Our annual call to end child welfare’s public celebration of family executions

Saturday, on “National Adoption Day, who will stop to remember that for some children and some young adults, every mass adoption ceremony, every treacly feature story on the local news is an act of cruelty – ripping the scab off a wound that never fully heals?

 

Termination of parental rights is child welfare's "death penalty."  So why do
some of the very judges who order a family "executed" preside over
public celebrations of the aftermath?   


This post originally was published on November 15, 2020

             There was a time when, as a people, we were so uncivilized that executions were a form of entertainment – a public spectacle to be celebrated. 

In Canada, for example, 

Before they were banned in 1870, executions in public places could draw thousands of spectators, including families and young children. Boisterous behavior and a less-than-solemn attitude marked these macabre gatherings.  “When the day of a public execution arrived, the businessmen closed their factories and their stores and the people put on their holiday dresses,” noted an 1894 article in the Evening Star about hangings in early Toronto.   

The last official state-sanctioned public hanging in the United States drew a crowd of 20,000.  Even then, reporters condemned it as a “carnival.” (I probably don’t even need to mention that the man they hanged was Black.) 

Fortunately, nearly a century later, we have, of course, outgrown such practices. 

Except in "child welfare." 

Termination of parental rights (or, as it should be called, termination of children’s rights to their parents) often is described as child welfare’s death penalty.  It is the prerequisite to any adoption of a child from foster care. 

And every year, all over America, we celebrate these family executions with a joyous public spectacle.  It’s called National Adoption Day.  This year it’s happening on Nov. 22. 

You know the drill. Open the court on a Saturday, bring in ice cream, cake and balloons, finalize foster-child adoptions en masse – and reinforce every stereotype about how the system supposedly “rescues” children from horrible birth parents and places them with vastly superior adoptive parents.  The same judges who are supposed to decide impartially on termination cases often lead these celebrations.

            In 2020, when celebrations still often were virtual due to COVID, organizers of the Los Angeles County event added a particularly macabre 21st Century touch: “A pool camera will be permitted at a pre-selected adoptive family’s home for coverage as the family’s virtual adoption ceremony takes place.”

  The whole spectacle also gets the courts and the local family policing agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare agency”) a guaranteed puff piece in the local newspaper celebrating what is, in reality, the aftermath of an execution.  And, of course, as with those other public executions, a disproportionate share of the families “executed” are Black. 

I’ve previously written that this day should be called National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day – since while "child welfare" systems always piously proclaim that their first goal is to reunify a family they’ve torn apart, the outcome that brings them true joy, the one they celebrate, is when that child, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite, is adopted by someone who often is neither. 

Unlike some of my friends in the family preservation movement, I am not opposed to all absolutely all involuntary adoptions of children taken from their parents.  I am not opposed to absolutely all terminations of parental rights.  On those very rare occasions where this is appropriate, I am not opposed to an adoptive family having a private, quiet celebration.  But each of these things should take place far less often than they do now.

 So in that sense, my previous column was too kind.  It said adoption was sometimes an appropriate second choice after reunification and sometimes the appropriate first choice.  In fact, adoption should be farther down on the list, after not only reunification but also guardianship and perhaps other options as well, such as tribal customary adoption, a practice used by some Native American tribes that might well be adaptable elsewhere.  And while a private celebration is one thing, it should never be a mass public spectacle – it rubs salt into too many open wounds, and not just for parents. 

Prof. Christopher Church, senior director of strategic consulting at Casey Family Programs, has argued that using the term “civil death penalty” to describe the terminations that come before the cake, ice cream and balloons actually understates the trauma to the child.  Horrible as it is to lose a parent to physical death, losing a parent to termination of parental rights can be worse. 

“When a child knows somebody is out there but they have no way of connecting to them, that is ‘ambiguous loss,’” Church said at a recent conference.  “That is a more complex trauma for children than death loss.  … Death is finality and [children] can comprehend that better.” 

Church also reminds us that before the joyous public spectacle there’s sometimes another ceremony, if you can call it that.  It’s called the “goodbye visit.”  Children are told they will never, ever see their parents again, and now they all must say goodbye.  No cake and balloons here; just tears and anguish. 

The children are not always saying goodbye just to their parents.  If one child is adopted and the others are not, the sibling bond is severed forever.  If a parent later has another child whom s/he is allowed to keep, the child who was adopted amid the ice cream and cake may never know that sibling – unless, when they are adults, they find some way to find each other. 

But hey, don’t let that spoil the party. 

I can imagine some readers thinking: But wait. We have to do this, don’t we?  After all, if a case goes to termination of parental rights, the parents must have been the worst of the worst, right? 

