Profiles in cowardice: Terrified of demagogic politicians, family police agencies in two states prolong the agony of a five-year-old and his mother.

All of the love, compassion and common decency in this case came from people not employed by family police agencies.

Massachusetts "Child Advocate" Maria Mossaides was not involved in this
case. Had she been asked, she probably would have made the right call.
But, though it wasn't her intent, she's fomented a climate of fear
that helped prolong this child's agony. 

The New York Times published a deeply reported, deeply moving story Sunday about one immigrant mother’s desperate quest to find and reunite with her five-year-old son.  It is almost a miracle that she ultimately succeeded. 

Olga fled her abusive husband in Honduras, with her seven-year-old daughter.  Her son was cared for by his grandmother – until the husband took the child by force and also made his way to the United States. 

Olga settled with a relative in Florida.  The husband wound up in Massachusetts – and the boy, Ricardo, wound up in foster care – because the father was abusing him too. 

When Olga finally tracked Ricardo down, things should have been simple.  She was a fit parent with a steady job and a good home.  Massachusetts could have reunited mother and son immediately.  But then the ugly politics of two states got in the way. 

Climate of fear 

Let’s start with the ugliness in Massachusetts.  As the Times story explains, in that state 

the child protection system was at that very moment embroiled in a cross-border custody scandal. 

It involved a 5-year-old girl named Harmony Montgomery, a ward of the state whose father, a New Hampshire resident, had sought her custody. Abiding by its internal regulations, the Massachusetts [Department of Children and Families] asked New Hampshire to approve the move under a 62-year-old agreement called the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children. But the judge disagreed with this request, considering it an infringement on the father’s right to parent his child, and did not wait for New Hampshire to respond. 

The interstate compact was created primarily to govern cross-border foster care moves. Whether it applies to fit parents has been widely debated across the country, and high courts in at least a dozen states have said it does not. 

The National Association of Counsel for Children agrees. “Applying the compact to parents who simply live out of state, when there is no finding or even allegation of wrongdoing, is unconstitutional and harmful to children,” said Allison Green, its legal director. 

But in late 2019, two years after the Massachusetts judge awarded custody to Harmony Montgomery’s father, the authorities in New Hampshire revealed that the girl was missing and presumed to be dead. 

Her shadow hung over Ricardo’s case. Nobody in the Massachusetts child-welfare system wanted to take another potentially deadly risk involving the interstate compact. 

But that climate of fear didn’t create itself.  It’s been nurtured at every turn by the state’s foremost advocate for a take-the-child-and-run approach to “child welfare,” Maria Mossaides.  She runs the state’s “Office of the Child Advocate.”  Yes, the same Maria Mossaides whose own commission studying mandatory child abuse laws rebelled and refused to accept her recommendations after they realized she hadn’t told them the whole story about these laws and their consequences. 

Mossaides has taken every opportunity to exploit the tragic death of Harmony Montgomery to undermine efforts to keep families together – and even to try to effectively silence children in court.  (In fact, Harmony Montgomery almost certainly would be alive today had Massachusetts not rushed to take her from the one person in her life who truly loved her: her mother). 

Mossaides had no direct involvement in Ricardo’s case.  I suspect had she been asked even she would have urged that the family be reunited.  But, while it never was her intent to make things worse for Ricardo, or any child, she shares a lot of responsibility for the climate of fear in Massachusetts that prolonged this family’s agony and the agony of many others who have not caught the attention of the media.  Indeed, though Massachusetts media are doing a notably better job of covering these issues in general, year after year, they still give Mossaides a free pass. 

Florida fails, too 

With Massachusetts DCF too cowardly to do the right thing, they invoked the ICPC and sought direction from its equally execrable counterpart in Florida, also called the Department of Children and Families.  They too were too cowardly to do the right thing.  As the Times story explains: 

When Olga’s advocates phoned her caseworker’s supervisor, according to Nick Herbold, the boy’s first foster father, the woman told them: “Hey, we’re in Florida. She’s undocumented. There’s no concern about the home. There’s no concern about safety with the mother. It’s just the fact that politically we cannot sign off on it.” 

And where might that come from? Again, from the story: 

Asked whether it was now Florida’s policy to refuse custody based on immigration status, Miguel Nevarez, press secretary for the state’s Department of Children and Families, neither answered directly nor denied it. “Cases regarding one’s legal or illegal status wouldn’t exist if the federal government enforced our immigration laws,” he said. 

In Olga’s case, that line of thinking trickled down to South Florida from Tallahassee, where Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill last spring that he proudly called “the strongest anti-illegal-immigration legislation in the country.” 

