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 Workshop was about foster care. It’s not finished yet. 

Child welfare in Illinois: The children’s crusade redux?

Twenty-six years ago, a little boy in Chicago died a horrible death, and everybody learned the wrong lessons.  Can the child welfare system – and the media – do better this time?

UPDATE, SEPTMEBER 15, 2020: The child welfare system has given its answer, and it is a resounding, and depressing “No.” Between fiscal years 2018 and 2020 the number of children torn from their homes in Illinois has skyrocketed 30%.  The 17% increase in 2019 alone was the second highest increase in the country that year.  In fact, even as the number of children taken over the course of a year nationwide approaches a 21-year low, the number taken in Illinois has hit a 21-year high.

The story I wrote for the Chicago Reader in 1995.

            In 1993, 3-year-old Joseph Wallace was killed by his mentally-unstable mother, Amanda. The child had been taken from her, then returned to her.  Aha! said politicians and media, especially the Chicago Tribune, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services must be bending over backwards to coddle abusive parents and support “family preservation” at the expense of “child safety.”   If we just take away vastly more children, there will be no more cases like Joseph Wallace. 

But, as I wrote in a story for the Chicago Reader in 1995, called “The Children’s Crusade,” family preservation had nothing to do with Joseph’s death – in fact, it almost saved his life.  Later stories by Tribune reporters all but acknowledged that their earlier reporting got it wrong.  But it was that early reporting that stuck in the public mind.  It was summed up best by Benjamin Wolf, Director of the ACLU of Illinois' Institutionalized Persons Project, which has a decades-old consent decree that spurred reform of DCFS. As Wolf put it at the time, those early stories made a bad child welfare system “unquestionably worse.”

            That’s because DCFS and the courts did what those early news stories told them to do.  There was a foster-care panic -- the number of children torn from their families soared.  By 1996, a child was proportionately more likely to be trapped in foster care in Illinois than any other state.  An already bad system was plunged into chaos, thousands of children were traumatized when they were taken from parents who were nothing like Amanda Wallace – and child abuse deaths actually increased.  It took a decade to recover. 

  

          Now, the whole cycle is in danger of repeating itself.  This time, the child who died a horrible death was A.J. Freund.  Some of the early news coverage has been more nuanced – a thoughtful examination of the issue of child welfare and drug abuse by Tribune reporter John Keilman and the way Tribune reporter Robert McCoppin handled allegations by a county prosecutor are good examples. But some of the commentary repeats the mistakes the Tribune made in 1993.  Meanwhile, politicians and others already are setting up efforts to keep families together to take the fall for this latest tragedy.  If they succeed, it will lead only to more such tragedy.  The stakes are, literally, life and death.

The harm of foster-care panic

            One thing that’s changed over the past 26 years: There is even more research on the enormous inherent harm of placing a child in foster care.  At least five separate studies, two of them massive in scope and looking specifically at cases from Illinois, have found that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

            That’s not as surprising as it may sound. The typical cases seen by DFCS workers are nothing like the horror stories. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect. Others fall on a broad continuum between the extremes.  Think for a moment about what happened to all those children torn from their parents at the Mexican border last year.  Yes, DCFS caseworkers almost always mean well – but the children they take suffer just as much trauma. They shed the same sorts of tears for the same sorts of reasons.

            And yes, that applies even when the issue is drug abuse. A study of infants born with cocaine in their systems found that the actual physical development of those infants was better when left with mothers able to care for them than when placed in foster care.

            Some might respond: “Yes, but A.J. was born with opiates in his system, and his mother allegedly killed him, so we should put all children born with opiates in their system in foster care.” But there is a problem with that logic:  The mother accused of killing him, JoAnn Cunningham, also was a licensed Illinois foster parent.

        

            That’s the problem with building arguments on horror stories.  For every one you have I have one that “proves” the opposite – and vice versa.  When anecdotes collide it’s time to look at the data.  We’ve already seen what those data tell us about typical cases.  Now consider what they tell us about physical safety.