Wrong. The termination phase is as arbitrary, capricious and cruel as every other decision-point in child welfare.  As Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan, has written: 

[C]ourts seem to terminate parental rights out of a sense of convenience. A child has been in foster care for 15 months, so let’s terminate. A foster parent prefers to adopt a child, so let’s terminate. A parent hasn’t fully complied with services, so let’s terminate. 

            Still another indication of what’s really behind termination cases can be seen in how different the outcomes are by age.  Among children torn from their parents during their first year of life, only 36% are reunified; 46% are adopted.  Then, year after year, reunification rates inch up almost every year until age 14. Nearly 54% of children taken at age 14 were reunified. 

            So are parents of infants vastly worse than parents of 14-year-olds?  Or do caseworkers have their own rescue fantasies triggered by a child about whom they can gush, “Awwww, he’s so cute!” 

            No, we don’t need adoption and the attendant spectacle of mass public family execution to give children “permanence.”  In fact, we don’t know how often adoption does that.  Child welfare systems don’t like to ask questions to which they don’t want to know the answers, so we don’t know how often, when, say, that cute baby becomes a teenager, the adoptive parents change their minds.  

            But even when the adoption doesn’t fall apart, and even when a child really can’t live safely with her or his own parents, the obsession with adoption still hurts children.  As Prof. Sankaran explains: 

Families, and the relationships within them, are far more enduring and resilient than we want to acknowledge. In our quest for legal permanence, we forget about a child’s need for relational permanence, often defined as a child’s lifelong connection with caring adults. For example, too often, we ratify adoptions with the hope of providing a child with a legally permanent home. But in doing so, we cut off the child’s ability to have permanent relationships with those who have – and will always – matter to him. A mother. A sibling. A grandparent. Hence the countless number of stories of adopted children searching for their kin.

           Other options, such a guardianship, don’t require a child to sacrifice any relationships. 

So this time, when National Adoption Day rolls around, remember that for some children and some young adults every mass adoption ceremony, every treacly feature story on the local news is an act of cruelty – ripping the scab off a wound that never fully heals. 

Again, that doesn’t mean adoption by strangers and termination of parental rights are always wrong.  But it needs to be moved much farther down on the list of options for children.  And while, on rare occasions, we still need to impose child welfare’s death penalty, can’t we at least have the decency to stop celebrating it? 

In child welfare, possession is 9/10 of the law – if you know the loopholes

 

There is so much in this brilliant story by Sandy West in the Texas Observer that it’s hard to know where to start. 

The centerpiece of the story involves representatives of private agencies, sometimes licensed, sometimes not, sometimes nonprofit, sometimes not, suddenly showing up and offering contracts to new mothers, sometimes just days after giving birth. The contracts, may or may not be in a language the mother actually can read. They involve the mother giving temporary custody to someone chosen by the agency.  At least it’s supposed to be temporary. 

But that isn’t the worst of it. 

The worst is how easy it is for middle-class foster parents handed these children to exploit legal loopholes, go into court and say, in effect: “We’re better people than this child’s parents, so we should get to keep the child!” They can do it even when the private agency objects. They can do it even when the state family police agency objects. 

It’s one more example of the ugliest of family policing realities: attempts by those with enough money to step right up and take a poor person’s child for their very own. 

In one of the two cases examined in the story, this happened: 

At the hearing, [Judge] Fisher said the Louisiana couple would be ineligible to sue again for custody based on their time caring for the child while the state sought another placement. 

“If that were the case, I could go kidnap a child from the playground and keep it for six months and then file for adoption,” Fisher said, per the court transcript. “They don’t have permission to have the child, so they don’t have standing.” …

But the Phillipses have continued their efforts to terminate the teen’s parental rights and adopt her daughter ever since, court records show. 

Texas is not even the worst. Many states formally allow foster parents to “intervene” if they’ve had a foster child for long enough, a practice exposed by ProPublica and The New Yorker.  This year, Indiana lawmakers even made this odious practice easier.

The Texas Observer story points to other issues: 

● This is still another form of hidden foster care. Such placements have even less in the way of due process protections than official, openly-acknowledged foster care. And these placements are not counted as entries into care, making a state’s foster care numbers look artificially low. 

This is at least the second form of hidden foster care discovered in Texas. The placements described in the Texas Observer story are in addition to the many so-called “parental child safety placements” in Texas.  Were “parental child safety placements” counted as foster care, which, for all intents and purposes they are, they would nearly triple the number of children reported torn from their parents in Texas every year. 

