News and commentary from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
concerning child abuse, child welfare, foster care, and family preservation.
The city can make smarter choices that will reduce the
number of kids placed in foster care, which will reduce strain on the system —
and save kids from having to sleep in conference rooms.
We’ve all heard the adage that goes: “The definition of
insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different
result.” A classic example of that adage is Philadelphia’s approach to the
welfare of its children.
In 2016, Philadelphia closed its only juvenile psychiatric
residential treatment facility — Wordsworth — after a 17-year-old died in a
fight with staff. The city opened another in 2020, but that facility soon lost
its license due to “multiple child right violations,” according to the state.
Now, the city is asking providers to bid for a contract to create another
facility.
So, the plan is to build an institution to replace the
abusive institution that replaced another abusive institution. Meanwhile,
because Philadelphia still is taking too many children from their homes, there
are not enough foster homes, so the children are held in conference rooms.
Once touted as a model institution, the Glen Mills School was closed after the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed widespread abuse.
The Philadelphia
Inquirer zeros in on real solutions
Here’s something I
never thought I’d see in a story about children trapped in night-to-night
placements because family policing agencies (a more accurate term than “child
welfare” agencies) had no place else to put them:
Advocates say
what’s needed now is to address the short-term glitches while pursuing the
long-term vision of supporting more families at home — not backsliding into the era when congregate beds
were ample and eagerly filled by a system that saw removing and
institutionalizing kids as an easy fix.
For as long as I’ve
been following family policing – and that’s more than 45 years now - I’ve been
reading stories exposing the horrors inflicted on children forced to endure days,
sometimes months in makeshift placements such as family policing agency
offices, hotels, hospital wards, jails – even parked cars.
As I recall, every one
of those stories got the solutions wrong.Oh, there might be a token paragraph somewhere about how “prevention” is
a really good thing.But that part about
“not backsliding into the era when congregate beds were ample and eagerly
filled by a system that saw removing and institutionalizing kids as an easy fix”?Never!
Instead, the
reporters would accept as gospel the party line from the “residential treatment”
industry. It’s always some version of: “See, we need to build more places to
institutionalize kids!” Or, “See? We told you you shouldn’t have shut down our hellholes
sorry, therapeutic communities!”
It would have been
easy for The Philadelphia Inquirer to fall into the same trap.After all, Philadelphia has made significant
progress in reducing the number of children torn from their families.But Philadelphia now has a serious problem
with children staying night-to-night in family police agency conference rooms,
among other awful places. Workers sum up
the conditions there as “chaos.” And
Philadelphia either shut down or pulled kids out of several institutions in
recent years – because the institutions themselves were so abusive.
But perhaps because
colleagues of reporter Samantha Melamed exposed horrific abuse in some of those
institutions, such as Glen Mills (which is now
closed) and Devereux, she wasn’t
ready to accept the idea that the answer is to reopen them, or build new ones.
Yes, the story
includes the usual claim from a residential treatment trade association
representative, whining that, now that the city has “reduced capacity” (by
refusing to warehouse all those children in hellholes) it’s “destabilized the
industry” making it hard to find placements for children with “really complex
or sophisticated behavioral health needs.”
But instead of
simply accepting this claim at face value, Melamed broadened her source
base.For starters, she explained
Philadelphia’s longstanding dismal status as a child removal outlier:
Now, the city is
part of a national and statewide push to stop institutionalizing kids, spurred
on by the federal Family First Prevention Services Act. That shift comes amid a
widespread recognition that abuses happen in those institutional settings, too
— and with startling frequency. It’s also an acknowledgment of racial
disparities: Black children account for 13% of Pennsylvania youth, but 35% of
those in foster care and two-thirds of those in state juvenile-justice
placements …
In the
child-welfare system, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia’s Kathleen
Creamer said the city needs to double down on preventing family separations.
Already, she
noted, Philadelphia DHS has reformed its process for screening and
investigating abuse allegations, and increased funding for legal aid for
families. It also begun holding rapid-response meetings to enlist extended
families to help kids in danger of being removed. She said that work now needs
to go even further, reallocating some of the millions that would be spent on
group homes or foster care to properly fund the supportive services that can
help families working to stay together.
