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Images by chatGPT, (with thanks for the caption to Andrew Brown of the
Texas Public Policy Foundation whose op-ed in The Hill used it as the headline.) |
A brief
preface for any journalists who may be reading this:
OK, all you
reporters and editors, admit it: You’ve gotten the calls or the long emails
from parents insisting that the child protective services agency that took their
children lied. But they can’t see you
when you roll your eyes and think: Yeah, right. After all, the CPS workers are
hard-working, underpaid, mostly well-motivated, white-collar professionals –
just the sort of people reporters can identify with.
That person who
sent the long email – the one that runs two pages with no paragraph breaks –
well, they’re probably child abusers, right? They conjure up images of the
worst case you’ve ever covered. So why check out what they have to say?
When you read
about the visit supervisor who called out her own colleagues for lying – and
who was pressured to lie herself – you may wish to reconsider.
The context: child
abuse pediatricians
It’s become a
staple of investigative journalism: Every few months, some news organization
exposes the horrors inflicted on children and families by some child abuse
pediatricians – the doctors who are supposed to find child abuse where it is –
but sometimes also find child abuse where it isn’t.
There was the stunning series by Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News
and more stories by Hixenbaugh and Keri
Blakinger, then with the Houston Chronicle. There are
the stories from Wisconsin Watch,
the Anchorage Daily News
and even excellent reporting from The Alligator,
the student newspaper at the University of Florida, all dealing with the same
child abuse pediatrician who kept getting run out of one job after another. Then
there’s this story from Illinois,
and this story from Texas,
and these stories from Georgia.
And of course, there was the reporting from the Sarasota Herald Tribune
on the case that was the subject of the documentary Take
Care of Maya.
The most recent stories,
from ProPublica, co-published with Minnesota-based APM Reports, add some new
elements to consider.
● They zero in on
the extent to which child abuse pediatrics appears to be a closed club, a small
group that constantly reinforces each other, tolerates no dissent and demands
absolute deference. (Indeed, some child abuse pediatricians have suggested
publicly that other doctors should stop doing so much thinking!)
● The stories show
how the harm caused by this culture can extend far beyond the harm done to
families directly affected by their blunders.
● The stories illustrate
the extent to which child protective services agencies can be complicit.
● And the stories
illustrate a couple of embarrassing failures by a big local newspaper.
At the center of
all of it is Dr. Nancy Harper, the child abuse pediatrician who leads a team at
the University of Minnesota’s Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy
Children. The bill of particulars alleged concerning Harper is much like those
concerning the child abuse pediatricians in all those other stories: An
unwavering belief in the validity of “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” a refusal to
consider any other explanation for injuries, running roughshod over anyone,
including colleagues who disagree and leaving a trail of despair for children
and families needlessly separated.
As one of the
ProPublica stories notes:
[T]wo federal
lawsuits filed recently accuse Harper of ignoring or even concealing
alternative explanations for children’s injuries. And, more broadly, medical
and legal experts are increasingly questioning a leading child abuse diagnosis,
shaken baby syndrome, which is also known as abusive head trauma.
But this may be the
scariest thing of all about Dr. Harper: As the ProPublica story puts it:
By Harper’s own
estimation, she’s never been wrong.
When the family
police are complicit
The role of the
family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) in
Hennepin County, Minnesota, itself is aptly illustrated by a case discussed
toward the end of one of the stories:
In this case, a
child had multiple bruises and fractures. No one called to report the parents,
they saw the bruises, they were alarmed, they brought the child to the
hospital. Harper immediately said: child abuse. Not only did authorities take
the child on the spot, the county attorney immediately filed for termination of
parental rights.
Here’s what
happened next:
The baby was
placed in foster care with a woman who worked as a nurse. … While in the care
of the foster parent, the baby developed new bruises and Harper evaluated him
again.
Instead of
considering that her diagnosis might be wrong – and remember, Dr. Harper says
she’s never wrong.
A new abuse
investigation was opened against the foster parent, and [the child] was moved
to a second foster family — in this case, a pediatrician and her husband. Once
again, the baby developed new bruises, according to his visitation supervisor.
So would Harper
change her mind now? No way! Instead, she said maybe those bruises
weren’t really bruises.
But prosecutors
came up with something even more outlandish: They alleged the parents were
finding a way to abuse their son clandestinely during visits – even though all
visits were supervised by a professional whose job is – to observe visits.
And here’s where
the whole issue of lying comes in. The visit supervisor
provided a sworn
affidavit saying that she did not witness any abusive behavior from the
parents, and that she’d become so stressed in part from the pressure to say she
had witnessed abuse that she asked to be taken off the case. She also wrote
that CPS workers were lying to and about the couple, claiming that the foster
parents spoke Spanish, which they did not, and that [the Spanish-speaking
parents] were unreliable about keeping visitation appointments.
“The parents
attended every visit. They never cancelled,” the supervisor wrote. “Even when
their tire popped on the way to their first supervised visitations, they got an
Uber and were only about five minutes late.”
The collateral
damage
The other key
figure in the main ProPublica story is another pediatrician, and one with a
distinguished record in his own right. Dr. Bazak Sharon could be difficult with
his colleagues, but was notable for his compassion for his patients and their
families. He was also the one and only doctor in Minnesota, and one of the few
in the nation, who was an expert at treating a rare, traumatic childhood
condition known by the acronyms PANS or PANDAS.
