NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 10, 2025

● In Missouri: more good journalism about a bad system. This time, The Journal reports on a foundation-funded effort to curb the confusion of poverty with neglect. But the most interesting part of the story is the lengths to which the state’s family police agency is going to sabotage the project by fear-bombing the reforms. I have a blog post about it, with a link to the full story. 

● It’s a long, slow process but, The Marshall Project reports, states are beginning to consider laws to curb secret non-consensual drug testing of pregnant women. From the story: 

“We know when there’s secret drug testing, families are often torn apart,” said New York state Rep. Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat from Manhattan, who noted cases of women who were reported to child welfare over positive tests caused by poppy seeds and prescribed medications. “This is not some theoretical discussion we’re having here. This is really something that occurs.” 

● Following up on a superb series of stories in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Billy Penn reports on efforts by two members of the City Council to take action. One of them, Councilmember Cindy Bass, wants to refocus on the report of the Council’s Special Committee on Child Separations, which issued what I refer to as a comprehensive “Blueprint for Child Safety.” (NCCPR was represented on the committee.)  As the story explains: 

Grounded in interviews with families who experienced foster care, the committee’s first report determined that the city often defines conditions of poverty as “neglect” and needlessly separates families, who then receive insufficient support. 

●The Inquirer reports that another member of the Council, Nina Ahmad, held a hearing focusing largely on the private agencies that oversee most foster care in the city. But, unlike the Special Committee, this hearing apparently did not focus on the problem at the root of all the others, Philadelphia’s ongoing high rate of tearing apart families. 

The head of Philadelphia’s family police agency, Kimberly Ali, correctly noted that there has been real progress in reducing entries into care. But as of 2024, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, Philadelphia still was taking away children at the second highest rate among America’s largest cities. Meanwhile, the private agencies that oversee foster care in Philadelphia and have been the subject of repeated exposés for tolerating rampant abuse have a solution of their own: Make it harder for their victims to sue them! To her credit, Ali has rejected this idea. 

Now, three dispatches from the frontlines: 

● In Minnesota, The Imprint reports, Foster Advocates released a report 

… spearheaded and produced by former foster youth. It takes glaring aim at the “promise” the state makes when it removes a child from its parents and home — on the premise that the system can provide better care. 

“It is a promise the state struggles and, too often, fails to keep,” states the report. … 

Also from the story: 

Dez was taken from her birth mother at age 1 along with her sister, and spent four years in foster care before they were both adopted into a home, where she said they were physically and emotionally abused. … 

A woman identified as Deddtrease … entered foster care at the age of 14 and stayed until she aged out of the system. The 26-year-old single mom said the report highlights the “mistreatment and underlying problems that nobody sees that we have to live with for the rest of our lives.” 

In her case, “I wish they would have left me with my mother,” she said. “They exposed me to more trauma than what I was going through at home.” 

This excerpt from the report summarizes its many recommendations. 

● Also in The Imprint, a former Child Protective Services worker writes about gaining new insight about substance abuse – when it happened in her family. She writes: 

I am grateful that I was divorced and that my children lived with me, avoiding the immediate threat of child protective services (CPS) intervention. I shudder imagining the potential intrusion and added trauma of having to prove the ability to keep our children safe while grappling with the chaos of addiction. And as someone who was once a CPS worker and intervened in the lives of other families, I now ponder how CPS involvement compounded the stress level of families in need and destabilized them in an already overwhelming time. Many families I worked with had been affected by substance dependence and resulted in family upset and child removal. 

● And there’s this from The Observer, in Sacramento: 

Given how it has historically shown up in the African American community, the child welfare system has earned its critics. They point to a history of systemic racism and inequality that leads to a disproportionate number of Black children being removed from their homes and spending more time in foster care than children of other ethnicities. Some of the most outspoken detractors are former social workers, legal experts and adults who have been scarred by their experiences in the system. … 

Among those profiled: Malachi Chaney-McClain of California Youth Connection. From the story: 

When they did have a legit apartment, Chaney-McClain purposefully took the bed near a window. 

“If CPS came, I wanted to be able to jump out the window,” he recounts. “It was on the second floor and there were bushes. I wanted to be able to catch my sisters and to just not be taken anymore.” 

● The headline from this story in Reason sums up the breathtaking cruelty of authorities in this North Carolina case “A Car Hit and Killed Their 7-Year-Old Son. Now They're Being Charged for Letting Him Walk to the Store.” 

And finally, two items seemingly unrelated to child welfare – except that they are: 

● Immigration raids are, of course, a great way to spread misery by separating children from their families. CNN reports that when the Trump Administration staged its immigration raids in Los Angeles, once again tagging along was – Dr. Phil. You know what else separates children? Court-Appointed Special Advocates. Though the volunteers almost always mean well, massive studies show that CASA prolongs foster care, reduces the chances of reunification and makes it more likely that foster youth will “age out” with no home at all. So it’s somehow appropriate that a longtime celebrity spokesperson for CASA is – Dr. Phil. 

 ● Carole Cadwalladr, the journalist who exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal – in which the data of millions was harvested from Facebook and then weaponized without their consent, was interviewed last week by John Stewart on The Daily Show. She painted a truly frightening picture of what happens when government agencies are allowed to take all the data they have in separate databases, put it all together and use it any way they damn well please. Yeah, we all know it’s scary when Elon Musk does it. But the reason this item is here is because when it comes to this kind of massive, dangerous invasion of privacy the trendsetter is – child welfare. Yet initially, at least, most journalists not only weren’t alarmed by it, they applauded it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns of a "toxic combination of secrecy and bias."  You can read more about all about that here.