Still another bad “child welfare” bill in West Virginia.

The latest bad bill in West Virginia would make it harder to keep siblings together.

In some cases, this one encourages moving instantly to keep children from their parents (and their siblings) forever, regardless of why they came into care. 

UPDATE, APRIL 24, 2025: Good news! This bill did not pass.

All of the posts in this series are available here.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that in West Virginia, the Child Removal Capital of America, which tears apart families at a rate more than four times the national average, no impoverished child is safe while the State Legislature is in session. 

First came the bill that would send worker caseloads soaring by more than 48%, while drowning workers in cases for which children never should have been traumatized by a needless investigation. 

Then came the bill to build at least one, possibly two more of the worst form of institutions into which to dump children, parking-place “shelters.” 

But another one may be the worst yet.  Think of it as ASFA on steroids. 

Among its many execrable provisions the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act demands that, with certain exceptions, if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months, the state family police agency must seek to terminate that child’s right to live with her or his parents. It doesn’t matter why the child came into care in the first place.  

There are some exceptions.  But there also are so-called “aggravating circumstances” – situations where the agency is allowed to seek TPR immediately. In extremely rare cases that is justified. But states also are invited to pile on whatever other so-called aggravating circumstances they can think of. 

It's all led to the needless destruction of a staggering number of families – overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite, of course -- and to the creation of a generation of legal orphans, children who “age out” of foster care with no ties to their birth parents and no other home either.  

That’s why, throughout the child welfare field and beyond, so many are having second thoughts.  But not in West Virginia, of course, where, by a nearly unanimous vote, the state House of Delegates passed a bill that would effectively double down.  This bill, like the other two, is sponsored by two Delegates who also are white, middle-class foster parents. But while I am sure both lawmakers are genuinely concerned about vulnerable children, the bill still oozes white privilege. 

One part of the bill says this: 

When a child has been placed in a foster care arrangement for a period in excess of fifteen consecutive months or fifty percent of the child’s life, and the department determines that the placement is a fit and proper place for the child to reside, the foster care arrangement may not be terminated unless the termination is in the best interest of the child … [Emphasis added].

There are some limited exceptions, including if the children are being reunified with parents and if the children were abused in the foster home. 

But now consider when that fifty percent provision would be triggered: 

● If the child is placed at one year of age.

● If the child is placed at six months.

● If the child is placed at two months.

● If the child is placed at birth. 

Though it doesn’t literally call for instant termination, and has that theoretical exception for reunification, the West Virginia chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (a group that is hardly family-friendly) got the real message.  According to a story in West Virginia Watch (which also is hardly family-friendly): 

Molly Arbogast, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers West Virginia chapter, said the change would allow termination of parental rights far earlier than the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act standard. … 

“The bill’s 50% rule would create a harsher, arbitrary standard [than ASFA] that could result in unnecessary family separations, particularly for very young children, without federal authorization.” 

Separating children from extended families 

The bill also jeopardizes the only area where West Virginia does better than average, placing children with relatives instead of strangers. 

Under this bill, what happens if relatives aren’t found almost instantly – or if the family police agency doesn’t make a serious effort to look?  What if they’re found but aren’t ready instantly because they, too, are poor and need help to fix up their home?  What if they’re simply afraid to have the family police agency in their lives and need reassurance? 

However hard this may be on the egos of privileged stranger-care parents, the evidence is overwhelming that kinship foster care typically is better for children’s well-being, and safer, than stranger-care.  And though the excuse for the bill is that it would promote stability for foster children, kinship care placements typically also are more stable than stranger care placements, because kin are less likely to give up on a child when the going gets rough. 

But the harm this bill would do to children doesn’t end there. 

One of the worst things foster care placement often does to children is to separate them not only from parents but also from siblings. The research on the need to maintain sibling connections is so overwhelming and the benefits are so great that the American Bar Association says: “Sibling relationships are sacred.” 

But this bill puts the interests of white middle-class stranger-care parents first. It sets time limits on when foster or adoptive parents who have taken in one child must be notified that siblings are available, and it says that even when a court determines that moving a child to a home with her or his siblings is in her or his “best interests” they no longer have to do it – they only have to do it if they feel like it; “best interests” be damned!  

Even the West Virginia chapter of Prevent Child Abuse America, a group, which, at the national level has a poor history on supporting families, is opposed: 

“West Virginia should be taking actions to keep brothers and sisters together — not make it easier to separate them,” said Jim McKay, state coordinator for Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia... 

