NCCPR in the New York Daily News: How the Daily News changed NYC’s child welfare

A half century ago today, child welfare reform began when the Daily News stunned the city with the first installment of a six-part series about the system by reporters William Heffernan and Stewart Ain, headlined “Big Money, Little Victims.”

Then as now, New York City has a harmful child welfare system. While foster care has declined, children still are taken needlessly. And a massive child-welfare surveillance state remains, with children still tormented by needless investigations and stripsearches, often when family poverty is confused with neglect. The time wasted on these cases is stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger. 

But the New York City system also does far less harm than its counterparts almost everywhere else, and it is far less harmful than it used to be. ACS now tears apart families at half the rate of Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Phoenix. 

Many organizations and visionary leaders contributed to this transformation, and continue to fight the system’s ongoing harm. But a good case can be made that the progress began 50 years ago this week with a stunning work of journalism. …

Read the full commentary in the Daily News

That Washington State law on clergy as mandatory reporters is not anti-Catholic – it’s anti-CHILD

● The Trump Administration launches a ludicrous "investigation" of a bad law.

● The real harm of this law: Impoverished parents in Washington State now have one less place to turn without risking being turned in to the family police because their poverty was confused with  “neglect.” 

Laws requiring clergy to report the slightest suspicion of child abuse or neglect are common – unfortunately. Laws requiring priests to report the slightest suspicion of abuse or neglect even when they hear about it in confession are less common but at least seven states have had them for some time – unfortunately. 

But two things have made the latest such law, in Washington State, the subject of national attention: 1. Local media hype, led by a local reporter who’s been, pardon the expression, crusading for it for years, writing stories that shut out any meaningful dissent. (Now he has something he can put on the “What did the stories accomplish?” line on awards entries forms.) And 2. the Trump Administration, which, presumably, saw the publicity and a chance to pander to its conservative base.  

So the Trump Justice Department is launching an “investigation,” calling the new law “anti-Catholic.” That’s likely to come as news to groups such as the Catholic Accountability Project and Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests which, mistakenly in my view, but sincerely, supported the new law. In case you didn’t know this Trump Justice Department: Chances are, most of the members of these groups are Catholics. 

No, the new law isn’t anti-Catholic. But it sure is anti-child. It’s one more example of a feel-good press-release-worthy law that ignores a huge pile of research and is almost certain to backfire. 

For starters, any law that expands mandatory reporting in any way is anti-child, because mandatory reporting backfires. It drives families away from seeking help, and overloads the system with false reports, making it harder to find the relatively few children in real danger.  That’s why so many one-time proponents of mandatory reporting have had second thoughts. 

But instead of heeding the research and replacing mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, in which professionals are free to exercise their professional judgment, Washington State lawmakers opted to careen full-speed backwards. 

The reason expanding mandatory reporting to clergy has support in some quarters is obvious: What comes to mind when you hear the words clergy and child abuse?  Priests raping altar boys – and bishops covering up the crimes. When Gov. Mike Ferguson (who, by the way is a Catholic) responded to the investigation he said “We look forward to protecting Washington kids from sexual abuse in the face of this 'investigation' from the Trump Administration." 

But the new law expanding mandatory reporting will do nothing to protect kids from sexual abuse. Pedophile priests either will stop confessing or go to a church where their voices won’t be recognized. 

It also can harm survivors, who sometimes first disclose their abuse in confession. Consider what a survivor group said in Australia, where pedophilia scandals have led to similar campaigns to end the exemption for the confessional: 

“The Seal offers victims a safe, secure and watertight place where they can be listened to without cost, where they can remain anonymous, and can decide what they’re ready, and not ready, to share – and all of this in complete confidence,” spokesman James Parker said. 

“The Confessional Seal as it presently stands literally saves lives and offers every abuse victim the chance to begin to heal.” 

But that’s only the beginning of the harm. Neither Ferguson nor anyone else supporting this law seems to have given a moment’s thought to the fact that in Washington State 93% of cases in which a child is placed in foster care don’t involve even an allegation of sexual abuse. In nearly nine times more cases the allegation is “neglect” which often means poverty – and clergy now have to report those, too. 

Now consider some hypotheticals about who is far more likely to be reported than a pedophile priest: 

● A mother is terrified.  She’s being beaten by her husband.  But when she threatened to go to the police he said: “Go ahead, call the cops! They’ll just call child protective services and they’ll take away the kids.”  She turns to her priest/minister/rabbi/imam and says: “Please help me to escape.  Where can I turn to protect myself and my children?” 

The clergyman replies: “I’m so sorry.  I’m now a mandated reporter and you may have allowed your child to “witness domestic violence” if he saw or heard you being beaten. So I have to call child protective services. 

● A single mother enters the confessional:  “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned,” she says. She says she’s guilt-ridden for having left her child home alone when she went to work and her regular childcare arrangement fell through.  She didn’t know what else to do. Her boss said he’d fire her if she didn’t show up; then she wouldn’t be able to afford the rent and the family would be evicted.  

