● Have you heard about the judge in child welfare cases who
actually follows the law? The child
welfare establishment is throwing a fit.
The Washington Post wrote
about the judge. I
have a blog post about her, with a link to the Post story.
● I’ve written before about hidden
foster care – a massive, parallel system of child removal in which parents
are coerced into “voluntarily” giving up their children to relatives with no
court hearings or due process protection of any kind. (The threat: Do this “voluntarily”
or we’ll throw the children into foster care with strangers.) In many places, this is standard operating
procedure and no one in “the system” bats an eye. But things have been different in North
Carolina. After the Associated Press exposed
the practice in one county, the state took over the system in that county. Days after the AP report, a judge found the
practice unconstitutional. She also found that the coerced “voluntary”
agreements were “the product of both actual and constructive fraud …” Now there’s a civil lawsuit, and the
possibility of criminal charges against county child welfare officials.
We know all this because of some outstanding reporting by
Kate Martin of the nonprofit news site Carolina
Public Press. This
story outlines the scope of the problem. Then came stories about missing
meeting minutes, massive document shredding, an investigation by the State
Bureau of Investigation, delays in state action, allegations of falsification
of records, allegations of lying under oath, and on and on. You can find those stories
here and here.
But they leave one question unanswered: Why haven’t the
abuses of hidden foster care prompted the same aggressive response anywhere
else?
● On the Rethinking
Foster Care blog, Georgia attorney Emma Brown-Bernstein writes
about a case in which a homeless mother made the terrible mistake of asking
the state child protective services agency for help to find housing. Instead, Brown-Bernstein writes, the child
was removed “because his family was homeless and no one could help the family
obtain housing. That’s it.” A trial
court rubber-stamped the removal, but the state Court of Appeals unanimously
overturned it. “This choice cannot be the only one we have,” Brown-Bernstein
writes. “Sending children to foster care because their parents cannot find a
house not only undermines families but, as the Court of Appeals reminded us … also
runs afoul of the law.”
As you read about this one case, it’s also worth
remembering: Multiple studies find that 30 percent of America’s foster children
could be home right now if the families had
decent housing.
● Two stories have nothing to do with child welfare – and everything
to do with child welfare: WNYC Public Radio’s On The Media, has
an excellent interview with Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction – about how, in field after field,
supposedly objective algorithms turn out to be biased. Guess who’s on the losing end every time. And it’s hard to imagine anything that could
be easier to keep free of bias than determining creditworthiness. It should be a matter of pretty basic math.
Yet somehow, the algorithm Apple and Goldman Sachs came up with to set credit
limits on their fancy new credit card wound up allegedly discriminating
against women.
All of which is all the more reason to be worried when a
child welfare agency starts trying to use predictive analytics algorithms to
figure out things that are vastly more complicated – such as predicting who
supposedly is likely to abuse a child.
In Allegheny County, Pa., they’re about to start trying to slap risk
scores on every baby at birth. In Talk Poverty, Elizabeth Brico has
a story about how they’re doing it.
And I have a
blog post about it here.
● In New York State, both the city Administration for
Children’s Services and the state agency that oversees it were doing their
usual song and dance before a state legislative committee: Of course we want
fewer children in foster care, they say, just give us more money to inflict
more “counseling” and “parent education” on families as we keep them under our
thumb and everything will be fine. But,
as this
story in the Chronicle of Social Change
makes clear, there are signs lawmakers aren’t buying it anymore. They
understand the real solution is giving families the tools to fight back from
the moment agencies such as ACS enter their lives.
As Emma Ketteringham of The Bronx Defenders told
legislators:
When you’re hungry,
and you don’t know where you are going to sleep, and your children were taken
in the middle of the night — therapy’s not going to fix the situation … We have
to back up and really explore how we respond to families that struggle …
because of poverty and because of structural racism.
