NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

Open courts in child welfare: LA Judge takes a big step in the right direction

2012-01-27T18:05:00.000-05:00

Court hearings concerning cases alleging child abuse and neglect in Los Angeles County would be presumed open to the press, but remain closed to most of the public under a draft order issued Friday by the Presiding Judge of the county’s Juvenile Court. Judge Michael Nash will hold a hearing on the draft order Monday.

If Judge Nash proceeds with this order as written, it will be a significant step forward in holding the county Department of Children and Family Services and the courts themselves accountable for what the system does to children and families in Los Angeles. As we explain in our Due Process Agenda, none of the many other state and local systems that have opened these courts has closed them again because all the fears of opponents proved groundless. The need for opening these hearings is superbly explained in a letter from Berkeley attorney Edward Opton, reprinted in the previous post to this Blog.

The order also has some unfortunate limitations. But in reading the reasoning Judge Nash offers in his draft order, it appears he considers this as far as he can go under existing law, based on rulings from California appellate courts.

Under the proposed order:

Members of the press shall be allowed access to Juvenile Dependency Court hearings unless there is a reasonable likelihood that such access will be harmful to the child’s or children’s best interests.

Any party can raise an objection to a reporter’s presence, at which point the judge would have to rule on the issue of “reasonable likelihood” of harm. The order offers no guidelines, no definition of harm, and no standard of proof that someone objecting to the presence of reporters must meet. That gives lousy judges plenty of leeway to keep their courts closed whenever they don’t want reporters to see how those courts do their jobs.

The provisions for the general public are a little more confusing, and a lot more restrictive. According to the draft:

Members of the public shall be admitted to Juvenile Dependency Court hearings at the request of or with the consent of a child about whom a petition has been filed. Other members of the public may enter the courtroom and be present at a hearing if the court finds that such persons have a direct or legitimate interest in the case or the work of the court. Upon request of the court, such persons shall specifically articulate the purpose of their presence.

As I read it, this means that if the child (which often will really mean the child’s lawyer) wants someone in the courtroom, that person is allowed in no- questions-asked. Anyone else has to prove a “legitimate interest.”

But it’s possible that Judge Nash is saying that, for a member of the public to be admitted, that person would have to both have an invitation from the child’s lawyer and meet the legitimate interest test. That’s unlikely, but if it is what Judge Nash is saying then it would set a terrible precedent. It would give one party to the case a power denied to all the others, instead of leaving such decisions up to the judge. This is exactly the kind of condition the sponsor of legislation to open California courts statewide wisely rejected.

The other problem, of course, is that the order opens up the question of what, exactly constitutes “the press”?

The appellate court decisions on which Judge Nash relies predate the Internet. No doubt a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, even Garrett Therolf, would be considered a member of the press. But the best coverage of child welfare in Los Angeles has come from WitnessLA, a Blog written and edited by Celeste Fremon, a former reporter for LA Weekly. Is she a member of the press? Given the strong reporting often seen at WitnessLA, I doubt that Fremon really would have a problem. But it illustrates how drawing the kind of distinction Judge Nash has in mind has become more difficult.

The good news is that for decades Illinois and New Mexico have operated this way. In those states juvenile courts are presumed open to the press and closed to the public. Those states don’t seem to have encountered any difficulties.

GUEST BLOG: Foster care in America: The case for open courts

2012-01-26T06:00:00.002-05:00

The Presiding Judge of Los Angeles County Juvenile Court, Michael Nash, is planning to open court hearings in child abuse and neglect cases to the press and the public. He has solicited comment on a draft order opening these hearings.

A particularly compelling response came from attorney Edward Opton, who has practiced law in Oakland, California, since 1981. He works with a national organization that advocates for the rights of low income children and youth. As Opton points out, toward the end of the letter, the description of the process offered by those who want the hearings closed actually is one of the strongest arguments for making them open.

With Opton’s permission, his letter to Judge Nash is reprinted here:

LETTER FROM EDWARD OPTON TO JUDGE MICHAEL NASH

Dear Judge Nash:

This letter responds to the several comments you have received in objection to the current proposed blanket order concerning WIC 346.

The objectors to a juvenile court that would be presumptively open, but closed upon proper showing of good cause, without exception ignore the reasons that, in democracies, courts normally are open to the public. The objectors point to a panoply of potential harms, almost all hypothetical, that might occur if dependency courts were open; but as to the benefits of open courts they say not a word.

I suggest that the objectors are failing to take notice of a thousand years, or more, of history, in which the openness of the judicial system has developed hand in hand with government of the people, by the people and for the people, while closed courts, secret courts, Star Chambers have been the tools of dictatorship, oligarchy and arbitrary rule. It goes without saying—but needs to be said more often—that the co-development and co-incidence of openness in government, including open judicial systems, on the one hand, and democracy on the other, is no accident. Justice flourishes in the open; injustice in the dark. This is a basic principle. It is supported by theory and, even more important, by mankind's collective experience. That experience is called history.

It follows that pleas for exceptions, for courts that operate in secret, cannot be persuasive unless they show that the particular proceedings they would keep secret differ in some exceptionally important respect from the great variety of proceedings, practically the whole of our judicial system, that are conducted in the open.

The objectors to the Court's proposed blanket order do not and cannot make the case that the potential costs of open dependency hearings, such as embarrassment and stress, are different from or greater than the identical “downsides” of openness in many other judicial settings.

Consider, for example, marital dissolutions, applications for domestic violence restraining orders, mental competency hearings, and criminal proceedings of all types. In all such proceedings, the alleged misbehavior of adults is contested. Often the alleged misbehavior is reprehensible, and no matter whether the evidence of human failure concerns a bank president or a bank robber, it has the potential to embarrass not only the adult plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses, but also their families, including their children.

In other words, the objectors' arguments that children might be harmed would apply with equal or greater force—or lack of force—to a large proportion, perhaps half or more, of all judicial hearings. The objectors offer no rationale for making dependency hearings an exception to the general rule of open courts. That general rule no doubt has costs for families, children included, but the benefits of open courts overbalance those costs. No evidence has been offered that the balance of costs and benefits in dependency court is uniquely different, so different that the normal principles of our judicial system should not apply.

* * *

The history of secret judicial proceedings teaches us that secret proceedings are unfair, unjust proceedings. I know of no exceptions. One side, the institutional side, has the advantage. The other side, the individual, is the subject of the proceeding but seldom an effective participant, for she finds the procedure is stacked against her. The forms of justice may be observed, but the reality is otherwise.

Consider, for example, typical dependency proceedings in Los Angeles Courts as described by a knowledgeable group of objectors to the proposed blanket order. The objectors, who are children’s attorneys and/or executives who employ children's attorneys, describe the dependency court as a scene of manifest injustice:

“The typical work day of children's attorneys in court is very full. Attorneys are constantly required to multi-task and juggle between many responsibilities. Once the attorneys enter the courtroom in the morning, they are reading the 5-10 court reports they have just received minutes before and then they meet with and interview extended family members, caregivers and clients in the shelter area of the courthouse. These conversations can take anywhere from 10-45 minutes or more depending on the child's current state of mind, the nature of the hearing, the complexity of the family situation and the number of children in the family. The child's attorney must also negotiate settlements with parents' counsel and county counsel. Throughout the day they are continuing to read late reports that are handed to them and speak to parties who continue to arrive. When their child clients are present their attention must be focused on the child talking with them, explaining what is happening and watching for nonverbal clues regarding their clients well-being and any current distress or anxiety.” (Letter from executives of Children's Law Center to Hon. M. Nash, November 28, 2011, p. 9.)

One might rephrase the objector's description of a routine day in court in transactional/operative terms as follows:

Children's attorneys come to court with two or more strikes against them and their clients. They are handed written reports that caseworkers have compiled. They now see for the first time the written evidence that will be used that day to consign their clients to be separated from their family, or to be reunited with the family. Their clients may or may not have been consulted in the preparation of those reports, and if their clients were consulted, what they said may or may not be fairly represented in the reports. The child's attorney was not present when the caseworker interviewed the child, and so, if there is a mismatch between what the child reportedly said to the caseworker and what the child is saying now to the attorney, the attorney is not in a good position to determine which version, if either, is more reliable. The children's attorneys must attempt on the spot to patch together oral evidence from family members and caregivers who they, the attorneys, may never have met before—and all this must be attempted not in a law office, with desks, quiet, privacy and staff, but in “the shelter care area of the courthouse.” In this chaotic scene, the children's attorneys often cannot provide effective legal counsel. Cases usually are resolved according to the recommendations of the Department of Children and Family Services, and the presence of the children's attorneys often is little more often a matter of form. The formalities must be observed even if the reality of effective legal representation has become a distant memory, a law student's aspiration that has drained away in the assembly line routine of dependency court reality.

Does the above extrapolation from the objectors' November 28 letter fairly represent the reality of dependency court? Is it totally off base, partially correct, or uncomfortably close to the truth? The writer of this letter does not know, and that is the problem. The secrecy of dependency court makes independent assessment impossible.

What the writer of this letter does know is that allegations of unfairness, of “stacked decks” in dependency courts, are widespread, and they are of a remarkable consistency, though they enter cyberspace, via blogs and on-line comments to newspaper stories, from people who mostly are strangers to one another. Such complaints are also consistent with principles of organizational sociology (or from another perspective, commonsense organizational politics): when isolated individuals and an institutional bureaucracy resolve conflicts in a setting where the bureaucracy is a repeat “player” and the individuals are not, the rules of engagement almost always develop to serve the interests of the repeat player, the bureaucracy—and especially so when the proceedings are secret.

Foster care in America: ABC News discovers false allegations of child abuse (against middle-class white people)

2012-01-23T06:00:00.007-05:00

One month after broadcasting a program about foster care in which all birth parents are evil brutes whose children, many of them minorities, must be rescued by noble white people who either are foster parents or run residential treatment centers, ABC News discovered that there is such a thing as a false allegation of child abuse after all.

But, of course, the network probably is interested only because this is one of those relatively rare cases in which the victims are people the producers can identify with. They are white and middle-class. That made the producers comfortable devoting an hour of ABC’s newsmagazine 20/20 to the story of the Wendrow family. (The full broadcast version is available here.)

If the name sounds familiar, it may be because I’ve mentioned the case before, in this Blog post. It’s the “Ouija board” case, in which prosecutors in suburban Detroit tried to prosecute a family based on “disclosures” supposedly made through a long-discredited practice called “facilitated communication.”

The case already had been the subject of an excellent six-part series in the Detroit Free Press. ABC even interviewed one of the reporters for that series. Nevertheless, the ABC News story is well worth a look, if only to actually see and hear former Oakland County District Attorney David Gorcyca during his deposition in a civil lawsuit brought by the family. There’s also an astounding segment toward the end of the program. It raises questions about whether the prosecution tried to hoodwink the court during a demonstration of facilitated communication. (Click on the last of the videos available here to see it.)

But there is particular irony in ABC News zeroing in on this particular case. Just a few miles – and a world – away, in a low-income neighborhood in Detroit there is a more recent case of blatant abuse by prosecutors and child protective services: the case of Maryanne Godboldo.

Godboldo’s daughter was taken from her and institutionalized for nearly two months after Godboldo exercised her legal right to take the child off of a potent psychiatric medication that was causing severe side effects – a medication that authorities later admitted she didn’t need. The child was taken after an illegal order (a judge’s signature had been, literally, rubber-stamped) was illegally served by police.

ABC’s Detroit affiliate, WXYZ-TV, led all other media in the city in covering the case – so it’s not as if there is any shortage of either information or video. In addition, one of the prosecutors instrumental in prosecuting the Wendrow family, Deborah Carley, also played a key role in the case against Marianne Godboldo.

There are of course, two key differences between the Godboldos and the Wendrows: Race, and class. Given that one of the messages in ABC’s foster care special (albeit an unintended one) is that Black people can’t be trusted to care for their own children, that may well explain the network’s lack of interest in the Godboldo case. The Free Press itself is guilty of a similar double standard.

So impoverished, minority families are victimized twice; first by the racial bias that permeates child welfare itself, and then when they attempt to get Big Media to pay any attention to what the system is doing to their children.

But things are not hopeless. There was a time when, when it comes to this sort of double-standard, no network was worse than NPR. But that changed last year. Perhaps someday better producers will bring change to ABC News as well.

Child abuse: What happens when the "mandated reporter" is - a reporter?

2012-01-16T06:00:00.001-05:00

Amid all of the calls to turn anyone and everyone into a “mandated reporter” of anything and everything that might conceivably be considered “child abuse” there is one thing that the reporters writing news stories about these bills and, especially, the editorial writers endorsing them may not have considered:

What happens when the mandated reporter is – a reporter?

It didn’t occur to me either, until Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed an executive order turning every employee of the University of Wisconsin System into a "mandated reporter" of child abuse.

My first full-time job after journalism school, nearly 35 years ago, was with Wisconsin Public Radio. That made me an employee of the University of Wisconsin System. The same is true for reporters at WUWM – the call letters stand for University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. There’s nothing particularly unusual about this. Around the country many public radio and television stations are run by colleges and universities.

“Child abuse” means far more than, say, seeing an adult rape a child in a shower, one of the allegations in the case against former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky. Under Wisconsin law, for example, mandated reporters must report when they have “reasonable cause to suspect that a child has been abused or neglected.” Wisconsin defines neglect as “failure, refusal, or inability on the part of a caregiver, for reasons other than poverty, to provide necessary care, food, clothing, medical or dental care, or shelter so as to seriously endanger the physical health of the child.”

So what happens now, if say a Wisconsin Public Radio or WUWM reporter is doing a story about families living in poverty? A single mother, speaking on condition that her name not be used, says things sometimes get so desperate that when the sitter doesn't show she has to leave her seven-year-old home alone to go to work, or she'll be fired.

Is the reporter supposed to shut off his or her tape recorder and say: "Excuse me, as an employee of the University of Wisconsin System, I’m not sure if you’re poor enough to fit the exception in the statutory definition, so my promise to you of confidentiality is null and void. I am now required to call the child abuse hotline and turn you in"?

It's unlikely, but it really could happen. Twenty-five years ago, during my first months at the Albany Times Union, I covered this story about two families living in dangerous housing.

Given the conditions in the building, one could make a case that any mandatory reporter was required to call in this family. Instead, when my editors put the story on the front page of the metro section on Thanksgiving Day, with a big photo, that got the families moved - but it took about three weeks.

Technically, journalists already might face this issue in the 18 states in which everyone is a mandated reporter. I doubt that any actually has turned in a family due to the law. But I think it's a problem of a different order of magnitude when a particular group that includes journalists is singled out as a category of reporter, and the governor is making a big deal about it at a time when mandated reporting is on everybody’s mind.

It’s hard enough to get news organizations to cover issues of poverty as it is. (One reason I remember the Albany story after so many years is that it prompted by first argument with the worst editor I've ever encountered - she wanted me to drop the story and cover some political trivia instead.) Impoverished families would have every reason to shy away from telling their stories if they knew that a mandated reporter law trumped any promise of confidentiality. And journalists might become even more reluctant to report on the problems of poverty if it could pose this kind of dilemma.

It’s something editorial writers might want to think about before jumping on the make-everyone-a-mandated-reporter bandwagon. Because none of the proposals says “except journalists.”

Foster care in America: Child abandonment, Casey-style, part two

2012-01-10T06:00:00.004-05:00

Foundation makes a poor choice to lead a new initiative.

Yesterday’s post to this Blog discussed the misplaced priorities behind a new Annie E. Casey Foundation initiative “to enhance the existing network of state child welfare policy advocates working to achieve comprehensive reforms for children and families involved in child welfare systems.”

The priorities are to make foster care “better,” and promote adoption – with barely a word, initally, about bolstering efforts to reunify families or keep children out of foster care in the first place. After this omission was pointed out, a few such words were added to the press release announcing the initiative.

