News and commentary from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
concerning child abuse, child welfare, foster care, and family preservation.
● We begin with, I kid you not, the table of contents from a
law journal – specifically the issue of the Columbia Journal of Race and Law
featuring papers presented at the Strengthened Bonds conference. The
full issue is here. Here’s what you’ll find in it:
PREFATORY MATERIAL
Editor’s Note—Growth in Unprecedented Times, Nicolás Quaid
Galván
Foreword—Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare
System and Re-Envisioning Child Well Being, Nancy D. Polikoff & Jane M.
Spinak
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: How I Became a Family Policing Abolitionist,
Dorothy Roberts
ARTICLES
Political-Economic Roots of Coercion—Slavery, Neoliberalism,
and the Racial Family Policy Logic of Child and Social Welfare, Gwendoline
M. Alphonso
The Surveillance Tentacles of the Child Welfare
SystemCharlotte Baughman, Tehra Coles, Jennifer Feinberg & Hope Newton
Abolition, Settler Colonialism, and the Persistent Threat of
Indian Child Welfare, Theresa Rocha Beardall & Frank Edwards
Reimagining Schools’ Role Outside the Family Regulation
System, Brianna Harvey, Josh Gupta-Kagan & Christopher Church
Twentieth Century Black and Native Activism Against the
Child Taking System: Lessons for the Present, Laura Briggs
Toward Community Control of Child Welfare Funding: Repeal
the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and Delink Child Protection from
Family Well-Being, Angela Olivia Burton & Angeline Montauban
Using Peacemaking Circles to Indigenize Tribal Child Welfare,
Lauren van Schilfgaarde & Brett Lee Shelton
How Racial Politics Led Directly to the Enactment of the
Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997—The Worst Law Affecting Families Ever
Enacted by Congress. Martin Guggenheim
Mutual Deference Between Hospitals and Courts: How Mandated
Reporting from Medical Providers Harms Families, Clara Presler
The White Supremacy Hydra: How the Family First Prevention
Service Act Reifies Pathology, Control, and Punishment in the Family Regulation
System, Miriam Mack
Assimilation, Removal, Discipline, and Confinement: Native
Girls and Government Intervention, Addie C. Rolnick.
Ending the Family Death Penalty and Building a World We
Deserve Ashley Albert, Tiheba Bain, Elizabeth Brico, Bishop Marcia Dinkins,
Kelis Houston, Joyce McMillan, VonyaQuarles, Lisa Sangoi, Erin Miles Cloud, and
Adina Marx-Arpadi
Calculating the Souls of Black Folk, Predictive Analytics in
the New York City Administration for Children's Services. J. Khadijah
Abdurahman
In other news:
● This really should be obvious: If you don’t know your
rights then you don’t really have those rights. New York City’s family policing agency, the Administration
for Children’s Services, desperately
wants to keep it that way. Because then
ACS can keep right on barging into homes in the middle of the night, ordering
that the children be awakened, questioned about the most intimate details of
their lives and stripsearched – or maybe worse – without families having any
idea that they can fight back. THE
CITY reports on a fight in the New York City Council over whether ACS
will continue to be able to run roughshod over families.
● Last month, two online news sites published more than
10,000 words about foster care in West Virginia.Not one of those words came from a birth
parent.I
have a blog post about why that’s a problem, and why so much of the
journalism of child welfare has failed.
● OK, I never expected to write this sentence: Paris Hilton
has an
op-ed in The Washington Post. It’s about the abuse of
children who are institutionalized.In
her case, she was forced into an abusive institution by her own parents.But, as she points out:
An estimated 120,000 young people are housed in
congregate-care facilities at any given time across the country, many of them
placed through the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
Hilton also took part in a webinar with
other survivors, led by Think of Us and Breaking Code Silence. And because she took part, Sixto Cancel of
Think of Us said, people are paying a lot more attention than when the other
survivors were speaking out on their own.
Two online news
sites published more than 10,000 words about foster care in West Virginia.
Not one of those words came from a birth parent.
Imagine for a moment that you are a reporter assigned to write a multi-part
in-depth series on the criminal justice system. Now, try to imagine
submitting a three-part series of more than 10,000 words filled with the
comments of judges, prosecutors, police officers and prison guards – but not
one word from someone accused of a crime, or even from a defense lawyer.
