The San Jose Mercury News is deep in denial about the foster-care panic it did so much to start

How Santa Clara County compares when entries into foster care are compared to the
impoverished child population in each jurisdiction. (Sources here.)

Julia Prodis Sulek is the reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who is one of the two people most responsible for setting off a foster-care panic in Santa Clara County that is among the worst anywhere in America. So it’s no surprise that in her latest story she seems desperate to pretend the panic doesn’t exist.

Granted, just writing a story with the words “foster care panic” in it is a big step up for Sulek, as is quoting people warning about such a panic and including actual comments from a parent whose child was wrongfully taken, and also from that family’s lawyer. She also quoted Prof. Kelley Fong when she cited the study she co-authored finding that increasing foster care does nothing to curb child abuse fatalities. 

That did not stop Sulek from writing the story in a way that implies children weren’t dying in the county before the child welfare agency started curbing needless entries into care. That is, of course, untrue. 

But that implication fits with what I think was the primary purpose of the story: to deny there’s a panic but still be able to say “we covered that” when the issue arises, and then return to fomenting more panic. Decades ago, in his groundbreaking work The Media Monopoly, former Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikian explained how journalists who have strong feelings about a story deal with the side of that story they don't like: They cover it. Prominently. Once. 

So, in her story about a presentation by several state and national experts to the county Board of Supervisors (a presentation that can be seen in full here, starting at about six hours and two minutes in), Sulek cited only part of a presentation by Dr Wendy Wiegmann, project director at UC Berkeley’s California Child Welfare Indicators Project. 

Weigman compared entries into foster care in Santa Clara County to entries in other counties and the state as a whole. But her graphs compared entries only to total child population.  She flagged this very point by also showing a separate table indicating that Santa Clara is, of course, one of the most affluent counties in California. This is crucial because poverty is both a risk factor for actual abuse and also a factor commonly confused with neglect. So the only true apples-to-apples comparison is one that compares entries into foster care to the impoverished child population in each county. 

When you do that, the result practically screams foster-care panic. 

In the index NCCPR publishes concerning America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties, we compare entries both to total child population and impoverished child population. Notice the huge change between them for Santa Clara. 

When you factor in poverty, Santa Clara recently has become very much an outlier. Santa Clara County takes away children at a rate 7% higher than Los Angeles, more than double the rate of New York City and nearly quadruple the rate of metropolitan Chicago. I wish Dr. Wiegmann had presented entries compared to impoverished child population for every California county. The Mercury News should have done just that. But that, of course, would have undermined Sulek’s thesis. 

Sulek also left out a supervisor’s suggestion that Santa Clara officials look at New Jersey, a state-run system with one of the lowest rates of child abuse deaths in the country. When you factor in poverty, the rate of removal in Santa Clara County is nearly triple the rate of New Jersey. 

Other problems with the story 

● Though the story does include that one example of wrongful removal, it leaves out crucial context. The case involved a mother whose two-year-old autistic son Nathan was taken after 

social workers determined that his mother failed to protect him from witnessing a domestic violence incident when his visiting father allegedly struck his mother — an experience the county said placed Nathan at substantial risk of physical harm. 

Despite the mother’s contention that she was protecting him from that violence and had agreed to a safety plan, her child was placed in foster care one day after Jaxon [Juarez’s] death. He was moved among four foster homes over four months as Jimenez complained about bite marks and other injuries she noticed during her weekly visits. 

What Sulek leaves out, and probably doesn’t know, is that taking away a child under these circumstances is even more traumatic than taking the child when the child has himself been victimized. In fact, it is so traumatic that, as a result of a class-action lawsuit, in one state, New York, it is illegal. The research underlying that decision is summarized here. 

In such cases, there is nothing to stop law enforcement from protecting the child by, say, arresting the abuser and removing him to jail. Instead, panic-motivated removals like this only discourage survivors of domestic violence from coming forward to seek help. 

● Sulek also writes that: 

Supervisor Sylvia Arenas expressed frustration with the recent tragedies, including Jaxon’s death that came after 18 months of state oversight and reforms. 

“We can’t keep up this rate of death in our county,” Arenas said. “I’m not saying foster care is a solution. What I was hoping to hear from you is that there were other strategies that were being used … somewhere where we might be able to mitigate for those deaths. …” 

She didn’t get easy answers. 

But she did get answers; they just weren’t the answers that Arenas, the other prime instigator of the foster-care panic, wanted to hear. 

In fact, many ideas were presented by the panel of experts, but Arenas rushed to dismiss them as too expensive. On the contrary, they all cost less than foster care, and those expenses almost certainly are skyrocketing – due to the foster-care panic. 

It is particularly disturbing to hear Arenas make her claim in the context of the death of Jaxon Juarez – since, as is explained in detail here, the foster-care panic itself may have contributed to Jaxon’s death because, at a crucial turning point, the county didn’t opt for a simple, and very inexpensive, option. 

● That isn’t all that frustrated Arenas. Over and over she tried to get the panel to say one could draw conclusions about systemic failure based on child abuse deaths. But no matter how many ways she asked, and no matter how frustrated she got when she wasn’t told what she wanted to hear, the panel unanimously disagreed. While each is the worst imaginable tragedy, even the panelist most prone to defend foster care, UC Berkeley Prof. Jill Duerr-Berrick, said they also are “outlier events, that are unpredictable and rare.” 

Perhaps this frustrated Sulek, too, since she left it out of her story. 

● Sulek also left out what Supervisor Betty Duong actually said when she bravely discussed what happened to her own family, growing up poor in East San Jose. Sulek said only that Duong “grew up with interventions from social workers for most of her childhood.” 

What Supervisor Duong actually said was: “We were in an environment where poverty was equated with neglect.” 

A massive experiment without informed consent 

● The most unintentionally revealing quote in the story actually came from Prof. Berrick, again the panelist most eager to defend the take-the-child-and-run approach. But in the course of doing so, she said this: 

[W]e don’t know whether [foster care is] a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative. 

The first thing to note about this is that Berrick is mistaken. There is a mountain of evidence showing that, while foster care is the less detrimental alternative in the horror story cases, for the overwhelming majority of children, those in the typical cases, it is, indeed, “a powerful intervention toward the negative” both because of the high rate of abuse in foster care itself, and the enormous trauma of removal, trauma so great it can lead to early death. 

The evidence is so strong that researchers actually have been able to estimate how many more children will die and become ill because of the panic itself. 

But suppose, hypothetically, Berrick is right and we’re as ignorant as she says we are. 

That means that for decades, arguably centuries, we have been conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment on millions of test subjects without their informed consent – and we have no idea if we’ve actually been harming them. That would be bad enough if the test subjects were adults, but in this experiment, the unwitting, unconsenting test subjects are children. 

If a California pharmaceutical company tested a new drug that way, those performing such an experiment might well be arrested and jailed.

So without intending it, probably without realizing it, what Berrick really is telling us is that “child welfare” as currently practiced in the United States is a fundamentally immoral enterprise. 

Why would anyone want to encourage such an enterprise with a foster-care panic?