If that weren’t bad enough, the person they’ve chosen to lead the effort has already used his Twitter account to smear and stereotype any of us who might want to do more to keep families together – he tried to hold us all responsible for the death of a child “known to the system” in Sacramento.

I’m talking about Bruce Lesley who runs a group called First Focus. Up to now they’ve done very little in child welfare, concerning themselves largely with broader children’s issues, like the impact of the recession on children. In one of their few forays into child welfare, they actually took an unusually progressive stand – taking a far more forward-thinking approach to child welfare waivers than groups like the Children’s Defense Fund and the Center for Law and Social Policy, who essentially tried to “Yes, but…” such waivers to death. But that only made a succession of tweets from Lesley last month even more disappointing.

As usual with people in child welfare, the last thing Bruce Lesley wants to do is anything that would harm children. The issue, as usual, isn’t motivation, it’s results.

So what’s the problem with what Bruce Lesley tweeted about child welfare – and why do a few tweets matter so much? Understanding that requires a brief recap of about 40 years of child welfare history. (For a more detailed history see our Child Welfare Timeline.)

THE SMEAR CAMPAIGN AGAINST FAMILY PRESERVATION

The family preservation movement started in the 1970s, but it didn’t really start to gain traction nationally until the early 1990s, with passage of the first federal law to put any money behind it, then called the Family Preservation and Support Act (now the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Act).

The prospect of the federal government actually spending money on family preservation scared the hell out of what I have come to call the foster care-industrial complex, the network of public and private agencies that lives off of a steady supply of foster children.

Those agencies started smearing family preservation to reporters every chance they got – spreading horror stories, or taking advantage of horrors the reporters found on their own. Throughout the 1990s, any time a child “known to the system” died, the party line was that it was because of family preservation. Family preservation advocates supposedly put it ahead of child safety. Worse, we supposedly put “parents rights” ahead of “children’s rights” and supposedly wanted to return to the days when “children were the property of their parents.” (For a classic example of how all this played out at the time, see my 1995 critique of how the Chicago Tribune handled the Joseph Wallace case – coverage that, tragically, became the template for much of what followed.)

In places like Arizona and Sacramento, California the smear campaign has never stopped.

“PROPERTY” OR GOOD PARENTING?

That “property” argument is particularly potent – and particularly dangerous for children. (It’s usually offered up by the same people who spread the Myth of Mary Ellen.)

Children always are going to need someone else, an adult or adults, to make key decisions for them. Depending on the children’s age an adult is going to have to decide how late they can stay out at night, whether they have to go to school and even whether they can cross a street by themselves. That’s not turning children into property – that’s loving them and protecting them.

So the issue isn’t whether children are going to be making their own decisions vs. being the “property” of adults, the issue is whether the best person to make decisions for a child, and indeed, to raise that child, is the child’s parent or the government.

Sometimes the answer really is the government. No one – not a parent, or a foster parent or a group home or an institution - has a right to beat, rape, torture starve or kill a child. But though I am a big-government tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it, when it comes to raising children the right answer is going to be “government” a lot less often than it’s used today.

The fear and smear culminated in passage of the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, which blew huge holes into previous law requiring “reasonable efforts” to keep families together.

It’s because of ASFA, and the mentality behind it, that even though actual child abuse in this country peaked in 1993, the number of children in foster care kept increasing until 1999, and the number of children torn from their parents over the course of a year kept escalating until 2005. ASFA also is the main reason for a 70 percent increase in the number of children aging out of foster care with no home since 1998.

Part of the reason the smear campaign against family preservation was so successful is that the family preservation movement failed to fight back. Many advocates naively thought that, because the attacks on family preservation were so preposterous, no one would believe them. But they did. As a result, the family preservation movement nearly “niced” itself to death.

NCCPR was established in part out of the conviction that this must never be allowed to happen again. No smear against safe, proven alternatives to foster care would go unanswered – not even a smear of 140 characters.

FAMILY PRESERVATION IS A CHILDREN’S RIGHTS CAMPAIGN

That effort includes making clear that those of us to advocate for more help for families but less coercive intervention into their lives are the real children’s rights advocates, and it is those who would make it easier for the state to control a child’s life who really want to turn that child into “property.”

If you want to know what it’s like to be treated as property, just ask a foster child who’s been moved from home to home and can’t even sleep over at a friend’s house without a government caseworker’s permission.

And that brings me back to Bruce Lesley, and one particular tweet. The tweet concerned this case in Sacramento – a case of a child who died after being returned to a dangerous home. The case actually is less clear-cut than many that make headlines. And the Sacramento Bee, often among the worst offenders when it comes to scapegoating family preservation, was much more careful this time. There certainly is no suggestion that any “parental rights groups” were pressuring Sacramento child protective services to keep this family together.

But good ‘ol Bruce Lesley rushed in to fill the gap with this tweet on Dec. 26:

Reasons unclear for fatal CPS decision to return a child to her parents - bit.ly/rF0NI1 How do parental rights groups justify this?

So there it was in 131 characters, a revival of the fear and smear against the family preservation movement by suggesting that we’re all really “parental rights” groups who don’t care if children die – or at a minimum somehow are responsible every time a child protective services agency screws up.

And a few minutes later, in another tweet, he said it again:

I am saying that parental rights advocates should answer to child deaths too, as does CPS.

That is the equivalent of saying that foster care advocates or agencies providing foster care – or big, new foundation initiatives that stress foster care and adoption and ignore family preservation - should be blamed whenever a child, like, say Logan Marr, dies in foster care.

Lesley’s Twitter behavior is all the more dangerous when citing a case from Sacramento, which, until recently actually took away children at the highest rate of any large county in California. (Apparently those “parents rights” groups aren’t so powerful after all.)

LESLEY’S NON-RESPONSE

Rather than respond on the issues when I and one other advocate on Twitter took him to task, Lesley just repeated the same mantra over and over in tweet:

some parental rights groups always support parental control & treat kids as property.

After tweet:

Kids are treated as property by some. To act as if that isn't the case is what is ridiculous.

After tweet:

The whole system needs to be improved. But, kids are NEVER the property of others.

Dare to disagree with what Bruce Lesley believes and you’re allied with those evil “parents rights” groups who want to treat kids as property. And, according to Bruce Lesley, “parent’s rights” groups somehow have something to “answer to” whenever a child known to the system dies.

This is the guy the Annie E. Casey Foundation has chosen to lead its new child welfare reform initiative.

I have never seen Bruce Lesley tweet that foster care advocates are responsible when a foster child dies. I’ve never seen him take to task the advocates who have left us with a system that tears apart thousands of families needlessly and churns out walking wounded four times out of five. I’ve never seen him warn against the danger of responding to cases like the one in Sacramento with a foster-care panic, a huge, sudden surge in needless removals of children. In fact, his tweets about the Sacramento case risk encouraging such panic.

Unlike some others in the field, Bruce Lesley has not been waging a concerted campaign against keeping families together. As I noted above, in one of its rare previous forays into child welfare policy First Focus took an unusually progressive position. I doubt that Lesley even knew the history of his kind of loaded rhetoric when he dashed off those 131 characters. I doubt he had any idea of the kind of damage that kind of careless rhetoric did in the 1990s. But that’s the kind of thing you need to know if you’re going to be in charge of a child welfare reform initiative that will depend, at least in part, on persuading policymakers and the public.

Foster care in America: Child abandonment, Casey-style, part one

2012-01-09T06:00:00.006-05:00

New Casey initiative is was silent on wrongful removal, racial bias in child welfare.

UPDATE: 12:30PM Casey breaks its silence on keeping families together, amends press release (but doesn't let on it's amended)

The Annie E. Casey Foundation (a former funder of NCCPR) sent a disturbing signal last week that it is abandoning any serious effort to stop the needless removal of children into foster care. Worse, it is putting in charge of an effort that should be countering stereotypes about family preservation someone who has promoted those very stereotypes. (M0re about that tomorrow.)

Casey announced creation of something called the State Policy Advocacy and Reform Center (SPARC – get it?) “to enhance the existing network of state child welfare policy advocates working to achieve comprehensive reforms for children and families involved in child welfare systems.”

But the reform efforts SPARC will “enhance” are anything but comprehensive. According to the press release in its original form:

SPARC will support a broad range of policy efforts, including permanency for older youth, child-focused adoptive parent recruitment, post-adoption services, educational stability for children in foster care, funding for permanency efforts, eliminating unnecessary delays in court processes, improving legal representation for children and families involved in the child welfare system, better regulation of psychotropic medications for children in foster care, reducing institutional placement of children, and customized services for immigrant children and their families.

UPDATE, 12:30PM: Responding to pressure from NCCPR (there've been lots of "hits" on this post from Casey Foundation websites this morning) Casey revised the press release. The new first sentence includes the words "strengthening families to safely prevent removing children from their homes."

The problem of course, is that this means only that, for those behind this project, family preservation is, literally, an afterthought. There still is no mention of family reunification, or fighting racial bias.

And the date on the release remains the same - Casey gives no clue the release was changed.

Anybody see anything missing in that list? The trade journal Youth Today spotted it immediately. According to their story:

The interests of SPARC focus mostly on youths who have already been removed from their families and placed in foster care.

Mostly? How about 99.99 percent. There is barely a word about working to prevent children from being torn needlessly from everyone they know and love in the first place. And while there is plenty about adoption on SPARC’s list, there is not a word about doing a better job of reunifying families. (In addition to the obvious references to adoption “eliminating unnecessary delays in court processes” is code for “rush to terminate parental rights.”)

CASEY’S UNFORTUNATE NEW DIRECTION

I’ve had the sense Casey was moving in the direction of abandoning family preservation and pushing only adoption and making foster care “better” at least since Patrick McCarthy succeeded Doug Nelson as CEO more than a year ago.

Casey continues to do good work reducing the use of the worst form of care, group homes and institutions, but SPARC’s priorities make clear the Foundation thinks reducing entries into care from more than 300,000 per year to the current 254,000 per year is enough.

In fact, evidence from the states doing the best job of safely keeping children out of foster care suggests that far more can be done, and tens of thousands of children continue to be traumatized by needless foster care every year.

SPARC’s priorities also confirm that Casey’s goal is permanence for children – regardless of how it is accomplished. Permanence is, indeed, among the most noble goals in child welfare. But it also signals that Casey doesn’t much care how permanence is achieved – and might even prefer getting more kids into those nice middle-class adoptive homes rather than sending them back to the poor but loving homes from which most of them were taken.

The only hint of even the slightest interest in keeping families together are the words “and families” at the end of the item on legal representation and the section concerning immigrant children.

Also notably absent: anything about combating the racial bias that permeates American child welfare.

Casey priorities also are clear in its choice of partners for this effort. They’ve included the best of the adoption advocacy groups, a group which also has led the fight against orphanages. Their inclusion is reasonable. But there is no organization supporting family preservation. Even a longtime previous Casey partner, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, which has been a leader both on family preservation and racial bias issues, is absent.

So when Casey writes that SPARC “will also target assistance for ‘big wins’ — helping a few states gain significant achievements that could inspire policy change on a national scale” it’s not hard to guess what those will be. Probably things like getting another state to extend foster care to age 21. There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact it makes sense. Real parents generally don’t abandon their children at age 18; the state shouldn’t either.

But as is discussed in our most recent Blog at Youth Today, new research suggests severe limits to how much this actually accomplishes in improving the dismal outcomes for foster youth “aging out” of the system. It would make far more sense to put at least some of the billions expended on this into stopping so many children from ever aging in. But that is not on SPARC’s agenda.

Even worse is who Casey chose to head up this effort – someone who just last month saw the kind of journalism that often can set off a foster care panic and tried to throw a little gasoline on the fire. That’s not the kind of “SPARC” that child welfare needs.

That story tomorrow.

On our Blog at Youth Today: How “Fostering Connections” fosters more failure

2012-01-05T06:00:00.001-05:00

The child welfare establishment couldn’t stop gushing over the Fostering Connections and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008. It was sold as the panacea that would significantly reduce the dismal outcomes for foster youth.

Now, two studies from that bastion of child welfare establishment “scholarship,” the Chapin Hall Center for Children, shed some light on how this is all working out.

On our Blog at the trade journal Youth Today: The fundamental failure of “Fostering Connections”

Child welfare in America: Important stories from Iowa, Chicago, D.C. and Michigan

2012-01-02T06:00:00.003-05:00

UPDATE, JANUARY 3: If you've had an experience with child protective services in IOWA, and are willing to share your story publicly, using your real name, the columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette whose work is discussed below invites you to post to this open thread on her Blog.

The year 2011 ended with some excellent journalism about child welfare across the country.

Last September, the Center for the Study of Social Policy issued a report on the racial bias that permeates child welfare in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. That’s no surprise. Iowa tears apart families of all races at one of the highest rates in the nation, four times the rate of neighboring Illinois, when rates of child poverty are factored in. (Of course it’s Illinois where independent monitors say the emphasis on family preservation has improved child safety.)

Across the country, states with the highest rates of removal also typically are among those with the worst rates of racial bias. Iowa is a case in point; South Dakota is another.

Now, Jennifer Hemmingsen, a columnist for The Gazette in Cedar Rapids is telling some of the stories behind the statistics. There’s an overview here, then a story about a perfectly fit father denied custody of his child. That’s followed by a story about how the man’s extended family was turned down as well. The child was adopted by strangers.

The New York Times has a very good story from its news-gathering partner, the Chicago News Cooperative, about cases in which adoption is not always the happily-ever-after it’s cracked up to be – particularly when the state stops paying the adoptive parents. NCCPR predicted this would happen in 1997, when Congress passed the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act which reinforced the take-the-child-and-run mentality in much of American child welfare, and threw in bounties to states for adoptions – bounties the states can keep even when the adoption fails. We have some context for the Times story, including what little is known about the extent of the problem on our website here.

For an excellent overview of how American child welfare got into this mess, and some of the ways to fix it, check out this Blog at the Huffington Post from Prof. Matthew Fraidin of the University of the District of Columbia School of Law.

Another law professor, Vivek Sankaran of the University of Michigan Child Advocacy Law Clinic wrote an excellent op ed column for the Detroit Free Press on the widespread confusion of poverty with “neglect” in Michigan – a problem made worse by the state’s dreadful settlement with the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights.” Sadly, Oklahoma soon may be headed for a similar fate.

Child abuse at Penn State: Jerry Sandusky, foster parent

2011-12-26T06:00:00.002-05:00

Given the mad rush to tell anyone and everyone to report anything and everything as “child abuse” – or maybe even force us all to do it – this seemed like a good time to remember the ultimate consequence: foster care.

With everyone running scared, there will be a lot more reporting of all kinds of “child abuse” – including “neglect,” which so often is confused with poverty. In fact, calls to state child abuse hotlines already have spiked, not only in Pennsylvania but also New York and New Jersey.

That means more children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love because they are poor, as in this case from Houston. It also means more children needlessly consigned to foster care just because caseworkers are afraid to do anything else.

The majority of foster parents do the best they can for the children in their care, like the overwhelming majority of parents, period. Some foster parents are true heroes. But one study after another has found abuse in one-quarter to one third of foster homes, and the record of group homes and institutions is even worse.

Oddly, however, in all the hundreds of stories written about Jerry Sandusky two facts rarely are mentioned, and almost never get much emphasis:

● Jerry Sandusky was a foster parent.

● Jerry Sandusky’s charity began as a group home.

So if Jerry Sandusky is guilty that should give us all something to think about:

Before we support laws turning everyone into a mandated reporter who risks going to jail if we don’t call a hotline whenever we think someone just might be abusing or neglecting a child, do we really want to put more children at risk of being placed with the next Jerry Sandusky?

Binghamton, N.Y. is a cesspool of depravity! BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!

2011-12-19T06:00:00.006-05:00

If there are any children outside in New York’s Southern Tier anymore it’s only because so few people still read newspapers.

No parent in her or his right mind would let a child out of the house, or even out of sight while in the house after reading the ten – ten! – fear-mongering stories splashed all over the Binghamton, N.Y Press & Sun Bulletin and its sister paper, the Elmira Star-Gazette on December 4. (Assuming, that is, that the parent made the mistake of believing the stories.)

