The Oregon family police agency fudges the figures at children’s expense

They’re misleading us about the rate of entries into foster care …

 Oregon is one of those states operating under a settlement resulting from one of those pointless McLawsuits that Marcia Lowry brings all over the country. (How pointless? The organization she now runs, A Better Childhood, is the fourth from which she has brought these lawsuits over the past 50+ years. All three of the others have turned their backs on her approach.) 

The settlement requires the state family police agency, the Department of Human Services, to submit “progress reports.” This is the most recent.   

DHS took advantage of the opportunity to engage in a whole lot of disingenuous figure fudging in an area the settlement doesn’t care about (because Marcia Lowry almost never cares about it): reducing entries into foster care. 

Let's start with the basics. In FFY 2025, Oregon took away children 2,391 times. That’s actually 227 more times than children were taken in Oregon in 2024. But what measure should be used to compare Oregon to the rest of the country? Oregon DHS's method is so ludicrous that if torturing logic were a war crime, they'd be hauled before an international tribunal.

After claiming that Oregon took away 2.7 of every thousand children in 2024, the progress report says: 

Oregon has a lower rate of foster care entry than the national median. Nationally, the median foster care entry rate in 2021 was 3.0. 

How are they misleading us? Let us count the ways: 

● The data for the national median are from 2021, while DHS compares it to Oregon data from 2024. Since nationwide entries have been declining slowly but steadily since 2021, odds are the median is lower now. And, by the way, as noted above, data now are available for 2025. 

● National median is an odd choice for comparison. If the DHS figures are correct, it would mean only that, compared to total child population, more states take proportionately more children than Oregon than take proportionately fewer. 

Source: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database

But comparisons typically are to the national average (the mean rather than the median). Why doesn’t DHS do that? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because when you do an apples-to-apples comparison involving the same year, 2025, Oregon took away children at a rate more than 25% above the national average, even when comparing entries to total child population (which, as is discussed below, is the wrong comparison anyway). 

And, by the way: While DHS says it took away 2.7 children for every thousand in 2024, in 2025 it rose to 2.89 per thousand.

But even that isn’t the worst of it. 

● DHS is using the wrong denominator, thereby hiding the full extent to which Oregon remains an outlier. DHS compares entries only to the total child population. But the far more valid measure is to compare entries to the impoverished child population. When you do that for every state, the national average is 16 children taken per thousand impoverished children. The figure for Oregon is 21.7 – thirty-five percent higher. 

By the way, that’s also the 23^rd highest rate of removal in the country, so it’s above the mean and the median. 

Sources: Entries: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database
Impoverished children: Census Bureau Current Population Survey (3 year average).

So, DHS misleads by comparing entries only to the total child population (and misleads about even that). That comparison is b.s. for one simple reason: Family police agencies don’t target the total child population – they target the impoverished child population. Can you find a middle-class family caught in the family police net? Occasionally. Can you find such a child placed in foster care? Even less often.

 As we explain in the annual NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index: 

We could have simply compared the number of children removed to a state’s total child population. But then all the states with high rates of removal and high child poverty rates would complain that this was unfair because we didn’t consider a risk factor for actual abuse (not to mention the factor most often confused with “neglect”) – poverty. 

In addition, since family policing agencies almost never take children from affluent families, using the total child population would allow affluent states that still take large numbers of children from impoverished neighborhoods to camouflage this fact. 

Based on per-capita Income, Oregon is America’s 18^th most affluent state. So Oregon DHS’s selective use of data hides what it does to its impoverished families by diverting our attention to what it doesn’t do to affluent families. And then it further hides the result by comparing only to the median instead of to the mean. 

… and their data on abuse in foster care are meaningless 

The report also contains a bunch of gobbledygook about the rate of abuse in Oregon foster care. The report acknowledges that their rate appears high compared to a target number that is based on the rate in other states. DHS is right in claiming such a comparison isn’t really valid, because definitions of abuse and neglect vary so widely. But it doesn’t matter. Because the entire measure is such a farce that DHS should be ashamed to put forward the figures it does, and Marcia Lowry should be ashamed of using official agency measures of abuse in foster care in this, or any other, settlement. 

That’s because, in every state, official measures of abuse in foster care are ludicrously low. For example, in 2024, 6,675 children spent at least one day in Oregon foster care. DHS claims that, of that number, only 114 were abused by a foster parent or group home or institution staff – that’s 1.7%.  That means Oregon DHS wants us to believe that if you gathered 100 former foster youth in a room and asked them: “How many of you were abused in foster care in 2024?” only two would raise their hands. 

Yet, study after study after study, including at least one specific to Oregon, find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate in group homes and institutions is even higher. These studies use conservative methodology, often imposing limits on things like which placements or which perpetrators are counted.

(Oregon DHS may try to defend itself by saying theirs is a single-year estimate, while the studies may cover a longer time period. But the average length of stay in Oregon foster care is 18 to 24 months, so even if one doubles the amount of abuse Oregon admits to, as in the graphic below, that figure is vastly below the reality.)  

  1.                                   2.
1.=% Oregon admits to in 2024, x2
2.=LOW END national average estimate from indepdendent studies

The reason for the difference in findings is obvious: When agencies investigate abuse in foster care, they are, in effect, investigating themselves. That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file. 

DHS and the governor even tried to get the Oregon Legislature to pass a law that would make this worse – it would have raised the threshold before awful things done to children in group homes and institutions would count as “abuse.” 

The very fact that people in the Oregon family police agency have to know they are putting forward numbers that are probably between one-tenth and one-twentieth or less the real rate of abuse in foster care should be cause to question their credibility and even their fitness for their jobs. (Unfortunately, however, every state essentially lies this way about the real rate of abuse in foster care.) 