After the priest prescribes the appropriate acts of contrition, the mother asks a question:  Might the priest know someone in the congregation who could volunteer to provide childcare if this ever happened again?  “As a matter of fact, I do,” the priest replies.  “But it’s too late to do only that.  You see, I am now a mandated reporter of child abuse.  What you did can be considered ‘lack of supervision.’  So I have to report you to child protective services” 

As it stands now, clergy are among the only helpers to whom impoverished families can turn with less fear that they will be turned in to a family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency).  Once the word gets around that even the confessional isn’t safe, you can bet that parents like those in these hypotheticals won’t come forward and ask for help.  Children at risk from pedophile clergy won’t get any safer – and children whose families' “crime” is poverty will be cut off from a potential source of support. 

Of course, it’s not a crime for lawmakers to rush into enacting bad policy that doesn’t have a prayer of stopping child abuse. But it sure seems like a sin.

NCCPR in the Missouri Independent: Hailey’s story illustrates Missouri’s failure — doing too little to preserve families

The Missouri Children’s Division has accomplished something most of us would have thought impossible: They got all sides in the debate over abortion to agree. 

They agree about Hailey, the young mother profiled in an outstanding story in The Independent. They agree that the behavior of the Children’s Division in surveilling, harassing, traumatizing and sometimes tearing apart Hailey’s loving family was, in the words of State Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, “really horrifying.” 

Over and over Hailey’s great-aunt, Jodi Spradley, overcame one obstacle after another to craft a fragile safety net first for Hailey and then for her infant as well.  Over and over the Children’s Division tore that safety net apart. The issue was never abuse, it was poverty – often housing. 

As Kelley Fong, professor and author of the landmark study Investigating Families said: 

“[I]t’s really striking that rather than provide her with what she needs to provide a stable home for mom and baby, the response is just to separate everyone. That is extremely traumatic for the new mom, for the baby, for everyone involved.” 

Yes, it’s horrifying. But here’s something more horrifying: A change in leadership at the Children’s Division means it’s likely to get worse. … 

Read the full column in the Missouri Independent

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 6, 2025

● The Missouri Independent has published a powerful story on what it means to confuse poverty with neglect. It is a story about a family that through enormous will and determination, marshaled meager resources to weave a safety net – only to have the family police come in, over and over, and rip it apart. It is a story as beautifully written as it is scrupulously reported. 

● Still, as this follow-up story makes clear, you’ve got to give the Missouri family police agency credit for this much: They united all sides in the abortion debate – everyone thinks the behavior of the family police agency in this case stinks. The story also includes NCCPR’s perspective and that of Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark study Investigating Families. 

● The confusion of poverty with neglect – and the first tentative steps to try to do something about it – also is the theme of this excellent story from the Maine Monitor. 

● When you swing a budget ax wildly and hit almost everything, occasionally you’ll strike something that deserves to be cut. That raises the question in this NCCPR Blog post: A whole lot of research shows that the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program, the most sacred cow in child welfare, does harm. So do facts matter? Or does wallowing in a warm, fuzzy narrative about overwhelmingly white, middle-class amateurs saving overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children matter more? 

● The Imprint looks at the kind of slash-and-burn Trump budget-cutting that really will hurt children and increase the risk that the family police will become part of their lives: cuts to Project Head Start. 

● Last week we highlighted a superb story from the New York City online news site THE CITY on the enormous harm of mandatory child abuse reporting laws. One item toward the end of that story was intriguing – it hinted that there may be a rebellion among the rank-and-file at New York’s celebrity-studded “child advocacy center.” I have a blog post about why that would be a very good thing. 

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

● From The Oregonian: 

The state will pay $3 million to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of two children who were sexually abused while in foster care after caseworkers placed a teenage boy with a documented history of sexual misconduct into the home, according to a negotiated agreement.

In the hope that facts really do matter, some hard facts about CASA

When you swing an ax madly and chop down virtually everything,
once in a while you’ll hit something that really should be cut

A whole lot of research shows that the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program, the most sacred cow in child welfare, does harm. So do facts matter? Or does wallowing in a warm, fuzzy narrative about overwhelmingly white, middle-class amateurs saving overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children matter more?

Links to all of the research cited in this post can be found here.

A ProPublica story aptly calls what’s happening now “The Trump Administration’s War on Children”:

The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. …  Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1… 

That doesn’t include more general proposed slashing and burning, such as cutting housing assistance, health care, and SNAP benefits with more on the horizon. 

But when you swing an ax madly and chop down virtually everything, once in a while you’ll hit something that really should be cut. And so one cut should be cause for celebration: The Administration is trying to cut $48.9 million in grants to the National CASA Association. The Association “sets standards” for hundreds of Court-Appointed Special Advocates programs and passes on some of that federal funding to some of them. 

Almost immediately, local reporters started churning out hand-wringing stories about how horrible this would be – because, obviously CASA is so wonderful, right? 

So while I don’t suppose this will do much good, I’m going to cling to the notion that facts matter and point out a simple fact concerning what abundant research tells us about Court-Appointed Special Advocates. 

Research tells us CASA doesn’t work. In fact, it documents how CASA does harm. 

CASA is a program in which overwhelmingly white middle-class amateurs, almost always well-intentioned, are given 30 hours of training (sometimes 40) and then sent off into the homes of overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families to pass judgment upon them. 