“For many children, those [sibling] relationships are their only remaining connection to family — and a critical source of comfort and stability. Separating them adds to the trauma they’ve already endured,” he said, adding that federal law requires states to take actions to place siblings together. 

To which one of the sponsors said, in effect, so what? “We are pushing the envelope because we’re serious about trying to improve our foster care system in West Virginia,” he declared.  (The previous posts in this series offer several ways to actually do just that.) 

Notwithstanding good intentions, the message these foster parent lawmakers are sending boils down to: Never mind the relatives, never mind the siblings, no one could possibly be better for a foster child than – someone just like me! 

I wonder how many birth parents who lost their children to foster care are members of the West Virginia Legislature.

A transformation at Children’s Rights

There's lots of good stuff in the latest issue of the Family Justice Journal
But in particular, don't miss the Foreword on Page 8, 

A few years ago, when the group’s rhetoric changed, I was skeptical about whether there’d be a change in substance.  I was wrong. 

For nearly 30 years no group has been in a better position to make real change for the better in “child welfare” than the group known as “Children’s Rights.”  But for much of the group’s history, they squandered the opportunity.   

In state after state, their media-savvy founder and first executive director, Marcia Lowry, became the “Godsource” for reporters – that one source treated reverentially in every story -- as the group brought what I came to call McLawsuits, essentially the same suit each time.  For reasons discussed in an NCCPR publication called “The Children Wronged by Children’s Rights” these McLawsuits almost never made systems better and sometimes made them worse. 

Then Lowry had some sort of falling out with her Board of Directors. She left to form “A Better Childhood,” another organization that churns out the same sort of McLawsuits.  A few years after Lowry was succeeded at CR by Sandy Santana, the rhetoric changed, so did the group’s public policy positions – they even called for repeal of the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  But would the change in outlook be backed by a change in the group’s strategy and litigation?  

The first sign that there would, in fact, be such a change came one year ago when, on behalf of the Minneapolis NAACP, Children’s Rights filed a federal civil rights complaint against the family policing systems in the two largest counties in Minnesota. The complaint deals head-on with needless investigation and surveillance, wrongful removal and racism in these systems. 

And now, Santana has presented a comprehensive agenda for a change in direction.  It comes in the form of the foreword for the latest issue of the Family Justice Journal (See Page 8.) I hope everyone will read it in full. 

Santana begins by telling his own remarkable personal story. Then he forthrightly acknowledges that the approach the organization had taken for decades had been wrong – and things are going to be different.  He writes: 

In the sometimes charged and polarized debate between advocates of parents’ rights and advocates of children’s rights, our organization historically leaned in favor of intervention to “protect” the child. In the years immediately following the passage of ASFA, perhaps blinded by our conviction that no child should grow up with the state as a parent, our child welfare reform litigation campaigns supported the enforcement of that law’s strict timelines for the termination of parental rights. As we know, that law created a new category of legal orphans, intensified the regulation and forced separation of Black communities and families, prioritized adoption over reunification, and does not align with our understanding of treatment, recovery, trauma, and the critical importance of t the parent-child bond. 

Over the past decade, under new leadership, we have reflected deeply on how the impact litigation cases we brought on behalf of kids in state custody and the reforms they delivered, did not always support the preservation of families – particularly Black families. Through this process, we listened closely to the voices of survivors, who not only described the deep trauma they experienced within the system but from being separated from their parents and

uprooted from their communities. We also heard from mothers who endured the terror of constant surveillance and the ineffable pain of losing their children. 

Those conversations profoundly transformed the organization’s long-standing conception of children’s rights. They made it clear that children do not exist in a bubble of autonomous rights disconnected from their families, communities, and cultures. 

The essay lists a series of concrete actions CR has taken or will take to back up these words, including: 

We are partnering with the Family Justice Law Center to explore constitutional challenges to warrantless home entries, invasive strip searches of children, and “emergency

removals,” often carried out in non-exigent circumstances without parental consent or due process protections. … 

We are co-leading with JMACforFamilies a collaborative of advocates, mandated reporters, legal professionals, researchers and lived experts to develop new mandated reporting policies and practices in New York State to prevent unnecessary family surveillance and separation. … 

We are exploring impact litigation to give teeth to the “reasonable efforts”* standard. 

And, perhaps most promising: 

In states where we have custodial consent decrees in place, we are using our leverage to press for front-end policy and practice changes that lead to more successful reunifications, increased extended family kinship placements without terminating parental rights, and driving toward a radically smaller foster system … 

That suggests some hope for the children of Michigan where the old leadership of CR, under Marcia Lowry, negotiated a particularly awful decree. 

