FLDS and foster care: Texas’ brilliant idea

What a concept! Attack child abuse by going after the abuser instead of revictimizing the victim.

They've just done that in Texas. As the Associated Press reported last night, Raymond Jessop, a member of the FLDS, "was convicted of sexually assaulting an underage girl with whom he had a so-called spiritual marriage." He could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.

Doing it this way has several advantages:

• You don't turn children from so-called spiritual marriages into victims by tearing them away from their mothers, interning them in a kiddie-Gitmo and then sending them hundreds of miles away into institutions.
  
• You don't revictimize the girl who was sexually assaulted by tearing her child from her – and quite possibly making her more loyal to the FLDS and more fearful of the outside world.
  
• You don't do enormous emotional harm to hundreds of children who were not, in fact, abused by anyone at the FLDS compound.
  
• Instead of exiling the victim and her children, you can put the abuser someplace where he can't possibly abuse another child – jail – for a long, long time.
  

If only Texas authorities had come up with this brilliant idea before they took more than 400 children from the compound in the first place.

Some children win protection from stripsearches – now if we could just take the next logical step…

By a vote of 8 to 1, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that an unverified tip is not sufficient justification for school officials to stripsearch a student looking for drugs. The justices zeroed in on the fact that a stripsearch is a particularly traumatic experience for a child, so you really need to have something solid to go on before you inflict it on that child.

I'm sure my fellow liberals will be pleased, just as I am. But I'll bet some of them will be the same liberals who backed SB 1440, the Texas bill that would have run roughshod over children's Fourth Amendment rights in cases where the allegation was child abuse.

Though it didn't get much attention in the debate over SB 1440, all over the country, stripsearches just like the one that prompted the Supreme Court decision are a common part of child abuse investigations (CPS agencies prefer euphemisms like "visual inspection.") If the allegation is sexual abuse, the examination is likely to be a whole lot worse. And sadly, despite Gov. Rick Perry's veto of SB 1440, for families too poor to fight back, in Texas and everywhere else, their children can be stripsearched based on little more than a CPS worker's whim. Indeed, the issue arose in a Texas case just last month.

Defenders of unlimited CPS power will say child abuse investigations are different. They'll argue that in those cases, the people doing the searching are looking for bruises, not drugs, so they're doing it for the child's own good. (Of course, that's also what they say whenever they haul a child off to foster care.) But when school officials are stripsearching a student looking for drugs they're presumably doing it for the good of an entire school full of children, yet the Supreme Court still said no. And, of course, if the child has not been bruised – as is likely when there is no more than, say, an anonymous phone call alleging abuse -- then the only people who have hurt the child are the people who stripsearched her or him.

But the Supreme Court decision also showed, once again, that my fellow liberals don't have a monopoly on inconsistency. The only dissenter in the school stripsearching case was Justice Clarence Thomas.

A “child size” Bill of Rights

During the four days of non-stop television coverage after 9/11, there are many moments I will never forget. But the moment I remember most – and the moment when I was proudest to be an American - has no vivid images. It has not been replayed over and over on television.

It happened about two days in: Police in Boston had surrounded a hotel and were waiting to move in on rooms they thought might have been used by the terrorists. They waited and they waited. For awhile, no one could figure out why they weren't moving in. Then a reporter found out: They were waiting for a search warrant.

That was the moment I was proudest to be an American because that was the moment when we showed that, just days after the worst attack on American civilians in our history, we were determined to live our values, to use President Obama's phrase.

Of course that determination waned a lot in the years since. But at least my fellow liberals could be counted on to fight each new infringement on civil liberties. Of course, that's because those whose liberties were being infringed upon were accused merely of plotting to blow up buildings and airplanes and kill thousands of people. The big tactical blunder of Bush and Cheney was failing to whisper in liberals' ears the two magic words that get so many of them to abandon everything they claim to believe in. They failed to accuse all the people rounded up in the wake of 9/11 of – child abuse.

The most recent example of this liberal myopia: The desperate attempt by, mostly, liberals in Texas to gut two court rulings that modestly bolstered children's protection against needlessly being interrogated, stripsearched, and taken from everyone they know and love. They were defeated in their effort to undermine these rulings when a coalition of conservatives and other liberals persuaded Gov. Rick Perry to veto SB 1440, a bill that would have allowed Texas CPS to pretty much enter any house any time it wanted for any reason.