But when Dr. Sharon
dared to challenge Harper, and especially when he put his concerns in writing
(which can be really embarrassing if there are ever, you know, lawsuits) – he
was forced to resign. That reduced the
number of doctors to whom Minnesota parents could turn to treat their
children’s PANS/PANDAS to zero. (One nurse practitioner treats it, but she
works for a clinic that doesn’t take insurance.) But the hospital that forced Dr. Sharon out
did have a solution. They told parents to try a program in Madison, Wisconsin,
four hours away.
The journalistic
failure
And that brings us
to the other key player in all this – one not mentioned in the ProPublica
story: The Minnesota Star Tribune.
When Dr. Sharon was
forced to resign, ProPublica notes, parents were so upset that “they went to
the local newspaper.” That’s the Star Tribune. On Nov. 6, 2023, they published a good story
about the plight of the families. And then they came within inches of another
urgent story – and missed it. The only
mention of the child abuse pediatrician issue was this one sentence:
Sharon said he feels terrible for his PANS/PANDAS
patients but that he resigned from University of Minnesota Physicians because
of an unrelated dispute over the clinical management of head trauma in infants.
That should have
been a “Wait – what?” moment for the Star Tribune. Child abuse pediatricians
have been controversial for some time now and, in particular, it’s well known
that there is considerable controversy over “the clinical management of head
trauma in infants.”
So one would hope
the Star Tribune would dig into the resignation – which could have led
them to the revelations that ProPublica would report nearly 18 months later.
But I can find no
follow-up. I found nothing at all about the controversy until Dr. Harper was
sued. Then the Star Tribune wrote about the lawsuit.
Would at least some
of the harm done to children and families since November 2023 have been averted
had the Star Tribune then done the reporting ProPublica has done
now? Why didn’t that happen? Did the Star
Tribune make a concerted effort to find out more, but simply couldn’t get
the story? Did it not occur to them to try? Or is it that the whole notion of
false allegations and wrongful removal makes the Star Tribune
uncomfortable?
I sent two emails and a text message to the reporter who
wrote the Star Tribune’s 2023 story seeking comment. I have received no
reply.
This brings us to the second Star Tribune failure that contributed, albeit indirectly,
to this tragedy. Here’s how the
ProPublica story explained it:
Harper’s arrival
in Minnesota coincided with the fallout of a high-profile tragedy: the 2013
death of 4-year-old Eric Dean.
Dean lived with
his family in sparsely populated Pope County, in west-central Minnesota.
According to an investigation by The Minnesota Star Tribune, teachers
and caregivers reported signs that Dean was being abused to child protection
workers at least 15 times before his stepmother threw him across a room,
causing injuries that would kill him. She is in prison serving a life sentence.
In response,
then-Gov. Mark Dayton signed an executive order in 2014 creating the Governor’s
Task Force on the Protection of Children. The next year, along with a slew of
other reforms, the state Legislature created a $23.35 million grant to give
counties money based partially on the number of open child protection
investigations.
The number of
child abuse cases soared. For instance, in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis
is located, cases of physical abuse more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, before
dropping over the next several years.
The lawsuit suggests
an even bigger jump:
In 2016—after
Harper arrived and her … policies and
procedures were put into place – 5,709 children in Hennepin County were
reported as alleged victims of physical abuse, an increase of 228% over the
previous eight-year average. In one calendar year, physical abuse cases in
Hennepin County rose by 223%.
The lawsuit also
has more about the financial incentives that may have been at play, alleging
that the Bremer Trust Center itself was “offering substantial financial bonuses
for the identification and prosecution of child abuse.”
But what does any of this have to do with the
Star Tribune?
It wasn’t the death of Eric Dean itself that
set all this in motion. It was the Star Tribune’s hype and hysteria-filled
coverage of the death of Eric Dean, and the foster-care
panic it
caused – in a state already tearing apart families at a rate far above the
national average -- that set all this into motion. It was the Star Tribune’s
blunders that led to the Task Force, which compounded the blunders. More about
how the Star Tribune and the Task Force failed can be found in this
NCCPR report. And in this column for the child welfare trade
journal, The Imprint.
This kind of
failure is bad enough done once, but the Star Tribune not only learned
nothing, it tried to do the same thing again in 2023.
Fortunately, Minnesota lawmakers seem to abide by the adage “fool me once,
shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” They did not repeat their mistakes
– they even passed legislation intended to curb needless removal.
But the damage done
by the first foster-care panic has yet to be undone. As of 2023, Minnesota still was tearing apart
families at a rate double the national average
when rates of child poverty are factored in.
And now, thanks to ProPublica, we know about some additional collateral
damage.
The stories told by
ProPublica involve families who were able to fight back. We’ll never know if
there are others whose children may have been misdiagnosed by the child abuse
pediatrician who says she’s always right.
At a minimum,
families accused under these circumstances should be entitled to obtain a
second opinion from an expert of their choosing at no cost.
Also, ProPublica
reports:
Hennepin County
has a contract with Harper’s employer, University of Minnesota Physicians, to
provide medical consultation, expert witness testimony and case consultation
with county attorneys.
That contract
should end.
Oh, and wouldn’t it
be great if the University of Minnesota apologized to Dr. Sharon and offered
him his job back?
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