NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 20, 2022

The week-in-review post is a day early because, for the rest of the week I'll be publishing a series of posts about various family policing establishment groups'  recent attempts at reputation laundering.

● To the long ugly litany of family destruction at the hands of Florida’s family police add another revelation: allegations of blatant conflict-of-interest.  WFTS-TV reports on a federal lawsuit in which: 

dozens of relatives across four families accused employees within the state’s foster care system of fabricating evidence, hiding and withholding key information, creating false abuse allegations, or ignoring state and federal family laws so the system workers could keep children from being placed with biological relatives and, instead, place them with system-connected people seeking children of their own. [Emphasis added.] 

As one relative said of one of the children taken: 

“She’s a black child, raised in a white household and she’s going to find out that she was stolen and stolen from an excellent family,“ said great-aunt Leigh Crutch about the Williams’ daughter. 

“The system is a lie, that’s what it is,” the baby’s mom said. 

● It’s particularly hard for children in Florida to fight back for themselves.  Last month, we wrote about efforts by the Massachusetts “Child Advocate” to effectively silence children in court by denying them a lawyer who would advocate for the outcome they want.  In Florida, most children don’t have that right – and the state’s CASA program is fighting to make sure it stays that way. Even some foster parents can’t stomach it. 

● And before we leave Florida: we have a blog post about how, thanks to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Another journalist discovers the “secret bombing” of families by CPS – when the shrapnel reaches into the white middle-class. 

● “Upstream.” It’s the latest buzzword in child welfare.  But as Nora McCarthy, co-founder of the Family Policy Project, explains in The Imprint, if it’s not done right, “upstream” can have a downside. 

● The upEND Movement has a new publication: Help is NOT on the Way: How Family Policing Perpetuates State Directed Terror. And upEND’s co-director, Alan Detlaff, dean of the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston, writes about the complicity of the social work profession and the need to End Carceral Social Work. 

● The Imprint reports on a pioneering program in Washington State to keep newborns with their mothers – by providing legal help to the mothers so the family police don’t confiscate the infants at birth. 

● The Hechinger Report has a story about still another study telling us that “Easing the stress of poverty can bring down rates of child abuse and neglect.”