Technically, they make recommendations, but National CASA brags about how often the recommendations are rubber-stamped by judges. So a bunch of white middle-class amateurs often effectively decide if overwhelmingly impoverished disproportionately nonwhite children will be taken from their homes or, if already taken, will ever get to live with their own families again. What could possibly go wrong? 

The answer to that can be found in research: 

No matter how warm and fuzzy the program makes the volunteers (and the reporters who cover it) feel, study after study shows CASA is a failure.  

The research tells us that CASA’s only real “accomplishments” are: 

● Prolonging foster care.

● Making it less likely families will reunify.

● Making it less likely children will achieve permanence through guardianship with a relative.

● Making it more likely children will age out with no home at all.

● Spending less time on a case when the child is Black.

● Doing nothing to make children safer. 

No wonder one law review article calls CASA “an act of white supremacy.” 

Could it be that the researchers were biased – and out to get CASA? On the contrary, these findings come from studies commissioned by National CASA and Texas CASA, and another done by a former CASA in the program she evaluated. 

Does every study come out this way on every measure? No. But the largest and most rigorous do.  Indeed, when researchers conducted a review of the literature seeking to find out if CASA is an evidence-based program, their answer was clear: No. 

Again, links to the studies are here. 

On the extremely rare occasions when anyone at CASA is asked about this mass of research, the program seeks to divert attention from those findings by pointing to other things it does, such as providing emotional support and mentoring for foster youth, and advocating to get them the services they need. Some CASA chapters also engage in intensive efforts to find extended family to take in children so they don't have to be in foster care with strangers. Those are fine things to do – and if CASA were willing to limit itself to doing only things like that, it would be making a useful contribution. It’s when the overwhelmingly white middle-class amateurs effectively become judge, jury and, sometimes, family executioner for overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families that they do vastly more harm than good. 

A classic example is CASA’s new program to help young people aging out of foster care. That’s a great thing to do. But wouldn’t it be better if CASA didn’t make it more likely that those children would age out in the first place? 

And yet, none of this information makes its way into all those local news stories. In most cases, CASA propaganda simply has been repeated so often that reporters don’t think to question it. But that’s not good enough. 

All over America news organizations rally behind the slogan “facts matter.” Do they? Or do feel-good myths matter more?

Child welfare in New York City: Rebellion on the horizon?

THE CITY's outstanding examination of
"mandatory reporting" (And in case anyone doubts
that "child welfare" agencies like New York's 
Administration for Children's Services are 
"family police" - take a look at that car.)

This week the New York City online news site THE CITY published one of the best dissections I’ve ever read concerning the enormous harm of “mandatory reporting” laws. Those are the laws that require workers in scores of professions to report their slightest suspicion of “abuse” or “neglect” to family police agencies.  I included excerpts from THE CITY’s story in our weekly news round-up. 

Now, however, I want to focus on one part of the story that may be of particular interest to advocates in New York City.  It concerns an organization called Safe Horizon which, as the story points out 

runs both the city’s domestic abuse hotline and its child advocacy centers, where children who may be victims of sexual and severe physical abuse are interviewed by detectives, pediatricians and child protective investigators. 

The domestic abuse hotline is separate from the child abuse hotline which is run by New York State. Child advocacy centers can do a lot of good. But they, and their trade association, also often do a lot of harm.  Here’s a case in point.  Another example: Their role at the epicenter of promoting the pandemic of fear concerning child abuse and COVID-19. 

In light of the track record of some of these centers in general and the history of Safe Horizon in particular. what might be a bit of a rebellion on the part of the rank-and-file is striking. 

First some context: 

Of all those who suffer from mandatory reporting laws, those who suffer most might be survivors of domestic violence and their children. The trauma inflicted on children by needless investigation and removal is even worse in such cases than in others. That’s why it’s actually illegal in New York to tear a child from a mother whose only “crime” is to have “allowed” the child to see her being beaten. 

Of course, just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s stopped. And another lawsuit is challenging the other ways in which the city harasses domestic violence survivors.  

Most tragically, all this stops survivors from coming forward – because of the sadly reasonable fear that seeking help will lead to their children being taken. (When we get to the history section, we’ll have a case in point.) So at a bare minimum, people who work with survivors should be allowed to exercise their professional judgment in determining when to report and when not to report. Incredibly, Safe Horizon seems to have no confidence in its own staff to do just that.  And that brings us to … 

… something that sounds like a rebellion 

As THE CITY reports: 

At [a New York State Assembly] hearing on mandated reporting in 2023, Megha Sardana, a representative from Safe Horizon … testified that she and many of her colleagues experience the mandate to report as a barrier to trust that  “prevents us from really providing that support and access to healing for families.” 

“We have staff who describe the wounds that they experience as mandated reporters as moral injury and that they carry these stories with them for years and even decades later and are haunted by the calls that they have made to the [State Central Register],” she added. 

During the question-and-answer period, Sardana felt so strongly that she went rogue, veering from Safe Horizon’s official policies to state: “If I’m answering as an individual rather than as a representative of Safe Horizon, I don’t think mandated reporting can be reformed. I believe that it should be abolished.” 

