UPDATED: When the journalism of child welfare fails, part three: Texas lawmakers are catching on; the Texas Tribune is not.

The state capitol in Austin

What the Tribune (and the Dallas Morning News) can’t face is that after decades of seeing the system that calls itself “child welfare” do enormous harm to children, people across the political spectrum are coming together and finding common ground. They've come to understand that due process for families is the best way to ensure children’s rights and child safety. 

The online news site Texas Tribune has improved its coverage of the family policing system (a more accurate term than “child welfare” system) compared to how it handled these issues when it was founded in 2009.  But it still has a long way to go. 

The Tribune is still pushing the Big Lie of American “child welfare” – the idea that any bill that protects children from being traumatized by the family police and forced into the hellscape of Texas foster care is a “parents’ rights” bill that supposedly comes at the expense of child safety.  And they do it with a slightly revised version of the standard Texas twist; the longstanding false claim that any such legislation must be part of a vast right-wing conspiracy! 

I previously discussed a fearmongering Texas Tribune story about one of the bills.  The theme of the latest story can be boiled down to: The Texas foster care system is horrible! How dare the legislature try to keep more kids out of it!  At one point, the reporter simply decrees on her own authority that one law is “extreme.” 

To understand the extent to which the Tribune keeps misleading Texans about these bills, we need to start with what the bills actually do. 

● One bill requires that families get the equivalent of a Miranda warning when the family police are at the door. That is, they must be informed of rights they already have.  Contrary to the Tribune’s latest story, they are not given any new rights. 

● That bill also curbs hidden foster care – or what should be called blackmail placements, in which families are coerced into “voluntary” placements of their children, usually with relatives, that are anything but voluntary.  The most recent data are old, but they indicate more than 60% of Texas placements occur this way – and they’re not even included in the figures Texas reports to the federal government, or to the public, as entries into care. 

● Another bill largely (though not completely) replaces anonymous reporting to the state’s child abuse hotline with confidential reporting.  That is, the accused still won’t know who accused them but, in most cases, the family police agency will. 

● Another bill bolsters legal representation for families – something that has been proven to curb needless foster care with no compromise of safety. 

● And another bill simply requires the family police and judges to document the “reasonable efforts” they made to prevent removal of a child to foster care and to prevent termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights).  

Again, this law does not give families any new rights. “Reasonable efforts” have been required by federal law since 1980 – and routinely ignored.  This bill doesn’t even stop Texas family police from continuing to ignore the requirement – they just have to state what, if anything, they did to comply with it! 

The vast bipartisan conspiracy 

All of these bills passed with bipartisan support – most of them nearly unanimously. 

That’s important because of a decades-long insistence by some Texas media on putting a false ideological framing on these issues.  (Some of the reasons for this are discussed in the report we issued on Texas child welfare nearly two decades ago.)  

In Texas media, particularly the Tribune and the Dallas Morning News, any attempt to curb the vast power of the family police supposedly is part of a far-right plot to place “parents’ rights” ahead of “child safety.” 

The Dallas Morning News truly outdid itself last year when it managed to blame both an expansion of family police power and a reduction in that power on the far right.  The latest Tribune story has come up with a new bit of spin to explain away the bipartisan support for these bills. 

So with that, it’s time for a close look at the latest Texas Tribune failure. 

The reporter’s preconceived notions are clear right off the bat.  Here’s how the story begins: 

Faced with a troubled foster care system and a 12-year-long lawsuit for putting children in state custody at risk, Texas legislators this year made sweeping changes to state agencies that look after vulnerable kids removed from their homes. 

But legislators’ focus was less on conditions for children in the system and more on reducing the number of kids entering state care. 

Translation: We want you to believe those awful right-wing lawmakers cared more about coddling abusive parents than fixing the state’s horrendous foster care system! 

On the contrary. The legislative priorities reflect the fact that, at long last, lawmakers are beginning to realize that you will never be able to fix the state’s horrendous foster care system as long as the state keeps shoveling children into it in huge numbers. 

