A personal note: Reflecting on 50 years following “child welfare”

That original J-School project

By Richard Wexler

Fifty years ago this month, I turned in my final project for the Broadcast Workshop at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism: a radio documentary about foster care. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but that project would set the course for my professional life. 

In the course of my reporting, I interviewed a 21-year-old college student. By the time she was nine years old, she had been in nine different foster homes. She told me she survived by keeping the rage inside, “unlike my five brothers who have been in every jail in New York State.” 

This is some of what she said: 

“When you spend your life going from place to place and knowing you’re not going to be in any place for very long, you learn not to reach out, not to care, not to feel. … 

“The people that I’ve seen, the kids that have emerged [from foster care] are dead.  Their hearts are functioning.  The ‘ol heart’s pumping the blood around.  But they’re basically dead inside.  It’s been killed.  Either they had to kill it to survive physically, or somebody else killed it in them – whatever it is that makes people human.” 

After speaking to this woman for two-and-a-half hours, I reached three conclusions: 

First, I was really glad I’d chosen journalism as a career. 

Second, I knew I would keep coming back to the story. 

And third: If we just got rid of all those no-good birth parents and got all these kids adopted, everything would be fine! 

Two out of three is not bad. 

That wasn’t my only mistake. Almost everything for which I now criticize reporters is a mistake I made in that documentary – most notably, whom I left out. In addition to the former foster child, I spoke to the head of an advocacy group for foster parents. I spoke to the head of an advocacy group for adoptive parents. I spoke to the head of a trade association for private agencies. And I spoke to Marcia Lowry, then just starting to bring what I would later call McLawsuits while at the New York Civil Liberties Union. 

I did not speak to a parent whose child was needlessly taken away. I did not speak to anyone who represented such parents, either as a lawyer or an advocate. It never occurred to me. It never occurred to the faculty who critiqued the documentary either – in fact, they were quite keen on it. That’s because my one professor who would have spotted and called out the omission, the late Phyl Garland, was not involved in overseeing it. 

A letter of complaint from a foster care agency trade association

Not long after, I adapted the documentary for the New York public television series Inside Albany. The next year, portions aired on what was then a relatively new NPR program, All Things Considered.  The editors there didn’t notice my omissions either. 

(I got some things right – notably the pernicious role of those private agencies and their financial
incentives, something first reported a year earlier by the New York Daily News. I still have in a scrapbook a letter from the head of the private agency trade association complaining about my interview for Inside Albany.) 

But I did keep coming back to the story.  And I kept finding that the facts on the ground were not matching what the most widely-quoted so-called “experts” were saying.  Over and over in the 1970s and 1980s, you would hear: “Well, you know child abuse crosses class lines.” But why, then, were the only people I was seeing in the system poor? 

As I kept asking questions, I found that the spectrum of expertise was far wider than the “usual suspects” quoted in news stories. The professional community had been divided about these issues all along. In those pre-Internet days, it took longer to find that out.  

But when the dichotomy between conventional wisdom and the facts on the ground became too much to bear, I wrote an article about it for The Progressive called “Invasion of the Child Savers.” That was in 1985. My wife kept encouraging me to write a book. A few years later, I listened to her and started working on Wounded Innocents, which my wife edited. It was published in 1990. 

The next year, I was contacted by the late Betty Vorenberg, whom I’d known when she was deputy director of the Massachusetts Advocacy Center, and I was a reporter in Springfield, Mass.  She asked if I wanted to try to form an organization around the principles in my book.  I said, “Sure!” Betty brought together a group for an initial organizing conference at Harvard Law School, a group that included the founding father of the modern family defense movement, and now president of NCCPR, Prof. Martin Guggenheim. A mere eight years later, we got sufficient funding for me to make NCCPR my full-time job, which it has been for most of the years since. 

From the beginning, we set out to fill one particular niche: changing “child welfare” systems by changing media coverage of child welfare systems. Because these systems are more secret than the CIA, they are enormously susceptible to media pressure. And for decades, the easiest and most appealing story for media to tell was the one about the death of a child “known to the system” in a case that had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade.  It was the only story that systems couldn’t hide. 