Hard to imagine, especially now, isn’t it? Yet the equivalent happens,
over and over and over, when the topic is foster care. Because, consciously
or not, while reporters may not believe all parents caught up in the system are
evil – indeed they will rush to say: “No, no, we wrote an entire story about
‘prevention!’” they write as if they believe any parent whose child "had
to be" taken away must be sick, sick sick! Therefore, they are too
subhuman to have their perspective shared with readers.
No wonder. Most reporters and, especially, their editors, are white and
middle class. Most foster parents are disproportionately white and
overwhelmingly middle class. Most caseworkers are disproportionately
white and overwhelmingly middle-class. Parents who lose their children to
foster care, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately
nonwhite.
So birth parents become, at best, nonentities, at worst those awful people
their foster or adoptive parent friends told them about.So they’re unworthy of inclusion, unworthy of
being heard. That winds up doing enormous damage to children.
When
I was starting out as a reporter, 45 years ago, I made all of the mistakes I
criticize now. But after all this time, journalism should have learned to
do better. Some journalists have; most have not.
The result is stories that, despite months of hard work by earnest, well-meaning
reporters are filled with stereotypes and misconceptions that only make it
harder to fix serious and real problems.
Case in point: The three-part series about West
Virginia foster care published in September by Mountain State Spotlight and The
GroundTruth Project, which also created Report for America. The reporters
for these stories are current and former Report for America Fellows. I single
these stories out not because they are exceptionally awful - there’s far worse
out there - but precisely because they are so typical of the journalism of
child welfare. (For that same reason, though anyone can click on the link, I’m
not naming the reporters; it’s their editors who should have asked more
questions.)
Another reason to look closely at
these stories: The flaws should be even more obvious when the state in question
is West Virginia.
In 2019, before
COVID, even when factoring in rates of child poverty, West Virginia tore apart
families at the third
highest rate in America, a rate well over double the national average.
When you look at the number of children trapped in foster care on any given
day, West Virginia is the fourth worst in America; again, that's even when
factoring in rates of child poverty.
Yeah, I know:
Opioids. The stories blithely attribute West Virginia’s high rate of
removal to the fact that “More than half entered the system because of a
parent’s substance abuse.” That’s not correct. More than half entered the
system because a worker checked the “substance abuse” box on a form; that is
not necessarily the same thing. Also:
● While opioids
made it worse, West Virginia was a family destruction outlier even before
the opioid crisis.
● It also
assumes that the only solution when, say, a parent’s legal prescription for
Oxycontin leads to addiction is to take away the children - as opposed to, say,
drug treatment, something discussed in detail here.
●Other states
with severe opioid problems, such as Ohio, take away children at a rate that,
while still too high, is far lower than the rate in West Virginia.
The reporters either
never spoke to – or ignored – all those families whose children were taken
where opioids were not an issue - including all those victims of false
allegations or cases in which family poverty is confused with
neglect. (Unless, of course, one believes that happens only in
the other 49 states.)
Thus, one story discusses how West Virginia institutionalizes far too many
children and sends many of them out of state. The story reveals case
after case in which these institutionalized children were abused. But
that is a story one West Virginia news organization or another has done every
few years for decades. And they all make the same mistake as the most
recent stories: The problem is said to be due to a “shortage of foster
parents.” So there’s supposedly a desperate need for more people like
someone I’ll call Saintly Foster Mom, a standard trope in these stories, who
I’ll talk more about later.
But because this point of view is entirely absent, this expose of horrible
out-of-state placements of Vest Virginia foster children is likely to have the
same substantive effect as all the other exposes of horrible out-of-state
placements of West Virginia foster children: None.
Of there’ll be the usual expressions
of shock and outrage, maybe legislative hearings, and perhaps some more money
thrown at the state family policing agency, the Department of Health and Human
Resources (DHHR) to hire more caseworkers to take even more children.All of that will give the news organizations
something to write on journalism awards entry forms where they ask “What did
the stories accomplish?”
But it won’t
accomplish anything for the kids.Because
by refusing to meaningfully consider wrongful removal, the series effectively
lets DHHR off the hook.The agency can
keep right on coming back with the same old excuse: We have to do this,
there’s a shortage of foster parents, you know.
That’s what happens when you limit your source base
almost entirely to people who are part of the very system that has failed: The
sources consist largely of people who now or in the past kept the West Virginia
child removal machine running at full speed: current and former
caseworkers for an assortment of “providers” or current or former high ranking
officials of those “providers,” with the occasional politician expressing
outrage thrown in. So of course the answer to everything is going to be some
version of give us providers more money so we can rescue children – and, maybe
while we’re at it, make those sick, sick, sick parents better.
