NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 3, 2021

● Movement for Family Power and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls have launched their #RepealASFA campaign – urging Congress to erase an odious law that has erased hundreds of thousands of families.  Their analysis of the law’s origins is striking.  Here’s an excerpt: 

When we consider the Adoption and Safe Families Act, we situate our analysis not only in the elements of the law, but also the dominant imagination that allowed it to exist and survive with very little opposition.  One starting point is looking at Senator John Chafee (R-RI), a lead senate sponsor for the legislation, who on the eve of the eve of the passage of the ASFA told the New York Times, “It’s time we recognize that some families simply cannot and should not be kept together.” He spoke these words when nearly half of the children in the family regulation system were Black, most were poor, and the federal government was rapidly draining social safety nets.  

We believe that the families Chaffee imagined were not his own. He was from a family to which the entire power and might of the United States was dedicated to keeping together. In his direct ancestry were multiple governors, law professors, and senators. He attended the most elite institutions of the Northeast and went on to live the life he was pre destined to live-- ascending from congressperson to governor to secretary of the navy to senator. He had been bequeathed generational wealth and social status from the blood, sweat and tears of our families--literally achieving social and political capital from the backs of our ancestors.  He would likely utter the words that “some families should not be kept together” with a strong sense that his would continue to accumulate wealth and status, while we would inherit crippling foster system histories. 

NCCPR has more about ASFA here and here. 

● Youth Today and The Imprint have excellent stories about that new study showing the extent to which family policing has become a pervasive, traumatic intrusion into the lives of families – especially nonwhite families.  In Arizona, for example, nearly every impoverished Black child will be subjected to a child abuse investigation and 20% will be forced into foster care.  Don’t worry, the Arizona family preservation agency told The Imprint, in recent years we’ve made “vast systemic improvements.”  But, as we point out in this blog post, the data tell a different story. 

● The story of one particularly appalling judge in Philadelphia, first reported in 2018 by the Legal Intelligencer, has gone national. NBC News looks at the havoc wrought by now-former Family Court Judge Lyris Younge.  Two elements are crucial: We would have known about this much sooner had court hearings in these cases been open in Philadelphia  -  as they are in states where more than 40% of America’s foster children live.  And Younge never could have done this to families had the Philadelphia Department of Human Services not harassed the families and brought them before her in the first place.

Child welfare in Arizona: Don’t believe the spin from the agency where workers called themselves “professional kidnappers.”

The Imprint has a very good story about that new study showing the obscene rates at which family policing agencies investigate families – particularly nonwhite families. 

As you may recall, that study estimated that in two of America’s 20 largest counties, Los Angeles and Maricopa (metropolitan Phoenix), more than 70 percent of Black children would be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  (And since the study didn’t factor in income, you can be damn sure almost every poor Black child will face this trauma.) 

Maricopa County also has appalling numbers for later stages in the process.  Nearly 15% of Native American children, nearly 15% of Hispanic children and nearly 20% of Black children will be placed in foster care, according to the study.  In Maricopa County, termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) happens at obscenely high rates. In fact, for Black and Native children, no other county studied even comes close. 

That’s what you’d expect from a state where the family policing agency, which carries the Orwellian name “Department of Child Safety,” had an office in which almost all the caseworkers thought it would be fun to wear t-shirts emblazoned on one side with the words “professional kidnapper” and on the other with the words “do you know where your children are?”  (Fun fact: You can now buy matching masks with the same message!) Those workers were fired.  The ones smart enough not to wear their sentiments almost literally on their sleeves remain. 

When The Imprint asked a p.r. person for DCS about the findings in the new study, the p.r. guy he went for what probably would be Rule #23 in “The Official Flack Handbook,” were there such a publication: When confronted by alarming data in a study, say that sure, things may have been bad then, but we’re sooooo much better now! 

And so, we get a DCS spokesman telling The Imprint: 

…the actual maltreatment records from which long-term estimates were derived, covering the years 2014 to 2018, “spanned a time in Arizona history that experienced the highest child removal rates ever.” 

