NCCPR family preservation news and commentary round-up for the year 2025, part two

For part one, which illustrates how the horror stories go in all directions, see the previous post to this blog.

POVERTY AND NEGLECT

●  The Nation zeroed in on one key part of the problem: families destroyed because parents can’t afford adequate housing. The story focuses on Missouri, where the problem is particularly acute and getting worse still, thanks to the horrifying approach taken by the new head of that state’s family police agency. 

● The Nation didn’t stop with what was wrong; they turned to places that are doing better: three counties in Wisconsin working to reduce needless removals because of housing. The story also cuts through the hype about the so-called Family First Act, pointing out that, particularly when it comes to providing families with the concrete help they really need, “Families First Act funding comes with so many strings attached it’s nearly impossible to use.”

● Hearst Connecticut Media did a superb job exposing the problem in one of the richest states in America.

Back in Missouri, the Missouri Independent did stellar work:

● The cruelty of the family police agency in that state is apparent in this outstanding story from the Missouri Independent.  It is a story about a family that, through enormous will and determination, marshaled meager resources to weave a safety net – only to have the family police come in, over and over, and rip it apart. It is a story as beautifully written as it is scrupulously reported. 

● Still, as this follow-up story makes clear, you’ve got to give the Missouri agency credit for this much: They united all sides in the abortion debate – everyone thinks the behavior of the family police agency in this case stinks. The story also includes NCCPR’s perspective and that of Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark study Investigating Families. 

● And I have a commentary column about the case in the Independent. 

● But it’s not just one case. In another example, the family police agency found all the allegations against Megan Knight to be unfounded. She even passed a background check to care for foster children in residential treatment. But her own children are still in foster care. That’s what can happen when families are literally defense-less. 

As the Independent reports, indigent parents in Missouri are not guaranteed an attorney at all – and when they get one, they’re often far too overloaded to do much of anything. Here’s what that means in the case of Ms. Knight: 

Her four-year-old daughter has been moved seven times since she was taken into foster care in April 2022. Knight said she’s developed behavioral issues Knight attributes to the trauma of separation and being tossed around from home to home. 

“When I was able to see her, she would always beg the caseworker, ‘Please, let me go home to my mom,’” she said. 

Now, her daughter is in care with a foster family and Knight doesn’t know where in Missouri they are or who the family is. Two of her kids are in another stranger’s home. 

There’s also been lots of excellent reporting from the Maine Monitor:

● The confusion of poverty with neglect – and the first tentative steps to try to do something about it – is the theme of this excellent story from the Maine Monitor. 

● Some advocates in Maine have tried to use one data point in the federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment report to justify the state’s high rate of tearing apart families.  But the Monitor took a closer look.  They took a deep dive into the federal report and concluded:

The new federal report bolsters some advocates’ argument that Maine is failing to keep kids safe not because it is investigating too few families but because it is investigating too many, and failing to identify the true threats in the deluge of cases. 

● I have a commentary about the misuse of this data point in the Maine Morning Star. (It applies to every other state as well.) 

● In another extraordinary story from the 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.

● Maine lawmakers defeated a bill that would impose a “balance of harms” test in child welfare cases. Judges would have to balance the alleged harm of leaving a child at home with the inherent trauma of tearing the child from her or his family. And the state family police agency would have to show it “exhausted the options” to mitigate the risk of harm and avoid removal. It would be hard to find a better example of the need for such a law than the case examined in this story from the Monitor. I have a blog post about some lessons from the story. 

Also from Maine:

● A story I missed from late in 2024: The Maine Morning Star reports on how, as the headline says, “Maine’s definition of neglect is ‘easy to conflate with poverty’”  Citing two Maine family defense attorneys, the story concludes: 

Kilgore said she has families on the verge of reunification, but who are delayed because they are trying to find the money for a security deposit. Housing can be “terrifying” for a family, Richter said, given the state’s lack of affordable units and how losing housing can trigger child protective services’ involvement. 

And that’s just one example. If the family with the broken car were given funds to pay the mechanic, that sort of assistance could help circumvent an investigation and perhaps keep a family together. 

● Maine is a state that once was on the verge of having a model “child welfare” system. Dreadful decisions by two governors and vile grandstanding from one current and one former public official plunged the state into foster-care panic.  So it should come as no surprise that more and more families are literally defense-less.  The Maine Monitor reports that many parents wait weeks or months for a defense attorney even to be assigned – dramatically prolonging children’s time in foster care. And the Portland Press Herald reports on the most important step the state is taking to finally start to deal with the problem.  I have a blog post about it, with links to both stories. 

