A transformation at Children’s Rights

There's lots of good stuff in the latest issue of the Family Justice Journal
But in particular, don't miss the Foreword on Page 8, 

A few years ago, when the group’s rhetoric changed, I was skeptical about whether there’d be a change in substance.  I was wrong. 

For nearly 30 years no group has been in a better position to make real change for the better in “child welfare” than the group known as “Children’s Rights.”  But for much of the group’s history, they squandered the opportunity.   

In state after state, their media-savvy founder and first executive director, Marcia Lowy, became the “Godsource” for reporters – that one source treated reverentially in every story -- as the group brought what I came to call McLawsuits, essentially the same suit each time.  For reasons discussed in an NCCPR publication called “The Children Wronged by Children’s Rights” these McLawsuits almost never made systems better and sometimes made them worse. 

Then Lowry had some sort of falling out with her Board of Directors. She left to form “A Better Childhood,” another organization that churns out the same sort of McLawsuits.  A few years after Lowry was succeeded at CR by Sandy Santana, the rhetoric changed, so did the group’s public policy positions – they even called for repeal of the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  But would the change in outlook be backed by a change in the group’s strategy and litigation?  

The first sign that there would, in fact, be such a change came one year ago when, on behalf of the Minneapolis NAACP, Children’s Rights filed a federal civil rights complaint against the family policing systems in the two largest counties in Minnesota. The complaint deals head-on with needless investigation and surveillance, wrongful removal and racism in these systems. 

And now, Santana has presented a comprehensive agenda for a change in direction.  It comes in the form of the foreword for the latest issue of the Family Justice Journal (See Page 8.) I hope everyone will read it in full. 

Santana begins by telling his own remarkable personal story. Then he forthrightly acknowledges that the approach the organization had taken for decades had been wrong – and things are going to be different.  He writes: 

In the sometimes charged and polarized debate between advocates of parents’ rights and advocates of children’s rights, our organization historically leaned in favor of intervention to “protect” the child. In the years immediately following the passage of ASFA, perhaps blinded by our conviction that no child should grow up with the state as a parent, our child welfare reform litigation campaigns supported the enforcement of that law’s strict timelines for the termination of parental rights. As we know, that law created a new category of legal orphans, intensified the regulation and forced separation of Black communities and families, prioritized adoption over reunification, and does not align with our understanding of treatment, recovery, trauma, and the critical importance of t the parent-child bond. 

Over the past decade, under new leadership, we have reflected deeply on how the impact litigation cases we brought on behalf of kids in state custody and the reforms they delivered, did not always support the preservation of families – particularly Black families. Through this process, we listened closely to the voices of survivors, who not only described the deep trauma they experienced within the system but from being separated from their parents and

uprooted from their communities. We also heard from mothers who endured the terror of constant surveillance and the ineffable pain of losing their children. 

Those conversations profoundly transformed the organization’s long-standing conception of children’s rights. They made it clear that children do not exist in a bubble of autonomous rights disconnected from their families, communities, and cultures. 

The essay lists a series of concrete actions CR has taken or will take to back up these words, including: 

We are partnering with the Family Justice Law Center to explore constitutional challenges to warrantless home entries, invasive strip searches of children, and “emergency

removals,” often carried out in non-exigent circumstances without parental consent or due process protections. … 

We are co-leading with JMACforFamilies a collaborative of advocates, mandated reporters, legal professionals, researchers and lived experts to develop new mandated reporting policies and practices in New York State to prevent unnecessary family surveillance and separation. … 

We are exploring impact litigation to give teeth to the “reasonable efforts”* standard. 

And, perhaps most promising: 

In states where we have custodial consent decrees in place, we are using our leverage to press for front-end policy and practice changes that lead to more successful reunifications, increased extended family kinship placements without terminating parental rights, and driving toward a radically smaller foster system … 

That suggests some hope for the children of Michigan where the old leadership of CR, under Marcia Lowry, negotiated a particularly awful decree. 

Lowry herself, however, continues to do damage. A Better Childhood still does the same old harm in the same old way. 

As for that publication, “The Children Wronged By ‘Children’s Rights,’” The full name is “‘The Children Wronged by Children’s Rights’ (and ‘A Better Childhood’ too’”), it’s been updated to put the Children’s Rights criticism in the past tense.  I hope it always stays that way.

*Federal law requires family policing systems, a more accurate term than “child welfare” systems to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together.  The law is routinely ignored.