NCCPR in The Imprint: We’re Making Progress Getting Rid of The ‘Orphan Tax.’ Now Let’s Talk About the ‘Reunification Ransom.’

In 2021, NPR and its reporting partners exposed two routine, pernicious practices involving child welfare systems and money that should have stayed with children and/or their families. Neither practice was new. Many groups, including my own, had been working to call attention to both of these injustices for years, after first learning about them thanks to the pioneering scholarship of Prof. Daniel Hatcher at the University of Baltimore School of Law. 

But NPR’s superb reporting lit a fire under government officials and others. As a result, there’s been real progress on curbing one of these awful practices — but not nearly as much on the other.

The difference in response cuts to the heart of what’s wrong with the approach we’ve taken to “child welfare” for decades. …  

Read the full column in The Imprint

Pete Buttigieg faces the family police

Pete Buttigeig

Much of America just got its first partial lesson in how the child welfare system really works (and why it should be called a family policing system). Two four-year-old children were the unwilling teachers. 

What happened to the children of Pete Buttigieg is horrible. It is not meant to diminish this harm in any way to add something at least as important: More than one-third of all American children and more than half of all Black children will endure the same experience. For most of them, it will be even worse. 

By now, you probably know about what happened to the four-year-old twins adopted by former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor, former Transportation Secretary and former (and perhaps future) presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten. Below are some key points, and some of the lessons that can be learned from his family’s ordeal. 

Key points: 

● The report to the Michigan child abuse hotline was blatantly, obviously, false and malicious. Law enforcement ultimately concluded that it was also politically motivated. 

● The allegations were ludicrous. The caller did not say that he actually witnessed any abuse. Nor did he say that one of the Buttigieg children told him about any abuse. Rather, Buttigieg says he was told: 

The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.

That was enough to a bring child protective services caseworker – and a police officer -- to the Buttigieg’s Grand Traverse, Michigan home. 

● It didn’t stop there. CPS and the police refused to even tell Buttigieg what he was accused of. The children, four-year-old twins, were separated from their parents for 24 hours. They were placed with grandparents and then taken somewhere “in town” where they were separated from each other for hour-long “forensic interviews” with total strangers. 

As Buttigieg writes: 

My in-laws had to explain to my children, whom we have taught to avoid talking to strangers, that they would need to have a conversation, one at a time and for nearly an hour each, in a place they’d never been, with adults they did not know, who would ask questions we weren’t allowed to know either. For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen. We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime. 

● The Buttigieg children were in foster care – even though it will never show up as such in Michigan family police agency reports to the federal government. Buttigieg and his husband were coerced into placing the children in out-of-home care. The placement lasted 24 hours. That’s foster care. It is the least harmful form of foster care – placement with relatives – but it’s still foster care. But because it was all done informally, the federal government will allow Michigan to exclude it from its figures for entries into foster care. That’s why such placements are called, of course, hidden foster care. 

● This was almost the least amount of harm the family police can do. (The harm would have been less had the children not been removed from the home at all.) Buttigieg says everyone was polite and professional, and, as noted above, the children stayed with relatives. What he encountered can best be called CPS-lite.  I’ve written before about what a shock that can be for white, middle-class families, and how the white middle-class version of a CPS encounter differs from the norm. 

But even when it’s CPS-lite, there’s still plenty of trauma. Buttigieg writes: 

The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life. I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained. 

Now our family is left to deal with the aftermath. I worry about any unseen effects this had on our kids, on Chasten and me, and on the rest of our family. Even though the accusation was absurdly and obviously false, and was promptly rejected by law enforcement, I still worry about the harm it has done. Chasten and I worry about who else might try to do this kind of thing, to us or to others. … I am a reasonable man. I try to keep as calm and low-key as possible. But I cannot describe the mix of rage and sadness that I feel at the idea that someone brought our children into this. … this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began. 

Now, let’s consider the lessons: 

● In media, social and otherwise, the incident is being treated largely as some kind of bizarre outlier and a sign of the increasing ugliness and polarization of our politics. That’s largely how Buttigieg himself framed it. 

But perhaps the most important lesson in all of this is that it is not an outlier. Not by a longshot. 

While the motives are rarely political, thousands of children are victimized every year by the weaponization of child protective services. It can be educators, trying to bully parents who are fighting for the special education to which their child is entitled. It can be landlords harassing tenants, neighbors harassing neighbors, ex-spouses harassing each other. 

By definition, no one knows what percentage of calls are made maliciously. But in New Mexico, for example, it was so bad that officials at their hotline issued a plea to callers to stop using it for vendettas. 

