A reminder: The horror stories go in ALL directions

 Several years ago, I made an offer to America’s latter-day “child savers” – the term their 19^th Century counterparts proudly gave themselves as they tore impoverished immigrant children from, their parents: I suggested a mutual moratorium on using horror stories to influence policy. 

I knew they’d never take me up on it.  Because when it comes to advocating for a take-the-child-and-run approach, horror stories are all they’ve got.  The actual evidence of the inherent harm of foster care and the high rate of abuse in foster care is so overwhelming, that all they can do is try to distract us with horror stories. 

But that only further overloads the system with false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which poverty is confused with neglect – so workers have even less time to find those very rare cases that will become the next horror story. 

Whether the target is impoverished immigrant children as it was in the 19^th Century or Black and Native American children as it’s been forever, a system built on extrapolating from horror stories makes all children less safe. 

But as long as the child savers insist on regurgitating horror stories because they have nothing else, those of us who have the evidence on our side can’t unilaterally disarm. 

So here’s a reminder: The horror stories go in all directions.  These stories appeared just in March and April of 2023: 

● In San Diego, KNSD-TV reports, 

A San Diego mother filed a $10 million wrongful death claim against the county last month, saying Child Welfare Services failed her 11-year-old biological daughter, Aarabella McCormack, who died in the hospital last August. Prosecutors say she was severely malnourished, weighing just 48 pounds at the time. They also say her body was covered in bruises and doctors found 15 still-healing bone fractures. 

The mother says Arabella was taken because she’s witnessed domestic violence, a tragically common reason for wrongful removal.  She was placed with foster parents who adopted her.

Prosecutors say Aarabella’s adoptive grandmother, adoptive grandfather and adoptive mother worked together to torture and physically abuse Aarabella and her two surviving sisters, ages 7 and 6. They say the children were hit with paddles and sticks, deprived of food and water, isolated in their rooms, denied access to bathrooms and forced to participate in rigorous exercises. 

● In New York City, WNBC-TV reports: 

A 34-year-old Bronx man was arrested on a bevy of charges when two children -- a 14-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy -- were found badly bruised inside his apartment earlier this week, authorities say, after they were allegedly held captive for months while being starved and even pistol whipped. … 

According to the criminal complaint, the 14-year-old girl told police that [Michael] Ramos would threaten them and hold a pistol to their heads. The 13-year-old boy was severely underweight, with swollen eyes and bruises.

"The defendant used a fork to jab [the girl] on the right side of her face and knees, causing bleeding puncture wounds and small lacerations to the right side of her face and knees," the complaint alleges. "On more than one occasion, the defendant struck [the girl and the boy] repeatedly about the head and various parts of their body with a wooden bat, a metal bat, a black tension rod, and an electrical cord."

And The New York Post added this detail:

Ramos allegedly taunted the siblings with the weapon, holding it to their heads and saying, “Someone is going to die today.”

“Do you want to die today?” he allegedly told them. “Open your mouth!”

● In Ohio, the Lima News reports, investigators repeatedly ignored allegations of abuse against a foster parent.  When a 12-year-old boy says the foster parent sexually assaulted him, administrators went on the offensive – against the child.  From the story: 

“I just can’t believe a search warrant is being considered off solely what (redacted) is reporting knowing his past,” Brent Bunke, a former program administrator who oversaw the agency’s adoption and foster care division, wrote in a text message to colleagues, according to messages recovered by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

 “If they find out (redacted) is lying I hope they charge his little (expletive) for this (expletive),” Staci Nichols, a fellow program administrator from the agency’s intake division who has since resigned, wrote in another text message that evening.

 The boy wasn’t lying. The foster parent was sentenced to 94 years in jail.

 ● In Clearwater Florida, WFTS-TV reports

 A new lawsuit describes claims of mental, physical, and sexual abuse against boys under the care of Clearwater foster parents that date back to 1997.