After the bill was vetoed, the Austin American Statesman turned a large chunk of its story into a de facto op ed column by one if the state's leading "liberal" groups, the Center for Public Policy Priorities, to fulminate against the veto. According to the story:

One of the opposition's concerns is that under the bill, they said, the parent would not have gotten a hearing before CPS interviews their child. But [CPPP's Jane] Burstain said that family courts aren't currently required to give parents such hearings for the same reason that criminal courts don't give suspected drug dealers a hearing before their house is searched.

"You don't want to be tipping off abusers," Burstain said. "If you tell the abuser, 'Hey, we're coming to your house,' the abuser has the opportunity to coach the child, to coerce the child into lying." Elsewhere, CPPP has suggested that allowing a hearing first, in any situation, would allow parents to destroy evidence.

Where to begin?

First of all, just as Burstain admits, current Texas law already allows CPS to get court permission to enter homes without giving families a chance to object. But precisely because that is such a drastic infringement on people's rights, and can inflict so much trauma on children, there is supposed to be a reasonably high standard of evidence offered to the judge before she or he gives that permission. As a practical matter, in child abuse cases, the standard is pathetically low – but SB 1440 would have lowered it still further.

Even had the bill passed, apparently it wouldn't have been enough for CPPP. Comments by Burstain and the group's director, Scott McCown, suggest they want there to be no circumstance under which families could get a hearing first, because then CPS would lose that element of surprise – which they say is just like criminal cases. In fact, in some criminal cases there is a requirement for such hearings. And the difference between child abuse cases and drug cases is explained in a detailed letter, in effect almost a legal brief, from the Texas Home School Coalition urging the veto. THSC notes that this analogy

unwisely assumes that the child is "evidence". The child will not be destroyed, and if a judge, after a contested hearing, decides that the child should be interviewed, expert techniques can be employed to elicit evidence. Also, medical examinations can determine whether the child has been subjected to long term abuse even after time is taken for a fair and contested hearing. Second, parents have no access to original medical records held by medical practitioners and cannot destroy them. Furthermore, because medical professionals have a duty to report abuse, [CPS] already has access to the actual medical professionals. A process which disregards the rights of parents and the emotional impact upon children is not needed in order to get medical information.

Finally, if the [issue is] … tangible evidence in the home-- other than the child— … a criminal investigation should ensue which includes all of the protections to the accused which criminal law provides and this bill does not. In that vein, there are already procedures in place to obtain a legitimate ex parte search warrant, via the criminal justice system.

But there is an even more fundamental problem with this analogy.

If the police mistake your neighbor for a drug dealer, the neighbor no doubt will be traumatized, but at least he's an adult. If CPS, based on no more than an anonymous call, bursts through the door of your neighbor's house because they think he's a child abuser, it's innocent children who suffer.

It is children who will face traumatic questioning. It is children at risk of being stripsearched by strangers looking for bruises. And it is children who risk being torn from everyone they know and love and thrown into the chaos of foster care – where at least one in four is likely to be abused. The younger the child the greater the harm.

One need only recall the hideous conditions the FLDS children endured during the first days after the raid, and the searing statements from the state's own therapists concerning the harm this internment was doing to the children to understand why it is so urgent that children be protected from this unchecked power.

There are conservatives who have a lot to answer for, too, of course, particularly those, like Newt Gingrich, who want to throw poor people's children into orphanages – suggesting that he feels "family values" are strictly a middle-class entitlement.

But for the left, what it all boils down to is this: When it comes to child abuse, too many of my fellow liberals refuse to heed President Obama's call for us to live our values. Indeed, CPPP and too many other liberals apparently believe in a "child size" Bill of Rights. They shrink it by leaving out Amendment #4.

A smidgen of victory for Texas Children

Very good news for Texas children: Texas Governor Rick Perry vetoed SB 1440, the bill discussed in several previous posts to this blog. The governor says the bill "overreaches and may not give due consideration to the Fourth Amendment rights of a parent or guardian." There's no maybe about it. But the problem with the bill is what it would have done to the Fourth Amendment rights of children. The full veto message is here.

Among those probably most disappointed: Some of the reporters covering the bill, particularly, it would seem, the one for the Dallas Morning News, who now is parroting the party line suggesting the opposition is a vast right-wing conspiracy. He even wrongly labels one of the groups leading the opposition, the Parent Guidance Center, a "conservative group." And, of course, if you're for the bill, according to this reporter, you get the coveted label "child advocate" while if you oppose it you're a "parents' rights" group.

