● How many different ways can the family police harm children in the name of “protecting” them? USA Today has part of the answer in a remarkable series of stories about one family.
● In this extraordinary story from the Maine Monitor about how Maine has become an extreme outlier in tearing apart families, the head of the Maine family police agency lists the reasons. You know what’s not on the list? Child abuse. Instead, she makes comments that amount to an admission that her agency regularly violates the federal law requiring “reasonable efforts” to keep families together.
● Meanwhile in New Mexico, the number of children torn from their families shot up 40% in a single year. I have a column in the Albuquerque Journal about the harm this is doing to the state’s vulnerable children.
● What should be called the Charles Murray faction of the extreme right is offering up a collection of half-truths, straw men, and statistics abuse on the matter of child welfare. I have a blog post about how, when it comes to race, class and child welfare, the American Enterprise Institute is getting it all wrong again.
● One of the things the Charles Murray wing on the right (and, sadly some on the Left) hate is any proposal to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. (Their argument – and I’m not kidding about this – is: Sure, anonymous reports are almost always false, but other categories of reporters have a record that’s almost as bad!) So the take-the-child-and-run crowd will probably be unhappy to read this story from The Imprint about how the New York State Legislature has passed a bill that would, in fact, replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. (We’ll have to see if Gov. Kathy Hochul is ready to stand up to the child welfare establishment fearmongering and sign it.)
● Another characteristic of some in the Charles Murray wing is denigrating the lived experience of foster youth. But that’s not stopping those young people from speaking out, and it’s not stopping the rest of us from listening. Last week’s roundup noted a comprehensive report issued by foster youth in Minnesota. Now, in Los Angeles, The Imprint reports, some current and former foster youth have produced a documentary about the harm done by the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medications.
● When you’re accused of child abuse, or if your poverty is confused with neglect, you are guilty until proven innocent. But in many states, even proving innocence isn’t necessarily enough to get you off a state’s blacklist of alleged child abusers. Through the ordeal of one family. WKRG-TV in Mobile shows how it hurts children in Alabama.
● In a testament to the tragic times in which we live, Vivek Sankaran and Betsy Fisher write in The Imprint about the steps child welfare agencies need to take - right now - to cushion the blow for children if their parents are deported. That includes making sure the separation itself, or the fact that the parents now live in a poorer country, isn't used to justify terminating their children's rights to them forever.
● Oregon Public Broadcasting profiles a young woman who suffered terribly when she was shipped out-of-state by the Oregon family police. Now she’s worried it will happen again if the legislature passes a bill, discussed in detail here, to make it easier to send young people away. She’s right to be worried.
But the story also has the same glaring failings of
virtually every OPB story: It serves as de-facto flackery for Oregon’s
Senator Soundbite, Sara Gelser Bloun, whose own policy failures and demagoguery
did a lot to worsen the problems in the first place, and it ignores the main
reason Oregon ships kids out of state every few years, and puts them in other
terrible places: taking away so many kids needlessly in the first place.