“The question
is, what’s the policy solution for this?” she said. “The policy solution is to
stop separating so many families. We don’t have good placements for them, so
let’s actually try to work with the family.”
The residential
treatment typically responds by saying something like: Even if you have enough
families, what about all those children with “really complex or sophisticated
behavioral health needs”?
But even when
residential treatment centers are not hellholes, there is no evidence that they
can meet “really complex or sophisticated behavioral needs.”On the contrary, the evidence is overwhelming
that residential treatment is a failure.
In contrast,
Wraparound services, in which anything a child needs is brought right into the
child’s own home, or, when placement is genuinely necessary, a family foster
home, do work.There is nothing
residential treatment does that Wraparound doesn’t do better and at less cost.
How does it work? differently
for every child – that’s the point.So
the best way to understand Wraparound is to let one of its pioneers, Karl
Dennis, give you an example:
But perhaps the
best indication of why building more institutions won’t work comes in this part
of the Inquirer story, the ultimate example of the adage that the
definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a
different result:
Wordsworth,
Philadelphia’s lone juvenile psychiatric residential treatment facility, was
shut down by the state in 2016 after 17-year-old David Hess died in a fight
with staff. A replacement opened in 2020 — then quickly lost its license, too,
due to what the state said were “multiple child right violations.” (The city
last year invited two new providers to negotiate contracts for yet another
replacement, but it’s not clear when such a facility may open.)
What if, at the
same time, Philadelphia built on its progress to date and reduced its rate of
removal to, say, that of New York City?That would be well under half the Philadelphia rate.What if Philadelphia then said to the foster
parents in those now-empty homes: Take in the relatively few children who
really need placement – and we will bring into your home whatever help the
children – and you – need to cope with those “really complex or sophisticated
behavioral health needs” and make the placement work?
Would that mean that
no Philadelphia child ever again would have to spend even one night in an
office or some other awful makeshift placement?Probably not.But it would happen
to a hell of a lot fewer children than endure it now.
Just two items of interest this week, one of which I’d
missed when it was published in May:
● A federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit against the
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, alleging that UPMC drug tests pregnant
women and their newborns without consent, reports the results to the family
policing agency and, even if it’s no more than a false positive result for
marijuana, the agency automatically investigates.
“Averments set form in the amended complaint allege that
[Allegheny County Children Youth and Families] used UPMC as a form of ‘cat’s
paw’ to undertake inquiries and to administer drug tests on UPMC’s labor and
delivery patients without their consent, and then to use reports of those
ostensibly private and confidential medical inquiries and ‘provision and
uncertain’ test results as a predicate to launch unwarranted and
unconstitutional child abuse investigations.”
This case has significant implications well beyond Pittsburgh.And it touches on multiple vital issues in
family policing, including the harm of the so-called Child Abuse Prevention and
Treatment Act and the dangers of “predictive analytics” algorithms in “child
welfare.”I’ve updated
our in-depth examination of the case on this blog.
● On the matter of algorithms, we have a full update of our report on predictive analytics, Big Data is Watching You.
Four major corporate landlords filed thousands of
evictions while federal moratorium orders were still standing, using aggressive
tactics to force out tenants at the height of the pandemic, according to a new
investigation by a House subcommittee. …
An email from an executive at [one major Texas landlord],
for example, advised a property manager and regional manager in San Antonio to
harass a tenant by towing her car, replacing her air conditioning unit with a
nonworking unit, knocking on her door “at least twice a night” and even
calling child protective services on the tenant if any children were present.
(The committee referred its findings to the Texas Department of Family and
Protective Services.) [Emphasis added.]
The referral will do no good, of course, because, though
false reports are illegal in Texas, anyone can evade the law by making the call
anonymously, something that won’t change until anonymous reporting is replaced with confidential
reporting.
● NPR and The Marshall Projecthave
a follow-up to their groundbreaking stories about family policing agencies
swiping foster youth’s Social Security benefits.And Cal
Matters reports on California counties that continue this odious practice.
