“Spotlight Fellows” writing for the Boston Globe and ProPublica misunderstood a key federal law and got the causes of child abuse fatalities wrong. Their massive project, reported and written with the best of intentions, is likely to make children less safe.
Today, NCCPR releases an in-depth analysis of stories that are a sad example of the way the journalism of child welfare often fails. The full report is available here. Below are the key points. As you read the report, I'm sure you'll understand why we decided to release it on Martin Luther King Day.
● Though
reported with the best of intentions, stories written by two
Boston Globe “Spotlight Fellows” and
published by the Globe and ProPublica are likely to endanger the
children they are meant to help.
The stories
will encourage public policy that
--Promotes
foster-care panic, sharp sudden
increases in removals of children from their homes that do terrible harm to
children needlessly removed and overwhelm caseworkers so they have less time to
find children in real danger.
--Discourages women, particularly poor
women and women of color, from seeking prenatal care or giving birth in hospitals,
increasing the risk to their newborns.
--Opens even wider the spigot of the
“foster-care-to-prison pipeline” which leads to disastrous outcomes for
children. At the end of 2019, in fact,
at almost the same time the Spotlight Fellows stories were released, this was documented brilliantly
by the Kansas City Star.
● More than
four decades of experience tracking child welfare – and the journalism of child
welfare – make clear that the failure to provide context and diverse points of
view concerning how to solve the problems the series exposed leads to such
panics by workers, judges and child welfare agency leaders, all of whom fear
being in the spotlight if they leave a child home and something goes
wrong.
● The reporters
misunderstood the history and the politics of the law at the center of their
stories, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. They made erroneous
assumptions about key provisions of the law.
● There is far
less consensus about CAPTA than is implied by the stories, in which only
sources who reinforce the “master narrative” of the
reporters are quoted. That narrative
suggests that CAPTA is fundamentally a good law that needs to be clarified,
toughened and given more funding. There
is a vigorous debate among child welfare experts over this, with many believing
CAPTA is a fundamentally bad law that harms
children and should not be encouraged with more funding. But those
viewpoints were entirely shut out of the stories, leaving readers in the dark.
● This was caused, in part, by a startling dichotomy in
sourcing. Child welfare is a system that overwhelmingly polices the poor and,
disproportionately the nonwhite. But every national expert quoted is
white.
To understand how harmful this is, consider: In poor
communities and communities of color, child protective services agencies are
viewed, for good reason, in much the same way as the police. It is inconceivable that a major series of
any kind about the criminal justice system would leave out the voices of all
national experts who are not white. It should be equally inconceivable when the
topic is child welfare.
● The
journalists’ view of CAPTA is seen most clearly in the series’ de facto endorsement of one of CAPTA’s
worst provisions, the “plan of safe care” provision, which ratchets up
surveillance of pregnant women and infants “affected” by parental substance
use. There is no evidence base for this
provision – no research indicating it makes children safer. What research does exists suggests that this
sort of approach makes children less safe – by driving their mothers away from
prenatal care and away from giving birth in hospitals.
● The stories
show a fundamental misunderstanding of who winds up in the child welfare system
and why, including a misunderstanding of crucial data about “substantiated”
child abuse and neglect reports.
● Even as she
was working on these stories, one of the reporters did pro-bono work for an advocacy group that takes strong stands on
these same issues. That is a conflict of interest.
● None of this
means everything about the stories was wrong. The reporters are right to
highlight the need for a standard national definition for child abuse
fatalities and near fatalities. They
also are right to call for far more public disclosure concerning such
fatalities. In fact, they don’t go far enough. NCCPR is on record calling for much
more transparency: a strong rebuttable presumption of openness for all court
hearings and almost all records in all child
abuse and neglect cases.
● Contrary to
what reporters who are called out for these sorts of failings often say, none
of this means that child abuse deaths should be ignored. No, it does not mean that, as sometimes has
been alleged over the years, “you don’t want
us to report it when children die!” On
the contrary, we need more coverage of such fatalities - coverage that gets at
the real causes and real solutions. At
least one newspaper, the Dayton Daily News has done that. And we need more stories about the
consequences of getting the solutions wrong – which, as noted above, the Kansas
City Star did at almost exactly the same time as the
Spotlight Fellows’ stories were published.
● The Spotlight
Fellows had the chance to advance the debate over how to reduce child abuse
fatalities, a debate that has been going nowhere for decades. Instead, they
offered only more of the same. Perhaps
others will do better. Because the
solution to the problems of journalism is more journalism.
NCCPR's FULL ANALYSIS IS AVAILABLE HERE