Lowry herself, however, continues to do damage. A Better Childhood still does the same old harm in the same old way. 

As for that publication, “The Children Wronged By ‘Children’s Rights,’” The full name is “‘The Children Wronged by Children’s Rights’ (and ‘A Better Childhood’ too’”), it’s been updated to put the Children’s Rights criticism in the past tense.  I hope it always stays that way.

*Federal law requires family policing systems, a more accurate term than “child welfare” systems to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together.  The law is routinely ignored.

Pushing back on a child welfare poll full of loaded questions

A new poll reveals that even when the questions are rigged, Americans are less likely to buy the snake oil the family police establishment has been selling.

The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Adoption and Safe Families Act
 have destroyed the lives of millions of children and families. 
But the "Bipartisan Policy Center" thinks they're models of a glorious era of bipartisanship.

Two new polls, one of them with questions that appear rigged to produce answers favorable to family policing, are bringing some good news to families, and some bad news to the family police. 

The polls make clear that even after growing up on decades of “health terrorism” – the exploitation of horror stories to misinform the public about who typically gets caught up in the system and why – the reality of family policing is starting to break through in the public mind. 

In this post I’ll look at the results, and at the group behind the poll with the loaded questions. 

The poll that wasn’t rigged 

Back in the 19^th Century, the white racists who stole Native American children and forced them into hideous boarding schools, and tore apart impoverished immigrant families and forced the children onto so-called “orphan trains” grandly called themselves “child savers.”  So it’s hard to imagine that in the 21^st Century there could be a group that actually calls itself “Kidsave.”  But there is.  And they commissioned a poll from Gallup, which appears to have been geared toward encouraging more Black families to foster and adopt. 

But the questions appear to be unbiased.  The results are broken down by Black adults and adults of all other races.  

It found that a majority of people of all races now recognize that the system is profoundly biased and doesn’t even try to keep families together.  And of course, the recognition is greater among those who, as a group, have had far more personal experience with that system.  Have a look:

The only good news for the family police came from the fact that, apparently, only a minority of respondents agreed with the statement “Overall, the foster care system harms more than helps the children in its care.”  But while Gallup reveals how many agreed with the statement, it doesn’t say how many disagreed.  Did the majority disagree or did the majority say some equivalent of no opinion / I don’t know. 

The poll that was rigged 

In politics they’re called “push polls” – polls in which the true objective is to sway voters using loaded or manipulative questions. 

Was that the intent of this poll done by Harris for a group calling itself the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) as part of its new child welfare initiative?  I don’t know.  But some of the questions sure sound like push polling. 

The poll was conducted as part of a BPC initiative that appears intended to thwart real change.  Indeed, the initiative’s home page explicitly states that they want to recreate the same bipartisanship that prompted Congress to pass two of the most hideous anti-family “child welfare” laws now on the books: the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Adoption and Safe Families Act.  

These laws have destroyed millions of lives.  

These laws have formed the foundation for a child welfare surveillance state that will subject more than one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children to the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  And almost always, it will be in response to a false report.  These laws have channeled millions into the lifelong emotional trauma inflicted by needless foster care.  One-quarter to one-third of them, and probably many more, will be subjected to abuse in foster care itself. 

And these laws have so overwhelmed the system with false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect that the system has little time to find the relatively few children in real danger. 

Equally revealing: The one excellent anti-racist law passed by Congress in the past 50 years is not celebrated by BPC. There is no mention of seeking to recapture the spirit of the Indian Child Welfare Act.  Even the current Supreme Court recognized the importance of ICWA, and the vote to uphold it was bipartisan! 

The bipartisanship of CAPTA and ASFA is the bipartisanship for which the Bipartisan Policy Center is nostalgic.  So of course they wring their hands about “polarization.”  But in this case, opposition to their agenda is not polarization – it’s families fighting back.  It’s foster youth refusing to be shut out and silenced.  It’s a refusal to label repression as consensus. 

The BPC’s initiative is an attempt to hold back the tide of change.  It is led by Rob Geen, who was a longtime apparatchik at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  His arrival coincided with a significant turn for the worse at Casey as it largely abandoned any concern about needless removal of children. (In contrast there already is a real bipartisan initiative pressing for real changes in family policing that would make all children safer.  It’s called United Family Advocates.) 

BPC is kicking off its initiative with what sure seems like a push poll.  It’s got lots of questions that stack the deck and encourage particular answers.  In question after question, they do this by embracing the Big Lie of American child welfare – the false claim that child safety and family preservation are opposites that need to be “balanced.”  According to the Big Lie, when the system falsely accuses families, traumatizes children with needless interrogations and stripsearches and forces them needlessly into foster care somehow only adults are harmed. 

