● 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.
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● 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:
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.
