NCCPR in the Maine Morning Star: Who watches the watchdog? Fixing the office of the Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman will take radical restructuring

We all know the cliché: Knowledge is power. The corollary, though, is that anyone who has a near-monopoly on knowledge will have enormous power to shape public perception. That enormous power brings enormous potential for abuse. 

Child welfare systems tend to be more secretive than the CIA. So whoever becomes a state’s ombudsman or child advocate often has enormous power. But while such offices are conceived as a way to watch over state child welfare agencies, lawmakers tend to forget a crucial question: Who watches the watchdog? 

So instead of simply further boosting the power of the Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman, which was among the oversight reforms proposed last legislative session, lawmakers need to restructure the office. …

Read the full column in the Maine Morning Star

In Maine “child welfare” it’s more like 1001 clowns – and there’s nothing funny about them

Tragic life imitating comic art illustrates why Maine – and every other state – needs a “balance of harms” law.

 Art … 

The movie has a happier ending. A case it echoes does not.

My earliest introduction to how child protective services works came all the way back in 1965 – at the movies. It was the film version of Herb Gardber’s play, A Thousand Clowns.  Wikipedia sums up the plot this way – including the ending, so there are MAJOR SPOILERS IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS: 

Unemployed television writer Murray Burns (Jason Robards) lives in a cluttered New York City studio apartment with his 12-year-old nephew, Nick (Barry Gordon). Murray has been unemployed for five months after quitting his previous job writing jokes for a children's television show called Chuckles the Chipmunk. Nick, the son of Murray's unwed sister, was left with Murray seven years earlier. When Nick writes a school essay on the benefits of unemployment insurance, his school requests that New York State [sic] send social workers to investigate his living conditions. 

In the end, Murray “is forced to conform to society to retain legal custody of his nephew.” By the end Murray is back in a business suit, carrying a briefcase, returning to the job he hated. That’s the price for Nick to be allowed to keep living with him.

 …And life

 A Thousand Clowns is a comedy – and a very good one.  But the real-life version playing out in Maine right now is deadly serious. The story is told in still another excellent story from Josh Keefe of the Maine Monitor.  It’s a long read – and worth every word. 

The real-life Murray is Mica Adler, a woman with a three-year-old son and a dream of living close to nature and off the grid, in a tiny house that some Amish neighbors helped her build. As the story explains: 

Her goal was to build a homestead there, where she could be self-sufficient. She had a well for water and solar panels for electricity, with plans to build a geothermal heating system for warmth. 

But that doesn’t mean she never drove to the supermarket. One day, 15 months ago, in a supermarket parking lot, the boy ran right out toward the path of an oncoming car. He turned around just as Mica was reaching for him, but she wanted to make sure he never did that again.  So she spanked him – on top of his snowsuit and another layer of clothing. 

But the driver of the car into whose path the boy almost ran claimed Mica punched the boy “in the back/butt” – something she said she could see through the side view mirror of her car. 

That was what brought the Maine family police – with their well-known hair trigger – into the family’s life. Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services tears apart families and holds children in foster care at one of the highest rates in the nation. 

And when DHHS caseworkers visited the home it became clear that what really upset them was less the spanking than Mica’s unorthodox lifestyle: minimal modern amenities, not bathing often enough to meet unwritten DHHS standards, often not wearing clothes around the house, and, the only thing in all of this that could be considered harm to the boy: tooth decay; due, Mica says, to a missed appointment because of car trouble. 

But that was enough for DHHS to take the child on the spot and not even ask a judge until afterward. And the parking lot incident led to criminal charges. The boy was moved to four different foster homes – and allegedly abused in one of them.  

At times the allegations bordered on paranoia – on the part of the workers – and may have said more about the mental health of the caseworkers than anyone else’s. From the story: 

At one point early in the case, a police report noted that a DHHS caseworker supervising the visits had concerns about the fact that Adler and her son had often been naked, and that he seemed familiar with anatomical terms for private body parts. (Adler said she taught her child these terms because sexual abuse prevention specialists recommend doing so.) 

The department referred the boy to a forensic interview, which are used to gather information about possible sexual abuse. There are no details about this interview in the DHHS files reviewed by The Monitor, and there were no formal allegations made. (Adler’s lawyer later said that had there been any findings, the department would have introduced them into the case.)[Emphasis added.] 