The people who did the right thing 

The other key lesson in this story involves who did step up – time and time again.  

Had the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families set out to deliberately traumatize Ricardo,  it couldn’t have done better than it did, with decision after decision that would have undermined his stability.  He was saved from DCF’s lousy decisions by two truly extraordinary foster parents, his teachers and his school principal.  They showed the courage, tenacity and generosity that family police agencies in two states did not. 

Indeed, in the entire story, there is no hint of compassion, caring, or sacrifice from anyone within the family policing establishment.  Please think about that the next time anyone in that establishment blathers about children’s “well-being.” 

Miracle in Pinellas County, Florida! Child Abuse suddenly plummets by 50%! (Unless there’s some OTHER reason the sheriff suddenly found a way to stop taking away so many kids)

The rate at which children were torn from their homes in large Florida counties
where sheriff's offices are in charge of child abuse investigations.
  Note that even if Pinellas County has now cut removals in half,
it's still above the state average and well above Broward County.

Hey, remember when the Sheriff of Pinellas County, Florida, Bob Gualtieri, whose office is responsible for child abuse investigations in the county, insisted that his officers never, ever needlessly take children from their homes?  Remember how he said his officers followed a Florida Department of Children and Families framework for investigations “to a T”?   Remember how he insisted on this even though Pinellas tears apart families at one of the highest rates in Florida, even when rates of child poverty are factored in? 

Less than two months ago, he said this to the Florida news site Florida Politics 

“We will always make the decision that is in the best interest of the children, regardless of what others may want, and that includes removing them from harmful situations when required. All of our removal decisions are reviewed by a judge and routinely upheld. We will continue to act to protect vulnerable children.” 

Later, Gualtieri bragged about refusing requests from the former “lead agency” running foster care in the county, Eckerd Connects, to please stop taking so many kids.  And he did all this knowing that Eckerd was placing the children in situations so horrible that Gualtieri himself was launching a criminal investigation. 

But then, the miracle:  As Florida Politics reports, according to a press release from the Florida Department of Children and Families, thanks to the brilliant leadership of the Florida Department of Children and Families (bet you didn’t see that coming) in just two months they’ve cut the number of children taken from their families in Pinellas and neighboring Pasco County by 50%! 

There are two possible explanations for this: Either all of a sudden, child abuse in these counties declined by half  -- or, month-after-month year-after-year until now, the Sheriffs tore apart families needlessly, Eckerd was complicit and DCF turned a blind eye. 

If the data are correct, it is a small, encouraging first step - though it would still mean Pinellas County is tearing apart families at a rate above the state average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  

DCF Secretary Shevaun Harris deserves credit for being the first person in that job since George Sheldon to at least have the courage to admit that wrongful removal is a problem and take some steps to deal with it.  (We’ll see if she still has that kind of courage when the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times come after her – as they will the next time there’s a high-profile death of a child “known to the system” in these counties.) 

But it’s not nearly enough.  The DCF press release is not a testament to sudden success but to horrifying long-term failure – by Eckerd Connects, by the sheriffs and by DCF itself. 

Think of what that press release really means: Hundreds, perhaps thousands of children needlessly traumatized, possibly for life, after being taken from everyone they know and love due to Gualtieri’s knee-jerk take-the-child-and-run approach and the failure of others in the system to stop it.  Many of those children were taken from homes that were safe or could have been made safe only to be abused in foster care.  Others were placed in conditions so horrible that, as noted above, Gualtieri himself has launched a criminal investigation. 

Gualtieri may claim that it was only all of a sudden that other agencies gave him alternatives to taking away all those children.  The press release seems to suggest as much – thanks to the magnificent leadership of DCF, of course.   But Gualtieri is also the one who demands no excuses from others.  As he put it when talking about Eckerd: “You don’t whine about it. … You figure out a way to make it happen." So why didn’t he take the initiative and build the necessary infrastructure of prevention to “make it happen”?  Why didn’t he show the same leadership as his counterpart in  Broward County, where the sheriff understood the problem and did something about it.  Broward tears apart significantly fewer children than Pinellas or Pasco. 

As for DCF, it effectively admits that poverty was confused with neglect in the part of the press release in which it brags that it 

Launched a direct referral process to Hope Florida – A Pathway to Prosperity and Care Navigation for the Sheriff’s Offices, providing assistance to 272 families who faced economic barriers in open child dependency cases. 