● This also illustrates the danger of various forms of what should be called sugar-frosted foster care.  That’s when private organizations, such as Safe Families for Children, offer to help impoverished families by finding volunteers to take in their children, as opposed to, say, finding volunteers to help ease their poverty. There is nothing nefarious in it. Those running the program have the best of intentions and they don’t try to trick or coerce anyone. But it’s open to the same sorts of abuses if a volunteer “safe family” decides they want to keep the child for their own and either goes to court or simply calls child protective services.

Forget the ceremonies: In Michigan, every day is Family Destruction Day

At a ceremony to commemorate “Michigan Reunification Day,” Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Megan Cavanagh said: 

Through coordination between courts and child welfare professionals, parents who are struggling and need support in order to reunify with their children are given opportunities in family courts to be met with opportunity, not punishment. 

But the data tell a different story ...

Read the full story in the Michigan Advance 

Points of no return

Here are some of the other states with child welfare systems so rotten that the vast majority of foster children are never allowed to go home.

The previous post to this Blog highlighted Virginia’s dismal distinction: worst in America for allowing foster children ever to return to their own homes. In Virginia, if you’ve been taken away from your parents, odds are nearly three in four you will never be able to return to them – unless you find them again when you’re an adult. 

Virginia’s rate of reunifying families is 27%. The national average is 44% - which itself is dismal. Virginia children are more likely to be torn from their parents forever and handed over, usually to total strangers, to keep through adoption than they are to go back to their own homes.  And Virginia’s contempt for families runs so deep that child welfare agencies will let nearly one in five foster children “age out” with no home at all, rather than exert any real effort to reunify families. 

But while Virginia wins for worst record in the nation, there were plenty of other contenders. Here are some of them: 

● Virginia may not be #1 for long. North Carolina is nearly as bad – only 30% of foster children get to return home.  And right now, North Carolina lawmakers are patting themselves on the back for supposedly passing a major “reform” bill.  While some provisions may be marginally helpful, what may be the most significant will make it even harder to reunify families. 

● Like Virginia, Michigan is triply dismal.  Only 35% of foster children are reunified, while 41% are adopted. And Michigan is another state where the proportion of children who age out with no home at all is nearly double the national average. 

● Much the same can be said for Ohio – except that the adoption percentage is lower. 

● Connecticut did good work in past years in reducing entries into foster care. But lately, there’s been backsliding. In 2023, Connecticut was one of the few states where the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year increased over the previous year, and it was the second-highest increase in the nation. A huge proportion of the children Connecticut took – more than two-thirds -- probably are never going home. Connecticut is another state where the proportion of children exiting to adoption, usually by strangers, is higher than the percentage reunified. 

● There is a similar pattern, though not as bad, in Alabama, another state that saw great progress in past years, but now is backsliding. 

● Texas has made ongoing commendable progress curbing entries.  But here, too, nearly two-thirds of those taken will never go home. And in Texas, nearly as many are adopted as reunified. 

Guardianship is no excuse 

Some of these states, such as Connecticut, may claim their rates of reunification are low because they supposedly place a lot of children in guardianship arrangements with relatives.  Yes, that’s better than adoption by strangers, but: 

● It is not the same thing as being allowed to go home to your own parents.

● The fact that many of these states use formal adoption – which usually means strangers – at a rate nearly as high or higher than reunification suggests they’re not doing enough with guardianships either.

Undermining Black families in Indiana: It's already bad, proposed legislation would make everything even worse

Indiana State Capitol - Photo by Warren LeMay

● If you are a Black child in Indiana, odds are four in five the family police WILL investigate you and your family. A shockingly high proportion of those investigations lead to foster care.  Now some lawmakers want to make it even easier to take you away and keep you away forever. 

● Among other things, they want to let those nice white, middle-class foster parents go to court on their own and try to take you and keep you forever – or at least as long as they feel like it. 

The Context:

The family policing system in Indiana has a number of distinctions – all of them bad.  

● Nationwide, 37% of children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  In Indiana, it’s 58%.  Nationwide, 53% of Black children will have to endure this trauma. In Indiana, it’s 79% - the highest rate in America. 

● It doesn’t stop with the investigation.  Eighteen percent of Black Indiana children will, at some point, be torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care.  That ties Indiana with three other states for the highest rate in America. 

● In any given year, among all children, Indiana takes them from their homes at a rate 66% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

● When going up against this family police juggernaut (a more accurate term than “child welfare system”) families often are almost literally defense-less – because their lawyers often have so little time and so many clients. Many Indiana counties want to keep it that way. One in five actually turns down federal funds to improve representation for parents and also for children. One county court administrator explained that county’s refusal this way: “[T]he system we have works well.” 

None of this is because Indiana is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than the national average.  In fact in Indiana in 2022, 85% of the time, when children were thrown into foster care their parents were not even accused of physical or sexual abuse. Forty percent of the time, there wasn’t even an allegation of drug abuse.

Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.  Indeed, in 17% of cases, Indiana family police admit they took the children because their families lacked adequate housing.

And now, some Indiana lawmakers want to make everything worse, with a bill that would move the family policing system in Indiana even closer to becoming the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own!

The bill:

The bill further stacks the deck against families in so many ways that just a summary listing all its proposed changes in current law – I count at least 40 of them -- runs to two-and-a-half single-spaced pages. Every one of those changes either makes it easier to take children away, harder to return them home or both.

To understand what may be the worst of these provisions, let’s leave the world of the poor – which is, of course, almost the entire world of family policing, and consider a hypothetical from the world of the rich:

Suppose in September you send your son off to boarding school. But when Christmas vacation comes around, he does not return. Instead, you got a letter from a lawyer for your son’s gym coach.

The lawyer explains that your son and the coach have “bonded.” An expert on “attachment theory” they’ve hired concludes it wouldn’t be in your son's "best interests" to return home. Instead, the coach is going to court to adopt your child – because he now has every bit as much right to your child as you do.

Ridiculous right? Well, ridiculous if you’re rich.  But in at least 15 states, if you are poor, and that poverty leads to your child being taken, and the middle-class foster parents simply decide one day that your child would be better off with them, they can march into court, bypass even the family police agency, file their own petition to terminate your child’s right to live with you (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) and adopt your child.  In Indiana, at least one lawyer already has found an entirely legal method to work the system in a similar way. This bill would would open the floodgates.

In some states, allowing foster parents who are likely to be white and middle class to be “intervenors,” declare themselves better parents for children who are less likely to be either of those things and then try to persuade a court has created an entire cottage industry – as eplained in this story from ProPublica and The New Yorker:

… It’s not acceptable in most family courts to explicitly argue that, if you have more material advantages to provide a child, you should get to adopt him or her. Outside the courtroom, though, intervenors are sometimes less discreet.

During a 2021 case meeting, according to a specialist who took notes, a foster parent and [attorney Tim] Eirich client said, of the prospect of reuniting a baby boy with his biological family, “He’s used to being raised by a maternal figure who stays home. We have 1.5 acres for him to run around, and they have an apartment.” Another foster parent and Eirich client told me that reuniting a baby girl with her birth mother would mean transitioning her from a “personalized nanny” to a “day care center with, you know, 50 kids running around, and sleeping on a little cot.” …

Oh, and if you want to see how much worse it can get, check out the follow-up story.

These stories focus largely on Colorado – where lawmakers have now had the decency to curb, though not to abolish, the right of foster parents to barge in this way.  But the Indiana bill would move in the opposite direction, making it even easier. 

That would come on top of an existing loophole in Indiana law.  The lawfirm of adoption attorney Grant Kirsh is the proud recipient of an Angels in Adoption award from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute.  In one of his many YouTube videos, Kirsh points out, twice for emphasis, that in Indiana “you can file a petition for adoption for anybody at any time!”

Of course it’s more likely to work in some cases than in others. As ProPublica explained:

Kirsh tells [foster parents] that, should the state’s child services agency move to return a child in their care to the child’s birth family, they can simply serve a notice of adoption, which the birth family will have only 15 days to contest. If there is no response in that time frame, the birth family loses the right to challenge the adoption.

“It’s nuts,” Andrea Marsh, a family court lawyer in Indianapolis, said, calling the process “similar to intervention, but the nuclear option.” One of her recent clients, a birth mother in Indianapolis, was trying to follow her court-ordered treatment plan when the suburban foster parents who were caring for her child filed for adoption in their home county. (Court-shopping is a strategy that Indiana adoption attorneys use to circumvent a court that is still trying to reunify the birth family.) The mother failed to reply by the deadline and, when the adoption of her child was finalized, neither she nor the local child services office could do anything about it.

The Indiana bill would make it all even worse by setting up a legally sanctioned system of “intervenors” who could barge in sooner.  They would be full parties to the case at every stage, and they could file their own petitions to terminate children’s rights to their parents.  All this in what some measures suggest may already be the most racially biased family policing system in America.*

Excuses for this legislation

The excuses for compounding the racial and class bias that permeate Indiana family policing are depressingly predictable.

First, invoke horror stories:

So at a hearing on the bill, a foster parent spoke of how, if only she could have brought her own termination action, perhaps her foster child would not have been returned to the birth father who tortured and murdered him.

But as always, the horror stories go in all directions.

● If this bill becomes law, will there be more cases like that of 22-month-old Nova Bryant of Clay County? She was taken from her parents only to die in foster care. There appears to have been no allegation that the parents abused Nova, only that they couldn’t cope with her special needs.

