Mass. family police try an end-run around the State Legislature on child welfare and drug use

But don’t worry, the “cannamoms” will still be safe

The Massachusetts family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, recently solicited comment (presumably only because they had to) on a proposed change to regulations defining child abuse. The change is an attempt to get around a wise decision by the State Legislature.

Indeed, it is entirely consistent with the way DCF helped the Massachusetts “Child Advocate” try to sucker a special commission into recommending all sorts of expansion of mandatory reporting. The commission wasn’t fooled. 

Neither was the legislature. They actually passed a good change which, ever so slightly, narrows the long list of conditions mandatory reporters must report.  But DCF isn’t having that!  They’re trying an end-run by changing regulations. 

It all amounts to a great big DCF-U! to the State Legislature.  Let's see if the lawmakers tolerate it.

Here’s the comment I sent to DCF: 

[Your proposed change] contradicts best practice, contradicts the evidence base concerning substance use and child welfare – and flouts the intent of the Legislature. 

The Legislature recently changed state law so mandated reporters no longer must automatically report any instance of “prenatal substance exposure.” They remain free to report it when, in their professional judgment, they believe such a report is necessary to protect a child. This is a clear recognition that this knee-jerk response of automatically reporting every such instance did nothing to improve child safety. On the contrary, it compromised safety by driving pregnant women away from prenatal care and hospital delivery. 

Rather than respect best evidence-based practice and the intent of lawmakers, you now propose to change regulations defining what constitutes “physical injury” – which of course is something mandated reporters have to report. 

Right now, that definition includes “addiction to drug at birth.” That’s bad enough. But your proposal would change the definition so that physical injury includes “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use.” What does that mean? Presumably whatever you want it to mean. (I’m guessing the groups you have in mind are those against whom DCF always comes down hardest: Poor people, especially poor people of color.  I doubt that it means you’ll be going after the “harmful patterns of substance use” displayed by the celebrated Cannamoms of Massachusetts’ affluent suburbs.) 

Here’s what this would mean for mandated reporters: Under state law mandated reporters don’t have to report “prenatal substance exposure.” But under the new proposed regulation, they would have to report “exposure to harmful patterns of substance use” – which, presumably would include “prenatal substance exposure.” 

In short, DCF seeks to overrule the Massachusetts Legislature. It is a classic example of the arrogance that leads Massachusetts to tear apart families at a rate 60%above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. And there certainly is no evidence that Massachusetts children are 60% safer than the national average. 

It is in keeping with the decades-long habit of DCF, and before that DSS, and before that DPW of failing to balance the potential harm of parental substance use (or any other alleged parental failing) against the known severe harm of tearing children from everyone they know and love – and the known risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find far higher rates of abuse than your agency acknowledges in official figures. 

For all of these reasons, and most importantly, for the safety of the children DCF claims it wants to protect, this proposed change should be rescinded.

When it comes to the problems plaguing “child welfare” wrongful removal drives everything else – including caseworker turnover. Case in point: Massachusetts

A system that tears apart families at a rate 60% above the national average is driving its own caseworkers away.

The Boston Globe had one of those stories almost every major newspaper publishes sooner or later – the one about the enormous number of family police caseworkers who keep quitting and how this adds to the terrible turmoil faced by children and families caught up in the system. 

But this story took things a step further than most.  Every story blames high stress and low pay.  But the Globe story also cited something else: a job that had become like an assembly line, processing children and families, where the workers felt they weren’t helping anyone.  Citing Ethel Everett, a leader of the caseworkers’ union, the story explains that 

the reality of the job clashes with many new employees’ idealism.  

“They think they’re going to be working with families, helping families to engage in services, to be self-sufficient, to move on to higher education,” Everett said. “The reality is we are moving kids night to night, we’re driving kids across the state for one-night placements to get them to school, we’re putting bandages on situations.”… 

A worker from [the Department of Children and Families] Chelsea office, who asked to not be named, left DCF in early 2024 after about two years, frustrated and disillusioned. “They market that they’re here to help families, but some of the situations it just felt like I wasn’t,” he said. 

The story puts a lot of the blame for this on high caseloads.  But it also offers a clue concerning why the caseloads are so high.

The story begins and ends with the story of Maria Toscano and her desperate efforts to schedule a visit with her children in foster care. She discovers that the caseworker she’d been texting – her fifth in less than a year - had left the Massachusetts family police agency, (DCF), and no one at DCF had bothered to tell her. 

At the end, the story circles back to Toscano and reveals why her children were taken in the first place.  She was not accused of beating them or raping them or torturing them No, as happens so often in Massachusetts and across the country, the children were torn from Toscano because she was, herself, allegedly a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her husband.  Taking a child under those circumstances causes the child even more trauma than taking the child for other reasons – that’s one reason it’s illegal to do it in New York. 

Ah, but DCF would surely remind us, that wasn’t the only reason.  According to the story, Toscano’s husband 

was also cited for substance abuse, according to DCF records she shared with the Globe. She was also cited for a history of violence and mental health concerns, though there is no allegation she was violent with her children. 

In other words, probably nothing that couldn’t be fixed by removing the actual abuser instead of the children and then getting Toscano the kind of high-quality therapy that wealthy people can simply go out and buy. 

And, in fact, Toscano tried. But it wasn’t enough: 

Toscano has records of repeatedly enrolling in domestic violence counseling and therapy over the past year, yet the frequent changes in caseworkers leave her feeling like her benchmarks for success keep changing. This fall, DCF shifted her children’s goal from reunification to adoption, she said. 

We don’t know if this was done at the behest of Caseworker #5 before leaving or maybe it was Caseworker #6 after reviewing the file left by Caseworkers 5,4,3,2, and 1.  Whatever the case, as Toscano says: 

“I did all those things and my kids have not been reunified.” 

This is not an aberration.  It is a symptom of the culture of contempt for families and a lust for child removal that has characterized Massachusetts child welfare for decades.  That’s largely a result not of frontline workers’ desires, but pressure from dreadful leadership at DCF compounded by constant hectoring from the state’s so-called “child advocate” Maria Mossaides.  The result: a state that, as of 2022, the most recent year for which data are available tore apart families at a rate 60% above the national average and nearly double the rate of neighboring Connecticut, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

In addition to the enormous harm that does to the children, it deluges caseworkers.  That makes the caseloads too high, so workers who really want to help families can’t provide any help.  So they quit. 