There should be no such thing as “economic barriers in … child dependency cases” because poverty is not neglect.  And again, why did Gualtieri and his counterpart in Pasco County wait for DCF – why didn’t they do this themselves? 

A failure of the judiciary 

The press release also illustrates the failure of the Florida judiciary.  Recall how Gualtieri justified his take-the-child-and-run approach by saying what bad family policing agencies always say: 

All of our removal decisions are reviewed by a judge and routinely upheld. 

Yet now we know that, at least half the time, those decisions almost certainly were wrong.  This further illustrates the need for Florida judges to start wielding gavels instead of rubber stamps – and it illustrates the urgent need for Florida to institute the model of high-quality family defense that has allowed other communities to dramatically reduce needless foster care with no compromise of safety. 

A failure of journalism 

And finally, there is another factor: journalistic malpractice by the most powerful media organization in the region, the Tampa Bay Times. 

Imagine how much better off hundreds of children would be now had the Times news side not ignored or downplayed the issue of wrongful removal.  How many children would have been spared the hideous conditions of Eckerd “care” had the Times editorial board, under former Editorial Page Editor Tim Nickens, crusaded to reduce entries into foster care instead of to increase them?  (By the way, Nickens also cited the fact that the judges kept rubber-stamping removals as some kind of proof they were justified.) 

And again, will DCF Secretary Harris have the guts to stand up to the Times, and the Miami Herald, when they come after her?

You get what you pay for: How Florida shifted funding priorities to foster care

Child welfare’s foremost data nerd has weighed in on the mess in central Florida child welfare caused by – well caused by a lot of things, including the dreadful performance of Eckerd Connects.  Eckerd is the “lead agency” in the region (though not for long) under Florida’s largely privatized system of family policing.  (Florida calls it a “Community-Based Care” (CBC) system of “child welfare,” but both those terms are euphemisms.) 

We wrote a detailed blog post about what went wrong last week.  Now there is a much more detailed post from Prof. Robert Latham, associate director of the University of Miami School of Law Children and Youth Law Clinic. He also has a degree in computer science and a talent for data visualization.  That makes him unafraid to go as deep into the weeds as necessary to determine whether a claim is true. 

In his most recent blog post, he documents, in chart after chart, why the claim by Eckerd that its failures are due to the agency not getting enough money is b.s.  As the headline for the post puts it “CBC Funding Doesn’t Make Children Live in Offices.” 

But there are some other significant observations.  Much as we did last week, Latham notes that 

None of the problems are new, and every player in the saga had some hand in creating the mess. The [Pinellas County] sheriff, who is now saying Eckerd could be criminally liable, is the child protective investigator in Pinellas county and has been removing children (at higher than statewide average rates) and handing them to Eckerd for years despite all the known problems. 

But he also explains how the Florida Legislature, the current administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis and the administration of former Governor Rick Scott skewed financial incentives for the “CBCs” toward holding more children in foster care and against trying to keep families together. 

In other words, in addition to all the other ways Florida government caved-in to the Miami Herald and reporter Carol Marbin Miller’s crusade to tear apart more families, the governors and the Legislature also rewarded agencies like Eckerd for holding children in foster care and penalized them for working to keep them safely at home. 

How the incentives work 

In 2010, back when Charlie Crist was still governor and the Florida Department of Children and Families had a visionary leader in George Sheldon, a small proportion of the complex formula for allocating funds to agencies such as Eckerd rewarded them if they reduced the number of children they trapped in foster care.  But by 2015, the year after Miller’s Innocents Lost series started a foster-care panic, that was gone.  Not only that, the proportion of the formula based on the number of children held in foster care doubled – from 30% of the formula to 60%.  It declined to 55% in 2018 – but it’s still, by far, the largest single driver of how much money Eckerd and its counterparts get. 

That isn’t even the worst of it.  The formula for how much these agencies get is based in part on what the other CBCs are doing – apparently, it’s a little like grading on a curve.  But in this case, the better you do the worse the grade. 

Writes Latham: 

[I]f an agency holds its numbers steady while every other CBC increases theirs, that agency will lose money in the formula. There is no incentive to be the first agency to lower the numbers … There is, however, an incentive to be the first to raise your numbers in a given category and capture a higher proportion before the other agencies catch up. This could be a good or bad thing depending on the category and the cost of care for that group. [Emphasis in original] 

In other words, if, say, a county sheriff is tearing apart families needlessly, a lead agency has no financial incentive to complain about it.  And they have no incentive to get children home as quickly and safely as possible.  In fact, if they do the right thing before anyone else, it’s great for the kids, but bad for the agency’s bottom line. 