The propaganda even affects the children themselves. To their credit, the
reporters at least spoke to some foster youth. Included was one, now 15,
who
entered the
state foster care system at 6 years old; by the time he was 8, his social
worker was transporting him to group homes outside West Virginia. “I was too
messed up for foster programs.” [he said.]
No
eight-year-old is too “messed up” for a family, either his own or, when that’s
genuinely unsafe, a foster family. The key is providing the family
whatever it takes through wraparound services. Wraparound pioneer Karl
Dennis explains it well in this video:
The 15-year-old
has internalized propaganda from the industry that institutionalizes children –
and the journalists failed to do enough to question it. The closest they
came was a quote from Marcia Lowry of A Better Childhood, who filed one of her typical McLawsuits against the
state. She at least disagreed with those who said the solution to sending
children to out-of-state institutions is to build more in-state
institutions. But Lowry's lawsuits suffer from the same failing as the
stories: they ignore the huge number of children needlessly taken from their
homes in the first place.
Indeed, the
journalists are so accepting of conventional wisdom that at one point they
write:
The path to
reducing the number of foster kids leaving the state isn’t clear, especially as
West Virginia continues to experience waves of children affected by poverty,
the COVID-19 pandemic and the drug crisis.
What does
children affected by poverty have to do with the need for foster care? ( unless,
of course, you think it’s a good idea to confuse poverty with “neglect”?) What does COVID have to do with it? (Unless
you buy into the widely-debunked (and, by the way, racially-biased) claims that
COVID lockdowns set off a “pandemic of child abuse”. Even in the
case of children orphaned by COVID, there usually are extended family members
who can step in.) As for the drug crisis, that was discussed above.
What do you
mean ignored it? the journalists might reply. We devoted one entire story to
“prevention” and how West Virginia starts prevention programs and then cuts
funding for them!
Except that
this is the traditional provider-centric model of prevention.The story describes an assortment of programs
built largely around what providers want to provide: counseling and parent
education – because, remember, those parents may not be evil but they sure are
sick!And we providers want to be noble
healers; we didn’t get college degrees just to do the grubby work of providing
concrete help to families!
Overwhelmingly,
the problem that leads to family separation is poverty – and the solution is
money. It doesn’t have to be a lot of money. One study after another has found that
even small amounts of cash significantly reduce what child welfare systems
label as “neglect.” And when "counseling" for some mental
health problem or other really is needed, providing cash allows the parent to
go out and buy some, just the way middle-class people with "mental health
issues" do. Yet this perspective is, again, entirely lacking in the
stories.
Even as these
stories point out that West Virginia spends $300 to $1,500 per day per child on
those out-of-state institutions, and $31 a day for foster families, at no point
is the idea of simply providing some of this cash to birth families even
mentioned. The state that often will spend $600 per day to
institutionalize a child out-of-state apparently won’t spend $600 per month
for a rent subsidy so a child isn’t taken away because of lack of housing or for
a childcare subsidy so a child isn’t taken on a “lack of supervision” charge.
But the reporters never take note of this.
A birth parent
might have mentioned it. So might a birth parent’s lawyer – but, again,
their voices are absent amidst those 10,000 words.
Enter “Saintly
Foster Mom”
No typical in-depth look at foster care would be complete without Saintly
Foster Mom – the character who has sacrificed so much to rescue helpless
children from those evil – sorry, sick – parents, and who could do so
much more if only “the system” didn’t treat her so badly.You’ll find her in story after story – here’s
another classic example. And because they are not powerful people (though they have more power than birth parents) and
have the best of intentions, I’m not naming the one in the West Virginia story
– even though in that one, the subtext is unusually close to the surface.Here’s how it begins:
For [the foster
mother], becoming a foster parent felt like a calling as early as high school.
She remembers
the little girl in her mom’s pre-K classroom, crying and wearing tattered
clothes. One time the child came in with a broken eardrum. Every time [the
future foster mom] visited she seemed to possess an ability to calm her.
She dreamed of
becoming a foster mother.
“I have always
felt like I was supposed to help kids in the system,” she said.
That doesn't
sound like someone who gets the confusion of poverty with neglect.
And later
there’s this:
On the wall of
their younger foster daughter’s bedroom, the [foster parents] have a print of a
tree with multi-colored thumbprints of all eight kids they have fostered since
2018 on the branches. The other side lists their names, the day they arrived
and the day they left.
