Covering foster care: Overriding the “Veto of Silence”

            Yesterday, I wrote about some of the reasons why so many reporters won’t even look into a story about parents who say their children were taken from them needlessly.  And I wrote about an exception: Issac Bailey, metro columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

            Bailey is not one of those sit-on-your-ass-and-pontificate columnists; content, week after week, to regurgitate what reporters found and add some declarations of outrage.  (In all of journalism is there anything easier to do than spit out the “boy do I hate child abuse!” column?)

            Bailey started out as a reporter and he’s still a reporter.  Bailey meets people where they live, seeks out all sides, and pours through documents.

            He spent months researching and reporting a very complex case, involving an impoverished father whose common-law wife ran off one day with their child.  She left him a taunting message on MySpace declaring he’d never find his daughter.  And he didn’t – until authorities in Warren County, New York told him she’d been placed in foster care after the children of the mother’s new boyfriend brutally abused her.

            That’s almost certainly where that little girl would be now, in foster care with strangers, had Bailey not exposed years of bungling by two states, in stories that, to the credit of his editors, the Sun News featured on its front page for six days in a row.  (The entire series is available by clicking here and scrolling to the middle of the page.)  With some encouragement from NCCPR, papers near Warren County picked up on the story, and it’s clear from this account in the Albany Times Union that the county, which at one point had been pushing for termination of parental rights, had been feeling the heat:

“[The lawyer for Warren county] told the judge his agency was simply following the law in the legal process, despite media coverage he considered critical.

"I'm not here to debate the press," the judge told him.”


           We know this, of course, because in New York, unlike South Carolina and most other states, these hearings are open to the press and the public.  With journalists watching, the county reversed itself, the judge ruled for the family and last week, this little girl celebrated Thanksgiving back home in South Carolina with her father. 

            In another column, Bailey performed a service that was almost as valuable: He said out loud what many reporters say only to their colleagues in the newsroom, or sometimes won’t even admit to themselves, about why these stories so often never get written:

           

We send out social workers to contend with some of the most difficult situations imaginable. And we cut back on their training in times of economic stress. We don't pay them well even when the economy is booming. And we tend to over-react when they make what we perceive as a mistake, particularly when a child dies while under the department's supervision.

I understand why, because I feel the same pang of uncertainty every time I look into a case. Every time I've written about a family involved with DSS and Family Court over the past half dozen years, I've done background checks and gone over court and police documents and visited them in their homes and fielded calls from their supporters and detractors, just like social workers do, seeking to weed through rumor and fact, never knowing how things are going to turn out.

Because there is no way of knowing. And that's why it is easier to not deal with them, to not write about them, to ignore the plight of such families. And it is why studies have consistently shown that after a highly-publicized child death, the number of kids taken into DSS custody skyrockets.

Because for many of us it is more comfortable to pretend we play no role in the dysfunction of the system - through our silence and apathy and irrational reactions - just as it is more comfortable for those within the system to believe it is better to err on the side of placing kids in a system that has chewed up and spit out too many children rather than leave them in homes - and provide real assistance - on the chance that they might - might - come to a different kind of harm, the kind that brings more public scrutiny.

And because of that vicious cycle, kids who would otherwise do well, even with imperfect parents in less-than-ideal living situations, are taken into foster care, flooding the system, making it harder for social workers to have a manageable load of cases, as well as increasing the likelihood that children who really need extreme intervention won't receive it.[Emphasis added].

            Bailey’s tolerance of ambiguity is important for another reason.  The overwhelming majority of people who lose children to the system are nothing like the sadists and brutes whose cases, rightly, make headlines.  But they’re not all pure as the driven snow, either.  They are, like most of us, flawed human beings who’ve made mistakes; they fall somewhere between the extremes, neither all victim nor all villain.  The real issue is whether their children should suffer for that by being consigned to the chaos of foster care.

            Most journalists don’t want to hear that.  I don’t remember where I saw it, but I recall a producer for NBC’s Dateline allegedly saying that program’s formula boils down to three words: “Victim, villain, confrontation.”  The real world of child welfare generally isn’t like that – neither is the real world, period.

