For part one, which illustrates how the horror stories go in all directions, click here.
If you don't see links to particular stories, hover over the name of the news organization to find them.
OVERVIEWS OF FAMILY POLICING FAILURE
● You hear it from family police agencies (a more accurate
term than “child welfare” agencies) all the time: We never take children
because of poverty alone. This investigative report from WABE
Public Radio in Atlanta and ProPublica could have been
called: Like hell they don’t! It documents hundreds of cases in which
Georgia family police tore apart families for lack of housing – and nothing
else. Read it and watch how, paragraph after paragraph, the madness of
the system unfolds.
There’s
the caseworker who probably didn’t even know she was admitting her agency
routinely violates federal law requiring “reasonable efforts” to keep families
together, when she seemed to be telling the mother at the center of the story
that the agency isn’t obligated to do a damn thing.
Or the
judge who wouldn’t return the children because “these children have lived in
unstable living arrangements long enough” – dooming the children to be split
from each other into separate foster homes, moved from placement to placement
to the point that two of them had to spend a night in a family police agency
office.
Or if the
harm to children isn’t enough, there’s the fact that taxpayers are spending
vastly more on foster care than it would cost to just provide the
housing. And not just Georgia taxpayers. If the case is
eligible for federal aid, and it probably is, we all paid to wreak havoc on
this family.
● WABE went on to publish and broadcast
another stunning story. It starts with one of the worst
practices of family policing – and then documents one failure after another
after another. That’s why this post to the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog is
called All the failures of family policing in a
single case - and it's not an unusual case.
● The Colorado Trust reports on
the way housing isn’t just the reason for so many needless removals of children
from their families, it’s also the trigger for so many of those “other reasons”
family police agencies love to talk about to divert attention from the
confusion of poverty with “neglect.”
●
Sometimes one small detail from a government document tells a huge story –
especially when a good reporter adds a little context. Rolling Stone has published a superb deep
dive that begins as an exploration of needless family
destruction because a pregnant mother smoked pot, then expands into an in-depth
look at the confusion of poverty with neglect. It includes this
paragraph:
Some states practically name poverty in their child
separation policies: If “family finances are insufficient to support unusual
need[s],” child separation could be justified, Arizona’s DCF policy reads.
(Using data from 2022, the Federal Reserve reported that 43 percent of parents
— more than 14 million families — did not have enough savings to cover a $400
emergency expense.)
● The
trauma of families desperate to reunite is brought home in this 20-minute New Yorker documentary. Here's the trailer:
It’s stories like this, again from ProPublica, that make me glad someone invented the word “gobsmacked.” If you drop everything and read it right now, you’ll thank me. No one excerpt does it justice, but here’s one that gives at least a hint:
Had she considered or was she even aware of the cultural background of the birth family and child whom she was recommending permanently separating? (The case involved a baby girl of multiracial heritage.) Baird answered that babies have “never possessed” a cultural identity, and therefore are “not losing anything,” at their age, by being adopted. Although when such children grow up, she acknowledged, they might say to their now-adoptive parents, “Oh, I didn’t know we were related to the, you know, Pima tribe in northern California, or whatever the circumstances are.”
"The Pima tribe is located in the Phoenix metropolitan area."
There’s
also a fascinating discussion of the internal disputes roiling the very
prestigious and very influential Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment
of Child Abuse and Neglect. As that suggests, the story focuses on
cases in Colorado – but it’s happening everywhere.
● KUSA-TV reports, a
judge has issued a scathing order demanding that a county family police agency
release its own internal investigation of one of the cases discussed in the ProPublica
story, as well as others in that county.
● The ProPublica
story came on the heels of one on the same issue for ProPublica and The New Yorker. A lawyer discussed in that story turns up in this story from
KUSA-TV in Denver. The story
illustrates how easy it is for the foster care system to become the ultimate
middle-class entitlement – step right up and take a poor person’s child for
your very own.
● Hey,
remember when Texas passed laws setting reasonable limits on the vast power of
the state’s family police agency, including higher standards before that agency
can tear children from everyone they know and love? Remember how
that sparked all that fearmongering about how it would lead to an increase in
horrific child abuse? Remember how that fearmongering was led by
groups like Texas CASA (which presumably wants to distract everyone from the
huge study showing that their program is a failure)?
Remember how their media allies at the Dallas Morning News and
the Texas Tribune bought into it all and amplified it all?
In April, The Imprint has gone back to see what
actually happened. Sorry CASA, they found that the fears
“have not panned out.” From the story:
According to data from the state’s “Child Maltreatment Fatalities and Near Fatalities Annual Report” published last month, the decreased reliance on foster care has not resulted in an increase in child deaths.
Fatalities where child abuse or neglect was confirmed have continued to decline through the recent period of fewer foster care removals. In 2023, 164 children died, which is 18% fewer than in 2021 and 30% fewer than in 2019. That places Texas from a spot well above the national average on child fatality rates, to below the nationwide rate.
● Later in the year, the Dallas
Morning News did a story about the new laws, but instead of the
usual fearmongering, this story profiles a family that might well have
benefitted had the laws been in effect sooner.
● In The New York Review of
Books, Kristen Martin reviews Investigating Families,
Prof. Kelley Fong’s outstanding examination of how family policing really
works. Martin writes:
Investigating Families humanizes [the] data by focusing on the everyday horror of CPS involvement, reconstructing and analyzing several women’s experiences of having their parenting scrutinized and threatened by a state agency that has the power to take their children away. CPS may see these investigations as routine, but for mothers, Fong writes, “the experience can’t be pushed aside so easily, precisely because CPS represents the agency poised to brand them bad mothers, to take away what they treasure most.” …
We would do well to examine why we continue to ignore the horror that is unfolding for millions of families in America each year, why we are reluctant to listen when women like Helen, Jazmine, Tatiana, and Sabrina tell us what things are like.
● On the EPPiC podcast Prof.
Fong discusses her book, including how families learn to “play the game”
and tell the family police what they want to hear.
● It’s not
just the United States. In this video, one of
Britain’s foremost “child welfare” scholars, Prof. Andrew Bilson summarizes
research from around the world on the question “Does child protection reduce
harm?” Since I’m highlighting it here, you can probably guess the
answer.
● Twenty
years ago, Youth Today revealed the
stunning results of a study of Court-Appointed Special Advocates commissioned
by the National CASA Association itself. The study found that the program
didn’t work. The story concluded that National CASA’s desperate efforts
to spin the findings “can border on duplicity.”
