NCCPR in the Arizona Capitol Times: DCS is on probation; here’s how to fix it

The Arizona Legislature has, in effect, put the Department of Child Safety on probation, allowing it to continue to function for another four years instead of the customary eight  The decision is a healthy recognition that DCS, both in its current form and when it was a division of the Department of Economic Security, often does enormous harm to the children it is meant to help. 

But recognition is just step one. Lawmakers need to understand what created this mess and how to fix it.  The root of the problem is a fanatical drive to tear apart families that has plagued the state for decades. … 

Read the full column in the Arizona Capitol Times

And the winner of the Kentucky Irony Derby is …

The Kentucky Derby isn’t run until May 4.  But when it comes to the Kentucky Irony derby, we already have a winner! 

WDRB-TV in Louisville has a story with this headline: “Norton Children's opens new center combatting child abuse at the Home of the Innocents.”  For a split second, I thought: Wow! They’re putting in monitors to stop the child abuse at Home of the Innocents – abuse exposed in this story from the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. 

No such luck.  The new center is just another “counseling” and “parent education” program.  But hey, when your state supposedly is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than most, won’t anything help?  Except that is a myth, repeated over and over by those still wedded to promoting what’s been aptly called “health terrorism” in which horror stories and distorted data are used to stampede people away from real solutions.

Yes Minnesota DOES have the money to implement the African-American Family Preservation Act

“We don’t have enough money to stop being racist!”

Well, no, county family police agencies in Minnesota (where counties run these systems) didn’t say it in those words.  But in this excellent story from Minnesota Public Radio that’s essentially the argument put forth by county family policing agencies opposing a new version of the Minnesota African American Family Preservation Act. 

That is just more b.s. 

Just as Minnesota takes away children at a rate nearly double the national average, Minnesota spends on child welfare at a rate even more than double the national average. And yes, NCCPR has an index to document that, too.  

In its own depressing way, this makes sense: The great paradox of “child welfare” is that the worse the option for children the more it costs.  Safe, proven approaches to keeping families together cost less than family foster homes, which cost less than group homes, which cost less than institutions.  So stop wasting all that money on needless foster care and you’ll have all you need to stop being racist. 

And there is nothing terribly complicated about implementing the African American Family Preservation Act.  Contrary to what some counties apparently are saying, workers don’t need vast amounts of “training” to know that if the family lacks adequate food, clothing, shelter and/or child care, they should provide the food, clothing, shelter and/or child care – and it will cost less than foster care. 

The counties don’t lack the money. They lack the will. 

For more context on Minnesota, see this NCCPR opinion column in The Imprint.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 16, 2024

● CNN reports on how some hospitals finally are moving to put the needs of children first. They’re no longer as willing to automatically turn in to the family police anyone who’s pregnant but is using drugs – because doing that is the perfect way to scare new mothers away from prenatal care and giving birth in a hospital. 

● But the bad news continues in Maine, where demagoguery by a former public official and a current child welfare “ombudsman” continues to fuel foster-care panic.  Now, the Maine Monitor reports, children are trapped in foster care even longer before even getting a chance to be set free – because there are not enough attorneys for their parents. 

● Things are not as bad in Massachusetts – but the Boston Globe reports that, in a state that tears apart families at a rate 60% above the national average – and spends on “child welfare” at roughly the fourth highest rate in America, somehow lawmakers can’t come up with funding to maintain even a few highly-successful programs providing high-quality preventive legal services to families. 

● Speaking of foster-care panic, a well-meaning U.S. Senator has issued a report that may well kick a foster-care panic in Georgia into overdrive.  I have a column about it in the Georgia Recorder. 

● No state is worse than West Virginia, the child removal capital of America, where almost every Black child is born with a family police target on their back.  I have a column about it in West Virginia Watch. 

● But there's better news from Minnesota: another sign that not only Minnesota lawmakers but also media aren't going to let the Minneapolis Star Tribune stampede them into another foster-care panic. Minnesota Public Radio reports on the real problems in the system - the ones the Star Tribune seems to prefer to play down.  And I have a blog post on the latest excuse some Minnesota counties are offering up for not doing anything about it.

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● Family police agencies love to tout figures that, when they, in effect, investigate themselves they find very little abuse in foster care. Next time that happens, please keep this in mind: In Texas, the Texas Tribune reports, the family police agency is so willfully blind to such abuse that a federal court is fining the agency $100,000 – per day. [UPDATE: But an appeals court has stayed the fines until the Texas family police can appeal.]

In Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee reports that 

Sacramento city and county have paid a $300,000 settlement to the parents of an infant who died after he was allegedly wrongfully placed in foster care. 

And Honolulu Civil Beat reports that

The state has tentatively agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a lawsuit over the mysterious death of a 3-year-old boy in state foster custody in 2017 on the Big Island.

NCCPR in Georgia Recorder: Ossoff’s report could leave Georgia with the same lousy child welfare system – only bigger

As soon as Sen. Jon Ossoff released his report on massive failures at the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, DFCS fired back, accusing Ossoff of “political gamesmanship.” 

