NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 8, 2025

● I’ve never before seen a foster-care story get a “push notice” from The New York Times. But this one did. That’s what happens when a county agrees to pay four billion dollars to more than 6,800 children sexually abused while in the custody of its foster care and/or juvenile justice systems. As I note in this blog post, in every one of the cases in which the children were thrown into foster care, it was done in the name of “child safety.”  The post also includes a link to a story from KFMB-TV about the latest lawsuits against a parking-place shelter in San Diego. Or you can just see it here: 

● The Harvard Law Bulletin profiles the extraordinary life and work of Dorothy Roberts, professor of law, Africana studies, and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” – and member of the NCCPR Board of Directors. From the story: 

“We need to radically change how we think about child safety and welfare, and that means we need to focus on supporting families,” says Roberts, author of the 2022 book “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.” She adds, “Our society could be structured in a way to provide for those families’ material needs, but instead, it unleashes this terrorizing system on them.” 

● Speaking of extraordinary work, The Imprint podcast talks to Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark book Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services. 

● To what should be the surprise of no one, there’s still another study showing that concrete help – in this case not evicting people from their homes – reduces child abuse.

● Last year The Marshall Project and Reveal reported on the enormous harm done to newborns when they’re taken from their mothers because of false positive drug tests.  Now, they have a follow-up story about the medical professionals who are saying Enough! 

From the story: 

A patient at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, the largest health system in the state, had said that she’d used marijuana to help her eat and sleep during her pregnancy. The hospital had reported her to child welfare authorities. Now, an investigator wanted Ostfeld-Johns to drug test the newborn. 

[Dr. Sharon] Ostfeld-Johns knew there was no medical reason to test the baby, who was healthy. A drug test would make no difference to the infant’s medical care. Nor did she have concerns that the mother, who had other children at home, was a neglectful parent. The doctor did worry, however, that the drug test could cause other problems for the family. For example, the mother was Black and on Medicaid — race and income bias could influence the investigator’s decision on whether to put the children into foster care. 

“Why did I ever order these tests?” Ostfeld-Johns found herself wondering, about past cases. … 

● For still another example of the harm of botched drug testing, check out this story from WANF-TV in Atlanta. 

And in Minnesota, the Star Tribune reports 

A federal racketeering lawsuit alleges that the leading child abuse pediatrician in Minnesota manipulated medical records that directly led to murder charges against a daycare provider in the death of a toddler in Minneapolis more than seven years ago.