NCCPR news and commentary round-up, weeks ending September 30, 2025

Time to catch up on some of what was in the news while I was on vacation:

● Steve Volk, whose outstanding reporting on child welfare in Philadelphia includes stories like this one, and this one, and this one, led a seminar for the Poynter Institute on child welfare reporting. He sums up the experience and offers some lessons for fellow journalists in this column for Poynter.  (And you can read Volk’s latest, a follow-up to his series, in Billy Penn.) 

● One of Volk’s students published an essay in which she mentions a very good question she posed to child advocates in her state. I have a blog post about why the answers were so lousy – but remarkably revealing. 

● The Syracuse Post-Standard has published an excellent editorial explaining why New York Gov. Kathy Hochul should sign legislation to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. 

● Behold the family police agency so arrogant and so sure of its near-absolute power that it readily admits it will tear apart families because those families are poor. I have a blog post about how that, and so much more, was revealed in this Indianapolis Star story. 

● And the most recent data released by the federal government show that in 2024, Indiana got even worse. Initially, the federal government made no public announcement that it has released its latest “AFCARS Report. ” NCCPR broke the story on this blog. 

● Another extreme outlier is Kansas. Yet even as Kansas tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation, the child abuse horrors don’t stop. In fact, as I discuss in the Kansas Reflector, that’s one of the main reasons why they don’t stop.

● But if the problem is poverty, some family policing apologists say, why do some nations with far less poverty than the United States still have high rates of removal?  As I noted in this column for Youth Today, among the reasons: Affluence doesn’t eliminate racism. Further evidence for that can be found in the case of a mother from Greenland whose child was confiscated at birth by authorities in Denmark. It’s the subject of stories in The New York Times and The Guardian. 

● From the Reason Foundation: A drug policy expert explains how the new child-confiscation-at-birth policy imposed by New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham will backfire – and what should be done instead. The policy change is part of the wave of hysteria that has spread through the state, which, in 2023, experienced the worst foster-care panic in America. 

● Maine children are paying the price of mediocre leadership at the Maine family police agency. I cite two recent examples in this blog post.  One of those examples actually involves a small improvement in Maine’s law defining neglect. 

● Colorado also made some small improvements when it comes to what mandatory reporters should and should not report.  Chalkbeat Colorado includes this in a Q and A about the changes: 

Does the new law take race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or disability status into account?

The law prohibits reports due to these factors.

 I’ll just interrupt here to note that it’s not as if anyone would admit to reporting based on these factors, even to themselves.  Now, back to Chalkbeat Colorado’s summary: 

Experts say this change came about because families of color and low-income families are disproportionately funneled into the child welfare system because manifestations of poverty, racial identity, ethnicity, or disability are sometimes conflated with abuse or neglect. 

For example, if a child wears the same clothes four days in a row or tells the teacher they’ve been sleeping on the couch at their aunt’s house, it might not be neglect, but an outgrowth of financial problems, said Jessica Dotter, sexual assault resource prosecutor at the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council and a member of the state task force. 

She said teachers should pause to ask questions like, “Is this neglect, or is this poverty? Is this neglect, or is this a kid with two parents who are disabled?” 

● In order for relatives providing kinship foster care to receive the same financial benefits as total strangers, the relatives must be formally licensed as foster parents. But licensing requirements often revolve around middle-class creature comforts that go well beyond health and safety. That can thwart relatives who, no surprise, often are poor. Now, The Imprint reports, Washington State is easing some of those requirements. 

● The lawsuits by survivors of abuse while in the “care” of family police agencies keep on coming.  The San Diego Union Tribune reports that: 

More than 100 new lawsuits have been filed against San Diego County in recent weeks by adults who claim they were taken to the Polinsky Children’s Center as minors to escape unstable homes only to be sexually assaulted by social workers who were supposed to protect them. 

The complaints are wrenching by any measure – boys and girls as young as 8 who claim they were targeted, molested and otherwise abused by county Health and Human Services Agency workers. 

And no, the issue isn’t just cases from long ago. The Union Tribune reports on recent allegations against the very same institution. 

● Fortunately, as The Imprint reports, California lawmakers defeated a bill that would have stopped some survivors from bringing these suits. 

From the story: 

Chantel Johson, directing advocate at the Youth Law Center, which opposed the bill, said …  limiting legal action gives public institutions a pass for failing to protect children, while imposing “heavy legal burdens” on the people harmed in their care, who often carry the trauma for a lifetime. 

“SB 577 would have closed the courthouse doors before some had the chance to step inside, silencing their stories and denying them justice,” Johnson said in a statement. 

But backers of the legislation plan to bring it back next year. And that would be in addition to the bailout lawmakers already gave private foster care agencies. 

● The Imprint reports on a new novel, Sisters in the Wind, by Angeline Boulley, that 

offers a rare Indigenous-centric glimpse into the failings of the country’s child welfare system. The young adult novel … is meant to show what can happen when a federal law meant to ensure that Indigenous families remain intact is not followed, and how a child’s life can be improved when it is, the Michigan author said in a recent interview. 

The thriller follows Lucy Smith, an Ojibwe teen who is running for her life, away from traumatic figures she encountered while growing up in foster care. As an adult she navigates a difficult childhood spent in various placements before finding family and healing. 

● WECT in North Carolina reports on how one foster child’s journey, and its tragic end, illustrate how the system really works. 

● Sometimes the cruelty of the system just boggles the mind. I have a blog post about a classic example.

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From Honolulu Civil Beat: An in-depth investigation of rampant abuse in a foster home – abuse no one at the state family police agency wanted to see, because the system was overloaded and the foster father would take children no one else would. As we pointed out in the story, when the system is overwhelmed with children, often taken needlessly, there is an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file. 

How much evil are we talking about? From the story: 

“Life for a young boy in the Teixeira foster home was a struggle for survival akin to ‘Lord of the Flies,’” the judge in JR’s lawsuit wrote in 2024, referring to the classic novel about castaway children creating a savage society. “The older boys were abusive and Defendant Teixeira, an abuser himself, failed to protect younger boys from them.” 

Oh, and check out this Civil Beat story documenting how the state is still trying to cover up the horrors.

 ● From The Baltimore Banner:

 A Maryland child in foster care was found dead Monday morning in a Baltimore hotel room where she had been living under the supervision of the state Department of Human Services. She was 16 years old. … 

Her death comes one week after publication of a legislative audit that criticized the state for placing nearly 300 foster children in hotels instead of homes over a two-year period, according to the audit. 

Auditors also found that Maryland had failed to protect children under state care from being placed in homes where registered sex offenders live and also failed to provide some children with proper medical care. 

● From the Seattle Times:

The state will pay $9 million to a Portland woman who said she was abused for years as a child in Washington’s foster care system, adding to the growing number of payouts related to sexual assault in foster care and juvenile detention. 

Ashley Miller, 34, alleges she was raped and abused from the ages of 5 and 12 years old by her foster parent’s live-in boyfriend in Pierce County. Miller sued the department in 2023, alleging the Department of Social and Health Services — the state’s child welfare agency at the time — knew the man was a convicted felon and was negligent in not properly monitoring the conditions in the foster home. …