She added that other Safe Horizon employees had discussed asking for an exemption from mandated reporting from the state for people working with domestic violence victims — a request that top Safe Horizon leadership made clear in an interview with THE CITY they were not making at this time. [Emphasis added.] 

To understand Safe Hrizon’s apparent distrust of its own staff, we need to delve into … 

… the history 

I first became aware of Safe Horizon in early 2006. I was in New York City a few months after the death of Nixzmary Brown, a tragedy that set off a huge, media-fueled foster-care panic. In fact, you couldn’t not be aware of Safe Horizon then. In the wake of Nixznary’s death, they plastered the city’s busses and subways with ads like this one, featuring Mariska Hargitay, star of Law and Order SVU. 

A major way Safe Horizon suggested turning your outrage and grief into action was by donating to Safe Horizon. At the time their website had four different “donate” links (including the Hargitay image) before you got halfway down the homepage. 

Click on Hargitay’s image and, along with the pitch for money, you got to this claim: 

More than 50,000 cases of abuse and neglect are reported each year in New York City. 

In fact, the 50,000 figure was the number of calls alleging some form of “abuse and neglect” referred from the state hotline to the city family police agency for investigation.  The overwhelming majority were false, and the overwhelming majority of the rest were “neglect” which often means poverty. 

Safe Horizon is not much more subtle today – referring to seven million children who “come to the attention” of family police agencies nationwide – a figure that is, in fact, the total number of calls received by child abuse “hotlines.” Of that seven million roughly two percent turn out to be cases in which a caseworker checked a box on the form indicating it was at least slightly more likely than not that physical or sexual abuse occurred. 

The scare number is followed by a list of “Signs of Child Abuse” that includes almost every possible negative change in a child’s behavior.  The website describes these as “common” signs of abuse. There is not even the usual boilerplate note of caution that these could be  “signs” of anything other than child abuse. 

The Fairstein Factor 

Linda Fairstein

In addition to Hargitay, back in 2006, the Safe Horizon website featured an endorsement from Linda Fairstein, who called Safe Horizon 

the organization that does more than any other to help New Yorkers feel safe in their homes and in the community. 

Does that name seem vaguely familiar? Perhaps it's because Fairstein was the prosecutor in the notorious case of the Exonerated Five. Fairstein remained on the board of Safe Horizon for 17 years after the five were exonerated and her own role came under scrutiny.  Although the Safe Horizon website includes a list of board members “emeriti,” Fairstein isn’t included. 

And how does this all play out in the lives of domestic violence survivors? Remember that domestic violence hotline? Mother Jones describes what happened after Angeline Montauban called it: 

While her partner and their 2-year-old son slept, Montauban retreated to the bathroom with her cellphone. She dialed the number of Safe Horizon, a domestic abuse hotline whose services include counseling and relocation assistance she had seen advertised in subway stations for years. Montauban had just experienced violence at the hands of her partner that made her fear for her life. Trying to stay as quiet as possible, she was looking for help to break a cycle of toxic behavior. Maybe Safe Horizon could refer them to couples therapy or find transitional housing for her and her son as they worked things out. 

It didn’t work out that way. Montauban was turned in to the family police. She waged a five-year fight to get her son back from foster care. As Mother Jones reported, “She never regretted anything more in her life than making that call to Safe Horizon.” 

Perhaps had Safe Horizon workers been allowed to exercise their professional judgment concerning whether or not to report it would have been different. But they can’t – and it seems their own management doesn’t trust them enough to seek to change that. 

No wonder a senior staffer at Safe Horizon “went rogue.” Perhaps more will follow.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 29

● Think you know all about the controversy over “mandatory reporting” laws that require most professionals dealing with children to report their slightest suspicion of “abuse” or “neglect” to the family police? This story, from the New York City online news site THE CITY, adds a whole new dimension of depth and nuance. For example: why the all-purpose cop-out non-solution solution of “more training” does so little good: 

Mandated reporters who spoke with THE CITY said that throughout their careers, they were routinely warned that not reporting a parent could lead to the loss of their professional license or worse, adding that that culture of fear drives many professionals working with children to report parents, even when they have misgivings about the impact that their call might have on a family. 

“Doctors, social workers, teachers often have crippling debt and cannot afford to lose their license,” said Matthew Holm, a pediatrician working in the Bronx. “Even if loss of licensure happens only one time, there’s a huge amount of fear.” 

Some reporters acknowledged that at times, the threat of a call to the hotline had been helpful in getting parents to make changes. As professionals on the frontlines, they said, they know that some children do need to be protected from their parents. 

What they don’t believe is that it helps children for the professionals who know them best to be forced to defer their judgment to hotline operators or investigators, some fresh out of college, who approach the issue from a prosecutorial, evidence-gathering position. … 

Frivolous reports can also terrorize families. One doctor interviewed by THE CITY described an incident in which a patient’s mother was reported by a teacher, who had mistaken a rash for a bruise. That led to investigators strip-searching the child’s body and aggressively questioning the mother in front of her child, leaving the mother in tears. 

● Similarly, adding some kind of alternative number mandated reporters can call to, in theory, direct support to families, such as the plan described here, won’t do much good if calling that number just leads to investigations by another name or if it doesn’t also make reporters immune from penalties for failure to report. 