It took a jury only an hour to find Mica not guilty of the criminal charges.  DHHS ultimately dropped its child abuse case.  Even the “guardian ad litem” named to represent the child’s “best interests” (and who, in this case, happened to be a former Maine Attorney General) wrote in one report: 

“While I might have my own view of Ms. Adler’s lifestyle, she was the only parent to [the boy] for several years, to cut [the boy] off significantly from his mother would not be in his best interest.” 

Yet Mica still doesn’t have her son back. That’s because, after four foster home placements, DHHS placed the child with his father, with whom he had not lived before, and now there are ongoing acrimonious negotiations over custody. 

Balance of harms 

Legislation introduced in Maine would require courts to apply a balance-of-harms test; that is, to weigh the enormous inherent emotional trauma of removal against the harm to the child of remaining in her or his own home. And it would require DHHS to show it did everything it could to mitigate any alleged harm that might occur by keeping the family together (something the director of the agency recently effectively admitted it does not do). 

So let’s balance the harms in this case: 

● If the child remained at home he might suffer further tooth decay (unless, of course, DHHS mitigated that harm by doing something bold and creative like, uh, taking him to a dentist). 

● By removing the child he was subjected to the trauma of separation at an age when he could not possibly understand it. Indeed, he might process it as further punishment for running toward the path of that car.  He was subjected to an astounding number of traumatic interrogations.  (And, though one of the lifestyle concerns was too much nudity in the home, I wonder if total strangers from DHHS stripsearched the boy. Given the nature of the allegation it almost certainly happened at least once.)  Then he was allegedly abused in foster care. 

It doesn’t seem too hard to see where the balance of harms falls here. 

The real-life ending 

Mica’s son goes through far more than Murray’s had to endure in A Thousand Clowns.  Murray’s son was never taken from his uncle, and Murray didn’t have to conform to one “service plan” condition after another, almost none of them related to the actual allegations. 

But Mica and Murray have one thing in common: giving up their dreams. In the end, Mica learns the same lesson as Murray: Conform precisely to middle-class, white-picket-fence child-rearing norms or lose your child. 

As the story explains, Adler now has 

a more traditional living situation. She had moved into a modest ranch house with a roommate, who had just become a grandmother. The house was clean and organized, cavernous in comparison to the tiny home. ...

She explained that she has essentially abandoned her tiny home, and all it represented — at least for now. She has a job tutoring at the Academic Resource Center at Northern Maine Community College. In the fall, she will begin studying electrical construction and maintenance. It’s possible she’ll eventually get a job working on the grid she once tried to escape.

 She is afraid that bringing her son to the small piece of Maine she owns, where she dreamed of raising him, will only invite more trouble.

 “If I don’t bring [my son] there, then it’s just going to be easier to keep them out of my life,” she said. “Out of our lives.”

Oh, and one last question: What wasn’t getting done by caseworkers for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, what child in real danger was missed while so many people there spent some much time tearing apart and keeping apart this mother and child?

No, Maine almost certainly is NOT the child abuse capital of America – and the group making that claim ought to know better

Maine State Capitol

One thing data really do show: the Maine family police seem to have an abiding hatred of Hispanic families 

The Maine Children’s Alliance sure captured a lot of headlines with a claim that is almost certainly false; a claim that will only hasten the state’s retreat from reform and endanger more children.  It’s the same false claim, ignoring the same caveats from the same data source, that misled Kentucky media for years: The “We’re #1 in child abuse!” claim. 

If anything, this kind of misuse of data is even worse in Maine.  That state’s child welfare “ombudsman” and a former lawmaker with a particularly ugly track record have been fueling a foster-care panic, leading an effort to tear apart a system that once, briefly was, relatively speaking, a national model.  

It’s not out of the question that Maine is the state with the highest rate of child abuse.  The odds are roughly 1 in 52.  But no one knows which state has the most “child abuse” – because the data actually measure only the subjective, sometimes biased judgments of individual caseworkers, judgments that can vary enormously from state to state and year to year.  