Indeed, BPC’s publication releasing the poll results explicitly characterizes support for massive overinvestigation of families as “err[ing] on the safe side.”  On the contrary, the massive child welfare surveillance state built on the very laws BPC loves has made all children less safe. 

In spite of the rigged wording, discussed in detail below, the poll produced some extraordinary numbers: 

● By a wide majority, respondents believe children’s well-being is best ensured by “heavily favor[ing] parents' authority” rather than “heavily favoring the government’s interest in ensuring children’s well-being.”  (Notice the subtle stacking of the deck: The question is not balanced. It does not repeat the line about children’s well-being in the part favoring parents, only in the part favoring government.) 

● Americans are realizing that racial and class bias permeate family policing.  Sixty percent agree that “Too often, decisions on whether the child welfare system should intervene in families are influenced by racial biases.”  (That’s the figure for all of those surveyed.  So far, BPC has not  released any results broken down by race.)  And 73% agree that “Too often, decisions on whether the child welfare system should intervene in families are influenced by socioeconomic/poverty biases.” 

● And despite the best efforts of the pollsters and the Bipartisan Policy Center, Americans understand how harmful it is for children to be consigned to the chaos of foster care. 

The poll found that 39% of respondents “Heavily favor the system removing the child from their home, even if removal might not be absolutely necessary”   But 53% “Heavily favor the system keeping the child with their family, even if the risk of future harm is unclear.” 

Now, let’s consider the more flagrant examples of loaded questions: 

● Consider this muddled mess of a question that led to seemingly contradictory responses 

In your opinion, which of the following statements most closely reflects your position on how the U.S. child welfare system should work when deciding whether to investigate reports of abuse or neglect in these scenarios?

-- Investigate every report, even if that means that some parents might be investigated unnecessarily. 

-- Only investigate reports where there is compelling evidence that abuse or neglect has occurred, or is occurring, even if some legitimate reports aren't investigated.

 The question is framed to leave the false impression that only parents might be harmed by unnecessary investigations.  So, not surprisingly, when questioned this way, a strong majority favors investigating every report.   

But what would happen if the options were phrased this way? 

-- Investigate every report even if it leaves some children emotionally traumatized for life after being interrogated about the most intimate aspects of their lives – and then being stripsearched – while also overloading workers so they have less time to find children in real danger. 

-- Only investigate reports where there is compelling evidence that abuse and neglect has occurred or is occurring in order to spare children needless trauma and increase the odds that workers will find children in real danger before it’s too late. 

And here’s where it gets weird.  In spite of the stacked deck nature of the actual poll question, the BPC publication discussing the poll also notes what apparently was a response to another question.  Before the family police begin an investigation 

60% of Americans think that authorities should need reports detailing first-hand knowledge or a strong reason to suspect a child has been or is being harmed.

So according to this poll, before the family police launch an investigation, a  majority of Americans oppose requiring “compelling evidence that abuse or neglect has occurred” but favor requiring “first-hand knowledge or a strong reason to suspect a child has been or is being harmed.”  (And by the way, either of those would be a higher standard than child abuse hotlines apply today.) 

Another question once again tries to stack the deck: 

 In an ideal world, which of the following statements most closely reflects your position on what the primary purpose of the child welfare system in this country should be?

They were given two options: 

44% said: 

Primarily protecting children at risk of abuse or neglect by their families. 

But 51% said: 

Primarily strengthening families' ability to care for their children.

So despite the false framing in which “protecting children” and “strengthening families” are presented as opposites, a majority wasn’t fooled.  A majority apparently understood that the primary way to protect children is strengthening families. 

But imagine how much greater the margin would be had the options been phrased honestly, and respondents had been asked if the system’s role should be 

Primarily protecting children at risk of abuse or neglect by investigating their families and removing the children 

or 

Primarily protecting children at risk of abuse or neglect by strengthening their families. 

Why were the results here so different from the very similar question about investigations?  Perhaps because people don’t realize how traumatic investigations, in and of themselves, are for children.  In contrast, this question speaks of the entire “child welfare system,” which might conjure up visions of the harm of child removal. 

The question that was really about ASFA 

As you read about this next question, keep in mind that BPC specifically cites the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) as the kind of glorious achievement their new initiative hopes to replicate. 

● Another example of pushback against the push polling comes in a question about timelines.  With certain exceptions, ASFA requires states to seek termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) if they have been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months – no matter what the reason.  Even if the child never should have been taken in the first place.  Even if the family police agency did nothing real to help the family reunify.  