 Close to a dozen agencies that are tasked with keeping children safe are named as defendants in the lawsuit. … [P]laintiffs in the lawsuit report little to eat, manual labor from sun up to sun down, and what they thought was only happening to them, sexual abuse by their foster father. …

 Twenty men and children shared stories about the abuse they endured in the foster home dating back to 1997.

 ● In Nevada, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports on still another litany of horrors alleged at still another “residential treatment center” a place called “Never Give Up.”  From the story:

 In October, the Department of Justice released a report finding that … the state relies on segregated institutional settings such as hospitals or residential treatment facilities and does not provide adequate community-based services.

 The report does not mention Never Give Up, but it paints many of the critiques of the private facility as institutional, statewide problems.

 And recall what the top official of the Devereux McTreatment chain said when the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed abuse at their facilities:

 “This is not an aberration that happens at Devereux because of some kind of lack of control or structure.  This is an industry-wide problem."

● A lawsuit accused a politically-connected Indiana “residential treatment center” of being rife with sexual abuse.  As the Indianapolis Star reports: 

A psychologist’s report prepared for the lawsuit said [the center] “showed deliberate indifference” to the rampant sexual abuse of young boys, interfered with the ability of residents and staff to report to DCS, and “emboldened sexual predators.” 

The center denied the charges and the lawsuit was settled.  But the center wasn’t done.  They pushed for a state law granting them immunity from future lawsuits.  Fortunately, as a result of the Star's revelations, the bill was withdrawn. 

 ● The Altoona Mirror reports on the case of three children needlessly taken from their families and placed with foster parents who ultimately were jailed for abusing them.  According to a civil suit, the foster parents;

 – Used racial slurs in referring to the three children, who are African-American.

– Beat the children.

– Would force the youths to stand against a wall for hours.

– Would allow the children to be bitten by dogs.

– Told the children their parents were dead.

--Threatened physical punishment for eating food unless it was approved by the adoptive parents. 

None of this stopped the family police from proceeding full speed ahead with terminating parental rights and allowing the abusive foster parents to adopt the children. 

 As the Mirror reports:

 According to the lawsuit, despite the arrest, the children still remained in the foster care system until they became of adult age.

 At that point, each of the (children) reunited with their families and “have been welcomed home and receive the love and support from which they had been deprived for the majority of their lives,” the lawsuit concluded. 

Anyone talking about child welfare who wants you to believe the number discussed below can’t be trusted

That’s because independent researchers report vastly higher rates of abuse in foster care than shown in the figures used by foster-care apologists - figures that involve agencies investigating themselves. 

Suppose, hypothetically, you could gather 400 former foster children in a room.  Then suppose you asked them this question: During the last full year you were in foster care, how many of you were abused or neglected?

Who seriously believes that, in that scenario, only one of those former foster children would raise her or his hand?

Right.  Probably no one.

And yet twice in just the past couple of days, a version of that claim has turned up.  No, I’m not going to link to it, any more than I would spread claims from Donald Trump’s tweets.

But in both cases, the authors seriously suggested we believe that only one-quarter-of-one percent of foster children are abused each year – one in 400.

They didn’t pull this number out of a hat.  But they did something just as unreliable. They cited the average that states report to the federal government.  But these official figures represent the state investigating whether there is abuse in homes and institutions to which the state itself forced the child to live in the first place.  That creates a clear incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file.  The fact that finding abuse also means finding a new placement for the child creates still another perverse incentive.

And, of course, agencies usually are investigating allegations of abuse in foster care while the children are still in the foster home or institution.  This is likely to produce results about as reliable as a POW video in which the prisoners assure the Red Cross they’re being well treated.

All that helps explain why, when independent researchers examine case records and question foster care alumni – who can speak more freely -- their studies keep finding abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes.  The record for group homes and institutions is even worse.  You’ll find the details here – including discussion of why even these figures probably are underestimates.