But to sell these as “parents’ rights” bills, there’s a lot you have to leave out.  So a story written by a
reporter whose bio says: “She covers how inequity plays out for children and families with an eye on the state’s foster care system” makes no mention of that inequity, even though Black and mixed-race children are torn from their families in Texas at a rate 60% above their rate in the general population – a disparity these bills are likely to curb. 

In contrast, ProPublica’s latest story about the Miranda rights bill notes that it “will in many cases benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income families who often have their lives and homes upended by CPS officers.”  The story also explains that “child welfare issues often defy typical partisan binaries.” 

But that doesn’t fit the Tribune story’s entire parents vs. kids framing.  So the Tribune story ignores inequity and instead claims that lawmakers concluded: “parents facing abuse accusations are entitled to more rights.” 

For starters, that’s grossly misleading.  None of the provisions of new laws discussed in the story give parents – or anyone else -- more rights.  The bills do things like force the family police to tell families the rights they already have and document whether they have followed existing federal law.  The one provision that arguably gives more rights – to children -- the one that helps protect them from blackmail placements – isn’t mentioned in the story. 

But the bigger problem with the story is the claim that these are “parents’ rights” bills. 

● A law that reduces the chances that children will be forced to endure the enormous trauma of a needless child abuse investigation because an angry neighbor is hiding behind anonymity to phone in a false report is a children’s rights law. 

● A law that requires the family police to simply document what, if anything, they say they tried to do to keep a child safety out of the horrors of Texas foster care – so a judge can step in when, in fact, they did little or nothing -- is a children’s rights law. 

● A law that bolsters family defense, so families have a team that can propose alternatives to cookie-cutter “service plans” doled out by the family police -- again, to spare children the horror of Texas foster care -- is a children’s rights law. 

● And a collection of laws that, together, may reduce false allegations trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect” so workers have more time to find the few children in real danger is a collection of children’s rights laws. 

The ultimate unreliable source 

To bolster the false claim that these are parents’ rights bills, the reporter turns to what probably is the least reliable source in all of Texas, but a source guaranteed to support the reporter’s own view: Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).  Indeed, she relied on the chapter of that organization which did the most comprehensive study of all to determine if its program worked -- and found that it actually did harm: the chapter in Texas. 

CASA is a particularly odd choice for a reporter whose beat focuses on inequity.  CASA is the program in which overwhelmingly white, middle-class amateurs with no required qualifications and maybe 40 hours of training (plus in-service so it’s OK, right?) are allowed to march into the homes of families who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite and pass judgment upon them – judgments that, depressingly often, are rubber-stamped by the courts. 

That’s why a law review article aptly characterized CASA as “an act of white supremacy.”  

Furthermore, study after study after study shows that CASA backfires, often hurting the children it is intended to help. 

The most revealing of these was a study of Texas CASA – commissioned by Texas CASA itself.  It was released at the end of 2019.  According to that study: 

“Overall, children appointed a CASA have significantly lower odds than children without a CASA of achieving permanency.” [Emphasis added.]

Compared to children not burdened with a CASA on the case, Texas foster children with  CASAs were:

● Less likely to be reunified with their own parents.

● Less likely to find permanence in the form of guardianship by a relative.

● More likely to “age out” of foster care with no home at all.

When the study came out the Austin American-Statesman did a good story about it. The Texas Tribune ignored it. 

Yet somehow this is the organization we are supposed to trust when it invokes the false claim that child safety and family preservation are opposites that need to be balanced. 

So the Texas Tribune story gives us this: 

“We’re in a period in history right now where things are swinging very much towards having the smallest possible system, really prioritizing parents’ rights,” said Sarah Crockett, the director of public policy at foster kid advocacy group Texas CASA. 