Given the shrunken size of small city daily newspapers, it’s hard to imagine there was any room for anything else in the papers that day; apparently there was nothing but story after story sending messages like this:

Beware! Sex offenders actually live in our neighborhoods! Don’t drop your kids off anywhere! (except grandma and grandpa – maybe). A volunteer gives a gift to a preschool child – it must be “grooming”! Johnny needs to get two blocks to a youth basketball game – quick get the minivan! What? Your teacher helped you after class with your homework and no one else was in the room? Call the hotline! Your teenager is moody and having school problems? It’s sexual abuse!

The ten stories appeared under the umbrella title “Protecting our children from people we should be able to trust.” Other headlines included: “Background checks can’t replace vigilance” and “Grooming: It’s how predators have their way with you and your child.” After reading through all this it’s apparent that either the Southern Tier is a cesspool of depravity beyond comprehension – or post-Penn State paranoia has gotten way out of hand. (The papers did publish a brief op ed column I wrote in response.)

Consider a few anecdotes from the series:

● A day care center director sees a volunteer laughing and joking “excessively” with a child. The volunteer buys the child a gift – “a seemingly innocent charm.” Knowing that “this is often a predator’s ploy…the volunteer was confronted and removed from the daycare center.” The center director declares that “I’m completely convinced the child would have been a victim.”

● When Jim Norris returned to coaching a grammar school basketball team after many years he was shocked that

parents would be driving their sons two blocks or whatever and dropping them off – two blocks … I say to [an assistant coach] “What’s this all about? No one walks or rides a bike?” He says “Jim, these aren’t the old days. You have no idea who’s out on the street these days.”

● Kim and Robert Michalak of Johnson City are taking precautions:

[They] both work full-time and use the phone to stay connected with their four active sons. Each boy is required to call in his whereabouts and ETA, wherever he goes. Kim makes it her business to know their friends and the friends' parents, and has a seat on [the Johnson City] school board. "I have my ears to the wall," she said.

To help you keep your ears to the wall, there’s a 1,542-word guide to things to watch for, in adults and in your own children, reprinted verbatim from a mysterious website. Advice includes:

Emotional and behavioral signals [of sexual abuse] … can run from “too perfect” behavior to withdrawal and depression, to unexplained anger and rebellion.

Well, that certainly narrows things down. Oh, wait. The guide helpfully adds this: “Be aware that in some children there are no signs.”

Another “expert” warns that “Abusers generate situations where they are alone with the child … Babysitting, tutoring, coaching and special trips enhance isolation.” Well, yes. But they’re also standard parts of a normal childhood. Are we now to tell teachers they shouldn’t offer students help with their homework? Should guidance counselors stop meeting with children to let them seek help with personal problems?

And you know how the right-wing keeps telling us marriage is the solution to all family and societal problems? Not if you already have a child from a previous marriage. The Press & Sun Bulletin tells us that, according to one expert:

A favorite target victim is a child living with a single mother … The predator may offer to babysit or watch her children after school, and will sometimes pretend romantic interest in the mother or express a desire to be a father figure or mentor for her child. He may even marry her or move in with her. The relationship with the mother can be used as a cover for his interest in children, and her child can be used as bait to lure or gain access to other children.

So all you single moms out there: Forget about remarrying, or even dating. Better just keep men out of your lives entirely.

CONTRADICTORY ADVICE

Some of the advice sprinkled among the stories is remarkably contradictory.

Rabbi Barbara Goldman Wartell says that at her synagogue, in the words of one story, “Everyone will also be watching everyone else, with little tolerance for odd behaviors.” But the mysterious website warns that “people who abuse children look and act just like everyone else.” So shouldn’t we, in fact, be least afraid of those who behave oddly?

Elsewhere a parent declares that “The kids are never in one-on-one [situations] unless it’s with somebody we’ve known for years.” But another story tells us that abusers are remarkably patient – “grooming” may involve years getting to know the child, and the parents, and gaining their trust. The mysterious website reminds us that “the greatest risk to children …[comes] from friends and family.” So isn’t “somebody we’ve known for years” the person to fear most?

Topping it all off was an essay from someone who is not just a helicopter parent but a fleet-of-fully-armed-Blackhawks parent. (I’m not going to name her or her eight- and six-year-old children - the kids are likely to be mortified enough in a few years) but here are some highlights:

When school friends have parties, I attend with [the children]. I know a lot of parents who drop off children at parties, in many cases because they have other children to take to other locations, or they have to run errands. [My husband] and I don't drop our children off anywhere, except for perhaps their grandparents' homes.

Perhaps? Are grandma and grandpa suspect too? Back to the column:

The same goes for baseball games and karate and gymnastics classes. Because one of us, fortunately, is able to always be there, my children never have to wait for a ride home and they know someone who loves and protects them is nearby.

I also do my best to get to know those who interact with our children. Friends, parents, coaches, teachers -- talking to them helps me ensure that my young children are surrounded by good people.

Unless, of course, they’re just especially good at “grooming.”

There are parents who can't attend every function with their children. … Some other parents just seem to be more trusting, leaving their children alone or with acquaintances much of the time. It's up to the rest of us out there -- parents, teachers, coaches, care-givers, medical professionals -- to keep an eye on all children, especially from dysfunctional homes, because they often are targeted by abusers.

But aren’t parents who start “keeping an eye on all children” exactly the ones we’re not supposed to trust?

Do I sometimes feel I'm being overprotective? Absolutely not. … Something must be working. A few weeks ago, my son was playing outside. He came running into the house and said he saw a stranger. I was so proud. …

Meanwhile, that mysterious website tells us to treat absolutely everyone as a suspect – and let them know they’re suspects the minute we meet them for the first time: “Find a way to tell the adults who care for children that you and the child are educated about child sexual abuse,” the website says. “Be that direct.”

I am not naming the site, because it’s already gotten tons of attention in the wake of Penn State and I don’t want to give it even more. (Anyone who really wants to find it can get to it via the Binghamton stories.)

But here’s why I keep calling it mysterious: I searched the site for a long time and could come up with not one name of anyone connected with the organization. No president. No executive director. No board of directors. No indication of the credentials of those offering the advice. All the e-mail contact addresses were generic – there isn’t even a media contact.

Yet in the wake of Penn State, newspapers all over America are accepting this site’s data and its advice, in the case of the Binghamton paper, reprinting it whole. That’s remarkably – um – trusting.

REAL PROBLEM, FAKE SOLUTIONS

Yes, the problem of child abuse is serious and real, and prudent precautions are in order. But don’t believe the scare numbers. For example, as I’ve noted before the claim that one-in-four girls and one-in-six boys will be sexually abused (which is the first thing you see on the home page of the mysterious website) is based on a study with a definition of abuse that can include a 19-year-old kissing a 17-year-old goodnight after a date.

And you’d certainly never guess from the Binghamton stories that all crime in America, including child sexual abuse, has dramatically decreased in recent decades. Yes, Jim, these aren’t the old days. They’re better.

There is no way to seal off our children against all risk of molestation, any more than we can check the driving record of every adult who volunteers for the carpool. And behaving like the mother in that op ed column, and following all the other paranoid advice, creates its own dangers for children.

Dangers like:

●Raising them to cower in their homes, afraid of everyone they meet – or running home after so much as seeing a stranger nearby.

●Destroying any opportunity to build the self-confidence, self-reliance and independence they’ll need to thrive as adults. What will our children do when we’re too old to always be there to protect them?

●Teaching them to treat normal human kindness as suspect, making it far less likely they will be able to receive such kindness – or give it.

Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, has crusaded against hyper-protective parenting. Long before Penn State, she wrote about the harm caused by the kind of paranoia on display in the Southern Tier in this column for The Wall Street Journal. She pointed out another danger to Milwaukee Magazine media columnist Erik Gunn:

We don't help kids if we're telling them to distrust half the population. If most people are good and your kid ever is in a dangerous situation, could they ever go to a principal at school or their father or their teacher and tell them what's going on? If nobody is to be trusted you’ve left your child without anywhere to turn.

There also is the risk of setting off another wave of panic like the “mass molestation” hysteria that destroyed the lives of hundreds of children in the 1980s amid lurid false allegations of Satanic cults lurking in day care centers.

And there’s one more risk: When every adult becomes afraid to show normal affection – when, like one teacher in Binghamton, they stop giving hugs and give taps on the shoulder instead – then children actually become easier prey for child molesters.

That’s because, as the Binghamton stories point out repeatedly, molesters target children who are denied normal affection. As child abuse researcher Dr. James Garbarino put it during the last wave of sex abuse hysteria in the 1980s:

The more you define making physical contact with kids as being extraordinary or something that makes one suspicious, the more you leave the field open to people who want to touch kids for the wrong reasons.

WHOM ARE WE REALLY “PROTECTING”?

Like so much that is done in the name of “child protection” the behavior described, and encouraged, in the Binghamton stories isn’t about protecting children at all – it’s about protecting parents.

Specifically it’s about our efforts to protect ourselves from one of the inevitable side-effects of parenthood: Worry - that constant, nagging fear that the worst will happen to our children as soon as they are out of our sight. (Interestingly, in my own experience, this does not stop when the child becomes a young adult.)

When our daughter was in college and wanted to spend a semester of her junior year studying in South Africa my wife and I worried – constantly. The easy way out would have been to say no. But we let her go, and it turned out to be one of the most important and fulfilling experiences of her life. (We remain grateful that she did not tell us about going shark diving off Cape Town until after the fact.)

At other times, I’m sure we’ve given in to fears when we shouldn’t have. But putting the children first means rising above our own fears as much as we can, whenever it’s prudent.

Anything less is not child protection, it’s adult self-indulgence.

New federal report: child abuse is down – again

2011-12-12T15:48:00.001-05:00

Most of what the child welfare community calls “child abuse” is, in fact the confusion of family poverty with “neglect.” This remains the single biggest problem in American child welfare, destroying thousands of families needlessly.

But, as the Associated Press is reporting today, a new report suggests that child welfare agencies have gotten a little better at distinguishing poverty from neglect and devising smarter interventions – such as “differential response.” As a result, even as the recession increases poverty, we are not seeing the predicted increase in “child abuse” because states are smarter about not confusing poverty itself with neglect.

The report also shows that nearly four out of five children alleged to be victims of child abuse actually are victims of false allegations. So the last thing we need is a law forcing every American to report her or his slightest suspicion of maltreatment or risk going to jail.

Every year since the beginning of the recession, America’s “child savers” – to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts proudly gave themselves – have made ever more dire predictions about how the recession will mean more “child abuse.” Those predictions, of course, are followed by demands to hire more caseworkers to investigate more families and throw more children into foster care.

This week, they’ve been proven wrong again.

The federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment report was released over the weekend. It covers the year 2010 (they always run a year behind). But once again the report reveals that there was less child abuse in America than there was the year before.

The decrease is slight. But the decrease is in all categories except one (about 2,900 more children, nationwide, were deemed to have suffered “emotional maltreatment.”) So notwithstanding the hype about what the recession would do, there has been no increase in physical abuse. And notwithstanding post-Penn State paranoia suggesting there is a child molester under every bed, there was no increase in sexual abuse either.

The recession doesn’t seem to be prompting more parents to kill their children either. In fact, child abuse deaths went down - to the lowest level since 2006. There are so many problems with how such deaths are reported, that I would not read too much into any change in this figure. But it certainly doesn’t support the notion that the recession is leading to an increase in brutality.

The reason for the small decline in total child “maltreatment” is fascinating. It appears that America’s child welfare systems have gotten a little better at dealing with the biggest single problem in American child welfare: the confusion of poverty with “neglect.”

FALSE REPORTS ARE A HUGE PROBLEM

A few things stayed the same in the 2010 report:

● For starters, the percentage of false reports remains staggering. Seventy-nine percent of the children investigated by child protective services workers were not abused or neglected. They were victims of false reports. (Child savers love to claim false reports aren’t really false – but in fact, they are really false, and there’s a full discussion of that here.) That means overloaded CPS workers spent nearly four-fifths of their time spinning their wheels – and harming families with traumatic investigations.

Needless to say, few things could be dumber than making that even worse by turning everyone into a mandated reporter, required to tell CPS their slightest suspicions of child abuse, as some are suggesting in response to post-Penn State paranoia.

● Among the reports that are “substantiated” (which typically means only that a caseworker thinks there is slightly more evidence than not that the child was “abused”) well over three-quarters of the “abuse” cases are not abuse – they’re neglect.

Because definitions of neglect are so broad, and so vague, neglect can include some extremely serious harm – like deliberately starving a child or locking him in a closest for weeks at a time. But since the typical definition of neglect – lack of adequate food, clothing, shelter or supervision – also is a perfect definition of poverty, the typical neglect case is usually more like this one from Houston – in which the children were taken solely because the parents lacked adequate housing.

So of course, if you define poverty itself as “child abuse” then child abuse will go up during a recession. Fortunately, the Child Maltreatment report suggests that child welfare agencies aren’t doing that quite so often.

THE SUCCESS OF “DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE”

The report attributes the decline largely to the growth in “differential response” (also known as “alternative response”) something discussed often on this blog. It’s an option with a proven track record for reducing trauma for families and improving child safety.

Differential response gives agencies an option in between “all” – a full-scale traumatic investigation of a family – and “nothing” – deciding the report doesn’t rise to the level of abuse and not looking into it at all. As a result, it both narrows and widens the net of intervention into families.

Under differential response, when a case is believed to be low risk, a specialized team of workers is sent out to do an “assessment” and offer voluntary help to the family instead of a coercive investigation. In some states and localities, the child protective services agency does this, in others the cases are assigned to a private agency.

Child savers hate differential response. After all, they say, how can you be absolutely, positively, 110 percent certain it’s really a low risk case?

You can’t. But differential response does not preclude a finding of abuse. If the caseworker offering help discovers things are worse than expected and there really is abuse or neglect she still substantiates it. (Where differential response cases are handled by private agency workers, they report any actual abuse they find back to child protective services.)

In addition, if you send out overloaded caseworkers to “investigate” anything and everything they won’t have time to do the job well, and they’ll miss many more cases of children in real danger – even as they traumatize many more innocent families.

DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE IS EVIDENCE-BASED

And unlike foster care, and mandatory reporting, differential response is evidence-based. A new review of the literature, released last month found that 23 separate evaluations of differential response found no compromise of child safety. Every evaluation found lower rates of subsequent reports alleging abuse for families diverted to a differential response assessment.

The Child Maltreatment report found that a lot of the decrease in “child abuse” cases probably is attributable to the fact that more and more child welfare systems are using differential response for low-risk cases – which often are the very cases in which poverty is confused with neglect.

So while the recession definitely is causing more poverty, differential response is helping some child welfare agencies avoid confusing poverty with neglect as often.

Of course, there is still at least one notable exception: New York City where, under the regressive leadership of John Mattingly, when he ran the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, the city refused even to pilot differential response. At one point Mattingly promised to do it, then reneged. The tragedy of his broken promise is aptly illustrated by this case. Perhaps his successor, Robert Richter, will be more moved by evidence than ideology and give differential response a try.

It’s needed now more than ever – after all, we’re in a recession.

UPDATE, DEC. 13: Universal forced child abuse reporting too extreme even for hearing witnesses

2011-12-12T14:00:00.001-05:00

This assessment of today’s Senate subcommittee hearing is based on watching the hearing online and on the witnesses prepared testimony

The good news: The idea of forcing every American to report any suspicion of child abuse or risk jail is so extreme that even the most extreme of the hand-picked witnesses who testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing today couldn’t stomach it.

Neither Frank Cervone of Philadelphia’s Support Center for Child Advocates nor Teresa Huizar of the National Children’s Alliance was willing to endorse the concept – though Cervone came depressingly close, and Huizar, who runs a trade association for child advocacy centers, seemed to indicate she’d be more receptive to the idea if it came with more money for child advocacy centers. No other witness endorsed it in prepared testimony either, though one, Dr. Robert Block, seemed to waffle in response to a questions.