If DHS, or Marcia Lowry, really wanted to know how much abuse there is in foster care, they would do what those independent scholars do: Pull together a random sample of former foster youth  - and ask them. 

In fact, Marcia really does know. In 2010, she told the Philadelphia Daily News: 

“I’ve been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not.” 

And that’s only one kind of abuse. 

Marcia also commissioned an actual study of abuse in foster care as part of another of her McLawsuit. The study found vastly more abuse than officially reported.

Why we need to whack the weeds … 

Here’s why going so deep into the weeds is important. If people get the misimpression that Oregon DHS is removing children at a rate below the national average, it tees up the next inevitable false claim. It will happen right after the next tragedy involving the death of a child “known to the system.” Someone (and I think we all know who it’s most likely to be) will rush to claim that this “raises questions” about whether “the pendulum has swung too far” toward keeping families together. 

That is the biggest lie of all. 

Yes, Oregon has made some real progress. Tearing apart families at a rate “only” 35% above the national average is a big improvement over where things were many years ago. But it’s hard to give DHS the credit it's due, when it keeps trying to claim credit it doesn’t deserve. 

Meanwhile, maybe it’s time to add a corollary to a famous adage in journalism that goes: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” Here’s the corollary: “If a ‘child welfare’ agency hands you data, check it twice!”

NCCPR in the Oregon Capital Chronicle: Oregon DHS needs to stop playing whack-a-mole with vulnerable children

For nearly a decade, Oregon’s approach to child welfare has amounted to a pathetic game of whack-a-mole.  The “solution” to one crisis begets another, while everyone ignores the issue at the root of it all: Oregon tears apart families needlessly at a rate well above the national average. 

This sick game began in earnest when news accounts exposed horrific abuse at one private agency’s group homes. They also revealed that the Oregon Department of Human Services knew about the abuse and did nothing. That investigation whacked the state into raising standards for foster homes. It wound up warehousing foster children in offices and jails. 

So — whack — a child advocacy group brought a lawsuit to prohibit the practice. DHS settled.  And children promptly wound up warehoused in hotels. Whack — there was another lawsuit and another settlement. 

Then DHS shipped children to horrible out-of-state institutions.  That was exposed, so DHS went back to warehousing children in what they called  “repurposed juvenile jails.” 

Now, the game of whack-a-mole may come full circle: …

 Read the full column in the Oregon Capital Chronicle

An odious practice tolerated in most states – and encouraged in Oregon

Third of three parts. Read the full series here.

There is an odious practice in the “residential treatment” industry known in that industry as “creaming” – as in skimming the cream.  Here’s how it works: 

First, the residential treatment “providers” justify their existence, the enormous harm they do to children and the astounding waste of taxpayer dollars, by claiming there’s no other choice: The children supposedly are so very, very difficult and have so many problems that no family could possibly handle them – they simply must be institutionalized.  (By the way, it’s not true.) 

But then, when children come along who are, in fact, particularly hard to handle, the providers refuse to admit them.  They don’t acknowledge that they’re creaming, of course, they just say that these children “aren’t the right fit for our program” or something like that.  Then, having taken only young people who could most easily succeed without them, if their own families or foster families got the right kind of help, the institutions claim as their own whatever minimal success they may have with some small portion of those they choose to admit. 

There are two ways to try to solve this problem: the right way and the Oregon way. 

To understand how Oregon screwed up so badly we need to return to 2015, when the Portland alternative weekly Willamette Week, exposed horrific abuse by one group home provider, Give Us This Day.  They also exposed how Oregon DHS knew about it and ignored it for at least 18 months.  And part of the problem revolves around creaming.  As I wrote at the time: 

The Willamette Week stories note that Give Us This Day was willing to take the children deemed most difficult – children other private agencies wouldn’t touch.  But “private” agencies funded with public funds shouldn’t have a choice in the matter.   It appears that DHS does not require private agencies to sign “no reject, no eject” contracts.  That allows agencies to engage in …“creaming” …  They take the easy cases and ignore the rest.  Since the state allows this, it makes agencies like Give Us This Day among the only choices for the children deemed hardest to place. 

There are two ways to deal with this: The right way: require “no reject, no eject contracts.” Then providers are required to develop programs that are flexible enough to accommodate the children rather than making the children accommodate the providers.  And the state only signs contracts with agencies that can do it.  

Most states are too afraid of their residential treatment industry to do this.  But I am aware of no state, other than Oregon, that went to the opposite extreme: Oregon actually passed a law that penalized agencies if they didn’t engage in creaming! 

The law states that 

The director shall impose a civil penalty of not less than $250 nor more than $500, unless otherwise required by law, on a child-caring facility that assumes care or custody of, or provides care or services to, a child knowing that the child’s care needs exceed the license, certificate or authorization classification of the child-caring agency if the assumption of care or custody, or provision of care or services, places that child’s health, safety or welfare at risk. 

Happily, an otherwise dreadful piece of draft legislation includes repeal of this part of state law – though only because Oregon, which tears apart families at a rate well above the national average, has no place to dump all those kids.  But that would merely make Oregon no worse than other states – it wouldn’t demand no reject no eject contracts and providers capable of handling such contracts. 

The source for so many bad ideas 

Oregon State Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin

And, of course, that still leaves the question: Who in the world would have pushed the idea of putting a provision encouraging creaming into state law in the first place?  It’s not entirely clear, but it appears to have been at least supported by Oregon media’s favorite lawmaker, the one they love to quote demanding accountability from everyone else, but is never held to account herself. Yes, it’s one more failure from Oregon’s Senator Soundbite – Sara Gelser Blouin. 

