Their anguish over the death of another child “known to the system” is genuine. I think they’ll also be open to some new ideas.
A little over a week
ago, two columnists for the Tampa Bay Times, Sue Carlton and John Romano, wrote
about still another death of a child “known to the system” in Florida. Often, when that happens, I reach out to the
journalists in a letter. This time, I’m
sharing that letter with everyone.
Dear Ms. Carlton and Mr. Romano:
I am
writing to you because you’ve both written
columns
about the tragic death of Jordan Belliveau, another child “known to the system”
in Florida – apparently on the same day.
More particularly, I am writing because your columns were not the usual
quick-and-dirty “Boy do I hate child abuse!” rants – the kind of column that is
filled with scapegoating; the kind that’s really just a cheap and easy way to
meet a deadline. On the contrary, the
anguish in your columns is real and you both seem seriously interested in
answers.
Indeed, I first
got in touch with you, Ms. Carlton, after you wrote a brave, counterintuitive
column on some of these very issues. That was in 2010, a time when Florida
child welfare finally was starting to improve.
As you may recall, when I wrote to you then, I predicted a backlash against
reform. Sadly, that’s exactly what
happened. I did not predict that it
would be led by the Miami Herald –
and the editorial board at the Tampa Bay
Times. But that’s also exactly what
happened. So the need for bold,
counterintuitive thinking is even greater now.
I am using
the open letter approach because you’re certainly not alone in agonizing over
how to fix child welfare in Florida. And
I am hoping that your interest in answers includes a willingness to look past
the usual failed solutions – just as you did, Ms. Carlton, in 2010. Because
those “solutions,” and the false premises that underlie them, are a large part
of what has gotten Florida, and much of the country, into this mess in the
first place.
Among those
false premises is one that both of you mention in your columns. That’s understandable, since it is probably
the most common misconception in all of child welfare: The idea that family
preservation and child safety are inherently at odds – competing interests that
somehow have to be “balanced.” The implication, of course, is that if you leave
a child in or return a child to a home where abuse or neglect has been alleged,
that’s inherently risky. Keep the child in foster care and it may ruin his
psyche, but at least he’s physically safe.
That is not
true.
What I will argue in this long
letter is that in the overwhelming majority of cases family preservation isn’t
just more humane than foster care, it’s safer
than foster care. And the real reason
for horrors such as the death of Jordan Belliveau has nothing to do with any
supposed “policy of reunifying families at all costs” at Gay Courter, a
volunteer “guardian ad litem (what most states call a Court-Appointed Special
Advocate (CASA)) claims in a Times
op-ed column.
On the contrary, it’s almost always
because of caseworkers so horribly overloaded with cases of children who don’t
need to be in the system that they lack the time to properly investigate any
case. As a result, they make terrible
mistakes in all directions. Even as they
take many children needlessly they leave others in, or return them to, dangerous
homes.
Those false
premises are laid out most clearly in Ms. Courter’s op-ed. Since I’ve followed Florida child welfare for
about 30 years now, and NCCPR has issued reports on child welfare dating back to 2000, I am
familiar with Ms. Courter’s work. I know that, like most people in child
welfare, she has only the best of intentions. I also know that at least one of
you has written admiringly about her in the past. I, on the other hand, am that guy who keeps
saying those terrible things about the whole approach to child welfare taken by
the Times and the Miami Herald. I make no apology for
that. When children’s lives are at stake - literally – good intentions aren’t
enough.
The Times and the Herald
didn’t make a good child welfare system bad. But they helped make a bad child
welfare system worse – and they helped to halt and reverse what had been the
first real improvement in that system in decades. You are in a position to do better. And if you are willing to reconsider old
assumptions then you can help break the cycle of tragedy-investigate-repeat
that Ms. Carlton aptly described in her column.
The Big Lie of American child welfare
Though I think Ms. Courter
sincerely believes what she is saying, the whole idea that child safety and
family preservation are opposites that need to be “balanced,” that child
removal equals child safety, and that the system is bending over backwards to
keep families together “at all costs” is still the Big Lie of American child
welfare. It is that very lie that has
contributed to creating a system where tragedies such as Jordan’s death are
more likely. In no state is that clearer
than Florida. It’s clear both because of
what is happening now and because there actually was a time, not that long ago,
when Florida was doing significantly better – something I’ll come back to later
in this long letter.