● If this bill becomes law, will there be more children like Dakota Levi Stevens of Porter County?  She too died in foster care, her foster mother was convicted of reckless homicide. Family members spent years desperately trying to get Dakota out of the system, one after another offering to take her in. All were turned down in favor of strangers.  This bill would make such outcomes more likely.

When anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data.  The data show that, on top of the enormous
inherent emotional trauma of being thrown into foster care, there is a shockingly high rate of abuse in foster care itself. Study after study, including one specific to Indiana, finds 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 contrast, multiple studies find that in typical cases, not the horror stories, children left in their own homes do better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

And of course, with one provision of the bill after another making the system ever larger, it would only further overload caseworkers, leaving them even less time to find the relatively few children in real danger.

So if anything, this bill, backed by horror stories, might wind up causing more horror stories.

Misunderstanding permanence

The other argument for the bill is the same argument that stampeded Congress into passing the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. The claim that doing too much to help families was the reason children languish in foster care.

On the contrary, advocates of family preservation were the first to raise the issue of children languishing in foster care.  Advocates of tearing apart families then exploited the plight of these children to pass ASFA – a bill which, like federal legislation of the same era commonly known as “the crime bill” and “the welfare bill” targeted the same population: poor Black people, especially mothers.

But ASFA failed. It created a generation of legal orphans with no ties to their own families and no adoptive home either.  And it did nothing to reduce the time children spent in foster care. 

The real reason children languish in foster care is because overloaded agencies don’t have time to do anything else: They recklessly tear children from their families, then those children are filed away and forgotten as workers race on to the next case.  So it’s no wonder that in Indiana where, it seems, caseworkers have never encountered a Black family that isn’t suspect, and which tears apart families at such a high rate, children are trapped in foster care longer than in some other states.

By making it even more likely that children will be taken and less likely that reunification will be an option, this bill will only make it more likely that children’s time trapped in foster care will increase.

So the first step to reducing the time children spend in foster care is making sure that for more of those children that time is reduced to zero – by not taking them away in the first place.

The bill also misunderstands the whole concept of permanence for children.  The bill, like ASFA and much of American child welfare policy, is obsessed with one form of permanence – the paper permanence of adoption by strangers, in which children are cut off completely not only from Mom and Dad but also often from siblings, grandmothers, grandfathers, friends, teachers, and classmates. They are uprooted from everyone loving and familiar, their birth certificates changed, communication cut off, even mementos denied them. It’s all for the benefit and convenience not of the children, but of the, typically, white middle-class strangers who have taken them forever from everyone they know and love.

But as Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan School of Law explains, what children need is relational permanence. Children need to be able to stay connected to everyone who loves them, whether they can care for them or not.  Why in the world would you want to deprive any child of as many loving connections as possible?  Unless the system that constantly postures about “children’s rights” and “the best interest of the child” isn’t really about either. 

One more advantage to relational permanence: it’s likely to be more permanent. Depend entirely for permanence on one stranger, or perhaps a stranger couple, and what happens when that cute little tyke becomes a rebellious teen and the strangers give up on her or him?  We don’t know how often this happens, because family policing systems almost never ask questions to which they don’t want to know the answers, but the data we do have are concerning.  In contrast, weave a web of relational permanence and the odds are far better that someone will always be there for that child. 

This is why the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, which once had a project to expedite termination of parental rights, now has a project to end it.

That means doing more, not less, to avoid taking children away and more, not less, to reunify them when taken.  It also means doing more to facilitate guardianships by relatives and others close to a child.  But, of course, one of those 40 or so changes in the Indiana bill would make guardianships harder.

Indiana children need laws that put them first, instead of prioritizing the rescue fantasies of white middle-class strangers.

*-Most racially biased in the sense of anti-Black prejudice.  For anti-Native American bias, the data suggest the worst is Minnesota – though, at least that state’s lawmakers are trying to do something about it.  For anti-Hispanic bias, the worst might be Maine. 

Adopted to death in North Carolina?

An adoptive mother is charged with murder, torture, and crimes straight out of a horror film nightmare.  That’s an aberration. 

At least one of the children probably never needed to be taken from his mother at all.  That’s not an aberration 

A horror film debuted in North Carolina last week.  The story has all the classic elements: torture, starvation, teenage victims, and elements too macabre to describe here.  But you can’t “keep repeating it’s only a movie.” Because it’s not. 

This horror film is a documentary. At a time when most television stations don’t even have documentary units, WRAL-TV has one that just produced a superb example of the form.  It’s about children taken from their own homes, in at least one case for no good reason, only to disappear – their bodies found years later.  They were allegedly adopted to death.  The starvation, torture, murder and other horrors all were allegedly orchestrated by Avantae Deven, the foster mother who adopted them. 