She told The Oregonian 

… the civil penalty was created in direct response to Give Us This Day accepting children whose needs it was not equipped to meet. “The purpose of that civil penalty was to give those places a reason to say ‘no’ …” 

Yikes.  Until they finally stop institutionalizing children altogether – and yes that can be done – states need to demand institutions that can serve any child -- at a minimum without abusing the child, neglecting the child or otherwise making the child’s condition worse. Then such institutions should be required to say “yes.” 

This kind of blunder is nothing new for Gelser Blouin. I think she actually means well.  But time and time again she has set back Oregon’s few feeble efforts at reform, and generally made a bad system worse.  Consider: 

● A recent study, using data from 2015 to 2019 found that in Oregon, more than 40% of all families and nearly three-quarters of  Black families – 72% - would eventually face investigation by DHS for alleged child abuse or neglect. Such investigations can, in themselves, be enormously traumatic for children.  Yet during this same time period, Gelser Blouin was getting fawning media coverage for falsely claiming that Oregon wasn’t investigating enough families.  (Details on how she took data out of context to reach that conclusion can be found toward the end of this post.)

What in the world does Senator Soundbite want? Should DHS not even wait for an allegation and just investigate every Black family in Oregon – given how close they come to that already?  Perhaps a reporter should ask her. 

● Then there was her war against “differential response” (DR). Gelser got the legislature to shut down that approach to easing the trauma of investigation in July 2017.  One month earlier, a comprehensive independent report on Oregon’s differential response initiative specifically refuted Gelser Blouin’s claims about safety declaring: 

[O]ur analyses find no evidence that DR undermines the safety of children in Oregon. [Emphasis in original.] 

The evaluation found that families receiving a differential response intervention were significantly less likely to have another substantiated report of child abuse than a matched comparison group of families who got a traditional Oregon child protective services investigation. 

So did Gelser Blouin not know about this evaluation when she moved to kill the initiative, or did she know about the report and decide to ignore its findings. Perhaps a reporter should ask her.  

● When children must be placed in foster care the most humane most stable and safest option almost always is kinship foster care, placement with a family member or close family friend.  But in 2022, Gelser Blouin said she would introduce legislation that would actually make it harder for relatives to get custody, tilting the balance in favor of what should be called stranger care.  

The idea didn’t even originate with Gelser Blouin.  It came from a right-wing group in Arizona that, ALEC-style, is promoting such legislation across the country.  Perhaps a reporter should ask Gelser Blouin about this.  

It’s not that Oregon would have a good system if every journalist covering these issues didn’t have Sara Gelser Blouin on speed dial while largely ignoring families whose children have been wrongly taken, their advocates and their attorneys.  But it probably would be less bad.

How the Oregon “child welfare” agency wants to make it even easier for “providers” to get away with abusing children in their care

 

The Oregon State Capitol

 Second of three parts.  Read part one here. 

Faced with an artificial “shortage” of foster homes caused by the fact that Oregon still tears apart families at a rate well above the national average (which is, itself, too high), the Oregon family police agency, the Department of Human Services, and Gov. Tina Kotek have decided the best answer is to loosen the already minimal rules concerning abuse of children in foster care, especially group homes and institutions.  They’ve proposed legislation to do just that. 

The minimal rules already are minimally enforced.  We know this because the official rate of abuse in foster care in Oregon is roughly 50 times lower than the rate found in multiple independent studies, including two specific to Oregon. (For details see the previous post). 

But according to one state official, Anna Williams, executive director of something called the Governor’s System of Care Advisory Council, as a result of these minimal laws minimally enforced the state is “bleeding providers” – at best an inapt choice of words. 

Yesterday’s post discussed the excuses those favoring this legislation have put forward.  This post discusses some of the specific provisions. 

Agency use of restraints would be almost unrestrained 

Among the most often exposed abuses in “residential treatment” is the overuse of various forms of “restraint” such as physically “restraining” a child who is, in some way, “acting out” or putting the child in “seclusion,” a euphemism for solitary confinement.  As the Oregonian reported, the bill waters down restrictions on physical restraint and seclusion to the point that if it’s not being done with the specific intent to punish the child or for the provider’s convenience, it’s just fine.

Willams explained that: “If a hold or seclusion is used for the safety of the child and it’s done with training, then it’s not investigated because that’s not wrong.” 

But, of course, those saintly providers for which Williams has such concern don’t go around admitting they use restraints for punishment or convenience – they always say they only use restraints when absolutely necessary for the safety of the child. You find out if that’s true or not by, um, investigating. 

The bill also narrows the definition of “chemical restraint” – doping up children to make them docile for their caretakers.  Again, this has been the subject of numerous exposes across the country.  But the Oregon bill would give institutions a blank check to do this to children as long as “a licensed physician or other qualified health professional…” prescribes the drugs and administers them.  (And who employs and/or contracts with the medical professionals used by residential treatment centers?) 

The bill even narrows the definition of sexual abuse when it happens in foster care.  As the Oregonian story explains: 

[I]t’s currently defined as sexual abuse for a child or youth up to age 20 in foster care or an institutional care facility to have sexual contact with anyone responsible for providing care or services to the child. The planned legislation would define sexual contact as abuse if it occurred only with a person employed by a child caring agency or foster home. 

So if, say, a therapist not directly employed by a group home or institution takes advantage of the inherent imbalance of power to have sex with an older foster youth, that’s OK?  

But wait, there’s more

Other provisions of the bill would: 

● Make it harder for DHS to suspend or revoke the license of a private foster care agency. 

● Reduce the amount of information about abuse in foster care that DHS must report to lawmakers. 