“Since that time, we have made vast systemic improvements, including reducing entries into care and reducing our out-of-home care population by 24% ...” 

But the problem with “Rule #23” is it only works if newer data are not available – so we have to take the agency’s word for it.  Tough luck, DCS: In this case, we have the data. 

The data show that for the last two years of the study period, 2017 and 2018, Arizona took away fewer children than in the two years before the study period began 2012 and 2013.  So no, those five years actually weren’t the worst in Arizona history – though they certainly were awful. In fact, Arizona has been in foster-care panic mode for most of the past 20 years – a national record. 

Worse, after the study period ended, somehow, despite all those “vast systemic improvements,” entries went up again. In 2019 entries increased by nearly 9% over the previous year.  And for 2020 – despite COVID – the state’s own data show a figure nearly identical to 2019 and still well above 2018. 

Here are the entry numbers from 2012 to 2020: 

Entries into foster care in Arizona 

2012      2013      2014      2015      2016      2017      2018    2019   2020

10,663   10,790   12,209   12,722   11,729   10,057   9,173   9,607  9,583 

Sources: 2012 to 2019: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database. 2020: Arizona Department of Child Safety Semi-Annual Child Welfare Reports.

 The 2019 figure meant Arizona tore apart families at a rate 45% percent above the national average that year, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  Maricopa County is worse than the state average.  And, by the way, Pima County (metropolitan Tucson) is even worse than Phoenix. 

2019 also was the year Arizona authorities did this to a family – because a child had a high fever:

 As for the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day – dredging that up is a nice deflection, but it has nothing to do with the study, which tracked the extent of intrusion into families at each stage of the process.  Reducing the number of children in foster care on one day of the year has nothing to do with how many children you tore from everyone they know and love in the first place. 

Indeed, that number can rise or fall for all sorts of reasons unrelated to the extent of “professional kidnapping” in a given state.  It can fall due to a lot of youth aging out of the system with no home at all.  It can fall due to churning – taking a lot of children and sending them home again in a few months, much the worse for the experience. If a child is taken in January and sent home in August, her or his presence in foster care won’t show up when the “snapshot” of children in foster care is taken in September. 

And, by the way, even with the reduction in the snapshot number, in 2019, Arizona still held children in foster care at a rate 20 percent above the national average; again, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

The “snapshot number” of children in foster care also can fall if a state is particularly aggressive about needlessly destroying impoverished families forever and rushing the children into the hands of more affluent strangers.  The study found that the rate at which this is attempted in Phoenix through termination of children’s rights to their parents is 17.5 times higher than the rate in New York City. 

So, Arizona Department of Child Safety, tell us again about those “vast systemic improvements.”

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 27, 2021

● Video is now available for all of the panels at the Columbia Journal of Race and Law Strengthened Bonds Symposium.  Here’s where to find all the videos.  This one is cued to Prof. Dorothy Roberts’ keynote:

Once again, a lot of stories are from and about family policing in Los Angeles: 

● Almost every Black child in Los Angeles (and also metropolitan Phoenix) will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. Almost every child.  I have a blog post about these and other horrifying findings; it includes a link to the full study. 

● WitnessLA has an excellent discussion of both the new study and the LatinoUSA stories, highlighted here last week, about abuse in LA foster care.  Medscape also has a good story about the study. 

● Speaking of abuse in LA foster care, there’s also this from KABC-TV. 

● And the excellent grassroots organization DCFS – Give Us Back Our Children sponsored this webinar on how the system really works. They’ve also released a guide to help parents facing DCFS understand their rights. 

In other news: 

● Think of Us, a group founded by a former foster youth, Sixto Cancel, interviewed 78 foster youth about their experiences in group homes and institutions.  Their overwhelming view: Such placements should – and can – be abolished.  There’s a story in The Imprint, which includes a link to the full report.  Several of those interviewed noted how though advocates of institutionalization (and their credulous journalist enablers) claim such placements are a last resort, for them institutionalization was their first placement. 