This, of course, is in addition to all those studies that directly compare outcomes for foster children to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes – studies that keep finding that the children left in their own homes do better.

And it isn’t just those of us in the Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy who know the one-in-400 figure is absurd.  Even Marcia Lowry, who founded the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights, and who is no friend of family preservation, said this to 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. [Emphasis added.]

The information about the real rate of abuse in foster care, and the limits of official figures, is so basic that anyone who works in child welfare or writes about it really ought to know it.

The claim that only one-quarter-of-one-percent of foster children are abused in foster care each year should be right up there with "cigarettes don't cause cancer" and "we don't know if human activity contributes to climate change" on any list of assertions so absurd that those making them don't deserve to be taken seriously.

And, indeed no one who suggests that the one-quarter-of-one-percent figure is valid should be taken seriously in any child welfare debate. They should be ignored.

If they seriously believe that figure they should be ignored because they’re naïve. If they know better but use the figure anyway, they should be ignored for being disingenuous.

NCCPR in Youth Today: Abuse in foster care: Research vs. the child welfare system's alternative facts

Suppose, hypothetically, you could gather in one room 333 former foster children. Now, suppose you asked how many of them had been abused while in foster care. Does anyone seriously believe that only one of those 333 former foster children would raise her or his hand?

Both common sense and an overwhelming mass of evidence says: Of course not.

But, apparently, Wendy Rickman wants us to believe it. That’s frightening, because Rickman is a high-ranking official in a state child welfare agency. She runs the division of adult, children and family services for the Iowa Department of Human Services (DHS).

Read the full column in Youth Today

Abuse in foster care: The denial runs deep

Here’s the latest foster care horror from Oregon, according to the Oregonian:

Under the watch of the Oregon Department of Human Services, a lawsuit alleges, a young sister and brother were starved so severely by their foster parents and guardians that they weighed the same at ages 4 and 5 as they did at ages 1 and 2.

 Those facts, largely supported by the state’s own examination of the case, are laid out in a complaint filed against the state Thursday. It says the children ended up resembling victims of a famine: their ribs visible, their bellies protruding and their brain development severely affected.

 The suit says caseworkers and their supervisors and managers overlooked repeated specific complaints and glaring red flags… A caseworker saw the children less than a month before doctors at Randall Children’s Hospital determined they were suffering from chronic starvation, but the caseworker did nothing.

That story comes on top of this one, and this one. That’s just Oregon. A federal judge in Texas found rampant abuse in foster care. And in just the past week, there was this from New York and this from Utah.

Of course, there are plenty of horror stories about how children are treated by their own parents. In fact, the current child welfare system was largely built on such stories. When anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data.

But not in the highly-selective way Marie Cohen chose to do so in a recent column published by The Chronicle of Social Change.

She wrote that “State data compiled by the federal government show that the proportion of children in foster care who were the subject of substantiated maltreatment in foster care ranged from 0 to 1.34 percent.”

But the figures she cites come from child welfare agencies’ own investigations of abuse in foster care. For reasons that should be obvious, in such cases agencies have a strong incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file.

If the figures Cohen cites are to be believed, there are three states – Delaware, Vermont and New Hampshire – where absolutely no children at all were abused or neglected in foster care in 2014. New Hampshire has made that claim for five years in a row. Seriously?

Texas claims that fewer than one-third of 1 percent of foster children were abused in foster care in 2014. In other words, if 300 former foster children were gathered in a room and asked, “How many of you were abused over the course of a year?” only one would raise his or her hand.

That’s not what the judge found.

And in Oregon, which claims that fewer than three-quarters of 1 percent of foster children were abused, state law apparently sets a higher standard for substantiating abuse if a foster parent or institution staff are accused than if the accused is a birth parent.

In contrast, research has revealed alarming rates of abuse in foster care. One independent study after another has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, and the rate in group homes and institutions is even higher. And for reasons related to study methodology explained here, even those figures almost certainly are underestimates.