For decades everyone in the system has claimed that they want the smallest possible system – that they only want to see children taken as a last resort.  Yet now, when some small steps are taken toward doing it, “smallest possible system” somehow is equated with “parents’ rights.” 

Crokett then offers the classic example of the Big Lie: implying that when you make the system smaller, children are less safe: 

“This system is traumatic and stressful for children and parents. I absolutely do think that we should do everything that we can to keep the child with their family,” Crockett said. “And it’s also true that child abuse is still happening. And so how do we balance those two things? 

Except that well over a decade ago, a Texas think tank – a liberal Texas think tank -- released a study debunking the idea that doing more to keep families together compromises child safety. On the contrary, it’s the massive overload of systems with all those false allegations trivial cases and poverty cases that makes it harder to find children in real danger. 

The bias of the center 

One of the problems for the Tribune in pushing the whole idea that these bills all spring from the minds of right-wing “parents’ rights” fanatics is the fact that so many of the bills passed nearly unanimously (something never mentioned in the story).  The solution is to stereotype both sides as extreme while groups like CASA – and the Texas Tribune -- are simply suggesting that, as journalists love to proclaim, the truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. 

So after accepting CASA’s false characterization the story declares that the new laws represent 

an approach supported by both ​​social conservatives who tout family values and progressive child welfare abolitionists who want to do away with the system. 

In the Texas Tribune’s eyes, only extremists support these “parents’ rights” bills; whereas good, sensible moderates oppose them.  This is a classic example of what’s been aptly called “the bias of the center” – the idea that the truth always lies “somewhere in between” – and somehow taking that stand in a news story, and stereotyping everyone you disagree with as an extremist, isn’t bias. 

In this case there’s a particular problem: By that logic, almost every Democrat in the Texas Legislature is an abolitionist “who want(s) to do away with the system.”  If that were true you’d think they would have proposed stronger bills. 

No, what the Tribune (and the Dallas Morning News) can’t face is that after decades of seeing the system that calls itself “child welfare” do enormous harm to children, people across the political spectrum are coming together and finding common ground.  They've come to understand that due process for families is the best way to ensure children’s rights and child safety.  

So the Tribune presents us with a lawyer, who, apparently referring to these bills and one that became law in 2021 said: “The failing in the laws is that the standard is so high now for a child to be removed.” 

In fact, none of this year’s bills changes the standard for removal. The one that became law in 2021 (again after passing with huge bipartisan majorities) said only that before branding families guilty of neglect and tearing children from everyone they know and love there should be an “immediate danger” to the child.  That’s because if the danger isn’t immediate then there’s time to find ways to remove the risk instead of the child.  Why in the world wouldn’t you try that first? 

The anonymous reporting bill 

The first bill discussed specifically in the Tribune story is the one largely replacing anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. Here, the reporter doesn’t bother with the figleaf of finding someone else to say what she thinks, instead she simply declares flatly that the bill “takes an extreme approach to weeding out false reports.” 

The story’s discussion of this bill is misleading in several ways. 

The story declares that “the anonymity can protect those afraid of retaliation.” At no point does the story explain why confidential reporting, in which the accused still doesn’t know the name of the accuser, fails to do that.  

The story then repeats this from that previous misleading Texas Tribune story about the bill: 

About 1,000 of the 12,473 anonymous reports made in 2022 led to findings of abuse, according to Texans Care for Children. 

Like the previous story, this one leaves a whole lot out:

      ● “Findings of abuse” is a gross exaggeration.  The 1,000 reports were “substantiated,” but that means only that a caseworker checked a box on a form guessing it is slightly more likely than not that something that meets Texas’ definitions of abuse and neglect occurred. 

      ●  Of those 1,000 cases, it is likely that 770 did not involve sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse.

      So what the numbers actually show is that, of all anonymous reports alleging abuse or neglect in Texas in 2022, 92% were flat-out false.  That means caseworkers handling these cases spent 92% of their time harassing innocent families, inflicting trauma on their children – and wasting time that could have been used to find children in real danger.