There’s also been great work from a consortium of news organizations in Philadelphia:

● The family policing system in Philadelphia tears apart families at the second-highest rate among America’s largest cities, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. In an extraordinary three-part series, the Philadelphia Inquirer looks at how that city’s system destroys children in the name of saving them – and what can be done about it. Part One deals with widespread abuse in foster care. Part Three compares Philadelphia to the state-run system in neighboring New Jersey, which has improved child safety while dramatically reducing the number of families it tears apart.

But most extraordinary – and perhaps most significant for a national audience - may be part two.  It is the best examination I’ve seen by any news organization into the horrors of “hidden foster care.”  Be sure to read it to the end.

The revelations all were shocking enough to prompt the City Council to plan public hearings.

● The author of that series, Steve Volk, 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.) 

● Gothamist has a story about a report from The Bronx Defenders that documents, in case after case, the bias that prompts the city’s family police agency to needlessly tear apart nonwhite families. From the story: 

“All parents are in situations where they need support," said Anne Venhuizen, a supervising attorney for the Bronx Defenders. "All parents are in situations where they wish, looking back on it, they could have done something different. All parents are in situations where they did nothing wrong. All parents are in situations where someone criticizes their parenting, where they're like, this is the parenting I want to do, that I think is best for me and my family." 

“Parenting is constant small and large decisions about what to do, what's best for your children, and it is inherently subjective," she added. "White parents get a grace that in this city, Black parents don't.”

● “I remember the case of a 6-year-old boy whose teacher called child protective services because he had missed school one too many times,” writes Mathangi Swaminathan in The 74.

No one asked why. If they had, they would’ve heard about the eviction notice taped to the front door, the backpack still stuffed from the rushed move, the air mattress where he now slept curled beside his baby sister. His parents were working two jobs each, leaving at dawn and returning long after bedtime, doing everything they could to keep food on the table and a roof overhead. 

He wasn’t unsafe. He wasn’t unloved. He was just missing too many days of school: seven, to be exact, the unexcused limit. And that was enough to trigger an investigation. 

● Could there really be anything good in an analysis of the intersection of poverty and neglect signed by 23 professors of social work and allied disciplines? In this case, in The Imprint, yes. They argue that when poverty is confused with neglect, the solution is likely to be money. But they go on to argue that when poverty is not “alone” – that there also are other problems, often the solution still is money. 

● A lawsuit alleges that a child who wandered out of his mother’s home in West Virginia, the child removal capital of America, was placed – for that reason alone -- in foster care.  He wandered out of the foster home and died. I have a blog post about why this tragedy is a failure not only of West Virginia foster care but also of West Virginia journalism, with links to news accounts about the lawsuit from WTAP-TV, The Parkersburg News and Sentinel and WCHS-TV. 

● In May, the New York Daily News published a commentary from NCCPR about what’s happened in the decades since the News exposed the predations of New York City’s private foster care agencies. Then Nora McCarthy, director of the New York City Family Policy Project, wrote about what needs to happen now, and one of the authors of the original series, Stewart Ain, sums up what they found. That’s a useful reminder at a time when all over the country these agencies are seeking either taxpayer bailouts or virtual immunity from lawsuits by the children harmed while in agencies’ “care.” 

DUE PROCESS 

Anonymous reporting 

● Just as the year was ending, families in New York won a huge victory when Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill that replaces anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. The accused still doesn’t get to know who called the child abuse hotline, but the hotline and local caseworkers need to know – in order to discourage false reports by ex-spouses, angry neighbors, landlords or anyone else abusing the process to carry out a grudge. 

The Imprint has a story about the signing. ProPublica has a good story on the bill. Also: there is an excellent editorial from the Syracuse Post-Standard, a superb commentary in The Imprint, from Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, and another outstanding commentary from the lawyers who regularly represent children in these cases, concerning why this law is needed – and why 48 states and D.C. should follow New York and Texas in enacting such laws. 