Congress was persuaded to pass this thanks to another Big Lie: the false claim that a vast family preservation conspiracy was forcing children to languish in foster care while the same agencies that took them away in the first place lavished chance after chance on horrible parents.  Impose strict timelines, they said, and all these children would be “freed” for adoption, taken in immediately by hordes of couples desperate to receive them and all would live happily ever after. 

None of it was true.  The primary purpose of ASFA was to encourage taking away more children.  One of those who claimed responsibility for writing ASFA, the late Richard Gelles, couldn’t resist gloating about this. In 2000 he told the New York City publication Child Welfare Watch: 

"Initially, this was just supposed to be a safe families bill, not really an adoption bill at all. The adoption component was a way of sanitizing the bill, to make it more appealing to a broader group of people. Adoption is a very popular concept in the country right now." 

In fact, not only was ASFA not responsible for reducing length of stay in foster care it may have impeded it.  ASFA also led to an increase in children aging out of foster care with no home at all, many of them legal orphans with no ties to their birth families and no magical adoptive home either. 

The best way to reduce time in foster care is to reduce it to zero by not taking children needlessly in the first place.  The next best way is to finally get serious about providing families with the concrete help they need to reunite.  

But BPC’s push poll-type question offers a false choice in keeping with the ASFA false narrative.  Respondents were asked: 

In your opinion, which of the following statements most closely reflects your position on how the U.S. foster care system should work when deciding how long parents should be given to address challenges? 

Heavily favor the system giving parents more time to address challenges and reunify with their children, even if it means that children spend more time in foster care. 

Heavily favor the system minimizing the amount of time that children remain in foster care, even if it means that parents and children are less likely to be reunited. 

Despite this loaded language, respondents weren’t hoodwinked.  By a remarkably strong majority 55 to 36% they favored “giving parents more time.” 

And what might have happened had the question been framed more honestly, with the options presented as: 

Heavily favor the system giving parents more time to address challenges and reunify with their children, because research shows children do best when they maintain ties to their families. 

Heavily favor the system minimizing the amount of time until termination of parental rights, even if it means children may become legal orphans with no ties to any family. 

They’re not evil, but they sure are sick! 

A key defense used by family policing agencies boils down to: You don’t understand.  We’re not police, we’re helpers!  We don’t think parents are evil (even though we gladly use horror stories about extremely rare cases where they are evil to stampede you into supporting us). No, we don’t think they’re evil, but they’re sick! Sick! Sick!  So we must be free to bestow upon them our counseling and parent education while we hold their children in foster care. 

This ugly, patronizing narrative pervades BPC’s and Harris’ discussion of the poll results.  And it’s straight out of the health terrorists’ playbook.  Compare: 

In the 1980s Prevent Child Abuse America, the group that admits to having practiced health terrorism – they even used the phrase – said this about neglect: 

“Whatever the causes of physical child neglect – and they are multiple – the heart of the problem is always an emotional lacking in the parents … The community and the caseworkers see parental behavior as the problem and they are, of course, right …

In 2023, here’s how BPC and Harris sum up the answers to one of their poll questions: 

While child abuse is largely seen as an outcome of parents who want to harm their child, there is more room for redemption and second chances for neglectful parents. 

Given this kind of framing, it’s amazing that, in another question, “parents lack of financial resources” makes it to #5 in the top five “contributors to child neglect.”  At no point are respondents asked if poverty is confused with neglect.  

The work still to be done 

After all those years of health terrorism, it’s remarkable that we’ve come so far.  But the poll still reveals how much work there is to be done.  Respondents believe the #1 contributor to neglect is “Parents who don’t want to care for their child” – almost exactly the message the health terrorists at PCAA were selling decades ago.  Number three, which will be music to the ears of the family policing establishment, is “Parents who are uninformed or uneducated about how to parent.”  

Majorities support family police investigation of almost anything bad that might happen to a child. But I’m betting all those respondents who said the family police should investigate “evidence of a child’s parent(s) abusing substances” weren’t thinking of the “cannamoms” of Massachusetts. 

Would they be so quick to call for investigation of any parent with substance use issues or mental health problems if they were told first that Betty Ford suffered from both? 

And would they be so quick to call for investigating any instance of domestic violence in the home if they knew that the threat of just such an investigation drives domestic violence victims away from seeking help and keeps them, and their children, trapped with the abuser? 

The only good news in this part of the poll is that a majority did not think homelessness was cause for a family police investigation. 

