When children are
taken from their parents forever and those children are adopted by strangers, the
parents often want to leave their children something to remember
them by, perhaps a cherished keepsake or a family photo from happier
times. So they give these personal
effects to the family police agency to pass on to the children.
But in Minnesota,
they don’t pass them on.
________________________
“If I would have
had something from my mom ... just to know that my mom loved me, you know, or
thought enough to send something with me to fight in this world. It would have
made a huge difference.”
-- Ann Haines Holy
Eagle on what the Minnesota family police stole from her
By now we’re all familiar
with one odious practice of most family police agencies (a more accurate term
than “child welfare” agencies): They steal the Social Security benefits to
which some foster children are entitled and keep the money for themselves. Thanks to some excellent reporting from NPR and The
Marshall Project some states and localities have been
embarrassed into ending the theft.
But in at least one
state, Minnesota, there’s another kind of theft from some foster youth that’s even
worse and has gotten almost no attention:
They steal memories.
They steal hope.
They steal love.
It’s not calculated
cruelty – it’s worse: It’s standard operating cruelty. It’s been done for decades, probably without
a moment’s thought. This practice is one
more illustration of something NCCPR’s President Prof. Martin Guggenheim said
decades ago: “There’s a lot of hate masquerading as love in this system.”
Because
this practice gives away the extent to which, deep down,
whether or not they even admit it to themselves, so many family police hate the
overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families from whom they take
children. It even makes me wonder if they consider the overwhelmingly poor,
disproportionately nonwhite
children to be fully human.
The practice was
discovered by accident by members of the group that is, proportionately, most
affected: Native Americans – since in Minnesota Native children are torn from
their families at fourteen times their rate
in the general population.
As this Minnesota Public Radio story explains
it involves nothing more than keepsakes and photographs.
When children have
their right to ever live with their own parents taken from them (a more
accurate way of looking at it than “termination of parental rights”) and those
children are adopted by strangers, the parents often want to at least leave
their children with something to remember them by; almost always the items are
family photos or documents. So they give
these personal effects to the family police agency to pass on to the children.
But in Minnesota,
they don’t pass them on.
Instead, in Minnesota,
the keepsakes are just shoved into the children’s case files. The children don’t get to see them until they’re
adults – and then, only if they happen to know about them. Because even then, the family police make no
effort to notify them that these keepsakes exist. (The MPR story implies that might be
changing, but it’s unclear.)
One adult adoptee, Ann
Haines Holy Eagle, said:
“If I would have
had something from my mom ... just to know that my mom loved me, you know, or
thought enough to send something with me to fight in this world. It would have
made a huge difference.”
But once you acknowledge that the parents whose children you’ve
taken forever love those children and the children love them, it undermines the
entire white, middle-class adult-centered false vision of “permanence” that has
poisoned the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.
In that vision, children
are supposed to feel about their birth parents the way so many family police
feel about them: that they are at worst evil and at best sick! Sick! Sick! So why
would their children want to know them, remember them, or have anything to do
with them?
And letting
children remember their birth parents and acknowledging the love between them
may make things uncomfortable for the people for whom the system is designed:
Overwhelmingly middle-class disproportionately white foster and adoptive
parents. As the Minnesota Public Radio
story explained:
Haines Holy
Eagle says she believes it’s possible that [the Minnesota Department of Human
Services] has held onto these personal effects because they prioritized the
wishes of adoptive parents over those of adoptees. “You want it to be respectful of the adoptive
parents, you didn’t want to disrespect them because you want them to feel like
this is my new start. This is my new family,” said Haines Holy Eagle.
Exactly. Like something out of
Orwell’s 1984, children are expected to erase their parents from their
memories. They don’t exist. They never existed. And nothing is more important than the
feelings of the people all those middle-class professionals find it easiest to
identify with: middle-class adoptive parents.
All this explains how
the family policing establishment perverted one of the most noble concepts in “child
welfare” – permanence. In the name of giving
children a permanent home, the system prioritizes paper permanence – a formal decree
certifying adoption by strangers. That’s
permanence of, by, and for, the white middle class circa 1955.
This paper
permanence doesn’t just mean cutting off parents from their children’s lives.
Sometimes it means cutting off siblings.