Double standards and bad incentives 

Any discussion of financial incentives is plagued with the same sorts of double standards that afflict any discussion in child welfare: tearing apart families is automatically considered the good, “safe” option, while avoiding the horrific trauma needless removal inflicts on children, and avoiding the high risk of abuse in foster care itself, is somehow deemed risky. 

So you may be sure that were the legislature ever to restore even a slight incentive not to hold children needlessly in foster care, the Herald or the Tampa Bay Times would find the first available horror story and blame it on a supposedly dangerous incentive to return children home. 

Of course, neither newspaper has expressed any concern about the current incentive to
prolong foster care, with all of the well-documented emotional harm this inflicts on children (think Mexican Border because it’s the same kind of harm), the well-documented rotten outcomes this causes in later life,  the well-documented high rate of abuse in foster care – and, of course, the well-documented harm to children who fall into the clutches of outfits such as Eckerd. 

There are also huge incentives to prolong foster care beyond the financial: No caseworker wants to be on the front page of the Herald or the Tampa Bay Times, accused of “allowing” a child to die.  They need have no fear of being on the front page for tearing apart families needlessly.  The same dynamic applies to judges and agency administrators. 

The bad financial incentives compound all that. Changing them would be a very small step toward redressing the imbalance and allowing the system to handle each case on its merits. 

That this can be done in Florida is illustrated by what happened when Sheldon and before him Bob Butterworth ran DCF.  During their tenure a waiver from federal funding rules allowed more money to be used to keep families together.  Entries into foster care declined and independent monitors found no compromise of child safety. 

Then the Miami Herald came along and blew the whole thing up. 

Everything from the series of outstanding stories from the USA Today Florida Network, and the accounts of youth left to the tender mercies of Eckerd make clear the consequences.

Florida journalism begins to face up to foster-care panic; Florida lawmaklers do not.

USA Today Network stories also reveal how the Florida Department of Children and Families effectively has become a spouse abuser’s best friend. 

           

Confronted with the fact that his agency overlooked
horriffic abuse in foster care and routinely tears children
from the arms of battered mothers, Florida DCF Secretary
Chad Poppell offered, at best, a mea minima culpa.

                In 2014, bad journalism set off a foster-care panic in Florida.  A Miami Herald series, falsely scapegoated family preservation for child abuse deaths.  In fact, efforts to keep families together, led by two leaders of the state child welfare agency, Bob Butterworth and the late George Sheldon, had made children safer.

             The Florida Legislature responded predictably. It passed a bunch of laws encouraging even more needless removal of children from their homes, escalating the panic.

             In 2020, good journalism exposed the harm done to children by the Herald’s bad journalism.  USA Today Network Florida reporters demonstrated how the foster-care panic overloaded the system, prompting the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) and the assortment of privatized “lead agencies” that together mismanage Florida child welfare to turn a blind eye (to an even greater degree than before) to horrific abuse inflicted on children in foster care.

             Then the reporters published a series of stories about children needlessly torn from their mothers and consigned to the chaos of that same horrific system because the mothers were victims of domestic violence.

             Last week, some Florida legislators responded predictably – accepting at face value meaningless assurances from the current “leader” of Florida DCF, Chad Poppell.

So for starters, let’s review what Poppell and the legislature – as well as the Herald and its ally in pushing Florida to relentlessly tear apart families, the Tampa Bay Times – want swept under the rug.

The USA Today Network journalists found that the system

 …sent nearly 170 children to live in foster homes where the state had some evidence that abuse occurred. In 2016, two preschool girls said their Sarasota County foster father molested them. The state sent him 13 more children, stopping only when a third toddler reported that the 64-year-old had forced her to put his penis in her mouth. …

The number of children under 10 sent to live in group homes doubled between 2013 and 2017, adding to the cost of care and the danger to children. Some were sent to places such as the Mount Dora-based National Deaf Academy even after a whistleblower lawsuit was filed in Lake County claiming that staff had held children down, punched them in the stomach, spat on them and denied them medical care. …

 As caseloads rose, child welfare workers skipped home visits and parent training sessions because they could not keep up with required safety checks. They fabricated logs to make it appear as if the sessions took place. When caseworkers lied and omitted information from their reports, children got hurt, according to lawsuits and DCF inspector general reports. One IG report told of a child who was sexually assaulted after an investigations supervisor falsely claimed a hotline call had been successfully investigated and provisions had been made for the safety of the children involved.