But particularly revealing – precisely because this the degradation is so routine – is this discussion of what an institutionalized youth must do just to use the bathroom. 

During the study, we heard story after story of youth only being allowed to go to the bathroom at specific times of the day and for only a few minutes. … Youth shared how they got so used to having to ask for permission before going to the restroom, that—much to their embarrassment—they could not shake that behavior even long after they left institutional placements. In this one simple act that most of us take for granted lie many instances of unjust control and violence against youths’ humanity, privacy, culture, autonomy, self-expression, and ability to make their own life choices. 

● Next City has an update on the story of children needlessly taken from their mother, Kyeesha Lamb, in Philadelphia.  The family is, at last, out from under the “supervision” of Philadelphia family police. 

“I feel great,” says Lamb. “Absolutely. But when they said it, I just felt concerned for all the people who might still be in the same situation.” 

● Hidden foster care is, unfortunately, a common and legal practice across the country – but not in Cherokee County, North Carolina, where coercing a family into signing a so-called “custody and visitation agreement” (CVA) can be a criminal offense. Carolina Public Press reports that David Hughes, a former supervisor for the county family police agency, pled guilty to two misdemeanors as part of a plea deal.  The former head of the agency still faces trial. 

To understand what’s so wrong with all this, consider how hidden foster care was used:  For cases so weak the county felt it couldn’t even get a judge to rubber-stamp a request to take away the children. As the story explains: 

DSS workers testified in May that they used CVAs to close “stuck cases,” in which they had difficulty building up enough evidence for a judge to agree to remove a child from what the social worker thought was a dangerous situation. 

“It may not have been enough for a petition,” Hughes testified in May at a federal trial, “yet we were concerned about returning the children back to the home for safety reasons.” 

Petitions were not filed because “we felt like it was probably not a strong enough case to take to court,” Hughes testified. 

● And finally, something I missed when it first came out a year ago, but which remains highly relevant: An in-depth report from Child Welfare Watch in New York City on the problem of taking children or otherwise harassing mothers whose only crime is themselves being survivors of domestic violence. 

Thanks to a class-action lawsuit settlement, New York City is probably better about this than most places in the country, and certainly better than it used to be. NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs in that suit.) Now, the city’s family policing agency is less likely to actually remove the children.  But they still do plenty of damage.  As the report explains:

 Even when there are no allegations against them, domestic violence victims are stripped of their privacy, deprived of authority in their homes, and made to live in terror of losing their children, [Raquel Singh, the executive director of Voices of Women] says. It’s not uncommon for abusers to use ACS as a weapon against their victims, who stay silent for fear of bringing more scrutiny into their homes. “It creates this double-victimization.” … 

Lawyers who represent parents in New York City Family Courts often argue that ACS practices would not be tolerated in communities with money or political influence. “It’s a one-size-fits-all, bullying approach,” says Maura Keating, the director of litigation at Center for Family Representation, which defends thousands of parents each year. “We tell families they have rights, but that goes out the window when your kids are trying to sleep and there’s someone from ACS banging on the door late at night, tearing through your closet, looking for evidence that a man is there.” 

“Pervasive,” “ubiquitous,” “extremely high”: New data reveal the extent of the invasion of Black homes by family policing agencies.

It’s even worse than previous research suggested (and it’s not great for white kids either). 

Graphic from Frank Edwards, et. al., "Contact with Child Protective Services is pervasive but unequally distributed by race
 and ethnicity in large U.S. Counties" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 27, 2021).

By now, people working in “child welfare” know, or at least should know, of the national study published in 2017 which revealed that about one-third of all children and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation at some point during their childhoods.  Earlier this year, a California study produced similar results. 

But, at least when it comes to most of America’s largest counties, these data underestimate the problem.  A new study of data from America’s 20 largest counties (with the five counties of New York City counted as one) reveals a system that is arbitrary, capricious, cruel and very, very racist. 

The study reveals an infrastructure of surveillance of families – especially nonwhite families -- that is, in the words of the study authors “pervasive” “ubiquitous” and "extremely high."  