● Even when it works right, the vastly overhyped Family
First Act won’t do much good.But, as
Mississippi Today reports, that state is managing to screw up what
little opportunity there is.
● In Arizona, KJZZ
Public Radio reports on a lawsuit demanding the standard of proof be raised
before someone is blacklisted in that state’s central registry of alleged child
abusers.
● Last week’s round-up reported on an innovative plan in
some Wisconsin counties designed to help families with the housing they need to
reunify with their children.One
of the counties voted it down.
● NBC
News reports that two senators are launching an investigation of some of
America’s largest residential McTreatment chains.The good news: They’ve included one scandal-plagued
nonprofit chain, Devereux.
That’s important because too often reporters assume that if we could just get
rid of the for-profit players everything would be fine.The bad news: The investigation appears based
on the implicit premise that, with enough regulation, residential treatment can
be fixed.But
it can’t.
● And finally: Pope
Francis set an example for the entire North American family policing
establishment this week by apologizing for one of that establishment’s worst
sins.Every one of the big, mainstream
“child welfare” groups has so much to apologize for, not just in terms of what
was done decades ago, but what they continue to do today.But don’t expect them to follow the Pope’s
example anytime soon.
That’s not what the
recent article in the online publication Parent Map is called, of course. The actual title is “What do Do If You Are Mistakenly
Accused of Child Abuse in a Hospital Emergency Room.” But the authors should have made clear the
advice only applies if the “You” in that headline is a white, middle-class
person.
Between them the co-authors,
a doctor and a lawyer, have five sets of
“look-at-all-my advanced -degrees!” initials after their names. It begins with what happened to one of the
authors, Katheryn Goldman, DMD, MPH,
ABD:
My 9-year-old
daughter was jumping on her bed. She bounced off, and I wound up taking her to
the emergency room. She got two small stitches under her eye. Just a week
later, two of our sons were engaged in some rough horseplay. Oops! Off to the
emergency room I went again. Thankfully, no stitches were needed on the
4-year-old’s head. Both times, we were treated by the same nurse in the same
examining room! I could sense that she looked at me with a tad of justifiable
suspicion. That’s why I made sure that in both instances the children told the
nurse what had happened. I did not want to give the impression that the kids were
being coached in any way.
This article is not
the worst of its kind. One pediatrician / author has practically made a career out of writing
this sort of essay.
But at no point do Dr.
Godman and her lawyer co-author, Daniel Pollack, MSW, JD, so much as
acknowledge that the kid gloves, anyone-can-have-an-oops treatment is reserved
for the white middle class.
Then comes a claim
that, for some hospitals, is demonstrably false. They write:
Simply because a
child gets injured and is treated at an emergency room does not mean that Child
Protection Services (CPS) will become involved. The hospital contacts CPS only
when staff suspect maltreatment.
A Marine Corps pilot and his wife are suing the County of
San Diego after Child Welfare Services took their seven-month-old son from
their home for more than a month after the boy head-butted his mother as he
played after breastfeeding.
According to the story, the hospital apparently didn’t
believe the infant was abused but
submitted a hotline referral to the county as required
when an infant is injured and admitted to the hospital.
California law does not require this - it's simply a
hospital policy that makes every parent who brings in an infant with an injury automatically
suspect.
Similarly, when Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
reported City Councilmember David Oh as a potential child abuser after one of
his children was injured as he taught the child martial arts, Oh says the
hospital social worker explained that she “typically reports injuries children
suffer in all sports.”
By the way, Councilmember Oh’s child was interviewed
separately and told the social worker what happened – just like Dr. Goldman’s
children. But somehow, the result was
different.
And these are just the hospitals that will say it out
loud.
Remember, no doctor, nurse, or other mandated reporter
will get in trouble for making a report that turns out to be false. They can face huge penalties for failure to
report if, later, it turns out there really was abuse. So even in the absence of a formal policy
that creates a huge incentive to report any injury, especially to the youngest
children.
But not only does the Parent Map article mislead on this
point, at no point does it mention the slew of studies showing that, where a report isn’t automatic, medical
personnel are far more likely to call the family police if the family is not
white.