In Maine, for example, a lot of caseworkers apparently loathe Hispanic families.  Though there are not very many of them, a new study – a real one – shows that more than one-quarter of Hispanic children in Maine will be forced into foster care at some point during their childhoods.  Worse, 15% of Hispanic families in Maine will have their children torn from them forever.  And that really is the highest rate in the nation.  So does Maine really attract Hispanic child abusers at an astounding rate – or is there a whole lot of racism in the system? Are those Maine data revealing the extent of child abuse or the extent of racial and class bias in general and anti-Hispanic racism in particular? 

A deeper dive

Now, let’s dig deeper into the data.  Where does that “worst-in-the-nation” claim come from?  The Maine Children’s Alliance relies on the KidsCount database maintained by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  Casey, in turn, gets the data from the federal government’s National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS).  That’s the same source used by the federal government to compile its annual “Child Maltreatment” reports.

As a group supposedly as savvy as the Maine Children’s Alliance should know, that same report (right upfront on page 5) comes with a crucial warning:

[R]eaders should exercise caution in making state-to-state comparisons. Each state defines child abuse and neglect in its own statutes and policies and the child welfare agencies determine the appropriate response for the alleged maltreatment based on those statutes and policies. 

But, hey, why spoil a great narrative that will “raise awareness” of child abuse, with inconvenient facts?

Here's why:

What the NCANDS data actually measure is the percentage of the child population for whom family police caseworkers (a more accurate term than child protective services workers) check a box on a form saying they think it’s at least slightly more likely than not that a parent or caretaker abused or neglected a child.  This can be little more than a caseworker’s guess.  The data about Hispanic families in Maine suggest how subjective these judgments can be.

Now, let’s unpack this further:

For starters, headlines claiming that these data measure “child abuse” are flat-out false.  The figure is for alleged abuse and alleged neglect combined.  And it’s mostly neglect.  In Maine,  more than two-thirds of cases deemed by workers to be “maltreatment” involved neither physical abuse nor sexual abuse.  Sometimes neglect is extremely serious; more often it means the family is poor – (or as we’ve seen in Maine, sometimes it may just mean the family is Hispanic).        

Defining “substantiation”

As we’ve also seen, the federal data on which the Maine Children’s Alliance report relies do not, in fact, measure child abuse or neglect. Rather they count the number of times caseworkers allege abuse or neglect.

The allegation does not mean there was a comprehensive investigation followed by a decision from a neutral arbiter.  Rather, it means only that an often overwhelmed, underprepared caseworker checked a box on a form.  In Maine, as in 38 other jurisdictions, workers can check the box when they believe only that it is slightly more likely than not that what the state defines as abuse or “neglect” occurred.  Seven jurisdictions have a higher standard, six have a lower standard (D.C. and Puerto Rico bring the total to 52). This is still another reason states can’t be compared. Similarly, Maine’s family policing agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, claims that the Maine data include a category DHHS calls “indicated” for less serious cases that other states don’t include at all.

A trend or a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The Maine Children’s Alliance report includes a graphic purporting to show that the rate of “child maltreatment” doubled in Maine even as it’s declined nationwide.  In fact, the sharpest increases occurred after Maine’s former “Trump-before-Trump” governor, Paul LePage, demanded a more aggressive approach to tearing apart families and then, again, after child abuse fatalities made headlines.  So what actually is being measured is the extent to which caseworkers run scared because they don’t want one of their cases to incite the wrath of politicians and/or media. 

Reports like the one issued by the Maine Children’s Alliance create a vicious cycle.  Fearmongering by politicians prompts caseworkers to needlessly “substantiate” cases and needlessly take away children they otherwise wouldn’t.  Then the supposed “increase” in “child maltreatment” provides more fodder for the fearmongers.  That leads to another vicious cycle: All those additional needless investigations and removals further overload caseworkers, so they have even less time to find the few children in real danger

I’m sure the folks at the Maine Children’s Alliance would insist they really, truly don’t want any of that.  They’re just offering up these numbers in the name of promoting “prevention.”  After all, their report mentions prevention a lot and even says that taking away children can be bad for them.