● Extend the amount of time children can be filed away and forgotten in what are often the worst placements of all – parking place “shelters.” 

● Make it easier to ship children all over the country to often abusive institutions. (Recall how well that worked) and reduce the information available to lawmakers and the public about how often this happens – or even which institutions are receiving Oregon foster youth. 

And, apparently fearful about what all this might say about racial bias and bias against the disabled in their system, DHS would no longer have to give anyone 

Demographic information about all children or wards the department currently has placed in out-of-state facilities, including but not limited to age, gender or gender identity, race, ethnicity, tribal status and, if disclosed by the child or ward, sexual orientation; [or] The number of children or wards the department currently has placed in out-of-state facilities who have autism, intellectual disabilities or developmental disabilities 

The bill amends 90 pages of existing law, so there may be other awful provisions I’ve missed.

It also has two good provisions: One would end the practice of making older foster youth in “independent living” programs pay part of their own housing costs.  The other would repeal a provision of existing law that was so dumb it boggles the mind to think it ever became law in the first place. 

I’ll discuss that on this blog tomorrow.

Oregon’s “child welfare” agency wants to narrow definitions of abuse – but only when THEY are the abuser!

In Oregon, "child welfare" has become a pathetic
game of whack-a-mole. Looks like lawmakers
are about to take another whack.

                            

When a state takes away too many children it becomes a seller’s market for “providers” who institutionalize those children. They can set the terms for how they’re regulated.  There are two possible solutions to this: Pander to the providers at the expense of the children or stop taking away so many children needlessly.  Guess what Oregon’s family police agency wants to do.

 First of three parts. Read the full series here.

 In 2015, the Portland, Oregon alternative weekly Willamette Week exposed horrific abuse at one private agency’s group homes.  They also revealed that Oregon’s family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) knew about the abuse for at least 18 months and did nothing.  As I wrote at the time: 

Why did [the Oregon Department of Human Services] allow all this state-sanctioned child abuse for all this time?   The Willamette Week stories make clear that political connections had something to do with it.  But the bigger reason is the problem that has plagued Oregon child welfare for decades: Oregon is begging for places to put children it takes from their parents, and beggars can’t be choosers. 

And the reason for that is not because there are too few foster parents.  Rather, it’s because Oregon takes away far too many children. 

When a child is abused in foster care, the abuser is not only the individual who committed the abuse.  The abuser also is the family police agency – because that agency put the child in that dangerous foster home, group home or institution in the first place. 

Rather than address needless removal the Legislature passed bills to marginally tighten regulation of group homes and institutions and raise standards for family foster homes.  But even minimal standards were enough to prompt some institutions to close. 

And so began Oregon’s pathetic game of whack-a-mole.  As I wrote in 2016: 

[A]n expose of abuse in foster care by the alternative weekly Willamette Week whacked the state into raising standards for foster homes.  So the state wound up warehousing foster children in offices and jails.  So -- whack! -- a child advocacy group brought a lawsuit to prohibit the practice.  The Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) settled.  And children promptly wound up warehoused in hotels. So –whack! – there was another lawsuit and another settlement. 

So then DHS shipped children to horrible out-of-state institutions.  Then, -- whack! – that was exposed, so DHS went back to warehousing children in what they called  “repurposed juvenile jails.” 

And now, the game of whack-a-mole may come full circle: Gov. Tina Kotek and DHS are backing draft legislation to repeal regulations curbing abuse in group homes and institutions.  

Oregon, like every other state, already grossly underestimates abuse in foster care.  Officially, Oregon claims that in any given year only three-tenths of one percent of foster children are abused in care.  In other words, Oregon DHS wants us to believe that if you gathered 300 former foster children in a room and asked “How many of you were abused during your last year in foster care?” only one would raise her or his hand.  The average length of stay in Oregon foster care is two years, so, if official figures are to be believed, only an average of six-tenths of one percent of Oregon foster children are abused at any point while in care. 

Nobody really believes this. 

Independent studies, including two specific to Oregon, repeatedly find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes – and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.  

In a story about the proposals, The Oregonian points out that under terms of a consent decree Oregon has to reduce abuse in foster care and an independent court monitor will be – well, monitoring that.  (Although the monitor is excellent, the settlement is a result of another dreadful McLawsuit of the kind that has failed all over the country. So this settlement probably will do little good and may make things worse.)  

It’s not clear what data the monitor will use, since, DHS claims there’s already almost no abuse in foster care. But could just the presence of the monitor have something to do with why DHS wants to narrow the definition of abuse – but only for abuse in foster care? 

Another reason was offered up by Anna Williams, a former lawmaker who now is executive director of something called the Governor’s System of Care Advisory Council. She told The Oregonian: 

“The reason we need to address provider concerns is we are bleeding providers and if kids need care, they have to get that from providers.” 

So, we have to loosen regulations about abusing kids because the providers are bleeding? 

The worst excuse for this bill 

That reason is dumb and it ignores the real problem of wrongful removal, but at least Williams probably really believes it.  Another reason put forward by DHS should send everyone’s b.s. meter off the scale. 

Essentially DHS stole our argument for narrowing a very different set of laws affecting birth parents and tried to use it to advance their own interests. 

They claim, presumably with a straight face, that the current supposedly overbroad definitions of abuse in foster care – but only abuse in foster care -  are swamping the state child abuse hotline, making it harder for them and for investigators, to identify real abuse. 

Here’s why that’s b.s. 

In 2022, Oregon’s hotline received 73,278 reports alleging child abuse or neglect.  Also in 2022, 7,410 children spent at least one day in some form of Oregon foster care.  A very rough estimate (projecting from the number in care on any given day) is that fewer than 600 of them spent even one day in a group home or institution. 

