Tuesday, June 30, 2020

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 30, 2020


● So now, finally, can we put to rest the fear-and-smear narrative about a supposed “pandemic of child abuse”? The Associated Press reports:

When the coronavirus pandemic took hold across the United States in mid-March … many child-welfare experts warned of a likely surge of child abuse. Fifteen weeks later, the worries persist. Yet some experts on the front lines, including pediatricians who helped sound the alarm, say they have seen no evidence of a marked increase.

The story goes on to quote Dr. Jerry Milner, head of the federal Children’s Bureau, who says some of the early warnings

had “racist underpinnings” — unfairly stereotyping low-income parents of color as prone to abusive behavior.
 “To sound alarm bells, because teachers aren’t seeing kids every day, that parents are waiting to harm their kids — it’s an unfair depiction of so many parents out there doing the best under very tough circumstances,” he said.

● Or, as Joyce McMillan of New York’s Parent Legislative Action Network and Jessica Prince of the Bronx Defenders write in City Limits: The Press is Stoking Fears of a Phantom Child-Abuse Crisis.

● Unfortunately, child welfare agencies may yet wind up creating a spike in child abuse -  by engaging in all that fearmongering and turning friendly virtual visitors into spies – because the contagion of fear they are spreading risks driving families away from seeking help. I have a blog post about it.

There’s lots more about racial bias in child welfare:

Youth Today reports on the landmark report by Movement for Family Power on how the foster system has become the epicenter of America’s failed drug war, and the consequences which fall, of course, predominantly on poor families of color.

● It was thanks to Movement for Family Power that I learned about this excellent position paper that the Movement for Black Lives has issued on foster care and child welfare.

Injustice Watch examines Illinois’ unconscionable ban on in-person visits between foster children and their parents through a racial justice lens. 

As the story points out:

At a time when calls to defund the police have grown louder, some politicians and pundits have suggested replacing police officers with social workers in certain situations. Advocates say the child welfare system is a cautionary tale of a system replete with social workers that still disproportionately targets and harms Black families.
“Families and communities of color are criminalized [in the child welfare system] in much the same ways they are in the criminal system,” said Tanya Gassenheimer, a staff attorney for the Shriver Center on Poverty Law who works on child welfare issues. “It really is a one-for-one parallel.”

● One of the best ways to fight the denial of visits, and the other injustices of the child welfare system: High-quality family defense.  In the Chronicle of Social Change, three lawyers show how this kind of defense has helped limit the damage caused by child welfare’s failed response to COVID-19.

● Encouraging such defense was a key feature of an executive order on foster care issued by the White House last week. Notably, the order urges the provision of such defense even before a case first goes to court.  AP has the story and the Chronicle has an analysis.

● There are two more notable commentaries on racial bias in child welfare in the Chronicle of Social Change.  One from Jessica Pryce, director of the Florida Institute for Child Welfare, the other from Dr. Sharon L. McDaniel, founder and CEO of A Second Chance, Inc.

In other news …

●The Chronicle also has a story about a report that looked at institutionalization of children around the world and reached the obvious conclusion: Stop doing it.

● The reason to do that isn’t just to stop horror stories such as this one at still another institution managed by Sequel Youth and Family Services. (If that name seems vaguely familiar, this may be why.)  It’s because institutionalization itself is inherently a failure. 

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Yes, there IS a contagion that might lead to a spike in child abuse – and child welfare agencies are spreading it



Imagine you are a parent living in poverty for whom life can be a struggle even in the best of times.  Now, perhaps, you’ve lost your job because of COVID-19; or you’re an essential worker, like a grocery checkout clerk or Amazon warehouse employee. Your job barely pays enough to get by, and now you have to worry every day about contracting coronavirus.

An acquaintance calls or texts with an offer to give you a little free time by distracting your children with a videochat.  Or maybe a volunteer is willing to drop off food you can no longer afford – or don’t want to risk going to the store to buy.

Such simple kindnesses might be just what you need to manage the stress.

But do you dare accept such offers?

The answer should be a simple yes.  But nothing is simple when what Prof. Dorothy Roberts aptly calls the family regulation system gets involved.