The data tell us that, step by step, brick by brick over more than half a century America has built a monstrous machine inflicting state-sanctioned emotional child abuse on a huge proportion of nonwhite children. 

For example: The study estimates that in Los Angeles County, 72% of all Black children – seventy-two percent – will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation during the course of their childhoods.  Neither this, nor the previous studies, provides data specific to income, but of course, we know that the widespread confusion of poverty with neglect means we’re talking almost exclusively about impoverished families.  So if 72% of all Black children in L.A. must endure this, imagine how rare it is to avoid this trauma if you’re poor and Black. 

Riverside County and San Bernardino Counties, next door to L.A., are nearly as bad.  So are Wayne County, Michigan (metropolitan Detroit), San Diego County, California, Clark County, Nevada (metropolitan Las Vegas) Middlesex County, Massachusetts (suburban Boston) and Maricopa County, Arizona (metropolitan Phoenix).  In none of America’s 20 largest counties does the percentage of Black children enduring a child abuse investigation fall below 40 percent. 

Phoenix and Los Angeles are also #1 and #2 respectively among America’s largest cities in NCCPR’s calculation on overall rates of tearing apart families and consigning children to the chaos of foster care over the course of a year. 

In none of these giant metropolitan areas does the proportion of Black children forced to endure a child abuse investigation fall below 41 percent.  Even for white children, in all but three of these counties, more than 20% will have to endure a child abuse investigation. 

Yes, an investigation is a big deal 

Before going further into the data, I want to pause here to respond to anyone thinking: Well, an investigation is no big deal, they’re just social workers knocking on the door to offer help Indeed, some weird comments made by one of the researchers, discussed below, suggests he may believe that.  But just to set the record straight, this story from The New Yorker gives some idea of what it’s really like: 

You will hear a knock on the door, often late at night. You don’t have to open it, but if you don’t the caseworker outside may come back with the police. The caseworker will tell you you’re being investigated for abusing or neglecting your children. She will tell you to wake them up and tell them to take clothes off so she can check their bodies for bruises and marks.  … 

You must be as calm and deferential as possible. However disrespectful and invasive she is, whatever awful things she accuses you of, you must remember that child protection has the power to remove your kids at any time if it believes them to be in danger. … If you get angry, your anger may be taken as a sign of mental instability, especially if the caseworker herself feels threatened. 

You may never find out who reported you. If your child has been hurt, his teacher or doctor may have called the state child-abuse hotline, not wanting to assume, as she might in a richer neighborhood, that it was an accident. But it could also have been a neighbor who heard yelling, or an ex-boyfriend who wants to get back at you, or someone who thinks you drink too much or simply doesn’t like you. People know that a call to the hotline is an easy way to blow up your life. [Emphasis added.] 

On one of the incredibly rare occasions when this actually happened to a white, middle-class foster parent, it sparked days of outraged news stories and demands for action from a state legislator.  The fact that this will happen to almost every impoverished Black child in the City of Los Angeles, almost every impoverished Black child in the City of Phoenix, and more than half of Black children nationwide somehow doesn’t provoke the same response. 

Almost every allegation is false 

All that is required for a caseworker to “substantiate” an allegation is for her to check a box on a form stating her personal conclusion that it is slightly more likely than not that the “abuse” or “neglect” occurred.  There is no trial beforehand, no neutral arbiter hears all sides.  Unsurprisingly, the only study we know of to second guess these decisions, and it’s a very old study, found workers two to fix times more likely to wrongly “substantiate” an allegation than to wrongly declare one “unfounded.” 

And yet, even with this incredibly low standard of proof and propensity to over-substantiate, this study found that, on average, in more than 90% of cases, the workers found that the allegation was false.  Even among Black children, where racial bias and the confusion of poverty with neglect make it more likely workers will check the “substantiated” box, on average workers decided at least 80 percent of reports were false.*  (And, of course, among those that are “substantiated” the vast majority are “neglect” – which often means the family is poor.) 