So here’s how to keep good caseworkers on the job: 

● Uproot the culture of removal.

● Find leadership for DCF that wants to uproot that culture and will grow a backbone and stand up to the likes of Mossaides. (That’s what happened in Connecticut.)

● Invest in high-quality family defense, basic help to ease the worst stresses of poverty and safe, proven alternatives to foster care. 

Then the cycle can be broken.  The caseloads will come down, and good workers will stay. 

Because when it comes to the problems plaguing “child welfare” wrongful removal drives everything else – including caseworker turnover.

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.” 

Massachusetts pilots the most promising reform in child welfare. Guess who’s trying to undercut it.

 The Massachusetts Legislature needs to step in and provide the funding to make the approach taken by the Family Preservation Project available in every case.  That will require finally standing up to the state’s Fearmonger-in-Chief 

There’s a new program underway that is exactly what children need in a state where they are torn from their families at a rate 60% percent above the national average. 

In Springfield, Mass. the Family Preservation Project provides high-quality interdisciplinary family defense.  Families facing investigation by the state family policing agency, the Department of Children and Families, get a lawyer, a social worker who can come up with alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” issued by DCF, and a parent advocate, usually someone who’s been through the system himself or herself. 

This is the model that’s proven so successful in New York City – where a comprehensive evaluation found that it reduced time in foster care with no compromise of safety.  It’s one reason New York City’s rate of removal is well under one-third the rate of Massachusetts, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.   

New England Public Media reports that the Western Massachusetts program is the first of five to be overseen by the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute with a two-year federal grant. Even DCF says it favors the program (perhaps because they don’t have to pay for it). 

What kind of cases does the program see?  Here’s how the NEPM story begins: 

On an afternoon last January, a 49-year-old artist and mother named Cara was working a warehouse shift, one of two jobs she held to support her family. She was still sharing a house in Greenfield, Massachusetts, with her ex-partner and had left their 4-year-old daughter in his care.  But he got drunk, and Cara — not sure what to do — ended up calling the police. 

Cara, who asked to keep her last name private, said she had already been in touch with a domestic violence organization about her ex. After the drinking incident, she said, that organization called [DCF]. 

“I thought that when DCF stepped in, that it would be an outside authority that could put this situation in control,” she said. “And it did the opposite.” 

The state opened an investigation against Cara for child neglect, saying she should have known her ex might get drunk. That meant she could lose custody of her daughter.  

(Let’s pause here to consider: By that standard President Gerald R. Ford should have been charged with neglect – repeatedly – because his partner got drunk – a lot. She also abused prescription opioids and had mental health issues.  Yet, because the Ford family had money, Gerald’s partner – Betty – could raise their children.) 

In Cara’s case, DCF never should have come to the door.  But at least the agency itself referred the family to the Family Preservation Project, which found a way to keep the family together, sparing a four-year-old from all the trauma of foster care – and the high risk of abuse in foster care itself. 

Enter the Fearmonger-in-Chief 

Mass. "Child Advocate"
Maria Mossaides

Who in the world could be against something like that?  If you’ve followed Massachusetts child welfare at all, you know exactly who:  Massachusetts’ Fearmonger-in-Chief, state “child advocate” Maria Mossaides. 

● Mossaides is the one who led – and misled – a commission on mandatory reporting for a year; making sure the other members of the commission heard only what she wanted them to hear.  When they finally heard the other side of the story, commission members said they were “shocked,” “surprised” and “taken aback.” 

● Mossaides is the one who told the commission that repealing mandatory reporting would cost the state $400 million.  The actual figure would be, at most, more like $1.5 million.  

● Mossaides is the one who has suggested that racial justice is at odds with child safety and racial bias isn’t a problem. Indeed, she seems to think a little racial bias might be good. 

So, keep Cara in mind as you consider what Mossaides told NEPM, and as we parse her comments. 

“I know that the advocacy community conflates neglect with poverty," Mossaides said. "That is not what the Office of the Child Advocate sees. What we see is actual risk to children or imminent risk to children.” 

That’s exactly what she told her mandatory reporting commission when she was misleading it.  As we explained at the time:

But, Ms. Mossaides, you don’t see a typical cross-section of cases – you focus on the most horrible cases.  If you really wanted to know what DCF does in typical cases, you would do what your former counterpart in New Jersey, Kevin Ryan, did when he was that state’s child advocate in 2005.  Not only did he look at a random sample of cases, he made sure the casereading would be objective by having the cases read by two groups with opposite views of the extent to which the state should intervene in families. 

Even DCF’s own annual report makes clear that the neglect cases OCA sees are rare exceptions.  Of all the reports alleging neglect – a total of 63,101, 16 were fatalities.  Another 1,121 involved a substantiated allegation of a substance-exposed newborn – and contrary to the fearmongering from the foster care establishment – and Mossaides --  not every such case by a longshot involves a parent endangering her child. The remainder, 14,345 cases, are labeled simply as “neglect.”  

In her interview with NEPM Mossaides made clear she prefers 

“another new program, based at the nonprofit agency Plummer Youth Promise, that provides mediators to work with parents and the child welfare agency.” 

That program sounds like a warmed-over version of family team meetings / team decision-making – which always put families at a disadvantage.  And, according to its own brochure, the Plummer program encourages something called “concurrent planning” which further stacks the deck against families and in favor of foster parents who want to adopt.* 

The program Mossaides prefers to the Family Preservation Project returns families to the status of supplicants. 

Then it was back to the fearmongering.  Mossaides told NEPM 

most of the cases her office reviews involve parents with substance use problems. She’s concerned the advocates could be too aggressive in siding with those parents and downplaying the risk to children. 

Well, for starters once again we have the problem of Mossaides seeing only what she chooses to see – or in this case “review.”  Of all the cases of children forced into Massachusetts foster care in 2021, 63% did not even involve an allegation of substance use.  And not every case of substance use endangers children – just ask all the parents in “pot smoking mom” Facebook groups.  

And here’s a news flash: It’s a lawyer’s job to be aggressive on behalf of her or his client.  But that doesn’t mean they get to decide what happens, and, indeed, the deck is stacked against lawyers for families at every turn.  Only when all sides have aggressive advocacy can judges get the information they need to make the right decisions. 

And then Mossaides says: 

“What I don't want is, it's just going to get more adversarial.” 