In 2024, The Imprint surveyed the research on
CASA. It finds no evidence that CASA works – and the most rigorous study
finds it actually does harm. And it does this harm at a cost of $477
million per year, most of it taxpayer funds. Think of it: $477 million
thrown away on a program that fails at best, does harm at worst. That’s
more than double the total federal spending on the Child Abuse Prevention and
Treatment Act.
As for how
CASA and its various chapters spin these findings – well, read the story for
yourself.
There is more on CASA in NCCPR’s 2021
presentation to the Kempe Center international conference.
● Despite this dismal track record,
CASA is explicitly included as an option for "representation" of
children in court under the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment
Act. Another egregious practice encouraged by CAPTA is mandatory reporting.
On this 50th Anniversary of the law's enactment, Dr. Mical Raz, author of Abusive Policies: How the American Child
Welfare System Lost its Way, explains in Time magazine why
that should be repealed.
NEW YORK
Because it’s the nation’s media capital and home to the
nation’s most active community of family advocates and family defenders,
there’s always a lot of news from New York City. But also because of those
advocates and defenders, New York City’s system is less bad than most. So when scrolling through the next few items,
please keep in mind: Wherever you are is probably worse:
●
We begin with this from The New York Times:
A sweeping class-action lawsuit filed against New York City on Tuesday argues that the agency that investigates child abuse and neglect routinely engages in unconstitutional practices that traumatize the families it is charged with protecting.
The lawsuit says that investigators for the Administration for Children’s Services deceive and bully their way into people’s homes, where they rifle through families’ most private spaces, strip-search children and humiliate parents.
The story
zeroes in on how much these practices hurt the children ACS claims it is
protecting, such as a child known in the lawsuit as Y.A.:
[O]nce outgoing and cheerful, [Y.A.] has been in therapy, her parents said, and blames herself for the investigations.
Y.A. … had been asked to write a story about the home investigations. In the story, [her mother] Ms. Azar said, Y.A. had written, “I am a bad kid” and “I need to behave at school or Mommy and Daddy will be arrested.”
Ms. Azar … said she often wondered while investigators were in her home, “What was happening with all the kids that actually needed your attention?”
Another
parent said that
one investigator asked her 6-year-old daughter if she was suicidal. Her daughter had not previously known the word. “From that day on, she started saying — when they would come — she felt suicidal.”
The story
includes a link to the full lawsuit complaint.
●
The lawsuit is so important (and so well-written) that there have since been at
least ten other news stories. I have links to all of them and an analysis
of some of the news coverage in this NCCPR Blog post.
And in this post, I simply
reprint the opening section of the lawsuit complaint – because it’s that
well-written.
● It’s not
just parents and their lawyers who are saying it. The lawyers who actually
represent New York City children in these cases agree. They write about it in City
Limits. They write:
[T]he aggressive and coercive tactics ACS employs to investigate, and the volume of children and families that it investigates, have created an apparatus that harms more children than it protects.
● Some of
the issues in the New York class action also arise in three individual lawsuits
in South Carolina. Kaiser Health News reports that
the lawsuits
accuse the state of forcing boys and girls to undergo traumatic genital exams during child abuse investigations, even when no allegations of sexual abuse have been raised.
In one
case
a 16-year-old girl claims she was subjected to painful vaginal exams against her will, even after she denied being sexually abused. She felt as if she was “being raped” during the forensic medical exam, her complaint asserts. …
Claims that the exams are comparable to normal pediatric checkups are “garbage,” said Donnie Cox, a civil rights attorney in Carlsbad, Calif.
“At the time they’re happening, they’re scary as hell and it really does traumatize children on top of the trauma of being removed from their homes,” said Cox, who has represented plaintiffs in similar lawsuits. “They’re using these kids, basically, as pieces of evidence, and you can’t do that.”
The state
family police agency has an interesting defense. It says such exams
are “standard procedure.” And the head of a trade association for
“children’s advocacy centers,” where many such exams are performed, says the
real problem is agencies aren’t doing enough of them.
● The Imprint reports on a series
of meetings in which families and their advocates told some of New York City’s
biggest names in family policing – private agencies that have been around in
some cases for a century or more - how much harm they have done. No
surprise there. Here’s the surprise: The agencies’ response boiled down to –
well yes, you’re right. Here’s how the story begins:
A pediatrician imploring fellow physicians to stop wrenching newborns from their mothers. A social worker who doesn’t want to report kids in dirty clothes to CPS. A case planner living with regrets that he failed to avoid a family separation through foster care.
These rare, firsthand stories from the frontlines of the child welfare system are not often shared with the public. But they’re examples of the remarkable testimony presented over three sessions in New York City this year, gatherings titled The Reckoning: Transforming Systems to Achieve Family Justice and Integrity. More than 600 social workers, nonprofit executives and staff, legal experts and advocates for parents’ rights have joined the hours-long convenings that began in March. …
● The
allegation was unfounded. The children were never removed. But
still, a false allegation of educational neglect caused so much trauma that it
destroyed a struggling family. Decades later, Stacy Torres, now a professor of
sociology at the University of California, San Francisco, writes in Vital City that
the wounds have not healed.
Her plea
is that the agency that wrecked her family, New York City’s Administration for
Children’s Services, not respond to the latest horrifying child abuse deaths by
rushing to investigate more families and take away more
children. She writes:
Inflicting reactive, punitive bureaucratic machinery on struggling families like mine kills in other ways. At nearly 45, I’m still grieving the day child welfare entered my life, killing trust, belonging and relationships that once seemed so durable I never imagined leaving home or my sisters — until one day I had no choice but to flee in order to save myself.
● And
using a New York case as an example, Anjana Samant, senior staff attorney for
the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, offers a superb overview of the system’s
failings, and a series of concrete solutions, on the Justice By Design podcast.
● In New
York, thanks to a class-action lawsuit,
it’s illegal to tear children from their homes and throw them into foster care
just because they “witnessed domestic violence” – typically a husband or
boyfriend beating the child’s mother. But the Administration for Children’s
Services considers itself free to harass domestic violence victims and their
children by putting them under constant surveillance. So now there’s
another lawsuit. The New York Times has an excellent story,
including lots of original material. But the story would have been even
more excellent had the Times fully credited the Daily
News for reporting on the suit first,
back when it was filed.
