 |
| Among the year's highlights: This ad campaign from JMACforFamilies |
Instead of the usual highlights of the week, we look back at some of the best family preservation journalism and scholarship of 2022 – and a little from late 2021.
We start with three important books:
● First, Prof.
Dorothy Roberts’ definitive dissection of racism in family policing: Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System
Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.
There’s an excerpt from the book in Mother
Jones.
Prof. Roberts, who is a member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors, was also the subject of this profile in New York Magazine. It’s called Dorothy Roberts Tried to Warn Us: The legal scholar and sociologist wrote about the criminalization of pregnancy 25 years ago. Why didn’t more listen? Prof. Roberts wrote this Five Myths column for The Washington Post. And on public radio’s The Takeaway, she made host Melissa Harris-Perry gasp.
● The other vital book about family policing published this year is a novel. But Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers is no ordinary novel. Barack Obama included it on his list of favorite books of 2022. Some might say the novel depicts a dystopian future child welfare surveillance state. Dystopian yes – but it’s only 20 minutes into the future (10 if you live in Pittsburgh). As Kate Knibbs puts it in her review for Wired:
“This closeness to reality is what turns the book’s emotional gut punch into a full knockout wallop. A mother reading it doesn’t close the book, sigh, and think, Thank god the world’s not really like this. No, she closes it and knows she must be very careful.”Read it and you’ll find yourself thinking about it almost every time you read about how the system functions right now.
● The third book was published in late 2021. But in 2022, Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival &
Hope in an American City won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
Series:
● ProPublica and NBC News teamed up to examine
every stage in the family policing process, from the initial call by a “mandated
reporter” through termination of parental rights (or, as it should be called,
termination of children’s rights to their parents.) They found a system that, every step of the
way, does enormous harm to the children it was intended to help. Unfortunately, there is no “grand unifying
link,” No, wait, yes there is!
And, from ProPublica late in 2021: TANF as a child welfare slush fund.
● There also is a grand unifying link to this series
of stories in Honolulu Civil Beat exposing everything from “grab-and-go”
removals to the sham of court hearings in family policing cases.
● USA Today continued its
outstanding series of stories on the harm of family policing, with a particular
focus on Florida. This year’s story
is more evidence that the solution to the problems of journalism is more
journalism. Bad journalism by the Miami Herald set off a
foster-care panic in Florida. Now great journalism from USA
Today Network Florida reporters is exposing how much that has hurt
children. Combining heartbreaking personal stories with rigorous
data analysis, this year’s story is the
definitive story about the havoc caused when poverty is confused with
“neglect.”
● An earlier USA
Today Network Florida story dealt with the
trauma inflicted on children when they are taken from mothers whose only crime
is to have, themselves, been beaten.
This year, that was the topic of one
of two excellent stories from WPEC-TV in West Palm Beach. In
a second story, an overwhelmed grandmother seeks help from Florida’s
family police agency. The granddaughter, now a young adult, talks about
what that did to her family.
● The Western New England Law Review has a superb
summary of the research showing the enormous harm to children caused when
they are taken from domestic violence survivors. The article interweaves
compelling case examples and a mass of research. It also includes an
excellent discussion of the dynamics of domestic violence, what makes it hard
for a survivor to leave such a relationship (including the enormous role of
poverty) and what courts – and the rest of us – should be asking concerning
whether family policing agencies are genuinely making reasonable efforts to
help them, as federal law requires. Although it is specific to
Massachusetts, it applies everywhere. And it is only about one-fifth
the length of a typical law review article. For more on this topic
see NCCPR’s summary
of expert testimony.
● An entire journal devoted to the harm of family
policing made its debut in 2022. Check
out the Family Integrity and Justice Quarterly with issues on the harm of the so-called “Adoption and Safe Families Act,” the confusion of poverty with neglect, the need to invest in community and families and, most
recently, the most dangerous phrase in the family policing lexicon.
● The Columbia Journal of Race and Law published a second set of
papers from the Strengthened Bonds symposium including this
groundbreaking paper by Ashley Albert and Amy Mulzer. But read
it only if you are ready to reconsider everything you think you know about
adoption.
● In North Carolina, WBTV produced a series of reports documenting the
harm done to children and families by hidden foster care in that state. This isone of them:
● Though not a formal series, there was a surge in news coverage and commentary about the enormous harm done to children by ASFA. Here’s our grand unifying link.
● In The Imprint, Nora McCarthy, co-founder of the
New York City Family Policy Project and the former director of Rise has a series of columns on alternatives to family
policing.