That same
Big Lie was the underlying premise of the 2014 Miami Herald series “Innocents Lost” and earlier work by the same Herald reporter. That’s why my organization created a special website and blog just
for Florida to counter the misreporting of the issue by the Herald – and, more recently, the Tampa Bay Times. The site includes a point-by-point
rebuttal to Innocents Lost and a detailed discussion of the
data on child abuse fatalities that the series omitted.
But the
most damning indictment of the approach to covering child welfare taken by the – and the Times – is the results.
Herald
“State steps in less, more children
die,” said
one headline on a Herald story
several years ago. That headline sums up the entire thesis of Herald child welfare coverage. But now the state is stepping in much, much
more. The number of children torn from
their homes each year has skyrocketed, as has the number trapped in foster care
on any given day. Florida is in the
midst of a foster-care panic. And it’s at its worst in parts of your
region, where children are taken at among the highest rates in the state.
What has
the panic wrought?
● Children
forced to spend their days literally parked – spending hour after hour stuck in
cars in a convenience store parking lot.
● Children
moving from place to place night after night after night.
● Children “dumped
… into the community without food, water, money or even a bus token when
they were suspended from school or refused to attend classes.”
● Children
torn from parents who are nothing like the mother accused of killing Jordan
Belliveau. On the contrary, a
representative of the state Attorney General’s office admits that children are
taken solely
because their families lack housing.
● And a
report commissioned by DCF itself found that in Hillsborough County there is a
widespread problem of needless removal of children – because workers are so afraid
of “media consequences.” (WFLA-TV first reported on this. When the Times
wrote its catch-up story about the report, it omitted any mention of the
findings concerning needless removal.)
But if
Courter is right, Florida’s children at least should be vastly safer now than
they were a few years ago, and children in your region should be among the
safest in Florida. But the one thing you
and I and your editorial board and Gay Courter probably can agree on is that
they are not.
The death
of Jordan Belliveau, the kind of case where there were more “red flags” than a
Soviet May Day parade, was exactly the sort that the Herald told us would stop if Florida just stopped supposedly
putting “family preservation” ahead of “child safety.” DCF did exactly what the Herald – and your editorial board, and Gay Courter – told it to
do.
But things only
got worse. The state report found that child safety had declined. All that suffering inflicted on all those
children who were taken needlessly, and all those children who now must sleep
in a different home each night and wait in cars by day -- all of it has been
for nothing.
That’s
because there is no Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy – and there never was.
The real reasons for tragedies such as the death of Jordan Belliveau are those
far more mundane reasons I mentioned at the start of this letter, reasons that
involve an overloaded system. A foster-care panic only overloads the system
more. So everyone makes even more mistakes – in all directions.
“Man up and
protect children first,” says Courter – by which she means take away even more
of them and reunite even fewer of them.
But nothing is less courageous than a foster-care panic. The caseworkers who rush to take the child
and run aren’t protecting children they’re protecting themselves – as the
state’s own report makes clear. It’s
hard to blame them. But I blame Courter
for encouraging it, and confusing such behavior with courage.
Selective outrage
When WFLA-TV
first exposed the fact that children were spending their days stuck in
cars, I saw no outraged op-ed from Gay Courter.
When WFLA-TV
reported on how the state admitted it’s tearing apart families solely
because of lack of housing, I saw no outraged op-ed from Gay Courter. And, most telling, when
WFLA-TV reported on the tragic death of Kwon McGee, I saw no outraged op-ed
from Gay Courter.
Tell me
honestly: When I mentioned Kwon McGee in the paragraph above, did you
immediately know the name? Does it ring
a bell even now? I don’t blame you if it doesn’t. But I do blame whoever it was among your
editors who did not think the story of an infant taken from his mother solely
because she was homeless – only to die in foster care – was worth even one story in the Tampa Bay
Times.
And when
Gay Courter writes that she knows “Jordan is not an exception!” because she has
seen other cases and that supposedly proves a bias in favor of keeping children
in their own homes, what does the case of Kwon McGee prove?