● Gothamist
reports on another New York City suit over the same issue.
● A
Mississippi prosecutor is taking this kind of persecution a step
further. The Mississippi Free Press reports the
prosecutor is trying to take away a mother’s children because, in effect, she
allegedly allowed her 11-year-old to get in the way of a police officer’s
bullet.
● But in
California a bill would chip away at the practice. The bill would make clear to “mandated
reporters” that they are not required to report battered mothers to the family
police. (Yes, that should be obvious – but, in fact, it’s
routine.) As the Orange County
Register reports:
With looming threats that they could lose their child, even temporarily, or be charged with child neglect, oftentimes domestic violence victims opt against reporting abuse, said Chris Negri, the associate director of public policy strategies at the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. (The coalition has signed on to support the bill.) And abusers can use that threat — the fear that their children will be taken away — to coerce victims from reporting abuse, he said.
“The current system is really counterproductive. It punishes survivors, and it encases them in this Catch-22,” said Negri. “We’re saying you have to leave, you have to get out of this situation so your child doesn’t witness a domestic violence situation, but if you do, your child might be taken away from you.”
“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” he said.
● Gothamist
reports that
Black communities in New York City have long said the city's child welfare agency has subjected them to an unmatched degree of scrutiny and that their families have borne the brunt of forced separations. Now, a new analysis of city data by the New York Civil Liberties Union finds that the agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, has furthered racial disparities the group and other advocates say are a hallmark of the child welfare system.
● The city’s family defense providers show, in a New York Daily News op-ed why all of this illustrates the urgency of passing “family Miranda” legislation.
_________
● A section of this review is devoted to stories about America coming to terms with what it used to do to Native Americans. But Reveal, the documentary series from the Center for Investigative Reporting begins its story about what’s happening now, involving a powerful Utah family and a Native American child this way:
In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child.
Actually,
“startling” doesn’t begin to describe it.
●
And here, OSV News reports on another case where
the same dynamic is at play.
● For
decades, we’ve said states grossly underestimate the rate of abuse in foster
care – indeed they don’t even try to find out. Now, the Associated Press reports,
the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
confirms it. (And be sure to read the last paragraph to see what HHS planned to
do about it – namely, nothing.)
●
A case in Upstate New York illustrates the horrifying double standards of
family police agencies when it comes to abuse in foster care. It’s a
tragic illustration of why independent studies find vastly more such abuse than
reported in official figures.
News 12 Westchester/Hudson Valley
reports that in this case, children were taken because of the
mother’s health and living conditions – which sure sounds like poverty confused
with neglect. Relatives were turned down in favor of a
stranger. One dedicated caseworker saw that the foster stranger was
allegedly abusing the children and reported it repeatedly. So, she
says, the family police agency fired her. I could tell you how this
story ends, but you probably already know. And see also this story
from the Mid Hudson News. The Albany Times Union has
more about the case.
●
Why do family police agencies so often turn a blind eye to rampant abuse in
group homes and institutions? The head of the family police agency in Rhode
Island gave a chilling answer. I have a column about it in Rhode Island
Current
● There is no indication anyone
accused the parents of one-year-old Nova Bryant of beating her, or starving
her, or torturing her. Instead, according to WRTV in Indianapolis
Bryant relied on a feeding tube and [her mother, Celena] Conkright has disorders, including ADHD and ADD. Conkright said DCS removed Bryant from her care two months after she was born. “They said I wasn’t capable of taking care of her, they said I wasn’t learning fast enough,” Conkright said.
Here’s what happened in the last of the three foster homes in which Bryant was placed:
The Indiana Department of Child Services is taking action to revoke a Brazil woman’s foster license after the drowning death of her 1-year-old foster daughter, Nova Bryant.
Bryant's foster mother, Hailynn Volpatti, is charged with Neglect of a Dependent Resulting in Death, a level 1 felony. Volpatti pleaded not guilty Friday and her jury trial is scheduled for April 15.
● Think
you know all of the insane financial incentives that encourage the needless
separation of children from their families? Wanna bet? Allow Prof. Josh
Gupta-Kagan to introduce you to another one, in this
essay for The Imprint, excerpted from his article in the
current Family
Justice Journal.
● This story in Reason,
involves giving the old practice of using child abuse hotlines to harass people
you don’t like a 21st-century twist. There’s a group
online that, Skenazy writes, “makes fun of people it believes are Christian
fundamentalists.” It appears someone in the group did far worse than
that to a family that was on a road trip through Florida.
● Family
policing apologists also have taken to acknowledging, grudgingly, that, well
yes, foster care can be traumatic, but, they claim, what happens in children’s
own homes must be worse. Abundant research says
otherwise. And before you buy the apologists’ claims, read this story from Oregon Public
Broadcasting.
● WitnessLA looks at the meaningless hoops the Los Angeles County
family police agency forces parents to jump through before their children can
get them back, and the rush to terminate children’s rights to their parents (a
more accurate term than termination of parental rights) if they don’t jump
through every one.
● On
the Proximity Process podcast Kathleen
Creamer, Managing Attorney of the Family Advocacy Unit at Community Legal
Services of Philadelphia discusses the enormous harm done to families by
America’s obsession with that termination of children’s rights to their
parents.
● When
children are taken from their parents forever and those children are adopted by
strangers, the parents often want to leave their children something to remember
them by, perhaps a cherished keepsake or a family photo from happier times.
So they give these personal effects to the family police agency to pass on to
the children. But in Minnesota, they don’t pass them on. That’s the topic
of this story from Minnesota Public
Radio, and this post to the NCCPR Blog.
● In 2022, the Kentucky family police took away a
child from grandparents who just needed help to handle his behavioral
problems. He was institutionalized. He ran away, and he
died. In 2024, the Kentucky family police agency took away a child
whose adoptive parents just needed help to cope with her behavioral problems.
Unfortunately, you can guess what happened next. I have a column about it in the Lexington Herald-Leader.
●
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. ABC News Nightline has
followed up on the story including bodycam video of the arrest.
●
In Minnesota, which takes away all children at a rate far above the national
average and has, by far, the worst record of racial disparity when it comes to
tearing apart Native American families, children of color don’t just lose
family and friends. As The Imprint reports:
Data compiled by the state’s Department of Human Services for this outlet show that in 2022, more than 40% of the 4,051 Minnesota foster children placed with strangers were Native American, African American, Asian American/Pacific Islander or Latino. Of the licensed, non-relative foster parents who received them, twice that percentage were white. In some counties where foster youth are mostly children of color, 100% of foster parents are white, state statistics show.