The Austin American Statesman was worse, refusing to acknowledge that anyone besides "conservative, libertarian and family-rights organizations" opposed the bill, (at least the reporter said "family"). Then, after a brief quote from the Parent Guidance Center, a huge portion of the story is devoted to comments from the bill's strongest backer, the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which offered up a series of misleading statements (about which more tomorrow). Both of these reporters love to refer to CPPP as a group "which advocates for low- and middle-income Texans" as though the one thing impoverished Texans want most is for their poverty to be confused with neglect and their children to be taken away. (In contrast, the San Antonio Express News didn't sink to cheap stereotyping in its story about several bills vetoed by the governor.)

In fact, this veto shows what can be accomplished when left and right put aside their differences – not forever, just long enough to find common ground and stop a bill that would have hurt children.

But there are limits to this victory. I said in a previous post that the bill effectively reduced the amount of evidence needed for CPS to enter a home from a smidgen to a tenth of a smidgen.

Now, if we can just increase the standard to, say, two or three smidgens.

TexProtects seems to think we’re pretty dumb

A group called TexProtects, The Texas Association for the Protection of Children, has put out an "Advocacy Alert" urging people to write to the Governor to ask him to sign SB 1440, that bill discussed in previous posts to this Blog that would legalize CPS' illegal behavior in cases like the FLDS raid.

Their argument boils down to this: Current law is terribly vague, but this bill supposedly makes things more specific. Therefore, TexProtects says, the bill "actually provides more protections for a parent in connection with orders in aid of an investigation."

Let's leave aside, for the moment, the phony notion implied by that statement that unlimited state power benefits children and basic due process benefits only parents. Let's ignore, for the moment, that in cases like the FLDS raid it was the children who suffered most from CPS' actions.

The argument from TexProtects still leaves out one small detail: Two key court rulings. One is the Texas Supreme Court ruling in the FLDS case, the other came from a federal appellate court in one of those rare cases where CPS picked on someone with the money to hire good lawyers. These rulings have filled in a lot of the blanks. Thanks to those rulings, the law now is a bit more specific. What SB 1440 really tries to do is undermine those court rulings and effectively return things to where they were before those courts ruled.

And let's get serious. If SB 1440 really increases families' protections, why are groups like Texas CASA and the Center for Public Policy Priorities, groups that strongly favored the FLDS raid, desperate to see SB 1440 become law? And why are so many groups that were against the raid urging a veto?

UPDATED JUNE 11: Texas: Where the stereotypes die hard

UPDATE: Thank you to the Dallas Morning News. While I disagree with some of how that paper's story today characterized what the bill, SB 1440, would do as compared with current law, the paper made a point of not stereotyping opponents ideologically.

I suppose if a newspaper in Texas calls your group "conservative" you should just shut up and let them believe it. But an old-fashioned belief in at least trying to be accurate, something carried over from my days as a reporter, compels me to set the record straight. The attempt to lump everyone opposing a dreadful bill now on the desk of Texas Gov. Rick Perry into the same ideological camp was not even the worst stereotype in the story. Also: The story misrepresents current law.

The story ran in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram today. It's about a bill I wrote about on this blog a few days ago, the one that would legalize the illegal behavior of Texas CPS in the FLDS raid and another case in that state.

The story begins this way:

A coalition of conservative and libertarian groups is urging Gov. Rick Perry to veto a bill that would make it easier for Child Protective Services to remove children from a home while investigating possible abuse.

That's stereotype number one. The story goes on to quote a conservative obligingly fulfilling stereotype number two by complaining that the bill undermines "parental rights."

In the most literal sense, both statements are true. What the reporter leaves out is that there are a whole lot of groups like NCCPR – filled with lifelong liberals – who think bills like this stink because they undermine children's rights.

Children have a right not to be traumatized by police and CPS workers based on no more than an anonymous call. Children have a right not to be stripsearched for no reason. And, most of all, children have a right not to be torn from everyone they know and love and exposed to the emotional trauma, and serious risk of physical or sexual abuse in foster care, based on no more than a caseworker's guess.

All this is why, when I wrote about the injustice of the FLDS raid for the website of a national magazine, it was for The Nation, not, say The Weekly Standard.