            Of course most foster parents don’t abuse or neglect the children in their care.  But study after study has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes and the record of group homes and institutions is even worse.  Worse still, for reasons discussed below, a foster-care panic actually makes it more likely that children in real danger will be overlooked and more children will die.

            But that hasn’t deterred Illinois politicians.

A Tribune story about a legislative hearing says that legislators “called into question the agency’s longstanding priority of keeping families together…”

            The Associated Press reports that Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, said there was “too great a focus on what was otherwise is a laudable goal of reuniting biological families when possible.”

            According to another AP story: “Then there are questions about whether it is too difficult for child welfare workers to remove children from their homes, and too easy for parents to have their children returned to them.”

            In fact, it is extremely easy to remove children from their homes – DCFS workers – and police - can do it entirely on their own authority, without even asking a judge first.  And Illinois has one of the worst records in the nation when it comes to prolonging the time children languish in foster care.

            But most important of all, if taking away more children is the answer to preventing child abuse deaths, why hasn’t it worked in states that take away proportionately far more children than Illinois?  They have exactly the same sorts of tragedies.  Even more to the point, if taking away more children is the answer, why didn’t it work the last time it was tried in Illinois?

            During those same years that the number of Illinois children taken from their parents skyrocketed, child abuse deaths actually increased.  They didn’t start to go down again until the panic abated and foster care numbers started to decline.

When DCFS actually improved

            And, in fact, it was that very decline, a new emphasis on family preservation, and bold new leadership that led to a remarkable turnaround at DCFS.

            As the AP story notes “The system saw big improvements in the late 1990s and early 2000s, after a federal consent decree in response to [the] American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois lawsuit.”  The improvements also were a result of the appointment of one of the most politically-savvy leaders ever to run a child welfare system anywhere in America: Jess McDonald.  He quietly put an emphasis on safe, proven alternatives to foster care. 

            And child safety improved. Who says so? Independent monitors appointed by the court as part of the consent decree.  In 2003, the lead monitor told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “Children are safer now than they were when the state had far more foster children.” Their latest report shows that safety continued to improve all the way through about 2011.

            Much of what looks like a significant worsening after that is simply due to the fact that the monitors changed the way they measured key safety indicators.  But part of it is a real decline – due to budget cuts, higher caseloads and turmoil in DCFS leadership – not a Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy.  We know this because in recent years there has been little change in the number of children taken from their parents in Illinois.

            All this also explains why child abuse deaths can actually go up during a foster-care panic. 

      

      The real reason for child abuse tragedies among children “known to the system” is almost always overloaded, underprepared caseworkers who don’t have time to investigate any case carefully – so they make terrible mistakes in all directions.  A foster-care panic increases the overload, so there’s even less time for each investigation -- and even more tragic mistakes.

            So now let’s look again at the death of A.J. Freund.  In hindsight the case file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. But if you’re working for an agency that’s suffered years of budget cuts and increasing caseloads, you don’t have time to look at the big picture.  Over and over, workers seemed to look only at the immediate incident.  They did the minimum required to check the necessary boxes – not because they didn’t care, but because it was all there was time for.  (Or, in some rare cases, if that county prosecutor is correct, they may not, in fact, care.)

            And it wasn’t just DCFS workers who didn’t go deep enough.  Rep. Feigenholtz says "I got the sense from what I read that the cops were essentially begging (DCFS) to take the child."  But, as noted aboive, the cops don’t have to beg anyone. They had full authority to remove A.J. themselves.  And on at least one occasion, a police officer arrived at the door and left again  after peering into the house, and seeing two boys there who appeared to be “happy and healthy.”

            But now, in a move that will increase the danger to children – but placate legislators -   DCFS   Every case involving young children that was determined to be “unfounded” is now going to be “reviewed” all over again.  At the same time, the number of calls to the Illinois child abuse hotline almost certainly has spiked – it almost always happens after high profile deaths.  Workers, terrified for their jobs, will rush to take away more children needlessly, exposing them to emotional trauma and the high risk of abuse in foster care – and at the same time, they’ll actually miss more children in real danger.

has made that workload even worse.