● But Minnesota
also has become the latest state to enact major legislation geared toward
curbing that ugly record. As The Imprint reports,
after passing the state House of Representatives unanimously, the governor
signed the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare
Disproportionality Act. What makes this all the more remarkable is
that it happened despite what reads like a desperate push by the
Minneapolis Star Tribune to foment a foster-care panic. (But
hey, take heart Star Tribune, now you have a new law you can
scapegoat for every future tragedy.)
● Though
some Native Americans have expressed concerns that such laws could dilute the
impact of the Indian Child Welfare Act, Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a
citizen of the White Earth Nation, doesn’t see it that way. As The Imprint reports:
“Other states should follow our lead,” Flanagan said. “As a Native woman, this bill hit home. So I’m incredibly grateful for all of the folks behind me who helped us get here today.”
●
Citing multiple examples of needless removal of children from the homes of
disabled parents, the U.S. Department of Justice has accused Arizona’s family
police agency of repeatedly violating the federal Americans with
Disabilities Act.
● Brooke
Scianna, now age 23, never needed to be torn from her family and
institutionalized in a group home when she was 16. Now, KNXV-TV reports, she
and her parents have settled a lawsuit against the Arizona family police and
the group home for what was done to her there.
● Because
Arizona tears apart families at a rate far above the national average, children
are dumped into substandard placements, like that time a child with
Type 1 diabetes, needlessly taken from a loving home, died in an Arizona group
home. What, you think you already saw that story? No. KNXV’s new investigation concerns another child
in another Arizona group home – including some harrowing
police bodycam video.
● Also in
Arizona, NCCPR explains in the AZ
Mirror, it’s a good news, bad news story:
Here’s the good news: Contrary to what one state legislator seems to believe, the Arizona Department of Child Safety is not in the grip of a global satanic sex trafficking cabal. Here’s the bad news: The real problems at DCS are way worse.
●
When family police agencies try to treat substance addiction as a moral failing
instead of as a disease, some of us have said: Well, you wouldn’t treat cancer as
a moral failing, would you? Of course not. Except in North
Carolina, that is. Check out this story from NC
Newsline.
● 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?”
● In
Nevada, even the family police agency in metropolitan Las Vegas wants to stop
having to take calls for so-called “educational neglect.” As the Nevada
Current explains the director of family services for
that agency told a legislative committee
“What we’re finding is that in a system that is
overtaxed and overburdened where workers are getting sometimes two or three
reports a day, getting an educational neglect report is adding to a workload
that is really, in our view, taking them away from being able to do the work
they need to do.”
● After
the Vermont Center for Parent Representation documented case after case of
families wrongly listed on that state’s blacklist of alleged child abusers, the
former head of the state family police agency itself, Bill Young, was so
shocked that he came out of retirement to help change the law. As WCAX-TV reports:
“After about two months, I realized oh my god, it’s true. These stories are true,” he said.
Young says the story that struck him the most was that of a seven-year-old girl taken into custody by a judge after she got a bruise on her back from sledding. DCF was convinced the mother was abusive even after the sledding story was corroborated by the school nurse. “[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.”
The
law has now been changed.
The new law also has the potential to improve standards for deciding when to
initiate an investigation.
● It
doesn’t get as much attention as the pervasive racism but there is another
group of families who automatically have targets on their backs. The
Guardian has been following that issue for years, and has an in-depth report from
a state that’s notorious for this kind of discrimination: Oregon.
● When a
report alleging “child abuse” is “substantiated” it typically means only that a
caseworker decided, entirely on her or his own authority, that it was slightly
more likely than not that the “abuse” or “neglect” occurred and the subject of
the investigation did it. So it’s no surprise that in state after
state, as soon as the accused has a chance to tell their side of the story
before even a quasi-neutral hearing officer, large proportions of those
findings are overturned. The latest example: Massachusetts. The Boston Globe reports that
when the process was made minimally less unfair, the proportion of successful
appeals rose from 5% to 40% -- even though the deck still is stacked against
the accused.
One
example of a successful appeal: A mother is slammed to the ground by her
boyfriend. She takes the kids, goes to the police and gets a
restraining order. But because the boyfriend slammed her to the
ground so hard the children could hear it in another room, the Massachusetts
Department of Children and Families said she was guilty of
neglect. Oh, and if you’re wondering who called in the complaint to
DCF – it was the abusive boyfriend.
● If you think Darth Vader was bad, wait ‘till you see how the family police
operated a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. For The Imprint, Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan writes
about it, and what we can learn from it in our galaxy right now.
“CHILD WELFARE’S” WAR AGAINST NATIVE AMERICA (AND OTHER INDIGINOUS PEOPLES)
● The U.S.
Department of the Interior released a report on the ghastly scope of the effort
to eradicate Native America by tearing apart native families and
institutionalizing children in hideous so-called “boarding
schools.” It’s not part of the distant past; the network of schools
existed, and children died there, until 1970. As The Imprint reported:
The atrocities occurring within school walls range from abusive to culturally genocidal, with matrons, priests and other school employees using various methods to erase the cultures and identities of tribal children. …
In a rare and sweeping admission, the federal agency that oversaw [the boarding schools] is now calling for a formal national apology to the descendants of those who died or suffered rampant abuse and trauma in this system.
Somehow,
that doesn’t seem like enough. Especially because, as the story
explains:
“The most important thing is that our work to tell
the truth about the Federal Indian boarding school system be paired with
action,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, a citizen of the
Bay Mills Indian Community, noted in the report. “As we have learned over the
past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past. Their
legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to
experience in communities across the United States.”
●
They got the apology. President Biden 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?
● Of course, if the federal government and the states were
serious about, at long last, compensating Native Americans for what family
policing has done to them – and continues to do to them – they could follow
Canada’s example.
● Even the federal report underestimated the extent of the
horror. At the end of the year The Washington Post weighed in
with a massive investigation. They found more than three times as many deaths
as the federal report documented. A
historian thinks the real number may be vastly higher still: 40,000. Another historian says they were not schools,
they were “prison camps.”
Wherever possible the Post published
the names of the children who died in the boarding schools. Post reporters followed one caravan bringing
back the bodies of children from Pennsylvania to Montana. They also offered an overview of the history and motivation
for this evil.
