Indiana woman accused in the death of her 10-year-old foster child has been taken into custody in Michigan following a days-long search. … [Jennifer] Wilson has been charged with reckless homicide in connection with the death of 10-year-old Dakota Levi Stevens in late April.

● The Sacramento Bee reports that 

Sacramento city and county have paid a $300,000 settlement to the parents of an infant who died after he was allegedly wrongfully placed in foster care. 

● KOVR-TV, Sacramento reports: 

Young twin brothers drowned in a pool in Roseville last October. The Placer County Sheriff's Office on Tuesday said their foster caregiver has now been arrested in connection to their deaths. 

Schitara Victoria Page faces two counts of cruelty to a child by abuse, neglect or endangering health relating to the deaths of the 22-month-old boys. She faces two counts of special allegations of willful harm or injury resulting in death.

● KOTV in Tulsa reports: 

A Green Country mother filed a lawsuit against the Oklahoma Department of Human Services after she said the agency put her daughter in the care of a foster home where the girl was abused. 

The lawsuit says both of the toddler's biological parents told DHS Case workers about the abuse, but their concerns were ignored.

● WTVF-TV Nashville reports that 

Law enforcement officials are investigating why a group of teenagers have repeatedly run away from the same foster home on Haskins Chapel Road in Bedford County.  During the past two years, at least four Hispanic teenage girls have disappeared from this location.

● The Leader-Call in Mississippi reports that

A pair of foster parents in Ellisville are facing four counts of felony child abuse after Ellisville police found four children living in what were described as horrific conditions on Saturday night.

● From the Oregon Capital Chronicle

The Oregon Department of Human Services has agreed to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit filed by four former foster children who were sexually and physically abused in a foster home, court records show. … One of the victims in the case endured sexual abuse that led to a 30-year prison sentence for a former foster father in 2017. With detailed documents and testimony, the lawsuit alleges caseworkers repeatedly ignored signs of abuse and tried to cover up the abuse of one child who suffered seven broken bones – even as a criminal prosecution was underway.

● KRQE-TV in Albuquerque reports: 

A civil lawsuit against the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department involving a developmentally and intellectually delayed teen girl getting raped by her foster parents has been settled. The lawsuit claimed they put the girl with a known sexual predator. 

Clarence Garcia pled guilty to seven sexual abuse charges as part of a plea deal in January 2023. One of his victims included a vulnerable teen girl. “Beginning when she was 14 J.H., an intellectually and mentally delayed young woman, was continuously raped by Clarence Garcia for 16 months while in his supposed care,” said the victim’s attorney Kate Ferlic.

●KRQE-TV in Albuquerque reports on still another lawsuit against the New Mexico family police agency and a private foster care agency.  The case concerns a young boy who was 

hospitalized for two months, during which he told doctors he had been physically and sexually abused by his foster parents. He told doctors they pulled his tongue and kicked him.

The claims were later substantiated by CYFD, according to the lawsuit. … [A lawyer for the child’s grandparents] said before the child was placed in foster care, his grandparents offered to take him in, and even underwent a home evaluation by CYFD personnel. “Why was this boy not placed with his grandparents when at least, theoretically, CYFD prioritizes family placements over non-family placements,” he said.

● WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge, La., tells the story of the children of Diamon Bell: 

Bell first came to WAFB last year when her daughter was molested by another child at a different foster home, all while she’s been fighting to get all of her children back. She believes because she came forward to report what’s been happening, she’s faced retaliation from the DCFS case worker on her case. [A source inside DCFS]… confirms the mother’s story. The source says they have also witnessed the DCFS worker threatening to “never let her get her kids back.” … 

That child finally was returned – after being abused in still another foster home.  But other children remain in foster care: 

The source … says it is past time this mother got her kids back because they believe the children have been harmed far more in the state’s care than they ever have in their mother’s care. The source says the children have faced sexual, physical, and mental abuse and everything in between. 

● In Augusta County, Va., WHSV-TV reports:

Jessica Duff, 44, of Raphine, pleaded guilty to child sexual abuse charges in Augusta Circuit Court and was sentenced to five years in prison. The victim of the abuse was Duff’s adopted daughter.

●KOLD-TV Tucson reports that 

A man was sentenced to more than 200 years in prison for the sexual abuse of a child in his care. That is in addition to a current sentence 53-year-old Francisco Medina is serving from different cases.  Medina is a former foster parent who was convicted of six counts of sexual conduct with a minor under the age of 15, all class two felonies.  He was also convicted of molestation of a child, also a class two felony and a dangerous crime against children.

● KTVF-TV in Fairbanks, Alaska, reports: 

A 60-year-old Fairbanks man will serve 30 years in prison after forcing underage boys to have sex with him, sometimes giving the minors cigarettes or alcohol as part of the exchange. 

Paul Michael Worman pleaded guilty Tuesday to first-degree sexual abuse of a minor as part of an agreement reached between his attorney, Emily Cooper, and State Prosecutor Kathryn Mason. 

Trooper investigators discovered in 2020 that Worman had been a state-licensed foster care provider for more than two decades until allegations arose in 2017, saying that Worman was grooming the minors for sexual favors.

● 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. …

● From KJRH-TV, Oklahoma:

“A literal nightmare,” Alexis Fridenberg called her childhood foster, and ultimately adoptive, home.  At four years old, Fridenberg said she was placed into a home of “career” foster parents.  “That is what they got out of it, the money,” she said. … 

Alexis said her adoptive brother, the parents’ biological son, Sammy Fridenberg, sexually assaulted her daily from age 7 to 18. He now faces multiple charges. Court documents show other relatives have come forward alleging abuse as well.

● Fox13 Seattle reports that

The State of Washington has agreed to pay $15 million to three sisters who were sexually abused for years at a foster home in Centralia, according to attorneys representing them.  The three women allege the abuse spanned between 1990 and 2000, starting at ages four, five, and six, and lasted until they were teenagers. Two teenage sons of the foster parents are accused of carrying out the abuse. 

From KXII in Oklahoma:

 A Pontotoc County man, who created a foundation to help children in foster care, is accused of child sexual abuse.  According to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI), Michael Priest, 72, was arrested for allegedly committing several acts of sexual assault towards a child.

● From VT Digger: 

A former state Department for Children and Families employee has been charged with sexually assaulting a youth she was working with when she was employed by the department several years ago.

 ● From the Tampa Free Press           

The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office has arrested a youth counselor at A Kid's Place of Tampa Bay for allegedly engaging in sexual acts with a minor resident.

● From The Columbian: 

A Kelso man formerly employed as a Child Protective Services caseworker is facing charges of third-degree child molestation and communication with a minor for immoral purposes after he allegedly sexually abused a child under his care.

And finally…

● In New Jersey where New Brunswick Patch reports on a $25 million settlement for a victim of abuse in one foster home after another in the 1990s, they’ve done the one thing that makes it less likely that the same will happen today: They’ve significantly reduced the number of children they take away.