Because all over the country, as part of the whole false – and racially biased - “pandemic-of-child-abuse” narrative, child protective services agencies are working to turn those friendly volunteers into spies.

You know the rationale by now: The claim is that the only thing that keeps legions of nonwhite parents from unleashing savagery upon their children is ever-vigilant, mostly white, middle class professionals whose “eyes” are always on the kids.  Now that these “mandated reporters” aren’t around as much, one news story after another warns of a “pandemic of child abuse.”

The solution?  Turn every virtual visitor into a spy!  Apparently, it’s so easy to detect child abuse that anyone can do it. Indeed, some advocates in Pennsylvania say you should just report a family for child abuse whenever your “gut” tells you to.

In Philadelphia, which tears apart families at the highest rate among America’s biggest cities, the Department of Human Services is offering even more help to this new corps of Junior Child Abuse Police. As they put it in a tweet:

When schools are closed, ensuring the safety of our children is up to all of us. Consider a virtual check-in if you have any concerns about a child’s welfare. Here are some tips to identify signs of abuse or neglect, virtually.

There’s a link (which I am not including here) to an entire script full of leading questions to ask kids, even as the kids and their parents are suckered into thinking the amateur child abuse investigator is just being friendly. That’s followed immediately by the number to call in a report.

Still not sure? Don’t worry, news articles include all sorts of broad, vague lists of symptoms that could be child abuse or neglect – or any number of other things. One such list includes “Flinching or avoidance to being touched.”  That seems a bit out-of-date at the moment.

Topping it all off: Constant messaging intended to make the spies feel like heroes for turning families in based on their slightest suspicion. 

Scaring families away from help


Now, consider what we know about what happens when all those mostly white, middle-class “mandated reporters” are keeping their eyes glued on all those overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite kids:

It backfires.

Research tells us that it overloads the system with so many false allegations and trivial cases that workers have even less time to find children in real danger.

And perhaps most important in this context: It scares families under stress away from seeking help.

So consider the paradox: The “pandemic of child abuse” theory postulates that, in the absence of  middle-class white people watching them, poor people of color will break under the stress of coping with COVID-19 and take it out on their children.  It is reasonable to believe that in a small number of cases that could happen, though we also should consider that in poor neighborhoods, a lower profile for child protective services actually eases stress.

But in that small number of potential abuse cases, even as the stress rises, parents who have not, in fact, abused their children now have to ask: Is the offer of help genuine, or might it be a way to spy on us, jump to conclusions and turn us in to child protective services?

So families under stress might actually be driven away from the help they need to prevent stress from leading to child abuse.

If there is, in fact, a spike in child abuse, it might not be because of COVID-19.  It might be because of another contagion: Fear.  And that contagion is being spread by child abuse police agencies themselves.

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 23, 2020


● The Movement for Family Power has released an outstanding report at exactly the time it’s needed most. It’s called: Whatever they do, I’m her comfort, I’m her protector: How the foster system has become ground zero for the US drug war. They have video of a webinar discussing the report and the issues it raises on their Facebook page.


 ● MFP writes that "This report is in part a plea to the social justice community to embrace activism against the foster system as a core social justice cause of our time."  There are signs that this is starting to happen. Check out the New York Daily News story about this protest.

● The critique isn’t coming only from the Left. The right-leading Texas Public Policy Foundation just released Punished for Being Poor: The Relationship Between Poverty and Neglect in Texas.

● And for an urgent example of why the reforms recommended in both reports are needed, check out this story from Texas by Roxanna Asgarian for the Chronicle of Social Change.

● While the social justice community is starting to mobilize, the child welfare establishment continues to offer, at best, lip service. Although a New York Times headline said  “Calls for Racial Justice Touch Seemingly Every Aspect of American Life” I explain in this NCCPR Blog post why it should have said: Every Aspect But One.

● Last week’s week-in-review was devoted largely to how the racial justice reckoning had yet to reach the journalism of child welfare.  This week: Why the award for tone deafness goes to the public radio program Fresh Air.

