Pete Buttigieg faces the family police

Pete Buttigeig

Much of America just got its first partial lesson in how the child welfare system really works (and why it should be called a family policing system). Two four-year-old girls were the unwilling teachers. 

What happened to the children of Pete Buttigieg is horrible. It is not meant to diminish this harm in any way to add something at least as important: More than one-third of all American children and more than half of all Black children will endure the same experience. For most of them, it will be even worse. 

By now, you probably know about what happened to the four-year-old twins adopted by former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor, former Transportation Secretary and former (and perhaps future) presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten. Below are some key points, and some of the lessons that can be learned from his family’s ordeal. 

Key points: 

● The report to the Michigan child abuse hotline was blatantly, obviously, false and malicious. Law enforcement ultimately concluded that it was also politically motivated. 

● The allegations were ludicrous. The caller did not say that he actually witnessed any abuse. Nor did he say that one of the Buttigieg children told him about any abuse. Rather, Buttigieg says he was told: 

The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.

That was enough to a bring child protective services caseworker – and a police officer -- to the Buttigieg’s Grand Traverse, Michigan home. 

● It didn’t stop there. CPS and the police refused to even tell Buttigieg what he was accused of. The children, four-year-old twins, were separated from their parents for 24 hours. They were placed with grandparents and then taken somewhere “in town” where they were separated from each other for hour-long “forensic interviews” with total strangers. 

As Buttigieg writes: 

My in-laws had to explain to my children, whom we have taught to avoid talking to strangers, that they would need to have a conversation, one at a time and for nearly an hour each, in a place they’d never been, with adults they did not know, who would ask questions we weren’t allowed to know either. For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen. We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime. 

● The Buttigieg children were in foster care – even though it will never show up as such in Michigan family police agency reports to the federal government. Buttigieg and his husband were coerced into placing the children in out-of-home care. The placement lasted 24 hours. That’s foster care. It is the least harmful form of foster care – placement with relatives – but it’s still foster care. But because it was all done informally, the federal government will allow Michigan to exclude it from its figures for entries into foster care. That’s why such placements are called, of course, hidden foster care. 

● This was almost the least amount of harm the family police can do. (The harm would have been less had the children not been removed from the home at all.) Buttigieg says everyone was polite and professional, and, as noted above, the children stayed with relatives. What he encountered can best be called CPS-lite.  I’ve written before about what a shock that can be for white, middle-class families, and how the white middle-class version of a CPS encounter differs from the norm. 

But even when it’s CPS-lite, there’s still plenty of trauma. Buttigieg writes: 

The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life. I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained. 

Now our family is left to deal with the aftermath. I worry about any unseen effects this had on our kids, on Chasten and me, and on the rest of our family. Even though the accusation was absurdly and obviously false, and was promptly rejected by law enforcement, I still worry about the harm it has done. Chasten and I worry about who else might try to do this kind of thing, to us or to others. … I am a reasonable man. I try to keep as calm and low-key as possible. But I cannot describe the mix of rage and sadness that I feel at the idea that someone brought our children into this. … this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began. 

Now, let’s consider the lessons: 

● In media, social and otherwise, the incident is being treated largely as some kind of bizarre outlier and a sign of the increasing ugliness and polarization of our politics. That’s largely how Buttigieg himself framed it. 

But perhaps the most important lesson in all of this is that it is not an outlier. Not by a longshot. 

While the motives are rarely political, thousands of children are victimized every year by the weaponization of child protective services. It can be educators, trying to bully parents who are fighting for the special education to which their child is entitled. It can be landlords harassing tenants, neighbors harassing neighbors, ex-spouses harassing each other. 

By definition, no one knows what percentage of calls are made maliciously. But in New Mexico, for example, it was so bad that officials at their hotline issued a plea to callers to stop using it for vendettas. 

The fact that it happened to the children of Pete Buttigieg simply brought it to the attention of millions of Americans – including Pete Buttigieg -- who had no idea the system worked that way. 

The danger of anonymous reporting

● It’s all made vastly easier by the fact that 48 states, including Michigan, allow anonymous reports. Many states even encourage them with constant reminders that callers don’t have to give their names. News stories about child abuse often end with the same great big notice, along with the hotline phone number. Buttigieg writes: 

To be clear, making a false report of this kind is a crime. That’s as it should be, both to protect the innocent from false accusations, and to preserve the integrity of a process designed to protect children from harm. I don’t know how much we can do about it, but so help me God, if there is any way to press civil or criminal charges over this, we will. Not just for our own sakes but to draw a line that I thought everyone already recognized: do not mess with someone’s kids. 

But he probably won’t be able to do a damn thing about it. And an entire child welfare establishment wants to keep it that way. That’s why so far only two states, New York and Texas, have had the courage to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. The accused still doesn’t know who accused them, but at least the hotline has to know. As for the fearmongering that’s used to defeat such laws, you can read a whole slew of news accounts and commentaries debunking it: 

amNY has a particularly good story about the New York law. The Imprint also has a story about the signing. So does the New York Daily News. And before it passed: ProPublica published a good story on the bill. Also: there was 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.  