Actually, it’s worse.

There is every indication that Ossoff is sincere and genuinely wants to help vulnerable children. But that will only make it harder to persuade him that, because of a critical error in his analysis, his report may trigger a response that makes everything even worse. ...

Read the full commentary in the Georgia Recorder

NCCPR in West Virginia Watch: West Virginia: Child removal capital of America

I have followed the harm done to children by America’s child welfare systems for nearly half a century, first as a journalist, now as an advocate. In all that time I have never encountered a state so mind-bogglingly fanatical about tearing apart families that even foster care agencies think it’s too much – until now.

Yes, even agencies typically paid for each day they hold a child in care say West Virginia is taking away too many children. They’re right. Year after year, West Virginia is the child removal capital of America. ...

Read the full column in West Virginia Watch

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 10, 2024

● Last week, in a column for The Imprint, I wrote about how, though the journalism of child welfare is improving, some places are still promoting the big lie of American child welfare.  They scapegoat family preservation for child abuse deaths and encourage foster-care panic. I cited the Minneapolis Star Tribune as a prime example.  They’re doing it for the second time in a decade – but this time state legislators don’t seem to be buying it. 

More evidence that lawmakers are not being suckered came at a dramatic public hearing on a new, expanded version of the Minnesota African-American Family Preservation Act.  The Star Tribune didn’t cover the hearing.  Fortunately, The Imprint did.  

● In 2022, the worst foster-care panic took place in Louisiana.  I have a column about how that’s hurting the state’s children in the Louisiana Illuminator. 

● Typically, when I compare New York to Philadelphia, Philadelphia is on the losing end.  But this time, some New Yorkers want to cave in to threats from private foster care agencies, but Philadelphia won’t.  The issue is accountability, in the form of lawsuits against the agencies by children abused on their watch.  In New York, the agencies want taxpayers to fork over up to $200 million to bail them out – otherwise, they threaten to go out of business.  They seem to think that would be a bad thing.  Some New York lawmakers who don’t know any better are proposing to cave in.  

In Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, agencies sought a similar bailout.  But to her great credit, the head of Philadelphia’s “child welfare” agency, Kimberly Ali, said no.  Though it will cost her agency a lot in time and money, she refused to cave.  “What the provider wanted the city to do was pay to indemnify them for their own negligence,” she said, “and that is what the city was not going to do.” 

And the sky has not fallen.  In fact, a whole lot of other agencies are lining up to replace the quitters.

● Philadelphia isn’t the only place pulling ahead of New York in some ways.  In 2023, Texas passed a Family Miranda law – so families know their rights when the family police are at the door.  It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.  Andrew Brown of the Texas Public Policy Foundation was in Albany, explaining how it was done on Spectrum News Capital Tonight.  He was joined by Angela Olivia Burton, a leader of the fight to pass such legislation in New York.   

● One of the worst things family police agencies do to children is to take them away from domestic violence survivors because those survivors “allowed” the children to “witness domestic violence.”  Under these circumstances, the trauma of removal is compounded.  Now a Mississippi prosecutor is taking it a step further.  The Mississippi Free Press reports the prosecutor is trying to take away a mother’s children because, in effect, she allegedly allowed her 11-year-old to get in the way of a police officer’s bullet. 

● WBUR Public Radio has more on that significant change for the better in how the largest hospital system in Massachusetts is handling issues involving pregnancy and substance use. 

● Change also is coming to Washington, D.C., where the Washington Post reports on a guaranteed income pilot program aimed specifically at mothers under surveillance by the D.C. family police agency. 

● And the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the Missouri Legislature is coming closer to prohibiting the state from swiping foster children’s money. 

NCCPR in the Louisiana Illuminator: Louisiana children pay the price of foster care panic

Faced with one revelation after another about tragedies involving children previously known to the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services, that agency has come up with a knee-jerk response that is simple, obvious and wrong: a worst-in-the-nation mad rush to tear far more children away from their families. 

As a result, in 2022, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, while almost everywhere else in America recognized the enormous harm of needlessly sundering families and reduced entries into foster care, in Louisiana, they skyrocketed 23% over the previous year — the biggest percentage increase in the country. 

There is a term for it: foster care panic. … 

Read the full column in the Louisiana Illuminator

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 2, 2024

● WABE Public Radio in Atlanta and ProPublica have another story about children kept from their families for months, sometimes years, only because their parents can’t meet housing requirements vastly more stringent than anything necessary for health or safety.  

The story includes one small example of what passes for “thinking” in family policing: The closest thing to justification for this odious practice comes from a longtime juvenile court judge who says, well, if we send the children back too soon they might have to be placed again and that’s traumatic. 

As opposed to prolonging foster care and putting the children at greater risk of being moved from foster home to foster home – which, of course, is no problem at all.  

● Also in Georgia, Reason reports on the case of a family repeatedly harassed by police and child protective services because their seven-year-old stopped in at the local grocery store for a free cookie while walking about two blocks home from the YMCA, and also for a "flagrant act of unaccompanied bike riding."  The case illustrates the need for Georgia to join the other states that have passed "reasonable childhood independence" laws.