So if we really want to keep children safe, safe from abuse, safe from neglect, safe from needless investigation and safe from the enormous harm of needless foster care, we still have our work cut out for us – including fighting the misdirection from Rob Geen’s project at BPC and supporting the real bipartisan solutions coming from United Family Advocates. 

But I am heartened to see how far we have come.

Texas tragedy is foster-care failure in microcosm

KABB-TV in San Antonio reported this week on the tragic death of 16-year-old Mia Morales who died in a car crash after running away from a makeshift foster care placement.  It’s remarkable how many tragic failings of Texas foster care – and the failed attempt to fix it with a McLawsuit – are illustrated by this one case. 

● Mia’s mother says she gave up the girl and her other children for adoption nine years ago because she thought they would be safe.  The mother was being abused by the children’s father. 

What if, instead of simply accepting surrender of the children, authorities had removed the abuser from the home, and helped the mother with whatever she needed to raise the children on their own?  

● The adoption failed – the adoptive parents gave up on the children and sent them back to foster care. 

We don’t know how often this happens – family policing agencies never like to ask questions to which they don’t want to know the answers.  But the available data are alarming.  It’s clear that often the “forever family” is anything but.  This much we do know: The adoptions helped Texas collect bounties of anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000 paid by the federal government under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  When the adoptions failed, Texas didn’t have to return any of the money.  In addition to all its other harms, ASFA creates an incentive for quick-and-dirty slipshod placements. 

● One reason the mother might have thought surrendering her children to foster care was the only option: She’d been in foster care herself.     

Yet, even after generations of failure, we still delude ourselves into thinking foster care is fixable. 

● The story ends with the obligatory quote from a lawyer involved in the McLawsuit against the Texas system brought by the group that calls itself “Children’s Rights.”  

But the McLawsuit, like so many other nearly identical suits brought by Children’s Rights, does nothing to fix these problems and may even make things worse. Children are in makeshift placements because too many are taken needlessly from their homes.  The McLawsuit diverts funds from what does work – providing the help families need so their children aren’t taken in the first place.  And the lawsuit complaint even calls for stricter enforcement of ASFA. 

The failure of the Children’s Rights McLawsuit approach is best summed up when the local lawyer working with them tells KABB “What these children need are trained caregivers.”  No. What these children need are exactly what Mia Morales needed – their own families.

Look who’s embraced US “best practice” in “child welfare”!

Yes, it’s this guy:

It’s tough being part of America’s “child welfare” establishment these days.  Americans are catching on to the harm done by a massive child welfare surveillance state that falsely equates child removal with child safety, and investigates the homes of more than half of all Black children.  They’re noticing the massive confusion of poverty with neglect – and not buying the excuses for it.  They have seen the racism that permeates every corner of the system.  And they’re not buying the excuses for that, either. 

But cheer up, take-the-child-and-run advocates!  There is one prominent world leader, and a top aide, who understand:  Vladimir Putin and his “Commissioner for Children’s Rights” Maria Lvova-Belova have your backs!  They’ve embraced what for decades has been considered best practice in American child welfare. 

I learned about the remarkable similarity in outlook after reading stories from NPR and The New York Times about Ukrainian mothers who have made a harrowing 3,000-mile journey to bring home children taken from them as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Some of the children were taken by force.  In other cases, the frontlines shifted.  Mothers in Ukranian territory occupied by Russia sent their children to summer camps in Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea.  But when Ukraine took back the territory they were cut off, and Russia refused to send the children home.  As NPR explains: “Kyiv now accuses Russia of using a system of summer camps and foster homes to indoctrinate and steal Ukrainian children.” 

But that’s just so unfair.  Russia’s rationale sounds remarkably like the reasons the American family policing system regularly invokes to take poor children, especially poor children of color.  For instance: 

Kostya, age 14, wound up with Russian foster parents.  They didn’t hold him by force; instead here’s how they tried to persuade him to stay: 

They said when I'm 18, I'll get 30,000 rubles a month - you know, the good life. And if I return to Ukraine, I won't get anything. 

Well, of course!  Just last month,  one of America’s most prominent advocates of a take-the-child-and-run approach to “child welfare” said pretty much the same thing.  In a publication for the American Enterprise Institute, here’s how Prof. Sarah Font explained why, for older foster youth, even aging out of the system with no home at all can be better than reunification with a parent, or even guardianship with a relative.  Wrote Font:

Although permanency is important for older youth as well, the implications are less clear given that reunification or guardianship or living with relatives … may deprive older youth of additional resources that are conditional on aging out. 

