We begin with several developments
surrounding a pernicious practice known as “hidden foster care.”
● Last year, I
wrote a blog post about the hidden foster care scandal in North Carolina –
a scandal exposed first by the Associated Press and then ongoing, dogged
reporting by Carolina Public Press. Now
the scandal has
led to criminal indictments of, among others, the former head of the county
child welfare agency at the center of the scandal. According to Carolina Public Press:
The
charges included dozens of felonies and misdemeanors related to a yearslong
Cherokee County DSS practice that separated children from parents without the
oversight of a judge.
As I wrote last year, here’s how
hidden foster care works:
A
parent is told at a minimum: We’re going
to take your children away and place them in foster care with strangers. In
some cases they’re told: We’ll also separate them from each other and place
them far, far away. You can go to court and try to get them back but, well,
good luck with that. Good luck even visiting them. Then they offer the alternative: Just sign
this little piece of paper in which you “voluntarily” agree to have us place
the children with someone nearby – usually a relative.
Of
course no lawyer for the family ever looks at that piece of paper first, or
explains to the family their rights. The
parents’ only explanation of what the piece of paper means is what the
caseworker tells them it means. And while many of these placements are
theoretically short-term, in some of the North Carolina cases these agreements
effectively involve signing away rights to a child forever.
It happens
all over the country – but only in North Carolina has a judge found it to be
illegal.
The North
Carolina scandal does not mean the practice is illegal everywhere, let alone
that there is criminal behavior – there have been no such allegations anywhere
else. Nor does it mean that other programs operate as the North Carolina
program operated. But in all its forms
hidden foster care is a pernicious practice that should be abolished. Unfortunately, it is spreading.
● In
Oregon, the state child welfare agency is using the COVID-19 pandemic as an
excuse to expand the practice. I
have a blog post about it here.
● Another
version of the practice involves a program called Safe Families. Proponents
would argue that Safe Families is different because, typically, parents
themselves reach out to the program and ask that a “host family” take in their
children temporarily, and the family promises to return the children on request. But it doesn’t always work out that way. Back when the program first began, more than
a decade ago, I warned on this Blog that it is really sugar-frosted
foster care.
Now “Safe
Families” is seeking to begin operations in New York – and the state Office of
Children and Family Services has proposed regulations to allow this.
In promoting this expansion into
New York, Safe Families wrongly claimed support from some family advocates. In this
detailed comment on the proposed rules, those advocates say their views
were misrepresented. They, and other
signers, make clear they strongly oppose the program in its current form. The parents at Rise, a magazine written by parents caught up in the system, also
oppose it.
The move in Oregon is one of several attempts
by child protective services agencies to use COVID-19 as an excuse to seize
even more power and run roughshod over minimal due process protections for
children and families. On this front
there is good news and bad news.
● First the good news: Two attempted power grabs, both in California,
have failed, at least for now. An unholy
alliance between Big Pharma and Big Foster failed
to persuade the California Legislature to weaken laws restricting the use
of powerful sometimes dangerous psychiatric medications on vulnerable
populations, including foster children.
And to his credit – and to my
surprise – the head of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family
Services wisely refused to cooperate with a scheme by the County Sheriff to
send uniformed officers to “check” on children – even when there’d been no
complaint at all of any form of abuse or neglect. I’ve updated my
blog post about it.
● Now the bad news: A court in Cook County has dismissed a challenge to
the state child welfare agency’s blanket ban on in-person visits between
children and families. The judge ruled that the families challenging the ban had
other remedies in their specific cases.
But as John Kelly explains in his
story for the Chronicle of Social Change,
even as the judge was issuing her ruling, those other remedies appeared to
vanish almost before everyone’s eyes.
The hearing, conducted by video, of
course, is online here. I’ve
cued the video to the conclusion of the Cook County Public Defender’s
impassioned explanation of why the ban does so much harm to children. And see
also this statement from the Shriver Center on Poverty Law and the Movement
for Family Power.
● Shanta
Trivedi, clinical fellow at the University of Baltimore Bronfein Family Law
Clinic, writes in Slate about why all
those “pandemic of child abuse” stories are wrong.
● Vivek
Sankaran writes about what
courts should look like when we get back to something resembling normal.
● In Rise, Kenya Franklin writes about the
ultimate vindication: not only getting her children back, but successfully
suing the child welfare agency for wrongfully taking them in the first place.
● And
journalist Sylvia Harvey has an important new book about a crucial area where
child welfare and law enforcement overlap. It’s called The
Shadow System: Mass Incarcertation and the American Family. Ms. Harvey is interviewed
about the book here.