● The Center for the Study of Social Policy is leading a new initiative that “works to create a society in which the forcible separation of children from their parents is no longer an acceptable intervention for families in need.” And while other child welfare organizations belong in a hypocrisy hall of fame, CSSP has a good track record on issues of child welfare and race. In the Chronicle of Social Change, leaders of the effort write:

The harm that results from [child protective services] intervention, and the families that are destroyed as a result, will only end through the abolition of the child welfare system as we know it and a fundamental reimagining of the meaning of child welfare – a reimagining that is fundamentally anti-racist.

● Also in the Chronicle, Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School reminds us that With Child Welfare, Racism Is Hiding in The Discretion. He writes:

My first client as a family defense lawyer was a Black mother who left her 13-year-old in charge of 8- and 6-year-old siblings while she went to the dry cleaners.  In suburban America, we call this babysitting. In a predominately Black, public housing complex in Washington, D.C., this constituted neglect.
I still remember the terror in my client’s voice. “They are coming to take my babies.”
“They” weren’t the police. They were child protective services — an agency every bit as powerful and as susceptible to racism as the police. But we have yet to face up to the racism that destroys thousands of families of color every year.

● Prof. Sankaran’s students won a big legal victory last week, as the Chronicle reports:

A Michigan parent on Thursday became the state’s first to successfully appeal a judge’s decision to remove a child into foster care, a ruling that the family’s advocates hailed as “an important first step” toward ensuring that judges don’t put families through the trauma of separation without showing sufficient cause.

Please let that part about “first to successfully appeal” sink in – and remember it the next time some foster care apologist hands you a line of bull about checks and balances and how “we can’t take children on our own, a judge has to approve everything we do.”

There were other legal victories over the past week:

● In Kentucky, the Northern Kentucky Tribune reports, a parent won a victory in an ongoing lawsuit challenging coerced “safety plans” in which parents are forced to surrender all their due process rights, and sign onerous “voluntary” agreements to submit to a cruel surveillance regime. If they don’t the state says it will take the children. It’s at least the second such case in Kentucky.

● And in western Pennsylvania, a similar suit is moving forward.

● Meanwhile, Rise reminds us that COVID-19 has not gone away, and issues another challenge to the racist narrative that suggests the absence of mandated reporters calling in anything and everything has unleashed a pandemic of child abuse.

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Child welfare and race: The award for tone deafness goes to NPR’s Fresh Air


The acclaimed public radio program chose this moment – this moment – to showcase a white mom's narrative about the joys of transracial adoption.

             About a year ago, Late Night with Seth Myers produced a parody called White Savior: The Movie Trailer.  I’ve cued the video to the part that the producers of public radio’s Fresh Air need to see most (though there might be an ad first):


            They need to see that because, in what has to win some kind of award for tone deafness, Terry Gross and her producers at WHYY Public Radio, where Fresh Air is produced for NPR, chose this moment – this moment - to showcase a real-life white mother's narrative about the joys of transracial adoption.

            Here’s the description of the June 18 program on the NPR website:

“Blogger [name omitted]  talks about how raising two white biological daughters and two black adopted sons helped her understand white privilege.”

(I am not linking to it or naming the blogger because she’s plugging a book about her life raising these children, and I’d rather not help promote it. The transcript is easy to find online.)

            One of the Black children was adopted, as a baby, from foster care.

I guess there’s nothing like exercising white privilege to help you learn about it.  And who knew that the job of Black children was to teach their white adoptive parents?

            What follows is 37 minutes of humblebragging from this white adoptive parent about things like how her children absolutely do not have to be grateful to her, she hates savior narratives and she learned how much easier it is for a white person to buy shampoo. 

            I’m not going to go into detail because the issue here is not transracial adoption.*  Nor do I want to suggest that the blogger is not a fine parent who cares about racial justice. The problem isn’t the blogger. The problem is Fresh Air and the tone-deafness of its producers. 

           
As far as I can tell, in its decades on the air, Fresh Air has never taken a serious look at the harm the foster care system does to children of color – or any children for that matter.  In this moment when we may finally be coming to grips with racism in all walks of life, here are some of the things Fresh Air could have done – but didn’t:

            ● They could have interviewed Prof. Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, about the havoc child protective services – the child abuse police -- wreak not only in Black families but entire Black communities. (Prof. Roberts is a member of NCCPR’s volunteer Board of Directors.)