Actually that’s exactly what the system needs.  The non-adversarial approach dates back to the first juvenile court in 1899.  Then, juveniles accused of crime were denied all rights because supposedly everyone was just there to help them.  The U.S. Supreme Court put an end to that, at least in theory, in 1967 with its landmark decision In re: Gault.  As Justice Abe Fortas wrote: 

“[A] child receives the worst of both worlds:…he gets neither the protections accorded to adults nor the solicitous care and regenerative treatment postulated for children. … Under our Constitution, the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court." 

Unfortunately, much of child welfare operates with a pre-Gault mentality.  That boils down to: Just let us at DCF exercise our untrammeled power – after all, we’re only there to “help.” So families should bow and scrape, and jump through all the pointless hoops we set up for them.  They should beg forgiveness for their sins and, if we deign to return the children, thank us profusely for our benevolence. 

This is the world Mossaides is desperate to maintain – or make worse, since she seems to think DCF doesn’t tear apart enough families.  She is so desperate that not only does she want to undermine legal representation for parents she even wants to undermine it for children. 

But wait, there’s more. Mossaides then claims that she’s the one who doesn’t want more kids taken away and it’s those awful lawyers with their “adversarial” mindset that might cause more removals: 

“And what will happen is less cooperation, less willingness of a family to work with the department, which will inevitably lead to more children coming into custody.” 

Except it hasn’t.  As noted earlier, the New York City model significantly reduced foster care.  The program on which the Family Preservation Project is based, the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy handled hundreds of cases before it had to close because it couldn’t get funding.  None of the children in those cases had to be placed in foster care. 

And, as NEPM points out “At the Springfield location, out of 50 clients so far, all but one has kept custody of their children.” 

And yet, Maria Mossaides apparently wants us to believe that she is just trying to keep kids out of foster care while high-quality family defense will result in more children taken away.  

Persecuting survivors of domestic violence 

The two cases profiled in the NEPM story also illustrate another tragedy Mossaides seems keen to perpetuate: the persecution of mothers who are survivors of domestic violence. 

In Cara’s case, she had sought help from a domestic violence organization – and they’re the ones who called DCF.  I hope that’s only because they felt that, as mandated reporters, they had to.  

These cases can be among the most tragic – because the emotional trauma of child removal is actually worse for a child when the child is being taken because the mother “allowed” him to “witness domestic violence.”  One expert said taking a child in such circumstances is “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  

Yet when proposals were made to the mandatory reporter commission to exempt people who help domestic violence victims from mandatory reporting, Mossaides opposed them.  Her approach to this issue can be boiled down to “Please pass the salt.” 

Fortunately, in both Cara’s case and the other discussed in the story, the Family Preservation Project kept the children with their mothers. 

But the project is small.  Even when there are four more of them, they can deal with only a small fraction of the families into which DCF intrudes every year.  So the Massachusetts Legislature needs to step in and provide the funding to make this kind of representation possible in every case.  And, by the way, because foster care is so expensive, and because in many cases the federal government will reimburse half the cost, the program is likely to be cost-neutral or even save the state some money.  

But step one is to stop being fooled by Maria Mossaides. 

Mossaides consistently ignores research and best practice in favor of what she “sees.”  But she sees only what she wants to see. 

The children of Massachusetts will be a whole lot safer when, at long last, politicians catch on and say to Maria Mossaides: We don’t give a damn what you “see” – because you are willfully blind. 

* -- Under concurrent planning, people who desperately want to adopt a child – and the child welfare agencies that desperately want those people to adopt -- are told, in effect: “Now remember, your first goal is to work with the birth parents and do everything you can to help them get the child back – but if, by some chance, you fail at this then you get what you really want – someone else’s child for your very own.” 

One parent in New Jersey was honest enough to tell The New York Times what she called “the mantra” of parents in this kind of program, which is: “I’m on the next plane to South America if they think they’re getting this baby back.” 

Meanwhile, the caseworkers are supposed to work equally hard to get the child adopted by people they like and can identify with – typically middle-class foster parents - as they do to try to reunite the child with people they often can’t stand, overwhelmingly poor disproportionately minority birth parents.

 

Court stops Mass. family police from crushing minimal due process rights for families

The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families found that their determinations of “child abuse” and “neglect” were being overturned after a hearing half the time. Guess what they did: 

A. Realized their process for labeling people child abusers was rife with error and fixed it.

B. Invented a way to evade the hearings.

(After a court saw through DCF’s ploy, the agency started providing the hearings).

Every state has some version of a “central register” of people accused of child abuse or neglect.  The process and the consequences vary from state to state, but they have one thing in common: It is extremely easy to be put on these registers and extremely difficult to get off again.  They amount to state databases of rumor and innuendo. 

In almost every state, getting on the register requires only that a caseworker check a box on a form stating it is slightly more likely than not that you are a child abuser – or simply slightly more likely than not that you are guilty of “neglect,” a label that can be slapped on almost anyone who is poor, if a caseworker is so inclined.  In some states, including Massachusetts, the standard is even lower. 

Sometimes a supervisor has to check the box, too.  That’s it.  There’s no independent factfinding beforehand, no chance to present a defense, no neutral arbiter evaluating all sides. The caseworker’s word is law.  Once on the register, you have to fight your way out.  The process varies from state to state, but again, there’s one thing in common: If you can’t afford a lawyer you’re unlikely to get one.  It’s you, on your own, vs. the entire family police bureaucracy.  And since overwhelmingly the people labeled “child abusers” are poor, well … 

All this does enormous harm to children.  A listing on a central register can be a barrier to a huge number of jobs – often the very jobs most likely to be open to poor people. So the listing drives them further into poverty, harming their children and, of course, making it more likely that the poverty will be confused with neglect. 

And the listing increases the odds that, even if the children weren’t thrown into foster care this time, it will happen if the family is reported again – because the listing raises suspicions, whether it’s the guess of a human caseworker or a computer algorithm raising a family’s “risk score.” 

In spite of the way the deck is stacked, a stunning number of people who fight these determinations win. 

So in Massachusetts, where you can seek an administrative hearing to fight your way out, even though the burden of proof is on you to show you are innocent, families win about half the time.  

One might hope that a record like that might give a family police agency second thoughts; that they might think: Hey, wait a minute, if as soon as a neutral arbiter looks at this, despite the way we’ve stacked the deck, the arbiters say we’re wrong half the time maybe that means we’re wrong half the time and we need to fix this. 