“When I walk in
here, I see all my kids,” [the foster mother] said.
Your kids?
A birth parent whose children were wrongly taken might have pointed out that
there is something wrong with a total stranger saying that someone else’s
children are hers. But we never hear from such a parent. So no one
suggests that a foster parent who declares someone else’s child to be hers
might not be objective about whether that child ever needed to be taken and
whether that child should be reunified.
At
another point, the reporters note that one of the foster children refers to the
foster parents as “mom” and “dad.” The reporters seem to see this as one more
indication of how wonderful the foster parent is.
And then there’s this from another foster parent, speaking of the two foster
children she went on to adopt:
Two of her
foster children “have a whole new life because DHHR did their job the right
way,” she said. But sometimes “DHHR has bad days, DHHR makes bad choices.”
The rest of the story is a litany of complaints by foster parents concerning
ill-treatment by DHHR and an assortment of private agencies. They’re the
same complaints aired in hundreds of other stories – and, odds are, many of
them are valid.
But, as I’ve noted often before, it almost never seems to occur to the foster
parents that if this is how the family policing agency treats them – and the
agency really needs them – imagine how they treat birth parents. It
didn’t seem to occur to the reporters, either. Like Saintly Foster Mom,
the reporters seem to view the birth parents as maybe salvageable but, if not,
then they’re disposable. But that attitude creates the very system that
has done all the harm the reporters have exposed.
Like so many other stories, these seem to have been written by earnest
journalists with good intentions. The solution to the problems of
journalism is more journalism. On its website, The
GroundTruth Project declares that “We take responsibility for all of our work.
When we make a mistake, we own it.”
Please take ownership of this one.Please go back and try again.
● Florida’s family policing agency, the Department of
Children and Families, has, in effect, confirmed the findings of a USA Today
Network investigation that found DCF ignored widespread abuse in foster
care. According to USA
Today’s follow-up story:
After a USA TODAY investigation in March brought to light
more than 4,000 records detailing such complaints that had been kept secret
from the public, DCF conducted an internal review of more than 1,100 of the
calls.The review’s findings? Only 19%
of the accusations were inaccurate. Twice that number were deemed accurate. An
additional 21% were partially accurate.And
few accused caregivers faced repercussions: Just 1% had their foster license
revoked. …
“If those were family-of-origin cases, would those
children have been taken from their families? The answer is a resounding yes,” [State
Senate Minority Leader Lauren] Book said. “We have a system that is taking
children because they think they can do better (than parents), and we’re
clearly seeing in black and white that they’re woefully ill-prepared to do so.”
And once again, USA Today reporters trace the origins
of the problem to the foster-care panic in Florida starting in 2014.(As to why that panic occurred, we
have an explanation here.)
● Back in May, KING-TV in Seattle reported on what some workers
for the state family policing agency allegedly were doing to youth who refused
the cruddy group home placements in which the agency tried to stash them:
Four people, who claimed they supervised foster kids
overnight in cars and offices, said their managers encouraged them to use
psychological tactics to make the youth miserable. They say they were told to
do things like blast air conditioning or turn off the heat to make the youth
intentionally cold. … Three workers said they were instructed not to allow
youth to fall asleep throughout the night. [Emphasis added.]
Though the story doesn’t mention it, sleep deprivation is
commonly defined as torture – the CIA used it on prisoners at Guantanamo.
Now KING-TV
has a follow-up, focusing on disturbing behavior by the head of the family
policing agency, Ross Hunter.
The station reports that
Hunter knew of the accusations at least four months
before the complaint became public in the KING 5 story. Hunter said he
forwarded the complaint to other managers in January, but he didn’t open a
formal investigation.
And there’s much more in the story about Hunter’s overall
approach to running the agency (something we first raised questions about more
than a year ago).
social workers at times coerced parents into signing [placement
agreements that bypassed the courts], saying their children would be placed in
foster homes far away if the documents were not signed.
The practice apparently began when the agency got fed up
with the fact that sometimes judges actually refused to rubber-stamp their
demands to take away children.
After reading Kim Strong’s excellent story about child
abuse deaths and implementation of the federal Family First Act in
Pennsylvania, some readers may be wondering: Why in the world is that guy you
quoted at the end (that would be me) saying we should do more to keep families
together?Why would he say we should
improve defense counsel for families when more children are dying?