So even by the workers’ own assessment, nine times out of ten, children are forced to endure this trauma for nothing.  That also means that roughly 90% of the time, workers are spinning their wheels, chasing down false allegations, making it less likely they’ll find the very few children in real danger. 

1 in 5 Black kids in L.A. endures foster care 

Graphic from Frank Edwards, et. al., "Contact with Child Protective Services is pervasive but unequally distributed by race and ethnicity
in large U.S. Counties" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 27, 2021).

But, of course, the harm doesn’t necessarily stop with an investigation.  The new study has stunning data on the cumulative effect of all that investigation: More than 20% of Black children in Los Angeles will be forced into foster care at some point during their childhoods – the figure is nearly as high in Phoenix.  Phoenix also is where it’s proportionately most likely that a Native American child will be forced into foster care, and second most likely for Hispanic children. 

Though family police almost always mean well, that means all these children endure the same trauma endured by children taken from their parents at the Mexican border.  Again, from the New Yorker story: 

If the caseworker believes your kids are in imminent danger, she may take them. You may not be allowed to say goodbye. It is terrifying for them to be taken from their home by a stranger, but this experience has repercussions far beyond the terror of that night. Your children may hear accusations against you—you’re using drugs, your apartment is filthy, you fail to get them to school, you hit them—and even if they don’t believe these things they will remember. And, after your children see that you are powerless to protect them, this will permanently change things between you. Whatever happens later—whether the kids come back the next week, or in six months, or don’t come back at all—that moment can never be undone. 

Just ask someone who went through all this, such as, say, this 14-year-old what “just an investigation” really means: 

I’m scared when I hear a hard knock at the door. I think they are coming. I was scared to go to school because they will come to the school and remove me and put me in a foster home. All because if my Mom and Dad don’t do what they want, never mind they are not abusing us.

I will be so glad when I am 18 and my brother is 18. Then I know [no one] will ever be able to put us in a foster home again. 

That’s best case – it doesn’t even begin to account for the high rate of abuse in foster care itself. 

When it comes to child welfare’s death penalty – terminating children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) Phoenix is again #1 – by a wide margin.  Nearly three percent of all children and nearly six percent of Black children in metropolitan Phoenix will have their parents taken from them forever. 

The family policing bias Olympics 

If one thinks of this study as scoring a family policing bias Olympics, different counties may “win” individual events.  But who does “best” all around?  Probably Middlesex County, Mass.   

In a state known for discrimination against Hispanic families in child welfare, Middlesex had the worst rate among the counties studies for inflicting child abuse investigations on such families.  It also had the worst rate for Native American families.  

Percentage of Middlesex County, Mass. Children likely to be subjected to family police investigation by race:* 

Asian                          19%

White                          28%

Native American       59%

Hispanic                     60%

Black                          68%

Middlesex also is the county in the study in which Hispanic children are proportionately most likely to have to endure foster care. 

Of course, this is the state where the head of the family policing agency and the state’s “child advocate” are doing everything possible to deny that racial bias is a problem. 

The other disparity – geographic disparity 

Communities are consistent about overinvestigating and overremoving Black children, but there is no consistency in how often they do it.  That, in itself, shows how arbitrary and subjective the whole process is. 

The rate at which caseworkers check a box on a form saying they think it’s slightly more likely than not that “abuse” or “neglect” occurred, (what the study wrongly describes as “confirmed maltreatment”) is ten times higher in metropolitan Detroit than in metropolitan Seattle.  A child is five times more likely to be placed in foster care -- and 17 times more likely to lose rights to her or his parents forever – in Phoenix than in New York City. 

Of course, it’s theoretically possible that Phoenix is such a cesspool of depravity compared to New York City that there really is 17 times the amount of child abuse severe enough to merit termination of parental rights.  But it’s more likely the result of the culture in a state family policing agency in which caseworkers thought it would be a great idea to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Professional kidnapper.” 

These data track with NCCPR’s comparisons of rates of child removal for states and, as noted above, for big cities, which find enormous differences, even when factoring in rates of child poverty. 