Now let’s consider some advice the authors offer
concerning lawyers:
Even though things are happening fast in the ER,
depending on the allegations, you may want to have an attorney present with
you during any interviews with a CPS investigator. Under many circumstances — but not all — you
may be inclined to proactively grant CPS access to your child. While you may
have the authority to deny that access in some states, such a denial may cast
you in a negative light. This is a judgment call to quickly consult an
attorney about. [Emphasis added.]
Is it really necessary to point out the problem with this
advice? Poor people generally don’t have
a lawyer on speed dial. And with
extremely rare exceptions, the government isn’t going to provide one,
either. In some states, impoverished
families have no right to a lawyer at all.
In the rest, except for a few pilot programs, they’re only guaranteed a
lawyer after the family police have decided to haul the family into court.
Even then, it’s not the kind of lawyering the authors of
the Parent Map article have in mind.
attorneys who represent parents or children have very high
caseloads, in some jurisdictions, as high as 300 cases per attorney. Parents
and youth consistently reported quick interactions with their attorneys, and many reported not knowing the
name of their attorneys. Parents are routinely told to plead and accept case plans as the quickest
way to get children back home and end system involvement.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with giving advice that
applies only to white middle-class families – provided it comes with a warning
label. The very fact that the authors
saw no need to place such a label on their story, or even acknowledge that
racial and class bias exist in the family policing system, is part of the
reason we have such a system in the first place.
● What – again???
Yes, another not-so-shocking study tells us that just a little
more concrete help for poor people – in this case increasing SNAP benefits –
reduces what family policing agencies call child abuse. According to a
story about the study in The Hill:
States with
more generous SNAP policies — and therefore more program participants
— had fewer children involved in Child Protective Services (CPS) and
foster care, according to the 14-year nationwide survey, published in
JAMA Network Open on
Wednesday.
And here’s
a review highlighting some of the many other studies reaching similar
conclusions.
● None of this will convince those who have built their
entire careers (both in family policing agencies and in academia) on denying
any such connection – or falling back on the: well, it’s not poverty
alone defense.But for the rest of
us Nora McCarthy, co-founder of the Family Policy Project, offers
some suggestions concerning what to do next.
● If you’re relatively new to all of this, take 20 minutes
to let Joyce McMillan of JMacForFamilies give you an overview of how the system
really works in this
podcast from Black Agenda Report:
● If you’re a journalist relatively new to covering child
welfare, please don’t repeat the mistake made by a reporter in Illinois who
accepted without question the
Illinois “Public Guardian’s” big little lie about who is in the system and
why.
● It’s always useful when family policing agencies admit
they are trapping children in foster care solely because their parents can’t
afford adequate housing.They generally
admit this when they are applying for grants.The
Wausau (Wis.) Pilot and Review reports on a case in point.
● One member of Congress who understood the confusion of
poverty with neglect before almost anyone was the late Rep. Patsy Mink of
Hawaii.She was the only Democrat to
vote against the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act back in 1997.She knew how much harm it would do.I’ve reprinted her prescient speech against
the bill in
this blog post.
● According to the Wisconsin Innocence Project, Dr. Barbara
Knox "fled to Alaska" after leaving "a legacy of flawed shaken
baby diagnoses in Wisconsin."According
to the Anchorage Daily News, Dr. Knox’s time in Alaska was “brief but
calamitous.”What state could possibly
want to hire someone with a track record like that? Here’s a hint: This story
is from Orlando
Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell. Oh, and the Anchorage Daily Newshas
an update of its own.
● Also in Florida (you'd already guessed, right?) WFTS-TV has
another excellent story about extended families who were denied custody of
their children in favor of strangers who sometimes had connections to the
system – like the couple who work in that state’s notorious CASA
program.
● Still more evidence that when family police agencies say “We
don’t remove children on our own – a judge has to approve everything we do”
they’re lying.” Carolina
Public Press reports on a county
where the head of the family police agency signed custody orders herself. (In case
anybody thinks this only happens in rural North Carolina, more than a decade
ago WXYZ-TV
exposed a similar appalling practice – in Detroit.Also, recall how a longtime child welfare
apparatchik recently
fessed up.)