Similarly, there is nothing right-wing about the Parent Guidance Center, the excellent grassroots organization in Texas that has been among the leaders in opposing this bill.

Only at the very end of the story does the reporter concede that, well, yes, a blogger at the liberal Daily Kos said Perry should veto the bill – and so did Scott Henson of the excellent, and decidedly left-leaning Texas criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast. But the bottom of the story is the traditional resting place for facts that contradict a reporter's pre-conceived notions.

Much higher in the story, there is this grossly-misleading description of the bill:

If the bill became law, a judge would be able to grant CPS a court order similar to a criminal search warrant, allowing a CPS worker to immediately enter the home and, if necessary, remove the child and secure medical and mental-health records as part of an investigation. It would be done without notifying the parent in advance.

That's wrong in what it says and wrong in what it implies. The bill would not create a procedure requiring an order "similar to a criminal search warrant." On the contrary, it would eviscerate an existing procedure that, even now, requires less than is needed in a criminal case.

Current law already allows CPS "to immediately enter the home and, if necessary, remove the child and secure medical and mental-health records as part of an investigation … without notifying the parent in advance." All the worker has to do is tell a judge a child is at imminent risk of maltreatment – and under some circumstances the worker doesn't need to go to a judge at all. The worker need offer only what amounts to a smidgen of evidence.

As I wrote in my previous post on this issue:

The reason for [the "imminent risk" standard] should be obvious. If the only alleged problem is that children face a threat that is not imminent, then there is time to hold a hearing before exposing children to the trauma of being questioned, stirpsearched, and often, torn away from everyone they know and love. In the FLDS case, for example, some of the allegations boiled down to the claim that very young children might be abused when they reached puberty. Now granted, there are a lot of delays in juvenile court – but ten years also usually is enough time to schedule a hearing.

What the new law does is lower the required amount of evidence to about one tenth of a smidgen. And no longer would there be a requirement that the child be in imminent danger before allowing a CPS raid without a hearing first.

When it comes to child welfare, both left and right have a lot to account for. Too many conservatives think family values are a middle-class entitlement only – like Newt Gingrich who wants to throw poor people's children into orphanages. And too many of my fellow liberals forget everything they claim to believe about civil liberties as soon as somebody whispers the words "child abuse" in their ears. So the fact that opponents of this bill include liberals and conservatives, advocates of children's rights and advocates of parents' rights is a good step in the right direction.

Texas tries to “legalize” FLDS-type raids

A couple of months ago on this Blog, I noted a solemn promise by Texas child protective service – a promise to, in effect break the law. I wrote that in stories about the FLDS raid,

The Salt Lake Tribune and the San Angelo Standard Times both report that Texas CPS says if they faced what CPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins called "the exact fact situation" again, they would do exactly the same thing again – take away all the children. But the Texas Supreme Court ruled that taking away all the children under these exact circumstances is illegal. As in, against the law. Did CPS forget that small fact – or do they just plan to break the law on purpose next time?

Clearly, the Texas Legislature couldn't stand for something like this – so they sprang into action: They passed a bill that would legalize CPS' illegal behavior in the FLDS case and another case in which their actions were struck down by courts. An excellent family advocacy organization in Texas, the Parent Guidance Center, reports that this language actually failed to pass on its own. It was sneaked onto another bill at the last minute.

Under current law, if CPS wants to rush onto someone else's property, demand entry, seize records question the children, stripsearch the children, and then seize the children and take them away, all without so much as a court hearing, CPS is supposed to convince a judge that it's a dire emergency. The judge needs to be persuaded that the children are being abused right now – or will be abused so soon that there is no time to even hold a hearing for the families to defend themselves.

The reason for this should be obvious. If the only alleged problem is that children face a threat that is not imminent, then there is time to hold a hearing before exposing children to the trauma of being questioned, stirpsearched, and often, torn away from everyone they know and love. In the FLDS case, for example, some of the allegations boiled down to the claim that very young children might be abused when they reached puberty. Now granted, there are a lot of delays in juvenile court – but ten years also usually is enough time to schedule a hearing.

Under the new bill, SB 1440, all CPS would have to do is file an affidavit claiming that

1. based on information available, a child's physical or mental health or welfare has been or may be adversely affected by abuse or neglect;
   
2. the requested order is necessary to aid in the investigation; and
   
3. there is a fair probability that allegations of abuse or neglect will be sustained if the order is issued and executed.
   

