NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 29

● Think you know all about the controversy over “mandatory reporting” laws that require most professionals dealing with children to report their slightest suspicion of “abuse” or “neglect” to the family police? This story, from the New York City online news site THE CITY, adds a whole new dimension of depth and nuance. For example: why the all-purpose cop-out non-solution solution of “more training” does so little good: 

Mandated reporters who spoke with THE CITY said that throughout their careers, they were routinely warned that not reporting a parent could lead to the loss of their professional license or worse, adding that that culture of fear drives many professionals working with children to report parents, even when they have misgivings about the impact that their call might have on a family. 

“Doctors, social workers, teachers often have crippling debt and cannot afford to lose their license,” said Matthew Holm, a pediatrician working in the Bronx. “Even if loss of licensure happens only one time, there’s a huge amount of fear.” 

Some reporters acknowledged that at times, the threat of a call to the hotline had been helpful in getting parents to make changes. As professionals on the frontlines, they said, they know that some children do need to be protected from their parents. 

What they don’t believe is that it helps children for the professionals who know them best to be forced to defer their judgment to hotline operators or investigators, some fresh out of college, who approach the issue from a prosecutorial, evidence-gathering position. … 

Frivolous reports can also terrorize families. One doctor interviewed by THE CITY described an incident in which a patient’s mother was reported by a teacher, who had mistaken a rash for a bruise. That led to investigators strip-searching the child’s body and aggressively questioning the mother in front of her child, leaving the mother in tears. 

● Similarly, adding some kind of alternative number mandated reporters can call to, in theory, direct support to families, such as the plan described here, won’t do much good if calling that number just leads to investigations by another name or if it doesn’t also make reporters immune from penalties for failure to report. 

● At the root of almost every problem in “child welfare” is poverty. So if the federal government is hell-bent on doing everything in its power to make poverty worse, the potential consequences should be obvious. But that’s what happening. ProPublica reports on “The Trump Administration’s War on Children." 

●At the same time, these devastating cuts can’t become an excuse to tear apart more families. But that sounds like what the head of New Jersey’s family police agency (an agency that has made enormous progress in recent years) is trying to do. New Jersey Spotlight News reports that 

potential federal funding cuts that could cost New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families more than $100 million, Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer told state lawmakers last week. 

A reduction of this magnitude would force the department to “revert to its most basic role — that of child protection — not prevention, not support or empowerment, just surveillance and foster care,” Norbut Beyer told members of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee during a hearing on the department’s $2.3 billion budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins July 1. 

Yes, $100 million would be a big cut, but it’s only about 4.5% of the agency’s budget.  Even if that turns out to be the final figure and even if the state makes up none of it, it should be possible to find places to cut without wiping out everything except surveilling and tearing apart families. 

● Of course if you swing an ax wildly and cut everything, you’re bound to make the occasional cut that does some good. So we should, in fact, rejoice, that, as The Imprint reports, federal funding to the National CASA Association has been eliminated, at least for now. CASA is both the most sacred cow in child welfare and one of its most harmful programs. Massive studies document that its effects include prolonging foster care and making it more likely that foster youth will “age out” with no home at all. 

This does not mean the end of CASA, just a funding cut to its national office.  And already, local reporters, unfamiliar with the research, are churning out hand-wringing stories about how awful it would be if their local CASA program was curbed. On the contrary, it would be an improvement. 

● New Mexico’s attorney general has announced plans to “investigate” the state’s family police agency – but not for taking away children needlessly. I have a column in Source NM on how he’s stacked the deck from the get-go. 

● Speaking of steps backward, The Imprint reports that a mid-level appeals court in New York has upheld a state plan to allow what amounts to sugar-frosted foster care. The vote was 3-2, and opponents plan to appeal. The story ends with a quote from Judge Stan Pritzker’s dissent: 

“Respondents’ refrain that the intent of the regulations ‘is not and will not be to create a new form of foster care’ will fall deafly on the ears of a child placed outside of their home with strangers. Not only do the Host Family Home regulations lack legislative mandate, they dispense with the hard-fought, constitutionally grounded due process rights of children who have no say as to their fate, no counsel, no permanency hearings, no judicial oversight at all and are trapped in an administrative mousetrap with no way out. What could possibly go wrong?” 

● In The Imprint a former foster youth, Martha Bul, writes: 

When I was with my dad, I went to school and became number one in my first-grade class. After my dad found out that I was number one in class, he put me in a private Catholic school. 

When I went to foster care, a foster care worker falsely labeled me as some kid who was mentally disabled and sent me to be locked up in a mental facility. While in the mental institution, I was not allowed to go to school or question anything. If I asked why I was in a mental facility when I did not have a mental illness, and why I was not allowed to be in school, they would throw me on the ground, restrain me, and stick me with needles that had drugs in them to sedate me. This is inhumane. This type of treatment is slavery. One can tell that these are exactly some of the ways that our ancestors were treated in the historical slavery days…. 

Ms. Bul suggests a system of compensation for young people who endured what she went through. Another term for that might be “reparations.” 

● The terror doesn’t end with the foster care. Also in The Imprint Kristen Nicole Powell, a young mother who spent years in foster care writes: 

One fear has haunted me since the day I became a parent: losing my kids to the child welfare system. For someone like me who grew up feeling tossed around by systems that were supposed to help, the thought of my children being taken away feels like my worst nightmare. Even simple situations, like my kid getting hurt at the park, scare me. I know it’s normal for kids to get hurt, and I know I shouldn’t be scared because I’m not doing anything wrong, but that fear lingers anyway. It’s always there, whispering in the back of my mind, reminding me of the moments when systems stepped in and caused more harm than good. It’s a fear I carry with me every day, and there have been moments when it felt dangerously close to coming true. 

Tragically, the fear is rational – because various risk assessment protocols raise the “risk score” of anyone who is accused of abuse or neglect, just because they themselves had been placed in foster care. 

● The Missouri Independent reports on a great big bill full of mostly small changes to the state child welfare system – most of them modest improvements. The bill would stop the state from stealing foster children’s Social Security benefits, add a “reasonable childhood independence” exception to the definition of neglect, modestly enhance a “family Miranda” provision in existing law, and set in motion a process that might someday mean that children age 14 and older would get an actual lawyer fighting for what they want. On the other hand, the bill also seems to encourage institutionalizing more children.

● The Imprint reports on efforts to strengthen Colorado’s version of the Indian Child Welfare Act. It’s one of three states where such efforts are underway. 

Updates to previous stories: 

● The Washington Post has more about the Texas parents whose child was wrongly taken baed on a report by a doctor who didn’t even name the right person as the mother. They got their child back, but they’re stuck in central registry limbo. 

● Blavity has more on that study of bias in the New York City family police system. 

● The Maine Morning Star reports that a legislative committee is supporting a bill to make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect – well, a little harder.  The committee refused to support the version with some teeth in it, and went for the one even the family police agency supports – so you know the effect will be limited. 

● This update is more of a a 50-years-later story: On the 50^th Anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, The Verge looks at what “operation babylift” was really all about. It was about what it’s so often about in “child welfare”: white saviors enacting their rescue fantasies on children of color. The Vietnamese knew it. From the story: 

A South Vietnamese lieutenant gave this bitter statement to the New York Times: “It is nice to see you Americans bringing home souvenirs of our country as you leave — china elephants and orphans. Too bad some of them broke … but we have plenty more.” 

In this week's edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● The Post-Tribune in Indiana has an update on the story of a little boy taken from relatives because they refused to say “how high” when the family police agency said “jump” – only to die in foster care.