● Though it was released in 2021, Season 2 of the This Land podcast remains the gold standard of
journalism for understanding the gold standard of child welfare legislation –
the Indian Child Welfare Act. And, of
course, what the podcast exposed took on new urgency in 2022, as the Supreme
Court heard a challenge to ICWA. See also this excellent take from The
Washington Post.
● Also related to ICWA: Every local newspaper in America
that had a so-called “boarding school” into which Native American children were
forced should do what the Everett Herald in Washington State has done
and done well: Tell the story.
From the Herald’s three-part
series:
There was no use running away, Harriette Shelton Dover recalled, when the Tulalip Indian School matron thrashed her with a horse whip from her neck to her ankles, swinging “as hard as she could.”
“Years later,” she said, “I found out that kind was also used in penitentiaries and outlawed. But it was used on us. And what were we doing? We were 9 years old and we were speaking our language.” …
From 1857 to 1932, thousands of Pacific Northwest children passed through a federally mandated school at Tulalip, about 30 miles north of Seattle, where students lived under a strict military regimen. Abuse was by design, to eradicate Native culture, at hundreds of similar schools across the nation.
Other news and commentary:
● In 12 minutes this superb story from CBS News Sunday Morning tells you everything about how “child welfare” really works. And
notice the "age restriction" warning placed on the video by YouTube.
In other words: what the family police agencies that are supposed to
"protect" children really do is so traumatic, children shouldn't see
it!
● In all the time I’ve followed child welfare – more than 45 years now – I’ve probably read hundreds of stories about foster children trapped in all sorts of hideous makeshift placements. But here’s what sets this year’s stories in The Philadelphia Inquirer apart. They got the solutions right. One of the stories summed it up this way:
Advocates say what’s needed now is to address the
short-term glitches while pursuing the long-term vision of supporting more
families at home — not backsliding into the era when congregate beds
were ample and eagerly filled by a system that saw removing and
institutionalizing kids as an easy fix. [Emphasis added].
That summary is in what reporter Samantha Melamed herself
called the “TL;DR
version.” But I hope you’ll resist the temptation and read the full
story.
● At last, a big, mainstream news organization wasn’t
suckered by the hype spewing forth from the evangelists for using “predictive
analytics” in family policing: Much of that dangerous hype has come from
Pittsburgh, where proponents hand-picked the people who would review their
plans. But look what the
Associated Press found when, at last, there was a truly independent evaluation:
According to new research from a Carnegie Mellon University team obtained exclusively by AP, Allegheny’s algorithm in its first years of operation showed a pattern of flagging a disproportionate number of Black children for a “mandatory” neglect investigation, when compared with white children. The independent researchers, who received data from the county, also found that social workers disagreed with the risk scores the algorithm produced about one-third of the time.
The story reveals something else; the character of Erin
Dalton, who led the push for using this kind of computerized racial profiling
in Pittsburgh and now runs the family policing agency there. Her
response to the potential for error boils down to: So what? Or as she told
AP:
“If it goes into court, then there’s attorneys on both sides and a judge,” Dalton said. “They have evidence, right?”
(If anyone still doesn’t know the answer to that, see the
Honolulu Civil Beat stories mentioned above.)
● Does anyone still believe the lie that
at least after taking the child (without so much as asking a judge first) there
at least has to be a hearing right after? Sure, that’s what most
state laws say. But, as Mother
Jones illustrates in this story,
the reality is that the free shot the family police have at any child can last
for weeks, sometimes months.
● The 74 reported that in
New York City alone “…between August 2019 and January 2022, city school
employees made over 13,750 false alarm reports to the state child abuse
hotline.” The story goes on to explain why that actually understates the
problem. As for the notion that the problem can be fixed with “more
training” here’s what one school social worker said her training was
like:
[T]he training sessions she has attended have begun by projecting the names and pictures of young people who have died by parental abuse, the social worker said, a tactic she considers “fear-mongering.”
● BuzzFeed News examined the enormous
harm to families when parents are wrongly placed on “central registries” of
alleged child abusers. A listing can shut parents out from the very jobs most
often open to low-income workers, driving their families further into the
poverty that often is confused with “neglect” in the first place. And,
because of who is disproportionately likely to be included in these
registries, the story is
aptly titled “The Black List.”
Community Legal Services of Philadelphia has filed a landmark lawsuit challenging the process by which people are placed on the registry in Pennsylvania. There’s a story in The Imprint. And here’s the CLS press release.
● Although
broadcast at the very end of 2021, this NPR story, on governments forcing
parents to pay ransom to
get their children back from foster care got results throughout the year as
several cities and states moved to curb the practice, and the federal government issued guidance recommending against it. (No, of course, they
don’t call it ransom, but when someone takes your child from you and
forces you to pay money to get the child back, any other term for the payment
is a euphemism.) But, as a follow-up story late this year makes clear, not everyone is getting the message. In North Carolina, for example, children can lose their parents forever for not paying ransom - even when the state forgets to send the ransom note.