In response, Cohen abandons the fiction of the official figures and simply tells us the homes from which the children were removed must be even worse because the children were removed from those homes. But just because a caseworker says a home was abusive or neglectful doesn’t make it so – particularly since poverty itself often is confused with “neglect.”

Her argument also presupposes that no intervention other than foster care could prevent recurrence of abuse in the cases in which children were removed. But the real question is: How does the rate of abuse in foster care compare to what would happen if families simply got the help they needed?

It’s not hard to answer, considering that even when families don’t necessarily get the help, foster care often is a worse option. There are two massive studies involving 15,000 typical cases in which the researcher made exactly the sort of comparison Cohen demands: What happens to children placed in foster care and left in their own homes, in the same types of cases?

The children left in their own homes typically do better – and that’s even when the families did not necessarily get any help.

None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. But foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses. Cohen wants to further increase the dose. I prefer less toxic options.

Foster care in America: Child abandonment, Casey-style, part one

New Casey initiative is was silent on wrongful removal, racial bias in child welfare.


UPDATE: 12:30PM Casey breaks its silence on keeping families together, amends press release (but  doesn't let on it's amended)

            The Annie E. Casey Foundation (a former funder of NCCPR) sent a disturbing signal last week that it is abandoning any serious effort to stop the  needless removal of children into foster care.  Worse, it is putting in charge of an effort that should be countering stereotypes about family preservation someone who has promoted those very stereotypes. (M0re about that tomorrow.)

            Casey announced creation of something called the State Policy Advocacy and Reform Center (SPARC – get it?) “to enhance the existing network of state child welfare policy advocates working to achieve comprehensive reforms for children and families involved in child welfare systems.”

            But the reform efforts SPARC will “enhance” are anything but comprehensive.  According to the press release in its original form:

SPARC will support a broad range of policy efforts, including permanency for older youth, child-focused adoptive parent recruitment, post-adoption services, educational stability for children in foster care, funding for permanency efforts, eliminating unnecessary delays in court processes, improving legal representation for children and families involved in the child welfare system, better regulation of psychotropic medications for children in foster care, reducing institutional placement of children, and customized services for immigrant children and their families.


UPDATE, 12:30PM: Responding to pressure from NCCPR (there've been lots of "hits" on this post from Casey Foundation websites this morning) Casey revised the press release.  The new first sentence includes the words "strengthening families to safely prevent removing children from their homes."


The problem of course, is that this means only that, for those behind this project, family preservation is, literally, an afterthought.  There still is no mention of family reunification, or fighting racial bias.


And the date on the release remains the same - Casey gives no clue the release was changed.

            Anybody see anything missing in that list?  The trade journal Youth Today spotted it immediately.  According to their story:

The interests of SPARC focus mostly on youths who have already been removed from their families and placed in foster care.

            Mostly?  How about 99.99 percent.  There is barely a word about working to prevent children from being torn needlessly from everyone they know and love in the first place.  And while there is plenty about adoption on SPARC’s list, there is not a word about doing a better job of reunifying families.  (In addition to the obvious references to adoption “eliminating unnecessary delays in court processes” is code for “rush to terminate parental rights.”)

CASEY’S UNFORTUNATE NEW DIRECTION

            I’ve had the sense Casey was moving in the direction of abandoning family preservation and pushing only adoption and making foster care “better” at least since Patrick McCarthy succeeded Doug Nelson as CEO more than a year ago.

Casey continues to do good work reducing the use of the worst form of care, group homes and institutions, but SPARC’s priorities make clear the Foundation thinks reducing entries into care from more than 300,000 per year to the current 254,000 per year is enough.

            In fact, evidence from the states doing the best job of safely keeping children out of foster care suggests that far more can be done, and tens of thousands of children continue to be traumatized by needless foster care every year.