● Most of
the attention finally being paid to these horrors has focused on institutions
run directly by the government. But the horrors of “child welfare”
always have been, and remain, the ultimate public-private
partnership. Another Washington Post
story examines the
sexual abuse that pervaded institutions run by the Catholic
Church. And again, this isn´t ancient history. These institutions
existed until 1969. (Of course, we don´t have places anything like
this today, now they´ve rebranded as “residential treatment centers” – and
there’s a whole other section of this year-in-review about them.)
●
Prominent proponents of tearing apart families today sometimes suggest that
some parents simply choose to be drug addicts and that’s what makes them poor.
I recalled those cruel comments when I read this part of another story about
the Interior Department report, from The 74:
The final report, released last week, also documented how the boarding school system negatively impacted genetics and health outcomes for Native families, who for generations have had the nation’s highest rates of substance abuse, suicidal ideation and chronic illnesses, such diabetes, arthritis, and cancer.
“As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland wrote in the report’s opening letter. “Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.”
● In words
and pictures, The Imprint documents an
oral history project that’s also an oral healing project for survivors of the
“boarding schools.”
●
And it still goes on and on: There was excellent reporting this year on two
states that destroy astounding numbers of Native
American families every year, and the state officials who don’t give a damn
about it. I have a short blog post
about it, including links to excellent reporting from the Montana
Free Press, South Dakota Searchlight and the Sioux
Falls Argus-Leader.
Using
child welfare to try to destroy native peoples is not unique to the United
States, of course.
● The
Associated Press reported this year on a bombshell report from a
Royal Commission inquiry in New Zealand. According to the story:
Of 650,000 children and vulnerable adults in state, foster, and church care between 1950 and 2019 — in a country that today has a population of just 5 million — nearly a third endured physical, sexual, verbal or psychological abuse. Many more were exploited or neglected, the report said. The figures were likely higher, though precise numbers would never be known because complaints were disregarded and records were lost or destroyed. ...
Children were removed arbitrarily and unfairly from their families, the report said, and the majority of New Zealand’s criminal gang members and prisoners are believed to have spent time in care.
As in Australia and Canada, Indigenous children were targeted for placement in harsher facilities and subject to worse abuse. The majority of children in care were Māori, despite the group comprising less than 20% of New Zealand’s population during the period examined.
And if you
think America is different – well that’s what they thought in New Zealand, too:
“New Zealanders just don’t think this thing would happen, that abuse on this scale would ever happen in New Zealand,” the prime minister said. “We always thought that we were exceptional and different, and the reality is we’re not.”
● Later, 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. …
“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.”
● "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.
RACISM
●
There’s still another study out documenting
racial bias in family policing. In this case: which families doctors
report as potential child abusers and which they don’t. Even when
you factor in poverty the results are exactly what you’d expect – or at least
what you should expect by now. Unfortunately, the study authors have
a solution that may well make things worse. But in a commentary about the study
for MedPage Today called “Child Protective Services
Is Being Weaponized Against Our Black Patients,” Dr. Onyi Okeke has better
ideas.
● The Imprint has an excellent overview of
a landmark report on racism in family policing produced by the New York State
Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
From the
story:
A number of the group’s eight recommendations focus on shifting away from the longstanding, nationwide practice of “mandated reporting.” Advocates and parents who testified at public hearings over the past two years say that system has produced a flood of baseless abuse and neglect allegations phoned in to authorities, with terrified families left in the wake of visits from child protective services.
● Remember
the Tennessee children who were torn from their parents and thrown into foster
care because the parents committed the crime of Driving While Black?
Now, Tennessee Lookout reports, the
mother is suing. And with the lawsuit come new details about what the
family endured:
According
to the lawsuit, before the children were taken, even a state trooper showed
more humanity than “child welfare” agency caseworkers:
“Trooper Clark told (DCS caseworkers) Pelham and Medina that Clayborne was a good mother, that she should be released so that she would not be separated from her children, that the kids were not being neglected or abused, and that it would be best for everyone for Clayborne to stay with the children,” the lawsuit said.
The
caseworkers took the children anyway. And after the family was
reunited:
Even after they were returned, the kids have displayed signs of trauma: the couple’s now-six-year-old son begs his mother “please don’t let them come back and take us.” He experiences nightmares and wets the bed. Another child “has a visceral reaction to seeing police."
Tennessee Lookout also reports that
a judge has ruled the caseworkers are not covered by immunity.
DRUGS
●
You may need to read this excerpt from a story by The Marshall Project and
Reveal twice, because the first time you may think: Wait that
can’t be right. Oh yes it can:
Across the country, hospitals are dispensing medications to patients in labor, only to report them to child welfare authorities when they or their newborns test positive for those very same substances on subsequent drug tests, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.
The positive tests are triggered by medications routinely prescribed to millions of birthing patients in the U.S. every year. The drugs include morphine or fentanyl for epidurals or other pain relief, anxiety medications, and two different blood pressure meds prescribed for C-sections.
Please
keep this in mind whenever you hear politicians and family police agencies
fearmonger about parental “drug abuse.”
●
ChildTrends summarizes the research on what works, and what does not, when it
comes to pregnancy and substance use. Bottom line: the family policing approach
makes everything worse. As ChildTrends explains:
Data show that certain policies are associated with positive and negative outcomes. For example, in states that consider prenatal substance use to be a crime, the policy is associated with a 45 percent increase in overdose deaths among pregnant women, following implementation of this criminalization. Among all policies that involve child welfare and/or law enforcement, data suggest these policies are associated with no decrease in prenatal substance use, less use of prenatal care and addiction treatment, a 10-18 percent increase in babies born exposed, and more children entering foster care.
In contrast, policies that fund treatment for prenatal substance use are associated with a 45 percent decrease in overdose deaths for pregnant women, and those that prioritize treatment access in cases of prenatal substance use are associated with more prenatal care use and healthier birth outcomes.
●
For the authoritative health news
site Stat, a psychiatrist and a nurse practitioner
specializing in addiction write:
Pregnant people and new mothers who are being treated for opioid addiction often have to fight to keep their children out of the hands of child protective services. But it’s a fight they shouldn’t have to face.
They’re active in treatment. They’re not using illegal drugs. Yet child protective services (CPS) often take their babies away — not because they’re unfit mothers, but because they’re being judged on falsehoods.