            But in those cases that really do fit the formula, middle-class families are more likely to be able to prove it, one more reason why, as I noted yesterday,  on those rare cases when wrongful removal does make the front page, or at least the front page of the metro section, it’s usually one of those very rare times that the long arm of child protective services reaches into the middle class: a story like this one or this one.

THE VETO OF SILENCE

            Although the general public doesn’t know about this, the people who run child welfare agencies do.  After all, their p.r. people, or “flaks” to use the common term among journalists, usually are former reporters.

So they know how to hide behind confidentiality laws in ways that magnify a reporter’s fears. They’ll say something like: “Oh, there’s really so much more to the case, and we wish we could tell you – really we do – but we just can’t; confidentiality, you know.”  I’ve even seen this used in states, like New York, where the law says public child welfare agencies can comment – but few reporters know about it.

             Of course reporters know that if the child welfare agency really had anything more, they’d almost certainly leak it; but given the doubts about parents to begin with and the fear of looking stupid, this veto of silence often kills stories.  And, of course, every time reporters fail to override this veto and go with the story anyway, it reinforces the agency’s determination to oppose any effort to change the confidentiality laws.

Indeed, I have a theory that every time one of these stories is killed, somewhere an agency flak gets his wings. 

            Issac Bailey’s willingness to take on stories that might not advance his own career stands out in other ways as well.

          Another reporter I know, in some ways a very good one, once admitted to me that she would never write a story about a really good program or improvements in a system because she was afraid of looking like a fool if things weren’t as good as she thought.  Very little will cause more loss of “face” for a reporter than coming across as naïve.  But doing right by readers sometimes means risking looking dumb.

         We need more reporters with Issac Bailey’s willingness to dig into the stories others won’t – and with his tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. 


Tomorrow: Back to Los Angeles and the role of the L.A. Times "Readers' Representative."

Covering foster care: Writing the stories others ignore

            It happens all the time after a reporter does “the fatality series” – the story or series about deaths of children “known to the system.”

            The reporter is deluged with calls and e-mails from parents who feel their children were wrongfully taken from them.  Naively, they assume that the reporter really cares about children and now that he’s seen how often the system fails, “he’s bound to want to know about my story.”

            The reporter never responds.  Within the newsroom he and his colleagues may well treat such requests with contempt.

            So the stories of children needlessly taken from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care are far less likely to be told.

            There are a lot of reasons.

THE RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION HIGH

            For one thing, after immersing oneself in the gruesome details of what a tiny minority of sadistic, brutal parents do to their children, the reporter is likely to be on a “righteous indignation high” – the last thing he wants to hear is someone saying “yes, but…” – least of all someone he’s sure really is a child abuser.

            But there are other reasons as well.  Child welfare may be the only beat where the story most likely to advance a reporter’s career also is the easiest to do.

            The “fatality series” is the low-hanging fruit of the child welfare beat, because the death of a child “known to the system” is the time when it’s hardest for child welfare systems to hide their failings behind confidentiality laws.

            Some years ago, I read with disgust a “how I got that story” piece by a reporter who had done one of these series – complete with all the usual false assumptions and scapegoating.  He advised any journalist starting out covering child welfare to begin with “the fatality series” – precisely because it’s the easiest to do.

            It’s also the quickest, easiest way to glory on the child welfare beat.

            For the same reason most parents are good parents – we’re “hard wired” to respond with horror and revulsion to a child being hurt – these usually are high-impact series, guaranteed to win journalism awards.  Unfortunately the impact often is a foster-care panic which makes everything worse (and no, David Lauter, assistant managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, that does not mean reporters shouldn’t cover child abuse fatalities, it means they should cover them better.)  The “fatality series” also leaves the impression that the only mistake child welfare agencies make is to leave children in dangerous homes - because so many reporters won’t do the harder stories.

            Oh, and one other thing: The professionals in the child welfare system and foster and adoptive parents usually are of the same race and class as most reporters; they’re people journalists naturally are comfortable with.  Most birth parents who lose children to foster care are not.

            Similarly, almost every middle-class professional has a friend or colleague who has adopted a child, few journalists personally know anyone, aside from, very rarely, story subjects, who has had a child returned to her or him from foster care.

            This helps explain why, on those rare cases when wrongful removal does make the front page, or at least the front page of the metro section, it’s usually one of those very rare times that the long arm of child protective services reaches into the middle class: a story like this one or this one.

FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, AN EXCEPTION

            Fortunately, there are exceptions.

            For several years, Issac J. Bailey, metro columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C. has reported on stories other journalists ignore.  Some of his columns have been collected in a book.

            Bailey is Black.  He was one of eleven children raised in rural South Carolina.  He is also, in his own words “a proud product of handouts.”  He writes:

The government provided me with food stamps and free lunches and big, long rectangular boxes of cheese and powdered milk and bags of beans and Pell grants and health insurance to nourish my body and mind in ways my family's precarious financial predicament did not allow.

           So his background is closer to that of a lot of parents caught up in the system than that of many reporters.

          A background like Bailey’s is by no means a prerequisite for getting the child welfare story right – some outstanding child welfare reporting has been done by journalists from backgrounds every bit as privileged as that of reporters prone to taking the cheapest of shots.   Conversely, there are plenty of poor people who, while escaping from poverty, developed amnesia.  That’s even more true if their “handouts” were the kind that have no stigma, like the G.I. Bill or an FHA-backed home loan, or the mortgage interest tax deduction.

         But I’m guessing that a background like Issac Bailey’s sometimes may make a reporter more willing to listen.

         But there’s something else: Bailey also just works harder than many reporters.

Tomorrow: How that hard work helped reunite a daughter with her father – and what probably is the most important reason why so many reporters won’t write a story like that.

UPDATED, OCT. 30: Foster care in South Carolina and New York: The power of getting the story right

          UPDATE: Johnny Smith's daughter will get her father back on Thursday.

  I’ve written a fair amount on this blog about shoddy journalism, the kind that drags down my former profession.  So it’s good to have a chance to write about journalism that elevates that profession – journalism that has just helped reunite a traumatized little girl with her father, Johnny Smith.

            Two years ago, the Albany, N.Y. Times Union ran a five paragraph item on a sexual assault of a three-year-old in Warren County, about 60 miles north.  The last paragraph says “The child is now in foster care.”

            She’s still there.

            And odds are the only reason she’s finally getting out, is because of  Issac Bailey, a tenacious columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina – and his editors, who put the story of this child, and her father, on the front page for six days in a row.

            Why Myrtle Beach, South Carolina?  Because not long before the child was brutally assaulted, the mother had absconded with her, and taken her to Warren County.  And all along, this girl’s father, Johnny Smith of Conway, SC, has been fighting to get her out of foster care and back home.

            Part one of Bailey’s series ends this way:

          “I want to know what I did wrong," Smith said he thought long ago.  He found out later it matters little that the answer to his question is: nothing.

          Originally, the screw-ups were on the South Carolina end.  That state’s Department of Social Services refused to approve the father as a placement for his own daughter  - the daughter he’d raised from birth until she was stolen - because he was poor.  You know all those times child welfare agencies say they never separate families because of poverty?  Six front page stories show that, in this case, that was a lie.

          Normally, a parent at least can challenge such a decision in court.  But not when the case involves more than one state – thanks to an incredibly screwed-up document known as the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children.  As you’ll see in Bailey’s stories, the comments of those in charge of this awful back-alley of child welfare set some kind of record for arrogance even by the standards of child welfare agencies.

          Fortunately, after Bailey started asking tough questions, South Carolina reversed itself.  But meanwhile, in New York, where individual counties run child welfare systems, Warren County was moving full speed toward termination of parental rights.

         Bailey first contacted NCCPR early on in his reporting.  NCCPR put him in touch with the nation’s leading expert on the ICPC, and someone working hard to reform it, Prof. Vivek Sankaran of the University of Michigan Law School Child Advocacy Law Clinic and director of the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy.

         After the stories were published NCCPR contacted journalists whose work would be seen in Warren County, including another very good columnist, Carl Strock of the Daily Gazette in Schenectady.  He wrote an excellent column, available from the newspaper’s paid archive.

         Yesterday, Bailey reports, the court did the right thing.  No later than Christmas, and maybe as soon as tomorrow, Johnny Smith’s daughter should be going home.  And here's the account from today's Times Union.

Some good journalism about some bad foster care systems

    This doesn't happen very often: There's been so much good reporting on child welfare that it's been hard to keep up. So here's a round-up:

     For starters, there have been many good stories on the case of Noah Kirkman, the Canadian boy held in Oregon foster care for two years. There are links in the previous post to this Blog.

