Reporters in North Carolina exposed the practice of child welfare agencies blackmailing families into giving up all their rights and letting them take away children with no court review at all.
The only thing unusual about this is that, in North Carolina, it’s illegal. Elsewhere it’s standard operating procedure.
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| What Associated Press reporters found in one small county in North Carolina actually is common all over the United states |
I have often written about the lack of due process in
proceedings involving child protective services. CPS agencies can and often do take away
children entirely on their own authority. Parents then have to go to court days
later to try to get their children back.
At that point, while the CPS agency has had days to make its
case, an impoverished parent – and it’s almost always an impoverished parent –
if she has a lawyer at all probably met her overwhelmed public defender for the
first time five minutes before the hearing.
The standard of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt as in
a criminal proceeding, or even the middle standard, “clear and convincing.”
Instead, CPS need merely persuade the judge that it is slightly more likely
than not that the child needs to remain in foster care – the same standard used
to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender.
The judge usually is easy to convince. That’s because the
judge knows that he can hold hundreds of children in foster care needlessly and
while this will do enormous harm to the children, the judge is safe. Return one
child to a home and have something go wrong and the judge’s career could be
over.
Resorting to blackmail
But in many cases across the country, even this doesn’t
stack the deck enough to suit CPS agencies.
So they’ve resorted to something else: blackmail, typically using a
parent’s own extended family as bait.
They don’t call it that, of course. Usually it goes by a
term such as “safety plan” or “parental child safety placement” or “custody and
visitation agreements.”
Here’s how it works: The child protective services worker
says to a parent: Sign this document allowing us to place the child with an
extended family member or we’ll take the child on the spot and place the child
with total strangers. (If that’s not enough, they might ratchet up the threat,
saying they will proceed immediately to termination of parental rights.)
CPS then argues, with a straight face, that the placement
was voluntary – the family chose to give up any rights they may have to a
lawyer and court review. In fact, these
placements are about as voluntary as a mugger sticking a gun in your face,
saying “give me your money” and then telling the judge “I didn’t mug the guy,
he gave me the money.”
What the AP reporters found
All of this brings me to what two enterprising Associated
Press reporters, Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr found
in Cherokee County, N.C. But let
them tell you:
When Brian Hogan got a call that his wife had suffered a massive heart attack, he knew he had to get to the hospital fast. So Hogan asked his neighbor to take care of his 10-year-old daughter, then headed 60 miles east to the intensive care unit in Asheville, North Carolina.
What happened next would eventually expose a practice by a child welfare agency that illegally removed potentially hundreds of children from their homes in this poverty-stricken mountain community …
Hogan said the Cherokee County Department of Social Services threatened to throw him in jail, place his child in foster care or give his daughter to another family for adoption if he didn’t sign a “custody and visitation agreement,” known as a CVA.
“They gave me no choice,” said Hogan, 38, who told AP that child-welfare workers wanted to remove his daughter because they believed he placed the girl in an “unclean” home while he was caring for his hospitalized wife.
AP found that the county “did the same thing with dozens,
possibly hundreds, of other parents…”
The extent of the blackmail
But that’s just the tip of a very large iceberg.
In North Carolina, individual counties run child welfare with
supervision by the state. To its great credit, the state Department of Health
and Human Services says what Cherokee County did was illegal and ordered
counties not to do it. A judge also
ruled the practice illegal. And, in a follow-up story, AP reports that the state is going to take over the entire Cherokee County child welfare system.
But it’s a different story in much of the rest of the
country. One reason we don’t know how
many blackmail placements exist is because states often don’t report them to
the federal government as entries into foster care – even though federal
regulations make clear they should be counted.
But by one estimate, on any given day, there probably are 300,000
children trapped in a foster-care Twilight Zone because of blackmail placements across the country – that’s over
and above the more than 400,000 children states admit to holding in foster care.
In Texas nearly
two-thirds of entries into foster care probably are blackmail placements.
In Illinois, blackmail placements have been the subject of
repeated lawsuits that lead
to settlements. Then the child welfare agency violates
the settlements.
So to really understand the harm done to children by
blackmail placements, take the pain inflicted on Brian Hogan’s daughter and
multiply it – hundreds of thousands of times.