It’s probably worse in rural America 

Bad as these data are, odds are the omnipresence of the child welfare surveillance state is even worse in much of rural America.  That’s suggested by the fact that, even when adjusting for rates of child poverty, the states that tear apart the most families tend to be states that don’t have any big cities – states like Montana, Wyoming and Vermont.  Of the 20 states most prone to tear apart families, only two, Massachusetts and Arizona, have counties big enough to be included in the new study. 

Substituting surveillance for foster care is not “success”

In a weird press release announcing the study – but not, it should be emphasized, in the study itself - one of the researchers, Christopher Wildeman, suggests that New York City is somehow a success story because, even though the proportion of children investigated is a little above average (though not, it should be noted, above average for the places in this study), and even though New York City caseworkers “substantiate” allegations at a relatively high rate, they take away proportionately fewer children and terminate parental rights at one of the lowest rates among the counties studies. 

Somehow Wildeman leaps from this to the conclusion that family policing is “working” because ultimately the families aren’t destroyed forever.  UPDATE: Asked for comment about this view, the lead researcher for the study, Frank Edwards, told NCCPR: "I think that the massive surveillance and separation of Black, Brown and Native kids is at crisis levels and needs to be dramatically reduced rapidly.” 

In fact, the New York data tell a very different story from Wildeman's spin.  They show only that, thanks largely to pressure from grassroots family advocates and a network of high-quality family defense providers, the city family policing agency has been stopped from doing the very worst things it can do to families. 

But, as the Movement for Family Power documents in this report, the decline in foster care numbers has been replaced by an almost precisely equal increase in oppressive, needless surveillance of families.  (One outcome the study does not measure is the proportion of families forced into such surveillance in each county). 

So no, success is not substituting needless family surveillance for needless foster care; success is substituting community-based community-designed concrete help for families for both forms of family oppression. 

*-These are estimates based on the graphics in the study. The authors did not supply accompanying tables so each may be off by a percentage point or two.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 20, 2021

 We start with four stories from Los Angeles: 

● You may think you know all about how the family policing system tears children from mothers whose only crime is to be survivors of domestic violence.  But public radio’s Latino USA has a story in which such a case turned into the ultimate tragedy.  

● Suppose a white couple from Beverly Hills decided to opt for home birth. The baby came sooner than expected, there were possible complications, so the family called paramedics.  The paramedics said the newborn was fine, but took mother and infant to the hospital anyway.  When the hospital wanted to draw blood from the baby, the parents said they’d rather that be done by their private physician.  The family went home.  For this hypothetical white family from Beverly Hills, what do you think would happen next? Bet you didn’t guess this.  

● Los Angeles is taking the first step toward possibly curbing racial bias in child welfare. As The Imprint reports, the county plans to try “Blind Removal Meetings.” 

● And following up on reporting from NPR and The Marshall Project, the county also took a first step toward letting foster children keep their own money.  Yeah, you wouldn’t think it would take a resolution of the Board of Supervisors to do that – unless, of course, you’ve either followed the NPR/Marshall Project stories or just have a sense of how callous and greedy the child welfare system can be. 

The discovery of mass graves of Native Canadian children who died after being taken from their homes and tribes and forced into white-run “boarding schools” has led to renewed scrutiny of the same practices in the United States.  

● Indian Country Today has an overview of what happened in each country as a result of what one historian calls “education for extinction.”  Here’s one difference: 

[W]hile Canadian officials have apologized for their operation of the schools and are in the process of paying compensation to those who were forced from their homes into the boarding school system, the U.S. has offered no such apologies or payments. In fact, U.S. officials have barely acknowledged the policy existed. 

Although many schools were run directly by the government, the article explains, some were run by private religious groups.  At one point, Catholic and Protestant groups actually were fighting over which would get to strip Native Americans of their culture. 

● The New York Times talked to survivors, including Noman Lopez: 

His grandfather taught him how to carve a flute out of the branch of a cedar. When the boy brought the flute to school, his teacher smashed it and threw it in the trash. 