            ● They could have interviewed leaders of the Movement for Family Power about their calls to expand the narrative about defunding and abolition from police to include the child welfare system.

            ● They could have talked to people in communities of color across the country whose view of child protective services is vastly different from the narrative among the white professional elite – the way Kendra Hurley did for Citylab and Eli Hager did for The Marshall Project.

            ● They could have talked to Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg of The New York Times about their landmark 2017 story: “Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow’”

            Fresh Air did none of these things.

It is one more example of the extent to which the racial justice reckoning has yet to reach child welfare – or the journalism of child welfare.


            *- For the record, I am not opposed to adoption. I am not opposed to all adoption of Black children by white families – though some in the family preservation movement are.  But it is important to understand that almost no one would even consider transracial adoption necessary if:

            ● We stopped taking so many Black children needlessly in the first place.
            ● We fully embraced kinship guardianship, often a preferred approach to permanence for Black families.
            ● Agencies got serious about finding adoptive parents in Black communities.    

           Needless to say, none of that was discussed on Fresh Air. 


Sunday, June 21, 2020

Will the racial justice reckoning ever reach child welfare?

#BlackLivesMatter protesters march on New York City family courts, and the
city Saturday, in a demonstration organized by the Parent Legislative Action Network
(Photo by Joyce McMillan)
THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE FACT THAT THE HEAD OF THE WASHINGTON STATE CHILD WELFARE AGENCY, WHOSE CALLOUS AND CRUEL STATEMENT IS QUOTED BELOW, HAS NOW SAID SOMETHING EVEN WORSE.


 The link to this story that appeared on the New York Times homepage on June 13 said: “Calls for Racial Justice Touch Seemingly Every Aspect of American Life.” It should have said: Every Aspect But One. 

Not only has the child welfare system, which needlessly separates countless Black families every year, been untouched, it continues to engage in racist behavior and messaging. Sometimes journalists have been its enablers.

So it’s worth remembering again how Robert Latham of the University of Miami School of Law summed it all up: “The child welfare system has nothing to say about anti-Black state violence because the child removal system engages in it daily.”

The most obvious example is one I’ve alluded to before: One agency after another issues dire warnings about what often is called a “pandemic” or “epidemic” of child abuse now supposedly underway because schools are closed and teachers and other “mandated reporters” are not calling in reports to child abuse hotlines.

Of course there is reason for concern that a tiny fraction of parents will respond to the stress of COVID-19 by lashing out. But 97 percent of calls to child abuse hotlines are false reports or cases of “neglect” which often means poverty.  

It should be obvious that it is racist to assume that the moment mostly white, middle class “eyes” are averted form overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children their parents will unleash savagery upon them in pandemic proportions.  Endless calls to ratchet up the child welfare surveillance state only drive families away from seeking help and overload child protective services workers, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.

The reduction in surveillance is viewed differently in communities of color. As Kendra Hurley writes in Citylab:

Some parents living in neighborhoods with historically high rates of child welfare investigations say the dramatic dip in maltreatment reports feels more like the pollution lifting — a much-needed respite from the intense and relentless surveillance of low-income moms, and especially those who are black and Latinx.”…
“One parent told [family advocate Joyce McMillan]: “They’re not opening my refrigerator. They’re not opening my dresser drawers. They’re not strip-searching my children and they’re not asking me to take their clothes off for the camera, because that would be child pornography.”


"Poor people are usually constantly inspected by all these agencies,” [one mother] said. “Now there is kind of a peacefulness.”

As Emma Ketteringham of the Bronx Defenders told Hager:

We have a child welfare system that is particularly, extremely sensitive to the media, so we should be very sure of narratives before we put them out there.

Child welfare, and a large chunk of American journalism, would do well to consider the words of David Kelly, special assistant to the Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau in the Department of Health and Human Services:

“If confined to telling binary stories of heroes and villains, an objective view may reverse the roles. Who is the hero, the parent doing the best they can under circumstances more difficult than most of us will ever know or experience, or the folks writing about the likelihood they will fail or actually seek to harm their children?”