Mandatory reporting

● Think you know all about the controversy over “mandatory reporting” laws that require most professionals dealing with children to report their slightest suspicion of “abuse” or “neglect” to the family police? This story, from the New York City online news site THE CITY, adds a whole new dimension of depth and nuance. For example: why the all-purpose cop-out non-solution of “more training” does so little good: 

Mandated reporters who spoke with THE CITY said that throughout their careers, they were routinely warned that not reporting a parent could lead to the loss of their professional license or worse, adding that that culture of fear drives many professionals working with children to report parents, even when they have misgivings about the impact that their call might have on a family. 

“Doctors, social workers, teachers often have crippling debt and cannot afford to lose their license,” said Matthew Holm, a pediatrician working in the Bronx. “Even if loss of licensure happens only one time, there’s a huge amount of fear.” 

Some reporters acknowledged that at times, the threat of a call to the hotline had been helpful in getting parents to make changes. As professionals on the frontlines, they said, they know that some children do need to be protected from their parents. 

What they don’t believe is that it helps children for the professionals who know them best to be forced to defer their judgment to hotline operators or investigators, some fresh out of college, who approach the issue from a prosecutorial, evidence-gathering position. … 

Frivolous reports can also terrorize families. One doctor interviewed by THE CITY described an incident in which a patient’s mother was reported by a teacher, who had mistaken a rash for a bruise. That led to investigators strip-searching the child’s body and aggressively questioning the mother in front of her child, leaving the mother in tears. 

● The American Federation of Teachers has 1.8 million members.  Odds are, most of them are mandatory reporters. The AFT says that should change.  In a comprehensive report based in part on a survey of more than 1,000 educators, the union concludes: 

We must challenge school cultures rooted in regulating families, valuing compliance over compassion, and funneling marginalized students into foster care or prison. Educators are sensitive to both state and local policies. To move away from the ineffective intervention of mandatory reporting, policymakers must decriminalize absenteeism. They can also remove educators from state laws on mandatory reporting, making reporting an option rather than a requirement. [Emphasis added.] 

Citing the phrase coined by JMACforFamilies, the AFT calls for replacing mandatory reporting with mandatory supporting.  The AFT has an overview here. 

“Emergency” removals

● Family police agencies are only supposed to take away a child on the spot in an emergency. And, indeed, workers love to claim that they can’t simply take children on their own. Check out this story from The Imprint that makes clear, once and for all: Most of the time, when they make that claim, they’re lying. 

● Even rushing to a judge without giving the family a chance to defend themselves is supposed to be reserved for emergencies.  But guess who decides if it’s an “emergency.” That’s why it’s so important that, at the very least, a full-scale hearing be held within days of children being torn from their parents and thrown into foster care. But as the Boston Globe reports in this story, with comment from NCCPR, that often doesn’t happen either.  

● In Hawaii, this kind of needless removal is known as “grab and go.” Honolulu Civil Beat reports on a victory for children victimized by that approach.

Domestic violence

● More than 20 years ago, a lawsuit stopped New York City’s family police agency from tearing children from their parents just because the parent, usually the mother, was herself a survivor of domestic violence. But that didn’t stop the agency from harassing those mothers and their children.  Now, the New York Times reports, a New York appellate court has ruled that the agency, and its Upstate counterparts, can’t do that anymore either.  See also this story in the New York Daily News, this story in The Imprint and this story from Law 360. 

● Gothamist reports on another appellate court ruling for the family in a similar case  From the story: 

“Essentially, the ACS policy at issue in this case permits it to surveil the mother simply because the child’s father committed acts of domestic violence against her,” Associate Justice Ellen Gesmer wrote in the court’s ruling. “We cannot condone a policy based on this faulty and unlawful premise.” 

● And then came still another New York case in which oral argument played out almost like the climactic scene in a Hollywood movie. Fortunately, it’s all on video.

In the video below, the argument starts at 2:22:22 in.  If you follow this link  it goes a little past that, to 2:38:00. That's the point where, at long last, an agency which normally is accountable to no one, finally is held to account for what it has done to so many children. I also have a blog post about the case.

Termination of children’s rights to their parents

● New York State’s highest court is sending a similar message. I’ve often written that, in much of the country, families would get about as much “representation” from a cardboard cut-out in a three-piece suit as they get from the overloaded court-appointed lawyers who may meet them for the first time five minutes before the court hearing. That can happen even when it’s a hearing to terminate children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate description of the stakes than “termination of parental rights”). The Imprint reports on a case in which the New York State Court of Appeals said that’s not good enough. 