      Add in the cases that were “substantiated” but involved neither physical nor sexual abuse, and the figure rises to more than 98%.  That’s 98% of workers’ time spent on cases that are nothing like the horror stories.

At no point in the Texas Tribune story is anyone quoted favoring the bill.  But, again echoing the previous story, the reporter gladly invokes the ultimate in fearmongering to oppose it: 

“None of us in this room want any child to suffer abuse or neglect. And I would hate for us to vote for a policy where the tradeoff is ... [having] a child possibly die from abuse or neglect,” [Sen. José] Menéndez said on the Senate floor. 

Texas Tribune readers never learn about that liberal think tank study showing that encouraging more reports, anonymous or otherwise, does not reduce child abuse deaths.  They never learn about the research showing that it is the overload of false allegations trivial cases and poverty cases that actually makes it more like that that you could have “a child possibly die from abuse or neglect.” 

Suckered by a McLawsuit 

Part of the blame for all this lies with the group that brought the massive doomed-to-fail Texas McLawsuit in the first place: the group that calls itself Children’s Rights.  Both CR and the group that spun off from it and which shares responsibility for the Texas McLawsuit, A Better Childhood, have abysmal records of filing almost identical suits across the country that ignore the problem at the root of all the others – needless removal of children.  Instead, they demand “solutions” that don’t always fail completely, but often leave states with the same lousy systems only bigger.  

That’s why Michigan’s leading child advocate recently blasted the consent decree resulting from a very similar Children’s Rights McLawsuit in that state, declaring that the Michigan consent decree has: 

if anything, made the situation much worse because it’s funneling money from front-end stuff to really fund our foster care system. 

The Texas lawsuit demands much the same – and it sounds like that’s exactly as the Texas Tribune thinks it should be.  

The Texas suit also is another example of CR’s excellent public policy work and its lousy lawsuits working at cross purposes.  In recent years CR has done bold work calling out racism in family policing and demanding things like the repeal of horrible laws such as the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. 

But in its Texas lawsuit Complaint (Paragraph 282) CR demands stricter enforcement of ASFA. 

None of this excuses how Texas has responded to the lawsuit – by fighting it tooth and nail instead of proposing an alternative: a consent decree that emphasizes services and due process protections to keep children in their own homes.  (It’s not too late to try that, by the way.) 

But none of this is hindsight either.  We knew the McLawsuit was doomed to fail and we said so early on.  Now, the Texas legislature is figuring out that the only way to fix foster care is to have less of it – whether the Texas Tribune or the Dallas Morning News like it or not. 

UPDATES, JULY 14 AND JULY 18, 2023:

KWTX-TV reports on a case in which six children were taken away.  All of them, even the youngest, age 2, apparently were institutionalized.  Now that child is dead.  According to the news story “this all happened because of a call alleging [the mother] was smoking marijuana.” And KXXV-TV reports the call was anonymous and the mother passed "numerous drug tests."  (They also report there was an allegation of "violence" - but no indication there was even an allegation of violence against the children.)

Apparently, the children were never in any danger, because shortly after boy’s death, the Texas family police agency gave all the other children back and closed the case.

So yeah, tell us again Texas lawyer how “the failing in the laws is that the standard is so high now for a child to be removed.”  And tell us again, Texas lawmaker, how the "tradeoff" for banning most anonymous reporting is "[having] a child possibly die."

Greg Abbott’s (and Ron DeSantis') liberal enablers

Greg Abbott (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

A giant vehicle with nearly unchecked power to destroy families was built largely by the Left.  Too bad it never occurred to a lot of my fellow liberals that, someday, someone like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott [or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis] would get the keys. 

UPDATE, JUNE 12: NBC News reports that another right-wing governor, Florida’s Ron DeSantis also wants to exploit power handed to him both by liberal politicians and by liberal media, particularly the Miami Herald, which has campaigned for years to make the state’s family policing agency ever more oppressive and more powerful. 