● Still in Georgia, WXIA-TV truly honors Child Abuse Awareness Month by reporting on families who say they were needlessly torn apart due to the actions of  “child abuse pediatricians.” 

● On this blog we have our annual reminder about why it really should be called Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month.  

● And the Associate Commissioner of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in charge of the Children's Bureau, Aysha Schomberg, reminds us that making sure families know their rights is, in fact, a crucial part of child abuse prevention. 

● The Georgia stories reflect how the journalism of child welfare is improving.  But some places are still promoting the big lie of American child welfare, and in the process encouraging foster-care panic.  I have some examples in this column for The Imprint. 

● There’s better news in Massachusetts. The Boston Globe reports that the largest hospital system in that state 

will no longer report suspected abuse or neglect to state child welfare officials solely because a baby is born exposed to drugs, targeting a practice hospital leaders say has long stoked fear in women in recovery from addiction. 

Sarah Wakeman, the system’s senior medical director for substance use disorder, explained what can happen without this change:

She recalled a patient roughly six years ago who had an opioid use disorder; because she feared being reported to DCF once she gave birth to her baby, she declined the medication offered to help her recovery. She later overdosed, Wakeman said, and “both she and the fetus died.” 

“I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than getting reported with the possibility of losing one of my babies,” said Wakeman, a mother of three. The current approach to reporting, she said, has had “a chilling effect on access to the most effective treatment we have for opioid use disorder.” 

● For journalists who want to do better, pediatrician and journalist ChrisAnna Mink writes about what she learned exploring the issue of children taken from survivors of domestic violence in this essay for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. 

● Think you know all about the harm the “troubled teen industry” does to kids?  There’s still plenty to shock the conscience.  You can hear some of it in this documentary from Reveal.

NCCPR in The Imprint: Foster Care Panic in Minnesota? Not So Fast; Legislators Don’t Seem Fooled by Recent Media Coverage

Former Illinois DCFS director Jess McDonald's "EKG chart"

More than 25 years ago, when he was running the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, Jess McDonald created what he called his “EKG chart.”  Resembling an electrocardiogram, it tracks huge spikes in the number of children caseworkers were tearing from their families immediately after stories about deaths of children “known to the system” are on newspaper front pages. 

McDonald was charting one of the nation’s early foster-care panics. Sometimes these panics are set off by misleading news coverage, sometimes by politicians. 

Most of the time, those who set off foster-care panics, like most who work in the system itself, mean well but don’t know any better. Less often, reporters sacrifice nuance for prizes — what legendary journalist David Simon calls “Pulitzer-sniffing.” 

But as our understanding of what should be called family policing has matured, things are starting to change. … 

Read the full column in The Imprint

If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

UPDATE, 2024: given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, expect the usual op-eds to have token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as these establishment groups propose making a profoundly racist family policing system even bigger and more powerful. 

Indeed, this year, the leading group of one time "health terrorists" (that's their own term!) Prevent Child Abuse America will be proclaiming its supposed interest in racial justice while campaigning to expand the so-called Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.  This horrible federal law laid the foundation for America's child welfare surveillance state, contributing to the trauma inflicted on millions of children.  You can read here about how awful this law, so beloved by PCAA really is.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , UPDATED APRIL 1, 2018, MARCH 31, 2020, AND MARCH 31, 2021, MARCH 27, 2024.

Back in 2003, one of the groups most responsible for fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse came remarkably close to admitting that they did just that – and that it had backfired. 

Rather like Dr. Frankenstein admitting he’d created a monster, in a 2003 Request for Proposals concerning how to improve their messaging, Prevent Child Abuse America wrote: 

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities. 

In 2020, PCAA went further. They actually branded what they had done “health terrorism” – but refused to apologize for it. 

This is especially worth remembering as we begin “Child Abuse Awareness Month” – a month, which, appropriately starts on April Fools Day. 

So I’ve reprinted below our 2010 blog post on the topic – with some updates and links to newer data – since, unfortunately, aside from those data, little has changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under control.

If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op-ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse. 

There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fool’s Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real nature of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op ed column follows a standard formula: 

1.  1. Take the most horrifying case to occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.

2.   2. Jump immediately from that story to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports" alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror story. Rather, they often involve the confusion of poverty with neglect. Or…

3.   3.  Use only the total number of cases that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed" giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on a form, far more credibility than they deserve. A major federal study found that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.

4.   4. Pile hype onto hype by reasserting the racist, discredited COVID-19 “pandemic of child abuse” myth.  (One hopes that, now that we know child abuse actually went down when COVID forced the family police to step back, they will knock it off, but that may be too optimistic.)

5.    5. Throw in huge lists of "symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be "signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number of other things.

6.     6. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of cautioning us about the harm of even well-meaning false reports and advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" actual maltreatment - not poverty -- the same standard theoretically used in law to guide "mandated reporters."  

      7. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity. 

All of this can do enormous harm to children.  

Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.  

Reality check 

NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions: 

·        -- Issue papers on Understanding Child Abuse Numbers and False Allegations: What the Data Really Show

·        -- Our Solutions pages, Doing Child Welfare Right and our Due Process Agenda.

·        -- Our presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health approach.

If the people behind "Child Abuse Awareness Month"  (also known as "Child Abuse Prevention Month") really want to prevent "child abuse" then how about campaigning to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.  

Poverty increases the stress that can lead to actual abuse and, as noted above, poverty itself often is confused with "neglect."  This can be seen by the fact that study after study shows even small increases in income significantly reduce what child welfare systems call "neglect."

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness" campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems even worse.

If only there were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 26, 2024

● Any family caught up in the politics of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Massachusetts “Child Advocate” Maria Mossaides is in for hell.  Neither was directly involved in a case in the news this week, but both did a lot to create the climate of fear that prolonged a five-year-old boy’s anguish.  The New York Times did a superb job telling the story.  I have a blog post about the lessons it teaches, with a link to the Times account. 

● Speaking of multi-state failure, Honolulu Civil Beat reports it turns out it took incompetence – or worse – in two states for Geanna Bradley to be taken from loving relatives and wind up in the foster home where she died, allegedly at the hands of her foster-parents-turned-legal-guardians. 

● There is somewhat happier news in Florida where, WFTS-TV reports, a mother whose children were wrongfully taken has gotten most of them back – though one child remains in Florida foster care. 

● Similar fights are ongoing everywhere, including North Carolina, where they are the topic of a documentary, To Be Invisible: 

I only found out about it, when I saw this from Prof. Dorothy Roberts:

I’m very excited to host this screening & discussion of TO BE INVISIBLE: A look inside the family policing system from the perspective of two impacted Black mothers and their children. Join us in Philly, April 12! https://t.co/ZiO8mdTFeJ

— Dorothy Roberts (@DorothyERoberts) March 21, 2024

● In Colorado, lawmakers wisely changed the law to reduce the number of cases in which doctors are required to turn in new mothers to the family police instead of giving them help.  But, the Denver Post reports, many medical personnel aren’t aware of the change. In the story, Dr. Kaylin Klie, a family practice and addiction medicine physician in Denver, explains some of what they need to know: 

Most doctors come from relatively privileged communities and struggle to understand that patients skip prenatal care because of fear their children will be taken away, Klie said. Children of color and those from low-income families are more likely to be part of an abuse investigation than white and more affluent children, according to nationwide data. 

While many people think babies and toddlers are too young to experience negative effects from being separated from their parents, taking them away puts extra stress on the brain in an important developmental window, she said. 

Parents “are making a reasonable choice to try to avoid detection unless we make a change, where labor and delivery units are seen as a safe haven,” she said. 

Making prenatal care a safe environment for people with substance use disorders also increases the odds that they will pursue medication treatment, which makes them more likely to succeed in quitting illicit opioids, Klie said. 

● Nothing sums up the problem of states swiping foster youth’s Social Security benefits better than this headline on a St. Louis Post Dispatch editorial urging lawmakers to stop the practice: 

Missouri legally steals from foster kids. Lawmakers can end it. Why haven't they?

The editorial continues: 

If Missouri’s elected representatives can’t get it together long enough to agree to stop stealing from the most vulnerable kids in society, what are they even doing in office? 

Fortunately, the Missouri Independent reports, prospects for passage now look pretty good. 

● At long last the federal government released foster-care data for 2022. It turns out a top candidate for the dubious distinction of foster-care capital of America is now – Vermont.  And that makes the bill discussed in this story from VT Digger a big step in the right direction. 

● One of the most common forms of so-called neglect is “lack of supervision.”  Children may be torn from their parents because the parents had to leave them alone since they couldn’t afford child care.  So what happens then? Rather than help the family with child care, the children are placed in foster care.  If the foster parents have to work, they may get special additional payments for childcare!  But in Kentucky, lawmakers decided that wasn’t enough coddling for foster parents.  Now, the Kentucky Lantern reports, they’ll be eligible for childcare aid even when they’re working remotely from home! 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions:

●KRQE-TV in Albuquerque reports on a lawsuit against the New Mexico family police agency and a private foster care agency.  The case concerns a young boy who was 

hospitalized for two months, during which he told doctors he had been physically and sexually abused by his foster parents. He told doctors they pulled his tongue and kicked him.

The claims were later substantiated by CYFD, according to the lawsuit. … [A lawyer for the child’s grandparents] said before the child was placed in foster care, his grandparents offered to take him in, and even underwent a home evaluation by CYFD personnel. “Why was this boy not placed with his grandparents when at least, theoretically, CYFD prioritizes family placements over non-family placements,” he said.

Profiles in cowardice: Terrified of demagogic politicians, family police agencies in two states prolong the agony of a five-year-old and his mother.

All of the love, compassion and common decency in this case came from people not employed by family police agencies.