Perhaps most notably, when a lawyer defending the termination tried to play the bonding card, the court didn’t buy it. From the story: 

“There is no question that it is very important and imperative that these cases be resolved in a speedy fashion,” [Judge] Troutman said during the appeal proceedings. “But we cannot throw the Constitution in the garbage with respect to people’s rights in order to get there.” 

● There was more from that court. In June, the online publication Documented told the story of two Asian families that the New York City Administration for Children’s Services and its contracted agencies tried to destroy. For one, it was too late, but the other family – and all vulnerable children – won a huge victory in the form of a landmark decision from the Court of Appeals. The court reversed the termination of a child’s rights to his father. As the Center for Family Representation, which represented the father, said: 

As the Court noted, "[e]conomic challenges, like those experienced by father, are often the most difficult to overcome because lack of financial resources may be at the root of other barriers to reunification." As a result, the Court held that agencies have a responsibility to assist parents with economic challenges when they present a barrier to reunification. 

● Another good decision comes from Michigan, where an appeals court ruled that, no, you can’t tear children from their families forever just because a caseworker thinks the family’s housing is too small. (And yes, the Michigan family police agency really tries to do things like that.)  

Central registries 

● Spotlight PA reports on the enormous harm done to children and families by a system that makes it incredibly easy to blacklist parents as child abusers, and incredibly difficult to get off the blacklist.  There is a lawsuit pending to try to change this, and also legislation.  

● WKRG-TV in Mobile shows it’s much the same in Alabama (but without the legislation or the lawsuit). 

● And in Texas: KERA Public Radio and  The 19^th each have stories on Black Texas parents whose child was wrongly torn from them at birth. Now reunited, the family is still trying to fight its way out of what amounts to a child abuse registry Twilight Zone.

Ransom

● Every once in a while, family policing systems give us a peek into the depths of their cruelty. A story in The Imprint gave us such a peek last week. It’s about the Georgia family police agency’s response to a lawsuit demanding that it stop making parents pay ransom to get their kids back. (Oh, they call it “child support,” but when you take away someone’s child against their will and then make the parents pay money to get the child back, obviously, the proper term is “ransom.”) 

The Georgia family police agency response included this: 

 “All parents have a duty to support their children,” a duty that is not “performed only at the voluntary pleasure or whimsical desire of the parent.” 

The story also notes that, even as the lawsuit is pending, the mother “continues to receive letters threatening jail time if she doesn’t pay off her accumulating debt.” 

Other due process issues

● Another example of the journalism of child welfare at its best: From CT Mirror:  A project that involved reporting over two years, revealing how the “child welfare” system fails on so many levels and leaves so much heartbreak in its wake. We’re pleased to have NCCPR’s perspective included.

● What’s the difference between “Driving While Black” and “Driving While a White Prominent Lobbyist and Former Campaign Policy Advisor to the Governor”? Based on a thoroughly reported story from The Imprint, I have a blog post that answers that question. 

● The Imprint reported on a bill passed unanimously by the New York State Legislature that, had it become law, would have taken the first step toward seriously regulating the insidious practice of “hidden foster care.” What is that first step? Finding out how much of it there is. 

From the story: 

[U]nder a recently passed bill in New York, these arrangements would be brought into the light, marking a first step toward fully understanding the extent of the practice and perhaps curtailing it. Critics say hidden foster care circumvents legal protections, relieves governments of their responsibility, and robs caregivers of vital support and resources that are available under the formal child welfare process. 

Bringing hidden foster care into the open would have one other advantage: It would be harder for family police agencies to pretend they take fewer children than they really do. 

But Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed the bill.

● Can a total stranger really show up in your hospital room days after you’ve given birth and hand you a contract in a foreign language letting them take your child? Well, not if you’re affluent. But if you're poor …  And that’s not even the worst of the abuses uncovered in this story by Sandy West in the Texas Observer. I discuss some of the other horrors in this NCCPR Blog post. 

● For another example of how the family police system can be the ultimate middle-class entitlement -- step right up and take someone else’s child for your very own! -- check out this story from WZTV in Nashville. 