● A new study demonstrates the harm of
harassing families where a newborn tests positive for marijuana
exposure. Such newborns were no more likely to experience abuse or
neglect than those who tested negative or who weren’t tested. And,
of course, “Black and multiracial newborns were significantly more likely to be
tested for substance exposure at birth.”
● But that
hasn’t stopped the family police. 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 Dobbs decision is encouraging states to
ratchet up the harm.
● Tearing
children from their parents because the parents are receiving
medication-assisted treatment to control drug addiction doesn’t just impose
enormous needless trauma on the children. As The Imprint points out in this two-part series,
it also happens to be illegal. But when has the law ever applied to the family
police or the family courts?
● KFF 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 Iowa,
a father tells the Des Moines Register:
“The sad part is that these doctors don’t realize that even if the kids aren’t taken away, even if the parents are innocent, how it can mess up an entire family. They have no understanding of what it does when somebody comes to your door unannounced with the threat of taking away your kids.”
I have a blog post on the case,
with a link to the Register story.
● CNN reports on how some
hospitals finally are moving to put the needs of children first. They’re no
longer as willing to automatically turn in to the family police anyone who’s
pregnant but is using drugs – because doing that is the perfect way to scare
new mothers away from prenatal care and giving birth in a hospital.
Stateline also has a story about
it:
Some states and hospital systems have updated their
policies on drug testing for pregnant women and newborns, aiming to better
support patients’ treatment and recovery from substance use disorder and combat
racial disparities in testing and reporting.
● WBUR Public Radio reports
on one of those hospitals -- the largest
hospital system in Massachusetts
● It’s bad
enough that hospitals routinely test pregnant women for drugs without their
consent, and then routinely report a positive result to the family
police. The Marshall Project and Reveal report on
the common practice of doing it based on tests that are wrong up to 50% of the
time.
●
InvestigateTV, the national investigative arm of Gray Television, also found
serious problems with the accuracy of the tests in some cases.
MANDATORY
REPORTING
● NCCPR
has released a new Issue Paper. It’s all about the enormous harm of mandatory
child abuse reporting laws and why mandatory reporting should
be replaced by permissive reporting.
● WitnessLA perfectly sums up the
harm of mandatory reporting laws in a story that begins this way:
Mandated reporting laws have led to a flood of calls to report suspected child abuse and neglect, burying calls about kids who are in critical danger, while subjecting many more families whose children are safe to unnecessary surveillance and separation.
● KFF has an overview of
the harm of mandatory child abuse reporting laws, focused largely on Colorado,
where a commission is studying those laws.
● That Colorado
Commission did something surprising.
They said they would not recommend a damn thing about who should report
and when they should report it until they first come up with proposals to the legislature
for ways to narrow the definitions of “abuse” and “neglect” According to The Denver
Post:
Colorado’s definition of criminal child abuse and neglect is too broad and should be narrowed to avoid conflating circumstances like poverty or homelessness with neglect and abuse, the task force members wrote in the report.
The 12-page report itself is
well worth reading.
● Colorado
may have learned from Massachusetts. Remember how the Massachusetts “Child
Advocate,” Maria Mossaides, spent more than a year propagandizing a commission
she chaired in an effort to get it to recommend further expanding mandatory
child abuse reporting? Remember how, after hearing what Mossaides didn’t
want them to hear, the commission rebelled and
recommended nothing? Well, now Massachusetts legislative leaders are
actually proposing to narrow mandatory reporting. As the Boston Globe reports:
Massachusetts House leaders are pushing a proposal that would free doctors, hospital officials, and others from requirements to report suspected neglect to child welfare officials solely because a baby is born exposed to drugs, offering a dramatic shift in the state's approach to child welfare reporting. …
The measure marks a rare instance in which lawmakers are seeking to pare back, instead of expand, the state's mandated reporter law, under which critics say Black and Latino families are disproportionately the target of abuse and neglect allegations.
Even
Mossaides now claims to be for it. Funny, though: She never
mentioned supporting this idea in all that time she was running a commission on
this very topic.
●
There are plenty of mandated reporters who want to be mandated supporters and
chafe at what the family policing system forces them to do. In the authoritative British medical
journal The Lancet, two US pediatricians
write:
[W]e have often felt complicit witnessing our physician and other health-care colleagues dismiss an abuse diagnosis easily within middle-class white families while over-evaluating and subsequently reporting Black and Brown children for, say, accidental falls from bed. If the mandate of paediatrics in general, and child abuse paediatricians in particular, is protecting the young, it has become clear to both of us that the current system is not working as it should.
● And in The Hill,
a call for radical change – from foster parents who write that such change
should include:
We should stop mandated reporting — doctors, teachers and social workers shouldn’t be acting as agents of the police. And we should discourage the use of child welfare hotlines, which all too often are used not for reporting real abuse but as means for harassment of a former intimate partner, a tenant or others. Keep reports confidential but not anonymous, and stop terrorizing already vulnerable children and parents, because this largely happens to poor people.
●
Prof. Josh Gupta Kagan, a lawyer, joins with a social worker, Andrea Asnes, and
a doctor who authored the definitive history of the modern
child welfare surveillance state, Dr. Mical Raz, to offer guidelines for
clinicians to answer this question: “Should I Call Child Protection.” The brief guide, in JAMA Pediatrics includes
“Five Things Every Clinician Should Know About CPS and Equity Before Making a
Report”
● There’s also a comprehensive
guide from If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice concerning when medical professionals must
report – and, more important, the wide latitude they often have not to destroy
families with needless reports.
HOTLINES
Mandated
reporters, and anyone else who wants to, call state child abuse “hotlines.” The
New York hotline got a lot of attention in 2024, but most of the lessons apply
everywhere:
● In New York State, the family policing system appears designed to
ensure Maximum Feasible Buckpassing. The state runs the child abuse
hotline and decides which cases to pass on to counties and New York City for
investigation – and they have to investigate whatever the state
sends. So the state has an incentive to screen out fewer cases,
since all those false reports are the localities’ problem. The
localities get to say: It’s not our fault that we traumatized all these
families with needless investigations and strip-searches, the state made us do
it!