My fellow liberals are very upset – as they should be. 

Everywhere you turn, it seems, the liberal child welfare establishment is churning out statements “blasting” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for unleashing the state’s family policing agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare agency”) against transgender children and their families. 

The Children’s Defense Fund is doing what it does best, issuing a statement. Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago did the same and included endnotes. The American Civil Liberties Union is doing what it does best – suing.  The group that calls itself Children’s Rights is doing what it does best – exploiting the whole situation to collect email addresses for endless fundraising appeals. 

And it’s not just the usual suspects. The federal government’s Administration for Children and Families, which can take six months just to clear its throat, already has an entire “information memorandum” out.  Even President Biden weighed in, condemning Texas for “weaponizing child protective services against loving families.”  (Meanwhile, some of the same news organizations who are outraged by Abbott bought into the whole racist COVID “pandemic of child abuse” myth.) 

President Biden is right.  CDF is right. The ACLU is right. Chapin Hall is right. Even Children’s Rights is right.  Greg Abbott’s cynical, callous, breathtakingly cruel attack targeting transgender children deserves all the condemnation it is getting – and more.   (And while Abbott has systematized such attacks, they are not limited to Texas.  This case is from Michigan.) 

It’s just too bad all these groups didn’t think of consequences like this when, either by action or omission, they built the very system that Abbott is abusing.  Some of them continue to prop up that system.  It’s too bad all these groups and individuals didn’t notice that the family policing system has been “weaponizing child protective services against loving families” – in particular nonwhite families -- from its inception.  

As Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore School of Law wrote in The Washington Post on Feb. 28: 

Though many are rightly outraged [by what Abbott has done], those familiar with the child welfare system are not surprised.  Vague definitions of abuse and neglect open the door to state-approved discrimination. These laws have historically been used to control Black and Native families, and these parents live in constant fear that their children could be removed. … Child welfare laws invite discrimination and have been used to regulate marginalized communities. 

How bad is this system that runs roughshod over families and was largely built by my fellow liberals? 

NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda, called Civil Liberties Without Exception, begins with this hypothetical: 

Suppose, when he was attorney general, William Barr had proposed anti-terrorism legislation with the following provisions: 

Special anti-terrorism police could search any home without a warrant – and stripsearch any occupant — based solely on an anonymous telephone tip.  Any occupant of the home could be detained for 24 hours to two weeks without so much as a hearing – and they’ll probably be detained far longer because, in the special anti-terrorism court set up by this legislation, all the judges are afraid to look soft on “terrorists.” 

At that first hearing the detainees may – or may not – get a lawyer just before the hearing begins, and they almost never get effective counsel. 

At almost every stage, the standard of proof is not “beyond a reasonable doubt” or even “clear and convincing” but merely “preponderance of the evidence,” the lowest standard in American jurisprudence, the same one used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender. 

And in most states, all the hearings and all the records are secret. 

Had Barr proposed such legislation, it’s reasonable to expect that civil libertarians would have responded with fury. 

Yet this hypothetical anti-terrorism law already is the law governing the system we call “child welfare.”  And sadly, many who in other circumstances are quick to defend civil liberties either stand silent or support it. 

Now Greg Abbott has driven home the consequences of liberal silence and liberal support for a child welfare surveillance state that tramples on civil liberties. 

The Right bears responsibility, too 

The Right should not be let off the hook here.  This is an issue that creates unusual divisions and unusual alliances.  It was, after all, Newt Gingrich who called for putting poor people’s children into orphanages.  It was the Right that watered down the Family First Prevention Services Act to eliminate the kinds of help families need most – concrete help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.  (They’re still at it, blocking President Biden’s anti-poverty agenda – which is the ultimate anti-child abuse agenda.) And much of the backlash against racial justice in child welfare comes from right-wing ideologues, including one who proudly analogizes her work to that of Charles Murray. 