The fact that it happened to the children of Pete Buttigieg simply brought it to the attention of millions of Americans – including Pete Buttigieg -- who had no idea the system worked that way. 

The danger of anonymous reporting

● It’s all made vastly easier by the fact that 48 states, including Michigan, allow anonymous reports. Many states even encourage them with constant reminders that callers don’t have to give their names. News stories about child abuse often end with the same great big notice, along with the hotline phone number. Buttigieg writes: 

To be clear, making a false report of this kind is a crime. That’s as it should be, both to protect the innocent from false accusations, and to preserve the integrity of a process designed to protect children from harm. I don’t know how much we can do about it, but so help me God, if there is any way to press civil or criminal charges over this, we will. Not just for our own sakes but to draw a line that I thought everyone already recognized: do not mess with someone’s kids. 

But he probably won’t be able to do a damn thing about it. And an entire child welfare establishment wants to keep it that way. That’s why so far only two states, New York and Texas, have had the courage to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. The accused still doesn’t know who accused them, but at least the hotline has to know. As for the fearmongering that’s used to defeat such laws, you can read a whole slew of news accounts and commentaries debunking it: 

amNY has a particularly good story about the New York law. The Imprint also has a story about the signing. So does the New York Daily News. And before it passed: ProPublica published a good story on the bill. Also: there was an excellent editorial from the Syracuse Post-Standard, a superb commentary in The Imprint, from Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, and another outstanding commentary from the lawyers who regularly represent children in these cases, concerning why this law is needed – and why 48 states and D.C. should follow New York and Texas in enacting such laws.  

The scope of the child welfare surveillance state

● Now consider the sheer scope of the intrusion by family police. Before they turn 18, more than one-third of all children and more than half of all Black children will be forced to endure much of what the Buttigieg children endured. For some, it will be better; for most, it’s likely to be worse. Most of the calls leading to these investigations are not malicious, but more than 80% of the reports are false, and many of the rest are cases in which poverty is confused with neglect. 

● Let’s go back to Buttigieg’s statement that “I am a reasonable man. I try to keep as calm and low-key as possible.” That was made easier for him by the simple fact that he has resources and a keen understanding of power and politics. In this case, it also was easier because the people who confronted him were not at all confrontational. On the contrary, Buttigieg takes pains to praise their politeness, professionalism and efforts to put the children at ease. 

But what if they weren’t? What if they’d pounded on the door in the middle of the night? What if they were harsh and demanding? What if they immediately stripsearched the children? What if their father had no clout, no resources and nowhere to turn?  What if all that caused a protective father to lose his cool? And what if that father were Black?  Would the twins be home now? 

In child welfare, where there's smoke there's usually just smoke

● There are many reasons Buttigieg should worry about the same thing happening again. In most states there is no such thing as crying wolf in child welfare. Often, if a call alleges something that, if true, would be child abuse, it’s screened in for investigation – no matter how thin the evidence, no matter how absurd the allegation and no matter how many times an anonymous caller has made similar unfounded allegations before. Obviously, that should change and screening should be tightened. 

But it’s even worse. In almost all states some sort of record is kept of every allegation, even those labeled unfounded, which is more than 80% of them. And keep in mind, for an allegation to be unfounded that means a worker found so little evidence she couldn’t even check a box on a form saying it was slightly more likely than not that the alleged abuse or neglect occurred. 

But those unfounded allegations are ticking time bombs. Whenever someone suggests they be expunged entirely someone in the take-the-child-and-run-all-families-are-guilty-until-proven-innocent crowd will insist they need to be kept to detect “patterns” because after all, they say, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” 

So if there’s another anonymous call made against Buttigieg the existence of the first call ratchets up suspicion  --  after all, where there’s smoke … 

It’s even worse in any community that relies on a predictive analytics algorithm. Those algorithms are likely to consider any previous report, unfounded or not, reason to raise the “risk score” on a family. 

And lawmakers love this stuff. A bill likely to become law in North Carolina requires what amounts to an extra push to take away children in any case where there are “three or more reports to Child Protective Services in a 12-month period” – no matter how ludicrous those reports may be. 

Good thing the Buttigiegs don’t live in North Carolina. 

The premise behind retaining false reports is, itself, false. In child welfare, where there’s smoke, there’s usually just more smoke. And no one can see clearly through smoke. 