Short answer: Because it’s the best way to stop more
children from dying.
● In child welfare, we can’t speak truth to power until we
speak truth to CASA.The most sacred cow
in American child welfare harms the children it is intended to help.NCCPR presented The Case Against CASA at the
Kempe Center’s international conference last week. Here’s
the text.
“It astounds me that we live in the richest country in
human history that takes people’s kids away because, in part, parents can’t
afford stable housing,” said Webb, executive director of Mother’s Outreach
Network and representative of indigent parents seeking reunification with their
children. …
“It’s important that we dig deep into the reasons for
these removals that are called ‘neglect only,’” Webb said. “I would imagine
most people would take some pause if they understood neglect is related to
poverty and poverty is driving these removals.”
● The Imprint has an
interview with MJ Jihad who founded MJ Consulting “to be doing
whatever it takes to have these children remain within their birth family.”Her work is partly an outgrowth of her own
experience, when she and her siblings were taken from their father when his
poverty was confused with neglect.
● From NPR’s
review of Andrea Elliott’s book, Invisible
Child: “Elliott is a masterful storyteller and, by sharing Dasani's
story, she calls on all of us to dismantle the systems that so often failed her
and countless others.”
● After NCCPR wrote a column for The Imprint about a
widely-circulated, and grossly misleading, graphic, Chapin Hall put a great big
warning label on their version.But why
use it at all?We
have an update.
About a month ago, I wrote a column for The Imprint calling out several organizations for using
a grossly misleading graphic that exaggerates the rate of physical and sexual
child abuse. In fact, two-thirds of the
numbers in the graphic are, literally, made up.
The creators of the graphic, from the University of New Hampshire,
decided to give the actual rate of known neglect, but double the rate of physical
abuse and triple the rate of sexual abuse.
As I explained in The
Imprint:
The end result is
a graphic that leaves the impression that there once was just as much physical
and sexual abuse as there was neglect — and all three existed in massive proportions
— until the child welfare system got the abuse figures to plummet.
The creators of the
graphic include a disclaimer – but only in the fine print, where many who see
the original shocking visual are unlikely to notice. The Chapin Hall Center for Children
reproduced the graphic in a presentation earlier this year. Then Chapin Hall’s Executive Director, Bryan
Samuels, compounded the error by extrapolating from the numbers in ways not
backed up by the figures themselves.
See for
yourself.Here is the graphic with the
made-up numbers, as presented initially by Chapin Hall:
Here are the real
numbers (Bonus, this version is interactive!):
Last week at a virtual conference
sponsored by the Kempe Center, Chapin Hall was back.To their credit they slapped a great big
warning label on the graphic:
But why use made-up
numbers at all? Why are so many in the
child welfare establishment afraid not to exaggerate?
And we shouldn’t
forget the worst offender: Prevent Child Abuse America. When they used the graphic at least year’s
Kempe conference, they reproduced the original but actually eliminated almost
all of the fine print – so it would be extremely difficult for anyone to see
that the physical and sexual abuse numbers are not real.(If you read our earlier post on this blog about “health terrorism,” that probably comes as no surprise.)
Meanwhile, another
panel at this year’s Kempe conference used the same most-misleading-of-all
version as PCAA.
It is the Graphic
That Will Not Die.Perhaps that’s
because, for the child welfare establishment, made-up numbers have always told
a better story than real ones.
This is the text of the second of two NCCPR presentations at the 2021 Kempe Center International Virtual Conference: A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare
I’m going to
spend a lot of time criticizing things people said and did in the past.Call that whatever else you’d like, but
please don’t call it hindsight.All of
what I am criticizing now was criticized then by a wealth of experts. But they
were drowned out.They need to be heard
now.
So, where were we?
I begin that way
because this talk was inspired by a presentation at last year’s
conference. At that conference, I first
learned that a phenomenon I’d been writing about, and deploring, for decades
actually had a name – and the name came from someone who had admitted his
organization used to practice this particular dark art.
It’s called
health terrorism – deliberately misrepresenting the true nature and scope of a
problem in the name of “raising awareness.”
Millions of children in the United States have been victims of health terrorism – and it’s happening even as we speak. Over the past year-and-a-half we’ve seen both a classic example of health terrorism and vivid proof of how effective it’s been at poisoning the public discourse about child abuse and neglect.