The bad news:

● Cervone took a classic cheap shot in the classic child saver “just sayin’” way: He said he didn’t actually know that “differential response” was the reason some advocates and doctors claim to have seen “some serious cases of physical abuse go by without intervention” but…

Cervone neglected to mention that there are now 23 separate studies showing that differential response does not compromise child safety. Indeed, all 23 found that repeat reports of maltreatment declined for families using this option.

And, of course, it’s not that Cervone is against differential response. On the contrary, he’s all for it. But… (Because in child welfare, when you want to stifle innovation you never say no, you just “yes, but…” it to death.)

● Cervone also seemed to think he was testifying before the Pennsylvania Legislature – raising a series of Pennsylvania-specific issues in his written statement, and repeating grossly-misleading claims about the rate at which Pennsylvania investigates and substantiates child abuse. NCCPR responded to those false claims in this op ed column for the Harrisburg Patriot-News.

● Huizar proposed the second most common all-propose child saver answer to everything, more “training.” (#1, of course, is “more money,” which she also proposed.) But training is no substitute for due process. She also wants to “educate all adults on the signs of abuse.” But given that, at some point, the list of such signs she touts could encompass almost every child in America any such program would need to be designed by someone other than Huizar and her allies.

● Huizar made some sound points concerning the annual survey of child abuse conducted by the federal government. Responding to that survey is one kind of “reporting” that should be mandatory – right now it isn’t. And there is a need to standardize many definitions, not just the ones Huizar mentions in her testimony.

STATISTICS ABUSE FROM DOCTOR BLOCK

● The award for statistics abuse goes to Dr. Robert Block of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He’s the one who cited the study purporting to show that one-in-four girls and one-in-six boys is a victim of child sexual abuse – the study discussed in NCCPR’s Blog on Youth Today; the one with a definition of abuse that can include a 19-year-old kissing a 17-year-old goodnight after a date.

Block mischaracterizes the study as asking about “abuse.” In fact, part of the reason the numbers are so high is that the study didn’t ask about abuse, but about sexual experiences. An earlier questionnaire, given to the same group, which did use the term “abuse” produced much lower figures. (There are good reasons to ask both ways. There are victims of genuine abuse who don’t realize or can’t face that the experience was abusive. But just as using the term abuse is likely to produce a figure that’s too low, not using it contributes to a figure that’s too high.)

● Block also discusses official reports of child abuse in a way that leaves the impression that every report is true. In fact, nearly four-fifths of reports are false. (Although child-savers love to claim the reports aren’t really false, they really are, for reasons explained here.)

● Block seems to view with alarm the large proportion of doctors who don’t report. It never seems to occur to Block and others like him that what Prof. Gary Melton of Clemson University calls this “rampant civil disobedience” is because, as Melton writes “professionals … are convinced that children are worse off as a result of reports to CPS” – and they are right. That would mean, of course, that mandatory reporting should be curbed, not expanded.

● Block even may have a problem with the fact that some states don’t define things like lack of adequate food, clothing and shelter as “neglect” if the parents can’t afford such things. He doesn’t actually say this is bad, he just lists it among inconsistencies in state laws. (But in any event, he needn’t worry – nobody pays attention to those provisions in the states that have them.)

Block’s solutions boil down to: Give doctors more money and give doctors more power.

WORDS IN NEED OF ACTION

Erin Sullivan Sutton, whose title at the Minnesota Department of Human Services is “assistant commissioner of Children and Family Services for Child Safety and Permanency,
Child Support Enforcement, Community Partnerships and Child Care Services, Management Operations, Transitional Support Quality Services, Office of Enterprise Technology-Transition Support Systems and Transition to Economic Stability” – said a lot of great things about how well Minnesota treats families who come to the attention of child protective services.

The comments would be more persuasive but for the fact that Minnesota tears apart families at a rate more than 75 percent above the national average, and has the worst record in the nation for taking away Native American children. (The good news: Minnesota used to be even worse; they really have made good use of differential response, for example. They might do even better, but Sullivan Sutton probably has to spend a lot of time memorizing her job title.)

POST ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 13, 2011 at about 2:00PM (post time below appears there only so that this post will appear on the blog below the post about the latest child abuse data from the federal government)

Child abuse in America: The paranoia express reaches the U.S. Senate

2011-12-12T06:00:00.001-05:00

NCCPR’s Briefing Paper on why more mandatory reporting harms children is available here.
An analysis of the bill likely to be discussed at tomorrow's Senate hearing is available from the Family Defense Center.

Tomorrow a Senate subcommittee holds a hearing called “Breaking the Silence on Child Abuse: Protection, Prevention, Intervention, and Deterrence.”

As is often the case with Congressional hearings this isn’t really about helping the Senators learn anything. The witnesses have been chosen to reinforce the biases of the person who asked for the hearing, Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey. Casey is pushing one of the bills that would force every American to report any suspicion of child abuse to authorities. The Family Defense Center has prepared a full analysis of this bill and NCCPR has a briefing paper on our website concerning the harm of such legislation.

The hearing is likely to start off well. The lead witness is Sheldon Kennedy, a former professional hockey player who repeatedly was abused by a junior hockey league coach when he was a teenager. As I’ve often noted, the problem of child abuse is serious and real, and we need to hear from victims with the courage to come forward.

The problem is how Kennedy’s story is likely to be taken out of context. Other witnesses include Teresa Huizar who heads a trade association for Child Advocacy Centers. In theory such centers are supposed to do careful, objective interviews with alleged victims. But a disturbing proportion of the fear-mongering op ed columns in the wake of Penn State – the ones with the baseless statistic about the prevalence of sexual abuse – are coming from such centers. Huizar herself pushes an absurd list of supposed symptoms of sexual abuse, symptoms which include: “changes in school performance” “using drugs or alcohol” and “lack[ing] sufficient clothing for the weather” followed by the admonition (in the pdf version): “If you see the signs, bring your child to a doctor or call the police."

Huizar’s group is one of the few to join in the most irresponsible campaign of all, one so extreme even the Child Welfare League of America and similar groups won’t take part: Michael Petit’s festival of distorted data in support of diverting $3 billion to $5 billion in scarce federal child welfare funds into hiring more child abuse investigators to tear apart more families. (Petit is the one who infamously said at a previous hearing that the states that do best at protecting children have “smaller, whiter populations.”)

Also testifying is Frank Cervone, who runs an organization that provides lawyers to represent children’s “best interests” in Philadelphia. (The lawyers do not advocate for what the child wants – unless it also happens to be whatever the lawyer thinks is best, which usually seems to be prolonging foster care). While the majority of cases in Philadelphia and nationwide end in reunification, of the 11 cases cited on Cervone’s website as examples of their brilliant work, only four end in reunification – and in three of those it appears that Cervone’s lawyers primarily worked to delay that reunification. In one case, for example Cervone brags that his lawyer demanded and got “rigorous standards” for reunification. There is not a word about helping the parents meet those standards.

In Philadelphia (as in most places) child welfare agency chiefs come and go, but Frank Cervone is always there. He’s been around for 30 years. He’s the Godsource on these issues for Philadelphia media. His influence probably is one of the main reasons Philadelphia tears apart proportionately more families every year than any other large American city.

A CASE OF HUTSON HYPOCRISY

Meanwhile, groups that really ought to know better, like the Children’s Defense Fund and the Center for Law and Social Policy have jumped on the force-everyone-to-report bandwagon.

Rutledge Q. Hutson of CLASP led the efforts to “Yes, but…” to death legislation to restore the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services to offer waivers from federal funding restrictions that limit huge amounts of money to funding foster care – and nothing else.

Hutson and the rest of the “yes, but…” brigade failed, but they succeeded in attaching a whole series of strings involving lots of burdensome, largely pointless, paperwork and reporting requirements. “These new reporting and tracking requirements are crucial,”Hutson told Stateline.org “We need to know what happens to the child,” she says. (In fact, every waiver already has a requirement for a full outside evaluation).

In contrast, it’s been nearly 50 years since every state adopted its first mandatory reporting law. And in all that time there has been not one, single study showing that it actually helps protect children. Yet while Rutledge Q. Hutson demands that supporters of waivers dot every i and cross every t on a ton of paperwork and make sure everything is evaluated, Rutledge Q. Hutson wants to force everyone to report their slightest suspicion of child abuse or risk going to jail based on no evidence whatsoever.

As a report from the federal government’s National Research Council puts it:

Mandatory reporting requirements were adopted without evidence of their effectiveness; no reliable study has yet demonstrated their positive or negative effects on the health and well-being of children at risk of maltreatment, their parents and caregivers and service providers.

So it’s no wonder the witness includes not even one child welfare scholar – not even one of those who favor massive coercive intervention into families. Because even they can’t stomach universal forced reporting.

ONE SCHOLAR’S ANALYSIS

To get a sense of why the scholarly community is not on board, consider this evaluation from 2004, by Prof. Gary Melton of Clemson University, published in a journal founded by the father of mandatory reporting, and the man credited with “rediscovering” child abuse in 1962, Dr. C. Henry Kempe.

Here are some excerpts:

Notwithstanding the charitable motives of the system’s founders, however, the evidence is overwhelming that many of the catastrophic problems in contemporary child protection work in the United States are a direct product of the system’s design. ...

[I]n the United States and numerous other jurisdictions that have copied the US model, policymakers maintain a child protection system that is now known to lack a grounding in valid empirical assumptions and indeed to have terrible unintended effects. ...

The assumption early in the history of the modern child protection system was that the problem of child maltreatment was reducible to “syndromes”—in effect, that abusive and neglecting parents were either very sick or very evil and that they thus could be appropriately characterized as “those people” who were fundamentally different from ourselves. Although such cases do occur, they are relatively rare. Most cases involve neglect (Administration on Children and Families, 2003). In my conversations with several senior physicians who have long worked on child protection teams at major medical centers in various US regions, all have said that they very rarely encounter the severe battering that Kempe et al. (1962) described. ...

In diagnosing “chronic and critical multiple organ failure” within the child protection system, the US Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect (1990, p. 2) made clear that ... the recurring crisis in the child protection system is the product of errors in design—specifically, making mandated reporting and investigation the centerpieces of the system ... [Emphasis added.]

[T]he threat of reporting probably deters many families from seeking help. The act of reporting leads to disruption of treatment in families in approximately one-fourth of cases among families already receiving mental health services (Levine & Doueck, 1995)....

It is plausible, for example, that health professionals’ involvement in mandated reporting compromises their own or their clients’ perception of them as helpers. Further, the rampant civil disobedience of mandated reporting laws by professionals who are convinced that children are worse off as a result of reports to CPS (Kalichman, 1999; Melton et al., 1995, and citations therein) may diminish their respect for legal policy in other contexts. …

Both common sense and empirical research lead naturally to the conclusion that mandated reporting is a bankrupt policy. The assumptions on which the system was built are now known to be plainly erroneous. Further, the current system appears to have paradoxical effects. It has had clearly negative side effects, some of which probably adversely affect children’s safety. ... Those countries without the US-style child protection system should develop other models. [Emphasis added].

Child abuse in America: True stories of false reports

2011-12-08T06:00:00.005-05:00

From the Family Defense Center in Chicago, a reminder of just how much harm can be done by false allegations of child abuse. Sixteen specific cases, some of them called in by “mandated reporters.” They are a reminder of the enormous harm that comes from urging – or even requiring - anyone and everyone to report anything and everything.

Here are four of the cases. As you read them consider not only the harm to the families falsely accused but also the fact that all the time, money and effort spent on these cases was stolen from finding children in real danger:

● A day care teacher followed the practice of other teachers in the center of giving back rubs to help the children fall asleep. The mother of a four-year-old told the day care center director that her daughter told her that the teacher had “touched” her daughter’s booty. The teacher was fired and forced out of his home for 11 months. A hearing eventually found the investigation to be “sloppy at best” for failing to interview other teachers to determine that abuse could not have occurred in the open classroom with 16 children and for failing to discover that the touching was a back rub.

● A school nurse called the Hotline on a mother because the 10-year-old child reported that she was required to clean up after the family cat and was being forced to go into a dark basement that was locked. During the investigation, the child protection investigator failed to observe that the basement the child referred to was where the cat’s food and litter box were kept, and that there were no locks on its doors. The indicated finding was dropped after the mother filed her appeal and retained legal counsel.

● A toddler who was learning to walk fell and was then found to have a wrist fracture. An emergency room doctor, without consulting any orthopedist, made a Hotline call. Later, several orthopedists opined that abuse was an implausible explanation because the only way to the wrist fracture could have occurred was through a commonplace fall. The child was taken from both parents involuntarily and placed in temporary custody of DCFS. After a nearly four-month separation, the State’s Attorney voluntarily dismissed the case after child abuse experts agreed with the orthopedists that abuse was not a plausible explanation for the fracture.

● A mother went to the police after her ex-boyfriend made a verbal threat while the mother was holding their 9-month-old daughter. The police called the Hotline and though the mother obtained an order of protection against her ex-boyfriend and kicked him out of her home, DCFS indicated a finding of neglect against the mother. When the ex-boyfriend later came to the home intimidating the mother, she was scared to call the police for fear that she would again be reported to DCFS. After a full hearing, the indicated finding against the mother was reversed.

The full list of sixteen cases is on the Family Defense Center website here. FDC also has a complete analysis of one of the bills introduced in Congress to make everyone a "mandated reporter."

Foster care in America: New video has the stories ABC News won’t show you

2011-12-03T10:23:00.003-05:00

Did you see that program about fairy tales on ABC?

No, not Once Upon a Time. On this fairy tale program the evil sorcerers dispense needless psychiatric medication to foster children – and on that point the program is on the mark.

But the wicked witches and other villains almost always are children’s parents. The knights in shining armor and prince and princess charmings are always foster parents or adoptive parents – or they run residential treatment centers. And while the villains come in all colors, the heroes are always “snow white.”

I am referring, of course, to ABC News' latest program about foster care and exercise in child exploitation. Our full response is on our website here.

Fortunately, another video was just released that tells the stories ABC News systematically left out, in its current program and so often in the past. It’s not quite as slick as the ABC News program – but it’s a lot more real. It’s from the Brooklyn Family Defense Project:

BFDP Fall Benefit Video, 11/17/11 from brooklyn family defense project on Vimeo.

Foster care in South Dakota: Federal lawyers may help SD tribes enforce ICWA

2011-12-02T07:10:00.000-05:00

Nearly half a century after Robert F. Kennedy sent federal marshals to enforce civil rights in Mississippi, the federal government is considering taking a similar step to enforce the rights of Native American children in South Dakota to remain safely in their own homes, free from needless foster care.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is considering sending federal lawyers to South Dakota to help tribes enforce the rights of their children under the Indian Child Welfare Act. The routine violation of those rights was exposed in a three-part NPR series in October.

BIA is considering this major enforcement action in response to a suggestion by U.S. Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA). Moran wrote to BIA after hearing the NPR stories. This link goes to the BIA’s full response to Moran.

BIA also plans to convene a summit early in 2012 in South Dakota bringing together all “stakeholders” including the tribes, the South Dakota Department of Social Services, the South Dakota Office of Tribal Relations and others.

It speaks volumes about the extent to which South Dakota is harming Native American children, and violating federal law, that BIA is considering such a forceful response to NPR’s excellent reporting. And it’s good news not only for Native American children but for all South Dakota children.

As I’ve noted in a previous post to this Blog, when it comes to child welfare, South Dakota is among the worst by almost any measure. It takes away children at one of the highest rates in the nation, it places children in the worst form of “care” – group homes and institutions – at one of the highest rates in the nation, and it tears apart Native American families at one of the highest rates in the nation. In short, South Dakota hit the trifecta of child welfare failure.

South Dakota tears apart families at the third highest rate in the country, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. This obscene rate of removal does nothing to keep children safe. On the contrary, states that take away proportionately far fewer children are nationally- recognized as leaders in keeping children safe.

