What happens when the family police and their enablers in politics and journalism treat impoverished children and their families as sub-human? A story in The New Yorker has some answers.

A story in The New Yorker notes that “A.C.S. acknowledges that many of its caseworkers have
 ‘experienced the toddler whose little fingers have to be pried off of her mother.’” 

There is a standard line used by those most fanatical about tearing apart families and throwing the children into foster care. It comes from the worst of the advocates and politicians, and it’s eagerly quoted by the worst of the journalists. You hear it in an effort to roll back even the most modest reforms, and to justify foster-care panics, sharp, sudden increases in children torn from everyone they know and love in response to high-profile tragedies. 

The exact wording varies, but it’s some version of: Foster care isn’t perfect, but at least the children aren’t dead. 

The first thing to understand about this kind of statement is: It’s inaccurate. In typical cases, not the horror stories, children placed in foster care actually are more likely to die, and suffer severe, debilitating illness, than comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. I’ll get to the details about that, and links to the various studies that prove it, below. 

But first, I want to turn to the part about “foster care isn’t perfect…” Anyone who uses that phrase is inherently unqualified to talk about foster care, because it is, in itself, an act of emotional abuse, a way to diminish and dismiss the inherent severe pain and trauma of removal as a mere imperfection. I don’t just mean the high rates of abuse in foster care itself. I mean the kind of routine trauma documented in a story published last week by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker. 

The story deals with a class-action lawsuit against the family police agency in New York City, the Administration for Children’s Services, challenging their routine abuse of “emergency” power to literally, take-the-child-and-run, tearing children from the arms of their parents and throwing them into foster care without asking a judge for permission first. What do I mean by “literally”? As the story itself notes: “A.C.S. acknowledges that many of its caseworkers have ‘experienced the toddler whose little fingers have to be pried off of her mother.’” 

As The Imprint points out in its own story on the lawsuit, the practice isn’t limited to New York City. In fact, it’s probably worse elsewhere. 

But perhaps the most important contribution the New Yorker story makes, and what makes it so relevant everywhere, is the way it brings home the inherent trauma of removal, trauma that lasts long after the children are back home.  Here’s what it did to the children in the family of one of the named plaintiffs in the suit, children who never should have been taken away in the first place: 

They stayed in foster care for almost three years. The first set of foster parents found Jasmine too difficult to handle, so she was sent to another home without her brothers, then to a third home, and then a fourth. The various parents found her so troublesome that they repeatedly called 911. She was forcibly medicated; on about ten occasions, she was sent to psychiatric wards, something that had never happened when she lived with her family. Her mother was not allowed to visit her in the hospital. … 

The three years of separation and foster care will leave a permanent mark on the family. Daevon, who is five, fearfully apologizes to his mother if he does something wrong. … Jasmine withdraws much of the time. While she was away, she once threatened to hurt herself and said that she wished she were dead. She blames herself for things that happened to her in care. When Jeremiah, the middle child, who is seven, was in his foster home, he started pulling out his eyebrow hairs and wetting the bed. He now tells his mom that she is not a bad mother. 

And this is what happened to the children of the other named plaintiff; again, children who never should have been taken away in the first place: 

After A.C.S. conducted its emergency removal of Lorimer’s children … they were taken to the Children’s Center in Manhattan, a holding place for kids who have entered the system. The children were separated from each other and assigned to dormitories by age. It felt to them like a jail. (Many children say they have been assaulted there.) Zoe arrived carrying a spiral notebook that contained years of drawings; it was taken away because wire wasn’t allowed, and she never got it back. 

Although the most recent removal was shorter than the first, [Larimer] sees that her kids have been changed by it. The girls cling to her. Kayden cries when she leaves. Zoe fills her book bag with as many things as she can carry—extra clothes, her sisters’ stuffed animals. … 

Now imagine pain like this inflicted up to 175,000 times every year. That’s how often children are thrown into foster care – officially. It does not, of course, count hidden foster care* placements.  It is a tsunami of children’s suffering, routinely dismissed by the child welfare establishment and its enablers in politics and journalism. 

What does it really mean when they dismiss this pain as “foster care is not perfect” or (inaccurately, it turns out) some version of  “well, at least they’re not dead.” Can you imagine any of these same people being so sanguine if the family police pounded on their door and said: “We’re taking your children tonight. A child died on this block, so we’re just going to take every child on this block – just in case. After all, we don’t want your children to wind up dead.” 