When anecdotes collide
That’s the
problem with policy-by-horror-stories.
We can trade such stories endlessly.
When Courter picks the ones that suit her point of view and suggests
they prove something, it’s like saying that global warming is a hoax because
it’s cold where I live. It is the
ultimate example of the tyranny
of personal experience.
When
anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data – from the nation as a whole,
and also from Florida.
Courter
speculates that for every child who dies there are vastly more enduring
enormous suffering by being left in their own homes. What she doesn’t tell you is that actual
research shows that in typical cases,
not the horror stories, children left in their own homes fare better in later
life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. There are at
least five such studies, all involving direct comparisons and actual
real-life outcomes – and two of the studies, from MIT, are massive in size and scope. In contrast, when it comes to actual research
on outcomes in typical cases, Courter cites exactly none.
The
research findings are not as surprising as they may seem.
Because the
typical cases are nothing like the horror stories. Far more common are cases in which family poverty
is confused with “neglect” such as the case of Kwon McGee and the cases
cited by the Attorney General’s office.
Other cases fall between the extremes.
When such
children are needlessly thrown into foster care, they lose not only mom and dad
but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and
classmates. They are cut loose from
everyone loving and familiar. For a
young enough child it’s an experience akin to a kidnapping. Other children feel they must have done
something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. But then, we should all know that by now,
after what we’ve seen at the Mexican border.
The motivation of DCF workers is, of course, vastly different. But the suffering caused by needless removal is
exactly the same.
All that
harm occurs even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far
higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general
population. Multiple
studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and
institutions is even worse.
But even that isn’t the worst of
it. The worst is what I mentioned
earlier: All those workers too overwhelmed with false allegations, trivial
cases and children who don’t need to be in foster care, to find children in
real danger.
So the approach advocated by the Herald – and your editorial board – and
the approach upon which Gay Courter actually wants to double down is an
approach that makes all children less safe.
George Sheldon’s legacy
There
actually was a time when Florida understood this. It was that time when Bob Butterworth and
George Sheldon were running DCF. They
significantly curbed the misuse and overuse of foster care. In the process they did not end the horror
stories – no child welfare leader anywhere in America has done that. But they
did improve child safety. And again, that’s not anecdote – that’s research,
specifically independent
evaluations. It was a record so
impressive it
got the attention of The New York Times.
But it was
a record the Herald distorted and
then ignored. Curbing needless foster care while improving child safety was
among the achievements of which Sheldon was most proud. But after his recent death, a 2,300 word Herald obituary made
no mention of it. In an Orwellian
twist, it was simply sent down the “memory hole.” Because this real success contradicted the Herald’s “master narrative” about child
welfare, the Herald had to pretend
the success never happened.
GAL ≠
God
A theme in both of your columns
can be boiled down to: Why don’t we just listen to the guardian ad litem (CASA, for those not living in
Florida) in these cases because, after all, that’s supposedly the only person
who cares only about the child.
Before I
discuss that premise, let me introduce you to someone who used to be
approximately the equivalent of a GAL.
Her name is Crystal Baker-Burr and she works in New York City, where
they do things a little differently.
Right now, Baker-Burr
represents parents. But before that she worked for the Legal Aid Society
Juvenile Rights Project – they’re the ones who represent children in child
abuse and neglect cases. In New York
this is done by trained professionals, not volunteers.
"Can I have that quarter?" Anita asked me, pointing to the change she found in the chair in the courthouse interview room. I asked her what she needed it for. "I am saving all the change I find on the ground and keeping it with me,” she said. “If they ever kidnap me and my brothers again, I can take a cab back home to mommy."
And if that
makes you want to stop reading this letter (assuming you’ve gotten this far)
and go straight to her full column, by
all means go ahead.
OK, now
that you’re back, let me introduce you to a very different sort of former GAL. His name is Merlin Sprague and his comments
about the families he’s seen might appall even Donald Trump. Have
a look.
So, now
that you’ve met Mr. Sprague and Ms. Baker-Burr, I’m sure you see the problem
with the GAL = God approach. Give the
same set of cases to Gay Courter and Merlin Sprague and Crystal Baker-Burr and
odds are they will reach very different conclusions about most of them.