Of course anything that curbs the blatant bias and the take-the-child-and-run mentality that dominate South Dakota child welfare helps Native American children avoid the enormous trauma of needless foster care. But curbing needless removal of children also gives workers more time to find children in real danger – and that makes all South Dakota children safer.

NCCPR commends BIA for considering this bold move. We hope they follow through.

Child abuse at Penn State: The myth of one-in-four / one-in-six

2011-12-01T02:32:00.000-05:00

In the weeks since Penn State, one statistic keeps turning up in the media. It’s scary, it’s ubiquitous, it’s meant to stampede people into things like universal mandatory reporting – and it’s wrong.

It’s the one about how, supposedly, one-in-four girls and one-in-six boys will be victims of child sexual abuse.

Ever wonder why, in all the scores of news stories, editorials and op ed columns where this stat turns up nobody seems to cite an actual study? Maybe it’s because of what the study actually reveals.

Our full analysis is on NCCPR’s Monthly Blog at the trade journal Youth Today.

Foster care in Cleveland: Did Plain Dealer sleaze claim another victim?

2011-11-27T19:15:00.003-05:00

UPDATE, NOV. 30: Citing court records WKYC-TV is now reporting that, in foster care “the child is having dreams of dying, is wetting the bed, and is anxious that the world is going to end in 2012.” The station also reports that part of the reason Cuyahoga County DCFS took the child away is that the mother missed some appointments. As noted below, the foster mother also is having trouble keeping up with appointments, but DCFS is responding somewhat differently.

You’ve probably already heard about this one: the eight-year-old boy who weighed 218 pounds and has been consigned to foster care as a result.

Apparently oblivious to the emotional trauma of tearing this child from his mother, (including the fact that, at age 8, this child may now believe he did something wrong and now is being punished) the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services showed up at his school one day last month and refused to let him go home. They shoved him directly into a foster home. His mother can’t even visit him for more than two hours a week.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer actually did a very good job with the story. Among other things the story noted that:

● The child was on the honor roll at his school and participated in school activities.

● The child only came to the attention of child welfare authorities, early in 2010, because his single mother, a substitute teacher who also is taking vocational school classes, brought him to the hospital because of breathing problems. He was diagnosed with sleep apnea, which often is caused by obesity.

The story doesn’t say exactly how this led to DCFS intervention, but, as we all know in the wake of Penn State, doctors and nurses are “mandated reporters” required to call in any suspicion of “child abuse.”

DCFS did not remove the child then and there; instead, the agency started monitoring the family. There is no mention of the agency helping the family.

● The boy did, in fact, lose weight. But recently he began gaining it back – apparently siblings were sneaking him food.

● The mother voluntarily enrolled the child in a special hospital program to help obese children.

What mom could not do, of course, was hire a personal trainer, or enroll the child in special camps or even keep an eye on him at all times, as wealthy families can do. So it’s no wonder that Dr. Arthur Caplan, America’s most quoted medical ethicist, told the Plain Dealer he was concerned that, as the newspaper put it, “families with the fewest resources, which often are minorities, will end up being the ones with their children removed.”

No kidding.

Prof. Vivek Sankaran of the University of Michigan Child Advocacy Center is dealing with a similar case in Detroit. "This is really dangerous stuff we're talking about," he told a Time magazine blog in July. "A lot of people don't realize how traumatic it is for children to be ripped away from their parents."

In the case he’s working on, Sankaran said:

What we've seen … is that the actual removal causes irreparable damage to the child — emotional problems, behavioral problems — and it's the type of thing that can't be remedied. People think [removing the child] is a quick fix, but you need to make sure you have tried every other possibility to protect the child.

Clearly in the Cleveland case they didn’t. Because here’s the kicker – according to Mom’s public defender it turns out that the foster mother, who lives in a nearby suburb, can’t keep up with all the child’s appointments – even though that’s what was expected of the boy’s single mother, even as she juggled her efforts to improve her education and make a living.

But The Plain Dealer reports that DCFS was far more solicitous of the foster mother. The newspaper reports that, according to the mother’s public defender, “There was even a discussion about getting the foster mother additional help or moving the child again, this time to a foster home with a personal trainer.”

That prompted the public defender to ask the obvious question: “I wonder why they didn’t offer the mother that kind of extra help.”

THE NEWSPAPER AS ENABLER

So if the Plain Dealer covered the story so well, why do I think the newspaper shares responsibility for this travesty? Because the Plain Dealer did so much to create the climate made it almost inevitable.

Early in 2010, after the Plain Dealer rediscovered two facts:

1. Cuyahoga County has a child protective services agency and

2. sometimes children known to that agency die,

it was the sleazy reporting by Harlan Spector and the even worse editorials by Sharon Broussard, falsely blaming the deaths on efforts to keep families together, that set off a huge foster-care panic in Cuyahoga County.

The panic began in March of 2010. By September of that year, the number of children taken from their homes had soared 65 percent over the same period in 2009 – and the panic has continued at the same rate this year.

So why did the Plain Dealer do better on this story? Probably because it was written by a different reporter, Rachel Dissell.

I don’t know how it happened that Dissell was assigned to the story. Perhaps in the midst of all the misery this family has been forced to endure, they got one stroke of luck. Maybe Harlan Spector was taking the days around Thanksgiving off.

Child abuse at Penn State: Look who’s NOT on the more mandatory reporting bandwagon

2011-11-23T11:40:00.000-05:00

Check the temperature in Hell. Watch out for flying pigs. Richard Gelles has just come out against more mandatory reporting of child abuse.

In the past, no one has been more fanatical about wanting states to do more barging into families and taking away children than Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Gelles takes responsibility for helping to write the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act which encouraged the needless removal of tens of thousands of children from their homes.

As he explained to the New York City publication Child Welfare Watch "Initially, this was just supposed to be a safe families bill, not really an adoption bill at all. The adoption component was a way of sanitizing the bill, to make it more appealing to a broader group of people. Adoption is a very popular concept in the country right now."

His influence probably helps explain why Philadelphia tears apart proportionately more families than any other big city and why Rhode Island, where he taught before coming to Penn, takes away children at among the highest rates of any state.

He’s spoken out in favor of orphanages and gone on record suggesting that only 20 to 30 percent of children taken from their parents ever should return home.

Some of us have long known that more mandatory reporting only backfires, further overloading workers for child protective services agencies so they have less time to find children in real danger, even as it subjects more children who never were harmed to the needless trauma of a child abuse investigation. But for Gelles finally to realize this is like Newt Gingrich joining an Occupy Wall Street protest.

In this he joins other one-time proponents of massive mandatory reporting like Eli Newberger and David Finkelhor, whose views are discussed in a previous post to this blog.

Perhaps it was that story from Florida, about the assistant principal, a mandated reporter, who called in a report about “a possible sex crime” – two 12-year-olds kissing – that was the last straw for Gelles. Of maybe it’s the case from Wisconsin last year where a district attorney tried to prosecute a six-year-old for “playing doctor.”

Whatever the reason, if even Richard Gelles thinks it’s a bad idea, then it should be obvious to anyone that it’s time to stop the make-anyone-and-everyone-report-anything-and-everything bandwagon.

Child abuse at Penn State: The ugly road from Happy Valley, part two:

2011-11-21T01:00:00.005-05:00

Too little skepticism, and too much, both can hurt children.

UPDATE, NOVEMBER 22: This example of child abuse hysteria occurred last year. But there will be a lot more of it if we don't start curbing post-Penn State paranoia.

In the previous post to this blog, I wrote about how the Penn State horrors threaten to spark a revival of the witchhunt mentality that dominated child welfare during the 1980s. Today’s “child savers” to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts gave themselves, are reviving a series of myths about child abuse that hurt huge numbers of children more than two decades ago.

Because so much time has passed, many people have forgotten the lessons of that era, or never knew them. There was a time when I could use simple shorthand to remind reporters – I could just say “McMartin.” But there are reporters on the job today who hadn’t been born when the lurid allegations about mass molestation at the McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles first made headlines. So it’s well worth reviewing the lessons from that era.

SORRY, WRONG NUMBERS

One of those lessons has to do with phony numbers that nobody bothers to check – absurd claims about the prevalence of child sexual abuse that appear to have been pulled from thin air.

By 1990, there were studies attempting to estimate the percentage of people sexually abused during childhood that had come up with results ranging from one percent to 62 percent. The studies used widely varying definitions of abuse, some of them breathtakingly broad, and usually included abuse by anyone, not just cases subject to the jurisdiction of child protective services.

But because large numbers attract more attention than small numbers, all through the 80s it was claimed, repeatedly that "one out of three girls and one out of ten boys will be sexually abused" during childhood.

Most of those claims, at least for the girls, could be traced back to a single, highly-publicized study which used extremely broad, vague definitions. But at least there was one study.

In the wake of Penn State, one news account after another claims that one out of four (or sometimes one out of three) girls and one out of six boys will be victims of child sexual abuse during their childhoods.

Typically the figure appears with no attribution at all, except some vague reference to “experts say” or “most experts believe.” I have yet to find a news account that cites an actual study of any kind, let alone a valid one. Instead there are quotes about how these crimes are so awful that we desperately want to “turn away” and refuse to face up to how widespread they are. In other words: if you try to check facts, you’re “in denial.”

Then, a segment of NPR’s Tell Me More last week, Dr. Leslie Walker of Seattle Children’s Hospital took things a step further, declaring:

I think you have to remember that one in three girls under the age of 18 do get sexually abused. And it's no different, it's the same number of boys under, before puberty. So when someone says that they have been abused you have to assume that it happened immediately … One in three people have been abused …”

Could we stop and think about that for a second? Most of us have at least one sibling. So if Walker’s number is correct, at least two-thirds of American adults either were sexually abused as children, or are siblings of a child sexual abuse victim.

If there are that many victims the number of perpetrators must be astronomical as well. Then you must add all the parents and others who are guilty of “neglect” because they should have known it was happening and “failed to protect” their children.

So if nothing else, if these claims were true the entire American child welfare system would have to be dismantled immediately – because if there are that many child molesters out there, the odds that children taken from their parents and placed in foster care will be molested are so staggering that foster care is way too dangerous an option. (As it happens, there is solid research indicating that there is child abuse in one-quarter to one third of foster homes, with an even worse record for group homes and institutions. Jerry Sandusky, who stands accused in the Penn State cases, was a foster parent and his charity began as a group home.)

THE REAL NUMBERS ARE BAD ENOUGH

The best evidence we have concerning the true prevalence of child sexual abuse comes from two comprehensive reviews of the scholarly literature.

The first is a review of 20 different studies conducted by seven Canadian researchers, published in 1991. They found that the studies with the best methodology consistently indicated that between 10 and 12 percent of girls under age 14 are sexually abused by someone during their childhoods. The 1980s study that produced the "one out of three" claim was singled out for criticism by these researchers.

A decade later, another comprehensive review of the literature put the actual figure at 9 to 11 percent for girls and 5 to 6 percent for boys. The review found that studies which met two fundamental tenets of good research, high response rates and large sample size, tended to find lower rates of abuse than the smaller, less representative studies.

Odds are the figure is lower today, since, as the Associated Press reports, there is strong evidence that the rate of child sexual abuse has declined significantly in recent years.

Those figures, like all of the best evidence concerning the true extent of child abuse in America, are cause for concern and action. The real numbers are bad enough. Exaggeration serves only to panic us into seeking "solutions" that hurt the children they are intended to help.

Right now, this kind of exaggeration and fear mongering can do even more harm.

HOW IT HURTS CHILDREN

In the 1980s, the rhetoric about “children don’t lie,” discussed in the previous post to this blog, and the absurd numbers made it easy for people to suspend reasonable skepticism when “child savers” started talking about satanic cults operating out of day care centers.

All those claims in the previous post about secret tunnels and child molesters with wings grew out of the way children were interrogated about allegations of sexual abuse in their day care centers or at the hands of their own parents. The result was a series of witchhunts across the country lasting all the way into the 1990s. The McMartin Preschool was only the most notorious. There were witchhunts that tore apart communities in Massachusetts, New Jersey, San Diego, Kern County, California, Jodan, Minnesota, and Wenatchee Washington, among others.

Hundreds of innocent people had their lives ruined, many were jailed. In the end, in almost every case, almost everyone accused was exonerated.

But they were not the ones who suffered most. As usual, the best efforts of the child savers backfired against the children. There were the children who suffered when they were separated from their jailed parents. There were the children who suffered when, at a very young age, they actually were persuaded by caseworkers and therapists that they’d been abused when they hadn’t. Some believe it to this day.

But children also suffered as a result of the climate and fear and paranoia spread by the child savers. Teachers and day care workers became afraid to hug their students – sometimes actually telling them to “give yourselves a pat on the back.” (Among the potential side effects: Children denied normal affection are easier prey for actual child molesters.) Men were largely driven out of pre-school teaching. Children were taught not simply to be prudent in dealings with adults but to be constantly fearful and on guard.

That seems to be making a comeback, too. One post-Penn State news story after another warns parents to never, ever let their children be alone with any other adult. (That’s going to make it rather difficult for teachers to meet with students having trouble with their homework or for guidance counselors to help them with personal problems, or for mentors to help kids with school projects.)

A Washington Times columnist warns that “sports are the perfect hunting ground for perverts, pedophiles and other assorted monsters.”

Some go further. One Huffington Post blogger raged against “how we encourage our kids to abandon their sense of self-trust -- their instinct and intuition -- in order to be polite through showing physical affection to adults.” He is referring to parents who, at holiday gatherings “pressure” the kids to “give your uncle a hug and kiss."

This blogger seems to suggest a child reluctant to do this, knows by “instinct and intuition” that uncle is a child molester. The possibility that uncle may just have bad breath or a scratchy beard does not seem to occur to him.

There was plenty of paranoia before Penn State (check out this list of absurdities, which I first discovered thanks to Lenore Skenazy at her Free-Range Kids blog. This one is my favorite). So it would be understandable if adults now hesitated to so much as smile at a child for fear of being accused of “grooming” that child into a sexual abuse victim. In fact, if this story from Florida is any indication, the paranoia is back, with a vengeance.

But there’s another way all this hurts children.

After the hysteria of the 80s came the skepticism of the 90s. There are children who almost certainly suffered because some people may have become too skeptical. In the wake of the collapse of the mass molestation cases there are bound to have been children who really were abused, but were not believed. Given how far back the allegations go, some of the Penn State victims may even be among them. As I wrote in my book, Wounded Innocents, in 1990: If so, the blame rests squarely with the child savers. They have managed to find one more way to destroy children in order to save them.

Ultimately, the Los Angeles Times would win a Pulitzer Prize for some of its writing about the McMartin case. But not for coverage of the case itself. Rather, the late David Shaw, the paper’s media critic, won it for a series asking why the media accepted all the wild claims from the child savers so easily. The headline in the first installment summed it up: “Where was skepticism in media?” it said.

Is it too much to ask for a little more skepticism this time, before it’s too late.

Child abuse at Penn State: The ugly road from Happy Valley, part one

2011-11-17T06:00:00.006-05:00

UPDATE 1: CHECK OUT THIS TIMELY REMINDER OF THE PITFALLS OF FORCED CHILD ABUSE REPORTING FROM PHILADELPHIA CITYPAPER

UPDATE 2: IN CASE ANYONE STILL BELIEVES THE HYSTERIA OVER REPORTING CHILD ABUSE WON'T CAUSE PEOPLE TO DO SOME REALLY STUPID THINGS: APPARENTLY, IT ALREADY HAS

UPDATE 3: IN THE CASE DISCUSSED IN THIS STORY, THE CHILD REALLY WAS ABUSED. IMAGINE WHAT IT'S LIKE FOR A CHILD WHO WAS NOT.

● The myth that “children don’t lie” is back

● The hype is back: One “expert” suggests that two-thirds of Americans either were victims of child sexual abuse – or have a sibling who was.

