● Responding to reporting from WXIA-TV, the family police agency in Georgia is taking steps to curb the abuses of “child abuse pediatricians” – steps they should have taken all along, such as allowing families to get second opinions.
On this blog: deep dives into two bad bills:
● In New Hampshire: drenched in trendy psychobabble, legislation proposes to fight trauma with trauma.
● If you are a Black child in Indiana, odds are four in five the family police agency will investigate you and your family. Now some lawmakers want to make it even easier to take you away and keep you away forever. One way they propose to do it: Just let foster parents march into court as “intervenors” and file their own petitions to terminate the rights of children to live with their own families.
● Tennessee already allows this. WZTV has the story of a foster parent who tried it – then realized she’d been misled by the family police agency, changed her mind, and worked to reunite her foster children with their own mother.
● Not all the laws are bad, of course. State law in Colorado
declares that “In order to heal from the generational trauma, we must confront
the past and shed light on the hidden cruelty.’’ The cruelty in question: Child welfare’s
attempt to eradicate Native America. So the state created the Federal Indian
Boarding School Research Program. The
Imprint discussed the work with
Colorado’s State Archeologist.
● New York University School of Law profiles the role of NYU’s pioneering Family Defense Clinic in a big recent victory: an appellate court decision barring the city’s family police agency from harassing domestic violence survivors and their children.
In this week’s
edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions:
● Remember that story in last week’s round-up about the horrifying death of a child from a Texas residential treatment center? This follow-up from the Texas Tribune should surprise exactly no one:
A Greenville foster care facility linked to the death of an 11-year-old last November had a history of sexual misconduct and physical abuse, including organizing fights between children and restraining one boy so severely he was hospitalized, according to a federal report filed Tuesday.
● From Courthouse News Service:
The New York Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a former
foster child Tuesday, finding that Cayuga County was negligent in failing to
prevent rampant sexual and physical abuse in her foster home.