● It is striking how little Buttigieg knew about how the child protective services system works. He had no idea any of this could be done to his children. That’s not a knock on Buttigieg. It’s simply due to the fact that, even if you’re in public life and the family policing system isn’t part of your portfolio (it probably didn’t arise much at the Department of Transportation) you are unlikely to know any of this – if you are white and middle class. Though there are exceptions, white middle-class status provides a great deal of immunity from encounters with family policing – though being gay weakens that immunity, and the report against Buttigieg may illustrate that. 

In contrast, if you’re poor and nonwhite, you may not know your rights, but you know that the family police are omnipresent in your neighborhood and you need to factor that in to every decision you make, from when to seek help to how much to confide in a helping professional. (For an excellent discussion of this, see Prof. Kelley Fong‘s brilliant book, Investigating Families.) 

● Indeed, even with all Buttigieg’s knowledge and experience in power, it’s not clear if he even knew he could say no to the CPS worker and the police and demand they get a court order. He didn’t get a lawyer until the next day (and, of course, unlike the overwhelming majority of parents in his position, he could afford a good one). This is why all states should have “family Miranda” laws, requiring the family police to tell families their rights. 

Left and Right share responsibility

● And finally, a note about politics: Some of the social media commentary from my fellow liberals has been quick to blame it all on the hatred stirred up by President Trump and his followers. Concerning this particular case, I think they’re probably right. But there’s more to it. The system that allowed this to be done to Pete Buttigieg’s children wasn’t created by Donald Trump. In its modern form, it dates back largely to the 1960s and 1970s, a time when party control of the White House shifted back and forth and Democrats controlled Congress.

The giant child welfare surveillance state, the mandatory reporting laws, the permission and even encouragement of anonymous reporting, the massive power to tear apart families, the lack of any serious due process, and horrible laws like the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Adoption and Safe Families Act – almost all of it well-intentioned – are bipartisan failures.  

Or, to put it another way: The person who tried to fire a weapon of family destruction at Pete Buttigieg’s children may well have been from the extreme Right. But when it came to building the weapon, loading it, and handing it to the shooter, the Left has been complicit, and we need to own up to it. 

Even now, three Democratic governors have tweeted their sympathy with Buttigieg and his family. All are in states that allow anonymous reports. Will they move to change that? 

It took the worst elements of liberalism and conservatism to create this horrible system, it will take the best elements of both to fix it. Some of us are working on it – together – through a group known as United Family Advocates.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 24, 2026

● I only say “drop everything and read this one” about once or twice a year, so I hope you’ll take my advice concerning this story from Disability Debrief: It’s one of the most compelling, most keenly observed and most beautifully written accounts of being institutionalized as a teenager that I've ever read. 

Here’s how it begins: 

There is a presumed history of institutions closing in the United States through the 1980s. But the reality is that institutions never disappeared. 

I know because I lived in them. When I was thirteen years old, I had my first experience with psychiatric and residential institutionalisation. In these places, horrific abuse was the norm. 

Staff alleged that compliance would help us “get out.” But compliance merely demanded submission to our routine exploitation and acceptance of destructive narratives. We children were seen as the problems needing intervention, rather than the violence that caused our mental distress in the first place. …

● Finally: the full story of New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s child confiscation-at-birth policy and the harm it does to children, particularly to Native American children. It is depressing but unsurprising to find that this story did not appear on the site of any New Mexico news organization – it’s in The Guardian 

● Also in New Mexico, all that needless foster care caused by policies like Grisham’s and the behavior of demagogic politicians and their allies, forced more children into the worst form of “care” group homes and institutions.  Here’s how bad it's gotten: The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that 

A state contract for a troubled Albuquerque group home for foster boys will expire without renewal June 30 following two years of high staff turnover, criticism from lawmakers and the death of a teen last year. 

But that’s not what makes this exceptionally awful. This is: The group home is closing not because the New Mexico family police agency refused to renew the contract, it’s closing only because the private firm running it decided to leave! 

But wait, there’s more: The New Mexico family police agency is so poorly run and so lacking in vision that it actually claims: 

congregate care facilities, like the Albuquerque home for boys, offer a middle-of-the road option between housing children in agency offices — a strategy the state announced it ended earlier this year — and the ideal situation of placing foster kids with families. 

One state legislator saw this for the BS it is: 

“What kinds of supports are we providing to families at the front end so that kids don’t end up in care? Because I think that we’ve all seen how traumatic this is for kids,” Chávez said. 

She added, “Doing a contract with [this group home operator] was sort of a reaction to having all these kids in custody, and so it was almost, in some ways, a knee-jerk reaction, and it feels like that’s what they’re doing again, without really taking a step back and thinking about the impact on kids.” 