            SPARC’s priorities also confirm that Casey’s goal is permanence for children – regardless of how it is accomplished.  Permanence is, indeed, among the most noble goals in child welfare. But it also signals that Casey doesn’t much care how permanence is achieved – and might even prefer getting more kids into those nice middle-class adoptive homes rather than sending them back to the poor but loving homes from which most of them were taken.

            The only hint of even the slightest interest in keeping families together are the words “and families” at the end of the item on legal representation and the section concerning immigrant children.

            Also notably absent: anything about combating the racial bias that permeates American child welfare.

            Casey priorities also are clear in its choice of partners for this effort.  They’ve included the best of the adoption advocacy groups, a group which also has led the fight against orphanages.  Their inclusion is reasonable.  But there is no organization supporting family preservation.  Even a longtime previous Casey partner, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, which has been a leader both on family preservation and racial bias issues, is absent.

            So when Casey writes that SPARC  “will also target assistance for ‘big wins’ — helping a few states gain significant achievements that could inspire policy change on a national scale” it’s not hard to guess what those will be. Probably things like getting another state to extend foster care to age 21.  There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact it makes sense.  Real parents generally don’t abandon their children at age 18; the state shouldn’t either.

            But as is discussed in our most recent Blog at Youth Today, new research suggests severe limits to how much this actually accomplishes in improving the dismal outcomes for foster youth “aging out” of the system.  It would make far more sense to put at least some of the billions expended on this into stopping so many children from ever aging in.  But that is not on SPARC’s agenda.

            Even worse is who Casey chose to head up this effort – someone who just last month saw the kind of journalism that often can set off a foster care panic and tried to throw a little gasoline on the fire.  That’s not the kind of “SPARC” that child welfare needs.

            That story tomorrow.

Child abuse at Penn State: Jerry Sandusky, foster parent

            Given the mad rush to tell anyone and everyone to report anything and everything as “child abuse” – or maybe even force us all to do it – this seemed like a good time to remember the ultimate consequence: foster care.

            With everyone running scared, there will be a lot more reporting of all kinds of “child abuse” – including “neglect,” which so often is confused with poverty.  In fact, calls to state child abuse hotlines already have spiked, not only in Pennsylvania but also New York and New Jersey.

            That means more children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love because they are poor, as in this case from Houston.  It also means more children needlessly consigned to foster care just because caseworkers are afraid to do anything else.

            The majority of foster parents do the best they can for the children in their care, like the overwhelming majority of parents, period.  Some foster parents are true heroes.  But one study after another has found abuse in one-quarter to one third of foster homes, and the record of group homes and institutions is even worse.

            Oddly, however, in all the hundreds of stories written about Jerry Sandusky two facts rarely are mentioned, and almost never get much emphasis:

            ● Jerry Sandusky was a foster parent.

            ● Jerry Sandusky’s charity began as a group home.

            So if Jerry Sandusky is guilty that should give us all something to think about:

Before we support laws turning everyone into a mandated reporter who risks going to jail if we don’t call a hotline whenever we think someone just might be abusing or neglecting a child, do we really want to put more children at risk of being placed with the next Jerry Sandusky?

Foster care in America: New video has the stories ABC News won’t show you

Did you see that program about fairy tales on ABC?

No, not Once Upon a Time.  On this fairy tale program the evil sorcerers dispense needless psychiatric medication to foster children – and on that point the program is on the mark.

But the wicked witches and other villains almost always are children’s parents.  The knights in shining armor and prince and princess charmings are always foster parents or adoptive parents – or they run residential treatment centers.  And while the villains come in all colors, the heroes are always “snow white.”

I am referring, of course, to ABC News' latest program about foster care and exercise in child exploitation.  Our full response is on our website here.

Fortunately, another video was just released that tells the stories ABC News systematically left out, in its current program and so often in the past.  It’s not quite as slick as the ABC News program – but it’s a lot more real.  It’s from the Brooklyn Family Defense Project:

BFDP Fall Benefit Video, 11/17/11 from brooklyn family defense project on Vimeo.