The law says nothing about when the child's "physical or mental health or welfare … may be adversely affected." It could be tomorrow, next month or years from now.

Johana Scot, executive director of the Parent Guidance Center, points out that "based on information available…" can be nothing more than an anonymous tip. She calls the "fair probability" requirement the "I swear what I'm about to find is true" clause.

As with most states, Texas has a broad, vague definition of neglect that easily is confused with poverty. So under the new law, all CPS needs to barge into any home at any time and take any impoverished child is an affidavit that says, in effect, "we think this family is very poor and it's likely that, once we get into the home, it will turn out that yes, they really are poor."

Or, in an FLDS-type case, they would need only present an affidavit saying "Sure the child's an infant now, but in 12 or 13 years…"

Indeed, this bill specifically rejects the notion that danger has to be imminent before CPS can skip over the niceties of due process. According to the bill:

This section does not prevent a court from requiring notice and a hearing before issuance of an order in aid of an investigation under this section if the court determines that:
(1) there is no immediate risk to the safety of the child; and
(2) notice and a hearing are required to determine whether the requested access to persons, records, or places or transport of the child is necessary to aid in the investigation [emphasis added].

First of all, the key words are "does not prevent." Courts would remain free to let CPS run roughshod over families even when there was no immediate risk to the safety of the child, if the court felt like it.

And the court would be required to let CPS do this, even when there was no immediate risk to the safety of the child if the court simply determined that it is necessary "to aid in the investigation."

Of course, even if the governor signs the bill, at some point, it may be challenged on constitutional grounds. But most children victimized by needless intrusion, stripsearches and foster care don't have parents who can afford such court challenges. And, of course, there's no guarantee such challenges will succeed; not when so many judges are afraid to look "soft on child abuse."

The last FLDS child in foster care is NOT leaving foster care

News organization websites across Texas carried stories today that began much like this one:

"The last child remaining in state custody as a result of the state's raid last year on a West Texas ranch owned by a polygamist sect will soon leave foster care, state officials said today."

But none of the stories was true.

Yes, the daughter of FLDS member Barbara Jessop would be allowed to move in with a relative. But Texas CPS and the courts still are overseeing the case. They decide where the child will live, when she can be visited and whether she will return home. And that means she's still in foster care. It's just foster care with a relative, instead of foster care with a stranger. Placements with relatives almost always are a better option than "stranger care" – but it's still foster care.

States often try to fudge this. They'll describe kinship care as a way to "avoid foster care" or, in this case, possibly claim a child is "leaving foster care" when she simply is being transferred to a different kind of foster care. They do this so they can make the number of children they've taken from their families, and the number they're holding in foster care, look lower than it really is. But the federal government is clear on this: If a child is taken away at the behest of CPS and/or the courts, and can't return home without their permission, it's foster care.

This afternoon, I pointed this out in an e-mail to NCCPR's list of reporters who have been following the FLDS case. I got two strikingly different responses.

Brooke Adams of the Salt Lake Tribune, who has been beating the you-know-what out of the entire Texas press corps in its own backyard on the FLDS story from day one, sent a gracious note, and changed the wording of her story.

The reporter who wrote the lead quoted above, whom I won't name because there's no reason to single her out, sent a very different response. She wrote:

"[M]y blog item clearly says she is being placed with a relative and that the state will continue to monitor her progress, so I don't think that leaves any confusion about what is happening."

Right. It just creates confusion over whether the child is in foster care or not. And if, in fact, CPS claimed the child was "will soon leave foster care" then the story accepts what would be a blatant falsehood as fact.

Now, as journalistic crimes go, accepting as fact the claim that kinship care is not foster care is a misdemeanor. It wouldn't even be worth bringing up here except for the fact that the hyper-defensive response perfectly illustrates Edward R. Murrow's comment that "the press doesn't have a thin skin, it has no skin." I think that kind of defensiveness, more than the initial error, and the inability to "talk back" to a newspaper in any meaningful way most of the time, is one reason there is so much distrust of the news media.

“Enhanced interrogation” in the war against child abuse

    As newspapers do their "one year later" stories about the raid by Texas CPS on the YFZ Ranch, we're learning more about what happened to more than 400 children torn from their families – and why.