That made it easy to use “health terrorism” – exploitation of horror stories – to persuade reporters. Their stories would persuade the public to sanction a child welfare surveillance state so huge that, over the past decades, millions of children have been confiscated and consigned needlessly to the chaos of foster care; a system so gigantic that more than one third of all children, and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. 

Because of the secrecy, and because that’s all they ever read in a newspaper or saw on television, plenty of my fellow liberals, people who never would be conned by Donald Trump’s horror stories about immigrants, were suckered by the same sorts of horror stories about parents – cases that were, and are, real, but are every bit as unrepresentative of who gets caught in the family police net. Sometimes they’re still fooled. 

The story AJR rejected

At first, when it came to that one niche – changing child welfare systems by changing media coverage - we were almost alone. We started monitoring and responding to news coverage. (Today, NCCPR has a database of at least 60,000 child welfare news stories dating back to 1997.) We did outreach, one letter to a reporter, one op-ed column, one editorial board meeting at a time. We issued reports on state systems and compiled the data and the studies that told the story the media largely wasn’t telling, sometimes because they didn’t want to hear it, more often because they didn’t know it.  I wrote my first critique of media coverage of child welfare for Nieman Reports in 1993 and my first critique of local coverage for the Chicago Reader in 1995. (Actually, that one was originally for the now-defunct American Journalism Review; the Reader ran it when AJR would not.) 

We banged our heads against the wall a lot. But it turns out that, if you do that enough, sometimes the wall moves. Eventually, we even changed some of the language of the discussion, putting terms like foster-care panic into the “child welfare” lexicon. 

Now an entire movement pushes back against media failure. There are grassroots groups led by those with lived experience, a family defense movement, founded and almost willed into being by Prof. Guggenheim, whose practitioners understand the need to practice in the court of public opinion. Thanks especially to the work of Prof. Dorothy Roberts (another NCCPR Board member), the field no longer can credibly deny the extent to which racism pervades the system (though that hasn’t stopped many from trying). 

Prof. Roberts' work is one example of the explosion of rigorous scholarship exposing the harm of the system and revealing better options. 

I have an ever-growing mental list of “I never thought it would happen in my lifetime” moments as mainstream advocacy organizations change direction. Yes, for some it’s just reputation laundering, but for others the change is real and substantive, such as the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law. In the 1990s, they had a project to teach family police agency lawyers how to expedite termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate description of the stakes than termination of parental rights). Today, the ABA Center on Children and the Law has a project that seeks to end the termination of children’s rights to their parents. And check out what’s happening at Children’s Rights and the National Association of Counsel for Children.

How much has it all accomplished? An enormous amount – and not nearly enough. 

The officially-acknowledged number of children torn from everyone they know and love and forced into foster care has declined by more than 42% from its peak in 2006, though some of that probably means only moving children to hidden foster care and not recording the placements. 

For those who still are taken, the worst form of placement, group homes and institutions, is down, while the percentage in the least harmful form of placement, kinship foster care, is up. 

One of our early goals was to “inoculate” media and government against foster-care panics – responding to high-profile tragedies by rushing to tear apart even more families. We’ve partially succeeded. While it’s still possible for a particularly demagogic politician or a reporter who either is clueless or what David Simon would call a “Pulitzer-sniffer” to set off such a panic, it’s a lot harder than it used to be. But this sort of inoculation requires regular booster shots. 

We still haven’t seen much of a dent in the child welfare surveillance state – the massive apparatus in which caseworkers for what should be called the family police pound on doors in the middle of the night, demand that children be awakened, and then are asked traumatic questions and often stripsearched. Almost always, the report that led to it was false or a case in which family poverty was confused with neglect. 

That, too, may finally change as more states pass laws raising the standard for intervening in families and bolstering their due process protections.  And it may change as states at least change their messaging around when to call a child abuse hotline. They should, of course, go much further and replace mandatory reporting with permissive reporting and replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. 

In part, this progress is a result of a dramatic change for the better in media coverage, particularly at the national level. Many major regional publications also have transformed their approach. 

But, particularly among smaller news outlets, there are still too many who continue to fall for health terrorism and continue to view birth parents as somehow too sub-human even to speak to. 

At a reunion of my J-School class ten years ago, each of us told the group what we’d been doing since graduation. My answer then still applies: My final project for the Broadcast Lab was about foster care. It’s not finished yet.