A report from the New York City
Family Policy Project confirms
what everyone would expect from an arrangement like this: New York screens out
proportionately far fewer allegations than the national average and
investigates proportionately more families needlessly. The report explains the
consequences:
Parents have spoken of “doorbell trauma” – mothers having panic attacks, their kids stripping off clothes to be inspected – when they hear their buzzer. At a recent meeting of Brownsville families, one parent described Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) involvement in her family and neighborhood as “like someone is on fire and screaming and no one is able to help them.”…
● The Imprint has a good story on
the report. So does the New York Daily News And
I have a blog
post on the pathetic response from Jess Dannhauser,
commissioner of New York City's Administration for Children's Services. (Be
sure to see the response from the ACS flack at the end!)
● The
report led to a New York State Assembly hearing examining the failings of the
“hotline.” The Imprint and Spectrum News 1 published
stories about it. I also have a blog post about
the hearing. Video of the hearing includes a
helpful index. Scroll down the right-hand column to the list
of witnesses. Click on any name and the video will go straight to testimony
from that witness.
There is
searing testimony from victims of false reports, particularly from survivors of
domestic violence. But you may want to start with the testimony of Melissa
Friedman. She is attorney in charge of legal strategy and training for the
Juvenile Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society in New York City. They don’t
represent parents in these cases. They represent the children.
She began her testimony in support of this bill by saying: “I’m here to express
to you, from the child’s perspective, the harm of over-investigation…”
DESPERATELY
SEEKING BAILOUTS / IMMUNITY
● Now that
states are allowing more survivors of abuse in foster care to sue the private
foster care agencies that oversaw their care, we’re learning that foster care
is so rife with abuse it’s becoming uninsurable. Rather than clean up their acts – or better
yet, admitting their acts can’t be cleansed and shutting down, the agencies are
demanding protection – not for the children, of course, but for themselves.
So in New
York, the agencies want a huge taxpayer bailout. I discuss why they shouldn’t get it in
commentaries for the New
York Daily News and the
Albany Times Union. In
California, the agencies want near immunity from survivor lawsuits. You can read about it in this NCCPR
column for WitnessLA.
In
Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports,
agencies sought a similar bailout. But to her great credit, the head of
Philadelphia’s “child welfare” agency, Kimberly Ali, said no. Though it
will cost her agency a lot in time and money, she refused to cave. “What
the provider wanted the city to do was pay to indemnify them for their own
negligence,” she said, “and that is what the city was not going to do.”
And the
sky has not fallen.
RANSOM
As
noted above, WABE published and broadcast a stunning
story that
starts with one of the worst practices of family policing: Making impoverished
families pay part of the cost of foster care.
States call it “child support” – but when you take away a child and make
the parents pay money to get the child back, the only proper term for the
payment is – ransom.
● Colorado
is making it official: codifying in law a rule change that bans ransom.
● The Imprint reports on
legislation in New York that would add new curbs to the practice Upstate. (To its credit, New York City’s
Administration for Children’s Services has already put a stop to it.) In the Albany Times Union leaders
of an adoptive and foster parents group explain why ransom should be abolished.
HIDDEN
FOSTER CARE
●
Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in Congress concerning hidden foster
care – essentially blackmail placements in which parents are coerced into
“voluntarily” placing their children in foster care. The
Imprint reports that
the bill would not regulate the practice, but it would force states to reveal some
of their hidden foster care placements – so we’ll come closer to knowing how
many children really are torn from their homes every year.
● The
child never needed to be taken. The Philadelphia family police agency had to
know even a Philadelphia juvenile court judge wouldn’t rubber-stamp such a
flimsy case. So they used a hidden foster care. Resolve Philly and The
Philadelphia Inquirer report on the tragic result.
●
Dr. Sharon McDaniel, a pioneer in doing kinship foster care the right way,
speaks out about the enormous harm of doing it the wrong way – through “hidden
foster care.” In a commentary for The Imprint,
she writes:
I want to be clear that while I believe hidden foster care should be eradicated, the path to doing so is not to simply place all of those children in the formal foster care system instead. Through an upstream preventative lens that narrows the front door and addresses poverty through support and not victimization, I assert fewer children will need any form of formal care as their parents will have the necessary community support and resources to care for their children without child welfare intervention. …
But when
children really must be taken from their parents, Dr. McDaniel writes:
I have spent my career pushing for relatives to be the solution. But they cannot be prioritized on the cheap and with less rights. They must be supported and provided the appropriate legal protections in place for any placement through the formal foster care system. Anything less is a disservice to the families and children we claim to protect.
CHILD
ABUSE PEDIATRICIANS
● Just as the year was ending, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica published another horrifying story about the behavior of child abuse pediatricians. But the biggest horror may not even be the individual case -- not even the part where the mother wasn’t considered “protective” of the children because she didn’t believe the allegations against the father. The biggest horror may not even be that 35 people convicted based on a diagnosis of “shaken baby syndrome” are on the National Registry of Exonerations.
No, the biggest horror may be in the revelation of how child abuse pediatricians and the American Academy of Pediatrics responded as more and more doubts were raised about the “science” of “shaken baby syndrome” – science that’s been labeled everything from questionable to “junk.” Did they reconsider? No. Did they re-evaluate? Of course not. They just rebranded. They simply relabeled shaken baby syndrome as “abusive head trauma.”
From the story:
“The rebranding of shaken baby syndrome preserved the diagnosis and allowed it to live on with less scrutiny,” says Randy Papetti, an Arizona trial attorney and author of the 2018 book “The Forensic Unreliability of the Shaken Baby Syndrome.” “Shaken baby syndrome is alive and well but mostly operates under an alias.”
A lead author of the name change denies this, and condemns
this interpretation as “cynical.”
● Remember
when the county controller in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania issued a scathing
report on the misdiagnosis of child abuse by the local child abuse
pediatrician? Here’s a reminder from The
Philadelphia Inquirer:
Willow Feeney said she and her sister were placed in foster care after her mother was accused of falsifying their medical conditions. She told officials that her family is still traumatized by their experience.
“Growing up medically complex is a challenge in itself,” she said. “I was suddenly told that everything I felt wasn’t valid anymore. No matter how much I explained, I was told that I was wrong and I was brainwashed.”
Now the
update: Instead of action, the Morning Call reports,
county officials and lawmakers have crawled into a bunker, retaliating against
the controller and stalling any action. I don’t know if she had Ms.
Feeney in mind when one county lawmaker complained that “It all became
emotional.” the Morning Call also reports
that the controller is seeking an independent investigation. NCCPR
agrees and is cited in the story.