So even if every single child who ever spent so much as a day in an Oregon group home or institution were the subject of a report to the Oregon child abuse hotline, that would account for less than one percent of all hotline calls.  Even if every child in any form of foster care for even a single day were reported to the hotline as abused it still would be only 10.1% of the calls. 

So no, allegations about abuse in foster care are not what’s overwhelming the hotline. 

What is overwhelming the hotline are false allegations trivial cases concerning birth parents and cases in which birth parents’ poverty is confused with neglect. 

That is a problem that absolutely could be ameliorated by narrowing definitions.  Because right now here’s how Oregon defines neglect: 

The term ‘abuse’ includes negligent treatment or maltreatment of a child, including but not limited to, the failure to provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, or medical care that is likely to endanger the health or welfare of the child. 

In other words, there is hardly an impoverished child in Oregon who couldn’t be called into the state hotline as allegedly “neglected.” 

But, despite amending some 90 pages of existing Oregon law, the bill the Governor and DHS want does nothing to change that definition. 

Tomorrow: Some of the awful things the bill would do. Read the full series here.

In Oregon white middle-class foster parents try to play the bonding card to prevent relatives from taking custody of their Asian-American niece

As usual, Oregon’s Senator Soundbite has a plan that would make everything worse.

Supporters of this little girl's foster parents claim those foster parents are 
"the only family she has ever known."  But wait: Who is that man in the picture with her? 
Well what do you know? It's her uncle!  The same uncle who, with his wife, have 
been fighting for custody almost since the child was born!  They seem to know each other.
(The photo is a still from an excellent story by Central Oregon Daily News which includes
several more such images.)

I have a hypothetical question for some folks in Oregon: 

Suppose a couple of strangers kidnapped your child at birth and fled to Mexico.  Suppose they took really good care of your child.  Suppose a year, or two years, or three years later they came back.  Should they be allowed to keep your child? 

Of course not, you say? 

But wait.  The kidnappers took great care of your child.  They just figured they’d do a better job than you.  And now the child has bonded with them.  After all, the kidnappers are the only family your child has ever known!  

Still no?  Are you sure? 

Then why are you – three state legislators, among others -- demanding that white foster parents be allowed to keep a three-year-old Asian-American child for precisely the same reason? (And in this case, the “only family she’s ever known” claim isn’t even true, something I’ll get to below.) 

And why is another legislator, Oregon’s notorious Senator Soundbite, Sara Gelser Blouin, planning to introduce legislation that would tilt the scales of justice even further in favor of what should be called stranger-care parents over relatives – while disingenuously claiming her bill supports kinship placements? 

Oh but this is different, those who’ve rallied round the foster parents would say.  The foster parents in this case didn’t do anything illegal – in fact the placement was authorized by a government agency, and the foster parents probably have the best of intentions. 

So what?  

If alleged bonding is superior to every other consideration and this child supposedly would be terribly harmed if moved from “the only family she’s ever known,” (and, again, that isn’t even true in this case) why should that alleged harm be inflicted on a child just because the initial removal was clearly illegal? 

Unfortunately, there is nothing new about white, middle-class people playing the bonding card in order to justify keeping in their possession children who often are neither.  Among the many who done it: Donald Trump.  His administration used it as a justification for not returning children his administration took at the Mexican border. 

A Trump Administration official explained that  even if they were wrong to take them from their parents in the first place, if they tried to find them and return them now it would “present grave child welfare concerns. … It would destabilize the permanency of their existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children.” 

The case in Oregon 

What prompts these questions is the case of a little girl known in court papers as A.N.  She was placed with non-relative foster parents shortly after birth.  But also shortly after birth, her aunt and uncle, Tige and Karen Nishimoto came forward and said they wanted to adopt the girl.  They say they made this request well before the foster parents did. 

We know from decades of research that kinship care placements reduce the trauma of removal from home, are better for children’s mental health, behavioral health and overall well-being, are more likely to keep siblings together, are more likely to preserve children’s cultural identity – and are safer -- than stranger care.  One other thing: notwithstanding all the claims about stability by supporters of the foster parents, research shows kinship placements are more stable than placements with strangers.  That may be because relatives are less likely to give up on a child when that cute toddler becomes a rebellious teen. 

Yet somehow, A.N. wound up with the foster parents long enough for their supporters to claim those foster parents are “the only family she’s ever known.”  We don’t know why, but we do know this: An evaluation from the Oregon Department of Human Services, described the child as “white – no cultural issues.” 

In fact, as her uncle points out: “Our niece is Asian-American, and she deserves to be raised by her Asian-American family.” (You’d think the fact that the relatives’ surname is Nishimoto would have been a clue.) 

We also know this: the white foster parents are not the only family this child has ever known.  On the contrary, as Central Oregon Daily News reports: 

A video provided to Central Oregon Daily News shows the girl as an infant to a two year old, to a three year old, laughing and hugging the Nishimotos, and playing with their sons. 

The Nishimotos say they and the foster parents once wee friends.  But despite everything the foster parents have put them through, the Nishimotos say they still “are open to healing with them.”  That suggests that, despite everything, the Nishimotos would be willing to keep their niece in contact with the foster parents.  That would make the Nishimotos the ones who truly are giving meaning to the term “best interests of the child.” 

But none of that has stopped three Republican state legislators from taking what amounts to the Trump Administration position and supporting the white foster parents.  Still, at least there’s no hypocrisy there.  They’re supporting the foster parents as they play the bonding  card, pure and simple. 

Enter the Senator

The same cannot be said for Oregon’s Senator Soundbite – Democrat Sara Gelser Blouin, who once again is disguising a take-the-child-and-run agenda while claiming to sympathize with the Nishimotos. 