Massachusetts "Child Advocate" Maria Mossaides was not involved in this
case. Had she been asked, she probably would have made the right call.
But, though it wasn't her intent, she's fomented a climate of fear
that helped prolong this child's agony. 

The New York Times published a deeply reported, deeply moving story Sunday about one immigrant mother’s desperate quest to find and reunite with her five-year-old son.  It is almost a miracle that she ultimately succeeded. 

Olga fled her abusive husband in Honduras, with her seven-year-old daughter.  Her son was cared for by his grandmother – until the husband took the child by force and also made his way to the United States. 

Olga settled with a relative in Florida.  The husband wound up in Massachusetts – and the boy, Ricardo, wound up in foster care – because the father was abusing him too. 

When Olga finally tracked Ricardo down, things should have been simple.  She was a fit parent with a steady job and a good home.  Massachusetts could have reunited mother and son immediately.  But then the ugly politics of two states got in the way. 

Climate of fear 

Let’s start with the ugliness in Massachusetts.  As the Times story explains, in that state 

the child protection system was at that very moment embroiled in a cross-border custody scandal. 

It involved a 5-year-old girl named Harmony Montgomery, a ward of the state whose father, a New Hampshire resident, had sought her custody. Abiding by its internal regulations, the Massachusetts [Department of Children and Families] asked New Hampshire to approve the move under a 62-year-old agreement called the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children. But the judge disagreed with this request, considering it an infringement on the father’s right to parent his child, and did not wait for New Hampshire to respond. 

The interstate compact was created primarily to govern cross-border foster care moves. Whether it applies to fit parents has been widely debated across the country, and high courts in at least a dozen states have said it does not. 

The National Association of Counsel for Children agrees. “Applying the compact to parents who simply live out of state, when there is no finding or even allegation of wrongdoing, is unconstitutional and harmful to children,” said Allison Green, its legal director. 

But in late 2019, two years after the Massachusetts judge awarded custody to Harmony Montgomery’s father, the authorities in New Hampshire revealed that the girl was missing and presumed to be dead. 

Her shadow hung over Ricardo’s case. Nobody in the Massachusetts child-welfare system wanted to take another potentially deadly risk involving the interstate compact. 

But that climate of fear didn’t create itself.  It’s been nurtured at every turn by the state’s foremost advocate for a take-the-child-and-run approach to “child welfare,” Maria Mossaides.  She runs the state’s “Office of the Child Advocate.”  Yes, the same Maria Mossaides whose own commission studying mandatory child abuse laws rebelled and refused to accept her recommendations after they realized she hadn’t told them the whole story about these laws and their consequences. 

Mossaides has taken every opportunity to exploit the tragic death of Harmony Montgomery to undermine efforts to keep families together – and even to try to effectively silence children in court.  (In fact, Harmony Montgomery almost certainly would be alive today had Massachusetts not rushed to take her from the one person in her life who truly loved her: her mother). 

Mossaides had no direct involvement in Ricardo’s case.  I suspect had she been asked even she would have urged that the family be reunited.  But, while it never was her intent to make things worse for Ricardo, or any child, she shares a lot of responsibility for the climate of fear in Massachusetts that prolonged this family’s agony and the agony of many others who have not caught the attention of the media.  Indeed, though Massachusetts media are doing a notably better job of covering these issues in general, year after year, they still give Mossaides a free pass. 

Florida fails, too 

With Massachusetts DCF too cowardly to do the right thing, they invoked the ICPC and sought direction from its equally execrable counterpart in Florida, also called the Department of Children and Families.  They too were too cowardly to do the right thing.  As the Times story explains: 

When Olga’s advocates phoned her caseworker’s supervisor, according to Nick Herbold, the boy’s first foster father, the woman told them: “Hey, we’re in Florida. She’s undocumented. There’s no concern about the home. There’s no concern about safety with the mother. It’s just the fact that politically we cannot sign off on it.” 

And where might that come from? Again, from the story: 

Asked whether it was now Florida’s policy to refuse custody based on immigration status, Miguel Nevarez, press secretary for the state’s Department of Children and Families, neither answered directly nor denied it. “Cases regarding one’s legal or illegal status wouldn’t exist if the federal government enforced our immigration laws,” he said. 

In Olga’s case, that line of thinking trickled down to South Florida from Tallahassee, where Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill last spring that he proudly called “the strongest anti-illegal-immigration legislation in the country.” 

The people who did the right thing 

The other key lesson in this story involves who did step up – time and time again.  

Had the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families set out to deliberately traumatize Ricardo,  it couldn’t have done better than it did, with decision after decision that would have undermined his stability.  He was saved from DCF’s lousy decisions by two truly extraordinary foster parents, his teachers and his school principal.  They showed the courage, tenacity and generosity that family police agencies in two states did not. 

Indeed, in the entire story, there is no hint of compassion, caring, or sacrifice from anyone within the family policing establishment.  Please think about that the next time anyone in that establishment blathers about children’s “well-being.” 