● NPR and The Marshall Project also published a
follow-up to their groundbreaking stories about another
odious practice of family policing agencies: swiping foster youth’s Social
Security benefits.
● The Associated Press published an amazing story that, at least for now, doesn’t touch on family policing directly. But you can bet it will, as soon as one couple tries to play the bonding card. NCCPR has a blog post on key lessons from the case.
● In October, I was asked to list the most
important contributions to the field of family advocacy and family defense made
by Prof. Martin Guggenheim. The fact that he is a founder and president of
NCCPR didn’t even make my top five. As Kathleen Creamer put it in this story from The Imprint “No one has done more than Marty to move this
field towards justice — even when no one seemed to care about justice.”
Other reports and scholarship:
● The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights
Watch released this
outstanding, comprehensive report on the racial and class biases
that permeate family policing. The report includes this video:
● A bastion of the establishment, the American Bar Association passed a resolution that comes within an inch of calling for repeal of ASFA and other awful family policing laws. The Imprint has a story. Our own take is here.
● Another bastion of the child welfare establishment JAMA Pediatrics has called b.s. on the whole COVID-19 “pandemic of child abuse” myth. Their somewhat more formal title: “Child Physical Abuse Did Not Increase During the Pandemic.” Unfortunately, it’s a typical, overpriced journal article – but NCCPR’s comprehensive round-up debunking the myth is free.
● I was proud to serve on a special
committee of the Philadelphia City Council examining the child welfare system
in that city. Here’s our report.
There’s a story about the report in Billy
Penn. And, because many of the
recommendations apply statewide, in
the York Daily Record. My statement
about the report is on this blog here.
NCCPR commentary:
In addition to posts on this blog, NCCPR has been
published all over the country on local and national issues involving family
policing.
● Thanks to Greg Abbott, affluent white people are
discovering that even “CPS-lite” is enormously traumatic for children and
families. As NCCPR explains
in this column for The Imprint, for Black,
Brown, Native and poor white families it’s a whole lot worse. And in Youth
Today we wrote about Texas caseworkers who have given us a lesson in whose lives matter.
● Following up on the excellent reporting by the Philadelphia
Inquirer noted above, we wrote for the Inquirer about how
Philadelphia could stop warehousing children in makeshift placements.
● We also wrote about makeshift placements for Bridge
Michigan – in particular, how Michigan judges are passing the
buck for their own failures.
● CalMatters published NCCPR’s commentary on a massive
science-be-damned, ethically-questionable albeit well-meaning experiment on
overwhelmingly poor, nonwhite Californians.
Several columns dealt with the harm of “residential
treatment.”
● Colorado plans to spend two years and nearly $100,000
on a task force charged with trying to find out why children run away from
residential treatment. In Youth Today, we save the state a
little money and a lot of time.
● In
the CT Mirror we wrote about how, when an 11-year-old
girl was sexually assaulted at a “residential treatment center” the RTC said it
was the child’s fault!
● In the Lexington Herald-Leader we wrote
about how, amid all the handwringing over the deaths of two
young children the state had chosen to institutionalize, no one was asking the
most important question.
● Who gave a damn about Harmony
Montgomery? She’s a seven-year-old New Hampshire girl who and was feared dead
(fears since confirmed) NCCPR’s
commentary on the case for CommonWealth Magazine
is about how the one person who cared about Harmony is the person no one would
listen to: her mother.
● In Youth Today we came up with a simple formula to determine if a “child neglect” problem is
really a poverty problem.
● In The Imprint we explained why Safety Science is Good for Aviation, But in Child
Welfare, it Won’t Fly
● In Honolulu Civil Beat, we wrote about the need
to curb the state’s “grab-and-go” mentality when it comes to tearing apart children.
● That mentality is even worse in Missouri, where, as we noted in the Missouri Independent, the head of the state’s family policing agency
effectively admitted to routinely violating federal law requiring “reasonable
efforts” to keep families together.
● It is worst of all in Montana. In the Daily Montanan, we wrote about how much children are hurt by that state’s
status (tied with West Virginia) as the child removal capital of America.
● And on our website: As
the racial justice reckoning finally reaches family policing, one big
mainstream “child welfare” group after another has been trying to launder its
reputation – hoping we’ll forget all the harm they’ve done, as they co-opt the
rhetoric of reform in service to the status quo. NCCPR’s new
publication, “Child
Welfare” heads to the reputation laundry, includes a guide to how to recognize reputation
laundering, and what real change is all about.
