NCCPR news and commentary round-up, weeks ending January 7, 2025

Before the news summary, a link to a remarkable virtual event taking place this afternoon (Jan 8): The American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law End TPR (termination of parental rights) Initiative is hosting the first in a series of virtual gatherings on the topic “Why we should end TPR.” You can register here.  (And anyone who has been following this field for nearly 50 years, as I have, will understand what a thrill it is just to be able to type the words “American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law End TPR Initiative.”)

● 2024 was the year that child welfare’s war against Native America finally got some of the attention it deserved – including a report from the Interior Department and an apology from President Biden.  But, it turns out, even the federal report underestimated the extent of the horror.  At the end of the year The Washington Post weighed in with a massive investigation. They found more than three times as many deaths as the federal report documented.  A historian thinks the real number may be vastly higher still: 40,000.  Another says these were not schools, they were “prison camps.”

Wherever possible the Post published the names of the children who died in the boarding schools.  Post reporters followed one caravan bringing back the bodies of children from Pennsylvania to Montana. They also offered an overview of the history and motivation for this evil.

● Also as 2024 was ending, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica published another horrifying story about the behavior of child abuse pediatricians.  But the biggest horror may not  be the individual case -- not even the part where the mother wasn’t considered “protective” of the children because she didn’t believe the allegations against the father.  The biggest horror may not even be that 35 people convicted based on a diagnosis of “shaken baby syndrome” are on the National Registry of Exonerations. 

No, the biggest horror may be in the revelation of how child abuse pediatricians and the American Academy of Pediatrics responded as more and more doubts were raised about the “science” of “shaken baby syndrome” – science that’s been labeled everything from questionable to “junk.”  Did they reconsider? No. Did they re-evaluate? Of course not.  They just rebranded. They simply relabeled shaken baby syndrome as “abusive head trauma.” 

From the story: 

“The rebranding of shaken baby syndrome preserved the diagnosis and allowed it to live on with less scrutiny,” says Randy Papetti, an Arizona trial attorney and author of the 2018 book “The Forensic Unreliability of the Shaken Baby Syndrome.” “Shaken baby syndrome is alive and well but mostly operates under an alias.” 

A lead author of the name change denies this, and condemns this interpretation as “cynical.” 

● Things keep getting worse in Maine, a state that once was on the verge of having a model “child welfare” system. Dreadful decisions by two governors and vile grandstanding from one current and one former public official plunged the state into foster-care panic.  So it should come as no surprise that more and more families are literally defense-less.  The Maine Monitor reports that many parents wait weeks or months for a defense attorney even to be assigned – dramatically prolonging children’s time in foster care. And the Portland Press Herald reports on the most important step the state is taking to finally start to deal with the problem.  I have a blog post about it, with links to both stories. 

● For the USC Center for Health Journalism, Taylor Walker, who has written two excellent series for WitnessLA, reflects on the reporting challenges. Most interesting may be what prompted her to examine family policing. She writes: 

While writing that 2021 series, “Pregnant Behind Bars,” which focused on a local program diverting pregnant people from LA’s jails into permanent supportive housing, many of the mothers I interviewed were more anxious for me to know about their disastrous experiences with [the Department of Children and Family Services] and LA’s family courts than about their time in jail. 

● Among the many barriers to placing children with relatives instead of strangers: hyper-strict licensing requirements geared to middle-class creature comforts.  Federal regulations now allow separate, more reasonable requirements for kin.  Capitol News Illinois looks at legislation that would implement that change in Illinois. The bill has passed the legislature and the governor is expected to sign in.

Two of those committtees states periodically name to study their family policing systems issued their reports.  Both are useful, but both suffer from the same flaw.

● In Colorado, the state’s Mandatory Reporting Task Force did something no other such panel has done in the entire history of mandatory reporting: It recommended curbing the use of mandatory reporting.  The report does an excellent job of zeroing in on the enormous harm done to children by mandatory reporting. But it fails to recommend the one change that would make a real difference: replacing mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, so professionals would be free to exercise their own judgment.  Though the Denver Gazette calls the actual recommendations “sweeping,” they’re actually minimal, focused on tweaking state law (albeit in a good way) and, of course, more training.

● Something similar happened in Hawaii. There the Malama Ohana Working Group issued a report on overall family policing failure that’s good about identifying the problems.  As KHON-TV reports:

“One of the things that wasn’t surprising, but we heard it loud and clear was that many of the families whose children were removed actually stemmed from poverty. And when you really look at that, poverty does not equate to neglect and abuse,” explained Venus Kauiokawekiu Rosete-Medeiros, Malama Ohana Working Group co-chair.

But the recommendations are largely bland boilerplate, and the state family police agency’s response consists of ways to make itself even bigger.

● There’s some good news from California where, The Imprint reports, the first family defense clinic on the West Coast will open at the University of California – Berkeley.

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

From the Cincinnati Enquirer: 

A Batavia Township mother and father, who prosecutors said punished their adopted boys by forcing them to sleep naked overnight on the bare floor of a "dungeon-like" basement room, both admitted in court to abusing the children. Charles Edmonson, 64, pleaded guilty Friday in Clermont County Common Pleas Court to kidnapping, felonious assault and three counts of child endangering. His wife, 50-year-old Matthew Edmonson, pleaded guilty to five counts of child endangering. … 

From the Santa Fe New Mexican: 

A new lawsuit accuses the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department of failing to protect a 10-year-old boy with a history of abuse from an alleged sexual assault in 2022 by a teenager in an agency bathroom. 

The suit alleges the agency knew the older child had a history of sexual assault but still failed to prevent the incident.

In Maine, more and more families are, literally, defense-less

The Maine State Capitol

Things keep getting worse in Maine, a state that once was on the verge of having a model “child welfare” system. Dreadful decisions by two governors and vile grandstanding from one current and one former public official plunged the state into foster-care panic.  So it should come as no surprise that more and more families are literally defense-less. 

The Maine Monitor has an excellent story about this.  The monitor reports that many parents wait weeks or months for a defense attorney even to be assigned – dramatically prolonging children’s time in foster care.  In one case, no lawyer was assigned for 281 days.  From the story: 

Parents who wish to maintain custody of their children are fighting against a system that a recent federal audit found failed to follow its own rules when investigating allegations of child abuse or neglect. 

A capable attorney can help identify those missteps, put pressure on the department and use those errors to argue on behalf of parents in court. Attorneys can also connect clients to services that can help move them toward reunification with their children. 

But a lack of attorneys makes that kind of zealous representation less likely, which in turn results in more families separated and more cost to the state. 

And if there’s no family defender keeping the pressure on, judges sure aren’t going to do it.  Again, from the story: 

One recent decision from the Maine Supreme Court shows how even repeated failures by the department can have little impact on the outcomes of cases. 

On October 3, the high court published a memorandum decision in an appeal of a termination of parental rights out of Portland. The memo notes that the lower court was right to terminate the parental rights of the mother despite the fact that the judge in the case ordered the department to file a rehabilitation and reunification plan “seven times during the pendency of the case and never did so.” 

The story tells us how many families get no representation at all for weeks or months.  Given the shortage of lawyers, one can bet that few families get the kind of high-quality representation that can truly ease the suffering of their children by reducing their time trapped in foster care.  

The state is taking the first steps toward building such a system – but it will take three years for it to reach even half the families who need it. [UPDATE, JAN, 6: This afternoon the Portland Press Herald published its own very good story about this effort and why it's so important.]

The story notes that even the state’s child welfare “ombudsman” mentions in her latest report that she is concerned about the shortage of defense attorneys. Of course, she does not mention her own role in creating the shortage by fomenting foster-care panic.