As far as I know, that’s never happened.  Not in Massachusetts and not in other states where the rate at which these findings are overturned on appeal can be even higher. 

But only Massachusetts DCF came up with this oh-so-clever little workaround: make up an entire new category out of whole cloth, make it slightly less harmful than the really bad category  and unilaterally deny families fair hearings!  

Until 2015, DCF had two boxes a worker could check: “supported” and “unsupported.”  An unsupported finding did not lead to a listing in the central register and other adverse consequences, a supported finding did. 

But then, faced with all those supported findings being overturned on appeal, DCF suddenly decreed
the existence of a third category: “substantiated concern.”  There’s supposed to be a formal rulemaking process, complete with public comment, before a Massachusetts agency does something like that; but hey, they’re the family police – rules are for other people, right?  They just pulled this new category out of their – uh, imagination.  Only after the lawsuit described below, did DCF go through the rulemaking process (which was, of course, a foregone conclusion since they already had the rule). 

Here’s what made this new category so dangerous: 

DCF unilaterally decided that victims of “substantiated concern” findings are not entitled to fair hearings.  Instead, they can write to DCF itself and ask them to please reconsider. 

So-called “substantiated concern” determinations don’t result in a listing in the central registry – but they still go into DCF’s internal database.  That means they can still be used, by humans or computers, to ratchet up suspicion if there’s another report, increasing the risk of needless foster care placement.  The new category means DCF can stay in the family’s life for months or more, placing them under constant onerous, stressful surveillance. 

The new category also imposes limits on whether someone so listed can become a foster parent.  That’s what happened to a mother known in court documents as Jane Doe.  She sought to appeal the “substantiated concern” finding and was told that wasn’t allowed.  So she used the only appeal mechanism open to her – writing to DCF – and lost. 

Then she sued.  And won. 

As Superior Court Justice Katie Rayburn wrote in her ruling: 

[M]ore than half* of the DCF’s initial “supported” determinations were wrong.  There is no obvious reason that the DCF’s determinations of “substantiated concern” would be any more accurate than its “supported” determinations.  As such, there is a great risk that DCF will make “substantiated concern” determinations which would be more likely than not to be overturned on a quasi-judicial appeal proceedings. 

In fact, the odds of injustice may be even greater with this category, as a story in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly explained, citing Susan Elsen of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. MLRI and the firm of Brown, Rudnick represented Jane Doe.  From the story: 

By its nature, the “substantiated concern” finding is designed for cases in which there is a low risk of harm to a child, making it that much more important to provide parents a means to challenge DCF’s initial findings, Elsen says. 

DCF’s intervention is not “benign,” Elsen notes. … “Once DCF intervenes, the family lives in fear that their child will be taken from them.”… 

Elsen expects that families facing “substantiated concern” determinations may be even more successful in fair hearings, given that it is an even vaguer standard requiring less evidence and thus less likely to withstand a “competent, careful administrative review.” 

And Elsen raised another vital issue: 

From the beginning, Elsen says, one concern was that the creation of the “substantiated concern” category would only perpetuate racial bias in the child welfare system. 

Statewide, Black and Latinx families are reported to DCF more than three times as much as white families, according to Elsen, while in the Boston area, the numbers are even starker, with Latinx families and Black families reported at more than six and nine times the rate of white families, respectively. 

DCF is now providing administrative hearings for those who appeal “substantiated concern” determinations.  But what about the thousands of families slapped with this label since 2015?** (There were 7,929 such determinations in 2021 alone.) 

And who is going to stop DCF from running amok like this the next time it comes up with a similarly brilliant idea? 

*-The “More than half” statement is based on 2020 figures, when DCF was reversed 54% of the time. The Boston Globe reports that in 2022, DCF did better – they were reversed only 48% of the time. 

** - News accounts make clear that the category took effect in 2015, though it’s not clear if all of the harm dates back that far.  The Globe story says the designation was “revised” in 2020.

Great news! Tearing children from their parents is sure to be “catastrophic” – but only when Donald Trump does it! (If a professor from Massachusetts is to be believed.)

We are supposed to believe that when HE does it, it's "catastrophic" ...

... but when SHE does it, well, that's different!

Back in 2018, when it was Donald Trump’s ICE agents tearing apart families, here’s how The Washington Post summarized the science concerning what happens “when children are forcibly separated from their parents.” 

Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain. 

No one in the scientific community gave more dire warnings about the harm family separation does to children than Charles A. Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School.  Said Nelson: 

“The effect is catastrophic.  There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.” 

But somehow, for some reason, if the people forcibly separating children from their parents are caseworkers from his own state of Massachusetts then, really, Nelson tells us, it may not be so bad after all.  Nelson never does cite a study showing that infants and toddlers can tell the difference between an ICE agent and a caseworker for the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, but hey, he’s a Harvard professor so he must know, right? 

Dr. Nelson’s double standards were showing when The Washington Post came back to him to comment on a harrowing case of wrongful removal in his own backyard.  

It’s the story of Josh Sabey, his wife Sarah Perkins, their three-year-old son Clarence and their 14-week-old son Cal.  Perkins rushed Cal to the ER when he awoke with a 103-degree fever.  The hospital discovered a healed fracture on Cal’s ribcage and rushed to assume – wrongly – that it was child abuse.  They let the family return home, but at 1:00 a.m. the next morning ICE agents – sorry, I mean DCF caseworkers and police pounded on their door, demanded entry, tore both children from their parents and took them into the night. 

From the Post story: 

When it became clear that they were not going to be able to keep their children at home, Sabey and Perkins began recording what was happening. Toward the end of the cellphone footage, the phone rests on a table as the parents retrieve their confused and disoriented children. “Clarence, you get to go on a car ride,” Perkins can be heard saying gently in the background. “I don’t want to,” he cries. There is the sound of the little boy screaming, and, later, his mother quietly sobbing. … It took more than 30 minutes to settle their hysterical 3-year-old into the back of a stranger’s car. 

Apparently only a Harvard professor can tell the difference between those cries and these, from children taken at the Mexican border: 

For the Perkins-Sabey children, the experience in foster care was probably the least awful it can be.  They were with strangers for “only” 16 hours, then placed with relatives. The parents had daily visits.  They were back home within four weeks, but the family remained under constant surveillance for months longer. 