There have been tragically similar horror stories in Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Iowa, and of course, Texas and Minnesota. Most of them involved children who never needed to be taken from their own homes. 

So watch the documentary here – but take the viewer advisory seriously – and then I’ll add some context, including the one place where I think the producers went wrong:

 

Now, that context:

Of course, most adoptive parents never harm the children in their care – like most parents, period.  And yes, I’m the one who always says don’t make generalizations based on horror stories.  But I’m also the one who offered a mutual moratorium on their use.  The family policing establishment (a more accurate term than “child welfare establishment”) has not yet taken me up on that, and I’m not about to unilaterally disarm.  That’s why our weekly round-up of family preservation news and commentary usually ends with a section called “The Horror Stories Go in All Directions.” 

More important, the only part of this story that’s unusual is the alleged torture and murder.  The documentary reveals other horrors that are common in North Carolina and across the country. 

The first horror was the removal of these children in the first place, in particular, the children of the mother profiled in the documentary, Felicia Chandler. 

There is no allegation that Chandler ever beat her children, tortured them, raped them – or harmed them in any way.  The only ground cited in the documentary for the removal of her children was the fact that she was herself a victim of domestic violence.  As we have noted often on this blog, there is overwhelming evidence that children taken under these circumstances are even more traumatized than when they are taken for other reasons.  One expert called it “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.” 

That’s why more than 20 years ago, New York courts made it illegal to take children the way Chandler’s children allegedly were taken.  And just last week, a New York appellate court ruled that family police harassment of these mothers and their children, even when the children are not taken, also is illegal.

But in North Carolina, it’s open season on domestic violence survivors and their children.  Indeed, Chandler’s isn’t the first such case in North Carolina to get headlines.  The same kind of wrongful removal was the focus of this story from WBTV and The Assembly. 

Of course, we get the usual excuse from the family police: Oh, there was something else, we just won’t tell you.  Not can’t tell you – the confidentiality laws family police agencies hide behind generally are there because the agencies want them there – so they can hide their failings. 

Enter Chandler’s former caseworker.  In comments dripping with condescension says: “I know know that she loves her children but I will also say something that I learned many years ago through this career is that often love is not enough.” 

What that usually means is: Love is not enough, because they don’t have enough money.  Money can buy whatever is missing.  

For example, according to the lawsuit discussed here, North Carolina took away the children of one mother because she was hospitalized – with cancer.  The children suffered horribly in institutions. But the family police agency didn’t want to give them back because the mother “might get cancer again.” 

Have you noticed? You never see a rich person’s child taken because “love is not enough.” 

And let's not forget Cherokee County, where the removal of children with no due process at all, in cases so weak the county knew it couldn’t get a judge to approve, led to criminal charges.  And let’s not forget this story. And this story. And this story. And this story. And this story.  And this story. And this story. 

Unlike the alleged torture and murder of the adopted children of Avantae Deven, the horrors of wrongful removal are not unusual – in North Carolina or anywhere else.  

And if there’s one these stories make clear, it’s this: When you leave children at the mercy of caseworkers and agencies that don’t love them – it’s never enough. 

Felicia Chandler never got her surviving children back and, since her children’s rights to be with her were terminated, she almost certainly never will.  But she continues her fight.  The documentary ends with her speaking directly to her children, wherever they are, telling them how much she loves them, in the hope that they might see it. 

About those deck chairs

And that brings me to what I see as this outstanding documentary’s one failing: Having raised the issue of wrongful removal, and followed Felicia Chandler on her quest for justice, the documentary doesn’t circle back to the issue of wrongful removal when discussing solutions.  Instead, it focuses on rearranging the deck chairs on the North Carolina family policing Titanic.  Unfortunately, that focus is all the rage in North Carolina right now. 

That, too, is not unusual.  Reorganization is what agencies and lawmakers do when they don’t have real ideas. 

So sometimes, in states where the family police are a freestanding agency, there are proposals to make it part of a bigger agency.  Where it’s already part of a bigger agency there are proposals to make it a freestanding agency.  Where the work is largely done by public agencies you hear cries to privatize.  Where it’s mostly private you hear about the need for the accountability only a public system is said to bring.  Where states run these systems you sometimes hear proposals to have counties do it, because they’re supposedly closer to the people. Where counties run these systems – as in North Carolina – you hear the state should do it, or at least give the state more power to supervise.  

But there is no evidence that any one of these structures is any better, or worse, than the others.  The many terrible systems, and the few that are not so bad, come in all shapes and sizes. 