AFCARS report is out at last: At first glance, the numbers are encouraging

At long last the federal government has released state and national foster care statistics for the year ending September 30, 2022.  Yes, 2022.  Instead of being a year behind, as usual, this time they’re nearly a year-and-a-half behind. 

But for what it’s worth, it appears that, slowly but surely, the pressure on systems to stop tearing apart families needlessly is starting to make a real difference – with one crucial caveat: We don’t know how much of the decline in the latest figures is real and how much represents “diversion” into hidden foster care; entries which states supposedly don’t have to report.  (It’s not clear if they’re violating regulations the federal government won’t enforce or if the states actually have found a loophole.) 

But with that caveat: 

Officially reported entries into foster care over the course of Federal Fiscal Year 2022 reached the lowest level since the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) started counting in 1999.  But children still were torn from their homes 187,000 times.  That’s down 20,000 from FFY 2021.  It's a nearly 40% decline from the worst year on record, 2005, when children were taken more than 307,000 times.

The snapshot number of children in foster care on any given day, also declined, from 392,000 on Sept. 30, 2021 to 369,000 one year later. 

The report also includes some new caveats about methodology.  But the in-care numbers are sufficiently close to data gathered by The Imprint to suggest that, aside from the hidden foster care issue, the figures may be close to the mark. 

A preliminary look at the state-by-state data indicate, as expected, that most states saw fewer children taken away (again, assuming they were not simply sent to hidden foster care).  But children in Georgia and Louisiana were victims of foster-care panic - sharp sudden spikes in removals of children after high-profile child abuse deaths.  

This was not the result of explicit scapegoating of family preservation in either state.  Unfortunately, the rush to take away children has become the knee-jerk response to such tragedies - and, because foster-care panics further overload systems, they only make it likely that there will be more such tragedies.  There also was a tragic spike in removals in Maine - and that is due to demagoguery by public officials.

Fortunately, more and more places are starting to understand that when we curb needless foster care, children get safer!  Let’s keep the momentum going.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 19, 2024

It’s stories like this, from ProPublica, that make me glad someone invented the word “gobsmacked.”  If you drop everything and read it right now, you’ll thank me. No one excerpt does it justice, but here’s one that gives at least a hint: 

Had she considered or was she even aware of the cultural background of the birth family and child whom she was recommending permanently separating? (The case involved a baby girl of multiracial heritage.) Baird answered that babies have “never possessed” a cultural identity, and therefore are “not losing anything,” at their age, by being adopted. Although when such children grow up, she acknowledged, they might say to their now-adoptive parents, “Oh, I didn’t know we were related to the, you know, Pima tribe in northern California, or whatever the circumstances are.” 

"The Pima tribe is located in the Phoenix metropolitan area." 

There’s also a fascinating discussion of the internal disputes roiling the very prestigious and very influential Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect.  As that suggests, the story focuses on cases in Colorado – but it’s happening everywhere. 

● In California a bill would chip away at one of the most odious practices in family policing – tearing children from their mothers because those mothers are themselves victims of domestic violence.  The bill would make clear to “mandated reporters” that they are not required to report battered mothers to the family police.  (Yes, that should be obvious – but, in fact, it’s routine.)  

As the Orange County Register reports: 

With looming threats that they could lose their child, even temporarily, or be charged with child neglect, oftentimes domestic violence victims opt against reporting abuse, said Chris Negri, the associate director of public policy strategies at the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. (The coalition has signed on to support the bill.)  And abusers can use that threat — the fear that their children will be taken away — to coerce victims from reporting abuse, he said. 

“The current system is really counterproductive. It punishes survivors, and it encases them in this Catch-22,” said Negri. “We’re saying you have to leave, you have to get out of this situation so your child doesn’t witness a domestic violence situation, but if you do, your child might be taken away from you.” 

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” he said. 

● The Imprint reports on legislation in New York that would add new curbs to another odious practice of family policing: making some parents Upstate pay what should be called ransom to the state when their children are in foster care.  (To its credit, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services has already put a stop to it.) 

● But ACS still does a whole lot of other awful stuff. And though they say they’re doing it in the name of “children’s rights” and “child protection” the lawyers who actually represent New York City children in these cases disagree.  They write about it in City Limits, citing both the groundbreaking report from the NYC Family Policy Project discussed here, and the groundbreaking lawsuit against ACS from the Family Justice Law Center 

They write: 

[T]he aggressive and coercive tactics ACS employs to investigate, and the volume of children and families that it investigates, have created an apparatus that harms more children than it protects.

● And in AMNY, Eve Stotland of the New York Community Trust explains why they’re supporting the Family Justice Law Center suit. 

● There's some good news in Massachusetts, where, NBC10 Boston reports, a federal judge is allowing a lawsuit by parents whose young children were dragged out of their home in the middle of the night based on a false allegation from a hospital. 

In this week's edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions:

● Lawmakers in two states have responded to allegations of horrendous abuse in residential treatment centers with laws that sound good but do almost nothing. 

In Alaska, Mother Jones updates an expose of a residential treatment center where 

Despite the facility’s troubling track record of assaults, escapes, and improper use of seclusion, state officials have admitted what foster youth have long suspected: Foster children are warehoused at North Star when there’s nowhere else for them to go. 