● A Texas legislator who co-sponsored bipartisan legislation
to narrow the state’s definition of “neglect” writes in the Dallas Morning News
about how the change is making
all children safer.
● Sixto Cancel, founder and CEO of Think of Us, discusses his
organization’s new Center for Lived Experience on
The Imprint podcast.He also
shares findings from his organization’s participatory research, including some
disturbing data about failed adoptions.
● Among the children most vulnerable to being needlessly
torn from their parents are those whose parents are disabled.Two federal agencies condemned
Massachusetts over this.There have
been similar problems in Oregon and Pennsylvania
– and those are only the cases that made headlines.Now, a bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced
a bill that might help these children and families.Here’s
the bill text.
● He smears all
birth families with a claim that is – by definition – false.
● It’s the same
claim that appears in scores of news stories.
It would never be tolerated in a story about criminal justice. Yet it almost never is challenged by
journalists reporting on child welfare.
A question for any
journalists reading this:
Suppose you were working
on a story about the criminal justice system, and a prosecutor said: “By definition,
anyone in jail is a criminal – they’re rapists and torturers and all sorts of
other crooks.”Wouldn’t you follow up
with something like: “Wait a minute: Aren’t there plenty of people in jail just
because they can’t make bail?No court
ever said they were guilty of anything – so why do you say they’re all
criminals?”
The same is true in
cases alleging – and that’s the operative word – child abuse and neglect.Children can be held in foster care for
months before a court ever decides if the child was, in fact, abused or
neglected.(And, of course,
overwhelmingly, the allegation is neglect and that often means simply that the family was poor.)
Yet story after
story after story about the “child welfare” system will include – unchallenged
– statement’s such as this one, from the Cook County (metropolitan Chicago)
“Public Guardian” Charles Golbert:
“By definition,
any child who is in [the Illinois ‘child welfare’ agency’s] care has been
removed from the custody of their parents due to abuse or neglect or sex abuse,
or torture or abandonment or being drug exposed,” Golbert said.
No. By
definition, Golbert’s statement is false.
I’m not going to
link to the story or name the reporter, because there’s no reason to pick on
one well-meaning journalist for an error that is more the rule than the
exception.In fact, in all the times
I’ve written to news organizations who have used this framing only one, Kaiser
Health News, ever corrected it.
The claim is
particularly damaging now in Illinois.The story in question is about the fact that foster youth are trapped in
psychiatric hospitals and juvenile jails because the Illinois Department of
Children and Family Services has no place to put them.The reason for that is a foster-care panic –
a sharp sudden surge in the number of children torn from everyone they know and
love in the wake of high-profile child abuse deaths. Such a panic has swept through the state, creating
an artificial “shortage” of foster homes.
So Golbert’s false
statement is not trivial.Journalism
that accepts as fact the stereotyping of all families who lose children to
foster care as rapists, torturers or hopeless addicts, wipes off the table the
one and only option that can actually solve the crisis in Illinois, and similar
crises across the country: Illinois needs to stop taking away so many families
needlessly.Illinois actually learned
this lesson once; now it needs to learn it again.
Get the many children
who don’t need to be in foster care at all back home and Illinois will have
plenty of room in good, safe foster homes for the relatively few children who
really need them – and plenty of resources to provide in-home “Wraparound”
services for what the story calls “high- needs youth.”But that will never happen as long as every
parent who loses a child to foster care is stereotyped as they are in this
story, and so many others.
The failure to challenge
the Golbert quote – the fact that the reporter apparently considered it an
obvious truth beyond questioning – isn’t the only failure in this story and
many like it.
Almost no one today
would do an in-depth story about the criminal justice system and speak only to
police, prosecutors and judges. Of
course, reporters doing that kind of story also would talk to the accused and to
their lawyers.Yet in the case of the
story quoting Golbert and many, many others, it is common in child welfare to
view parents as so sub-human they’re not even worth talking to.