Such gentle treatment is almost unheard of for the vast majority of children torn from their families, almost all of whom are poor, nonwhite or both.  The Perkins-Sabey family is white and middle-class. And to their enormous credit, they know what a difference that makes.  Here’s what they told NBC10 Boston, which was first to report the story: 

The couple is quick to point out their ordeal turned out better than many other removal situations, especially for minority and low-income parents. 

For one, their kids were placed with relatives after a brief stint in foster care, allowing them to regularly see Clarence and Cal. They also had the resources to hire an experienced attorney to navigate the complicated process. 

“There certainly needs to be a check and balance there,” Sabey said. “We’re going to try to change the system and improve things for other families that don’t necessarily have the social capital or network that we have.” 

And yet, as the Post reports, it still took a toll: 

Clarence … started waking unexpectedly at night, screaming in a pitch his parents had never heard before. He’d been fully potty-trained before he was taken from his parents, but after he was returned to them, he started having accidents. His parents noticed that this often happened immediately after the twice-weekly visits from DCF workers. 

So now, let's see what Dr. Nelson has to say about all this.  He doesn’t dismiss the harm to these children entirely: 

Nelson says an unanticipated, middle-of-the-night removal is a particularly extreme event for a young child. 

But, of course, government agents pounding on the door and demanding to take away your children tends to be unanticipated.  And often it happens in the middle of the night. 

And yet, Nelson goes on to say, maybe it’s not so catastrophic: 

From the moment of separation, a number of variables will affect a long-term outcome for a child: For children who are put in unsupportive or unsafe foster care environments, who aren’t quickly reunited with their families, who do not receive the care they need for already-existing mental health issues, Nelson says, “that can lead to a terrible long-term outcome.” 

OK let’s stop right there.  Study after study finds abuse in one-quarter to one-third of stranger foster homes, and the record of group homes and institutions is even worse.  So you can imagine how many are merely “unsupportive.”  Only 4% of foster children leave foster care within 30 days – which itself is a very long time in the mind of a young child, and time enough, according to other researchers to cause plenty of trauma.  So Nelson is effectively saying that the majority of forced family separations “can lead to a terrible long-term outcome.” 

 In a worst-case scenario, he says, “the child isn’t just in one foster care placement, but the child goes from one to another to another — that, we know, is catastrophic.” 

Ah, so it’s only by placement #3 that things are catastrophic!  Well, that’s probably somewhere around half of all foster care cases.  

However … 

in a situation like the one experienced by the Sabey and Perkins family, Nelson says, he holds a more optimistic outlook for the children.[Nelson says] An infant might not register anything about the brief experience at all; 

Really? 

That’s not what another distinguished Massachusetts doctor said – again, back when it was Donald Trump’s ICE agents doing the taking: 

From the time they are born, children emotionally attach to their caregiver and vice versa, said Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center [Emphasis added.] 

Now, back to Dr. Nelson when it’s Massachusetts DCF making the decisions: 

 a 3-year-old like Clarence might experience short-term behavioral changes that could subside over time. … With proper support, with a family with access to the resources they need, this should all be in the rear-view mirror on the part of the child in months,” he says. 

Clarence is, of course, getting that support – especially now that the family has moved to Idaho and DCF is out of their lives.  But the typical families caught in the family policing net are poor – that’s often why their children were taken in the first place.  How do they get “access to the resources they need”?  

And nearly 7,700 mental-health professionals and 142 organizations are not nearly so sanguine. Here’s what they said in a petition protesting the separations at the Mexican border: 

“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma,” the petition reads. 

Why, then should we assume that when American family police agencies inflict the same wounds, they leave no shrapnel? 

It is true that every child will respond differently.  Some children and families have enormous reserves of resilience.  Indeed, that’s one of the many reasons doing things like turning in families to the family police based on questionnaires about “Adverse Childhood Experiences” is so dangerous. 

But why should that let DCF – or ICE – off the hook?  Is pain inflicted on a child OK as long as it doesn’t last forever?  Suppose a father said: “Sure, I broke my kid’s arm a few months ago to punish him, but I took him right to the doctor, he put it in a cast and now the arm is good as new.  It’s all in the rear-view mirror!” Would that father not be a child abuser?  When ICE or DCF do it, are they not child abusers whether the trauma lasts forever or not? 

All in the rear-view mirror?  That attitude toward the torment inflicted on a three-year-old boy is chilling. 

Nelson gives away what’s really at play here in what he says next: 

“But the parents — the parents are going to be traumatized. They’re going to be reviewing this episode forever.” 

And that doesn’t affect a child?  Really?  Well, then, clearly we should stop using taking away children because of parents’ “mental health” problems, since the learned professor now tells us, in effect, traumatizing parents forever doesn’t affect their children! 

The reason Nelson is so hellbent on contradicting himself is apparent in something else he said.  He is terrified that pointing out how catastrophic it is to tear children from their families will stop agencies like DCF from tearing children from – well, you know, those people:  The Black people Brown people and poor white people who are their usual targets. 

Maintaining the fiction that only parents suffer “forever” then their children are torn from them is the lynchpin of the Big Lie of American child welfare, the idea that any attempt to curb the massive, unchecked power of family policing agencies is putting “parents' rights” ahead of “child safety.”  Or, as Nelson put it: 

“Where you set the bar is a really tough issue. Child protection has dealt with this forever. In Massachusetts, DCF has come under tremendous criticism because there have been times where they set the bar [for intervention] so high that kids were being grievously harmed by their parents,” he says. “On the other hand, if we set the bar very low, we perpetrate a different harm, which is separation. I think it needs to be on a case-by-case basis." 

Unfortunately, the Post story, which is quite good in many respects embraces this false framing. Here’s why it’s wrong: 

When you set the bar too low for family police intervention, you overload the system, deluging workers with so many false reports, trivial cases and poverty cases that they don’t have time to investigate any case properly.  That is almost always the reason for the tragedies that make headlines.  Consider Massachusetts: The state tears apart families at a rate 60% above the national average – a very low bar indeed --yet the tragedies keep right on happening. 

In contrast if you “set the bar … high” workers have more time to investigate and find those few children in real danger.  

Either way, some children in real danger will be missed.  But if you set the bar low you are likely to miss more such children.  Setting the bar low makes all children less safe. 