On our Blog at Youth Today: Foster care in America: It’s not the recession, it’s the RESPONSE to the recession

The long decline in the number of children in foster care on any given day is slowing way down.  And the decline in the number of children taken  away over the course of a year stopped entirely in 2010.

America’s latter-day “child savers” will claim, almost gleefully, that this is a result of the recession supposedly causing more child abuse.

But it’s not.  The real reason is discussed on our Blog at the trade journal Youth Today.


And on Monday: A major magazine article reveals the failed legacy of a child welfare agency leader.

Foster care in Michigan: CR makes its indifference to families perfectly clear

            According to a new statement from the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights

 … the overarching aim of the [Michigan] reform campaign holds true — permanent, stable families for older youth; enhanced services for teens aging out of the system without a permanent family in place; increased adoptions for all kids. 

            Notice anything missing?

            To hear what CR forgot about, listen to NCCPR’s take on WDET Public Radio.

On our Blog at Youth Today: How "risk assessment" puts kids at risk

Every year or so, the child welfare community finds a new way to prove the adage “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

It works this way. Researchers publish a study or some committee (Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commission) issues a report which determines that “X” is a risk factor for child abuse. In other words, if someone who is an “X” or has “X” or does “X” is in the home, that person is more likely to abuse a child.

Having been officially deemed a risk factor, “X” then makes it onto various “checklists” and “risk assessment” forms that child protective services workers take with them when they investigate an allegation of alleged child maltreatment.

If a parent has too many risk factors, the CPS worker may well walk out with the child – not because the child has been abused but because the “risk factors” supposedly tell us the child might be abused sometime in the future. It’s a bit like the science fiction movie Minority Report, in which people are arrested for crimes they haven’t yet committed based on predictions of three psychics in an oversize bathtub – only the psychics in the movie were more accurate.


Continued on NCCPR's monthly Blog at Youth Today

Foster care in America: Then and now

My daughter found this on YouTube.  It's from the 1927 Clara Bow film "It"

If anyone wants to see the rest of the film, it's available here thanks to a YouTube user who goes by the name "Silver Light Special"

Lighting a candle for institutionalized children

            For the second year in a row, Lumos, the British charity that works to get children out of orphanages in Eastern Europe is commemorating International Children’s Day with an ingenious campaign to raise funds and illustrate their plight – a campaign I wish would gain traction here.  Details are in our post from a year ago.


TOMORROW: The head of the New York City child welfare agency breaks a promise.  Meet some of the children hurt as a result.

Foster care in Texas: This time seeing is believing

Some of the best child welfare reporting anywhere in the country is being done by Randy Wallace at KRIV-TV, Fox26 in Houston.  There was a fine example on May 19.  But I’m not sure my telling you that will be enough to get you to click on the link to this latest story, about a child who never should have been taken from her parents.

So allow me to show you two stills from the video of the Fox26 report.  This is a picture of the three-year-old child at the center of the story before Child Protective Services took her away:

This is the same child, six months later, after CPS tore her from her parents, moved her from foster home to foster home and doped her up on psychiatric medication:

If you want to know what happened; if you want to know how this child ever wound up in foster care, and if you want to know why, even though she's home now, CPS wants to take her again - forever - click here.

They can’t fix foster care – but they sure have mastered doublethink

           One of the most, uh, remarkable things about Marcia Lowry and her colleagues at the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” (CR) is their mastery of doublethink – the term George Orwell invented to describe “the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.”

            CR’s skill at doublethink is now on display in a series of reports and press releases about Oklahoma, where they’ve brought one of their class-action McLawsuits.

            In a previous post to this Blog, I noted that CR had issued a scathing report on the widespread abuse of children in Oklahoma foster care.  The problem, I said, was that CR isn’t lifting a finger to actually keep Oklahoma children out of foster care.