● At the root of almost every problem in “child welfare” is poverty. So if the federal government is hell-bent on doing everything in its power to make poverty worse, the potential consequences should be obvious. But that’s what happening. ProPublica reports on “The Trump Administration’s War on Children." 

●At the same time, these devastating cuts can’t become an excuse to tear apart more families. But that sounds like what the head of New Jersey’s family police agency (an agency that has made enormous progress in recent years) is trying to do. New Jersey Spotlight News reports that 

potential federal funding cuts that could cost New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families more than $100 million, Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer told state lawmakers last week. 

A reduction of this magnitude would force the department to “revert to its most basic role — that of child protection — not prevention, not support or empowerment, just surveillance and foster care,” Norbut Beyer told members of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee during a hearing on the department’s $2.3 billion budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins July 1. 

Yes, $100 million would be a big cut, but it’s only about 4.5% of the agency’s budget.  Even if that turns out to be the final figure and even if the state makes up none of it, it should be possible to find places to cut without wiping out everything except surveilling and tearing apart families. 

● Of course if you swing an ax wildly and cut everything, you’re bound to make the occasional cut that does some good. So we should, in fact, rejoice, that, as The Imprint reports, federal funding to the National CASA Association has been eliminated, at least for now. CASA is both the most sacred cow in child welfare and one of its most harmful programs. Massive studies document that its effects include prolonging foster care and making it more likely that foster youth will “age out” with no home at all. 

This does not mean the end of CASA, just a funding cut to its national office.  And already, local reporters, unfamiliar with the research, are churning out hand-wringing stories about how awful it would be if their local CASA program was curbed. On the contrary, it would be an improvement. 

● New Mexico’s attorney general has announced plans to “investigate” the state’s family police agency – but not for taking away children needlessly. I have a column in Source NM on how he’s stacked the deck from the get-go. 

● Speaking of steps backward, The Imprint reports that a mid-level appeals court in New York has upheld a state plan to allow what amounts to sugar-frosted foster care. The vote was 3-2, and opponents plan to appeal. The story ends with a quote from Judge Stan Pritzker’s dissent: 

“Respondents’ refrain that the intent of the regulations ‘is not and will not be to create a new form of foster care’ will fall deafly on the ears of a child placed outside of their home with strangers. Not only do the Host Family Home regulations lack legislative mandate, they dispense with the hard-fought, constitutionally grounded due process rights of children who have no say as to their fate, no counsel, no permanency hearings, no judicial oversight at all and are trapped in an administrative mousetrap with no way out. What could possibly go wrong?” 

● In The Imprint a former foster youth, Martha Bul, writes: 

When I was with my dad, I went to school and became number one in my first-grade class. After my dad found out that I was number one in class, he put me in a private Catholic school. 

When I went to foster care, a foster care worker falsely labeled me as some kid who was mentally disabled and sent me to be locked up in a mental facility. While in the mental institution, I was not allowed to go to school or question anything. If I asked why I was in a mental facility when I did not have a mental illness, and why I was not allowed to be in school, they would throw me on the ground, restrain me, and stick me with needles that had drugs in them to sedate me. This is inhumane. This type of treatment is slavery. One can tell that these are exactly some of the ways that our ancestors were treated in the historical slavery days…. 

Ms. Bul suggests a system of compensation for young people who endured what she went through. Another term for that might be “reparations.” 

● The terror doesn’t end with the foster care. Also in The Imprint Kristen Nicole Powell, a young mother who spent years in foster care writes: 

One fear has haunted me since the day I became a parent: losing my kids to the child welfare system. For someone like me who grew up feeling tossed around by systems that were supposed to help, the thought of my children being taken away feels like my worst nightmare. Even simple situations, like my kid getting hurt at the park, scare me. I know it’s normal for kids to get hurt, and I know I shouldn’t be scared because I’m not doing anything wrong, but that fear lingers anyway. It’s always there, whispering in the back of my mind, reminding me of the moments when systems stepped in and caused more harm than good. It’s a fear I carry with me every day, and there have been moments when it felt dangerously close to coming true. 

Tragically, the fear is rational – because various risk assessment protocols raise the “risk score” of anyone who is accused of abuse or neglect, just because they themselves had been placed in foster care. 

● The Missouri Independent reports on a great big bill full of mostly small changes to the state child welfare system – most of them modest improvements. The bill would stop the state from stealing foster children’s Social Security benefits, add a “reasonable childhood independence” exception to the definition of neglect, modestly enhance a “family Miranda” provision in existing law, and set in motion a process that might someday mean that children age 14 and older would get an actual lawyer fighting for what they want. On the other hand, the bill also seems to encourage institutionalizing more children.

● The Imprint reports on efforts to strengthen Colorado’s version of the Indian Child Welfare Act. It’s one of three states where such efforts are underway. 

Updates to previous stories: 

● The Washington Post has more about the Texas parents whose child was wrongly taken baed on a report by a doctor who didn’t even name the right person as the mother. They got their child back, but they’re stuck in central registry limbo. 

● Blavity has more on that study of bias in the New York City family police system. 

● The Maine Morning Star reports that a legislative committee is supporting a bill to make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect – well, a little harder.  The committee refused to support the version with some teeth in it, and went for the one even the family police agency supports – so you know the effect will be limited. 