Also noted previously, the Los Angeles Daily News story about the foster-care panic in Los Angeles County. But there's lot's more:

    ● A dogged columnist for the Myrtle Beach, S.C. Sun News, Issac Bailey, has spent months investigating the case of a father whose child was brutally abused by the children of her mother's new boyfriend. The child has been trapped in foster care for two years, for just one reason: Until the columnist started asking questions, the State of South Carolina deemed the father too poor to raise her – even though he'd been raising her before mom fled with her, and even though he's raising his other children with no problem. It's a six-part series.  This link, to today's installment, will get you to the rest.  And see, especially, part three,

    ● The Lincoln Journal Star has an excellent editorial, pegged to NCCPR's data, asking why, as most of the nation does a better job of keeping children safe in their own homes, Nebraska is getting even worse. The Daily Nonpareil, in Council Bluffs Iowa, also citing NCCPR, is asking the same question about Iowa.

    ● Also in Iowa, the Des Moines Register has a very good story about what the state child welfare agency does when one of its caseworkers allegedly "goes rogue" and interferes in a custody dispute involving her own family. (It does absolutely nothing). The Register also has done excellent editorials, like this one, on the dangers of "central registries" of alleged child abusers that are utterly lacking in due process protections for families.

    ● And then there's this incredibly botched case in Texas, which illustrates the first rule of lousy child welfare systems: No matter how much it hurts the child, never, ever admit you made a mistake. KPRC-TV in Houston broke the story, and did a follow-up story the next day about the (relatively) happy ending.

It's the second time a Houston television station has beaten the you-know-what out of the Houston Chronicle. (The Fox affiliate, KRIV, did it with this story, and this one.) That's because the longtime reporter on the child welfare beat at the Chronicle, Terri Langford, appears to view it as her mission in life to make sure that this side of the child welfare story never makes it into her paper's news pages.

Which just goes to show that child welfare and the journalism of child welfare have something in common: There's been some real improvement in some places, while others remain mired in failure.

When destroying your OWN family just isn’t enough

Lynn and Bryan Blevins of Conway, South Carolina did not torture their three children. They did not rape them. They did not break their bones. But one day, their ten-year-old and their eight-year-old got into a fight, as siblings sometimes do. One of the boys wound up with scratches on his face.

As a very good columnist, Issac Bailey of the Myrtle Beach Sun-News, reported last year (in a column that, unfortunately, is not available online), the police saw it for what it was; a normal part of childhood. But a caseworker for the South Carolina Department of Social Services concluded that the fight must be a sign of deeper problems in the home. That was enough for her to confiscate all three children and throw them into foster care.

And now, thanks to a new South Carolina law, holding children like the Blevins' in foster care for just six months will become grounds to tear them from their parents forever.

The same applies to children taken from parents just because those parents are poor – or for any other reason.

The South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that the passage of time alone is reason enough to sever family ties permanently, even when DSS itself contributed to the delay. (In contrast, the Illinois Supreme Court wisely said the same provision in that state's law was unconstitutional.) Now, South Carolina DSS need merely "run out the clock" to have grounds to tear apart families like the Blevins after six months.

After 18 months the bill requires termination of parental rights, no matter what. So DSS can take a child, provide no help to the family, stall for 18 months and be guaranteed that the child never will go home.

The law even prohibits courts from considering whether an adoptive home really is available when deciding whether to terminate parental rights. What this law really guarantees for many children is prolonged foster care and creation of more "legal orphans," with no ties to birth parents and no hope of adoption either.

Indeed, we've already seen it across the country. For more than a decade, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act has ordered states to seek termination of parental rights when children have been in foster care for 15 months. The result: a 70 percent increase in the number of children who "age out" of foster care at age 18 with no home at all.

That's why much of the rest of the country has begun to turn away from this termination-at-all-costs mentality. But not South Carolina, which remains mired in the failed approaches of the 1990s.

There was, of course, a signing ceremony when the bill became law Tuesday. Adopted children were brought in to serve as props for the photo op as the Governor of South Carolina offered up platitudes about the importance of family.

That would be Gov. Mark Sanford. And, after all, who would know more about family values?