            Turns out I underestimated CR’s capacity for doublethink.  Now they’ve put out another press release about still another report.  Among the complaints this time: Oklahoma supposedly has gone too much to reduce the number of children in the very system CR itself says is a grave danger to those children.

            The report is written by Viola Miller, an odd choice given her mediocre record running child welfare systems in Kentucky and Tennessee.  Her report appears to be based in no small measure on reading other reports commissioned by CR.

            Miller agrees with what those other experts said about Oklahoma foster care.  She concludes that children are being harmed at an “alarmingly high rate” and until DHS cleans up its act, “the children in its care will continue to live in danger.”

            Then, in the very next paragraph, Miller launches into an attack on DHS for its success in getting more children out of this abysmal system.  Miller condemns DHS for using “differential response” an approach that now is used in many other states.  Every independent evaluation done of differential response shows it does not compromise safety; some have shown that child safety improves.

            And what evidence does Miller have that differential response is unsafe in Oklahoma?  The fact that it’s working.  Miller complains that the number of children in Oklahoma foster care is dropping too quickly.

            But that ignores one key fact: Oklahoma started out with, proportionately, vastly more children in foster care on any given day than the national average, and a vastly higher number of children taken away over the course of a year.  Even with the reductions in recent years – the very reductions Miller says have come too quickly – Oklahoma still tears apart families at a rate 40 percent above the national average and the number of children in foster care on any given day remains 50 percent above the national average.

            That means Oklahoma simply had vastly more cases that could suitably be diverted to differential response, and a sharp decline in the foster care population makes sense.

            Miller’s other “evidence” of a problem is that DHS offers voluntary safety plans to families who are assessed using differential response.  But that’s exactly what DHS is supposed to do.  That’s the whole point of differential response – in cases where the risk is believed to be low, you go out and offer voluntary help, not a coercive investigation.  What Miller appears to be arguing for is perverting differential response into child abuse investigations by another name.

ERRORS IN ALL DIRECTIONS

            There is, in fact, a case to be made for the possibility that DHS is not doing differential response as well as it should – but not based on the reasons Miller suggests.

People often point to horror stories about children dying in their own homes when they are “known to the system” as supposedly proving that the only error made by child welfare agencies is to leave the children in dangerous homes.  I usually reply by saying, among other things, that child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and cruel; they err in all directions.  Indeed, it makes no sense to think the errors go only way.

            But that also means a system that has screwed up foster care as royally as Oklahoma DHS has done is bound to be having problems getting alternatives right as well.  And, in fact, Miller found contradictions in various manuals for implementing differential response and responding to hotline calls.  That raises legitimate cause for concern.

            But nothing in Miller’s report suggests that the problems with differential response come anywhere near the scope and severity of the problems with foster care; nothing justifies any notion that there is equal danger.

            The credibility of Miller’s claims about differential response are further undermined because they are part of a pattern of CR seeking to undermine almost anything in almost any state that doesn’t involve subjecting every family to a full-scale child abuse investigation and traumatizing children with needless foster care.  CR also is going after differential response in Georgia, despite significant evidence that the Georgia program does not compromise safety.

            And back when Miller herself still was running the system in Tennessee, CR successfully bullied the Tennessee legislature into repealing a law that would have brought just a little bit of balance to the incentives judges face when making decisions about whether to remove children from their homes.

            A lot of this boils down to the whole bureaucratic mindset at CR.  Sure, foster care in Oklahoma is horrible for kids’ psyches and puts them in grave physical danger, but, they seem to believe, we’ll fix it – we’ll hire lots more workers and give them lots more bureaucratic forms and checklists and “training” and then everything will be fine.  And while we’re fixing foster care, we’ll just keep shoveling more kids into it and opposing efforts to divert kids to better options.

            Lowry likes to say that she doesn't know how to fix poverty, but she knows how to fix foster care. In fact, the results of her lawsuits suggest she doesn't know how to fix either one – and her efforts sometimes make the poverty worse.