● This update is more of a a 50-years-later story: On the 50^th Anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, The Verge looks at what “operation babylift” was really all about. It was about what it’s so often about in “child welfare”: white saviors enacting their rescue fantasies on children of color. The Vietnamese knew it. From the story: 

A South Vietnamese lieutenant gave this bitter statement to the New York Times: “It is nice to see you Americans bringing home souvenirs of our country as you leave — china elephants and orphans. Too bad some of them broke … but we have plenty more.” 

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

● The Post-Tribune in Indiana has an update on the story of a little boy taken from relatives because they refused to say “how high” when the family police agency said “jump” – only to die in foster care.

NCCPR in Source NM: Torrez’s CYFD investigation will fail if it leaves people out

A child welfare expert weighs in on latest effort to reform NM’s foster system

 New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez says he’s going to launch “a comprehensive and wide-ranging investigation” into how the Children, Youth and Families Department fails children. Allow me to save him some time. I can just write the report now — and I’ll throw in the news story that will follow. The story will go like this: 

The beleaguered Children Youth and Families Department and its embattled leadership are plagued with a shortage of foster parents and high turnover among demoralized, overworked and understaffed caseworkers, according to the blistering conclusions in a scathing report released today. 

We know this is what the report will say for a couple of reasons. First, almost (but not quite) all of that is true. Indeed CYFD’s performance is every bit as awful as Torrez says it is. Second, it’s what scathing reports on embattled child welfare agencies all over the country always say, particularly when those issuing the reports show no interest in real solutions. … 

Read the full commentary in Source NM

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 22

 

● Kansas has its own special, ugly little version of hidden foster care. I have a blog post on How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.” 

● Indiana has a law limiting the number of cases family police are supposed to carry – at least it has one for now. WRTV Indianapolis reports on efforts by some lawmakers to sneak repeal of those limits into the state budget – including NCCPR’s perspective on how it all traces back to Indiana’s obscene rate of tearing apart families. 

● Gotthamist and Black Enterprise both have stories on a new report about racial bias in the New York City family policing system. 

● It’s not just New York City, of course. KERA Public Radio and  The 19^th each have stories on Black Texas parents whose child was wrongly torn from them at birth. Now reunited, the family is still trying to fight its way out of what amounts to a child abuse registry Twilight Zone.

● Even as a white middle-class foster parent who doubles as a state legislator in the Child Removal Capital of America, West Virginia, tries to weaken laws protecting the rights of siblings to stay together in foster care, The Imprint reports on a national group founded by those with actual lived experience, that works to strengthen those protections. 

● For children and families who are survivors of sibling separation and all the other harms of family policing, Imani Worthy, co-founder and executive director of Black Failies Love and Unite has a column in The Imprint about what reparations should look like. 

● Here’s something you don’t see every day – in fact hardly ever: a child welfare “ombudsman” who recognizes that agencies make terrible errors in all directions. But Virginia’s ombudsman gets it. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on a “blistering” report by the ombudsman which finds that workers often make decisions “in arbitrary ways with little planning or thought.” 

Among other findings, the story notes, the report echoed concerns of other advocates that decisions sometimes 

-- can be more about the convenience of social service department staff than a child’s needs;
-- do not take account of earlier problems that put a child at risk;
-- result from personality conflicts with parents;
-- are based on hasty judgment calls about parents;
-- and can reflect unsubstantiated worries about children’s safety. 

It’s quite a contrast to the willful blindness of ombuds / “child advocates” in, for example, Maine and Massachusetts. 

● Speaking of Massachusetts, the Legislature there did the right thing when it slightly curbed the number of different conditions mandated reporters are mandated to report. But even that was too much for the state family police agency – which is trying to overrule state law with a regulation.  I have a blog post about the Department of Children and Family’s great big “DCF-U!” to the legislature. 

● Florida Politics reports that Florida is the latest state to introduce Reasonable Childhood Independence legislation. 

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

● From Searchlight New Mexico: 

Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, 16-year-old Jaydun Garcia took his own life at a makeshift home for youth who lack foster placements.  Jaydun’s family included four brothers and a baby sister. He was very close to his siblings, those who knew him said, and a close friend to many kids in foster care. 

“He was always building us up, like helping us all,” said Jacie, a friend of Jaydun’s who lived with him for months in the Albuquerque office building of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, where case workers have often housed kids who don’t have foster homes available to them. … 

And finally … 

● Columbia Journalism Review has a fascinating interview with “Alec Karakatsanis on the Media’s Role in Spreading ‘Copaganda’  So what is an interview about covering the police doing in a list of stories about family policing? Well, you don’t have to change the wording much to see the similarity.  Just change a sentence like this: 

[W]hen you report as an objective fact that there’s a shortage of  prison guards foster parents as opposed to too many people in prison too many children in foster care, you’re actually taking a side in a very consequential political debate.

Mass. family police try an end-run around the State Legislature on child welfare and drug use

But don’t worry, the “cannamoms” will still be safe

The Massachusetts family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, recently solicited comment (presumably only because they had to) on a proposed change to regulations defining child abuse. The change is an attempt to get around a wise decision by the State Legislature.