And, as Prof. Vivek Sankaran recently pointed out in a similar context,  when people who favor a take-the-child-and-run approach say “case by case basis” what they mean is: We decide based on our whims and prejudices. 

That doesn’t work when ICE does it, and it doesn’t work any better when a U.S. family police agency does it.

“Maybe we're just too damn intrusive": Tracing the take-the-child-and-run mentality that has endangered Massachusetts children for more than a century

If you're a poor child, the moment your family crosses this border heading north
the odds that you will be taken from your parents more than double.

● How did Massachusetts wind up tearing apart families at a rate more than 60% above the national average - and two to three times the rate of Connecticut? 

● Why does Massachusetts also institutionalize children at a rate 60% above the national average?

● Why does Massachusetts have one of the worst records of racial disparity when it comes to tearing apart Hispanic families? 

This post is adapted from a virtual presentation I gave last month to the Racial Justice Task Force of the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, Child and Family Law Division. 

Forty-three years ago, I started work as a reporter for a public television station in Western Massachusetts.  Whenever anyone in state government was asked about the problems in the state’s “child welfare” system they’d give the same stock answer: As soon as the new Department of Social Services was up and running, and took over jobs then done by the Department of Public Welfare, everything would be fine! 

Today the Department of Public Welfare is the Department of Transitional Assistance.  The Department of Social Services got itself a new name as well: Department of Children and Families.  On the Massachusetts “child welfare” Titanic, there always are more deck chairs to rearrange. 

What has not changed in all of this is the fanatical devotion of Massachusetts public officials – and private agencies – to tearing apart families.  That history goes back well over a century. 

While researching my book on family policing, I read an invaluable history, Heroes of Their Own Lives, by Linda Gordon.  It traced the history and documented the racism that infused the work of the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  Here’s some of what she wrote: 

MSPCC agents in practice and in rhetoric expressed disdain for immigrant cultures. They hated the garlic and olive oil smells of Italian cooking and considered this food unhealthy  (overstimulating, aphrodisiac). … [T]hey believed that women who took spirits were degenerate and unfit as mothers. They associated many of these forms of  depravity with Catholicism. Agents were also convinced of the subnormal intelligence  of  most  non-WASP  and  especially  non-English-speaking clients; indeed, the agents' comments and expectations in this  early period  were  similar to  social workers' views  of  black clients  in the mid-twentieth century…. 

Black women were described as “primitive,” “limited” …”fairly good for a colored woman.”  White immigrants came in for similar abuse: e.g. “a typical low-grade Italian woman” [Others were called] “typical Puerto Ricans who loved fun, little work and were dependent people.” 

That last remark appears in a record from 1960. 

            When MSPCC agents felt their power was insufficient, they bent or broke the law.  When SPCC agents couldn’t get into a home legally 

They climbed in windows, They searched without warrants. Their case notes frequently revealed that they made their judgments first and looked for evidence later. … 

            As one annual report put it delicately: “It is true we have taken risks on the margin of legal liability which seemed needful to rescue the child … but without cost to the society … If ‘indiscreet zeal’ which is made such a bugbear occasionally leads us into mistakes, the public will condone the error … much more readily than they would approve the opposite fault of timidity or lukewarmness in cases of well-ascertained cruelty.” 

            In other words, as the current Massachusetts “Child Advocate” Maria Mossaides might say, they were “erring on the side of the child.” 

            Now let’s flash forward to 1989.  While researching my book, I interviewed a group of stewards for the caseworkers’ union in Massachusetts.  

            This is some of what they told me: 

“I work out of a very affluent area,” said Brett Cabral. “We screen in [for investigation] … things that Boston would be laughing at the person phoning in the report.” 

“Don’t get investigated in Weymouth,” said Robert Moro. “They’re famous for substantiating everything and naming everybody.” 

Said Philip Leduc, a veteran supervisor in Northampton: “If the level of intrusiveness perpetrated allegedly to protect children were attempted in any other field, we would be in court … we would be in jail, we would have the Supreme Court coming down with innumerable decisions against us.”

Or, as Moro put it: “Maybe we’re just too damn intrusive.” 

            Now, let’s consider where we are today.  In a moment, I’ll compare Massachusetts to the national average, but first I want to emphasize: The national average stinks.  There are places across the country that have proven children can be taken away at far lower rates than the national average, with no compromise of safety.  So a comparison to the national average understates how bad things are in Massachusetts.           

Here’s the bottom line: No matter how you slice and dice the data, Massachusetts is fanatical about tearing apart families. 

            So in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available, when you compare entries into care to impoverished child population, Massachusetts tore apart families at a rate 60% above the national average. 

            The snapshot number – the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day -- is even worse.  Massachusetts children were trapped in foster care at a rate 65% above the national average.           

And DCF has a fondness for putting children in the worst possible placement – institutionalizing them in “congregate care.” Massachusetts institutionalizes children, at a rate 60% above the national average. 

            Now, let’s see how racism comes into play. 

            Nationwide, Black children represent 14% of the child population – but 23% of the foster child population. 

            In Massachusetts, the disparity is similar.  Black children are nine percent of the total child population and 15% of the foster child population.  

However, the picture worsens when you add in multi-racial children. The federal government data source does not appear to have such a category online, but for Massachusetts, multi-racial children are four percent of the child population – and nine percent of the foster child population. 

            Nationwide, on average, Hispanic children are not overrepresented in foster care.   But in Massachusetts, they represent 19% of the child population and 33% of the foster child population. 

            Someone who lived in Massachusetts for only a short time, as I did, might think that bias against Native American families would not be a problem, because the Native American population in Massachusetts is low.  But that would be underestimating DCF!  

A study of America’s 20 largest counties found that the county where Native American children are most likely to be subjected to the trauma of a child abuse investigation is: Middlesex County, Massachusetts.  The county where Native American children are second most likely to have their rights to their parents terminated also is Middlesex County, Massachusetts. 

            There are only about 4,800 Native Americans in the county, but by God, DCF seems to have its eye on all of them!  Fully half of Native American children in that county will have to endure all the trauma of a child abuse investigation. 

            The percentage for Black children enduring traumatic investigations by DCF probably is even higher – since we know that nationwide, 53% of Black children will have to endure such trauma and, as we’ve seen, Massachusetts almost always is worse than the national average. 