● In Alaska, which tears apart families, especially Alaska Native families, at one of the highest rates in America, lawmakers passed one of those largely pointless bills trying to “fix” abuse in residential treatment with bold visionary steps like actually requiring unannounced inspections. But, as Mother Jones reports, even that was too much for the governor, who vetoed it. 

But hey, it’s not like the institution that helped inspire the bill, an institution with wat the story calls “a troubling track record of assaults, escapes, and the routine use of seclusion and chemical restraints” took no action at all. As the story notes: 

North Star hired a lobbyist, Dianne Blumer, who was paid $41,000 in each of the past two legislative sessions to advocate on “issues related to mental health, workforce, background checks and State of Alaska budget.” 

Oh, and did I mention that Alaska tears apart families, especially Alaska Native families, at one of the highest rates in America? 

● The Imprint reports on an oral history project led by the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition: 

Hundreds of Indigenous people have testified. They’ve sobbed, cursed and laughed in spite of it all. Many told stories about their time in Indian boarding schools that they’ve kept inside for decades, finally able to begin recovering from childhood trauma. … 

The intent is to document and share with the public the systemic abuse endured by boarding school survivors under the government’s attempts at forced assimilation — policies that began in the 1800s and lasted for over a century. 

● Truthout reports on the failure of New York State to pass “legislation that would require informed consent for drug testing of pregnant people.” As the story explains: 

While drug and alcohol use while pregnant can present complications for a newborn, nonconsensual drug testing of pregnant people doesn’t solve the issue at hand. … This practice has been shown to force pregnant people to delay prenatal care, afraid of the potential criminal consequences of being drug tested against their will. Moreover, nonconsensual drug testing could trap the birthing parent in a web of criminalization that, at best, hinders family bonding, and at worst, irrevocably tears families apart — all because of a disease. 

● Tennessee State Rep. Aftyn Behn has filed 14 federal civil rights complaints involving alleged wrongful removal of children in that state.  WTVC-TV reports that the mother, Michelle Ward, 

alleges DCS removed her daughter from her sister’s home in February 2025 while Ward was at the hospital with her newborn son. She says the removal happened without a court order or petition. 

“My son having surgery, he was having surgery. They went to my sister’s house, and they removed my daughter. They said it was for failure to cooperate with them from a prior case that was already closed,” Ward said. 

The complaint alleges that shortly after entering state custody, Ward’s daughter, who has epilepsy, was denied seizure medication, causing her to suffer a seizure and an injury that required stitches above her eye. 

Her child has been in foster care for more than a year. 

● On the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog: Two examples of performative outrage that backfire and hurt children. From politicians in North Carolina, and from a “journalist” in California. 

In this week’s reminder that The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From the Salt Lake Tribune: 

Daily fights that staff allegedly fail to stop. Teenagers with large, open self-harm wounds. Two riots that ended with arrests and hospitalizations. 

Those are examples of the “shocking” conditions Utah’s Disability Law Center says its employees discovered after four days of visits to Provo Canyon School’s Springville and Provo campuses. 

The watchdog group is now calling on state regulators to consider stronger intervention for the embattled teen treatment center — including shutting it down. 

● From WBBM-TV, Chicago: 

"A house of horrors." That's how one former Chicago foster child described Aunt Martha's Integrated Care Center, a facility that's been at the center of a years-long CBS News Chicago investigation. 

On Thursday, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services was added as a defendant in a lawsuit accusing the foster facility of failing to protect a 17-year-old foster child from sexual assault by an Aunt Martha's employee. 

In March, a Cook County jury convicted former Aunt Martha's youth center manager Trulon Henry of sexually assaulting that teen. There were also allegations involving five other girls, as young as 12. … Escamilla alleges that after she reported abuse, DCFS removed her from Aunt Martha's, but then sent her back, where she was isolated in a basement room and repeatedly assaulted by Henry.

The real lessons from the latest “revelations” in a Santa Clara County tragedy

Photo by Steve Rhodes from 2007, when the Mercury News was a real newspaper.

The lessons are nothing like what the Mercury News wants you to think (but you probably guessed that).

The latest story about Santa Clara child welfare from Julia Prodis Sulek of the San Jose Mercury News reads like an act of desperation to keep the foster-care panic in Santa Clara County going. The story is about two-year-old Jaxon Juarez, who died after enduring horrific abuse, allegedly at the hands of a cousin whose mother was serving as Jaxon’s foster mother. Sulek and her all-purpose insta-quote source have taken some newly public details and left the impression that they reveal callousness and incompetence. They don’t. 

