Donald Trump and the child savers redux. It’s not a band, but they still sing the same song

 

More than a decade ago, I wrote a column for The Imprint called “Donald Trump and the Child Savers. It’s Not a Band But They Sing the Same Song.” I began it this way: 

Last month, author and political commentator Jeff Greenfield wrote an essay for Politico on the politics of fear – and how Donald Trump exploits it.  He wrote: 

History teaches us lessons of what can happen when genuine public fears are co-opted by the demagogues, fear-mongers and over-reactors. There was a reason to fear crime in the 1960s and 1970s, because violent crime in America was increasing by leaps and bounds, but that didn’t mean the only response [had to be] four decades of over-incarceration, driven by politicians’ fears of looking soft on crime. There was a reason to fear a Soviet espionage network looking for military secrets during a Cold War waged in the shadow of countless nuclear weapons, but that didn’t require McCarthyism as a response. There was a reason to fear where Al Qaeda might strike next after 19 men with box cutters killed 3,000 people in the heart of two great cities, but that didn’t mean we had to invade Iraq. 

Let me add one to Greenfield’s list: There is a reason to fear that a small number of parents are brutally abusive and will do terrible things to innocent children if they are not stopped.  But that doesn’t mean we needed to create a system that puts millions of children through frightening investigations every year, and casts thousands of them into a chaotic system of foster care, traumatizing some of them for life. 

 I was reminded again of how the Trump approach and that of the take-the-child-and-run crowd in child welfare are nearly identical when I read about Trump’s State of the Union address. I spared myself the ordeal of watching it, but you can get an idea of his fixation on exploiting horror stories from this (brief, I promise) excerpt, from Rolling Stone: 

Of course, these horrors have nothing to do with actual rates of crime, nor the actual record of immigrants – who, documented or not, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. 

But Trump wants us so upset by the gruesome details of stories that are as rare as they are horrifying that we’ll lose sight of the facts, lose sight of the context and embrace his phony solutions. (And, of course, he argues that anyone who doesn’t embrace his phony solutions doesn’t care if people die gruesome deaths.) 

Now consider the behavior of the child welfare fearmongers in various statehouses, think tanks and college campuses. Have you noticed how often their behavior is identical? Find a gruesome case of fatal child abuse. Imply that it's common. Scapegoat efforts to keep families together – and accuse anyone who disagrees of not caring if children die and/or wanting to ignore fatalities.

And what has it gotten us over the past 50 years or so? Millions of children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care. A child welfare surveillance state so huge that more than one-third of all children and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. And almost always, it will be in response to a false report or a case in which poverty is confused with neglect. 

What it does not get us is an end to the horrific and extremely rare cases that this massive intrusion on families supposedly was going to stop.

On the contrary, the horror stories are needles in a haystack. We’ve spent more than half a century making the haystack bigger, so it’s even harder to find the needles. What should be called the Donald Trump Fearmongering Approach to Child Welfare is making all children less safe. 

Yet all we hear from the fearmongers are cries for more of the same.

But wait, you might say. Don’t you also highlight horror stories? Yes. Often, our weekly news roundup ends with a section called The Horror Stories go in All Directions, followed by one or more examples of terrible things done to children in a foster home, an adoptive home, a group home or an institution. 

The title explains why we do it. Nine years ago, I first offered the other side a mutual moratorium on the use of horror stories. But I’m not going to unilaterally disarm and allow the fearmongers to leave the impression that foster care, adoption, group homes and institutions are free of horrors of their own. 

They haven’t taken me up on the mutual moratorium idea. 

They can’t. Here’s why:

If we stopped pointing out horror stories, here’s what else we would have to make the case for curbing the child welfare surveillance state and ending needless foster care: 

● The mass of research showing that, in typical cases, not the horror stories, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children thrown into foster care. That research includes the stunning study from Sweden showing that, under these circumstances, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to die.

● The mass of research showing high rates of abuse in foster homes and even higher rates of abuse in group homes and institutions.

● The mass of research showing that poverty is routinely confused with neglect.

● The mass of research showing even small amounts of additional cash can go a long way toward curbing not only what agencies call “neglect” but even cases of serious abuse. 

If the Trump-style fearmongers in “child welfare” had to stop pointing out horror stories to make the case for doing more of what has failed for decades, here’s what else they would have to make their case:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Donald Trump and the child savers: It's not a band, but they sing the same song

Photo by Gage Skidmore

This post originally appeared at the Chronicle of Social Change

Last month, author and political commentator Jeff Greenfield wrote an essay for Politico on the politics of fear – and how Donald Trump exploits it.  He wrote:

History teaches us lessons of what can happen when genuine public fears are co-opted by the demagogues, fear-mongers and over-reactors. There was a reason to fear crime in the 1960s and 1970s, because violent crime in America was increasing by leaps and bounds, but that didn’t mean the only response [had to be] four decades of over-incarceration, driven by politicians’ fears of looking soft on crime. There was a reason to fear a Soviet espionage network looking for military secrets during a Cold War waged in the shadow of countless nuclear weapons, but that didn’t require McCarthyism as a response.There was a reason to fear where Al Qaeda might strike next after 19 men with box cutters killed 3,000 people in the heart of two great cities, but that didn’t mean we had to invade Iraq.