But the enablers of foster-care panic, and those who oppose any effort to curb needless removal, are overwhelmingly middle-class professionals and disproportionately white. So they know full well that their children are largely immune from the harm caused by their own advocacy. It is extremely unlikely a family police agency caseworker will show up at their door at all, much less walk off with the children. 

What this really suggests is that, deep down, the overwhelmingly middle-class professionals who run these systems, govern these systems from statehouses, and write about them from newsrooms, don't really view these overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite children, or their families as fully human. They are something less. The suffering of children like theirs somehow doesn’t count the way the suffering of children like ours counts. 

It reveals itself in so many ways: 

● The casual cruelty of never giving Zoe back her notebook – and the fact that even worse acts of cruelty, denying children whose parents were taken from them forever even mementos of their former lives, sometimes is routine. 

● The behavior of journalists in West Virginia – child removal capital of America - who can write 10,000 words about foster care with not one of those words coming from a parent whose children were taken, or from children saying they never needed to be taken. You can find similar behavior among some journalists in other states as well. 

● Or someone like Prof. Sarah Font, who’s actually suggested that older foster youth may be better off “aging out” with no home at all than being reunified or placed in guardianship with relatives, because, if they age out, they’ll get more financial benefits. 

As I’ve noted before, this attitude, that poor children, especially poor nonwhite children, don’t really suffer when taken from their parents, or at least not enough for it to matter, and all these suggestions that somehow love means less to them than to our children, reminds me of nothing so much as a notorious comment by Gen. William Westmoreland about Asians during the Vietnam War:  “'The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” Westmoreland said. “Life is cheap in the Orient." 

For the worst of the child welfare establishment, and their political and journalistic enablers, the lives of poor, nonwhite children and their parents are cheap indeed. 

Where are children more likely to die? 

That also may explain why this same establishment, and those same enablers, can’t even face up to the simple fact that their approach not only doesn’t save lives, it makes it more likely that more children will die. 

For starters, recall the massive study which found that tearing apart more families does nothing to curb child abuse deaths, and reducing foster care does nothing to increase them. 

But it’s even worse than that. An honest version of the statement about deaths in foster care would be: “…at least they’re not dead yet.” 

Because, as I’ve noted in previous posts, there is now a vast body of research from around the world showing how, in typical cases, children placed in foster care typically fare worse even than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes on all sorts of measures – including premature death. 

So, for example, a Swedish study found that in typical cases, among maltreated children left in their own homes, 1.8% died by age 20. Among children facing the same level of maltreatment at home, when placed in foster care, 8.6% died by age 20. The foster youth were more than four times more likely to die. The most common cause of death: Suicide. 

And we’re not talking about dying at age 70 instead of age 80 – as though that wouldn’t be bad enough. We’re talking about dying before turning 21. 

Premature death is just the tip of the iceberg. Many more will suffer from serious illness and disability. 

There are so many similar studies measuring so many rotten outcomes for foster youth that it’s actually possible to project how many more children will die and will suffer such illness and disability due to a foster care panic, like the one in Santa Clara County, California right now, and how many lives have been saved in places such as New York City and New Jersey that have safely reduced needless foster care. 

So I wonder if Larissa MacFarquhar was really speaking to some of her fellow journalists when she wrote this: 

In the lawsuits against A.C.S., a legal victory may actually be less important than changing public perception, because the law as written isn’t the main problem: the problem is that A.C.S. isn’t following it. A.C.S. isn’t following it because public pressure is pushing it in only one direction. Insofar as most people know anything at all about child-protective services, they know that its caseworkers are people who rescue children from danger. They hear about A.C.S. only when this mission fails and a child ends up dead. Therefore, A.C.S. follows the mantra of “better safe than sorry,” where “safe” often means preventing the kind of harm to a child that A.C.S. might be blamed for, while discounting the harm of separating children from their families. An unpublished report in 2020 found that some A.C.S. staff “described an internal culture that operates on fear and intimidation. . . . This frequently means that staff err on the side of safety for themselves, by seeking removal.” 

This means sending into foster care thousands of children who would be better off with their parents. …  The litigators hope that the seizure lawsuit will bring public attention to unwarranted A.C.S. removals, because, if sufficient outrage can be generated, then “safe”—both for children and for A.C.S. staff—can be redefined. 

*=Some official placements and many hidden foster care placements are with relatives. Those typically inflict less pain. But those most extreme about tearing apart families also are among those most hostile to these kinship foster care placements.

Illustration by ChatGPT