 

At a legislative committee meeting on Jan. 12, Poppell offered up what can best be called a mea minima culpa

 “I won’t belabor the point, the quality of the work was poor,  We did a bad job,” he said, adding “DCF shouldn’t be finding out about these things in the newspaper.”

 But he neglected to mention that he had done everything he could to prevent his own agency, or anyone else, from finding out.  As the USA Today story notes:

DCF and the nonprofit agencies in charge of foster care repeatedly tried to prevent USA TODAY from obtaining information about foster parents and the allegations against them. They would not provide a list of parent names and demanded $50,000 for search and copy fees for disciplinary records. In reaction to one USA TODAY records request, DCF officials pressed legislators to pass a law making foster parent names secret from the public – an effort that ultimately failed.

Taking children from battered mothers

As I’ll discuss in more detail below, the legislative committee barely touched the issue of abuse in foster care.  And when it comes to the issue of the harm done to children taken from battered mothers, they don’t seem to have said a word. 

So let’s review what the journalists found.  Here’s how one of the stories begins: 

Her memory of the midnight attack was muddled, but her battered body bore the story. 

Purple bruises peppered her arms, legs and chest. Blood dried on her busted lip. Dark, swollen skin circled her bloodshot right eye. Hospital scans confirmed her ex-boyfriend’s attack had inflicted internal trauma too. 

Now, hours later, he was in jail and Leah Gunion was home again. Concussion-weary and tender, she tucked her toddler back into bed and sat down to nurse her infant son. An 8 a.m. knock at the door disrupted her first moment of peace. 

A woman waited at the threshold. Her polo shirt bore the insignia of the Florida Department of Children and Families. Thinking she was there to help, Leah let her in. 

For the next six weeks, Leah would battle the state for custody of her children, though DCF investigators never suggested that she injured her kids. They didn’t accuse her of using drugs or failing to provide for her boys’ basic needs. 

But she had lost consciousness from being beaten and strangled, briefly leaving her children unsupervised. They ordered Leah to never be alone with her children, or risk losing them. 

Ultimately her children were indeed taken away.  It happened right after a domestic violence counselor assured the mother it wouldn’t: 

 “She was very afraid that day of the department,” [the counselor] recalled. “And I stood right here in this building and said, ‘You’ve done everything right. Don’t worry about the department. They’re not going to take your kids.’” 

Because a police officer with a bodycam was there to provide backup, we can see what happened next:

 

Does Poppell know the research?

             Poppell tried to dismiss the cases as isolated while at the same time justifying tearing children from the arms of battered mothers on grounds that the children had been emotionally abused.          

But research shows that while witnessing domestic violence can harm children, emotionally, taking children from nonoffending parents harms those children far more.  One expert called it “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  That’s why in one state, New York, as a result of a class-action lawsuit, the practice is illegal.  (NCCPR’s vice president was co-counsel for plaintiffs in that lawsuit.)  In Florida, in contrast, DCF’s approach can be summed up as: please pass the salt. 

            As the Daytona Beach News-Journal wrote in an editorial. Poppell ... 

...should be aware of the national research showing how badly children suffer when they are separated from their parents  – and be wholly committed to ensuring that doesn’t happen to parents who never abused or neglected their children. 

            One reason the emotional trauma is so great in these situations: Children assume they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished.  The Florida stories illustrate just that.  Leah Gunion’s children ultimately were returned, but ... 

Her toddler, whom DCF and police had picked up from day care, asked what he’d done wrong. “He thinks he was arrested,” Leah said, something she’d previously told him happens only to bad boys. 

            As for the claim that such cases are isolated, here’s what the USA Today Network reporters found: 

[I]n defiance of widely accepted best practices, Florida aggressively removes children from parents – most of them mothers – who have been battered by an intimate partner, a USA TODAY investigation found. … While other states have moved away from that approach, DCF cited domestic violence as the reason it removed more than 3,500 children from biological parents in 2018, an increase of nearly 1,400 from 2013. It is the primary reason for 25% of removals this year. … 

USA TODAY identified 22 domestic violence victims who were willing to share their stories and provide case documents that normally are hidden from public view. … Taken together, their experiences reveal a system stacked against women who are abused. Caseworkers and judges treat them like criminals on probation, even when their children have not been physically harmed, and impose a level of scrutiny that many parents could not pass. Any failing can be used against them to remove their children or delay reunification. 

Perhaps worst of all, Florida DCF effectively has become a spouse abuser’s best friend: 

Worried their children could be taken again, eight mothers say they’re now afraid to call 911 if they’re in danger. Four mothers told USA TODAY they believe their children were abused or medically neglected in a foster home. 