The scope of the child welfare surveillance state

● Now consider the sheer scope of the intrusion by family police. Before they turn 18, more than one-third of all children and more than half of all Black children will be forced to endure much of what the Buttigieg children endured. For some, it will be better; for most, it’s likely to be worse. Most of the calls leading to these investigations are not malicious, but more than 80% of the reports are false, and many of the rest are cases in which poverty is confused with neglect. 

● Let’s go back to Buttigieg’s statement that “I am a reasonable man. I try to keep as calm and low-key as possible.” That was made easier for him by the simple fact that he has resources and a keen understanding of power and politics. In this case, it also was easier because the people who confronted him were not at all confrontational. On the contrary, Buttigieg takes pains to praise their politeness, professionalism and efforts to put the children at ease. 

But what if they weren’t? What if they’d pounded on the door in the middle of the night? What if they were harsh and demanding? What if they immediately stripsearched the children? What if their father had no clout, no resources and nowhere to turn?  What if all that caused a protective father to lose his cool? And what if that father were Black?  Would the twins be home now? 

In child welfare, where there's smoke there's usually just smoke

● There are many reasons Buttigieg should worry about the same thing happening again. In most states there is no such thing as crying wolf in child welfare. Often, if a call alleges something that, if true, would be child abuse, it’s screened in for investigation – no matter how thin the evidence, no matter how absurd the allegation and no matter how many times an anonymous caller has made similar unfounded allegations before. Obviously, that should change and screening should be tightened. 

But it’s even worse. In almost all states some sort of record is kept of every allegation, even those labeled unfounded, which is more than 80% of them. And keep in mind, for an allegation to be unfounded that means a worker found so little evidence she couldn’t even check a box on a form saying it was slightly more likely than not that the alleged abuse or neglect occurred. 

But those unfounded allegations are ticking time bombs. Whenever someone suggests they be expunged entirely someone in the take-the-child-and-run-all-families-are-guilty-until-proven-innocent crowd will insist they need to be kept to detect “patterns” because after all, they say, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” 

So if there’s another anonymous call made against Buttigieg the existence of the first call ratchets up suspicion  --  after all, where there’s smoke … 

It’s even worse in any community that relies on a predictive analytics algorithm. Those algorithms are likely to consider any previous report, unfounded or not, reason to raise the “risk score” on a family. 

And lawmakers love this stuff. A bill likely to become law in North Carolina requires what amounts to an extra push to take away children in any case where there are “three or more reports to Child Protective Services in a 12-month period” – no matter how ludicrous those reports may be. 

Good thing the Buttigiegs don’t live in North Carolina. 

The premise behind retaining false reports is, itself, false. In child welfare, where there’s smoke, there’s usually just more smoke. And no one can see clearly through smoke. 

● It is striking how little Buttigieg knew about how the child protective services system works. He had no idea any of this could be done to his children. That’s not a knock on Buttigieg. It’s simply due to the fact that, even if you’re in public life and the family policing system isn’t part of your portfolio (it probably didn’t arise much at the Department of Transportation) you are unlikely to know any of this – if you are white and middle class. Though there are exceptions, white middle-class status provides a great deal of immunity from encounters with family policing – though being gay weakens that immunity, and the report against Buttigieg may illustrate that. 

In contrast, if you’re poor and nonwhite, you may not know your rights, but you know that the family police are omnipresent in your neighborhood and you need to factor that in to every decision you make, from when to seek help to how much to confide in a helping professional. (For an excellent discussion of this, see Prof. Kelley Fong‘s brilliant book, Investigating Families.) 

● Indeed, even with all Buttigieg’s knowledge and experience in power, it’s not clear if he even knew he could say no to the CPS worker and the police and demand they get a court order. He didn’t get a lawyer until the next day (and, of course, unlike the overwhelming majority of parents in his position, he could afford a good one). This is why all states should have “family Miranda” laws, requiring the family police to tell families their rights. 

Left and Right share responsibility

● And finally, a note about politics: Some of the social media commentary from my fellow liberals has been quick to blame it all on the hatred stirred up by President Trump and his followers. Concerning this particular case, I think they’re probably right. But there’s more to it. The system that allowed this to be done to Pete Buttigieg’s children wasn’t created by Donald Trump. In its modern form, it dates back largely to the 1960s and 1970s, a time when party control of the White House shifted back and forth and Democrats controlled Congress.

The giant child welfare surveillance state, the mandatory reporting laws, the permission and even encouragement of anonymous reporting, the massive power to tear apart families, the lack of any serious due process, and horrible laws like the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Adoption and Safe Families Act – almost all of it well-intentioned – are bipartisan failures.  

Or, to put it another way: The person who tried to fire a weapon of family destruction at Pete Buttigieg’s children may well have been from the extreme Right. But when it came to building the weapon, loading it, and handing it to the shooter, the Left has been complicit, and we need to own up to it. 

Even now, three Democratic governors have tweeted their sympathy with Buttigieg and his family. All are in states that allow anonymous reports. Will they move to change that? 

It took the worst elements of liberalism and conservatism to create this horrible system, it will take the best elements of both to fix it. Some of us are working on it – together – through a group known as United Family Advocates.