There also are groups, on the Left and the Right who do understand this and have worked together to curb the family policing system. 

But when you look at the lawmakers who lead efforts to make state and local family policing systems even bigger and more powerful, they tend to come from the Left.  At the federal level, while right-wing Republican Tom DeLay was a prime mover behind the odious, racist Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, a law that passed almost unanimously, it had an even more powerful backer: Hillary Clinton. She was still bragging about it when she ran for president in 2016. 

So now, thanks to ASFA, if Greg Abbott’s family police take away transgender children and stall the process for 15 months, federal law actually requires the family police to seek termination of those children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights). Because under ASFA it doesn’t matter why a child was taken in the first place.  

Enablers in Texas 

It is much the same in Texas. 

For decades Texas media fawned over Scott McCown, first when he was a judge in Austin and then when he ran a liberal think tank, the Center for Public Policy Priorities.  For at least a decade McCown was the Godsource for Texas media – no story about Texas child welfare was complete without an obligatory Scott McCown quote.  His skill at portraying himself as the lone Voice of the Left fighting for children against the right-wing Texas political establishment enhanced his appeal. 

McCown was the personification of everything wrong with the liberal child welfare establishment.  He said there was no problem with wrongful removal, that families had all the due process they needed and he was explicit in demanding that Texas take away more children.  You can read all about him in NCCPR’s 2005 report on Texas child welfare. 

McCown’s legacy lives on.  Even as they write story after story about the hellscape that is Texas foster care, with rare exceptions, Texas media won’t even consider that the problem involves taking away too many children and the widespread confusion of poverty with neglect. 

Last year, the Texas legislature considered a bill to modestly narrow the grounds for coercive intervention into families and make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect. In a "news story" dripping with sarcasm, Dallas Morning News Austin Bureau Chief Robert T. Garrett almost brags about refusing to report himself on issues of wrongful removal and due process. He writes: 

GOP leaders want to put a tighter leash on [child protective services]; make it harder to remove children from their birth families … Some staunchly conservative Republican lawmakers have helped make individual families’ fights with CPS, covered by right-leaning news outlets, into causes célèbres.

In fact, in a legislature where Democrats are greatly outnumbered, they made up more than one-third of the bill’s sponsors and cosponsors.  The bill passed almost unanimously.  One of those apparently not too keen on it: Greg Abbott. He let it become law without his signature. 

So which is it, Dallas Morning News?  Is the vast right-wing conspiracy in Texas out to crush innocent families by misusing its vast power?  Or is the vast right-wing conspiracy in Texas tying the hands of noble caseworkers and turning a blind eye to child abuse by cutting back on that same power? 

It’s not just the Dallas Morning News.  On March 4, the Texas Tribune ran a very good story about parents of transgender children rushing to lawyer-up – as they should.  Because, as one expert said: “Once you're in the clutch of the child welfare system, you're very vulnerable.”   

But back when she was editor of the Tribune, and before that when she covered child welfare for that respected online news outlet, Emily Ramshaw (now CEO of The 19^th) wrote stories much like Garrett’s – and she, too, systematically shut out all dissent. 

Even now there’s a subtle bias.  Although the story about the rush to hire lawyers briefly mentions that some are working pro bono, it says no more about all the families who can’t afford to pay and aren't likely to find such a lawyer – which is most families “in the clutch of the child welfare system.”

UPDATE, MARCH 9: One Texas-based reporter does get it. In this excellent story for Slate, Roxanna Asgarian writes:

The child welfare system—decried as “family policing” by critics—is a particularly potent tool for transphobic politicians because it was set up to surveil families that fall outside of the white, middle class norm.

Not much of a learning curve 

Maybe all this would be excusable if these various organizations really learned anything.  We’ve seen that most Texas media have not.  At the national level, the ACLU has – they’re doing excellent work countering the use of predictive analytics (computerized racial profiling) in child welfare.  