Or consider the Russian official who said this to a mother from the Ukrainian town of Vovchansk trying to get her children back.  As the mother recalls: 

He said, why are you in such a hurry? We know that Vovchansk has no gas or water. Why do you want to return the kids to such conditions? 

Here in the United States, 30% of foster children could be home right now if their families just had decent housing.  Keeping children from parents because of no gas or water, or for even less reason, is just standard operating procedure. 

The parallels don’t end there.  According to the Times: 

The children were told that if their parents did not collect them by this month, six months after their arrival, they would be sent to foster homes or put up for adoption. 

Of course!  America’s child welfare establishment says it’s just best practice to tear apart families forever if the parents don’t meet timelines! After all, the children need permanency! 

Perhaps the Russians simply got hold of a copy of America’s Adoption and Safe Families Act and decided to push it just a little further – as California does.  ASFA says family police agencies must seek termination of children’s rights to their parents after 15 months but encourages states to make the time even shorter. For the youngest children in California, the law says to seek termination of parental rights after six months.  

It’s not hard to guess what comes next.  When Ukraine finally wins and Russia is pushed back, the Russians will adopt another American best practice and declare they won’t return the children because they’ve “bonded” with their foster parents.  After all, they don’t call Maria Lvova- Belova Commissioner for Children’s Rights for nothing! 

Of course, not everyone gets it.  The woke mob at the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova, claiming their approach to child welfare constitutes a war crime.  But they have nothing to worry about.  In the extremely unlikely event that they’re ever brought to justice, the Russians have the perfect defense. They can just explain that they were acting “В интересах ребенка” – in the best interests of the child.

UPDATED: NCCPR news and commentary round-up – special Harm of ASFA edition

Saturday marked a tragic milestone – the 25^th anniversary of a law that has harmed millions of children, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  So this week, the round-up is devoted entirely to news, commentary and resources concerning the harm of ASFA. 

News: 

● A parent may be sentenced to a relatively short time in prison – but, because of ASFA, for their children it can lead to a life sentence of separation from parents they love.  The PBS NewsHour has an in-depth report. 

Recent commentary: 

● From Prof. Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of Shattered Bonds and Torn Apart, the definitive books on family policing and race, in Slate: "The Clinton-Era Adoption Law That Still Devastates Black Families Today."

● UPDATE, DEC. 13, 2021: From Kathleen Creamer, managing attorney of the Family Advocacy Unit at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia in The Imprint: "The Children of ASFA Are Now the Parents of ASFA." 

 As a family defense attorney representing parents in child welfare cases, I have spent my career as an eyewitness to the devastating aftermath of our approach. My clients are the children of ASFA. It has decimated their lives. So very many of my clients are the products of a system that devalued their connections and took them away, forever, not only from their parents, but from their brothers and sisters. From their grandparents. From their aunts and uncles. From their neighborhood, their community, their culture. I have seen the trauma of this approach ripple across generations as the system that ripped children from their natural family supports seeks to take away their own children as they move into adulthood.

● From Prof. Sarah Katz, director of the Family Law Litigation Clinic at Temple University, in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “A federal law has been destroying families for 25 years.  Let’s get rid of it.” 

● From Prof. Mical Raz in The Washington Post: “Our adoption policies have harmed families and children.  The Clinton-era Adoption and Safe Families Act passed 25 years ago. It’s time to reexamine its origins.” 

● UPDATE, FEB. 7, 2023: Also from Dr. Raz writing for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Policy Lab: "What We’ve Learned About the Impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act 25 Years Later."

● From Josie Pickens and Dean Alan Dettlaff of the upEND movement, in the Houston Chronicle: “Instead of making children safer … ASFA became yet another means for national and state governments to forcibly and permanently remove Black children from their families through a speedy process of terminating parental rights.” 

● From longtime family defender Diane Redleaf in Reason: “The Adoption and Safe Families Act Takes Kids Away From Loving Parents.” 

● UPDATE, DEC. 1, 2022  From Sara Block of Ascend Justice, and Melissa Staas of Legal Aid Chicago in the Chicago Tribune: “A federal time bomb perpetuates cyclical trauma in the foster care system”

● UPDATE, DEC. 8, 2022 From Prof. Shanta Trivedi, director of the  Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and the Courts at the University of Baltimore in Family Court Review: An in-depth examination of why: "The Adoption and SafeFamilies is Not Worth Saving: The Case for Repeal."

● UPDATE, DEC. 12, 2022 From New York City's family defenders in the New York Daily News: "Our collective experience of representing nearly 40,000 New York City parents over the past 15 years makes clear that ASFA must be repealed."