He grasped even then how special the cedar flute and his native music were. “That’s what God is. God speaks through air,” he said, of the music his grandfather taught him. 

● And NBC News reports on the difficulties ahead in piecing together the full scope of crimes committed – and covered up – for generations. As the story explains: 

The endeavor acknowledges a truth Indigenous peoples across North America have known for generations: that the governments of Canada and the U.S. didn’t just take the culture of the Indigenous children that both countries attempted to assimilate through boarding schools. In countless cases, they also took these children’s lives, each one representing a stolen generation. 

● But it would be a huge mistake to view these solely as crimes of the past.  You don’t need a boarding school to destroy a family or a culture.  South Dakota’s fanaticism about tearing apart Native American families right now was documented nearly a decade ago by NPR. And look what just happened there last week. 

In other news: 

● On The Imprint podcast, Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan explains “hidden foster care,” in which families are coerced into surrendering custody of their children but the placements are labeled “voluntary” and not reported in official data.  He says there may well be as many children torn from their homes and placed in this system as the officially reported figure.  That would mean that family policing agencies tear children from their families half a million times every year. 

● In Arizona, dozens of organizations, including NCCPR, have joined in support of a mother who is appealing the state’s decision to put her on a blacklist of alleged child abusers – solely because she made legal use of medical marijuana to control severe nausea and vomiting.  Phoenix New Times tells her story. 

● In Massachusetts families for whom English is not their first language may be interrogated by the state family policing agency in a language they don’t understand and, as their children are taken from them, handed documents they can’t read.  CommonWealth Magazine reports on a lawsuit filed in an effort to end these practices.  

● The Imprint reports that New York State is finalizing plans to help counties and New York City take advantage of federal reimbursement for half the cost of lawyers for parents and children in many child welfare cases.  According to the story: 

Beyond simply giving court-appointed lawyers raises, or hiring new ones, each jurisdiction will have to first submit “enhanced quality plans.” That could include hiring parent mentors and social workers for legal teams … or providing parents and kids with access to counsel at the earliest stages of a child welfare investigation, before a petition has been filed in family court.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 13, 2021

● We may never know exactly how it happened or how they did it, but I’ve noted before that the most progressive leadership team at the U.S. Children’s Bureau, possibly in its entire history, was the one in place during the previous Administration.  We were among those who hoped the Biden Administration would keep Jerry Milner and David Kelly in place.  But, as The Imprint reports, Milner and Kelly are doing the next best thing. 

● My guess is one state where leaders won’t be interested in Milner and Kelly’s work is Massachusetts.  Both their family policing agency and their so-called “Child Advocate” seem determined to drag a state that already tears apart families at a rate 60% above the national average full-speed backwards.  This can be seen in their desperate attempts to use a commission named by the state legislature as a way to expand the state’s mandatory child abuse reporting law -- despite a tsunami of opposition at public hearings.  This week NCCPR released its own in-depth analysis of the commission’s work. 

● When you take away too many children, as Washington State has done for decades, you wind up with an artificial “shortage” of foster homes.  That sets off a cascade of failure that ultimately leads to children sleeping in offices and even cars, moving from place to place night to night.  And, as KING-TV reports, that ultimately leads to this: 

[One foster youth] said her depression and anxiety is what led her to attempt suicide. But there were times, she admitted, she injured herself so she could go to the hospital instead of sleeping in the DCYF office, where she said she felt unwanted, unloved and alone. 

“Sometimes I’d cut so I’d have at least three or four days of stable placement, where I can live and not have to worry about eating or drinking or where I'm going to sleep,” she said. “The life I was living got to be too much for me, and it kind of made me explode." 

This story is a follow-up to one in which KING revealed that the state Department of Children, Youth and Families used tactics on these youth that international human rights organizations call torture, such as forcing children to sleep in cars and then repeatedly waking them up.  Now, KING reports: 

DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter repeatedly denied those claims following KING 5’s investigation, which “infuriated” [former after hours caseworker Deanna] Ginter and prompted her to go public with her own experience working in the field.