But fearmongering and misuse of data in the name of a good cause are what created the wretched mess that is the American system of family policing in the first place.  You may be sure that the ombudsman and the former legislator will cite this report over and over as they insist there is no such thing as needless removal of children in Maine and, if anything, we need to take away even more. 

Actually, we DO need to “quibble about numbers

When those pushing for more policing of overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite families, more massive surveillance and more removal of children to foster care – or even those who say they’re just doing it to “raise awareness” and promote “prevention” -- get caught with their data down, they have a standard response. Usually, it’s some variation of: “How dare you quibble about numbers! Children are dying!  Even one case is too many!

The second two sentences are, of course, correct.  But we’ve been suckered by fearmongering, hype and hysteria for decades.  At least one organization responsible for a lot of it effectively admitted as much. They even have a name for it: “health terrorism.”   As a result, we’ve spent those decades embracing “solutions” that only make things worse.

The horror stories represent a tiny fraction of the cases seen by workers for Maine’s family police.  To move closer to geting that tiny fraction down to the only acceptable number -- zero -- requires a vastly different approach than an ever-expanding child welfare surveillance state.  It requires the approach Maine once embraced, when it embraced family preservation and made all children safer.

We damn well do need to “quibble about numbers.” The Maine Children’s Alliance should have done a lot more quibbling before putting out its misleading report.

So, does Maine have more “child abuse” than any other state?  Since there’s a 1 in 52 chance,  I don’t know.  And, Maine Children’s Alliance,  neither do you. 

Child welfare in Maine: A response to institutional amnesia

Did a foster child’s plea to see her mother lead to her death?

 

The lawmakers - and most of the journalists - who remember
what happened to Logan Marr are not in government or
journalism anymore.

In the previous post to this blog, I summarized the story of five-year-old Logan Marr. She and her younger sister, Bailey, were taken from their mother in Maine, primarily because their mother’s poverty was confused with neglect.  They were placed with Sally Schofield, a foster mother who was, herself, a former supervisor for the Maine child welfare agency.

Logan tried to tell people she was being abused by Schofield – it’s even on videotape.  But the child welfare agency wouldn’t listen.

In January, 2001, Schofield dragged Logan to the basement and tied her to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape. Logan died of asphyxiation. Schofield was convicted of manslaughter.  Last year she was released from prison.

Logan’s death helped lead to a surprising result: real child welfare reform. The state became a recognized national leader by emphasizing safe, proven alternatives to foster care.  

But, as I wrote yesterday, Maine has term limits, so the state legislators who were there when Logan Marr died, and who pushed for real reform, are no longer in office.  And between the passage of time – it’s been 17 years since Logan died – and the turmoil in the news business, almost all of the Maine journalists who covered the death of Logan Marr are gone.  So there is almost no institutional memory.

That has left the state’s “Trump-before-Trump” governor, Paul LePage, and his Department of Health and Human Services, free to run roughshod over the reforms and return to a take-the-child-and-run, pre-Logan Marr mentality.

Two documents to refresh memories

So today I’d like to introduce people who’ve never heard of Logan Marr to her and to her family. And I’d like to refresh the memories of those who have forgotten.  I’ll do that with two documents.

The first is one I’ve reprinted on this blog many times before. It is a letter that Logan’s mother, Christy, wrote to Schofield weeks before Schofield killed Logan. The letter originally was published in Logan’s Truth, independent journalist Terrilyn Simpson’s comprehensive account of the case.

The second document is one I didn’t know about until I started researching yesterday’s post. It’s from a story I missed when it was published a year ago in the Kennebec Journal. It’s by Betty Adams, one of the few reporters still around who covered the death of Logan Marr.

Adams wrote about Logan’s surviving sister, Bailey. At the time Bailey was 18 and a high school honor student.  It’s an extraordinary story about an extraordinary young woman. The story includes a link to Bailey’s full college admissions essay, in which she writes about the night her big sister died. It reveals, for the first time I know of, that it may actually have been a plea by Logan to see her mother that led to her death.

“PLEASE DON’T HIT OR HURT MY CHILDREN”:

A LETTER FROM LOGAN MARR’S MOTHER TO LOGAN'S FOSTER MOTHER

Dear Sally,

 My name is Christy. I'm Logan and Bailey's Mom. I'm writing this so you can know and understand my children. I thought I would let you know their likes and dislikes.