This is the text of the first of two NCCPR presentations at the 2021 Kempe Center International Virtual Conference: A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare
Most Court-Appointed Special Advocates programs call
themselves CASA programs – as you’d expect.
Two programs cited in this presentation either in the past or now use a
different term: Volunteer Guardian-at-Litem or VGAL. They mean the same thing, and to avoid
confusion I will refer to these programs as CASA programs throughout. Where a quote uses the term VGAL I will
substitute the term CASA.
Whatever you call it, the program I am going to discuss today is probably
the most sacred cow in American child welfare; the subject of thousands of
local news stories across America, gushing over how wonderful this program
is.I’m going to talk about why those
stories are wrong, and how this most sacred cow in child welfare, Court-Appointed
Special Advocates or CASA - harms to children.
That’s not because they want to hurt children, of course. It was all created with the best of intentions. CASAs still, overwhelmingly, are, to use
Malcolm X’s famous phrase “kindly intentioned.”
But it has failed.
To understand what CASA is and how it really works, I’d like you to imagine
the following scene.
IF YOU'RE SEEING THIS ON THE NCCPR BLOG HOMEPAGE, PLEASE CLICK BELOW ON "READ MORE" TO SEE THE ENTIRE POST.
● We begin with publication of a landmark book about
homelessness poverty and, therefore, inevitably, the family policing system: Invisible Child by New York Times
reporter Andrea Elliott. The book is, in
some ways, a de facto sequel to what I consider the best book ever
written on the topic, Nina Bernstein’s masterpiece, The
Lost Children of Wilder.Elliott adapted one part of
her book into a New York Times Magazine cover story. I
have a blog post about the book and the cover story.
In other news:
● Stop and think for a moment about this comment, from one
of only two Black directors of a county family policing agency in Ohio (there
are 88 such agencies). She’s speaking of her own caseworkers:
“We’ve had people come in and say, ‘They were cooking
something on the stove. And I don’t know if it was drugs or what,’ and it was
collard greens.”
But that isn’t even the most revealing comment.Wait until you read what the white
transracial adoptive parent has to say.
● This year the American Bar Association annual conference
of family defense attorneys was, of course, an online event. The ABA has put
some of the presentations online – including the keynote from Prof. MartinGuggenheim, who founded the nation’s first family defense clinic at New York
University School of Law (and who also is president of NCCPR).
● The online news site The City has been on top of a
story other New York City media have ignored: how the city schools and the city
family policing agency join forces to harass families with “educational
neglect” reports if they can’t get their children online for classes – and now,
if they are rightly concerned about sending children back into classrooms.Here’s
their latest story.
● Also in New York City, Rise has
issued an outstanding blueprint for replacing family policing.The report and a video about it are available
here.As the report explains:
Like policing and incarceration by the criminal legal
system, surveillance and family separation by the family policing system impact
predominantly Black and brown, low-income families living in communities marked
by societal neglect. Involvement with ACS often lasts for years and for
generations, and, for families in these communities, can be unavoidable.
Rise knows from our work with impacted parents, and from
our partner organizations, that parents have been reported and investigated for
suspected child maltreatment when they’ve rinsed their children’s clothes in a
tub without detergent, left younger children in the care of an older child, run
late for picking their child up from school, or sought medical care for an
infant with health challenges.
● As the so-called Family First Act, with its curbs on
institutionalizing children, takes effect, New York State courts have made
clear they’re going to demand that those who want to institutionalize a child
actually show the child really needs to be institutionalized.As
The Imprint reports, some of the agencies that institutionalize
children are very upset about this.
● And, still in New York: Marcia Lowry suffered
a huge defeat when a federal court refused to cerfity one of her McLawsuits
as a class action.The defeat is a
significant victory for children. This particular lawsuit was opposed not only
by lawyers for parents but also
by the lawyers who represent children in family policing cases.You don’t suppose they know something Marcia
doesn’t.
● The Imprintalso
has a story about a new Texas law which curbs the enormous power of
so-called child abuse pediatricians – doctors who find child abuse when it’s
there but also, sometimes, when it’s not.
● United Family Advocates, a group that brings together Left
and Right where we have common ground on family policing issues, has a new, updated website,
with UFA’s bipartisan position papers on issues like the so-called Child Abuse
Prevention and Treatment Act and the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.
[W]hen it comes to the State of Illinois agency that
bears the heavy responsibility of working with children and parents in family
crisis, that bit of common sense — work with the families as much as possible
in their own language — too often is not practiced, despite a federal court
order.