            None of this means no child ever should be taken away.  But foster care is an extremely toxic intervention.  Illinois was able to make children safer only when it started to use foster care in smaller doses. 

Enter Chapin Hall

            Even those of us who are not learned scholars understand this much about the research process: You’re supposed to do the research first and then draw conclusions.

            But apparently, over at Chapin Hall, they prefer a different approach.  According to AP:

The research center Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago is expected next month to issue what [Gov. J.B.] Pritzker called “actionable recommendations” into how the DCFS’s Intact Family Services Unit functions.

But Chapin Hall has shared one conclusion in a press release: “With the lowest foster care entry rate in the nation, Illinois has a high threshold for child removal.”

            Rep. Feigenholtz leapt on that, and, according to AP “said lawmakers have to answer the question of whether the threshold for child removal is too high or whether the workers are ‘not aware of them [sic] or are poorly trained.’”

            But even leaving aside the problems with this conclude-first-do-the-“research”-later approach, the way Chapin Hall uses the figure on entries into foster care is misleading.

            ● The low rate of removal in Illinois is driven almost entirely by Cook County.  It’s not unusual for big cities to have lower rates of removal than their surrounding states, possibly because caseworkers in big cities may see more poverty and are less likely to confuse that poverty with neglect.

            In the rest of Illinois, the rate of removal is more than two-and-a-half-times the rate in Cook County, and only about 18 percent below the national average.*  But of the three cases that prompted Chapin Hall’s “research” two occurred outside of Cook County.  So these data could as easily be used to make a case that downstate Illinois should be taking proportionately fewer children.

            ● And there’s still another problem with the figure.  Illinois is notorious for taking away children and not reporting the removals as foster care placements.  Chicago attorney Diane Redleaf, author of They Took The Kids Last Night, calls it a “shadow foster care system.”  It works this way: DCFS tells a family: agree “voluntarily” to place your children with, say, grandma, and we won’t go to court and place them with strangers.  DCFS then can argue that it was not really a “foster care” placement.

            Illinois is not alone in this practice. But by its nature, we don’t know how often it happens and how Illinois compares to other states.  That calls into question Chapin Hall’s claim.

            There’s one other problem with Chapin Hall being hired to do anything concerning DCFS. Chapin Hall is run by a former DCFS director, Bryan Samuels, creating an unavoidable appearance of conflict-of-interest.  This is not the first time Chapin Hall has failed to be sensitive to such appearances.

Then how do we fix this?

At the legislative hearing, Rep. Grant Wehrli pretty well guaranteed himself a place in news stories by demanding of DCFS Director Marc Smith: “What are you going to do as an agency to ensure that a case even remotely close to this one doesn’t happen again?” If the governor plans to hold Smith to the same standard then just fire him now. And his successor. And his successor’s successor.

The only acceptable goal for child abuse tragedies is zero.  But we must seek that goal understanding that our reach will always exceed our grasp, and if that is the measure of a child welfare agency leader than every leader of a large system has failed, is failing and always will fail.

No one demands that police chiefs stop – or even solve – every murder.  Yet now Smith is expected to “ensure” that there will never be a tragedy even “remotely” like the death of A.J. Freund.

I can hear the objections now: Yes, but we’re talking about children who were known to the system.  As is discussed in detail here, invoking the percentage of cases “known to the system” may be the most meaningless statistic in all of child welfare.  But here’s the short, Illinois-specific response: A vast number of children become “known to the system” each year.

The problem is illustrated by what I have come to call the big blue haystack:

That’s based on national figures.  Here’s the Illinois version, UPDATED MAY 8:

This blue haystack represents the  358,545 children who were, not only known to DCFS in some way but the subjects of investigations by the agency over the three years from 2015 through 2017, according to a just released state audit.  According to that audit, 102 of those children died.  But among those other 348,443 children are many whose case files look just like the files of the 102 who died – and yet nothing went wrong.**

It’s a lot harder to find those needles in a haystack than simply trotting out the “known to the system” figure might lead one to believe.