    We'll never know the single worst moment for the children. Perhaps it was the initial removal from the Ranch. Perhaps it was the terrible conditions where the children were interned for the first days after the raid – essentially their own private Guantanamo. Maybe it was being sent to institutions hundreds of miles from home. But for many of the children, especially the youngest, the worst moment probably came a year ago yesterday, when they were taken from their mothers.

    None of the mothers had been accused of abusing the children. They had not been accused of arranging underage marriages. Some were accused of "failure to protect" children from underage marriages – which, in fact, is a euphemism for sexual abuse. Most were accused, in essence, of living in the same place where other mothers may have failed to protect children from this kind of sexual abuse. This is much like the all-too-common practice of taking children from battered women simply because the women had been beaten and they had "failed to protect" the children from witnessing the beating. A class-action lawsuit led to a ban on this pernicious practice in New York City. (NCCPR's Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs in the case.) During the trial one expert testified that, for the child, being taken from his mother under these circumstances is "tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound." The approach of Texas CPS boiled down to "please pass the salt."

    Initially the explanation from Texas CPS was the same chilling explanation they gave for everything they did wrong in this case: "It's what we always do." And, as I've noted before, the most frightening thing about the entire FLDS case is that this particular claim is true.

    But now, it turns out, in the FLDS case, CPS actually tried to be a little kinder to the children. It's well known that many of the children were allowed to stay with their mothers at first, only to be torn from them after their first days in internment. Now we know CPS was pressured into taking the children from their mothers.

But who would do that? Who would know – or care - so little about child development that they would go out of their way to impose an extra measure of misery on helpless children? Who would be so caught up in their own self-righteousness that they could advocate something so cruel?

    CASA, of course.

    The San Angelo Standard Times reports that it was the local chapter of Court-Appointed Special Advocates that "pressed CPS and the court to remove the mothers, something that eventually occurred April 14."

    In several previous posts to this Blog, I've written about the enormous harm CASA does to the children it is supposed to help – and who most CASA volunteers genuinely want to help. I've written about the major national study, commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, which shows that the program accomplishes almost nothing except to prolong foster care and reduce the chance that children will be placed with relatives – while doing nothing to make children safer. And I've written about the vile racism by a performer at a CASA fundraiser in Kansas.

    And now we find similar poor performance by CASA in the FLDS case.

    The CASAs don't even pretend they thought the children actually would be abused by their mothers. No, their only argument was that some of the mothers "began to inhibit efforts to elicit truthful answers from their children." That isn't necessarily cause to take any of the children from those mothers, much less tearing all the children from all of the mothers. What CASA is saying is that it's ok to inflict cruelty on hundreds of children to get "the truth" out of them and build a case against someone who may have abused some of them.

In fact, it might have been easier to question some of the children once their mothers were completely out of the picture – just as it probably is easier to get a story out of a terrorism suspect if you waterboard him. And yes, it's even possible that the information gleaned this way from hundreds of children who were never abused might reveal a child who was abused or prevent some other child from being abused. It also may be that if you waterboard hundreds of innocent people, and a few real terrorists, you might prevent a terrorist attack.

    But there is no more justification for "enhanced interrogation" in the war against child abuse than in the war against terror.

    Of course no CASA wants to hurt a child; on the contrary, they genuinely want to help children and keep them safe. But once you decide the ends justify the means …

    The CASAs go on to dismiss the anguish of mothers seen on television when their children were taken. They say the mothers were faking it. "Most of that was just staged," one of the CASAs said. How do they know? Because the mothers on TV weren't the same mothers they were working with. But CPS took children from all the mothers, not just the ones these particular CASAs were "working with." (Also, as it happens, CPS' justification for taking the children was that the YFZ Ranch functioned as one family. If that's true, then it stands to reason that all the mothers would grieve for all the children. You can't have it both ways.)

And it gets scarier.

    Almost anyone who followed the FLDS case will recall the courage of 11 mental health professionals sent by Texas CPS itself to the places where the children were interned in those first days. They put their careers on the line by breaking confidentiality oaths to tell the world just how horribly the children were being treated. Their statements are available here. Again, these are statements not from advocates for the parents but from professionals sent in by the State of Texas. And what do the CASAs say about this? They suggest it never happened.

    According to the Standard Times: "Although not explicitly questioning the truthfulness of the claims, the CASA workers said they saw none of the alleged incidents detailed in the reports." Talk about being "in denial."