Let me add one to Greenfield’s list: There is a reason to fear that a small number of parents are brutally abusive and will do terrible things to innocent children if they are not stopped.  But that doesn’t mean we needed to create a system that puts millions of children through frightening investigations every year, and casts thousands of them into a chaotic system of foster care, traumatizing some of them for life. 

Yet that’s what we’ve done. Some of the same people who probably are horrified by Donald Trump seem to have no problem using his tactics in the fight against child abuse.

Case in point: Suppose someone tried to set up a role-playing exercise concerning international relations. But every Muslim character was a terrorist and they all said things like “death to America” and “kill the infidels.”  The furor at this blatant bigotry would be enormous.

Yet a column in the Chronicle of Social Change recently sang the praises of a role-playing exercise about foster care in an article that begins with the script for those taking the role of birth parent:

The birth parent leans in and whispers horrific things to her child.“I don’t want you.”“I can’t protect you.”“Don’t tell anyone our family secret.”

Everyone playing a birth parent is instructed to “choose an addiction” – since, of course, every parent who loses a child to foster care must be an addict. 

In fact, the problem of drug abuse, like the problem of child abuse, is serious and real. But both also have been subjected to enormous hype, and inflated figures.

Where in this role-playing exercise are the birth parents who lost their children because their poverty was confused with neglect? Where are the mothers who were beaten by their husbands and then had their children taken away because they “allowed” the children to “witness domestic violence”?   And where are the ones who lost their children because of a false positive drug test, or whose “drug problem” consists of smoking marijuana?

This same role-playing exercise features only “enlightened foster parents.”  There are many of these.  But since multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, they can’t all be enlightened.

And where are the caseworkers who immediately jump to conclusions about families because they are poor, and especially if they are poor and African-American?  has shown that to be a common problem.

Yet this exercise in stigma and stereotyping not only isn’t condemned, it is honored. The guy who came up with it, David White, won and “Angels in Adoption” award.

Donald Trump would be proud.

Or suppose Donald Trump were asked which states were doing the best job at solving a social problem. Suppose he replied that it’s complicated, “but I will tell you the states that do the best overall are the ones that have smaller, whiter populations” [emphasis added].

Even Trump never actually said that - but Michael Petit did, when asked which states are best at preventing child abuse. He’s the founder of the group that calls itself Every Child Matters, and he said it at a Congressional hearing. 

And then there is this, from a former social worker for the Washington, D.C. child welfare agency. She laments the fact that a judge would not let foster parents adopt a child, and instead awarded custody to

The 19-year-old father, jobless and a high school dropout. … He had not abused or neglected Davon. Nevertheless, it was clear that Davon would do better with his foster parents. 

In other words, why do we need actual maltreatment to take away a child forever? And why help a birth father with employment and child-rearing?  Let’s have a society in which mostly white, middle-class caseworkers descend upon impoverished communities and take black children from parents because they would be “better off” elsewhere! 

Perhaps she should send the idea to the Trump campaign. I’m sure they’d love it.

None of this is new. In the 19th Century, Protestant Minister Charles Loring Brace snatched away the children of poor Catholic immigrants whose parents he deemed genetically inferior and threw them onto “orphan trains” even though many were not orphans.  Brace knew how to whip up a crowd with scare stories. 

Other child savers, as they proudly called themselves, hid their agenda of fear and loathing of the immigrant poor – and their efforts to confiscate their children -- behind horror stories of brutally beaten children, complete with “before” and “after” pictures for the media.

They, and their latter-day counterparts, could be Donald Trump’s role models.

If there is a difference between Donald Trump and today’s child savers it is this: The child savers mean well.  They want to help children and they really believe their “solutions” will work. 

But Greenfield wrote something else in his Politico column on the politics of fear:

The dilemma, of course, is that in every one of these examples, the lunge toward useless, or foolish, or dangerous, or deplorable responses seems almost built into the political system.

In child welfare, we have a system that subjects millions to needless investigations, traumatizes thousands with needless foster care – and still overlooks children in real danger.

Useless, foolish, dangerous and deplorable seems like a pretty good description of that system. If we’re ever going to change that, America’s latter-day child savers need to stop playing the Trump card.

More about the impact of Trump-style paranoia, and the implications for child welfare, in this post.