For those unfamiliar with Blouin’s track record: She first came to prominence taking data out of context to claim – wrongly -- that Oregon wasn’t subjecting enough children to traumatic child abuse investigations; this in a state that long as torn apart families at a rate well above the national average.  Then she got the Legislature to kill a “differential response” initiative one month after  a comprehensive independent evaluation found that, contrary to Blouin’s claims, the initiative was safe. 

Now Blouin has issued a statement that is a masterpiece of sleight-of-hand.  It sounds like a “fair and balanced” approach.  In fact it’s as fair and balanced as Fox News.  The good stuff is already law, only the bad stuff is new. 

The statement starts out well enough: 

All of the heartache in this case related to the adoption and placement decision for all involved mostly [sic] likely could have been avoided if the agency had placed AN with relatives when they first stepped forward.  

Wow; does Sara Gelser Blouin finally get it?  Nope.  For starters, notice how she never actually says what should happen now.  And it’s all downhill from there.  Here’s how the sleight-of-hand begins: 

I plan to introduce legislation that clarifies the need to identify and place with biological relatives early in a case … 

Sounds great right?  Except this is already required under federal law.  Notice how she says her bill would merely “clarify” things.  Then comes the hammer: 

…and to prioritize placement with long term foster parents if a child has been in the continuous care of the foster parents for more than 12 consecutive months prior to the child becoming free for adoption. This is consistent with the law in other states. 

Well – two other states anyway.  Those laws are the brainchild of a foster and adoptive parent who used to run the far-right Goldwater Institute (until she was reportedly ousted by the Institute’s board).  At Goldwater, she spearheaded their ongoing efforts to get the Supreme Court to overturn the most progressive, anti-racist child welfare law in America, the Indian Child Welfare Act. 

She’s been promoting bills like the one Gelser plans to introduce.  Those laws make it harder for relatives to gain custody. 

Consider the law in Georgia: Under that law, courts need merely “consider” whether the state’s family policing agency – a more accurate term than “child welfare agency” - did enough to find relatives.  But whether they did or not, the court still is freed, indeed encouraged to give preference to stranger-care parents if the child has been living with them for 12 months.  And a specific preference for relatives in prior law was repealed. 

That’s only the beginning.  The Georgia law merely requires the state family policing agency to search for relatives – again, as federal law also already requires.  It doesn’t stop the state from imposing all sorts of requirements on the relatives involving middle-class creature comforts that poor people often find it impossible to complete.  Or the agency can simply stall and stall and stall for 12 months. 

The Nishimotos say they came forward immediately.  There’s nothing in Gelser’s statement to indicate her bill will require Oregon DHS to do anything differently in such cases in the future, whereas after the 12 months pass, no matter why those 12 months passed, the agency and the courts will be instructed to prioritize placement with the stranger-care parents.  Thus, were Gelser’s proposed law in effect now, it would be even harder for the Nishimotos to gain custody of their niece. 

The 12-month time limit is arbitrary, capricious and cruel for other reasons.  What if relatives are simply too hard to locate right away?  What if, despite agency efforts relatives don’t find out about a child until after 12 months? 

At long last, child welfare is waking up to the enormous harm of arbitrary timelines - how they needlessly tear apart thousands of overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite families and put paper "permanence" over relational  permanence. Even the American Bar Association says so. But leave it to Sara Gelser Blouin to want to impose additional timelines on those same families.

The real reason for laws like the one Blouin wants, and the real reason stranger-care parents playing the bonding card is so appealing to so many is the reason behind every injustice in family policing: Stranger-care parents typically are white and middle-class. The families from whom children are taken and their relatives are more likely to be neither – so they are viewed as expendable. 

This week, Sixto Cancel, who grew up in foster care and founded Think of Us gave an interview to Youth Today.  He talked about the urgent need to make it easier, not harder, for extended family members to take in children.  At the end of the interview he was asked: “If you had a magic wand, and you could do one fix on the child welfare system right now, what would it be?” 

He replied: 

I would go ahead and ensure that kin were able to take in their relatives without going through an exhaustive and intrusive process of getting licensed.  

Oregon’s foster children would be far better off if Senator Soundbite stopped taking her cues from people with ties to the Trump Administration and the Goldwater Institute and started listening to young people with lived experience such as Sixto Cancel.

Great news – Oregon "child welfare" attains mediocrity!

Now, let’s see if Senator Soundbite tries to undermine the progress 

The Oregonian has a story about the decline in foster care numbers in that state – and how it’s not due to more child abuse supposedly being hidden due to COVID lockdowns.  On the contrary – what declined during the lockdowns were the false reports and the poverty cases. 

“Even though we had fewer calls, the right calls were coming in and we got to the children who needed us,” the state’s Deputy Director of Child Welfare Practice and Programing, Lacey Andresen, told The Oregonian. 

Indeed, Oregon’s experience is one more debunking of the whole racially-biased “pandemic of child abuse” myth. 

According to the story, Oregon’s family policing agency, the Department of Human Services, is now tearing apart families an average of 208 times a month, down from 250 times a month before the pandemic.  

That is, in fact, real progress – DHS deserves credit for a good start.  But to put it in context, if those figures are accurate it means that Oregon’s rate of removal has declined from well above the national average to – the national average. 

But the national average is, itself, way too high – since there are communities that have brought rates of removal far lower with no compromise of child safety. 

Unfortunately, recent history suggests what will happen next.  Oregon’s Senator Soundbite will undermine it. 

State Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin will find a horror story about a child left in a dangerous home – the same kind of horror story that has been happening all along, even as Oregon tore apart families at a rate far above the national average. 

State Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin

But because rates of removal are declining, precedent suggests Gelser Blouin will rush to scapegoat efforts to keep families together.  Her media acolytes will buy it immediately, and she’ll get lots of free publicity.  That will start a foster-care panic, another surge in needless removals of children.  The increase in removals will, in turn, restart – or accelerate -- the dumping of children into horrible placements.  Then Gelser Blouin will get herself another round of great press deploring the terrible placements – which will be due, in part, to the foster-care panic she helped to start. 

Or maybe she’ll surprise everyone, rise to the occasion, truly put the children first and not do any of that.  It’s just that there’s so much precedent.  You can read all about Gelser Blouin’s track record here and about how she killed Oregon’s “differential response” initiative – even after an independent evaluation found it safe and effective – here.   

So now that there are signs Oregon “child welfare” finally is making progress, two key questions remain: Will they keep it up?  Will they resist any politician’s effort to derail it?

UPDATED: Beware! Beware! Every child in Oregon will be abused!! (If an op-ed column by a bunch of Oregon legislators is to be believed.)

            

The Oregon Sate Capitol in Salem

 

UPDATE: THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL SHARES THE BLAME

            The column below deals with a preposterous number included in an op-ed column written by Oregon state legislators for the Oregonian. They claimed that one in seven children is abused each year.  After we raised the issue with the Oregonian, the Oregonian queried the legislators.  The lawmakers have partially corrected the error – but they still are misleading the public. 

            It turns out the one-in-seven figure doesn’t come from Oregon data (as I had assumed in the original post) and isn’t specific to Oregon. It comes from the Centers for Disease Control, which cited a study that uses extremely broad definitions, has an unintentional undercurrent of racial bias – and was not limited to abuse.

             The legislators have partially corrected their false claim. Now it reads: “One in seven children are believed to experience abuse each year in the U.S., according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control.” 

             But the CDC publication doesn’t say that. The CDC publication states that “Self-report data suggest that at least 1 in 7 children have experienced child abuse and/or neglect in the last year.” [Emphasis added.]

             That, of course, is vital, since the single biggest problem in child welfare is the confusion of poverty with neglect – and one doesn’t need more funding for child advocacy centers to deal with it.  In fact, the money the lawmakers want for more child abuse policing would be better spent ameliorating the worst effects of poverty.

             The CDC claim is based on this study.  The study claims that one in seven children experienced some form of “maltreatment.”  Five percent of respondents experienced any form of physical abuse and another 0.1 percent experienced sexual abuse.  So even assuming the definitions are valid, that’s not one in seven, it’s one in 20.

             And there are problems with definitions. The definition of physical abuse is:

 Not including spanking on (his/her /your) bottom, did a grown-up in (your child’s/your) life hit, beat, kick, or physically hurt (your child/you) in any way?

             That definition includes any “grown up in (your child’s/your) life” not just parents or other adult caretakers.  More problematic: The definition includes a parent slapping a very young child on the hand as he’s about to touch a hot stove.  It includes grabbing a child and leaving a bruise while pulling him apart from another child with whom he’s having a fight.  It includes a scenario in which an angry teenager is letting loose with a string of vile insults aimed at his mother. Dad has had enough and slaps him?  Is that the right thing to do? No.  But would sending in the child abuse police to do an investigation at best and walk out with the child at worst make everything worse? Of course.   

Racial bias in the definition

             And then there’s the unintended racial bias built into this definition. Consider this scenario: A 10-year-old Black youth mouths off at a police officer.  Mom slaps him. Did mom abuse that child or, perhaps, save his life? – because if you’re a Black child mouthing off to a police officer can Get. You. Killed.  The study definition makes mom a child abuser. I’d say she’s a child rescuer.  But whatever you might say, we can all agree: While middle class parents never face this dilemma.

             As for the definition of neglect, have a look:

 When someone is neglected, it means that the grown-ups in their life didn’t take care of them the way they should. They might not get them enough food, take them to the doctor when they are sick, or make sure they have a safe place to stay. At any time in (your child’s/your) life, (was your child/were you) neglected?

             That’s a perfect definition of poverty.    

            So to sum up: A study with unintended racial bias and overly broad definitions is badly summarized by the Centers for Disease Control.  Then a bunch of fearmongering state legislators inaccurately summarize the CDC summary.

 And that’s how we wind up with a child welfare system that fails everyone.

How is it possible that so many politicians, and so many journalists, have accepted without question a fundamentally racist narrative about child welfare and COVID-19?  The narrative is the one filled with breathless claims to the effect of: Now that fewer mostly white middle class professionals have their “eyes” constantly on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children, their parents will unleash upon their children a “pandemic of child abuse”?

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

             The myth continues to spread, even after news organizations such as the Associated Press, The Marshall Project and Bloomberg CityLab debunked it.

             

The myth persists in part because racism goes far deeper than a lot of us white people will acknowledge, especially those of us on the political Left (which, sadly, has been the source of much of this mythology).  But also it’s because a whole “child advocacy” industry has spent decades spreading hype and hysteria to the point where most people may well believe that most other people are child abusers (at least if the “other” is not the same race or class).  For a master class in how to distort data and leave this kind of misimpression check out how Garrett Therolf did it last week in The New York Times.

             But a week ago, we got a dramatic indication of just how effective decades of this mythology has been in worming its way into our collective psyche.

             The lesson comes from a group of Oregon state legislators in an op-ed column that somehow got into the state’s largest newspaper, the Oregonian.

             Mostly it was just the usual fearmongering, with scare numbers put forth to get more funding for child abuse policing; in this case for so-called child advocacy centers.  But here’s what set this one apart.