“The thing I regret most is that I ever called 911,” said a Martin County mother of two whose sons spent eight months in foster care after she reported to police that her boyfriend hit her and threatened her with a gun. “But I could also have been killed that night. Which one do you pick?”

 

The Florida Legislature responds – NOT! 

On Jan. 12, Poppell spoke at a meeting of the Florida Senate Committee on Children, Families and Elder Affairs.  He admitted that DCF had wrongly dismissed a large proportion of the allegations of sexual abuse in foster care – now that the journalists had overcome DCF’s own efforts to hide the problem.  He promised the agency will look more carefully in the future. 

But he implied that the official figure of 92 children with such allegations in fiscal year 2020 is accurate.  In fact, study after study shows that there is abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse. 

Having just admitted that his investigations of abuse in foster care are sloppy and miss a lot of such abuse, Poppell then went on to claim that abuse in foster care had declined since 2007.  I trust the problem with that claim is obvious. 

As for the foster-care panic, Poppell claimed, of course, that all those children were taken to keep them safe.  But, as always happens with foster-care panics, it backfired.  Independent monitors found that the one time child safety really improved in Florida was when Butterworth and Sheldon were running DCF and doing more to keep families together. 

By overloading the system, the foster-care panic didn’t just make foster care less safe, it also made it harder for caseworkers to find the relatively few children in real danger. 

But safety wasn’t the real reason for taking away all those children.  That was made clear by Poppell himself – inadvertently – when he pointed out that the number of children torn from their families has returned to about where it was before the panic.  

But why? If all those children were so unsafe they needed to be taken away in 2014, why not now? 

      There are two possible explanations for the rise and fall in entries into Florida foster care: 

1.              1. By amazing coincidence, child abuse in Florida spiked at precisely the same moment the Herald was publishing its stories, and then it magically declined again. 

2.              2. Thousands of children were needlessly torn from everyone they know and love, consigned to the chaos of foster care, suffered emotional trauma akin to that suffered by children torn from their families at the Mexican border and, in some cases were horribly abused in foster care itself – all so Florida DCF could appease the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times.

             So, which is more likely? 

1,280 “great things” per child? 

Speaking of unlikely, Poppell also declared that “a million great things happen in this system every day.” 

I did the math.  On average, 781 children come to the attention of DCF every day – that’s the number of children who are investigated as alleged victims of child abuse and neglect.  So if Poppell is right, his agency is so magnificent that it does an average of 1,280 great things for each one of those children!  Kinda makes you wonder why the outcomes for children who go through the system are so rotten, doesn’t it? 

And yet, instead of holding Poppell to account for any of this, his token initiatives about abuse in foster care reportedly were “well-received.” Another news account said “For the most part, the Senate committee members appeared pleased with Poppell’s responses.” 

Of course they were.  Poppell simply ignored the problem at the root of all the others – taking away too many children.  That’s the problem for which the legislature is complicit. 

The chair of the committee State Sen. Lauren Book had earlier written that “The USA Today investigative series will serve as a blueprint for me to follow in examining these issues.”  

But if she, or any other committee member, so much as uttered a word at the hearing about what was being done to the children of battered women, no news account mentioned it. 

So if you’re really going to use those stories as your guide, Sen. Book,  

● Will you introduce legislation to make it illegal to tear a child from the arms of mothers whose only crime is to, themselves, be the victims of domestic violence? 

● Will you demand that DCF stop taking away so many families needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect? 

● Will you demand that DCF return to the reforms initiated under Butterworth and Sheldon, reforms shown by independent monitors to make children safer? 

● Will you demand that Florida create a program of high-quality interdisciplinary family representation like the one in New York City that has spared so many children the trauma of prolonged needless foster care, with no compromise of safety? 

● Will you at least demand that DCF follow this sound advice from the News-Journal and start 

...[examining] a random sample of child-abuse investigations that cite domestic violence as a leading cause and assigning an experienced team (preferably made up of people who don’t currently work for DCF) to review them. It should also look into allegations that assigned blame to victims of domestic violence and looked for any reason to take their children into foster care.

          And one more thing: Will you demand that Florida child welfare do what you say you are going to do and use the USA Today series as a blueprint – instead of taking its cues from the Miami Herald?

Florida’s right-wing governor exploits the Left’s false narrative about child abuse to promote his COVID-19 recklessness

Melania Trump, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Casey DeSantis

(See? Who says Left and Right can’t work together?)

             Among the nation’s governors it would be hard to find one whose botched the response to coronavirus worse than Florida’s own “mini-Trump” Ron DeSantis.