THE FAMILY POLICE WAR AGAINST NATIVE AMERICA

● 2024 was the year that the family policing war against Native America finally got some of the attention it deserved – including a report from the Interior Department and an apology from President Biden.  But, it turns out, even the federal report underestimated the extent of the horror.  At the end of that year, too late for the 2024 Year in Review, The Washington Post weighed in with a massive investigation. They found more than three times as many deaths as the federal report documented.  A historian thinks the real number may be vastly higher still: 40,000.  Another says these were not schools, they were “prison camps.”

Wherever possible, the Post published the names of the children who died in the boarding schools.  Post reporters followed one caravan bringing back the bodies of children from Pennsylvania to Montana. They also offered an overview of the history and motivation for this evil.

● Sadly, the reporting staff at the Minnesota Star-Tribune often has been clueless, or worse, about these issues for a little over a decade.  But at least one of the interns got it right, in this story about the appalling treatment of Native American families by county family police agencies. 

The remaining stories in this section all are the work of one outstanding reporter, Nancy Marie Spears of The Imprint:

● The Imprint reports on what is believed to be the first national survey of current and former Native American foster youth.  One of those responding wrote: 

“Our connection to culture, land, and community is not optional — it’s vital. When those ties are broken by placement in non-Native homes or systems that don’t understand our identity, it creates deep, long-term harm. Too often, Indigenous youth in care are expected to adapt to systems that weren’t built for us — systems that have historically contributed to our displacement and trauma.’’ 

● The Imprint reports on a study of “ambiguous loss” among Native American mothers whose children were taken from them forever. From the story:   

History weighs heavily on the experiences of Indigenous birth mothers, making them “distinct from other races as they have been disproportionately exposed to systemic practices of forced child removal,’’ [lead investigator Sandy] White Hawk’s team posited in the 2022 published article. Culprits include U.S. policies that coerced parents into relinquishing their children to boarding schools, and the Indian Adoption Project — a federally funded effort in the mid-20th century to force the assimilation of Native American children into white families. 

Also harmful, they wrote, is the ongoing disproportionate removal of Native children from their parents through the country’s child welfare systems. 

Though not mentioned in the story, the lead agency spearheading the Indian Adoption Project, from 1958 to 1967, was the Child Welfare League of America. In 2001, they tried to apologize for it and justify it at the same time. CWLA’s current slogan is “over 100 years of excellence.”  

Does that include 1958 to 1967? 

● Remember how Donald Trump said he was going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it? He couldn’t do it. But when it comes to cruelty, even Trump is no match for America’s history of family policing. Because, as The Imprint reports, when America did something far worse to Native American children – tearing them from their homes and imprisoning them in hideous “boarding schools” – they made the tribes pay for it.  (And of course, many modern family police agencies still make parents pay what amounts to ransom to get their children back from foster care.) Now, a class action lawsuit brought by several tribes demands that the federal government literally, as the story says, “show its receipts.” 

● In the United States, there’s been a lot more talk lately about child welfare’s history of trying to eradicate Native America.  The talk has helped.  But in Canada, the government is putting some money where its mouth is.  The Imprint reports that for First Nations Canadians: 

Those taken as children between 1991 and 2022 from “reserves” and the northwestern territory of Yukon are eligible to submit claims, as are their caregiving parents and grandparents. [Emphasis added, in case anyone thinks these are just crimes of the distant past.] … 

“While no amount of money can make up for the harms done by Canada’s racist child welfare system, March 10 will be a historic turning point to address these past wrongs,” National Chief Woodhouse Nepinak stated. “The $23 billion compensation settlement is an important recognition of the heroic representative plaintiffs and everyone who took part in the long process of negotiations that brought us to this point.” … 

Yet as the claims process moves forward, a far larger and more systemic reform sought on behalf of Indigenous children and families remains stalled. 

CHILD ABUSE PEDIATRICIANS

2025 was the year the enormous harm done by some child abuse pediatricians got sustained attention:

● Serial, the famous podcast shop that’s now part of The New York Times,  took an in-depth look at that harm. But if you think you already know the story, at least check out Part 3 – because it looks at a bigger issue: the terrible harm done to children when agencies think tearing apart a family is ok because it’s “erring on the side of the child” or “better safe than sorry.” 

● Also in the Times: As 2024 was ending, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica published another horrifying story on the topic. But the biggest horror may not be the individual case -- not even the part where the mother wasn’t considered “protective” of the children because she didn’t believe the allegations against the father.  The biggest horror may not even be that 35 people convicted based on a diagnosis of “shaken baby syndrome” are on the National Registry of Exonerations. 