● And from NCCPR in the Albany, N.Y., Times Union “This law was supposed to protect kids from abuse. It hasn't.” 

Previous commentary: 

● Also from Prof. Trivedi, in The Imprint: “Adoption and Safe Families Act is The ‘Crime Bill’ of Child Welfare.” 

● From Kathleen Creamer, managing attorney of the Family Defense Unit at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia and Prof. Chris Gottlieb, director of the New York University School of Law Family Defense Clinic: “If Adoption and Safe Families Act Can’t Be Repealed, Here’s How to At Least Make it Better.” 

Additional resources 

● NCCPR’s ASFA resource page, with an overview of the harm the law has done and responses to some of the excuses put forth by ASFA proponents.

The American Bar Association(!) just came damn close to calling for repeal of America’s three worst “child welfare” laws

 They even acknowledged their own role in “contributing to racism in the legal field” in general and “within the child welfare legal field in particular…” 

Offhand, I can’t think of an organization that says “establishment” more than the American Bar Association.  Oh, a committee or a task force may say something radical from time to time – but the entire House of Delegates? 

So take a look at ABA 2022 House of Delegates Resolution 606.  The topic is “anti-Black systemic racism within the child welfare system.” 

I’ve noted before that lots of “child welfare” establishment groups have been engaging in reputation laundering. They’ve rushed to slap “Black Lives Matter” statements on their websites and otherwise pretend to support real change – while supporting nothing that would reduce the family policing system’s power or acknowledge their own complicity in creating and supporting that system. 

The ABA resolution is different on both counts. 

At various points, the report gets specific about where to find the racism.  It singles out for criticism three odious laws, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act.  The resolution makes clear that the ABA views these laws as running afoul of the right to maintain one’s family. 

Then, a few pages later it says "policymakers must evaluate where laws run afoul of the right to maintain one's family and, where necessary, revise or repeal legislation with discriminatory impact." [Emphasis added.] 

And then there’s this the part, on page 2, where the ABA seems to be apologizing for its own role in supporting ASFA and for its “Termination Barriers” project.  That project taught lawyers how to persuade judges to rush to terminate children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than “termination of parental rights”). According to the resolution: 

the ABA also has a responsibility to recognize its own role contributing to racism in the legal field. … Within the child welfare legal field in particular, the ABA has also traditionally supported and helped design pieces of legislation that have disproportionately affected and caused harm to Black children, parents, and families.[10] 

And just to be sure everyone knows what they’re talking about, that [10] refers to a footnote which states: 

See e.g., Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001), (Referencing the ABA’s project Termination Barriers and active support for provisions in the Adoption and Safe Families Act that facilitated parental and child termination of family rights). 

The report continues: 

Recognizing the discriminatory effect of these laws requires that the legal profession stand up and do something to change them. Even if those results arose from well-intended laws, no profession should turn a blind eye once the consequences are clear. 

So, now that the American Bar Association has done it, what about you Children’s Defense Fund?  Will you admit how wrong you were about ASFA and call for repeal, or at least support of Rep. Karen Bass’ bill to significantly revise it?  Are you ready to admit the failure of CAPTA and MEPA and act accordingly?  How about you “Social Current” – or whatever you call yourselves this week?  And you, Child Welfare League of America.  Are you finally ready to put the needs of children ahead of the financial security of your members?  And you, Prevent Child Abuse America. Are you really ready to renounce your long, ugly history of, in your own words,  “health terrorism” and support change that goes beyond prattling about “well-being”? 

The ABA itself still has some work to do.  Although what was once the termination barriers project is largely gone, it’s still active in Pennsylvania – though the name has been sanitized and, I’m sure they would argue the goals broadened a bit.  But they’re still pushing, for example, the horrific practice of “concurrent planning.” 

But still …  

In 2003, I debated Howard Davidson, the first director of the ABA Center on Children and the Law, before the National Center on Adoption Law and policy.  The topic was ASFA. 

In my closing statement, I cited two of the extremely rare occasions when child welfare establishment groups actually apologized: Australian governments for the Stolen Generations, and CWLA for its project to destroy Native American communities through transracial adoption, which they admitted was “both catastrophic and unforgivable.” I said that in doing so, Australia and America showed they had become better nations. 

I concluded this way: 

I am convinced that someday America will become a better nation still.  And from tomorrow’s perspective, we will see that what is happening now is  -- both catastrophic and unforgivable.  I don’t know who will say it or when it will be said.  But I know that someday someone will stand before its victims and their descendants – and seek forgiveness for ASFA. 

We’re not there yet.  But I never thought we’d get this close in my lifetime.