Indeed, it is entirely consistent with the way DCF helped the Massachusetts “Child Advocate” try to sucker a special commission into recommending all sorts of expansion of mandatory reporting. The commission wasn’t fooled. 

Neither was the legislature. They actually passed a good change which, ever so slightly, narrows the long list of conditions mandatory reporters must report.  But DCF isn’t having that!  They’re trying an end-run by changing regulations. 

It all amounts to a great big DCF-U! to the State Legislature.  Let's see if the lawmakers tolerate it.

Here’s the comment I sent to DCF: 

[Your proposed change] contradicts best practice, contradicts the evidence base concerning substance use and child welfare – and flouts the intent of the Legislature. 

The Legislature recently changed state law so mandated reporters no longer must automatically report any instance of “prenatal substance exposure.” They remain free to report it when, in their professional judgment, they believe such a report is necessary to protect a child. This is a clear recognition that this knee-jerk response of automatically reporting every such instance did nothing to improve child safety. On the contrary, it compromised safety by driving pregnant women away from prenatal care and hospital delivery. 

Rather than respect best evidence-based practice and the intent of lawmakers, you now propose to change regulations defining what constitutes “physical injury” – which of course is something mandated reporters have to report. 

Right now, that definition includes “addiction to drug at birth.” That’s bad enough. But your proposal would change the definition so that physical injury includes “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use.” What does that mean? Presumably whatever you want it to mean. (I’m guessing the groups you have in mind are those against whom DCF always comes down hardest: Poor people, especially poor people of color.  I doubt that it means you’ll be going after the “harmful patterns of substance use” displayed by the celebrated Cannamoms of Massachusetts’ affluent suburbs.) 

Here’s what this would mean for mandated reporters: Under state law mandated reporters don’t have to report “prenatal substance exposure.” But under the new proposed regulation, they would have to report “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use” – which, presumably would include “prenatal substance exposure.” 

In short, DCF seeks to overrule the Massachusetts Legislature. It is a classic example of the arrogance that leads Massachusetts to tear apart families at a rate 60%above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. And there certainly is no evidence that Massachusetts children are 60% safer than the national average. 

It is in keeping with the decades-long habit of DCF, and before that DSS, and before that DPW of failing to balance the potential harm of parental substance use (or any other alleged parental failing) against the known severe harm of tearing children from everyone they know and love – and the known risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find far higher rates of abuse than your agency acknowledges in official figures. 

For all of these reasons, and most importantly, for the safety of the children DCF claims it wants to protect, this proposed change should be rescinded.

How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.”

Even the Wizard of Oz couldn’t do that. But at last, we’re getting a peek behind the curtain. 

Seventeen years after we first raised the issue, an ugly little practice that leads to hundreds of needless foster care placements in Kansas every year finally is getting some attention – though far from all of the attention it deserves. 

The Kansas Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill that may slightly reduce the number of times this practice is invoked – but it still allows the family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, to keep such placements “off the books” – so no one will know how many children really are taken from their homes in Kansas each year. 

The practice is known as placing children in “police protective custody.” It’s a special Kansas twist on the ugly practice of “hidden foster care.” What Kansas allows is so awful that it earns the state a special note in the narrative for the NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index. 

After decades, it appears that DCF finally has leadership that is concerned about the practice and how it leads to the needless removal of children. They supported the modest reforms.  But they’re still sticking to the disingenuous claim that these placements are not foster care. 

Why are police protective custody placements not foster care? Because, DCF says, they’re police protective custody placements, that’s why! 

And no wonder: 

In a foster care placement, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

In a police protective custody placement, on the other hand, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

See the difference?  

Well, actually there is that one difference. When the police take the child (hence the term “police protective custody”) and the child is returned home at or before the first court hearing – which can be as much as six days later – DCF pretends it never happened!  In other words, when Kansas tells the public, and the federal government, how many children were torn from their homes and placed elsewhere by force of law, they don’t count police protective custody placements. 

How many such placements are there? No one knows for sure, but apparently quite a lot – so many that it can take the rate of removal in Kansas from outrageous all the way to obscene. Even worse, it appears that a significant proportion of these placements involve dumping children into the worst, most traumatic form of placement of all – institutionalizing them in parking place “shelters.”   

Officially, in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, Kansas consigned 3,096 children to the chaos of foster care – that made the rate of removal in Kansas well over double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. (DCF gives a lower figure for 2024, but the number nationwide also probably has declined, so it’s unlikely Kansas’ relative position has changed.)

But in March, DCF finally released some figures on police protective custody placements. While not precise, they suggest that anywhere from 979 to 1,076 children were taken into police protective custody and then “thrown back” – much the worse for the experience – before the first hearing, and so would never be counted in official figures.  (A link to DCF’s figures and an explanation of the estimate can be found at the end of this post. If anyone wants to suggest an alternative figure, I’d be glad to take a look.) 

National Average   Kansas1         Kansas2

1=Rate-of-removal based on officially acknowledged entries.
2=Rate-of-removal based on likely real number of entries (including 979 PPC placements)

Using the low-end estimate, that would mean Kansas really took away 4,075 children in 2022. That would make the rate of removal in Kansas more than triple the national average and the fourth highest in the country. 