    And, it appears, the CASAs only wish the children were still far from everyone they know and love. They condemned Texas CPS – not for inflicting all this damage in the first place, but for supposedly dropping cases too quickly after the courts ruled that the removals were illegal.

    Toward the end of the story, even one of the CASAs admits that "There were definitely some of the cases where the children shouldn't have been removed and should have been returned quickly." But she expresses no remorse for this, or for her role in it; no sympathy for the suffering these children endured when taken from the ranch and then from their mothers. Rather, she simply declares that "these are children who were removed for a reason."

    Well, yes. But that doesn't mean it was a good reason.

   

And they didn’t make any mistakes, either!

    The commissioner of the agency that oversees CPS in Texas repeated the promise: If another case like the FLDS case arises, Texas CPS will deliberately break the law.

She didn't put it that way, of course. But, just like her spokesman, Patrick Crimmins, Anne Heiligenstein, commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services said Friday that, were the same kind of case to arise again, her agency would respond in the same way. And that "way" was found to be illegal by Texas courts.

    In fact, Heiligenstein went further. According to the Houston Chronicle, Heiligenstein said her agency, in the story's words "made no mistakes" during the entire FLDS raid and its aftermath. No mistakes at all. Not a one.

Those wretched conditions in which the children were interned in the first days – according to CPS' own therapists? Not a mistake. Taking away huge numbers of children from families the agency now effectively admits were innocent? No error there. The enormous emotional trauma inflicted on the children? Somebody else's problem, I guess.

    And what is it that outweighs all this harm? (Assuming for the moment that Heiligenstein even understands this harm at all?) The fact that "we educated FLDS mothers and children about abuse, what it looks like and how to report it." So that's why they took all those children. I'd sure like to know how they conveyed these lessons to the infants and toddlers.

    Of course, odds are that's not really what these children learned at all. From all accounts, these children lived in a world where their self-proclaimed "prophet" told them the outside world was a terribly dangerous and frightening place, where people were out to get them. So chances are, what they really "learned" was to believe their "prophet" was right.

Texas CPS promises to break the law

    Hard to believe it's been a year since Child Protective Services seized more than 400 children from the YFZ Ranch in El Paso – and almost a year since the Texas Supreme Court found that the seizure was illegal. But it looks like the only lesson CPS may have learned is to be careful what they say.

In their "one year later" stories, The Salt Lake Tribune and the San Angelo Standard Times both report that Texas CPS says if they faced what CPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins called "the exact fact situation" again, they would do exactly the same thing again – take away all the children. But the Texas Supreme Court ruled that taking away all the children under these exact circumstances is illegal. As in, against the law. Did CPS forget that small fact – or do they just plan to break the law on purpose next time?

Apparently, it occurred to someone at CPS that this degree of candor was unwise, because when Crimmins spoke to The Deseret News he said: "There's no way to predict how exactly we would react."

Of course, that assumes the Deseret News interview came later. If the News talked to Crimmins first it suggests that Crimmins' bosses told him to take a harder line, and never mind the law.

Living our values makes CHILDREN safer, too

    I'll bet a lot of my fellow liberals cheered last night when President Obama got to this line in his not-quite-a-State-of-the-Union address: "Living our values doesn't make us weaker," the President said, "it makes us safer and it makes us stronger."

    I checked a transcript of the President's speech just to be sure: There is no asterisk after that line, no parentheses containing the words "except if the allegation is child abuse."

For too many of my fellow liberals in the child welfare establishment, there is a mental asterisk when it comes to civil liberties. As long as you say the magic words "child abuse" it's o.k. to hold secret trials, it's o.k. to search homes and stripsearch children without a warrant, it's o.k. to deprive the accused of legal counsel, it's o.k. to detain children indefinitely based on a standard of proof no higher than "preponderance of the evidence."

    President Obama made the comment in the context of repeating his pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo. We on the left are all for it. But when the State of Texas held hundreds of innocent children in their own private Guantanamo last year, there was silence from the big, liberal child welfare groups. The Children's Defense Fund did not defend these children. They didn't seem to matter to Every Child Matters. Voices for America's Children stood mute.

    It's time the child welfare establishment erased the mental asterisk. NCCPR believes in civil liberties without exception. We have a Due Process Agenda because living our values makes children safer, too.