No, the biggest horror may be in the revelation of how child abuse pediatricians and the American Academy of Pediatrics responded as more and more doubts were raised about the “science” of “shaken baby syndrome” – science that’s been labeled everything from questionable to “junk.”  Did they reconsider? No. Did they re-evaluate? Of course not.  They just rebranded. They simply relabeled shaken baby syndrome as “abusive head trauma.” 

From the story: 

“The rebranding of shaken baby syndrome preserved the diagnosis and allowed it to live on with less scrutiny,” says Randy Papetti, an Arizona trial attorney and author of the 2018 book “The Forensic Unreliability of the Shaken Baby Syndrome.” “Shaken baby syndrome is alive and well but mostly operates under an alias.” 

A lead author of the name change denies this, and condemns this interpretation as “cynical.” 

● The name change didn’t fool the New Jersey Supreme Court.  New Jersey Monitor reports that the court ruled that prosecutors cannot simply assume that if a child dies of otherwise unexplained head trauma with a particular set of symptoms, it’s so-called “Shaken Baby Syndrome” and then claim it proves the child died of abuse. The widely-questioned “syndrome” has been abused by some doctors and family police agencies, who rush to blame abuse and rule out any other explanation. From the story: 

Justice Fabiana Pierre-Louis, in a lengthy majority decision that five other justices joined, said the syndrome has not been generally accepted in the biomechanical community, making expert testimony about it unreliable and inadmissible in court. … “Regardless of the severity or viciousness of a crime … Thursday’s decision affirms lower court rulings that had declared shaken baby syndrome “junk science.” 

● But are there also times when medical experts will do amazing rhetorical handstands to avoid labeling what happened to a child as abuse, and come up with other explanations, no matter how implausible? Of course! Provided those under suspicion are foster or adoptive parents. Honolulu Civil Beat has a case in point. 

● Even before all these stories, you may think you already knew all about the horrors inflicted on children and families by some “child abuse pediatricians” – but these extraordinary stories, when ProPublica returned to the topic add all sorts of insights, including how, in one state, a foster-care panic helped start the problems. Here’s the inevitable NCCPR Blog post discussing the implications. 

● And at the end of the year Courthouse News Service had this update: 

A former University of Minnesota pediatrician filed a federal lawsuit against the university, its associated medical groups and several doctors on Friday, claiming his June 2023 termination was retaliation for exposing a fraudulent scheme to maximize child abuse prosecutions. 

Also in Minnesota, the Star Tribune reports 

A federal racketeering lawsuit alleges that the leading child abuse pediatrician in Minnesota manipulated medical records that directly led to murder charges against a daycare provider in the death of a toddler in Minneapolis more than seven years ago.

● While in Georgia, WXIA-TV reports on child abuse pediatricians resisting reform. 

● Perhaps you remember the scandal surrounding the “child abuse team” at Children’s Wisconsin Hospital. That’s the place where other doctors said they would be afraid to bring their own children to their own hospital after accidental injuries. Now, WTMJ-TV and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report, one couple is suing. 

● Child abuse pediatricians allegedly are at it again – this time in Indiana. And once again, a news organization, this time WRTV Indianapolis, goes beyond that immediate issue to explore larger failings in the family policing system. the IndyStar also has a story about the lawsuit. 

● Child abuse pediatrician Barbara Knox left Wisconsin after her behavior was called into question by Wisconsin Watch. She moved to Alaska, where her behavior was called into question by the Anchorage Daily News.  Then she went to the University of Florida – where her behavior was called into question by the university’s independent student newspaper, The Allegator.  Their story has something new: Allegations of racial bias.  From the story: 

Knox has also commented on employees’ skin color. The second CPT employee, who is mixed race, said Knox once asked her, “Why are you getting so dark?” 

According to the first [child protection team] employee, Knox complained that the receptionist for CPT’s Tallahassee office, a Black woman, looked “ghetto” due to having long, decorated fingernails.  In her account, Knox also wanted a case built against the Tallahassee receptionist and described her as “lazy” and someone who “looks like one of our clientele.” … 

Knox would treat families of color differently than white families, according to all three employees.  “We have African American, Hispanic, Muslim families that come in, and… she will go ahead and verify a report against them [over the smallest of issues], say it’s child abuse, and put the family in terrible, terrible situations,” one employee said. 