So what do lawmakers propose to do about this? One bill would require a hearing within 72 hours of placement to determine if children really need to be there.  But, of course, everyone already knows they don’t need to be there, but there’s supposedly “nowhere else to go.”  But that’s because, for decades, Alaska has torn apart families, especially Native Alaskan families, at one of the highest rates in America – currently more than two-and-a-half times the national average! 

Another bill would require unannounced visits by state regulators – twice a year.  And each time they’d have to see at least half the children.  So, one visit per year per child?  And remember, because there’s supposedly “nowhere else to go,” officials have an enormous incentive to ignore any abuse they may see or anything an inmate – which is really the best term for those forced to live in these places – might tell them. 

● The response to Indianapolis Star revelations of abuses at RTCs in that state is, if anything, even more pathetic. Indiana takes away children at a rate that’s merely about 50% above the national average.  But fear not!  The same state authorities who investigated and ignored abuse of children under age 18 for all these years will now be authorized to investigate and ignore abuse of youth aged 18 to 21. 

Reading quotes from lawmakers bragging about this is offensive.  For those victimized, it must be like rubbing salt in their wounds.  And the Star, which did a good job exposing the problems, should know better than to pretend this means anything, just because some politicians praised their stories. 

● Remember all those revelations about horrors at a residential treatment center in Rhode Island? Remember how a gullible lawmaker was fooled by the scent of Pine-Sol?  Now, the Boston Globe reports, the state's Child Advocate was only partially fooled.  She still believes such places should exist - but at least she doesn't believe this one has cleaned up its act.  The Child Advocate said the institution's response 

minimizes the profound concerns raised and deflects attention away from those who this should truly be about, the children

● In New Jersey on the other hand, where New Brunswick Patch reports on a $25 million settlement for a victim of abuse in one foster home after another in the 1990s, they’ve done the one thing that makes it less likely that the same will happen today: They’ve significantly reduced the number of children they take away.  

● And in Augusta County, Va., WHSV-TV reports:

Jessica Duff, 44, of Raphine, pleaded guilty to child sexual abuse charges in Augusta Circuit Court and was sentenced to five years in prison. The victim of the abuse was Duff’s adopted daughter.

NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending March 12, 2024

● Last week, we noted a fascinating study by the NYC Family Policy Project revealing that New York State’s child abuse hotline screens out far fewer cases than the national average, inundating the localities that investigate the screened-in calls with false allegations, trivial cases and poverty-confused-with-neglect cases.  The Imprint has a good story on the report.  So does the New York Daily News And I have a blog post on the pathetic response from Jess Dannhauser, commissioner of New York City's Administration for Children's Services. (Be sure to see the response from the ACS flack at the end!)

● CNN has a story about the civil rights complaint brought by Children’s Rights and the Minneapolis NAACP against the family policing systems in Minnesota’s largest counties. 

● It doesn’t get as much attention at the pervasive racism but there is another group of families who automatically have targets on their backs.  The Guardian has been following that issue for years, and has an in-depth report from a state that’s notorious for this kind of discrimination: Oregon. 

● Many people, especially in New England, know at least part of the story of Harmony Montgomery.  She was taken from her mother in Massachusetts and placed with her father in New Hampshire.  Then she disappeared. Her father has been convicted of killing her.  The case has been exploited by the Massachusetts “Child Advocate” Maria Mosaides as she seeks to make the family police even more powerful and even effectively silence children in court. 

What Mossaides wants us all to forget is the one person who truly loved and cared about Harmony: The person no one would listen to; the person who was written off from the start: Crystal Sorey — Harmony’s mother.  Now, the Boston Globe reports, Sorey is getting ready to sue those who really let Harmony down. 

● And in The Hill, a call for radical change – from foster parents who write that such change should include: 

We should stop mandated reporting — doctors, teachers and social workers shouldn’t be acting as agents of the police. And we should discourage the use of child welfare hotlines, which all too often are used not for reporting real abuse but as means for harassment of a former intimate partner, a tenant or others. Keep reports confidential but not anonymous, and stop terrorizing already vulnerable children and parents, because this largely happens to poor people.

Is this guy the most helpless “child welfare” leader in America? His own comments suggest the answer is yes.

New York City Administration for Children's Services
Commissioner Jess Dannhauser

UPDATE: SEE ACS'S RESPONSE AT THE END OF THIS POST

Poor Jess Dannhauser.  The head of New York City’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, says he’s really, truly concerned (though apparently not much more) about all those families and children traumatized by needless investigations and strip-searches resulting from all those false allegations, trivial cases or cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.”

But sheesh, all that whining!  Over and over again he offers the same response: It’s not my fault!  That mean old state government makes us do it!  And yet, Dannhauser ignored the obvious solution.  That should make us wonder if he really just wants to keep things as they are. 