The story begins with almost literally breathless prose hyping the supposed revelations. (“I have to catch my breath here,” says Mr. Insta-quote at one point.) By and large, I won’t be repeating that here. Instead, I’ll reprint parts of the main body of the story, the part many readers won’t get to. That part, which offers more detail, reveals failings that are far more mundane and lessons that are far more useful to those in Santa Clara County making a good-faith effort to find solutions. 

We already know a lot about the death of Jaxon, and how the real causes may well be linked to the very panic that Sulek and her allies have done so much to foment. All of that is discussed in this previous post. So I’ll focus now on the latest “revelations” – according to Sulek’s story. Excerpts from the story are in italics, starting with this: 

Concerns about Jaxon’s health appeared to begin April 2 at his daycare center, where staff members noticed a rash on his body and a line on his neck. In an interview last month, the daycare director said she called Jaxon’s foster mother to take him to the doctor. 

So we already know something crucial. Daycare staff are mandated reporters of child abuse, and, especially in the current climate in Santa Clara County, they’re probably terrified not to report their slightest suspicion. The fact that the director called Jaxon’s foster mother, and not a child abuse hotline, suggests whatever she saw raised no suspicion at all. 

On that Friday, April 3, the foster mother took Jaxon to the SPARK Clinic which serves foster children. 

Also significant: While it’s the foster mother’s son is accused of horrifically abusing and killing Jaxon, the foster mother herself has been portrayed only as someone with two DUI convictions with children in the car, convictions that should have disqualified her as a placement. Yet instead of seeking to cover up possible child abuse, she does exactly what the daycare center owner suggests. 

Jaxon returned to the daycare center that afternoon, the director said, with a doctor’s note suggesting they use cream on his rash. 

So, apparently, the examining doctor didn’t suspect abuse either. 

Why Jaxon wasn’t immediately seen downstairs at the Child Advocacy Center, which partners with the SPARK Clinic and specializes in assessing children for signs of sexual abuse, isn’t entirely clear. But it appears there was a paperwork problem that prevented him from being seen immediately. At about 1:40 p.m. that day, Jaxon’s father, Albert Juarez, was asked by his social worker to sign an authorization form allowing Jaxon to be treated there. By then, however, Jaxon was napping at the daycare center across town before an Easter egg hunt planned that afternoon. 

This leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Without benefit of hindsight, it’s not at all clear what prompted anyone to see a need to refer a child with a rash on his body and a mark on his neck to the Child Advocacy Center. Nor is it clear who wanted him seen there. Was it the doctor who first saw Jaxon? Was it some other doctor who might have heard about Jaxon? Was it the social worker acting on her or his own initiative? Regardless, initially, it seems, it was not considered urgent enough to awaken Jaxon from his nap and bring him back that day. 

After Jaxon’s appointment at the SPARK Clinic, a call was made to the child abuse hotline about his “suspicious injuries,” the newly released documents show. The hotline keeps the identities of callers private. 

The same day, a doctor at the Child Advocacy Center emailed both a social worker and a division manager. 

The doctor, whose name was blacked out, was “requesting the child be seen for an evaluation as soon as possible and requesting the assistance” of the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services “to bring the child in for the evaluation.” 

That didn’t happen. 

So what’s the order of events here? Did the hotline call prompt the social worker to seek permission from Jaxon’s father? That seems unlikely since Jaxon was not in his father’s custody, and if a doctor says it’s urgent that a child be seen, I’m aware of no requirement that an agency wait for a birth parent’s permission.

Or, and this is no more than speculation, perhaps the doctor who originally treated Jaxon spoke to a colleague downstairs who said something like “That might be serious, we should call the hotline and get the child in ASAP.” 

Either way, none of this suggests any lack of caring or competence on the part of the county child welfare agency. 

Now, let’s get back to what the story says did happen: 

Instead, the social worker forwarded the email to her supervisor, “noting she was not available to bring the child in the next day but would ask the caregiver to do so.” 

So, again, remember: Only with hindsight do we know that the hotline caller was right and the situation was urgent. And given how cooperative the caregiver was when the daycare center director first suggested taking Jaxon in for a medical exam, the social worker had no reason to believe she wouldn't do so again. 

Here’s what else we know: During a foster care panic, everyone’s workload increases. So while Sulek and Mr. Insta-quote seem to want to leave the impression of some sort of dereliction of duty, it’s more likely that any number of other things appeared to be more urgent at that moment. In other words, this is still another way, in addition to those discussed in this previous post, that the foster-care panic may have contributed to Jaxon’s death. 