 “It’s so frustrating to hear those things being denied, as somebody who is on the ground and has seen those things happening,” said Ginter, who added that supervisors instructed her, on multiple occasions, to stay with foster youth in cars overnight and make them uncomfortable as a form of punishment. “I didn’t feel like I could speak up. I didn’t feel like I could say anything.” 

So, who should we believe?  Well, let’s consider Ross Hunter’s track record.

● And finally, a column that, on the surface, has nothing to do with child welfare, but inadvertently has a lot to do with the journalism of child welfare.  New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples writes about the racist history of American journalism, and the fact that many newspapers are reexamining that history – and profusely apologizing for it.  But the apologies ring hollow when so many news organizations (including the Times) keep buying into the racist myth about child abuse and COVID-19.

Child welfare in Massachusetts: NCCPR releases in-depth analysis of Mass. Mandated Reporter Commission report

Job One now falls to the Massachusetts Legislature.

Regular readers of this Blog know that we’ve been following closely the work of a commission named by the Massachusetts Legislature to study the state’s mandatory child abuse reporting law.  The Commission released its final report on June 30. 

Today we release our in-depth analysis of that report.  Our analysis, called Failing Job One, is available here. The analysis summarizes our overview of the failure of mandatory reporting and our overview of how the Commission was manipulated, something discussed in detail in our previous posts.  We then go on to examine the report page-by-page. 

Though the analysis is specific to the deliberations of a Massachusetts commission, much of it is relevant in every state, since every state has a mandated reporter law with failings similar to, or, in some cases, even worse than the one in Massachusetts. 

The title of the report is derived from something said by a member of the Commission itself, Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan.  Like many Commission members, Ryan was stunned when, after more than a year, the Commission held public hearings and almost every witness opposed the Commission’s draft recommendations.   

That came as a surprise because the Commission chair, the state’s “Child Advocate,” Maria Mossaides, and her allies at the state Department of Children and Families had, in effect, kept the commission in a bubble, staging carefully orchestrated presentations that told the Commission only what Mossaides and DCF wanted them to hear. 

So at the first Commission meeting after hearing from the public Ryan said: 

I spent a lot of years thinking that [mandated reporting] gets us to a better place; I’m disheartened to hear maybe it really doesn’t – and even if it does, perception is reality.  A lot of well-credentialed, well-meaning experts think this doesn’t work. … I was taken aback to hear so much of that conversation. [Finding out if they’re right] should be Job One. 

The Commission wasn’t able to do Job One. Mossaides, and her allies in DCF prevented it.  

Therefore, as we note in the conclusion of our analysis, doing Job One now is the responsibility of the Massachusetts Legislature: 

Unfortunately, most legislators right now are where the dissenting commissioners were before the public hearing – finding it incomprehensible that expanding mandatory reporting is even controversial, much less that it should be curbed or abolished.  In addition to skewing the final report, Mossaides has bragged about her regular meetings with key lawmakers – so she’s had months and months to spin all this without the rest of us even knowing what she’s been saying. 

Maria Mossaides and her allies prevented the Commission from doing “Job One” – taking an in-depth, open-minded look into whether all those scholars, advocates and people with lived experience, and all those researchers who have questioned mandatory reporting for decades, are right.  The Legislature needs to do that job. 

Oops, they’re doing it again 

There’s one more reason why a close examination of the behavior and tactics of Mossaides and DCF is useful: They’re at it again.  Mossaides and DCF Commissioner Linda Spears co-chair a “Data Work Group” studying the gathering and presentation of data about Massachusetts child welfare. 

They have been laboring to whitewash – in every sense of the term – the facts about racial bias in Massachusetts child welfare.  To the extent that there is any bias at all, they argue, it’s almost all because of what happens at the “front door” – that is, because of the people who file reports alleging child abuse – you know, people like mandated reporters.  

Yes, that’s right. After spending nearly two years trying to open the “front door” as wide as possible, Mossaides and DCF now are claiming that any racial bias is due to what happens at the front door – and, they say, they have no control over that! 

READ OUR FULL ANALYSIS HERE.