Logan - she likes butterflies, pizza (what kid doesn't?), flavored noodles, pitted black olives (she likes to put them on her fingers), white cheese, grape soda, Babes in Toyland (her favorite movie) the Cartoon Arthur. Logan's dislikes - peas, fish sticks, going to bed early, not picking out her clothes. Bailey's likes - her brown teddy bear blanket (she takes it everywhere, including visits), dry cereal, pitted black olives, cheese, eggs, cooked carrots.

Bailey's dislikes - having her poopie diaper changed (if you haven't noticed), someone taking her pacifier, fish sticks, someone feeding her (she likes to do it herself). Please ask [caseworker] Allison Peters what the kids are allergic to.

I don't blame you for not wanting me to know who you are, I will respect that. Regardless of what you have heard or read, I love my little ladies with all my heart. I have never hit, spanked or put my hands on my girls. I do respect my children. I'm not saying you would or wouldn't, but Please don't hit or hurt my children. The girls have already been through enough they don't need the added stress in their life.

Every night I look up at the sky about 7:45pm and say goodnight to my girls. In closing, I want to thank you for taking the time to read this. Please tell the girls before they go to bed I love them and give them a big hug and kiss. Thanks again!

--Christy

“I DO IT ALL FOR LOGAN AND ME”:

COLLEGE ADMISSION ESSAY BY BAILEY CHAREST, LOGAN MARR’S SISTER

I believe everyone has a certain person in their life that inspires them to live each day to the fullest. It is what makes them tick. A sole moment in time can be all it takes for a person’s view on life to change forever. Looking back into my own past, I can quickly identify who inspires and motivates me to live my life to the fullest. It is her, the one that I feel so close to me yet nearly impossible to reach. As much as I would love to feel her touch, I know she is in a place with no pain or suffering. She is the reason I wake up every day ready to fill my own shoes while attempting to fill a pair for her.

My memory of her does not deceive me. Fifteen years later, when I close my eyes at night, the nightmare is still the same.

“No!” shrieks a small, dark haired little girl, “I want to see my mumma!”

“For the last time, it is not going to happen” the woman insists while trying to stay calm. As if on cue, the lights above flicker, and the snow outside is still falling fast. A blood curdling scream starts coming out of the little girl’s mouth. Losing the calm demeanor she just had, the woman shakes her head with fury.

“Stop this now, I cannot handle this anymore!” the woman is screaming and shaking with anger.

I sit as still as possible on the soft run nearby not wanting to be noticed. Another scream is let out by the little girl, somehow this one is louder and more powerful than the previous. The woman stands up and forcefully grabs the child’s small, delicate wrist and pulls her towards the nearby door. Wide eyed, the child decides to stay quiet, but is still sobbing. The lights briefly flicker again. The woman opens the door, and leads the child down the stairs to the basement. I hear two sets of footsteps descend down, my heart is pounding. I am frozen in place. All is quiet at first, then a violent scream starts. It is heart wrenching. Finally, the saddest sound, one a wounded animal might make when it knows it is going to die. I hear the little girl’s voice for the last time, it is the word “help.” Everything goes silent, but it seems louder than the screams. Finally after some time, I hear footsteps coming back up the stairs, but this time it is only one set. A single tear falls down my face.

I wish I could say that this is just a nightmare that I am able to wake up from and have everything be all okay. Sadly that is not the case. This is a nightmare that I will have to live with awake or asleep for the rest of my life. I heard my older sister’s last words during one of Maine’s darkest moments on January 31, 2001. My five-year-old sister’s death became national news. Her story prompted Maine to reexamine many of DHS’s Child & Family Services policies. Our own foster mother murdered my older sister, Logan. Being the survivor of this horrid incident, I push myself to my limits and strive for excellence in everything for the both of us. I am not saying that any of this has been easy, but it has most certainly shaped me into the person I am today. I know that her life was taken away from her all too soon. This causes me to live each day of my life to the fullest. There are no guarantees in life, so I make the most out of the path I have been given. I do it all for Logan and me.

Child welfare in Maine: Who will remember Logan Marr’s voice?