That’s true even when it comes to the kind of horrors exposed in the WRAL documentary.  I mentioned similar horrors in five other places. Pennsylvania has a county-run system. So does  Minnesota. But the systems in Hawaii, Iowa and Texas are state-run. 

As for North Carolina, what good is giving more power to the state oversight agency when a top official of that agency, interviewed by WRAL, insists the system isn’t broken?  

Yes, it might make some marginal difference around the edges.  But the fixation on organization diverts attention from the elephant in the room: all those children needlessly taken.  Wrongful removal drives everything else.  Ending it alone won’t fix these systems, but it’s the prerequisite for fixing these systems. 

UPDATE, FEB 15: Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, in a follow-up story, when lawmakers were asked what they were going to do about this, their answers were all about the deck chairs (with a quick mention of those other failed stand-bys "silos" and "background checks").

Similarly, it would be a huge mistake to spend more to make the system even bigger.  Rather, additional spending should focus on bolstering services and supports to families whose children often are taken when family poverty is confused with neglect.  That will ease any artificial “shortage” of foster homes and reduce worker caseloads, so workers have more time to find children in real danger and do their jobs well. 

In other words, spend more, but spend smarter. 

Two other notes

● Another proposal discussed in the documentary is one that always comes up when adoptive parents are accused of abusing their adopted children: require government monitoring of the family even after the adoption.  

Here’s the problem: Adoption by strangers should be very rare; almost always there are better ways to assure safe, permanent homes for children.  But when it does happen, then adoptive parents are parents, period. Before the adoption, they should be subject to intense scrutiny.  After the adoption they should be subject to no greater monitoring than birth parents.  Otherwise, it’s just foster care by another name.  As such it denies children the security and permanence they need. 

And to those who say: Well, adoptive parents often accept government checks so they should have to accept government supervision, well, I also get a government check every month. It’s called Social Security – and no one gets to make unannounced visits to my home to see if I’m spending the money wisely. 

● There’s one more thing to keep in mind, one more factor that can lead to quick-and-dirty slipshod placements in adoptive homes: Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, for every finalized adoption over a baseline number, states receive a bounty from the federal government of $4,000 to $10,000.  Avantae Deven adopted five foster children. So North Carolina may have collected anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 for tearing these children from their own parents and placing them with the adoptive mother now accused of murder and torture.  And get this: Under ASFA North Carolina doesn’t even have to give the money back. 

Our annual call to end child welfare’s public celebration of family executions

Saturday, on “National Adoption Day, who will stop to remember that for some children and some young adults every mass adoption ceremony, every treacly feature story on the local news is an act of cruelty – ripping the scab off a wound that never fully heals?

 

Termination of parental rights is child welfare's "death penalty."  So why do
some of the very judges who order a family "executed" preside over
public celebrations of the aftermath?   


This post originally was published on November 15, 2020

             There was a time when, as a people, we were so uncivilized that executions were a form of entertainment – a public spectacle to be celebrated. 

In Canada, for example, 

Before they were banned in 1870, executions in public places could draw thousands of spectators, including families and young children. Boisterous behavior and a less-than-solemn attitude marked these macabre gatherings.  “When the day of a public execution arrived, the businessmen closed their factories and their stores and the people put on their holiday dresses,” noted an 1894 article in the Evening Star about hangings in early Toronto.   

The last official state-sanctioned public hanging in the United States drew a crowd of 20,000.  Even then, reporters condemned it as a “carnival.” (I probably don’t even need to mention that the man they hanged was Black.) 

Fortunately, nearly a century later, we have, of course, outgrown such practices. 

Except in "child welfare." 

Termination of parental rights (or, as it should be called, termination of children’s rights to their parents) often is described as child welfare’s death penalty.  It is the prerequisite to any adoption of a child from foster care. 

And every year, all over America, we celebrate these family executions with a joyous public spectacle.  It’s called National Adoption Day.  This year it’s happening on Nov. 18. 

You know the drill. Open the court on a Saturday, bring in ice cream, cake and balloons, finalize foster-child adoptions en masse – and reinforce every stereotype about how the system supposedly “rescues” children from horrible birth parents and places them with vastly superior adoptive parents.  The same judges who are supposed to decide impartially on termination cases often lead these celebrations.

            In 2020, when celebrations still often were virtual due to COVID, organizers of the Los Angeles County event added a particularly macabre 21st Century touch:  “A pool camera will be permitted at a pre-selected adoptive family’s home for coverage as the family’s virtual adoption ceremony takes place.”

  The whole spectacle also gets the courts and the local family policing agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare agency”) a guaranteed puff piece in the local newspaper celebrating what is, in reality, the aftermath of an execution.  And, of course, as with those other public executions, a disproportionate share of the families “executed” are Black. 