But that is only the tip of the iceberg.  Consider the other ways in which child welfare seeks to set itself apart from racial justice:

Defund the child abuse police? Child welfare establshment says: No way!


The Times story notes that

The flood of corporate statements denouncing racism “feels like a series of mea culpas written by the press folks and run by the top black folks” inside each organization, said Dream Hampton, a writer and filmmaker.

It also reprints a tweet from Prof. Crystal Fleming, author of How to be Less Stupid About Race:


In other words, in other fields no one is fooled.  No one should be fooled by the similar statements coming from the child welfare establishment.  Because none of those groups is willing to put real money where its press releases are.

A key component of the racial justice movement is defunding police; that is, transferring large parts of police budgets into better alternatives such as education, housing, and public health. Not only have there been no similar calls from the child welfare establishment, they actually have teamed up with several liberal Democrats in Congress to try to use COVID-19 as an excuse to increase funding for the child abuse police – child protective services investigations -- by up to $500 million.

Just as harmful: They propose funneling the money through the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, an odious law deliberately crafted to avoid issues of race and class in child welfare.  To get their share of this additional $500 million states would have to comply with racist provisions of CAPTA, most notably the so- called “Plan of Safe Care” provisions, which target substance using mothers and drive them away from prenatal care.

Apparently, to the child welfare establishment, forcing more than half of all African-American children to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation – almost always needlessly – just isn’t enough.

In contrast, in the Senate it took two Republicans and two conservative Democrats to propose spending $800 million on what families actually need to prevent what the system calls child abuse: aid for things like housing, transportation and child care.

The proposal to put more federal dollars into child abuse policing is in keeping with a long, ugly  tradition of mainstream child welfare groups opposing real child welfare finance reform.

They successfully blocked a proposal to allow – not require, just allow – states to take the money they now receive through the huge, open-ended foster-care “entitlement” known as Title IV-E as a flexible flat grant that could be used both for foster care and for better alternatives.  Then they tried to block something even more modest: state-by-state waivers. And when they couldn’t block waivers they tried to undermine waivers through regulations.

Radical finance reform


What’s really needed is much more radical finance reform. The federal government should stop paying for foster care, period.  Not only should the open-ended entitlement be converted to a flexible grant, over several years states should be required to transfer the proportion of that grant used for foster care to better alternatives.  No, that doesn’t mean there would be no money for foster care. It just means that the state and local governments that put children in foster care would have to pick up the tab themselves.

Real finance reform also means ending the obscene practice of paying bounties to states for every finalized adoption over a baseline number, a practice that encourages a mad rush to needlessly terminate parental rights, as was well documented more than a decade ago.

The bounties are part of another racist law that needs to be repealed, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  In addition to the bounties, ASFA demands that, with certain exceptions, states presume parents unfit and move to terminate their  children’s right to any relationship with them based solely on how long a child has been in foster care – even if the child never needed to be in foster care at all, and/or is still there because of the agency’s failures. 

Just as harmful is the mentality enshrined by the law: the racist dogwhistling Big Lie of  American child welfare, that child removal equals child safety and that child safety and family preservation are opposites.In fact, family preservation is the safer option for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time.

It’s no wonder ASFA led to a surge in foster care placements and an increase in the number of children “aging out” of foster care with no real home at all.

ASFA was one of a trilogy of racist bills passed during the mid-1990s.  But while the other two, the crime bill and the so-called welfare “reform” bill, have been called out for their underlying racial and class bias, child welfare has remained willfully blind to the fact that ASFA used the same myths and stereotypes to target the same population: poor women, especially poor women of color.

Jobs not on the line


In a section headed “Jobs on the line,” the Times story discusses the many people forced to resign  because they “made offensive statements.”  But in child welfare, you can make such statements and worse, act in ways that do enormous harm to families of color, and not only will you not have to resign, you might even get promoted.

Consider this offensive statement:



            “There are some things we’re finding with visits on video that are actually more positive than in-person visits.”