            But even were it true, as Miller suggests, that the problems in Oklahoma foster care and Oklahoma’s efforts to avoid foster care are equivalent, that still raises a fundamental question: 

Miller writes that “children in Oklahoma are facing serious risk of harm both before and after they enter state custody.”

In that case, by tearing these children away from their families at a rate 40 percent above the national average, you accomplish exactly what?

Not OK: CR’s double standards for measuring abuse in foster care

The group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR) has put out a press release concerning a report it commissioned from an outside expert, John Goad, concerning foster care in Oklahoma.

The findings are indeed horrifying.  They suggest a pattern of willful blindness to widespread abuse in substitute care in Oklahoma, especially in group homes and institutions.

For some reason, one division of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services investigates abuse in family foster homes while another, known as the Office of Client Advocacy (OCA) investigates it in group homes and institutions. 

That latter division, in particular, is the Keystone Kops of child welfare, according to the report.  According to CR’s press release, these “investigators”

do not specialize in child welfare or receive adequate training on how to investigate abuse or neglect. Investigations of harm in institutions and group homes “lack any sense of urgency, are haphazard, and superficial,” wrote Goad. “OCA’s failure to conduct even marginally adequate child protection investigations for this vulnerable population is far outside any reasonable standard.”

While it’s always good to have anyone point out the severe risk of abuse in foster care, as so often happens when it comes from CR, the press release leaves that strong, bitter aftertaste of hypocrisy.

That’s because there is not one word in CR’s lawsuit about the problem at the heart of so much abuse in foster care: Too much foster care.

Oklahoma takes away children at a rate 40 percent above the national average and more than double the rate in states widely recognized as, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe.  The more children you take needlessly the greater the temptation to misuse and overuse group homes and institutions and lower standards for foster homes.  States like Oklahoma are begging for beds and beggars can’t be choosers.

So, having concluded that often Oklahoma foster care is hell, CR doesn’t lift a finger to keep more children out of hell in the first place.

But neither the revelations, nor the hypocrisy end there.

A LOWER STANDARD FOR MILWAUKEE

It seems that OCA is on a different computer system from the one that compiles data about everything else in Oklahoma child welfare.  So the abuse OCA does manage to find never gets into the statistics it shares with the public, or the statistics it is required to report to the federal government.

CR’s director, Marcia Lowry (or whoever wrote the quote in the press release for her) declared herself appalled:

“It is appalling to hear DHS rely on numbers it knows to be inaccurate at the same time it is completely ignoring the suffering of an entire group of children in its care.” 

That is indeed appalling.  It’s also appalling to see a group that claims defend these children apply one standard for measuring abuse in foster care in one state and another somewhere else.  Because in this case, CR’s hypocrisy extends all the way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In Milwaukee, CR already has a settlement.  When the agreement first was reached in 2002, NCCPR pointed out in an op ed column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (available in the newspaper’s paid archive) that a key weakness in the settlement was the lack of independent monitoring.  We wrote:

It wasn’t that long ago that …[CR] alleged widespread falsification of case records in Milwaukee.  Yet now, CR proposes to rely on the alleged falsifiers to provide accurate information …

And sure enough, CR is doing just that.  The Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare has examined itself and proclaimed that abuse in foster care is at an all-time low!   And what was CR’s response? No request for independent verification, much less the kind of study done in Oklahoma.  Instead, CR simply took the child welfare agency’s word for it and sang the agency’s praises.  According to the Journal Sentinel, CR attorney Eric Thompson declared that:

"The bureau has made tremendous progress transforming its child welfare system over the last several years improving the basic safety and well-being of the many vulnerable children in its care.”

What accounts for the difference?

Perhaps it’s because CR still is suing in Oklahoma, so they need ammunition.  In Milwaukee they’ve settled and need to show donors they’ve accomplished something.