The practice goes back a long way 

We first discovered the practice in 2007, while working on our report about Kansas child welfare. We discovered it when it was referenced in passing in an op-ed column written by the public official who, then as now, might be Kansas’ foremost proponent of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. That would be Ron Paschal, then as now the deputy district attorney in charge of the Juvenile Division in Sedgwick County (metropolitan Wichita). His op-ed hinted that the number was huge, but offered no specifics. 

Just as in 2007, the most extreme use of police protective custody placements is still in the Wichita area. In that region, it appears that more than half of all entries into care were police protective custody cases in which the children were returned to family within six days. 

The excuse for hiding all these placements 

Although DCF has more concern about these placements now than it did in 2007, it still uses the same excuse now as then for failing to report them as entries to the public or to the federal government: It’s not foster care because DCF doesn’t have custody of the children – the police do. In other words: Sure, they’re in exactly the same places and subject to exactly the same control as if DCF had them, but hey, so what? That’s our technicality and we’re sticking to it! 

At best DCF is exploiting a loophole in federal regulations concerning what must be reported as an entry into foster care, at worst they may not be following those regulations. 

Those regulations do not say a child has to be in the custody of a given agency to be counted as in foster care.  Rather, the state family police agency must have “responsibility for placement and care of the child.”  In the case of Kansas police protective custody placements, children may be placed in foster homes group homes or institutions that are licensed and overseen by DCF. That sure sounds like responsibility for placement and care.  But, in fairness to DCF, when we asked the federal Administration for Children and Families about this in 2007, they were just fine with letting Kansas do this and looking the other way. That may be in part because if Kansas doesn’t call a case foster care, the federal government doesn’t have to pick up part of the tab for that case. 

So maybe DCF can get away with it legally – ethically it’s a shameful misrepresentation of the full scope of the extent to which Kansas destroys families.

Six-day placements are almost never necessary 

The new data also tell us something else: In nearly 1,000 cases – and maybe more – a Kansas law enforcement officer decided that something was happening to a child that was so awful it required tearing that child from everyone she or he knows and loves and throwing that child in with strangers – at worst dumping them into an institution. And yet, that child could be returned, typically to the home from which she or he was taken, within six days. 

A sadistic, brutal parent out to beat and torture a child does not suddenly reform in six days.  Neither does a parent who’s been deliberately starving a child. In these sorts of extremely rare cases, the problem is not likely to be remedied in six days.  Where the danger is not severe and immediate, odds are there are things that can be done without taking away the child. Here’s a good example, from next door in Missouri, of a police officer who understands that.  

But Ron Paschal doesn’t understand that. In legislative testimony, he cited horrible situations supposedly requiring police protective custody, and declared in written testimony that when the child then is returned home from this supposedly impossibly horrible situation within six days “THIS IS AN INDICATION THAT [POLICE PROTECTIVE CUSTODY] WAS SUCCESSFUL.” (Capitals in original(!)) 

That’s like saying that kidnapping a child does the child no harm, and even declaring success, if the child is rescued in a few days.  I think most people – especially the children in question – would consider it far better not to be kidnapped in the first place.  And make no mistake, particularly for a young child, the trauma is every bit as great as a kidnapping – no matter how “short” the time in foster care – oops, sorry, I mean “police protective custody.” 

If anything, Paschal suggests Kansas still isn’t tearing apart enough families.  He cites claims that child abuse is underreported, and the fact that his position has popular support – as evidenced by viewer comments on a television station website. 

This is a longstanding belief on Paschal’s part. You can read more about him in NCCPR’s 2007 report on Kansas child welfare. 

One other thing about police protective custody placements. They don’t always end with a return to the birth parents. Sometimes they end with an informal arrangement to place the child in the home of a relative – in other words, the classic version of hidden foster care. So Kansas’ special version of hidden foster care – police protective custody placements – probably increases the number of classically hidden placements. 

______________

How we estimated the number of unreported foster care entries in Kansas. 

In written testimony to the Kansas Legislature, Deputy DCF Secretary Tanya Keys includes several tables on Page 5. One of those tables puts the total number of Police Protective Custody (PPC) placements in 2024 at 2,509.  Another table states that of all the children Kansas officially admits they put in foster care in 2024, 1,433 of them started off as PPC placements. So if 1,433 out of 2,509 PPC placements ultimately became officially recognized foster-care placements, that leaves 1,076 that did not. That would be 1,076 children taken from their families but never officially counted as foster care placements. 

But the number might not be that high. In an email, Keys explained that's because the 1,433 figure is actually an estimate, extrapolating from various data sources. (By the way, however much I disagree with the agency, Keys sure works hard – she answered my emails on a Sunday night.) 

But there’s an alternative, simpler way to estimate: The Kansas Reflector reports that during a legislative hearing 

Keys said, the Kansas Department of Corrections reported 39% of children dropped off at juvenile facilities last fiscal year by law enforcement officers across the state were subsequently released to a family member. 

“Forty percent of those children are returned to a parent or relative. That’s their placement outcome after a juvenile intake an assessment worker is alongside that family,” Keys said. 

That would be 979, and that more conservative figure is the one I’ve used to estimate the real rate of removal in Kansas.