I’ve previously written that this day should be called National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day – since while "child welfare" systems always piously proclaim that their first goal is to reunify a family they’ve torn apart, the outcome that brings them true joy, the one they celebrate, is when that child, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite, is adopted by someone who often is neither. 

Unlike some of my friends in the family preservation movement, I am not opposed to all involuntary adoptions of children taken from their parents.  I am not opposed to all terminations of parental rights.  On those very rare occasions where this is appropriate, I am not opposed to an adoptive family having a private, quiet celebration.  But each of these things should take place far less often than they do now.

 So in that sense, my previous column was too kind.  It said adoption was sometimes an appropriate second choice after reunification and sometimes the appropriate first choice.  In fact, adoption should be farther down on the list, after not only reunification but also guardianship and perhaps other options as well, such as tribal customary adoption, a practice used by some Native American tribes that might well be adaptable elsewhere.  And while a private celebration is one thing, it should never be a mass public spectacle – it rubs salt into too many open wounds, and not just for parents. 

Prof. Christopher Church, senior director of strategic consulting at Casey Family Programs, has argued that using the term “civil death penalty” to describe the terminations that come before the cake, ice cream and balloons actually understates the trauma to the child.  Horrible as it is to lose a parent to physical death, losing a parent to termination of parental rights can be worse. 

“When a child knows somebody is out there but they have no way of connecting to them, that is ‘ambiguous loss,’” Church said at a recent conference.  “That is a more complex trauma for children than death loss.  … Death is finality and [children] can comprehend that better.” 

Church also reminds us that before the joyous public spectacle there’s sometimes another ceremony, if you can call it that.  It’s called the “goodbye visit.”  Children are told they will never, ever see their parents again, and now they all must say goodbye.  No cake and balloons here; just tears and anguish. 

The children are not always saying goodbye just to their parents.  If one child is adopted and the others are not, the sibling bond is severed forever.  If a parent later has another child whom s/he is allowed to keep, the child who was adopted amid the ice cream and cake may never know that sibling – unless, when they are adults, they find some way to find each other. 

But hey, don’t let that spoil the party. 

I can imagine some readers thinking: But wait. We have to do this, don’t we?  After all, if a case goes to termination of parental rights, the parents must have been the worst of the worst, right? 

Wrong. The termination phase is as arbitrary, capricious and cruel as every other decision-point in child welfare.  As Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan, has written: 

[C]ourts seem to terminate parental rights out of a sense of convenience. A child has been in foster care for 15 months, so let’s terminate. A foster parent prefers to adopt a child, so let’s terminate. A parent hasn’t fully complied with services, so let’s terminate. 

            Still another indication of what’s really behind termination cases can be seen in how different the outcomes are by age.  Among children torn from their parents during their first year of life, only 36% are reunified; 46% are adopted.  Then, year after year, reunification rates inch up almost every year until age 14. Nearly 54% of children taken at age 14 were reunified. 

            So are parents of infants vastly worse than parents of 14-year-olds?  Or do caseworkers have their own rescue fantasies triggered by a child about whom they can gush, “Awwww, he’s so cute!” 

            No, we don’t need adoption and the attendant spectacle of mass public family execution to give children “permanence.”  In fact, we don’t know how often adoption does that.  Child welfare systems don’t like to ask questions to which they don’t want to know the answers, so we don’t know how often, when, say, that cute baby becomes a teenager, the adoptive parents change their minds.  

            But even when the adoption doesn’t fall apart, and even when a child really can’t live safely with her or his own parents, the obsession with adoption still hurts children.  As Prof. Sankaran explains: 

Families, and the relationships within them, are far more enduring and resilient than we want to acknowledge. In our quest for legal permanence, we forget about a child’s need for relational permanence, often defined as a child’s lifelong connection with caring adults. For example, too often, we ratify adoptions with the hope of providing a child with a legally permanent home. But in doing so, we cut off the child’s ability to have permanent relationships with those who have – and will always – matter to him. A mother. A sibling. A grandparent. Hence the countless number of stories of adopted children searching for their kin.

           Other options, such a guardianship, don’t require a child to sacrifice any relationships. 

So this time, when National Adoption Day rolls around, remember that for some children and some young adults every mass adoption ceremony, every treacly feature story on the local news is an act of cruelty – ripping the scab off a wound that never fully heals. 

Again, that doesn’t mean adoption by strangers and termination of parental rights are always wrong.  But it needs to be moved much farther down on the list of options for children.  And while, on rare occasions, we still need to impose child welfare’s death penalty, can’t we at least have the decency to stop celebrating it?