But there are ways to reduce the likelihood of such tragedies. 

Those ways were summarized in a study done by a liberal Texas think tank (yes, there is such a thing), the Center for Public Policy Priorities.

Let’s start with what doesn’t contribute to more child abuse deaths. The study found:

● The rate at which people report child abuse does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state screens in reports for investigation does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

● The rate at which a state takes children from their parents does not contribute to more or fewer child abuse deaths.

Here’s what does contribute to more child abuse deaths:

● High rates of poverty.

● High rates of teen pregnancy.

● Low rates of services to prevent child maltreatment.

Which means, of course, the real solutions are pretty obvious.

For starters, restore the cuts to DCFS so workers have manageable caseloads.  But that can’t be done simply by going on a caseworker hiring binge – not now at least.  A foster-care panic almost certainly already is underway in Illinois.  If all the state does is hire more caseworkers, then they’ll simply be chasing all the new cases and all you’ll get is the same lousy system only bigger.

So any new hiring must be accompanied not just by restoring but expanding services for the many families who are troubled but where the parents are neither sadists nor brutes.  That kind of help can prevent such families from ever becoming the subjects of DCFS investigations and stealing time from finding children in real danger.  Similarly, crisis intervention services must be expanded for families on the verge of losing children to foster care.  And high-quality family based drug treatment needs to be readily available for every parent who needs it.

That will cost some money. But the final step won’t cost a dime: Smith and Pritzker need to show the courage to stand up to politicians, stand up to media if necessary, and refuse to allow a foster-care panic.

They should follow the example of Jess McDonald.  Or they could take the more blunt approach favored by Joette Katz in Connecticut.  Katz left a judgeship on the state Supreme Court to run the Connecticut Department of Children and Families under former Gov. Dannel Malloy. 

Before Katz took over the agency, every few years a high-profile child abuse tragedy would set off a foster-care panic.  Not long after Katz started running DCF it happened again.  But this time there would be no panic.  Because Katz would not allow it.  As she put it at the time:

A child dies and the next thing you know workers are getting thrown under the bus and 500 children get removed [from their homes] the next day because it’s a reaction to a tragedy. I think that’s the exact wrong way to behave.

She – and Malloy -- paid a political price for it.  But you know how everyone says we’re supposed to “put the children first”?  It turns out that this child welfare leader and this governor really meant it.

A test for Illinois media

This is also a testing time for the state’s media.  Back in 1993 and 1994, the Tribune’s coverage of the Joseph Wallace case attracted enormous national attention.  Then Managing Editor Ann Marie Lipinski said she got calls from "18 million reporters."  One national news organization after another did huge stories scapegoating family preservation, almost all with a Chicago dateline. 

And it hasn’t stopped.  The Tribune coverage created a template that continues to be followed all over the country: Find a high-profile fatality, or every child abuse death in a state or locality, and rush to blame efforts to keep families together.  All over the country, children suffer for it.

Now, the Tribune, and other Illinois media, have a chance to create a brand new template – in which instead of cheap shots and scapegoats, they search the nation, and even Illinois’ recent past to see what really works in child welfare. 

Perhaps this time, they can set an example for how to cover child welfare right. 

*-Rates of removal are calculated by comparing data on entries into care, available here, to Census Bureau data on the number of impoverished children in every Illinois county.

** - The DCFS Inspector General gives a higher figure for deaths known to the system. But it appears she also uses a much broader definition of "known to the system" - any child who was the subject of a call to the state child abuse hotline.  So while her figures show more needles, her comparison involves a much larger haystack.  Also, as the Chicago Tribune points out, the Inspector General's figures don't indicate how many of these deaths were due to abuse and neglect.