            That offensive statement came from Ross Hunter, secretary of the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families.  He was attempting to justify a cruel, blanket ban on in-person visits between foster children and their parents, something that is not necessary to curb the spread of COVID-19.

            But in a state where Black and mixed-race children are in foster care at twice their rate in the general population, and Native American children are in foster care at five times their rate in the general population, Hunter appears to have issued the ban to appease a bunch of appallingly selfish, white foster parents – like those who signed an online petition, which reads in part:

They say what about the bio parents who will miss [their children]? I say to this. [sic] They are the ones who made the choices which in turn lead [sic] to losing their children in the first place. They should not be worried about missing visits at this time.

            I know of  no calls in Washington State for Hunter to resign.    

UPDATE: The statement about visits isn't even the worst thing Hunter's said. He just outdid himself.

One month ago, the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog broke the story of Hunter's agency warehousing children who tested positive for COVID-19 in an office building.  Now that the Seattle Times has finally caught up, we know Hunter's response.

First, here's what some family defenders said:


Tara Urs, special counsel for civil practice and policy for the King County Department of Public Defense ... said its use amounted to “warehousing children in an office building,” sending a message to kids that no home will take them.
Already marginalized, exposed to COVID-19 and put at such a site, “it has to be terrifying for them,” said S. Annie Chung, a lawyer who represents youth separated from their parents.


But Hunter saw it differently: 


“It’s not palatial, but it’s a reasonable alternative for two weeks” — one not unlike the confined spaces millions of people are stuck in, Hunter said. “This is the challenge of the pandemic.”
       Illinois, where Black children are in foster care at triple their rate in the population, has the same blanket visitation ban.  The Shriver Center on Poverty Law has been leading efforts to get it overturned.  On June 12, they tweeted:

For Black lives to matter, Black families must also matter. For close to 3 months, @IllinoisDCFS has kept over 11,000 parents, children, and siblings apart, many of whom are Black. This is unacceptable. #LiftTheBanIL


That prompted a response from a deputy communications director for Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, which concluded:

To claim @IllinoisDCFS does not care about black families is frankly disgusting.


No. What is "frankly disgusting" is when a p.r. person for a white governor lectures a Black-led group fighting for racial justice about what they should say - while distorting what they actually said. 

I know of no calls from Illinois for the p.r. guy to resign.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services now claims it will begin a slow, grudging resumption of in-person visits, starting on June 26. [UPDATE, JUNE 24: But as the Shriver Center explains, it's not nearly enough.]

Nor has anyone I know of demanded the resignation of the California district attorney who declared that “For the most vulnerable people in our community ‘shelter-in-place’ is the same as putting them in a cage with a violent gorilla.”

Failing up


And then there is the case of Cynthia Figueroa, former commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services.  She has repeatedly tweeted support for #BlackLivesMatter, even posting a selfie as she took part in a march.

But during her tenure – and for long before – Philadelphia DHS tore apart familiesat the highest rate among America’s biggest cities, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. , More than 85 percent of those families are nonwhite, When confronted, the agency’s response was misdirection and obfuscation. Only now has DHS finally admitted what it sought to obscure for so long.

But that’s only the beginning. Not only does Philadelphia also ban all in-person visits, Philadelphia DHS falsely blamed federal guidance for the ban. Federal guidance is precisely the opposite.  And now, DHS has published a guide that effectively urges people to turn virtual visits into ways to spy on families.

Yes, I did say Figueroa is a former commissioner. But that’s not because she was forced to resign. On the contrary, she keeps failing up. Mayor Jim Kenney promoted her to a deputy major job. She still oversees DHS.

And then Kenney gave Figueroa new job: Chairing what the Philadelphia Inquirer says will be “a steering committee to help the city move toward reconciliation with residents.”

The reckoning is a long way from reaching child welfare.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Week in review special edition: Challenging the (mostly white) master narrative about child abuse and COVID-19. When will more journalists step up?




Scores of stories state as fact that the decrease in child abuse reports because COVID-19 has closed the schools is, as one reporter flatly declared, “bad news.”  But that is mostly the white view. In communities of color it’s often seen differently.  This week-in-review is devoted to the harm done by journalists when they buy into this master narrative, and the good they can do when they challenge it.