● The 1980s witchhunt mentality may be making a comeback, too – and it’s children who really have been abused who are going to suffer most.

As I listened to the end of a segment of NPR’s Tell Me More on Tuesday, I felt as though I’d been transported back in time. Suddenly it was the 1980s again, when a bizarre, hyperbolic, myth-fueled reaction to the serious and real problem of child sexual abuse led to a whole series of tragedies of its own. In the wake of the Penn State horrors, it looks like those myths are making a comeback.

Anchor Michel Norris was leading a discussion of “how to teach children to be alert to potentially abusive behavior and how to get them to speak up …”

At the very end, Norris raised an issue that, as far as I know, no other journalist has had the courage even to mention since the Penn State story broke:

There is an awful other side to this and there have been examples of false accusations … a group of girls were angry at a gym teacher because he had punished them for passing notes or talking and so they made up an accusation which turned out to be false. So how do you recommend that parents navigate such a thing?

This is where the trip through time began, led by Dr. Leslie Walker of Seattle Children's Hospital. It was 1980s mythology all over again as Walker declared:

The one-in-three number is utter nonsense, and I’ll deal with it in a post on Monday.

For now, consider the fact that, though she didn’t use the exact words, Walker was leading us back to the era of those 1980s catchphrases “children don’t lie” and “believe the children.”

It’s been such a long time since those phrases were all the rage, and such a long time since the hyped numbers were in vogue, that I had to go back to the book I wrote in 1990, Wounded Innocents (Prometheus Books, 1990, 1995) to review what happened and how much harm was done to children.

“CHILDREN DON’T LIE”

The issue of the truth of claims attributed to children wasn’t simple then, and it’s not simple now.

Of course, it is extremely unlikely that a very young child would make up out of whole cloth a story of being sexually assaulted.

In other cases, there is strong evidence that the children are not only telling the truth, but showing extraordinary courage in coming forward – courage for which they deserve wholehearted support. I would put the Penn State cases in that category.

But many allegations of sexual abuse involve situations that are far less clear-cut. So, for example, in Upstate New York, authorities concluded that children who had heard one of the now-ubiquitous “good touch / bad touch” lectures that supposedly prevent sexual abuse wound up falsely accusing their substitute teacher. But the children weren’t lying. They had confused normal affection with “bad touching.”

In addition, young children aren’t the ones who pick up the phone and call child abuse hotlines. Adults do that. And by that time the child might have been questioned repeatedly by a concerned parent or a therapist, or someone else who asked so many leading questions that what gets phoned into the hotline may bear little resemblance to what the child actually said.

Or the children are rewarded with praise for “disclosing” abuse and badgered if they don’t – a common problem in the “mass molestation” nightmare cases of the 1980s – cases that produced some remarkable allegations.

● If children don’t lie about abuse, then Bakersfield California was a hotbed of cannibalism.

● If children don’t lie about abuse there was a secret underground amusement park near Fort Bragg, California. You got in from the ocean by submarine.

● If children don’t lie about abuse, then they were being flown from day care centers all over the country in planes to be molested, then returned in time to be picked up by their parents. Some of the molesters didn’t need a plane. They could fly through the air all by themselves.

● If children don’t lie about abuse, some children in El Paso Texas had their eyes removed – and then put back,

Or the allegation may not come from a child at all. Consider this actual report to a child abuse hotline in Rochester, New York, about a young girl in the 1980s:

The victim and the suspect have been seen holding hands and walking while the suspect had his arm around the victim. The source also stated suspect used to live with the victim’s mother and the victim. He had moved out in the recent past but visits the home every day. The source also stated the victim goes away with the suspect for long periods of time. Source stated victim wears dresses, tights, and shoes. Source said it is rumored by children that the victim may be sleeping with suspect. No other information is available…

That was enough to prompt both Child Protective Services and the police to investigate. Here’s what they found out:

● A doctor found no evidence of sexual abuse.

● The man was a friend of the family.

● According to both mother and child, when he slept over he slept on the couch.

Why was the little girl so nicely dressed when the man took her out? Because he was taking her to church.

And of course, older children may, in fact, have all sorts of reasons to lie, as in the case cited by Michel Norris (and notice how Walker simply ignored the case in her “answer.”)

Another key element of the “children don’t lie” myth was the claim, made with equal certainly, that in one situation children are always lying: when they recant. Any notion that a child could recant because the allegation was not, in fact, true – perhaps it had been the result of a coercive interrogation – is dismissed out of hand. Children only recant, it was said, to cover up for the abuser.

And sure enough, Walker revived that claim as well. Walker claimed she never, ever had a child claim abuse when it wasn’t true. But, she said,

I have seen kids recant, though. And kids back down from what really happened a lot of times because they feel like they're breaking up the family. They feel guilty. They feel that it's overwhelming and the community and people are all coming against them and they recant, but it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. I would always err on the idea that it did happen.

Too bad it’s the children themselves who often pay for that kind of error.

On Monday: Phony claims bolstered by phony numbers, and how it all hurts children

Update: Child abuse and the Penn State horrors: Casey strikes out

2011-11-16T17:42:00.001-05:00

Taking knee-jerk idiocy to the ultimate level, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey (D-Pa.) has introduced legislation to coerce every state into passing a law to require anyone and everyone to report any and every suspicion of child maltreatment to child protective services or the police. It’s co-sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Ca.).

The federal government can’t force the states to do this directly. But Casey’s bill would withhold federal aid under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act from states that refuse.

For all of the reasons described in the post below, the best title for this bill would be the Helping Child Abusers Get Away With It Act of 2011.

Child abuse in America: Learning the wrong lessons from the Penn State scandal

2011-11-11T12:05:00.002-05:00

The fact that it’s so predictable makes it no less depressing: In the wake of a scandal over the alleged rape of children by a former Penn State football coach, there are calls to require even more people to report their slightest suspicions of child abuse to child protective services agencies and/or law enforcement.

The near-certain result: More people will get away with child abuse. More children will suffer at the hands of child abusers because CPS caseworkers will be even more overwhelmed with false allegations and have even less time to find the children in real danger. And more children will suffer at the hands of CPS agencies – because inflicting a child abuse investigation on a child who was never otherwise harmed is an act of child abuse in and of itself. That is particularly true in cases of physical and sexual abuse.

THE PENN STATE CASES

For starters, consider the Penn State cases themselves. If he is guilty of the charges against him, former coach Jerry Sandusky didn’t get away with it until now because of the lack of a mandatory reporting law; he got away with it because people already required to report the abuse failed to do so.

The Penn State case is unusual in another way as well: In this case, Mike McQueary, then a graduate assistant in the football program, says he actually caught Sandusky in the act of raping a ten-year-old boy. Very few cases are so clear and unambiguous. As Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights persuasively argues at The Daily Beast, what stopped McQueary from immediately calling 911 had nothing to do with child abuse reporting laws. Rather, Bissenger writes:

What happened, or more accurately did not happen, goes to the core of evil that major college sports programs in this country have become, equivalent to Mafia families in which the code of omertà rules and coaches and staff always close ranks around their own, even if it means letting someone who was first accused of inappropriate sexual conduct in 1998 continue to roam. … Except that the even the Mafia has higher moral standards.

To leap from this extreme – and extremely unambiguous case – to requiring everybody who works in a school or college, from the janitor to the secretaries to the school bus drivers – to phone in their slightest suspicion about everything or risk jail time is to court disaster.

Remember, we’re talking about the slightest suspicion of everything that now comes under the heading of “child abuse” and “child neglect” – including all those breathtakingly-broad statutes that define poverty itself as neglect.

OVERLOADING CPS AGENCIES

The most obvious problem with all this, of course, is that it will further overload child welfare agencies with CYA referrals from mandated reporters terrified of what will happen to them if they actually exercise some common sense. Even now, more than 75 percent of all reports alleging "child abuse" are false. That is, they fail to meet the minimal standard for declaring the report "substantiated." No hearing is required to "substantiate" a case; it's simply the guess of a caseworker checking a box on a form. Turning everyone into a mandatory reporter will make the proportion of false allegations even bigger.

Even David Finkelhor, of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and someone with impeccable “child saver” credentials, told the Associated Press:

Maybe it's better that people use discretion ... If everybody obeyed the letter of the law and reported a suspicion of abuse, the agencies would be completely overwhelmed with reports.

Finkelhor is not alone. As early as the 1980s, some former proponents of massive mandatory reporting began to have second thoughts. In a 1983 article, Dr. Eli Newberger of Children’s Hospital in Boston, again, someone with gold-plated “child saver” credentials, wrote that

had professionals, like me, known then what we know now, we would never have urged on Congress, federal officials and state broadened concepts of child abuse as the basis for reporting legislation.

Newberger’s article was called “The Helping Hand Strikes Again.”

Of course, not everyone thinks this is all that much of a problem. A former prosecutor named Victor Veith, best known for coming up with a master plan to end all child abuse – in 120 years, thereby assuring that no one who implements it will be around to see if it actually worked - told AP:

I'd be in favor of as broad a mandated reporting law as possible. But it needs to be accompanied by required training.

The broadest possible law, of course, would make everyone a mandated reporter. Eighteen states actually do that. I can’t wait to find out Veith’s master plan for training more than 200 million Americans in how to detect child abuse.

Actually, “training” could make things even worse if it’s done by the same organizations that put out broad, vague lists of symptoms we’re all supposed to watch out for to determine if a child might be abused, lists which tell us to suspect abuse if a child is too shy or too aggressive or acts too much like an adult or too much like a child or has nightmares or doesn’t have warm clothing in winter and on and on and on. Here's a classic example.

But system overload is only one of the harms that broadening reporting laws will cause.

THE TRAUMA TO CHILDREN

Almost forgotten is the fact that a child abuse investigation is not a benign act. Having a stranger come to the door – or your school – pull you aside and ask questions about the most intimate aspects of your life can be an enormously traumatic experience for a child; and the younger the child the greater the trauma. It can leave lifelong emotional scars.

Three of the nation’s leading scholars of child welfare in the 20^th Century – scholars who opposed mandatory reporting, by the way - the late Anna Freud, Joseph Goldstein and Albert J. Solnit wrote that children

react even to temporary infringement of parental autonomy with anxiety, diminishing trust, loosening of emotional ties, or an increasing tendency to be out of control. The younger the child and the greater his own helplessness and dependence, the stronger is his need to experience his parents as his lawgivers -- safe, reliable, all-powerful and independent . When family integrity is broken or weakened by state intrusion [the child's] needs are thwarted and his belief that his parents are omniscient and all-powerful is shaken prematurely.

It’s not just young children who are harmed. For a particularly-insightful take on the dilemma of mandatory reporting check out this essay from a pediatrician that ran in The Washington Post.

STRIPSEARCHES – AND WORSE

Even worse, when the allegation is physical abuse – and, sometimes, even when it’s not - the investigation often is accompanied by a stripsearch by a caseworker or a doctor looking for bruises. If anyone else did that it would be sexual abuse. And if the allegation is sexual abuse, the medical exam can be a lot more traumatic.

Indeed, try to imagine the terror for a young child, suddenly taken from family by strangers, often including police. She goes to a strange hospital, where doctors and nurses she’s never met before perform the most intimate possible examination.

It’s already far too easy to inflict this kind of harm on a child, as can be seen in this case, part of a class-action suit in New York City. (NCCPR’s Vice President represented the family).

Surely we should not make it even more likely that this kind of abuse will be inflicted on children by setting the process in motion based on nothing more than a school janitor’s hunch.

All this is before we even reach the harm of panicky workers using these kinds of flimsy allegations to throw children needlessly into foster care – where the rate of actual abuse is far higher than in the general population. (Though the majority of foster parents try to do the best they can for the children in their care, as it happens, Jerry Sandusky was a foster parent, and his charity ran a group home.)

ADULT SELF-INDULGENCE

But as with so much else that supposedly involves “child protection” the call for more reporting laws really is about adult self-indulgence. This can be seen in what Jim Hmurovich told the AP. Hmurovich now runs Prevent Child Abuse America – that’s the group that publishes the Spider Man comic book that effectively encourages children to turn in their parents if they get a spanking.

Before that he ran the child welfare system in Indiana, where he turned it into a paragon of mediocrity, from which it still hasn’t recovered. Indiana is best known for horrifying cases of deaths of children “known to the system” and for tearing apart families at a rate more than 50 percent above the national average.

When people in child welfare are asked to cite states that do a particularly good job of keeping children safe, I’ve never heard anyone outside Indiana cite Indiana. (And it’s hard to believe those in Indiana are doing it with straight faces.)

But Indiana is one of those states where everyone is a mandated reporter, and Jim Hmurovich thinks that’s just dandy. According to AP, Hmurovich “supports the state's broad reporting requirement, even though he said its impact is hard to quantify.”

“Hard to quantify” means there is not a shred of evidence that making everyone a mandated reporter makes children safer, in Indiana or anywhere else. But that doesn’t seem to be Hmurovich’s main concern.

"It gave everyone some comfort that they were doing the right thing legally if they report suspicions of abuse," he told the AP. "If children are so important to us, shouldn't it be all our responsibility to make sure they're safe?"

In other words, Jim Hmurovich has just given new meaning to one of the less noble catchphrases of the 1960s: "If it feels good, do it."

Foster care in America: Another excuse for high rates-of-removal bites the dust

2011-11-10T06:00:00.005-05:00

I hear it all the time when I point out to reporters in certain states that their states are extreme outliers when it comes to tearing apart families – states like Nebraska, Iowa, Rhode Island and South Dakota, among others.

The reporters ask the flack for the child welfare agency and she or he almost always comes up with the same excuse: “We’re different,” the flack claims, “unlike other states, we count children placed in foster care through our juvenile justice system, not just our child welfare system.”

I then ask the reporter: What percentage of placements do they claim are juvenile justice placements? It turns out that the percentage is so small that, even if you deducted those placements the extreme outliers remain just that - extreme outliers.

But there is another problem with this argument: If so many states are saying they’re unusual – if not unique – because they count these additional placements, it can’t really be all that unusual.

The federal government doesn’t actually count how many states include juvenile justice cases. But one state legislature’s audit staff has.

Staff for the Performance Audit Committee of the Nebraska Legislature got tired of hearing this excuse. So they checked with Casey Family Programs which actually asked the states. The findings are in this report on pages 31 and 32. It turns out that the majority of the states, 31 in all, include juvenile justice placements in the counts of entries into care and the snapshot number of children in foster care that they send to the federal government.

So the assorted public officials, agency leaders and flacks who have been blithely using the juvenile justice placement excuse all this time either are grossly ill-informed, or they are lying.

On our blog at Youth Today: Is the Children's Defense Fund leaving homeless children behind?

2011-11-07T09:45:00.001-05:00

One of the complaints liberals, like me, have about the far right is that they tend to believe that protectable life begins at conception and ends at birth.

But some recent behavior by the liberals at the Children’s Defense Fund raises questions about whether there may be a similar problem with some on the left. Does CDF believe children should be defended only from the day they enter foster care until the day they leave?

Details are on our Blog at the trade journal Youth Today.

Foster care in South Dakota: When all else fails, try xenophobia

2011-11-03T06:00:00.009-04:00

Apparently those NPR stories about the damage done to Native American families by child protective services in South Dakota have made that state’s governor, Dennis Daugaard, very nervous.

He refused to actually be interviewed by reporter Laura Sullivan and producer Amy Walters. Instead, he issued a five-page rebuttal to the series – before it ever aired.

What is so fascinating about the rebuttal is that it leaves all of the most important points in the series unrebutted. There is no response to the fact that South Dakota tears apart families at a rate vastly above the national average. There is no response to the fact that Native American children are trapped in South Dakota foster care at a rate nearly four times their rate in the general population. In fact there is no response to anything in the NPR stories about the actual harm done to Native American children.

