NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 18, 2024

● 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. 

● 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. 

● Citing advocates including NCCPR, a New York Daily News story also noted concerns about a possible foster-care panic. 

● 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. 

● It’s not just New York, of course – indeed, most places are worse. NCCPR Board Member Prof. Dorothy Roberts discusses the harm in an interview for Current Affairs.  Says Prof. Roberts: 

[M]any Americans have been convinced that it is better to put children through the trauma of family separation than to leave them at home. They don't realize that the vast majority of children who are removed from their homes aren't removed because of physical or sexual violence or abuse. They're mostly removed because of neglect. And so you have loving, caring parents who, in most of these cases, are trying to take care of their children, and they just don't have the material resources. And instead of helping them, you're making it worse for these children by adding this trauma to their lives. 

● In fact, 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. 

● Back in the United States, 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.” 

● 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. 

● In Tennessee a story from the Nashville Banner illustrates how deep the stereotypes run when it comes to families who lose children to foster care.  The story deals with two ways family policing systems steal from families.  A key lawmaker is very concerned about one of them – swiping the Social Security benefits to which some foster youth are entitled.  Tennessee also forces parents to pay some of the cost of foster care to get their children back.  The euphemism is “child support” but the proper term is “ransom.”  The lawmaker is also concerned about that – but not nearly as much. 

● Ever wonder why so many studies keep finding that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care?  This column in The Imprint, from Lamani Moore, a former foster youth, sheds some light on it.  He writes: 

Growing up poor and not entitled to anything when I lived with my family was hard, but it wasn’t lonely or sad. I wasn’t truly introduced to sadness or abandonment until I reached the foster care system.

● The Imprint reports that Congress has passed a bill intended to curb the abuses inflicted on children by the “residential treatment” industry.  But a more accurate title for the Stop Institutionalized Child Abuse Act would be the Study Institutionalized Child Abuse Act because, unfortunately, that’s pretty much all it does.  The only way to stop institutionalized child abuse is to stop institutionalizing children.