But the Children’s Defense Fund, which has been fine with ASFA and opposed real child welfare finance reform is as regressive as ever.  Have you heard what they said about legislation to curb ASFA?  Neither have I. I haven't seen a word about it from Chapin Hall either.

And the award for chutzpah goes to Children’s Rights,  They have radically changed their rhetoric, especially their Twitter feed, but not their awful litigation – which repeatedly has made family policing systems bigger and more powerful.  CR even cites its own Texas McLawsuit – which does nothing to curb the power of the family policing system as somehow putting them “in a unique position” to recognize Greg Abbott’s hypocrisy!  (CR has an even worse settlement in Michigan, but they have leveraged none of their influence to do anything about what happened in the case cited above.) 

So here’s a test for any individual or organization who claims to oppose “weaponizing child protective services against loving families.” Are you ready to acknowledge your own complicity in building the weapon?  Are you ready to sue to stop wrongful removal? Are you ready to seek to reopen old settlements that fail to address the issue?  Are you ready to demand repeal of ASFA, or at least support significant reform?  What about it ACLU?  Where do you stand CDF?  Are you willing to do more than exploit the issue to raise money, Children’s Rights? 

And what about you, Mr. President?  Are you ready to support repealing a law that doesn’t just weaponize the family police – it gives them the equivalent of a nuclear arsenal? 

A teachable moment? 

Perhaps this is another teachable moment in child welfare.  Just as what Donald Trump did to children at the Mexican border brought home to millions of Americans the trauma of needless family separation, perhaps Gregg Abbott’s behavior will help my fellow liberals understand the need for civil liberties – without exception. 

It all boils down to this: A whole lot of people and organizations whose politics are a whole lot like mine decided that everything they professed to believe in about civil liberties did not apply as soon as someone whispered the words “child abuse” in their ears.  So they built a monstrous vehicle – like a giant tank - with the power to crush almost any family. 

But they never expected that, someday, someone like Greg Abbott would get the keys.

Child abuse in Texas: Things you should not do in an emergency

Photo by James Cridland

The Dallas Morning News reported last week that: 

Tens of thousands of infants and children believed to be in imminent danger of abuse or neglect, even death, are not being seen promptly by state child abuse investigators — and thousands of them haven’t been checked on at all. …

Across Texas, on an average day, nearly 700 unseen children are classified as extreme cases — “Priority 1” in the agency’s terms …

But the most staggering numbers come from Harris County, where about 1,300 children who are supposed have already had a face-to-face contact with a caseworker haven’t been seen. The unvisited children account for about 22 percent of all cases referred to that office in March and April, The News’ analysis found. 

The reason all these children aren’t being seen?  Caseworkers are overloaded.

A Morning News editorial correctly calls this “an emergency.”

Here are some things you should not do in an emergency:

● Texas should not be investigating and taking away children from a Harris County family like this one.

● Texas should not be investigating and taking away children from a Harris County family like this one, either.

● Texas should not be taking away children at a rate we now know is far above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

And Texas journalists might want to spend some time watching out to be sure that the new spending required to meet the terms of a federal court decision isn’t stolen from the few things being done in that state that actually work – like this, in Bexar County.

Then, maybe, caseworkers actually would have time to get to all those “Priority 1” children they’re not seeing now.

There is nothing “incomprehensible” about the latest child welfare failure in Texas

The Dallas Morning News reports that, in response to the latest child abuse death in Texas involving a child “known to the system,” four-year-old Leiliana Wright, State Rep. Chris Turner, a Democrat whose district includes the town where the tragedy took place tweeted this:

“Incomprehensible failure of Govt.”

He’s wrong.

It’s a horrible failure of government, a tragic failure of government and an abysmal failure of government, and I don't doubt that Rep. Turner is sincere in wanting to do something about it.

But it is entirely comprehensible.  It happens over and over in Texas, year after year.  And while Republicans bear most of the responsibility – because they run the state government - Democrats who can think of no alternative other than spending more (which is necessary) without also spending smarter (which is just as necessary) share some of the blame.