Consider the premise that underlies this narrative: Story after story accepts as fact the claim that now that so many white, middle-class professional "eyes" are averted from overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children, their own parents will unleash upon them child abuse in "pandemic" or "epidemic" proportions. Multiple stories put it just that way.

It's one thing to tell readers about why some people think the stress of COVID-19 will cause some small number of parents to lash out - and why others disagree.  It's another thing to simply amplify the white "master narrative" about a "pandemic of child abuse" to the exclusion of all dissent.

How many journalists have stopped to so much as ask if the "pandemic of child abuse" claim is rooted in racialized fears and stereotypes?

What does it say about journalism – especially now - that so many reporters and editors assume only the white view is the right view?  As the racial justice reckoning reaches so many other walks of life, why does child welfare, and so much of the journalism of child welfare, remain trapped in an earlier era?

The exceptions illustrate the rule. Two stories, in particular, challenged this white master narrative during the past week.


Some parents living in neighborhoods with historically high rates of child welfare investigations say the dramatic dip in maltreatment reports feels more like the pollution lifting — a much-needed respite from the intense and relentless surveillance of low-income moms, and especially those who are black and Latinx. …
One parent told [family advocate Joyce McMillan]: “They’re not opening my refrigerator. They’re not opening my dresser drawers. They’re not strip-searching my children and they’re not asking me to take their clothes off for the camera, because that would be child pornography.”

 "Poor people are usually constantly inspected by all these agencies,” [one mother] said. “Now there is kind of a peacefulness.”

As Emma Ketteringham of the Bronx Defenders told Hager:

We have a child welfare system that is particularly, extremely sensitive to the media, so we should be very sure of narratives before we put them out there.

More on this theme:


For families of color, agencies like New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services can be every bit as oppressive as the police, and even more powerful. Police can stop a black teenager on the street, throw him against a wall and frisk him. ACS can march right into the home, strip-search a black child and walk out with him, consigning the child to the chaos of foster care.

● From Prof. Martin Guggenheim of New York University School of Law (and President of NCCPR) in the Chronicle of Social Change:

[The so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act] has been responsible for the massive destruction of black and brown families. More than 2 million children’s parents’ rights have been terminated ... since ASFA was enacted. … It is an unpleasant truth that many of the organizations whose collective voice is condemning racist police practices now have for decades celebrated the approach enshrined in law by ASFA, some by explicitly celebrating adoption and others using the euphemism “permanency.”


● And consider the warning in the Chronicle of Social Change from Prof. Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania Law School (also an NCCPR Board Member), who, when almost no one was talking about it, literally wrote the book on child welfare and race, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare: 

Prison abolitionists should support defunding the family regulation system and be careful not to enrich it more with funds divested from the police. Calls to divert money wholesale to federal and state health and human services departments, without exempting CPS and foster care, will further empower these engines of community surveillance and control.

● Still more calls for extending the abolition/defund movement to child welfare are in the video of this webinar from Black Lives Matter – LA.

● Another example of racism in child welfare: Blanket bans on visits between children in foster care and their parents.  Such bans are not necessary to curb the spread of COVID-19. Illinois has such a ban.  Here’s what Laura Matthews-Jolly, a lawyer who regularly represents children in child welfare cases wrote in The Chicago Tribune:

As a guardian ad litem, I represent children in foster care who have not visited with their parents since the ban took effect and can personally attest that denying meaningful contact between a child and parent is one of the most punitive acts a state can take. Separation from a parent, for whatever reason, can result in lifelong trauma.

● The challenges are not coming only from the Left.  In fact, even as many of my fellow liberals push Congress to spend up to $500 million more on the policing functions of child welfare, two Republican Senators and two conservative Democrats propose putting $800 million into better alternatives. Here’s the bill text.

● One reason challenging the white master narrative concerning child welfare and COVID-19 is so important: It’s already leading to appalling acts of racism such as this, from a hospital in New Mexico.

● Another reason: As I note on this blog, it can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In other words:

If you tell teachers over and over again that while their students were out of school, they were abused in pandemic proportions, then the bruise that last year would have been seen for what it was, an accident, suddenly is child abuse.  The hungry child for whom they might have called a food bank now becomes a call to child protective services.