Connecticut does better 

            Massachusetts’ record looks even worse when you compare to a neighboring state with similar problems: Connecticut.  The rate of removal in Massachusetts – again, factoring in poverty – is between double and triple the rate in Connecticut. 

            Connecticut has not done well at getting children out of foster care – so their snapshot number is very slightly worse than the national average – but still way better than Massachusetts.   

Connecticut fails on another count: though it tears apart fewer families, period, the racial disparities are disturbingly similar to Massachusetts. 

But Connecticut does better than the national average when it comes to institutionalizing children – they institutionalize them at about half the rate in Massachusetts. 

            The Connecticut comparison on overall removals is particularly relevant since it touches on the current all-purpose excuse for the take-the-child-and-run mentality in Massachusetts: Opioids. 

            Opioid abuse didn’t stop at the state line.  But while Massachusetts politicians and journalists spent their time demonizing parents, especially mothers, who used drugs, Connecticut invested in one of the nation’s most innovative home-based family drug treatment programs. 

            But that wasn’t even the biggest reason for the difference. The biggest difference is leadership.  In 2011, then-Gov. Dannel Malloy named Joette Katz to run that state’s DCF.  Not long after, there was a high-profile child abuse death.  There were all the usual calls for tearing apart more families.  Katz did something simple. 

            She said no. 

She made clear she wouldn’t tolerate foster-care panic, that sharp sudden surge of removals of children that often follows horror story cases.  And Malloy backed her up. 

            So far, their respective successors in Connecticut are showing the same strong leadership. 

            Massachusetts, of course, has taken a different approach.  DCF has no leader.  Oh, it has a commissioner, but it has no leader.  And, like his long-ago predecessors at the MSPCC, the governor has used every opportunity to smear families and promote the Big Lie of American child welfare, that family preservation and child safety supposedly are opposites. 

            So, in the wake of high-profile child abuse fatalities – and demagogic news coverage from what was then the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, the governor famously and falsely claimed there was “mission confusion” at DCF – and somehow an agency which, then as now, was tearing apart families at a rate far above the national average was putting family preservation ahead of child safety. 

            A Boston Globe headline at about the same time declared: “balance between children’s safety, family stability is perennial challenge.” 

            And over and over, everyone from Mossaides to lawmakers to newspaper editorials will give you some version of “well, you know, we have to err on the side of the child.” 

            But it’s all a lie.  Anything that equates child removal with child safety is a lie. The only way to actually err on the side of the child is to err on the side of the family.  Because it’s not just that family preservation is more humane than foster care; for the overwhelming majority of children it is also safer than foster care.  

            That is because most cases are nothing like the horror stories.  Far more common are cases in which poverty is confused with neglect. 

            There now have been at least six separate studies showing that in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better than comparably maltreated children in foster care – even when the families don’t get any special help.  (Imagine what would happen if we actually provided real help.) 

            That should come as no surprise.  The motivation of a DCF caseworker in Holyoke and an ICE agent at the Mexican border may be different, but the harm to a child torn from the arms of her or his mother is exactly the same.  Anyone who dares to use that “err on the side of child” line needs to sit and listen to a recording of anguished cries of separated children at the border, obtained by ProPublica.  To paraphrase activist Joyce McMillan: They tear apart families at the border of Roxbury, too. 

            Once taken, children can be moved from home to home, emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone.  They have twice the level of post-traumatic stress disorder of Gulf War veterans.  Only 20% are doing well in later life.  And they are more likely to wind up in prison than in college. How is that “erring on the side of the child”? 

            But it’s not just a matter of emotional abuse, enormous as that abuse is.  

            DCF wants you to believe that in any given year only 1.59% of Massachusetts foster children are abused in foster care. 

            Here’s what that means.  They are claiming that if you filled a room with 70 former foster youth and asked: “How many of you were abused during the last year you were in foster care?” only one would raise her or his hand. 

            Of course, that’s absurd on its face.  But in case anyone seriously needs research to confirm it, study after study after study has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes – and for a variety of methodological reasons, those estimates almost certainly are low.           

The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions – which DCF loves so much – is even worse. 

            If a child is taken from a safe home, or one that could be made safe, only to be beaten, raped or killed in foster care -- recall, for example, Avelina Conway-Coxon -- how is that “erring on the side of the child.” 

            But even that isn’t the worst of it.  

            All that time spent on investigating false allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases, all that time searching homes and stripsearching children, all that time spent needlessly taking away all those children is, in effect, stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger. 

            And that almost always is the real reason for the horror stories that make headlines.  How is that “erring on the side of the child”? 

Reefer madness at DCF 

            Then there’s the all-purpose excuse for Massachusetts’ obscene rate of removal that I mentioned earlier: Opioids. 

            That, too, fails for several reasons. 

            First, in more than two-thirds of all Massachusetts cases, no substance abuse of any kind is even alleged. 

            Second, all substance use isn’t opioids.  There is no breakdown of how often the substance at issue is one that is now legal in Massachusetts: marijuana.  But we do know this: The referendum legalizing marijuana in Massachusetts included language saying that marijuana use alone could not be grounds for even a DCF investigation, let alone removal.  DCF must have “clear, convincing and articulable evidence that the person’s actions related to marijuana have created an unreasonable danger to the safety of a minor child.”

             That caveat is so mild that even Mossaides didn’t object.  But DCF threw a fit.  The referendum passed anyway so now the problem is solved – if, that is, you believe DCF rigorously follows the law when it comes to intruding on families.  

            The point here is that the talk about drug abuse may say more about Massachusetts’ puritan tradition and reefer madness at DCF, than actual danger to children. 

            Third, even in the case of opioids, a 2014 story hyping the opioid epidemic and parents giving birth to children with drugs in their system, oh-so-briefly noted an admission from Boston Medical Center.  They acknowledged that most of the infants born with drugs in their system were exposed not to heroin, but to drugs like methadone or buprenorphine – drugs medically prescribed to treat heroin addiction. 

            None of that means opioid abuse is not a serious and real problem.  But even in such cases, we should learn from a previous “worst drug plague ever” – crack cocaine. 

Researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.  Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. 

Similarly, consider what The New York Times found when it looked at the best way to treat infants born with opioids in their systems. According to the Times: 

[A] growing body of evidence suggests that what these babies need is what has been taken away: a mother.  Separating newborns in withdrawal can slow the infants’ recovery, studies show, and undermine an already fragile parenting relationship. When mothers are close at hand, infants in withdrawal require less medication and fewer costly days in intensive care. 