The story continues: 

The division manager, meanwhile, “responded that she had been sent the email in error,” according to a summary of events put together by the county as part of its internal review. 

And that’s where Sulek and Mr. Insta-quote – that one source she counts on to say what she wants said – really go in for the kill. 

Before the story gets to these mundane details, toward the very top of the story, after mentioning what the manager didn’t do, Sulek writes: 

Steve Baron, a member of the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council, said the revelations are shocking, especially for a division manager to apparently ignore the doctor’s email. 

“I have to catch my breath here,” said Baron, who said he wasn’t speaking for the council. He hadn’t seen the documents, but relevant excerpts were read to him. “If it is accurate that the manager, because the email was sent to her in error, took no action to ensure that the child was seen by the clinic, that’s absolutely inexcusable. [Emphasis added.] 

Loaded language like “dismissed” implies that the manager read the doctor’s email, and shrugged her shoulders because, somehow, she was too uncaring to jump in.

In fact, the manager never should have been involved at all; she got the email by mistake. She simply pointed that out. She had no reason to believe that the supervisor wouldn’t simply assign someone else to take Jaxon to the Child Advocacy Center. 

As for the supervisor not acting immediately, that might be explained by the fact that a caseworker did, in fact, act immediately. Again, from the story itself: 

The emergency response social worker who was called out to “immediately assess” signs of possible physical abuse that Friday afternoon noted that Jaxon’s cheeks were rosy and he had a “scratch” on his neck and bumps on his ear. But the social worker wrote that she “was unable to determine whether it was eczema or impetigo.” 

In a letter from the Child Advocacy Center the day Jaxon died, a doctor wrote that “in young children, skin injuries on the neck and ear are highly sensitive and specific for child physical abuse.” 

The social worker, however, wrote that Jaxon “presented unharmed, made no sounds and appeared to be appropriately attached to his caregiver.” 

Look closely again. The letter in question came the day Jaxon died – after he already was hospitalized with horrific injuries; it wasn’t anything the worker knew about beforehand.  The worker knew only that the day care center did not suspect abuse, the first doctor who saw Jaxon apparently did not suspect abuse, but the Child Advocacy Center wanted to see him. 

Medical examinations by Child Advocacy Centers are themselves often enormously traumatic for children. And the behavior of so-called child abuse pediatricians repeatedly has been called into question for their allegedly jumping to conclusions. 

So, again, try it without the hindsight: Should every child with “skin injuries on the neck and ear” really be subjected to those traumatic medical exams? And if any call from a doctor to a hotline alleging child abuse automatically means it’s child abuse – or at least something urgent enough to have the child examined immediately, why have caseworkers at all? Why have investigations at all?   

But Sulek didn’t see it that way. Her story then goes into full self-righteousness mode: 

County officials declined to answer questions from this news organization, including why Jaxon was marked “safe” and why there wasn’t more effort to act with urgency in getting him to the Child Advocacy Center. 

Probably because, without benefit of hindsight, and with the crushing workload caused by the foster care panic, there wasn’t time to look more closely, and, on the surface, Jaxon did, indeed, look safe. Just as he apparently looked safe to the daycare center director and the first doctor to examine him. So, yet again, the foster-care panic may have contributed to the tragedy. 

And that, of course, is the most fundamental lesson of all. We’ve already seen how the foster-care panic may well have led to a series of missed opportunities to keep Jaxon safe by bolstering support for other family members who wanted to care for him. Now we see how, during a foster-care panic, workers don’t have time to look as closely as they would otherwise, and may miss warning signs they otherwise might have spotted. 

The other lesson is not to let any one source become what amounts to an information choke point. In Santa Clara County, the Child Abuse Prevention Council fills its reports with citations to the same extremely limited group of “scholars” preferred by Steve Baron, while ignoring contrary research. Then the Council presents its reports to the County Board of Supervisors. Then Julia Prodis Sulek gets comment on what the Supervisors say or do – from Steve Baron. 

I think Steve Baron sincerely wants to save children. But as has been clearly documented, his approach is backfiring. So it’s urgent that the Board of Supervisors broaden its source base and reach out to the many scholars who know what really works to make children safer – and what does not.

How North Carolina’s performative outrage over child abuse deaths is making everything worse

 

The North Carolina State Capitol, where performances are likely to resume this week

During a legislative hearing about the failures that contributed to the death of Dominique Moody, a six-year-old in North Carolina, State Rep. Allen Chesser said: 

“There’s a pattern here. A child dies and the Department of Health and Human Services investigates, finds a lack of oversight, poor decision-making, and poor management. The local Child Protective Services Office is put on a corrective action plan and the state takes over for a little while, but fundamentally, nothing changes.” 