Often it means cutting off grandmothers,
grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, teachers, coaches and mentors.
But as Prof. Vivek
Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare
Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan School of Law explains, what
children need is relational permanence.
Children need to be able to stay connected to everyone who loves them, whether
they can care for them or not. Why in the world would you want to deprive any child of as
many loving connections as possible? Unless
the system that constantly postures about “children’s rights” and “the best
interest of the child” isn’t really about either.
One more advantage
to relational permanence: It’s likely to be more permanent. Depend
entirely for permanence on one stranger, or perhaps a stranger couple, and what
happens when that cute little tyke becomes a rebellious teen and the strangers
give up on her or him? We don’t know how
often this happens, because family policing systems almost never ask questions
to which they don’t want to know the answers, but the data we do have are concerning. In contrast, weave a web of relational
permanence and the odds are far better that someone will always be there for
that child.
And what does it
tell us when people in a system believe that children can do just fine
pretending their parents never existed and having nothing about them to hold onto? I think it suggests a system that dehumanizes
not only impoverished, disproportionately nonwhite parents, but their children
as well. I think it suggests that, at
least subconsciously, a lot of people in the system don’t see these children as
quite as fully human as white middle-class children, so they don’t need love as
much.
Consider the comments
of Penn State Prof. Sarah Font, who actually has suggested
that “aging out” of foster care with no home at all is better for older foster
youth than reunification or guardianship with a relative – because while family
might offer love, aging out offers money.
Or as Font put it:
Although permanency is
important for older youth as well, the implications are less clear given that
reunification or guardianship or living with relatives (adoption is exceedingly
rare for older youth) may deprive older youth of additional resources that are
conditional on aging out.
Notice also the one exception: In Font’s view, the only
thing clearly better for older foster youth than aging out with no family at
all is adoption. What’s the difference between adoption and those
other options? Simple. Adoptive homes tend to be richer – and
whiter.
This attitude, and the notion that all those nonwhite
children can do just fine without so much as a memento of their own families,
suggesting that somehow love means less to them, reminds me of nothing so much
as a notorious comment by Gen. William Westmoreland about Asians during the Vietnam
War: “'The Oriental doesn't put the same
high price on life as does a Westerner,” Westmoreland said. “Life is cheap in
the Orient."
So, Minnesota family police, you’ve shown us who you
really are. But what about the other 49
states? What are their policies? Do they have policies – or is it up to an
individual office or an individual caseworker?
So far, we don’t know.
It’s reasonable to assume that not every place is like Minnesota. All over the
country, there are adoptive
parents who accept not only mementos for their adopted children but open
adoptions. They work hard to keep children in touch with their birth parents. There are foster parents who fight to reunite
their foster children with their own families, sometimes over the objection of
the family police agency. And I’ll bet
there are caseworkers who make damn sure that a treasured keepsake or photo
makes it into the hands of a newly-adopted child.
But nearly 50 years of following these issues leads me to
believe the Minnesota approach is more the rule than the exception.
So here’s what the policy should be:
When a parent gives a caseworker a keepsake to give to a
child they may never see again: First, make several high-quality copies. Then, take the original and Give. It. To. The
Child.
When the child is too young, wait until the child is old
enough and then: Give. It. To. The Child.
Why multiple copies?
Because children are often moved from home to home with nothing but a
garbage bag to hold their belongings, so it’s easy for things to get lost. And some children are institutionalized in
places with staff that are abusive enough to destroy a cherished keepsake out
of spite.
But this should be only the beginning.
Systems that really gave a damn about these children
wouldn’t take them needlessly in the first place. And in the rare cases where separation is
necessary and a child can’t live with her or his own parents, systems would
emphasize relational permanence instead of rushing to terminate parental
rights.
Shrounda Selivanoff, social service manager
at the Washington State Office of Public Defense Parent Representation Program
and Tara Urs special counsel for civil policy and practice at the King County
Department of Public Defense put it best in the new issue of Family Justice Journal:
A parent who is
unable to regain custody of their child within the timeframes of the dependency
system will still have irreplaceable stories, traditions, memories, and love to
give their child. A child has a right to those stories, memories, traditions, and
love.
It is their
birthright.