● Ever
notice how often the same so-called “child abuse pediatricians” come up in case
after case where they allegedly got the diagnosis wrong? It’s
happened again. This New York Times
Magazine story documents a tragic case in which even
the district attorney’s office that won the conviction now believes child abuse
pediatrician Suzanne Starling got it wrong. A week later Dr. Starling was back, in this story from WXIA-TV in
Atlanta. WXIA also has more stories
of the enormous harm done to family
after family by false allegation, And a story about
first steps other states are taking to try to balance the scales of justice in
these cases, and a follow-up report.
● Another child abuse pediatrician also
seems to have failed up. In this case, a family brought their
five-month-old to the hospital. After four days of
repeated medical tests due to a potentially life-threatening genetic
condition,
seven rib fractures became visible on the X-rays. These were all new, non-calcified fractures that had not appeared on earlier X-rays. Rib fractures are viewed by medical profession as evidence of possible abuse.
The Bruckers immediately suspected that the fractures had occurred during the hospital stay itself, possibly due to the extensive handling and exams Aiden had endured. The lack of any signs of these injuries at admission certainly suggested that they had appeared during Aiden's inpatient care. And yet as soon as the fractures were detected, a child abuse hotline call was placed to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) naming the Bruckers as suspected abusers.
The family
ultimately was cleared – and someone else was “substantiated” for
abuse. But DCFS won’t say who!
As for the
child abuse pediatrician, she now also is president of the board of directors of
the trade association for the nation’s “child advocacy centers” which interview
and assess alleged victims of child abuse. You may recall this group
was the one that did the most to spread the false “pandemic of child abuse” hysteria in
the early days of the COVID pandemic.
● ABC News reports on
another family tormented, and their children needlessly placed in foster care,
because of a hospital’s misdiagnosis of child abuse.
● WFTV in Florida has
the story of still another.
● In
Texas, a mother dared to seek a second opinion when a doctor prescribed a
particular antibiotic. Can you guess what happened next? Stories
from WFAA-TV and KDFW-TV answer
that question.
● The
Family Justice Resource Center specializes in exposing the abuses of these
doctors and helping families fight back. They’ve issued this comprehensive toolkit.
CHANGES
AT CHILDREN’S RIGHTS
●
Every once in a while I’ve gently chided the group known as “Children’s Rights”
for its approach to litigation. But in 2024 their litigation took a big
turn - for the better. They represented the Minneapolis NAACP in filing a
federal civil rights complaint alleging pervasive racism in Minnesota family
policing. I have a blog post about it, including
links to the full complaint and a good story in The Imprint.
CNN also has a story.
● 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.
● In The Grio, Shereen
White, director of advocacy and policy at Children’s Rights, and Prof. Shanta
Trivedi, faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families,
Children and the Courts at the University of Baltimore School of Law, write
about the need to repeal the law that did so much to get us into this mess, the
Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.
As we honor Black history this February, we look back at a decades-old law that remains, to this day, a blight on generations of Black families. … One of the consequences of [CAPTA’s requirement for] mandated reporting is that it can discourage a family or parent from seeking help or punish them if they do.
Consider a parent who is facing violence in the home, is struggling to afford food for their children, or, like many in this country, is unable to find affordable, livable housing. Often, when these parents reach out — going to the hospital for example or seeking therapy — that nurse or therapist whose trusted expertise they desperately need, is required under law to report suspected abuse or neglect in the home. That report can then lead to intervention by Child Protective Services (CPS), invasive interviews, threats of child removals and potentially, and most devastatingly, removal of a child from a caring parent.
A FEW
MORE NCCPR COMMENTARIES
● While
others try to exploit child abuse deaths, NCCPR works to help people understand
them – and find real solutions. Check out our updated Issue Paper
on this topic.
● Just
before the New York City Council held a hearing concerning the city’s family
police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, I had a column in the New York
Daily News that asked: “Can ACS stand up to foster care
panic?”
● In less
than 25 years, Maine child welfare went from national scandal to national model
to national disgrace. In the Maine Morning Star I
discuss what can be done about it.
● In
Oregon, the state family police agency wants to narrow the definition of child
abuse – but only when they are the abuser. I discuss what they have
in mind in this three-part post to this blog. The
post also recaps the many blunders of Oregon’s Senator Soundbite, whose
blunders have only made a bad system worse.
● No state is worse than West Virginia, the child removal capital of
America, where almost every Black child is born with a family police target on
their back. I have a column
about it in West Virginia Watch.
SOLUTIONS
Two solutions are key: concrete help for families, and high-quality legal representation.
Concrete help:
● The New York City Family Policy Project has a report on “The Protective Power of Cash” and what can be done to mobilize that protective power to keep children out of the family policing system.
● One of the most promising ways to mobilize that power is providing families with a guaranteed income. Even a little bit of no-strings-attached cash can go a long way. The New York City Family Policy Project has another report on the various guaranteed income experiments across the country and what we can learn from them.
● Business Insider has more about one of these guaranteed income pilot projects, targeting families on the radar of the family police in Illinois.
● It’s also happening in Washington, D.C., where the Washington Post reports on another guaranteed income pilot program aimed specifically at mothers under surveillance by the D.C. family police agency.
● 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 :-))
Legal representation
● Here’s the good news: 31 states have taken advantage of a change in federal funding rules that provides some reimbursement for lawyers for children and families. Here’s the bad news: 19 states and Washington, D.C. have not. This story in The Imprint has a chart so you can see where your state stands.
As the story explains:
Jey Rajaraman, a longtime parent defender who’s now an associate director of the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law, sees the new funding as part of a larger shift nationwide in the approach to high-stakes child welfare cases. There is an increasing understanding in the field that accusations of poverty-related neglect drives the majority of foster care removals — not severe physical or sexual abuse — and that children are best served with added supportive services within their families.
● In Indiana, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reports, one in five counties isn’t bothering to seek reimbursement. Some say it’s just too darn much paperwork. Now, as it happens, the money comes from the same “funding stream” as federal reimbursement for foster care and adoption– and there’s far more paperwork involved in obtaining those funds. But I’ll bet no one in Indiana leaves that money on the table. None of this should be surprising considering that year after year Indiana tears apart families at a rate roughly 60% above the national average. I have a commentary about it in the Capital Chronicle
● The National Center for Youth Law has published a superb guide for families so they’ll know their rights when they have to face the state family police agency.