He’s right. But that’s not the only pattern that follows such tragedies – it’s not even the worst.  The worst pattern is the one he’s a part of, the one playing out right now: Lawmakers pound tables, fulminate, and issue outraged press releases. They demand the ritual sacrifice of the child welfare agency chief, the firing, and maybe criminal prosecution of anyone who came anywhere near the case. And, of course, no such grand performance is complete without exploiting the child’s memory by putting the child’s name on some largely pointless (or worse) law. 

All this makes everything worse – because, almost always, the real cause of tragedies like the death of Dominique Moody is an overloaded system. In Mecklenburg County, where Dominique died, workers are carrying more than double the number of cases they should. That means workers rush from case to case, making terrible errors in all directions – leaving some children in danger even as they take other children needlessly from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help. 

The system is not overloaded because North Carolina is a cesspool of depravity, where suffering like that endured by Dominique is the norm. On the contrary, in 2025, of all the North Carolina children torn from their families and thrown into foster care, 83% did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 61% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” Indeed, nearly one-third of entries into North Carolina foster care were due to homelessness or inadequate housing. That’s well over twice as many as were taken for physical and sexual abuse combined. 

That helps explain the mountain of research showing that, in these typical cases, children left in their own homes do better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. One study found that the intrinsic toxicity of forced family separation is so great that foster youth are more than four times more likely to die by age 20, and the most common cause of death is suicide. All that is before we even reach all the other studies showing high rates of abuse in foster care itself. 

It is these false reports, trivial cases and poverty cases that overload workers, leaving them less time to find the next Dominique Moody before it’s too late. So when lawmakers do little more than shout the equivalent of “off with their heads!” it makes everything worse, and it makes all vulnerable children less safe. 

With the threat of dismissal and even criminal prosecution over their heads, the result almost always is a foster-care panic, a sharp, sudden increase in the number of children thrown into foster care. That only further increases caseloads. 

As for the proposed law with Dominique’s name on it, which already has passed the North Carolina House of Representatives unanimously, it’s going to increase caseloads even more. The bill’s main feature is a so-called “escalation team” which would add an extra level of review – meaning an extra push to remove a child or fail to reunify a family, in a whole slew of circumstances, including a prior placement in foster care or “three or more reports to Child Protective Services in a 12-month period.” This in a state that already reunifies families at one of the lowest rates in the country; less than half the national average. 

So, attention angry ex-spouses, aggrieved neighbors, vengeful landlords or anyone else with a grudge against a North Carolina family: When this bill becomes law, you can make those anonymous reports three times and voila! You’ve vastly escalated the chances of tearing the family apart! You’ve also contributed to vastly increasing caseloads for overloaded workers. 

Children would be far better off if North Carolina created a de-escalation team, to re-examine the case of every foster child and see if they really need to be in foster care and to re-examine typical cases and see if the case is really a poverty case. That would reduce caseloads and give workers time to investigate every case with care. 

It could get worse still if North Carolina buys into a proposal from North Carolina professor (and occasional LinkedIn troll – see below) Emily Putnam-Hornstein to add so-called “predictive risk modeling,” in which an algorithm “advises” caseworkers concerning who to investigate and which children to take away.

Prof. Emily Putnam-Hornstein on LinkedIn. She subsequently deleted her profile there.

Consider what keeps happening when objective evaluators look at the model she co-designed for metropolitan Pittsburgh. 

● Independent evaluators found it was racially biased. 

● So did the ACLU. 

● The Associated Press reports that the Biden Justice Department investigated whether it discriminates against the disabled. (We don't know what happened to this, but we presume the Trump Administration dropped it.)

● A family suing over removal of their children, because of the parents' disabilities, said the caseworker told them their children were being taken because “the machine has labeled you high risk.” 

● In her landmark book, Automating Inequality, Prof. Virginia Eubanks called the algorithm “poverty profiling.” 

● And, in describing another of their proposed algorithms, even Putnam-Hornstein’s co-author said “Yes, it’s big brother…” but she argued we should use it anyway. When you begin a sentence with the words “Yes, it’s big brother…” the only ethical way to end the sentence is: “…so we won’t do it.” 

There is more about the dangers of Putnam-Hornstein’s approach in this NCCPR publication. 

If scapegoating workers won’t work, and a poverty-profiling algorithm won’t work, what will? We list a series of solutions here. But two changes are key: 

● Zero-in on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. Study after study has shown that even small amounts of concrete help go a long way to reducing abuse and neglect. 