That’s not hindsight.  NCCPR issued a comprehensive analysis of Texas child welfare in 2005.  Several years later, the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a liberal Texas think tank, issued a report in which it found that taking away more children does nothing to reduce child abuse fatalities.

And while we’re considering responsibility, some of it rests with those in the Texas press corps who have covered the issue year after year after year and written pretty much the same stories or columns year after year after year, all the while systematically ignoring the problem that leads to most of the others: the needless removal of children from their homes.

Because it’s all those unnecessary investigations and needless removals that are overloading caseworkers to the point that, at best, they can’t possibly find all the children in real danger or at worst, as may be the case in the most recent horror, they don’t try.

One exception is Randy Wallace of KRIV-TV in Houston.  Consider this case he reported on last week:

In addition to all the harm done to this father’s children by being consigned to the hellscape of Texas foster care, consider all the time and resources spent investigating this case, hauling the family into court and finding placements for the children.  All that time money and effort was, in effect, stolen from finding the next Leiliana Wright.

It’s not the first time Houston CPS rushed to confuse poverty with neglect.  Here’s another example.

So why do reporters keep covering the story the same old way – in Texas and elsewhere? 

In the worst cases, it’s an example of what David Simon aptly calls “Pulitzer sniffing.”  Of all the stories you can do in child welfare, the “Who Let [name of child] Die?” story, or better yet, the entire series on the children the child protective services agency “allowed” to die, is the quickest way to cheap glory within the profession.

But like most people in the system itself, most reporters are well-motivated.  So the answer may lie in another video: this 11-minute Ted-X talk from Molly McGrath Tierney, someone who is trying to run a child welfare system the right way:

 In particular I’m struck by what she says about why caseworkers keep taking so many children, knowing – in their heads, at least – how much harm it does them.  It’s at about four minutes and 16 seconds in, where she says:

“[I]t feels good to save kids. We get a great injection of adrenaline when we rush in and our brain responds to that stimuli just like we do anything else that feels good — we want more of it. And when we figure out how to keep returning to that good feeling, we start thinking that, in and of itself, is success. We start mistaking something that feels good to us for something that’s actually helping other people — ‘cause it feels so good, we must be doing the right thing.”

She could as easily have been speaking of a lot of journalists – the ones who actually are well-motivated but who get their righteous-indignation high from writing the “boy-do-I-hate-child-abuse-and-look-how-I-care-more-than-anyone-else” column, or the news story dripping with sneer and swagger instead of the kind of sophistication and nuance Simon calls for.  It feels so good – so they figure they must be doing the right thing.

At best such reporting diverts attention from the real problems besetting child welfare  - and from real solutions.  At worst it encourages foster-care panics, with workers rushing to tear apart many more families needlessly rather than risk being on the front page if they leave a child at home and something goes wrong.

And then, once the panic takes place, papers like the Dallas Morning News solemnly proclaim in an editorial that there has been “a spike in the number of children removed from dangerous home situations.”  In some cases, those home situations really were dangerous; in others they were not.  But the editorial writers, dependent on their own paper’s news coverage, would have little way of knowing that.

I can hear the reporters’ responses now: Oh, so you want us to let incompetent workers and administrators get away with it!  You want to let them stay on the job and let more children die! You want us to ignore child abuse deaths!  You don’t care if children die!

All of which is fully in keeping with the sneer-and-swagger ethos of those journalists.  And all of which is b------t.

The solution to the problems of journalism is more journalism. Those of us who want better child welfare journalism want reporters to do more.  We want reporters to hold caseworkers and administrators accountable, and draw the distinction between accountability and scapegoating, and report on children wrongfully removed from their homes, and report on real solutions.

It’s not that hard. Because some journalists have been getting it right for years, we have a web page full of examples to learn from.

Read more about how to fix child welfare in Texas