As a little girl who died in foster care is forgotten, Maine embarks on a course that makes child abuse tragedies more likely.

The gravestone of Logan Marr

First of two parts. Read Part Two here.

I have written many times on this Blog about the death of a little girl in Maine named Logan Marr.  She and her sister, Bailey, were taken from their mother when the mother’s poverty was confused with neglect. They were placed with a foster mother who had once been a caseworker for the Maine child welfare agency. 

Logan herself tried to tell people she was being abused in foster care. She can be heard disclosing the abuse on a video taken during a supervised visit with her mother. But the child welfare agency wouldn’t listen.

One day in January, 2001, that foster mother took Logan down to the basement, tied her to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape and left her there to die of asphyxiation.

The case was so emblematic of what has gone wrong with American child welfare that the PBS series Frontline devoted three hours of programming to the case and its implications.

Unlike many deaths in foster care, the death of Logan Marr led to real reform. A new governor, John Baldacci, named new leadership to what is now the state Department of Health and Human Services. They rebuilt the system to emphasize safe, proven alternatives to foster care.  They curbed needless removal of children and made all of Maine’s vulnerable children safer.

By 2009, Maine’s child welfare reform was a finalist for an Innovations in American Government award from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Maine Gov. Paul Lepage
(Photo by Gage Skidmore)

But none of that mattered to the next governor of Maine, Paul LePage.  That should be no surprise.  With his penchant for lying, racism, vulgarity and miscellaneous cruelty, LePage has been aptly called “Trump before Trump.”

As with Trump, facts don’t matter to LePage. So he soon set about getting rid of the child welfare reformers and backing away from the child welfare reforms. 

Maine already was well into a retreat from reform when two children “known to the system,” Kendall Chick and Marissa Kennedy, died in late 2017 and early 2018.  Instead of  “raising questions” about the way the LePage Administration had undermined safe, proven reforms, those deaths kicked the backlash into high gear. LePage embraced the Big Lie of American child welfare; the lie that family preservation and child safety are opposites that need to be balanced.

This flies in the face of the track record of states – including Maine itself – that improved child safety by embracing family preservation.

A pre-Logan Marr mentality

A year ago, Logan Marr’s mother made this plea: “Don’t forget Logan’s voice. Just don’t forget her voice.”

But not only her voice, but her story have been largely forgotten.

Maine has term limits, so the state legislators who were there when Logan Marr died, and who pushed for real reform are no longer in office.  And between the passage of time – it’s been 17 years since Logan died – and the turmoil in the news business, almost all of the Maine journalists who covered the death of Logan Marr are gone.  So there is almost no institutional memory.  In part two of this post, I've published two documents to refresh the memories of those who have forgotten and introduce Logan and her family to those who never knew about them. 

All this leaves LePage and his DHHS free to revert to a pre-Logan Marr mentality. It leaves them free to take actions that endanger all of the state’s vulnerable children and make another tragedy such as the death of Logan Marr – or the death of Kendall Chick or Marissa Kennedy - more likely.

So in a letter to lawmakers, LePage writes:

First, we will be recommending that Maine’s statutes are revised so that the priority is on what is best for the child, not family reunification. Placing the priority on family reunification forces the system and the courts to try to keep vulnerable children in a family when the best thing would be to remove the child from the situation.

The claim is echoed in a report issued by Maine DHHS.  Neither LePage nor DHHS specify which Maine law supposedly forces “the system and the courts” to keep children in dangerous homes. That’s because there is no such law. It is, however, far easier for LePage and DHHS to say “these tragedies happen because the law makes us do it” than to say “these tragedies happen because we screwed up.”

Much of the harm LePage and DHHS are doing to children is obscured by invoking a phrase that seems entirely benevolent: “what is best for the child” – a variation of the classic “best interests of the child.”  After all, who could be against that? In fact, these are among the most dangerous words – for children – in the entire child welfare lexicon.

An unchecked “best interests” test gives caseworkers and courts free reign to impose their whims and prejudices on families. What is “best” is whatever a caseworker happens to think is best.  So it devolves into comparison shopping, in which birth parents, often poor and disproportionately people of color, are forced to compete with overwhelmingly white middle-class foster parents – people with whom caseworkers can far more easily identify.