Instead the governor obsesses over part two of the series which was all about – the governor. That was the part which discussed how, back when he held the part-time job of lieutenant governor, his full-time job was running the Children’s Home Society of South Dakota – and how, during this time, CHS did remarkably well when it came to obtaining state contracts.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told NPR that it’s “a massive conflict-of-interest.” The governor’s defense is that everybody in South Dakota knew all about it – it’s a small state – and anyway, he was only doing it for the kids.

It’s certainly true that Daugaard made no secret of his connection to CHS – as NPR reported, he bragged about it in his campaign for governor. He may well have believed, sincerely, that what CHS was doing was best for the children. (NPR never suggests otherwise.) Most people who run great big child welfare agencies that hold kids in foster care believe that – and only rarely does the mass of objective evidence to the contrary change their minds.

Whether CHS got the contract to warehouse kids or someone else did doesn’t make a lot of difference to me. The issue is that South Dakota not only tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation, it also dumps the kids into the worst form of “care” – group homes and institutions – at one of the highest rates in the nation. But the governor’s past employment raises another concern: Anyone that emotionally invested in warehousing children is going to find it hard to face up to the reality of how much it harms children.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF CONFLICT

The role of CHS raises questions about a different kind of potential conflict of interest – the kind that comes with what is known in the corporate world as “vertical integration.” During Daugaard’s time as Lieutenant Governor, CHS grew so huge that a good case can be made that, as a practical matter, CHS runs child welfare in South Dakota.

● CHS does the examinations of children to determine if they were abused or neglected.

● CHS trains the state caseworkers who decide whether to remove a child from the home.

● CHS screens the potential foster parents, both strangers and relatives, who might take in those children.

● CHS trains the foster parents.

● CHS runs lots of group homes and institutions.

So if CHS decides a child is abused, it increases the number of potential candidates for CHS group homes and institutions. If CHS trains the caseworkers, will those caseworkers be trained in a way that makes them more likely to take away the child – and send that child to a CHS institution? If CHS screens family foster homes that are, in effect, “competitors” to CHS group homes and institutions, will they set standards many of those family foster homes can’t meet?

I’m not suggesting that any of this would be some kind of conscious conspiracy. But rationalization is powerful. Any organization whose livelihood is dependent on substitute care is going to persuade itself that lots and lots of children need substitute care.

It’s no different from doctors who are more likely to perform unnecessary surgery when paid on a fee-for-service basis or hospitals which extend patient stays when they are paid by the day. In both cases, the medical personnel almost certainly have persuaded themselves that the patients are really, really sick.

The governor’s “prebuttal” as it was aptly described by one reporter, addresses none of this. And, as I noted at the outset, it says nothing about the entire issue of the destruction of Native American families.

“SHOW THEM THE WALL”

The only support the Governor can come up with for the claim of bias is a statement from his own press secretary, Joe Kafka (I’m not making that name up) and an e-mail from reporter Sullivan requesting an interview.

In fact, rather than showing bias, the e-mail is an example of exactly what good, careful reporters are supposed to do.

When I was a reporter in the late 1980s, the newspaper where I worked brought in a superb investigative reporter as a guest speaker. In discussing the need for fairness in investigative reporting, this reporter urged us, as we reached the conclusion of any project, to go to anyone who may not come out looking good and “show them the wall.” By that he meant, lay out every specific point that raises questions about the subject and give that subject a full opportunity to respond.

That is exactly what Sullivan does in her e-mail. She spells out exactly what she and producer Walters have found so far and asks the Governor to please tell his side of the story. This is precisely the opposite of the kind of “ambush interview” we’ve all seen on some television newsmagazine programs, the kind that gives investigative reporting a bad name.

Governor Daugaard should have welcomed the e-mail and told his side of the story. Unless of course, he had no real answer.

Apparently he doesn’t. Because the governor’s other tactic was to change the subject.

THE PENULTIMATE REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL?

If, as Samuel Johnson said, false patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrel, the next-to-last is xenophobia.

And so, in the very first paragraph of his prebuttal, the governor notes that Sullivan “a native of San Francisco, works for Washington DC-based NPR.”

Horrors! Washington and San Francisco! Obviously, anyone with a background like that simply has it in for South Dakota. (I imagine the only thing worse would be to work in the Washington area and be from New York City – like me.)

Similarly, after two Members of Congress said they were launching an investigation, an aide to the governor complained that they are from “other states” and didn’t speak to the South Dakota Department of Social Services first. The real question is why the South Dakota Congressional delegation so far has refused to speak up for their Native American constituents – and all the children harmed by the rampant misuse and overuse of foster care in the state.

But it seems the governor underestimated his constituents, or at least the state’s journalists – because they don’t seem to be buying it.

See, in particular the work of Denise Ross, a reporter for the Daily Republic in Mitchell, S.D. (She’s the one who came up with “prebuttal.”) In a post on the newspaper’s Blog she speaks highly of the governor, and expresses her conviction that he really does care about the kids. But she also writes:

The much bigger, longer-standing issue is whether South Dakota complies with the federal Indian Child Welfare Act and other laws, for example when social workers enter Indian reservations with which the state has no agreement and remove tribal children from their homes. The Crow Creek tribe threatened to prosecute for kidnapping in one case, NPR reported, and the children were promptly returned to their relatives. …

Here’s my hope, especially given my enduring belief in Daugaard’s character. I hope that he acknowledges that the state contracts for CHS look bad, but I hope he then vows as governor to look into South Dakota’s foster care system, our compliance with ICWA and our rate of taking children from their home – about 3 times that of other states. I hope he works as hard at that as he worked as a young lawmaker to bring some reform to juvenile corrections. This time, he has a lot more power to affect change.

I don’t know where Ms. Ross was born and raised. But right now, Gov. Daugaard, she’s sending you a message straight from Mitchell, South Dakota.

CORRECTION: This post has been corrected to fix an error in the name of the newspaper in Mitchell, S.D. I can only imagine what Joe Kafka will make of that.

UPDATE: Foster care in South Dakota: Members of Congress investigate NPR’s revelations

2011-11-01T12:05:00.000-04:00

Rep Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.), the ranking minority members of the House of Representatives committee and subcommittee with jurisdiction over Indian affairs, have launched an investigation of the revelations in NPR’s brilliant three-part series about what child protective services in the State of South Dakota is doing to Native American families.

That’s another good step in the right direction, coming as it does after the announcement from the South Dakota ACLU.

Foster care in South Dakota: NPR stories get the ACLU’s attention

2011-10-31T05:31:00.000-04:00

This will give you some idea of the power of NPR’s three-part series on the destruction of Native American families by child protective services in South Dakota: The stories were a 2 x 4 so big they even got the attention of the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

That has the potential to jump-start efforts to stop the practices exposed by NPR. Up to now, the small and underfunded Lakota People’s Law Project has stood virtually alone in fighting for the rights of South Dakota’s Native Americans under the Indian Child Welfare Act. (Their director has posted a blog to answer the many people who have asked how they can help as individuals.)

One would think ACLU involvement would be a no-brainier: A state tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation, repeatedly confuses family poverty with neglect and tramples on a federal law designed to protect Native Americans.

But as I’ve noted often before on this Blog, too many of my fellow liberals forget everything they claim to believe about civil liberties as soon as someone whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears. That’s a major reason why the traditional due process protections Americans take for granted in other fields of law are almost non-existent in child welfare. (For details see our Due Process Agenda).

There is no clearer example of this myopia than the behavior of the ACLU, nationally and in most states. Typically, when it comes to the rights of children to live with their own families, the ACLU is AWOL. NCCPR’s founder, Elizabeth Vorenberg, resigned from the ACLU’s National Board over its failure to defend the civil liberties of families facing the unchecked power of child protective services.

The child welfare field is filled with issues that would seem to be obvious choices for ACLU litigation: Secret trials, lack of adequate (or sometimes any) defense counsel, searches and seizures without warrants, and on and on.

REFUSING TO DEFEND CHILDREN’S FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS

But consider what happened this year when the first major child welfare case in 21 years, Camreta v. Greene, reached the U.S. Supreme Court. As we explain on our special website about the case:

The child was only nine years old when she was called out of her classroom and forced to endure a two-hour interrogation by a male caseworker for the Oregon Department of Human Services because DHS had received a false allegation of sexual abuse. Sitting silently in the room during the entire interrogation was another man - an armed deputy sheriff.

The child repeatedly denied any abuse, only to be browbeaten by the caseworker, who kept insisting she was giving the wrong answers while questioning the little girl about the most intimate details of her life. … The experience so traumatized the child that she became physically ill.

The child sued and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure had been violated.

NCCPR’s Vice President, Carolyn Kubitschek represented the child. The Family Defense Center co-ordinated an extraordinary effort leading to the filing of 18 amicus briefs by 70 individuals and organizations in support of this child’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Several of the groups, including the Legal Aid Society Juvenile Rights Practice, Lawyers for Children, and the Children’s Law Clinic at Penn State University specialize in representing children in cases involving alleged child maltreatment. All of them understood how destructive it is to a child to deny that child her rights under the Fourth Amendment.

But not the ACLU. The ACLU remained silent.

It is much the same at the state level. Over and over, families have told me about how they sought help from the ACLU in their state and were turned away. Sometimes it’s even worse.

In Indiana, the state chapter of the ACLU actually sued to block modest reductions in pay for foster parents. Even if one believes that foster parents somehow should be exempt from the sacrifices being made by everyone else in a recession, (which can only lead to more cuts elsewhere, such as help for birth parents) how exactly is that a civil liberties issue?

In Michigan, the ACLU did go to bat for the upper-middle-class white child taken from his parents after his father accidentally bought him Mike’s Hard Lemonade at a baseball game, and the redress they are seeking will help all families. But they did nothing to help Maryanne Godboldo’s child, who is poor and Black, and was taken from her mother when she exercised her legal right to stop giving the child psychiatric medication with severe side-effects. Godboldo and her grassroots allies had to win that case without the ACLU’s help.

Certainly, there are exceptions. The ACLU of Pennsylvania repeatedly has championed the rights of children against the power of CPS agencies (their legal director is a member of NCCPR’s Board of Director). And one of the class-action lawsuits that has helped dramatically improve child welfare in Illinois was brought by the Illinois ACLU.

Now, the South Dakota ACLU is stepping in to help champion the right of Native American children to their own families. But the Indian Child Welfare Act is a federal law, and, as NPR notes, it is being violated in 32 states. Where is the National ACLU? Doing what it usually does: Exercising its very own right to remain silent.

PRIDE OF THE YANKEES

Part of the explanation lies in an unfortunate decision made by the ACLU when it set up a Children’s Rights Project in 1979. They hired as its director the person who was already running a similar project for the New York Civil Liberties Union – Marcia Lowry.

One of Marcia’s earliest suits in New York was an attempt to bolster the rights of foster parents to prevent children from being transferred to other homes – including the homes they came from in the first place. Real champions of civil liberties, like Louise Gans, who then was with Community Action for Legal Services, were furious. As Nina Bernstein writes in her brilliant book, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care:

For Gans and many of her colleagues, the true road to children’s rights lay in defending poor parents against the state’s abuses of power. Gans believed that poor families were routinely misled and mistreated by foster care agencies – their children unnecessarily removed, their visits curtailed, and reunification wrongfully discouraged. More passionately that most, she felt that legal reform efforts should concentrate on changing the state’s s treatment of biological parents. Yet here, instead was CLU litigation that risked establishing some kind of constitutional right for foster parents – another weapon agencies could use against poor families …

Gans and other Legal Services people felt embattled. Their clients had terrible problems, and their staff and resources were always inadequate to help. By their standards the CLU was rich. That made it all the more galling that with a million lawsuits to choose from, Lowry should bring one that in their view threatened to make things worse instead of better.

Or as Danny Greenberg, then Managing Attorney for MFY Legal Services put it in a confrontation with Ira Glasser, then executive director of the NYCLU (and later executive director of the ACLU):

My God, Ira. Think of the class issues in this. You think of yourself as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, a supporter of the underdog. Only a Yankee fan could bring a lawsuit like this. The Yankees would love this lawsuit.

Today, of course, Marcia Lowry still is the pride of the Yankees.

She actually left the ACLU to create the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” because even Ira Glasser’s liberalism was too much for her. She told the Chronicle of Philanthropy that too much of what the ACLU did was tied to a “liberal agenda.” Leaving the ACLU also may have made her more appealing to Carl Icahn, the corporate raider who once chaired her Board of Directors.

So no one should be surprised at CR’s response to NPR’s revelations about what’s being done to Native American families in South Dakota:

Silence.

Foster care in South Dakota: At last, “these people” are heard on NPR

2011-10-26T15:37:00.003-04:00

NOW I remember why I used to be proud to work at a public radio station.

To hear the excellent NPR stories discussed in this post, follow this link

One of the earliest posts on this Blog concerned a dreadful story aired on what was then known as National Public Radio concerning the death of Nixzmary Brown in New York City in January, 2006.

The story gave a full airing to those who said the case “raised questions” about whether the city had been doing too much to keep families together - with no response from families who had lost children to foster care.

When we complained to NPR’s ombudsman at the time, he contacted an editor who worked on the story, Andrea DeLeon. She said of parents:

I don't believe these people are key stakeholders in a story about whether the system is functioning well today. [Emphasis added].

That contempt permeated NPR coverage of child welfare for several years thereafter

That could be seen clearly when four separate NPR programs covered a report about trans-racial adoption – and talked only to white people.

It could be seen in the story in which reporter Michelle Trudeau’s very first sentence was an outright lie:

A child is placed in foster care only as a last resort, when parental maltreatment or neglect is extreme and unremitting.

At the time I wrote that “The only reason I can't call that a baldfaced lie is that I don't think she would make this false allegation on purpose.” But that was three years ago. An honest error that remains uncorrected no longer is honest.

Things did start to get better more recently. Tell Me More did an excellent report on racial bias in child welfare and, of course, recently NPR’s flagship news programs, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, aired an excellent series on parents falsely accused of killing their children.

But Tell Me More is a program aimed at minorities. And the fatality stories dealt with a very small subsection of the problem, and one of the few where the issue reaches into the middle class.

The heart of the problem – poverty and racism - never made it to the heart of the NPR schedule – until now.

Now Michelle Trudeau’s error of commission, Andrea DeLeon’s error of omission, and all the errors in between, all the mistakes that led me to conclude that NPR stood for “No Parent Response” are being corrected – the record is being set straight and then some.

The corrective comes in the form of a superb three-part series now airing on the network. Part one aired on All Things Considered yesterday. Part two is scheduled to air on that program today and part three airs on Morning Edition tomorrow [Oct. 27.]

The stories are the result of a year-long investigation by reporter Laura Sullivan and Producer Amy Walters into the child welfare system in South Dakota – and in particular the widespread needless destruction of Native American families in that state.

South Dakota is among the worst by almost any measure. It takes away children at one of the highest rates in the nation, it places children in the worst form of “care” – group homes and institutions – at one of the highest rates in the nation, and it tears apart Native American families at one of the highest rates in the nation. In short, South Dakota hit the trifecta of child welfare failure.

NPR’s searing stories are revealing it all for the first time.

But South Dakota is not an isolated example. Plenty of states are as bad, some are worse. And almost every state has similar problems, the only difference is one of degree.

This is the NPR that made me so proud to be working for a public radio station fresh out of journalism school decades ago. This is the NPR I remember from before it became gentrified and too-precious-by-half. This is the NPR that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. I hope it stays around for while.

Foster care in D.C.: The stories behind the statistics

2011-10-24T06:00:00.005-04:00

A previous post to this Blog dealt with a report by the District of Columbia Citizens Review Panel (CRP), a group mandated by federal law to assess the performance of D.C.’s child welfare agency, the Child and Family Services Administration.

The report is a scathing indictment of CFSA for tearing apart hundreds of families needlessly – and often, probably, illegally. The previous post sums up the facts and figures. But one of the most notable features of the report are the case histories, and the appalling responses from CFSA.