             The column claims that “One in seven children will experience abuse each year …”  Really? One in seven each year? So, uh, what happens after seven years?  Is every child in Oregon abused by then?  What about after 14 years? Has every child been abused twice?

             Of course, the column doesn’t claim the abuse is distributed evenly.  Presumably, the authors figured some children would be abused many times.  But even then, were it really true that one in seven Oregon children is abused each year, after 18 years that almost certainly would cover every child in Oregon.

             In fact, according to the same Oregon document cited in the op-ed, 13,674 children were alleged by caseworkers to have been maltreated in some way in 2019.   Although the op-ed uses the word “confirmed” that misleading term is part of the hype. “Confirmed” doesn’t mean there was a trial or any decision by a neutral arbiter.  “Confirmed” can be nothing more than a caseworker’s guess.  And the figure includes everything from the tiny fraction of cases involving torture, rape and murder, to the vastly larger number of cases in which a worker confused a family’s poverty with neglect.

             But, just for argument’s sake, let’s assume every one of those 13,674 children really was a victim of “child abuse.” There are 873,567 children in Oregon. So the figure does not represent one in seven, it represents one in 64. The figure for cases where workers allege sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse is one in 392. The figure for child abuse fatalities is one in 38,111.

             But even without knowing the exact number, it should have been obvious immediately that the one-in-seven figure was lunacy. 

             Two Oregon state legislators, Democrat Anna Williams and Republican Ron Noble are listed as authors of the op-ed.  Apparently, at no time during the writing and editing did they say “Hey, wait a minute, this can’t be right.”  Nine other Oregon solons signed on.  Presumably they, or at least someone on each of their staffs, read the thing before they put their names on it. But apparently none of them thought there was anything odd about the one-in-seven claim.  No editor at the Oregonian saw a problem either. 

 Actually we DO need to “quibble about numbers.”

             When those pushing for more policing of the poor, more massive surveillance and more removal of children to foster care get caught hyping the numbers, they have a standard response. Usually it’s some variation on: “How dare you quibble about numbers! Children are dying!  Even one case is too many!”

             The second two sentences are, of course, correct.  But precisely because we’ve been suckered by fearmongering, hype and hysteria for decades (at least one organization responsible for it effectively admitted as much) we’ve spent decades embracing “solutions” that only make things worse.

             Thus, we wound up with a massive system of mandatory child abuse reporting. Recent research shows it discourages families from seeking voluntary help and overloads the system with false reports, making it harder to find the very few cases in which children are in real danger.  Mandatory reporting is a system that is relentlessly promoted but is useless at best and dangerous at worst.  Mandatory reporting is the hydroxychloroquine of child welfare. 

             Yes, I did say very few cases in which children are in real danger. The horror stories represent a tiny fraction of the cases seen by workers for Oregon’s Department of Human Services.  To get that tiny fraction down to zero requires a vastly different approach than an ever-expanding child welfare surveillance state, and tearing apart families at a rate well above the national average – a hallmark of the Oregon system for decades.

             The Oregon Secretary of State’s office made that clear in a recent audit. Unfortunately, instead of heeding the message from that audit, the authors of this column call for the usual: More money for an arm of the child abuse police. That money would be far better spent on voluntary help for families – delivered by people who are not mandated reporters of child abuse, so families don’t need to fear accepting the help.

             So yes, we damn well do need to “quibble about numbers.” 

 Where did the one-in-seven number come from? (Now we know. See the UPDATE at the top of this post)

             It’s possible that the one-in-seven figure came from confusing any and all calls to Oregon’s child abuse hotline with the vastly lower number in which workers checked the box on the form indicating they believed the allegation to be true.  [UPDATE: That was not the source, see the update at the top of this post for a full discussion.]  There were 89,451 reports to the hotline.  Since some percentage of reports will involve more than one child, it is quite possible that one in seven Oregon children is the subject of a call to Oregon’s child abuse hotline every year.

             That is a frightening figure, but not for the reasons suggested in the op-ed. 

             Nationwide, of every 100 calls to hotlines, 97 are either false reports or “neglect” cases, which, as noted above, often means simply that a child is poor. Both nationwide and in Oregon, every 100 such calls three involve cases in which workers think there was sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse.

            That means a staggering number of Oregon children are being traumatized by investigations of false child abuse reports.  And yes, traumatized is the right word. A child abuse investigation is not a benign act.

 Investigators for agencies like Oregon DHS have more power than police. Their approach can best be called “knock and strip.” Effectively, they can enter homes and stripsearch children without a warrant. Say no, and they can come back with the police and even break down the door.  Worst case: worker walks out with y the children on-the-spot.

  Even when the entry, and the final result, is less drastic, the terror of the investigation is something a child may never forget.  It can leave children fearful for years, wondering if the stranger who stripped them will be back someday – and if next time, they’ll take her or him away; something more likely to happen in Oregon than in much of the rest of the country.

It appears that, in a single year, roughly one in seven Oregon children will endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation – compared with between one in nine and one in ten children nationwide.  So how many will endure it over the course of their childhoods?  One study estimates that nationwide, one-third of all children and more than half of Black children will endure it. In Oregon the numbers probably are worse.

 An even if you believe the infliction of so much state sanctioned trauma is worth it to find the few children in real danger, remember: It doesn’t work. In fact, overloading workers with all those false allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases leaves them less time to find children in real danger.  And now we can add one more danger: The risk of spreading coronavirus to families and caseworkers alike.

How do we break the cycle? How do we spare children this trauma – and redirect resources to finding the few children in real danger who really need to be rescued?  For starters, journalists could begin questioning absurd misuse of data – and holding the fearmongers to account.