             He locked down too late, reopened too soon, bragged about the reopening – and helped turn his state into an epicenter of the pandemic.  Chris Cuomo https://youtu.be/LZ2OHfUAZcM on June 30: “Ignoring a pandemic doesn’t make it go away.”

             But DeSantis didn’t learn from any of this. Now he is pushing, fanatically, to reopen Florida schools.  He even threatened to cut off all state aid to a school district that simply proposed to delay in-person classes by one month.

             But before you say: “Well, what do you expect from that right-winger?,” consider: His most effective weapon in pushing this dangerous agenda is a trope created and spread mostly by a bunch of liberals – the American child welfare establishment.

             DeSantis exploited what has become a standard liberal-created, media fueled – and racist – master narrative: Now that fewer mostly white middle class professionals have their “eyes” constantly on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children, their parents supposedly will unleash upon their children a “pandemic of child abuse”?

             Yes, the pandemic is putting more stress on everyone.  But why do we rush to assume that for poor people in general and poor Black people in particular the only way they’ll cope with it is to beat up their children?

              The myth continues to spread, even after news organizations such as the Associated Press, The Marshall Project and Bloomberg CityLab debunked it.  And in Florida, Prof. Robert Latham, Associate Director of the University of Miami School of Law Children and Youth Law Clinic,  and child welfare’s best number cruncher, has pored over the data and posted the results on his blog. He’s found no evidence for a pandemic of hidden child abuse in Florida.

            

 But who cares about facts?  When Ron DeSantis wanted the perfect excuse for opening schools, all he had to do was whisper the magic words: “child abuse.”  Or as a headline in the Orlando Sentinel put it: “DeSantis touts return to school to counter suspected rise in child abuse amid coronavirus.”

             Actually, he got his secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families, Chad Poppell to do the touting at a media event in Sarasota.  According to the Sarasota Herald Tribune Poppell said:

             There are concerns that keeping children out of school will lead to abuse cases going unreported.

            “We’ve been going for five-plus months; it is horrible to think about a child stuck in a (abuse) situation” for that long, Poppell said.

 There is, of course, no evidence that any more children are actually stuck in an abuse situation than before. And in fact, more children in real danger may be discovered because what are being “lost” are largely false reports, trivial cases, and cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.”

             But it didn’t stop there.  Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis chimed in with the claim that in March, when the pandemic began, the number of children who were subjects of calls to Florida’s child abuse hotline was 20,000 lower than in March, 2019. Said Ms. DeSantis:

           “20,000 less [sic] individuals being reported to the child crisis hotline. That’s 250 school buses packed full of kids one right after the other, that’s how many kids are not getting a chance to tell their stories.”

             Or as public radio station WFME put it in its own breathless headline: “In Florida, 20,000 Fewer Children Got Help for Abuse, Neglect at the Start of the Pandemic.”

             Amazing how much misinformation you can pack into a single headline: National data suggest that at least 91 percent of those children were not abused or neglected and most of the rest probably had their poverty confused with neglect.  But WFME declares all their parents guilty, and all the children abused or neglected.  As for the “got help” part, that’s not what the child welfare system does. It’s a policing system.

             It is far more likely that 20,000 children were spared the enormous trauma of a needless child abuse investigation, while workers were given time to find the very few in real danger. 

            So while Florida media have been careful to note that, why yes, there are dangers in opening schools in the middle of a pandemic, they have accepted without so much as a hint of skepticism the governor’s most potent argument for reopening schools: The false narrative that the typical impoverished nonwhite parent is more of a danger to her or his own children than the coronavirus.  (Even this claim is not limited to the right. Self-proclaimed liberal Prof. James Dwyer claims schools never should have closed at all!)

             As Gov. DeSantis continues to botch the response to COVID-19, Florida media, and a largely liberal child welfare establishment, have been his great enablers.

On our Florida blog: Tampa Bay Times exposes a crisis made far worse by the Tampa Bay Times

The Times tells us all about the enormous harm done to children when they are moved from foster home to foster home - without ever mentioning the Times-fueled foster-care panic at the root of the problem.

“Nowhere to call home,” says the headline on a big story in the Tampa Bay Times at the end of last year. “Thousands of foster children move so much they risk psychological harm.”  The subhead declares that “A Tampa Bay Times investigation finds Florida’s overburdened foster care system repeatedly bounces children from home to home and family to family.”