When the child of a white doctor arrived to the clinic with gonorrhea — which is highly indicative of sexual abuse — Knox decided not to verify the case and claimed the child contracted gonorrhea from unwashed hands, the employee said. 

Knox has resigned.

DRUGS

● From the Reason Foundation: A drug policy expert explains how a 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. 

● In the Seattle Times, two actual experts on child welfare and addiction refute demagogic attacks on efforts to keep families together in Washington State from politicians who are neither. 

● 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. 

● In 2024, The Marshall Project and Reveal reported on the enormous harm done to newborns when they’re taken from their mothers because of false positive drug tests.  In a follow-up story, they report on medical professionals who are saying Enough! 

From the story: 

A patient at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, the largest health system in the state, had said that she’d used marijuana to help her eat and sleep during her pregnancy. The hospital had reported her to child welfare authorities. Now, an investigator wanted Ostfeld-Johns to drug test the newborn. 

[Dr. Sharon] Ostfeld-Johns knew there was no medical reason to test the baby, who was healthy. A drug test would make no difference to the infant’s medical care. Nor did she have concerns that the mother, who had other children at home, was a neglectful parent. The doctor did worry, however, that the drug test could cause other problems for the family. For example, the mother was Black and on Medicaid — race and income bias could influence the investigator’s decision on whether to put the children into foster care. 

“Why did I ever order these tests?” Ostfeld-Johns found herself wondering, about past cases. … 

● It’s a long, slow process, but, The Marshall Project also 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.” 

● The Marshall Project also teamed with CBS News Sunday Morning to bring the story to that program’s viewers in this joint investigation.

● “They literally took her off my breast in the hallway with her screaming at the court hearing,” says Kristen Clark-Hassell, of the day her newborn was taken.  

It’s bad enough that Clark-Hassell had her daughter and other children taken by Georgia’s family police agency for reasons that sure sound like the confusion of poverty with neglect. It’s worse that she was subjected to constant drug testing even though there was no allegation of drug abuse. Worse still, The Current reports, when test results conflicted, the family police ignored the ones where results came out negative and relied on positive results from a company with a questionable track record for accuracy.    

They kept using the company even when they knew about the questions.  And, according to the story, the agency 

failed to notify the thousands of parents whose tests may have been faulty, nor sought to learn how tests processed by the company impacted custody decisions about their children. 

● The Iowa Capital Dispatch reports that a mother forced to endure the trauma of a needless investigation and then fight her way off a state blacklist of alleged child abusers, all because of what she says was a false positive drug test when she gave birth, is suing the lab.  

● WANF-TV in Atlanta reports, “A Cherokee County mother has been cleared by child welfare officials after false positive drug test results nearly separated her from her children.”

● For still another example of the harm of botched drug testing, check out this story, also from WANF-TV in Atlanta. 

OTHER STORIES

● A lawsuit alleges that one state maintains a secret docket of pregnant women. For those on it, it is alleged, this state will rely on a “network of informers” to plunder confidential records and spy on any mother they deem “high risk.” The state may even seek custody before the children are born.  You may be surprised at which state it is. I have a blog post about it, including links to two excellent news stories about the suit.  (Normally, I’d mention the news organizations here, but then you’d know the state.)

● Research overwhelmingly shows that, almost always, the least harmful form of foster care, by far, is kinship foster care – placement with extended family. Consider that as you read this story from USA Today about how the State of Texas threw every possible barrier in the way of a heroic grandmother who stepped up to take care of her grandchildren. 

● 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. 

● UCLA Blueprint looked at the “rebel child” among the 900+ Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) programs in the United States. It was the one in Los Angeles led by Charity Chandler-Cole, a child welfare abolitionist with lived experience. We’re going to need more data to be sure, but the very nature of who was made uncomfortable by Chandler-Cole is a good sign. From the story: 

Some volunteers and board members told her that her approach was scaring people. Some quit. One said she was triggered every time the new CEO used the words “social justice” or “racial justice.” 

● And then, it turned out, the CASA program couldn’t handle the discomfort. Instead of deciding the problem was with the volunteer, they … well, it’s CASA, so I’m sure you can guess. The Imprint has a story and I have a blog post about it.