The latest example to emerge from Dannhauser’s whine cellar is a letter to the editor in the New York Daily News.  That newspaper published an excellent commentary from the city’s family defense providers calling on the City Council and/or the State Legislature to pass a “Family Miranda” law – requiring ACS to tell families their rights.  Because if you don’t know your rights, you don’t have your rights. 

Dannhauser (or some flack in the ACS p.r. department) wrote a letter to the editor that regurgitated his standard excuse.  He writes: 

Anyone can make a report to New York State’s child abuse hotline. If a call about a New York City child is accepted by the state, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is required by state law to respond to allegations and assess the safety of the child. ACS can’t choose which families to respond to but must, under law, respond to reports the state accepts. 

He continues: 

A Black child is seven times more likely than a white child to be in a report to the hotline. This is concerning. 

Let me interrupt here: just "concerning"? 

ACS can’t control calls made or reports accepted, 

Yes, you already said that. 

so we have been retraining mandated reporters on when to appropriately make a report and when, instead, they should connect the family to support. 

Because training is what you do when you don’t want to make real change. 

Here’s what Dannhauser never mentions.  Laws can be amended.  If he doesn’t want to be “required by state law” to do something, why doesn’t he go to the New York State Legislature and ask them to change the law? 

Perhaps if I say that more slowly ACS will understand: Ask. Them. To. Change. The. Law. 

Perhaps I need to say it louder: Ask. Them. To. Change. The. Law. 

The change would be simple: Authorize ACS and its county counterparts across the state to set up their own mechanisms to screen calls and decide if they need to be investigated. 

Of course, asking for such a change doesn’t mean he’ll get it.  But not asking guarantees he won’t.  So I figure there are three possible explanations: 

● It never occurred to him to ask.

● He’s asking but it’s top secret because he wants it to be a surprise and he hates spoilers.

● He likes things the way they are because they enable Maximum Feasible Buckpassing. 

I’m thinking it’s the third one. Because it so benefits both ACS and the state agency that runs the hotline, the Office of Children and Family Services.  That means it also benefits the mayor and the governor.  Here’s why: 

As things stand now, the state has an incentive to screen out fewer cases, since all those false reports become the localities’ problem.  The localities get to go full Dannhauser and say: It’s not our fault that we traumatized all these families with needless investigations and strip-searches, the state made us do it!  And both are in a position where it’s less likely they’ll wind up on the front page of the New York Post for wrongly screening something out.  In short, it works for everyone – except the children and families. 

Oh, and by the way: Nothing Dannhauser wrote in his letter is a reason not to pass family Miranda legislation.  On the contrary, if Dannhauser really believes that often his investigators shouldn’t be knocking on families’ doors at all, isn’t that more reason to make sure those families know their rights? 

The consequences were perfectly illustrated in a new report from the NYC Family Policy Project.  The report found that New York State screens out, proportionately, far fewer reports than the national average. 

As The Imprint reported: 

The report quotes several parents by first name. Cynthia said that as her CPS investigation dragged on, she couldn’t concentrate at work and eventually lost her job. Her 3-year-old daughter “was so nervous being interrogated by strangers so many times that she started behaving irregularly.” A mom identified as Ruth said she went through five years of “malicious calls,” leaving her anxious and depressed. 

“My daughter wet the bed for three years straight,” she stated. “There has to be some mechanism put in place so you’re not destroying families.” 

Among the report’s many great recommendations: 

“Enabling ACS and county agencies to have discretion to screen out reports” 

It’s not just Jess Dannhauser who needs to answer a question.  Reporters have published his don’t-blame-me-the-state-makes-us-do-it whine over and over.  Why has no reporter ever asked Dannhauser why Dannhauser doesn’t seem to have asked the Legislature to change the law?

UPDATE: I just had an interesting email exchange with an ACS flack:  Here it is, in full:

Kaufman, Marisa (ACS)	2:52 PM (6 minutes ago)

Hi Richard,

We saw your blog post today.  We are not asking you to make any changes.  We did want to be sure that you were aware that the Commissioner has asked for there to be a review and changes to the state laws related to the SCR. 

 

As an example, please see our testimony (attached) from the September 2023 Assembly hearing where at the top of page 4 he says, “ We believe that the State should conduct a full review and assessment of SCR practice and policies, as well as mandated reporter laws, and then take actions (legislative or otherwise) to address.”

 

In addition, in the Imprint article about the hearing it says:

 

At a public hearing last fall, the head of New York City’s children’s services agency, Jess Dannhauser, said state leaders should conduct a “full review and assessment” of the Statewide Central Register of Abuse and Maltreatment, including a potential overhaul of the relevant statutes.

“We cannot make sufficient progress within the current laws that were written over 50 years ago,” Dannhauser said.

Thanks,

Marisa Kaufman

ACS Division of External Affairs

AND HERE'S MY RESPONSE:

Richard Wexler	2:58 PM (3 minutes ago)
to Marisa

I am well aware of that.  Asking for "a full review and assessment" is like asking for "more study," which is another classic copout.  It is not the same thing as going to key legislative leaders and saying: Can you please introduce and pass a law that lets us screen reports.  Why won't you do that?