A Tampa Bay Times investigation?  Really?  All they had to do was turn on a television and watch the stories on WFLA-TV.  The television station broke the story and beat the you-know-what out of the Times on it all through 2018.

The Times catch-up story goes on to describe the terrible toll taken on children by being moved from placement to placement. It does add some data giving a sense of how often it happens in Florida in general and Hillsborough County (metropolitan Tampa) in particular.  Any story reminding people of this institutionalized child abuse has value, even one that adds little to what WFLA already told us.

How the Times made the whole problem worse

But the biggest problem with the story is the problem with all of the Tampa Bay Times reporting on child welfare over the past few years.  In a state that’s been in the midst of a media-fueled foster-care panic since 2014, and where, by some measures, the panic is worst in the Tampa-St Petersburg area. The Tampa Bay Times has spent years committing journalistic malpractice, helping to fuel the panic by denying the very existence of the problem that drives everything else: needless removal of children.

Read the full post on our Florida blog.

An open letter to two Florida columnists

Their anguish over the death of another child “known to the system” is genuine.  I think they’ll also be open to some new ideas.

A little over a week ago, two columnists for the Tampa Bay Times, Sue Carlton and John Romano, wrote about still another death of a child “known to the system” in Florida.  Often, when that happens, I reach out to the journalists in a letter.  This time, I’m sharing that letter with everyone.

  

Dear Ms. Carlton and Mr. Romano:

            I am writing to you because you’ve both written columns about the tragic death of Jordan Belliveau, another child “known to the system” in Florida – apparently on the same day.  More particularly, I am writing because your columns were not the usual quick-and-dirty “Boy do I hate child abuse!” rants – the kind of column that is filled with scapegoating; the kind that’s really just a cheap and easy way to meet a deadline.  On the contrary, the anguish in your columns is real and you both seem seriously interested in answers.

            Indeed, I first got in touch with you, Ms. Carlton, after you wrote a brave, counterintuitive column on some of these very issues. That was in 2010, a time when Florida child welfare finally was starting to improve.  As you may recall, when I wrote to you then, I predicted a backlash against reform.  Sadly, that’s exactly what happened.  I did not predict that it would be led by the Miami Herald – and the editorial board at the Tampa Bay Times.  But that’s also exactly what happened.  So the need for bold, counterintuitive thinking is even greater now.

            I am using the open letter approach because you’re certainly not alone in agonizing over how to fix child welfare in Florida.  And I am hoping that your interest in answers includes a willingness to look past the usual failed solutions – just as you did, Ms. Carlton, in 2010. Because those “solutions,” and the false premises that underlie them, are a large part of what has gotten Florida, and much of the country, into this mess in the first place.

            Among those false premises is one that both of you mention in your columns.  That’s understandable, since it is probably the most common misconception in all of child welfare: The idea that family preservation and child safety are inherently at odds – competing interests that somehow have to be “balanced.” The implication, of course, is that if you leave a child in or return a child to a home where abuse or neglect has been alleged, that’s inherently risky. Keep the child in foster care and it may ruin his psyche, but at least he’s physically safe.

            That is not true. 

What I will argue in this long letter is that in the overwhelming majority of cases family preservation isn’t just more humane than foster care, it’s safer than foster care.  And the real reason for horrors such as the death of Jordan Belliveau has nothing to do with any supposed “policy of reunifying families at all costs” at Gay Courter, a volunteer “guardian ad litem (what most states call a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA)) claims in a Times op-ed column.

On the contrary, it’s almost always because of caseworkers so horribly overloaded with cases of children who don’t need to be in the system that they lack the time to properly investigate any case.  As a result, they make terrible mistakes in all directions.  Even as they take many children needlessly they leave others in, or return them to, dangerous homes.

            Those false premises are laid out most clearly in Ms. Courter’s op-ed.  Since I’ve followed Florida child welfare for about 30 years now, and NCCPR has issued reports on child welfare dating back to 2000, I am familiar with Ms. Courter’s work. I know that, like most people in child welfare, she has only the best of intentions. I also know that at least one of you has written admiringly about her in the past.  I, on the other hand, am that guy who keeps saying those terrible things about the whole approach to child welfare taken by the Times and the Miami Herald. I make no apology for that. When children’s lives are at stake - literally – good intentions aren’t enough.

The Times and the Herald didn’t make a good child welfare system bad. But they helped make a bad child welfare system worse – and they helped to halt and reverse what had been the first real improvement in that system in decades.  You are in a position to do better.  And if you are willing to reconsider old assumptions then you can help break the cycle of tragedy-investigate-repeat that Ms. Carlton aptly described in her column.