Consider this case:

The “D” Family. A child was living with his uncle, who reported to CFSA that he was facing eviction. The uncle said he was feeling overwhelmed, “tired, frustrated, and hungry” and that caring for the child would hinder his relinquishing his apartment. CFSA interpreted this situation as an admission of the uncle’s inability to raise the child and an immediate threat to the child – even though the eviction was not imminent and the uncle’s story could reasonably have been understood as a request for assistance. CFSA removed the child.

The case record reveals a later email from CFSA’s lawyer to a Child Protective Services staff member stating “had CFSA responded differently to the uncle’s repeated requests for help, this case might never have led to a removal.” The Panel agrees with this assessment. No imminent danger was present. The eviction was not scheduled for several weeks. CFSA could have helped the uncle obtain a housing lawyer to help him fight the eviction in landlord-tenant court or helped him obtain housing assistance, but instead CFSA removed the child. It is possible that the uncle would have refused to take the child back even if CFSA had provided this sort of assistance. But there is no way to know. We do know that the uncle did take the child back just three days later – strongly suggesting that the uncle did desire to keep the child. [Emphasis added].

In response, CFSA argues that it was absolutely essential to remove this child on the spot because, according to the case record:

the child had been born prematurely had been exposed to PCP and was believed to have developmental delays. … [T]he uncle “noted several times …that he would not take the child back [emphasis added]… noting that he wants to leave the apartment as quickly as he could and having to care for the child would hinder this effort.”

The investigator further quoted that the uncle as saying [sic] that providing care for his nephew was “getting to me feeling overwhelmed” and the uncle was “tired, frustrated and hungry.”

Further, the uncle was himself a recovering PCP user. The dangers associated with forcing this man to continue to care for a child under these circumstances are not acknowledged by the CRP reviewers.

But, of course, neither the CRP reviewers nor anyone else was suggesting that the uncle be forced to keep the child. Rather, CRP was suggesting that had CFSA offered to ease the enormous stress faced by the uncle by providing him the help he needed – including a lawyer to fight the eviction or a new place for the entire family to live - the uncle would no longer feel overwhelmed and be glad to continue taking care of his nephew.

The fact that the nephew was, in fact, returned to the uncle three days later, suggests that CRP got it right. And, of course, it’s not just the Review Panel that drew this conclusion. As is noted in the Panel report, CFSA’s own lawyer reviewing the case reached the same conclusion.

The Panel also found appalling behavior by CFSA in cases involving battered mothers, like this one:

The “L” Family. The father of four children assaulted their mother. The Metropolitan Police Department arrested both the father and the mother following this incident. … An aunt of the children appeared on the scene but neither MPD nor CFSA considered releasing the children to her. The case record reflected no effort to determine the mother’s wishes regarding short-term care of her children. CFSA removed the children. Their mother was released from jail very shortly and CFSA returned the children three days after their removal. CFSA could have avoided this traumatic separation and the placement of the mother on the child protection registry by permitting the aunt to take the children or asking the mother to designate a temporary caretaker via a custodial power of attorney.

Incredibly, CFSA responds that whenever it uses its emergency power to tear apart a family it has concluded, on its own and on the spot, that the parents must be “unfit” and it would be “improper” to have an “unfit” parent “make a custodial decision.”

But how, exactly, does being beaten by a man make a mother unfit? This speaks volumes about the mindset at CFSA, as does this case, which raises the same issue:

The “M” Family. This child’s parents were in the process of divorcing, and her
father physically assaulted her mother. MPD arrested both parents and contacted CFSA. The child’s brother was temporarily staying with the children’s grandmother. The grandmother physically came to CFSA to request that she take care of the child who was removed, but CFSA did not release the child to her grandmother. The case record indicates no effort to ask the mother to designate a caretaker. CFSA removed the child, placed her with strangers, and placed her mother on the child protection registry. Her mother was quickly released and reunified with her daughter four days after the removal.

Thanks to a successful class-action lawsuit, in New York City such behavior by the child welfare agency is illegal. (NCCPR’s Vice President, Carolyn Kubitschek, was co-counsel for the battered women who brought the suit.) That’s because the harm of removing a child from a parent is actually worse for that child, sometimes far worse, when the parent is, herself a victim of domestic violence. As one expert testified, taking a child from a battered mother because that mother has been beaten “is tantamount to pouring salt on an open wound.”

Unfortunately for the children, at CFSA, the policy on these cases boils down to “please pass the salt.”

Foster care in Arizona: Thank you, Laurie Roberts

2011-10-19T02:03:00.000-04:00

That headline is not meant to be sarcastic, though I can see how readers might think it was.

After all, I gave Roberts hell in a couple of posts on this Blog not long ago – and a couple more all the way back in 2007. Not to mention the stuff I’ve said in the comment section under her columns.

So what does Roberts go and do? She calls me. Not to tell me off, but to ask me about NCCPR’s approach to fixing child welfare systems in general and Arizona in particular. She heard me out for at least 90 minutes – and then wrote about it in her column today.

A lot of reporters wouldn’t do that – let alone a columnist who according to the “rules” for these things can be as one-sided as she wants. It shows a lot of class. I will try to live up to that example in dealing with the people who give me hell – at least those who sign their names.

Foster care in DC: District’s own expert panel blasts widespread needless removal of children

2011-10-17T06:00:00.006-04:00

It’s not unusual for outside agitators – like me – to say that a given child welfare system is taking away a whole lot of children needlessly. It’s quite unusual when the charge comes from a panel of experts named by the community’s own government leaders.

But that’s what happened last month in Washington, D.C., in the form of a scathing report about the D.C. Child and Family Services Administration. The report was issued by the District’s child welfare Citizen Review Panel (CRP). Federal law requires at least one such panel in every state to examine child protective services agencies.

The D.C. panel was appointed by the mayor and the D.C. Council. It’s quite a distinguished group. Members of the panel include a former social services administrator in Maryland who now is the legislative policy associate for the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators – a trade association for agencies like CFSA. Another member spent 23 years in human services, including five years as a CPS caseworker. Another is a senior attorney for the D.C. Children’s Law Center – the group that represents children in child welfare cases in the District. Another served as Coordinator of Child Abuse and Neglect for the D.C. Public Schools.

The Review Panel was disturbed by the large numbers of children taken from their parents by CFSA who were sent home again within four months. Typically, anywhere from 18 to 35 percent are sent home that quickly. Depending on how you run the numbers that’s an average of anywhere from 161 to 225 children per year.

It’s not that the CRP doesn’t want children returned home quickly. But it raised an obvious question: If the children could be returned within four months, did they really need to be taken at all? After carefully reviewing a random sample of such cases, the CRP concluded that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the answer was no. Said the panel:

This study concludes that, when children leave foster care quickly – a significant and longstanding feature of the District’s child welfare system – it is likely that CFSA removed the child unnecessarily.

Indeed, the report found that only 25 percent of removals met the legal standard for taking a child away on the spot, without even asking a court’s permission first. Such removals are supposed to take place only when CFSA “has reasonable grounds to believe that the child is in immediate danger” and removal is necessary to eliminate the danger. Yet CFSA uses this grab-the-child-first-ask-the-court-later power in 97 percent of all removals.

Now consider the implications: 75 percent of the cases did not meet the standard for an emergency removal, and that’s pretty much the only kind of removal CFSA does. That means that every year, D.C. tears anywhere from 121 to 169 children from their families unnecessarily.

But that’s probably an underestimate. Because when families get decent lawyers, the number of children sent home fast soars.

Nearly three years ago, Prof. Matthew Fraidin of the University of the District of Columbia Law School presented the results of his law students’ work representing families whose children had been taken away by CFSA. (His findings are included in material he released at a joint news conference with NCCPR in January, 2009.) In fully 60 percent of the cases the children were returned within three months – and in most of those cases, they were returned within a week.

If the real number of children who can go home that quickly is 60 percent, then the real number of wrongful removals every year is nearly half of all the children taken away by CFSA.

“For these children,” notes the report, “these are severe, possibly life-changing events.”

OTHERS REACH SIMILAR CONCLUSIONS

The review panel and Prof. Fraidin are not alone in sounding the alarm about wrongful removal in the District.

● Organizations that provide “guardians ad litem” for children in child welfare cases typically only complain when a child welfare agency isn’t taking away even more children. So it speaks volumes that Judith Sandalow, executive director of the Children's Law Center - the group which provides such representation in D.C. wrote a letter to The Washington Post in which she estimated that at least 100 DC children every year are taken from their families unnecessarily. She writes that "These removals traumatize children and devastate families."

● The independent monitor overseeing the long-running class-action lawsuit settlement in the District also examined a sample of cases. The CRP report points out that the monitor found that CFSA’s action in immediately removing the children was justified in fewer than half of those cases.

One of the strongest features of the CRP report is the case examples, like this one:

In one case, CFSA refused to release two children to their own mother who had done nothing wrong. The children’s maternal grandmother was a recovering substance abuser and had been clean and sober for a substantial amount of time. Their mother reasonably relied on the grandmother’s babysitting. Unfortunately, the grandmother relapsed one evening and left the young children alone. CFSA could not immediately locate the mother and reasonably took custody of the children. But when the mother showed up at CFSA that same day, CFSA inexplicably refused to release her children to her, despite its legal obligation to release them to her “with all reasonable speed.”Instead, CFSA kept the children in foster care for three days and then released them.

The report provides an excellent discussion of precisely what child welfare agencies so often forget – the need to balance harms:

Many parents have had the experience of a toddler crying when dropped off at preschool – even with a parent giving him a goodbye hug, assuring him that she will return within hours, and turning him over to a classroom full of unfamiliar faces.

Now imagine that same child taken away by a stranger, over the parent’s objection, and without anyone able to tell him what will happen next or even when he will see his parent again. Days pass and people still cannot explain what will happen next, or why he hasn’t been able to see mommy for a long time. Weeks pass, and he gets to see his mom for brief visits, and then is taken away again, with no idea when he will see her again. It is not hard to see the emotional toll these separations impose on children or their parents.

On the other hand, very real safety concerns are at stake. Some children do suffer serious abuse and neglect at the hands of their parents and in some cases the only available response is to separate the child from the parent because the emotional harm of that separation is less than the harm inflicted by the parent’s abuse or neglect.

But over and over again, the report found, CFSA flunks this balance-of-harms test.

CFSA: NOTHING’S WRONG – AND LOOK HOW WE’RE FIXING IT!

In a response to the repot most notable for its sheer snottiness (read it and see for yourself – it’s included with the report) CFSA insists that every single decision it made in every one of these cases was the right call. On the other hand, in a very good story about the report in The Washington Post, CFSA’s acting director talks about how it’s reduced entries into care this year (though even at the reduced rate, children in Washington D.C. are torn from their homes at a far higher rate than in New York, Chicago and Miami, among other cities, even when rates of child poverty are taken into account). She also discusses new programs to keep families together.

So apparently CFSA’s position is: Look at all we’re doing to fix the problems we deny ever existed in the first place!

In a future post: More case examples, and CFSA’s appalling response to the report.

Child welfare and race: The smoking transcript

2011-10-10T06:00:00.006-04:00

The director of Every Child Matters tells Congress that the states that do best at preventing child abuse have “smaller, whiter populations.”

I’ve written before about the hype and hysteria spread by the group that calls itself “Every Child Matters” in its effort to stampede child welfare systems into diverting $3 billion to $5 billion into hiring more child protective services workers to take away more children.

I’ve noted how their executive director, Michael Petit, spent 45 minutes comparing rates of child abuse deaths among the states – and maligning states that allegedly rated high – only to admit that it was, in fact, impossible to make such a comparison.

Over the past couple of years, Petit spent an enormous amount of time and effort trying to get Congress to hold a hearing on the issue where he could be in the spotlight as a witness. If any nonprofit has gone through so much just to give its director five minutes of this kind of fame (you don’t even get 15 for your statement) I’m not aware of it.

On July 12, Petit got his hearing, before a House subcommittee, complete with the obligatory celebrity witness, a second-tier cast member from Law and Order: SVU, to guarantee a crowd. But I’ve said nothing about Petit’s remarks until now because one thing he said was so disturbing I decided to wait until the transcript came out to be sure I’d heard it correctly.

Unfortunately, I did, in fact, hear what I thought I heard. It happened when Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Washington) asked Petit “what states have had the best system in place to predict and deal with and prevent [child abuse]?”

Petit said it was a complicated question, and he explained some of the complexity. And then he said:

But I will tell you the states that do the best overall are the ones that have smaller, whiter populations.

Petit immediately realized that might not have been the best thing to say, and rushed to clarify:

So where ‑‑ which translates into less poverty and less complicated issues around domestic violence, around imprisonment issues, around substance abuse."

But then he couldn’t resist raising the issue of race again:

If you take a look at the overall distribution of these issues, they are concentrated especially most severely in the states with large minority populations. And I say that, saying that that correlates, in turn, with high rates of poverty in those communities.

MYTHS ABOUT SUBSTANCE ABUSE

Notice how Petit repeats the common canard about minorities and substance abuse. In fact, as the Annie E. Casey Foundation notes in this report:

Despite being more likely to be poor, black and Hispanic Americans use drugs at levels comparable to, and in some instances, lower than white Americans.

So if Petit is really referring to the impact of substance abuse on child maltreatment, why would he claim that “whiter” states do better at curbing the child abuse that stems from substance abuse? Perhaps he got his misimpression the way so many Americans do – by looking at who gets punished for substance abuse.

As that same Casey study notes:

Despite having drug use rates comparable to whites, black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to experience negative consequences from drug use, including being involved in the child welfare system and in the criminal justice system

And as The New York Times reported in this recent story about children being taken from their parents because of those parents’ marijuana use:

Over all, the rate of marijuana use among whites is twice as high as among blacks and Hispanics in the city, the data show, but defense lawyers said these cases were rarely if ever filed against white parents.

So first, child welfare systems apply racially-biased double standards when it comes to dealing with substance-abusing parents, and then Michael Petit runs to Congress to perpetuate stereotypes resulting from those very double standards.

A little later in the hearing Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia) a hero of the civil rights movement, demonstrated grace equal to his well-known courage and gave Petit a chance to walk back his remarks. But Petit only dug himself in deeper with comments veering disturbingly close to the stereotypes about Black women debunked in this excellent article from Colorlines. Petit’s comments can be found by going to the transcript and doing a search for “Mr. Lewis.”

There is no evidence that there is more child maltreatment (or more of what we label child maltreatment) in poor Black communities than in poor white communities. Even those who are “in denial” about the racial bias that permeates decisions to take away children claim that Blacks are overrepresented in child welfare systems only because of the pressures of poverty. (In fact, the overrepresentation of African American children in foster care is due to both poverty and racism, as is discussed in detail in our Issue Paper on child welfare and race.)

So all Michael Petit needed to say was that the states doing better have smaller, richer populations. When it comes to solving the problems, he’d still probably be wrong - there is strong evidence, for example, that one of America’s most successful child welfare systems is the one in Alabama - but at least he wouldn’t have taken any gratuitous swipes at an entire race.

Michael Petit is not a racist. Like most people in child welfare, he cares deeply about helping vulnerable children, of all races, and sincerely believes his approach will help do just that. But his comments reveal the extent to which our feelings about race bias our policy choices more than we realize - until something slips out, as it did at the hearing. And what do such comments from Petit, who once ran an entire child welfare system and who had been a top official in the Child Welfare League of America, tell us about the unconscious biases of frontline workers and others when they decide to remove children from their homes?

AN UNSEEMLY ALLIANCE WITH NASW

Petit’s comments raise another question that is at least as troubling:

Why have none among Petit’s small group of allies, the groups supporting his crusade to divert funds to hiring more CPS workers, called him out on this? Particularly disturbing is the silence from the National Association of Social Workers, which remains a part of the alliance Petit formed to push his agenda and continues to promote it.

Sadly, this isn’t all that puzzling.

NASW is a trade association for social workers. So of course, NASW would be pushing Petit’s agenda. Three billion dollars can buy a lot of social work jobs.

But I would have hoped Petit’s linking child abuse to race would have prompted an end to an unseemly alliance.