 “Mom is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent babies. 

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can always leave children with addicted parents.  But it does mean that in most cases, even when untreated parental drug use might endanger children, drug treatment for the parent is a better option than foster care for the child.  

Connecticut recognized that.  The Puritans of Massachusetts DCF have not – and neither has much of the Massachusetts media. 

The Betty Ford standard 

Instead, Jennifer McKim’s reporting for the New England Center – reprinted in the Boston Globe – echoed the worst examples of “crack baby journalism” from the 1980s. 

Her stories are replete with phrases condemning parents “who caused their [infants’] drug problems in the first place…” or a mother whose pregnancy “did not cause her to alter her daily heroin habit…” 

I doubt that McKim, or any other reporter, would have spoken that way about the mom addicted to prescription opioids and alcohol who raised her teenage children in an affluent neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia back in the 1970s.  And no family police agency investigated her when she moved to a new residence in D.C. – the White House. 

On the contrary, Betty Ford was treated as a hero for admitting her addiction – and she wound up opening a celebrity rehab center. 

So let’s try applying the Betty Ford standard to Black people, and Hispanic people, and Indigenous People and poor white people. 

One last thought about child welfare and opioids.  Massachusetts’ extreme outlier status existed long before the opioid epidemic.  But that epidemic was well underway before a huge spike in children torn from their homes that started in 2014 and continued through 2016 – in other words, when the state’s awful record got even worse.  That spike had nothing to do with opioids, and everything to do with foster-care panic – the response by DCF to the demagoguery that followed high-profile child abuse deaths. 

But there are signs that, at last, some people may be ready to reconsider the take-the-child-and-run approach that has brought down so much misery on Massachusetts families – and made all children less safe. 

            For a year, Mossaides stage-managed presentations to her Massachusetts Mandatory Reporter Commission, in order to persuade the commission to further expand mandatory child abuse reporting – indeed, that was the commission’s charge.  But after hearing from affected families, practitioners, advocates and scholars across the country, the Commission refused to buy what Mossaides was selling.  They refused to make any recommendations at all.  This was so extraordinary that it recently gained national attention in a story by NBC News and ProPublica, which documented the enormous harm mandatory reporting does to families. 

            Because there’s so much available about this on our special mini-website about the Massachusetts Mandatory Reporter Commission, I won’t repeat it here.  But lawmakers need to understand that mandatory reporting makes children less safe. 

            Yes, the lawmakers will be upset.  Some will say: “If we won’t have mandatory reporting we’ll miss some cases.”  They need to understand that there is no system that will find every case.  But with mandatory reporting, you actually miss more of those “real cases.”  That’s because the cases or horrific abuse that make headlines are needles in a haystack.  

Nationwide, the blue represents the percentages of cases that are screened
out or determined to be false, the red is the percentage of "substantiated" neglect
(which often means poverty) and the green are the percentage of "substantiated"
abuse of any kind.

Each time you expand mandatory reporting you make the haystack bigger, further deluging DCF with false reports, trivial cases, and poverty cases. That only makes it harder to find the needles – even as you inflict needless trauma on tens of thousands of children. 

            Mandatory reporting also creates serious cases of abuse.  Because it makes families afraid to seek help before cases become serious. 

            Then they may say: “Can’t we fix it with ‘training’?  I would say: But how many times have we heard training proposed as a panacea? How many times has it worked?  If we had before you massive evidence of the harm – and the racism – of stop-and-frisk policing, how many of us would be satisfied if a police chief said: “Don’t worry, we’ll just provide more ‘training’ about who to stop and how to frisk them”? 

            There is no such thing as training that eliminates racial bias, or class bias.  And even if there were – even the best-trained mandatory reporter may have to ignore the training rather than risk fines or jail time for not reporting. 

            That’s why creating some kind of second hotline to report families who just need help won’t work either – unless you also eliminate mandated reporting. 

            Eliminating mandatory reporting is not the same as eliminating reporting.  Professionals would remain free to exercise their professional judgment and call DCF whenever they genuinely believe it’s essential. 

            Like the rest of us, lawmakers have grown up on a steady diet of  “health terrorism” – the misrepresentation of the true nature and scope of “child abuse” in the name of “raising awareness.”  So of course abolishing mandatory reporting would be a tough step to take, even though it will make Massachusetts children safer. 

            But at a minimum lawmakers should be willing to eliminate one of the worst aspects of mandatory reporting – requiring people who work with survivors of domestic violence to turn those survivors in to DCF if the children saw them being beaten, leaving the survivors open to “failure to protect” allegations.           

            Taking children from battered mothers is illegal in New York City, thanks to a class-action lawsuit.  It still happens, of course, but it happens less.  My group’s Vice President was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.  During the trial, one expert after another said the same thing: Witnessing domestic violence can be emotionally harmful for a child. But taking the child from the non-offending parent is far, far worse.  One expert said taking a child under such circumstances is “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.” 

            The policy of DCF, and the approach of Maria Mossaides, boils down to: “Please pass the salt.” 

            There are superb resources about this specific to Massachusetts in the detailed written testimony to the Mandatory Reporter Commission from Jane Doe, Inc., in the spoken testimony of attorney Michelle Lucier and in a recent Western New England Law Review article. 

            Long ago, the father of family defense (and the president of NCCPR), Prof. Martin Guggenheim, said: “There is a lot of hate disguised as love in this system.”  Nothing better illustrates the point than the fact that Maria Mossaides and DCF refused to consider something as minimal as exempting those who deal with victims of domestic violence from mandatory reporting laws. 

            Another issue on the horizon concerns how children are represented in court.  Mossaides is trying to, in effect, silence children by undermining what’s known as -- expressed wishes representation – that is, requiring children’s lawyers to fight for what their child clients want.  Mossaides is exploiting a horror story, the death of Harmony Montgomery, to try to undermine that – even though the real lesson from that tragedy is that Harmony probably never should have been taken from her mother in the first place. 

A final note about names 

            I began by noting how often Massachusetts family policing agencies change their organizational structure – or even change their names.  But if the Massachusetts family police were honest they’d simply adopt the name used by poor people more than a century ago to describe the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  Just call yourselves what you really are: “The Cruelty.”