● All over the country, private foster care agencies are fearmongering in a desperate attempt to get taxpayer bailouts and/or near immunity from liability – because now that victims of child abuse on their watch can sue, there are so many lawsuits that the agencies can’t afford insurance. In Youth Today, NCCPR suggests a better idea.
● In a column for The Imprint, one of a series documenting what it takes to stop families from being torn apart when their poverty is confused with neglect, Sarah Winograd of Together With Families writes about a case in Georgia which began with this ultimatum:
Child Protective Services gave Maurice a deadline: fix your home, or your granddaughters will be placed in foster care.
That’s pretty amazing, since foster care apologists keep telling us such cases don’t exist. The column documents how much it took to cobble together the support this grandfather needed to save his children from foster care. It reminded me of the question I posed concerning a similar example from Missouri: Why is foster care so easy and everything else so hard?
● Also in The Imprint, Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, documents the enormous harm of anonymous child abuse reporting, and why New York Gov. Kathy Hochul should sign a bill to replace it with confidential reporting.
● If we must have offices of Child Advocate/Ombudsman, then at least let's structure them to be unbiased and recognize error in all directions. In a column for the Maine Morning Star about what is currently one of the worst such offices, I suggest ways to do that.
● The American Law Institute periodically issues what it calls “Restatements” of aspects of American law. They are massive undertakings, and until now ALI had not tried it with child welfare law. Now that they have, Prof. Martin Guggenheim has written a commentary on the Restatement for Family Court Review that also is an assessment of the current state of family defense – and the current state of the teaching of family defense in law schools.
In the same issue, Prof. Shanta Trivedi writes that
The family policing system separates families every day. As a result, children and their parents suffer lifelong, irreversible trauma and a host of other negative consequences. The Restatement acknowledges these harms and directs courts to consider the harms of removal throughout court proceedings when deciding whether a child should be removed from their parents or in determining if reunification is appropriate.