And while,
personally, I’d love to see courts always defer to someone like Ms. Baker-Burr,
a GAL = God approach also would mean always deferring to Merlin Sprague. Is that really what you want?
So no, we
can’t just dispense with courts and caseworkers and everyone else and just say:
Do whatever the GAL says. (No you didn’t literally recommend that, but you came
pretty close.) We need to do it the old-fashioned way: All sides should have
high-quality professional legal counsel making the best possible case for the
outcome sought by their clients. And
then the one person who is really supposed to be objective – the judge – makes
a ruling.
Sometimes
those judges will get it wrong, send a child home and tragedy will follow. Other
times – and the data show this is far more common – the judge will rubber-stamp
whatever DCF wants. Then, too, tragedy will result. Remember, a judge approved
removing Kwon McGee from his home.
But we also
know a few things about the effectiveness of what Florida calls GALs based on,
yes, data. The most comprehensive study ever done, one
commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that they do not,
in fact, make children safer. What they
do is prolong foster care and reduce the chances that children will be placed
with relatives instead of strangers.
We also
know this: The fact that a GAL has no vested interest is not the same thing as
having no bias. On the contrary, for
reasons discussed here and here, GALs
are among those most likely to bring strong personal biases to their work –
biases that revolve around race and class – biases that help explain the
findings from the research. And, indeed,
this is reflected in a disturbing
track record across the country.
What can be done?
How to we
break this cycle of failure? How can we
create a system that doesn’t demand that columnists write that same column over
and over? It can be done. But you’ll
need to question a lot of assumptions.
Journalists
and caseworkers and GALs tend to have similar backgrounds and experiences. In every newsroom there is probably at least
one reporter or editor who has a friend who’s a foster parent, or an adoptive
parent or maybe a caseworker or a friend of a caseworker – or a GAL. It’s almost unheard-of for reporters to know
children who were taken from their parents unjustly, or to know those parents –
except, perhaps, as story subjects.
So it’s a
lot harder to imagine walking in their shoes.
So, if you
have not done so in the past, I hope you will seek them out. Where? It’s harder in Florida than in, say
New York City, where most families get high-quality defense counsel. Florida is one of those places where, sometimes,
even parents’ own court-appointed lawyers feel only contempt for them.
But you might get somewhere by
reaching out to civil rights groups, or groups that deal with issues relating
to poverty. A representative of the
Attorney General’s office says children are being taken away because their
parents lack housing. Surely it’s
possible to find some of those families.
You might
have to look beyond Florida. You could
do what the Arizona Daily Star recently
did and go all over the country looking for best practices. (Newsroom budgets being what they are, I
imagine you might have to do it by phone.)
You could start in the same place the Herald actually cited in Innocents Lost as a model for doing child
welfare right: Alabama.
But, in another Orwellian twist,
the Herald never explained that the
reason for Alabama’s relative success in improving child safety is that it
rebuilt its system to do far more to keep families together. The Herald
never told readers that Alabama takes away children at a far lower rate
than Florida – and they did it all while actually spending even less,
proportionately, than Florida.
(I’m not suggesting that spending
less is a good idea. On the contrary, I’m a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of
it, and I agree that Florida should spend more. But that won’t help unless
Florida also spends smarter. I’m just
pointing this out because it’s a myth that Florida can’t do far more to keep
children safe and families together even without a massive infusion of
additional funds. Alabama shows how it can be done.)
The Herald story about Alabama never quotes
the people who actually led the transformation of the system. Either the
reporters never contacted them or, more likely, they didn’t like what they
heard, so they left it out. I’d be glad
to put you in touch with them; one of them is a member of my group’s Board of
Directors.
Fortunately,
The New York Times didn’t make the
Herald’s mistake in its excellent account
of how Alabama transformed. The Arizona Daily Star also got it right.
Tell the
stories that the Herald refused to
tell – and that, so far, the Tampa Bay
Times has refused to tell as well.
Break away from the “master narrative” that has constricted most child
welfare reporting – and almost all such reporting in Florida. Do that, and maybe, in a few years, you won’t
have to write the same column you’ve written so many times before.
Sincerely,
Richard
Wexler
Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform,
www.nccpr.org
