Adopted to death in North Carolina?

An adoptive mother is charged with murder, torture, and crimes straight out of a horror film nightmare.  That’s an aberration. 

At least one of the children probably never needed to be taken from his mother at all.  That’s not an aberration 

A horror film debuted in North Carolina last week.  The story has all the classic elements: torture, starvation, teenage victims, and elements too macabre to describe here.  But you can’t “keep repeating it’s only a movie.” Because it’s not. 

This horror film is a documentary. At a time when most television stations don’t even have documentary units, WRAL-TV has one that just produced a superb example of the form.  It’s about children taken from their own homes, in at least one case for no good reason, only to disappear – their bodies found years later.  They were allegedly adopted to death.  The starvation, torture, murder and other horrors all were allegedly orchestrated by Avantae Deven, the foster mother who adopted them. 

There have been tragically similar horror stories in Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Iowa, and of course, Texas and Minnesota. Most of them involved children who never needed to be taken from their own homes. 

So watch the documentary here – but take the viewer advisory seriously – and then I’ll add some context, including the one place where I think the producers went wrong:

 

Now, that context:

Of course, most adoptive parents never harm the children in their care – like most parents, period.  And yes, I’m the one who always says don’t make generalizations based on horror stories.  But I’m also the one who offered a mutual moratorium on their use.  The family policing establishment (a more accurate term than “child welfare establishment”) has not yet taken me up on that, and I’m not about to unilaterally disarm.  That’s why our weekly round-up of family preservation news and commentary usually ends with a section called “The Horror Stories Go in All Directions.” 

More important, the only part of this story that’s unusual is the alleged torture and murder.  The documentary reveals other horrors that are common in North Carolina and across the country. 

The first horror was the removal of these children in the first place, in particular, the children of the mother profiled in the documentary, Felicia Chandler. 

There is no allegation that Chandler ever beat her children, tortured them, raped them – or harmed them in any way.  The only ground cited in the documentary for the removal of her children was the fact that she was herself a victim of domestic violence.  As we have noted often on this blog, there is overwhelming evidence that children taken under these circumstances are even more traumatized than when they are taken for other reasons.  One expert called it “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.” 

That’s why more than 20 years ago, New York courts made it illegal to take children the way Chandler’s children allegedly were taken.  And just last week, a New York appellate court ruled that family police harassment of these mothers and their children, even when the children are not taken, also is illegal.

But in North Carolina, it’s open season on domestic violence survivors and their children.  Indeed, Chandler’s isn’t the first such case in North Carolina to get headlines.  The same kind of wrongful removal was the focus of this story from WBTV and The Assembly. 

Of course, we get the usual excuse from the family police: Oh, there was something else, we just won’t tell you.  Not can’t tell you – the confidentiality laws family police agencies hide behind generally are there because the agencies want them there – so they can hide their failings. 

Enter Chandler’s former caseworker.  In comments dripping with condescension says: “I know know that she loves her children but I will also say something that I learned many years ago through this career is that often love is not enough.” 

What that usually means is: Love is not enough, because they don’t have enough money.  Money can buy whatever is missing.  

For example, according to the lawsuit discussed here, North Carolina took away the children of one mother because she was hospitalized – with cancer.  The children suffered horribly in institutions. But the family police agency didn’t want to give them back because the mother “might get cancer again.” 

Have you noticed? You never see a rich person’s child taken because “love is not enough.” 

And let's not forget Cherokee County, where the removal of children with no due process at all, in cases so weak the county knew it couldn’t get a judge to approve, led to criminal charges.  And let’s not forget this story. And this story. And this story. And this story. And this story.  And this story. And this story. 

Unlike the alleged torture and murder of the adopted children of Avantae Deven, the horrors of wrongful removal are not unusual – in North Carolina or anywhere else.  

And if there’s one these stories make clear, it’s this: When you leave children at the mercy of caseworkers and agencies that don’t love them – it’s never enough. 

Felicia Chandler never got her surviving children back and, since her children’s rights to be with her were terminated, she almost certainly never will.  But she continues her fight.  The documentary ends with her speaking directly to her children, wherever they are, telling them how much she loves them, in the hope that they might see it. 

About those deck chairs

And that brings me to what I see as this outstanding documentary’s one failing: Having raised the issue of wrongful removal, and followed Felicia Chandler on her quest for justice, the documentary doesn’t circle back to the issue of wrongful removal when discussing solutions.  Instead, it focuses on rearranging the deck chairs on the North Carolina family policing Titanic.  Unfortunately, that focus is all the rage in North Carolina right now. 

That, too, is not unusual.  Reorganization is what agencies and lawmakers do when they don’t have real ideas. 

So sometimes, in states where the family police are a freestanding agency, there are proposals to make it part of a bigger agency.  Where it’s already part of a bigger agency there are proposals to make it a freestanding agency.  Where the work is largely done by public agencies you hear cries to privatize.  Where it’s mostly private you hear about the need for the accountability only a public system is said to bring.  Where states run these systems you sometimes hear proposals to have counties do it, because they’re supposedly closer to the people. Where counties run these systems – as in North Carolina – you hear the state should do it, or at least give the state more power to supervise.  

But there is no evidence that any one of these structures is any better, or worse, than the others.  The many terrible systems, and the few that are not so bad, come in all shapes and sizes. 

That’s true even when it comes to the kind of horrors exposed in the WRAL documentary.  I mentioned similar horrors in five other places. Pennsylvania has a county-run system. So does  Minnesota. But the systems in Hawaii, Iowa and Texas are state-run. 

As for North Carolina, what good is giving more power to the state oversight agency when a top official of that agency, interviewed by WRAL, insists the system isn’t broken?  

Yes, it might make some marginal difference around the edges.  But the fixation on organization diverts attention from the elephant in the room: all those children needlessly taken.  Wrongful removal drives everything else.  Ending it alone won’t fix these systems, but it’s the prerequisite for fixing these systems. 

UPDATE, FEB 15: Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, in a follow-up story, when lawmakers were asked what they were going to do about this, their answers were all about the deck chairs (with a quick mention of those other failed stand-bys "silos" and "background checks").

Similarly, it would be a huge mistake to spend more to make the system even bigger.  Rather, additional spending should focus on bolstering services and supports to families whose children often are taken when family poverty is confused with neglect.  That will ease any artificial “shortage” of foster homes and reduce worker caseloads, so workers have more time to find children in real danger and do their jobs well. 

In other words, spend more, but spend smarter. 

Two other notes

● Another proposal discussed in the documentary is one that always comes up when adoptive parents are accused of abusing their adopted children: require government monitoring of the family even after the adoption.  

Here’s the problem: Adoption by strangers should be very rare; almost always there are better ways to assure safe, permanent homes for children.  But when it does happen, then adoptive parents are parents, period. Before the adoption, they should be subject to intense scrutiny.  After the adoption they should be subject to no greater monitoring than birth parents.  Otherwise, it’s just foster care by another name.  As such it denies children the security and permanence they need. 

And to those who say: Well, adoptive parents often accept government checks so they should have to accept government supervision, well, I also get a government check every month. It’s called Social Security – and no one gets to make unannounced visits to my home to see if I’m spending the money wisely. 

● There’s one more thing to keep in mind, one more factor that can lead to quick-and-dirty slipshod placements in adoptive homes: Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, for every finalized adoption over a baseline number, states receive a bounty from the federal government of $4,000 to $10,000.  Avantae Deven adopted five foster children. So North Carolina may have collected anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 for tearing these children from their own parents and placing them with the adoptive mother now accused of murder and torture.  And get this: Under ASFA North Carolina doesn’t even have to give the money back.