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

● The Harvard Law Bulletin profiles the extraordinary life and work of Dorothy Roberts, professor of law, Africana studies, and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” – and member of the NCCPR Board of Directors. From the story: 

“We need to radically change how we think about child safety and welfare, and that means we need to focus on supporting families,” says Roberts, author of the 2022 book “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.” She adds, “Our society could be structured in a way to provide for those families’ material needs, but instead, it unleashes this terrorizing system on them.”  

●And Time Magazine has included Prof. Roberts among “The Closers: 25 Black leaders working to end the racial equity gap” 

● Speaking of extraordinary work, The Imprint podcast talks to Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark book Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services. 

● After they turn off the cameras and blow out the candles on the cakes at those “Adoption Day” ceremonies, when no one is looking anymore, some of those adopted foster children wind up shipped out of state to be institutionalized – their new “forever family.” The Imprint reports that California has decided that, at least, if the adoptive parents are going to do that, the state will stop paying for it. 

● File this next one under “those who cannot remember the past…” I always worry when I ask reporters if they’ve ever heard of cases like the McMartin Preschool, and they say no. That’s understandable; that case happened more than 40 years ago. But it seems that a lot of people, from caseworkers to therapists to journalists, forgot. How else to explain the horrific injustice exposed in a very recent case in Washington, D.C., by former Washington Post reporter Radley Balko on his Substack, The Watch. It could have been called McMartin Redux. And in this recent case, some of the biggest failures were those of the D.C. family police agency. 

Given that none of the individuals or organizations most responsible for whipping up the hysteria over cases like McMartin all those years ago ever has been held accountable – indeed, some are still treated as reliable sources by journalists today -- perhaps it was inevitable. 

NCCPR COMMENTARY

● Study after study keeps showing that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes fare better even than children alleged to be comparably maltreated but placed in foster care.  Most recently, there was a Swedish study showing that, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to have died. But there’s an even more fundamental question: Why have we allowed foster-care apologists to reverse the burden of proof? My column in The Imprint: Safer Compared to What? Foster care apologists set an incredibly low bar — and still can’t clear it 

● 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. 

● The Nevada Current is the latest publication to report on children torn from their families because their parents lack adequate housing.  I have a commentary in the Current on their findings. 

● 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.

● New Mexico’s attorney general has announced plans to “investigate” the state’s family police agency – but not for taking away children needlessly. I have a column in Source NM on how he’s stacked the deck from the get-go. 

● 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. 

● NCCPR’s commentary, behind a paywall in the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, begins this way: 

Faced with horrifying child abuse deaths, often in cases that were well known to child protective services agencies, there are two ways to respond: Determine what went wrong case-by-case and do the hard work necessary to fix the problems so they never happen again. Or just scapegoat efforts to keep families together and embrace what amounts to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. …

 The first approach leads to safer children; the second makes for great politics. Unfortunately, Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Janet Kelly, chose the second.

● Oregon’s governor wants to loosen regulations curbing abuse in foster care – because they can’t think of any other way to deal with a so-called shortage of placements.  In a commentary for the Oregon Capital Chronicle, I suggest an alternative.  

● Foster care numbers have gone down in Hawaii – but not by enough.  I have a commentary about it in Honolulu Civil Beat. 

● In Rhode Island, a state that tears apart families at a rate more than double the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in, the head of a foster care agency wrote about the urgent need to provide more support – to foster parents, because there’s a “shortage.” She portrayed foster parents as saviors, rescuing children who, until they came along, couldn’t sleep through the night, never heard laughter and were never listened to. As I noted in a response in the Rhode Island Current: 

[T]here also are many other foster children who cry through the night desperate to return to the parents they loved – and laughed with – and who desperately love them back; children who, even years after being reunited may dive under the bed or try to hide in the closet whenever there is a loud knock on the door for fear that they will be taken again; children taken because that family’s poverty was confused with neglect … 

A lot of that could be solved if birth parents simply got the kinds of generous support Rhode Island foster parents already receive from the state.

● How generous? This is from another commentary for the Rhode Island Current: 

If the fact that Rhode Island’s child welfare system wastes lives isn’t enough to prompt real change, consider the staggering waste of money. New data show Rhode Island spending on child welfare is proportionately the highest rate in the nation — well over triple the national average. 

The amount is equal to $11,244 for every impoverished child in the state. Rhode Island’s children would be far better off if the state could simply give every impoverished family $11,244 per child.

● In the Michigan Advance, I have a column about that state’s dismal record when it comes to reunifying families. 

● 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.