Material poverty is easy to see – the love between an impoverished child and her or his parents is harder to see. So the child is needlessly consigned to the chaos of foster care – because the caseworker can impose her arbitrary, capricious and cruel vision of “best interests” on the child.

A phrase filled with hubris

Because of term limits, the Maine lawmakers who fought
for reform after the death of Logan Marr are no longer in office.

“Best interests of the child” also is a phrase filled with hubris.  It says we are wise enough always to know what is best and capable always of acting on what we know.  In fact, those are dangerous assumptions that can lead us to try to fix what isn’t broken or make worse what is.

More than forty years ago, three scholars, Albert Solnit, Joseph Goldstein, and Anna Freud, proposed an alternative phrase.  They said “best interests of the child” should be replaced with “least detrimental alternative.”

“Least detrimental alternative” recognizes that whenever we intervene in family life we do harm.  Sometimes we must intervene anyway, because intervening is less harmful than not intervening.   In other words, foster care, even when done well is not “good for children.” But sometimes it is less bad than any other option.

The phrase “least detrimental alternative” is a constant reminder that we must always balance the harm that we may think a family is doing against the harm of intervening. It is exactly the shot of humility that every child welfare system needs.

It is exactly the shot of humility that was missing when the Maine child welfare agency first intervened in the life of Logan Marr.

● When Logan Marr was torn from her loving mother, largely because that mother was poor, it was done in the name of her “best interests.”

● When Logan Marr’s complaints that she was being abused in foster care were ignored, it was because workers were convinced that her placement in foster care was in her “best interests.”

● And when Logan Marr’s foster mother tied her to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape and left to die of asphyxiation, that happened, in part, because caseworkers were convinced the placement was in her “best interests.”

When anecdotes collide

Of course one could argue that Logan Marr’s tragic death is a horror story and shouldn’t be the basis for policy.  But the current undermining of reform in Maine also is rooted entirely in horror stories – the deaths of Kendall Chick and Marissa Kennedy.

When anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data.   As I have written before, I would be glad to negotiate a mutual moratorium on the use of horror stories and stick strictly to what research and data tell us about what happens in typical cases.

● It is the data that tell us that in typical cases, not the horror stories, children do better when they are left in their own homes. 

● It is the data that tell us that, while extremes like the death of Logan Marr are, of course, rare, abuse in foster care is not. 

● It is the data that tell us that when Maine reformed to emphasize family preservation, there was no compromise of child safety. 

So it is the data that tell us that the best way to really promote the best interests of the child is to do more, not less, to keep families together.

Other bad ideas

LePage’s second bad idea is to create criminal penalties for mandated reporters who don’t report when they have “any reason to suspect” abuse or neglect. 

But the real reason for most tragedies involving deaths of children “known to the system” almost always is that caseworkers are overwhelmed. Penalizing mandated reporters for not calling in anything and everything will deluge the child abuse hotline with even more false reports and trivial cases.  That will do enormous harm to the children needlessly investigated.  But it also will further overwhelm workers, leaving them even less time to find children in real danger – so more such children will be missed.

Indeed, although we have had mandatory reporting laws for more than 50 years, there is not a shred of evidence that they make children safer. Even some of the biggest original proponents of mandatory reporting laws are having second thoughts.  But there is abundant evidence that they make politicians happy because they can issue press releases about how they “cracked down on child abuse.”

Though not mentioned by LePage, still another DHHS initiative undermines the state’s differential response program, known in Maine as “alternative response.”  Differential response has become a favorite scapegoat for those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare – despite more than two dozen studies showing it is safe.

Tyranny of Personal experience

There is one more complication in Maine: As he notes in his letter, Gov. LePage himself was abused as a child. So even beyond his Trump-like disdain for facts, the governor also is a victim of the tyranny of personal experience – an inability to recognize that other people have very different personal experiences, and no one personal experience can be a rational basis for policy.

After all, what if Logan Marr has survived and grown up to be governor of Maine.  What would her personal experience have told her to do?  Of course, we’ll never know. Because Logan Marr never survived Maine’s strenuous efforts to protect her “best interests.”

In part two of this post: A letter from Logan Marr's mother, and a college admissions essay from her sister.