The “pandemic of child abuse” narrative is only the most recent example of the white narrative being assumed correct among journalists who cover child welfare.  The problems go much deeper and have been around for much longer.

The journalism of child welfare needs a reckoning all its own.

Monday, June 15, 2020

NCCPR in the New York Daily News: Dismantle the racist child welfare system, too


As communities of color rise up against police brutality and the other day-to-day brutalities they face, we are reminded again about the dangers of walking while black, driving while black, birdwatching while black and doing almost every other daily activity-while-black. But there’s one area of profound bias against people of color that keeps getting left out: parenting while black.

For families of color, agencies like New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services can be every bit as oppressive as the police, and even more powerful. Police can stop a black teenager on the street, throw him against a wall and frisk him. ACS can march right into the home, strip-search a black child and walk out with him, consigning the child to the chaos of foster care.

As with so much else in American life, COVID-19 has highlighted the problem — and worsened it.

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Child welfare and COVID-19: If there’s a surge in foster care, it won’t be because of actual child abuse, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy

That makes the heartfelt response to the fearmongering from a top child welfare official even more important.


            I have previously noted some of the problems with the whole notion that because mostly white, middle-class professional “eyes” no longer are gazing upon overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children, there is now underway a “pandemic of child abuse” at the hands of their parents.  Among the problems with this claim: It’s racist.

            There is also another danger that hasn’t gotten enough attention: self-fulfilling prophecy.

            The fearmongering stories often are followed by a prediction that, once schools reopen and the army of “mandated reporters” is back in action, there will be a big increase in foster care placements as soon as they spot all that supposedly previously-hidden child abuse. 

But if you tell teachers over and over again that while their students were out of school, they were abused in pandemic proportions, then the bruise that last year would have been seen for what it was, an accident, suddenly is child abuse.  The hungry child for whom they might have called a food bank now becomes a call to child protective services.

            So yes, there may well be a surge in foster care placements when the kids go back to school – but the relationship between rates of foster care placement and rates of child abuse have has always ranged somewhere between slim and none – as can be seen by the vast differences in rates of removal among the states, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

The coming surge in foster care placements, if there is one, will be no exception.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to heed the words of David Kelly, special assistant to the Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau in the Department of Health and Human Services.  In this time of reckoning for all walks of life, Kelly’s words deserve the attention not only of everyone in child welfare, but perhaps even more from journalists.


There remains a deep-seeded distrust and lack of faith in the poor families and families of color that disproportionality populate the child welfare system. It may not be as blatantly visible in all places and all times as it has been historically and can be quite implicit, but it is there just below the surface, insidious.
We need look no further than the daily features in newspapers across the country in recent weeks forecasting spikes in child maltreatment. Words typically used to describe natural disasters and war, such as surge and tsunami, describe what we should expect. Concerns about declines in reporting and leaps to grim conclusions abound. …
 If we take a rational look at what we know, there is good cause to question the legitimacy of the alarmism. …

            Kelly also discusses another double standard:


Several commentators have pointed to the prevalence of parents joking about losing patience with children and restraining them or parents calming their nerves with adult beverages or substances—or even allowing kids to use them. These are deeply troubling images that mock lack of parental supports, resiliency, and protective capacity in times of deep stress, regardless of one's income level.
While there is value in discussing shared experiences and challenges, there is also a stark double standard on display. As parents with lived experience have told us in recent conversations, these are not jokes that poor parents and parents of color would ever feel safe making in public. They are statements that, even if made light heartedly, heighten scrutiny and the risk of separation in very real ways.

I particularly hope journalists will consider this:

 If confined to telling binary stories of heroes and villains, an objective view may reverse the roles. Who is the hero, the parent doing the best they can under circumstances more difficult than most of us will ever know or experience, or the folks writing about the likelihood they will fail or actually seek to harm their children?

I also hope they will take time to question their assumptions and see how all this looks in communities of color, as Kendra Hurley did in this excellent story for CityLab and Eli Hager did for The Marshall Project.