● As the North Carolina Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recommended, provide every family with high-quality interdisciplinary legal representation, an approach proven to safely reduce foster care, not by getting “bad parents” off, but by finding alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” often dished out by child welfare agencies. 

Rep. Chesser says the problem is “the inaction.” That’s one problem. The other problem is action that makes everything worse. Lawmakers should learn what really works, even if it doesn’t make a good press release. 

NCCPR’s written statement to the North Carolina Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was cited more than a dozen times in the Committee’s report. You can read the full statement here.

Residential treatment: When the stories just speak for themselves

The promises to improve protocols and procedures that follow each new revelation of abuse [in group homes and institutions] are not only inadequate, they may be worse than nothing at all. By creating the illusion of progress, these never-ending “reforms” legitimize an intrinsically damaging institution.

--Commentary in The Imprint, June 15, 2026

Late Friday, when a troubled psychiatric facility outside Minneapolis was on the verge of being shut down for placing youth at “imminent risk of harm,” an agreement was reached with the state to keep its doors open.

 But under the settlement with the Department of Human Services (DHS) obtained by The Imprint, Nexus East Bethel Family Healing must scale back its offerings and submit to more rigorous oversight.

--News story in The Imprint, June 16, 2026

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 16, 2026

● In The Imprint, Charles Zeanah of Tulane University School of Medicine and Carole Shauffer, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Youth Law Center discuss the mountain of research showing that the real problem with group homes and institutions is that they are group homes and institutions. They write: 

The promises to improve protocols and procedures that follow each new revelation of abuse [in group homes and institutions] are not only inadequate, they may be worse than nothing at all. By creating the illusion of progress, these never-ending “reforms” legitimize an intrinsically damaging institution. 

● Unfortunately, lawmakers don’t seem to get the message. In Minnesota, The Imprint reports, in the wake of abuse allegations that dogged a residential treatment center since it opened, the state finally suspended its license. But legislators and state officials seem more concerned about losing a place to institutionalize children than they are about what happens to the children once they’re institutionalized – because the state promptly reached an agreement to allow the place to stay open. Presumably, they promised to improve protocols and procedures. [UPDATE JUNE 17: And sure enough ...]

● The Imprint also has two stories on the issue of drug testing and consent in New York. One story reports on inaction by legislators: 

A legislative fix in New York was first introduced seven years ago. The state attorney general has investigated. Lawsuits have been filed. And some hospitals in the state have changed their rules. 

But birthing mothers and their newborns are still routinely tested for drugs without consent, triggering CPS investigations and removals at the most tender of bonding times. And as this year’s legislative session ended Friday, the Maternal Health, Dignity and Consent Act — a bill to ban the practice — once again failed in Albany. 

● The other story reports on action by litigators. They’re suing to stop a policy that would allow judges to “ask” parents to submit to instant on-the-spot drug testing. Technically, the tests are voluntary, but … 

“When saying ‘no’ means unlawful separation from your child, that is coercion,” Trisha Trigilio, the [Bonrx Defenders’] director of impact litigation said in a press release. “Judges should not leverage the power of their offices to extract consent and circumvent the law. If the court wants a drug test, it can follow the law and issue a warrant based on probable cause.” 

● Things are far worse in New Mexico, where that state’s Supreme Court refused to stop a confiscation-at-birth directive issued by the Governor. I have a blog post about it. 

● Kentucky Lantern reports on another bizarre turn in the saga of former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s failed adoption of Jonah, a child from Ethiopia.  As the story reminds us: 

Jonah, who alleges he was abandoned by the Bevins at age 17 in an abusive facility in Jamaica, is seeking support and help in completing an education. 

Now, according to the story, an email that sounds like a Trump social media post … 

blasts lawyers for his estranged son, Jonah Bevin, for making “FALSE STATEMENTS” to the media and accuses Jonah of trying “TO SHAKE HIS PARENTS DOWN FOR MONEY.” 

The two-page email, mostly in capital letters, repeats attacks on Jefferson Family Court Judge Angela Johnson, who oversees the case in which Jonah, 19, seeks support from his divorced parents. It calls her an “ACTIVIST JUDGE” who “INSISTS ON MILKING THIS CASE PUBLICLY FOR THE MEDIA ATTENTION THAT IT BRINGS HER.”… 

The email statement is not signed by Bevin and the sender did not reply to multiple requests from the Kentucky Lantern for confirmation that the email was from him or respond to questions about its content.