Pete Buttigieg faces the family police

Pete Buttigeig

Much of America just got its first partial lesson in how the child welfare system really works (and why it should be called a family policing system). Two four-year-old children were the unwilling teachers. 

What happened to the children of Pete Buttigieg is horrible. It is not meant to diminish this harm in any way to add something at least as important: More than one-third of all American children and more than half of all Black children will endure the same experience. For most of them, it will be even worse. 

By now, you probably know about what happened to the four-year-old twins adopted by former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor, former Transportation Secretary and former (and perhaps future) presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten. Below are some key points, and some of the lessons that can be learned from his family’s ordeal. 

Key points: 

● The report to the Michigan child abuse hotline was blatantly, obviously, false and malicious. Law enforcement ultimately concluded that it was also politically motivated. 

● The allegations were ludicrous. The caller did not say that he actually witnessed any abuse. Nor did he say that one of the Buttigieg children told him about any abuse. Rather, Buttigieg says he was told: 

The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.

That was enough to a bring child protective services caseworker – and a police officer -- to the Buttigieg’s Grand Traverse, Michigan home. 

● It didn’t stop there. CPS and the police refused to even tell Buttigieg what he was accused of. The children, four-year-old twins, were separated from their parents for 24 hours. They were placed with grandparents and then taken somewhere “in town” where they were separated from each other for hour-long “forensic interviews” with total strangers. 

As Buttigieg writes: 

My in-laws had to explain to my children, whom we have taught to avoid talking to strangers, that they would need to have a conversation, one at a time and for nearly an hour each, in a place they’d never been, with adults they did not know, who would ask questions we weren’t allowed to know either. For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen. We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime. 

● The Buttigieg children were in foster care – even though it will never show up as such in Michigan family police agency reports to the federal government. Buttigieg and his husband were coerced into placing the children in out-of-home care. The placement lasted 24 hours. That’s foster care. It is the least harmful form of foster care – placement with relatives – but it’s still foster care. But because it was all done informally, the federal government will allow Michigan to exclude it from its figures for entries into foster care. That’s why such placements are called, of course, hidden foster care. 

● This was almost the least amount of harm the family police can do. (The harm would have been less had the children not been removed from the home at all.) Buttigieg says everyone was polite and professional, and, as noted above, the children stayed with relatives. What he encountered can best be called CPS-lite.  I’ve written before about what a shock that can be for white, middle-class families, and how the white middle-class version of a CPS encounter differs from the norm. 

But even when it’s CPS-lite, there’s still plenty of trauma. Buttigieg writes: 

The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life. I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained. 

Now our family is left to deal with the aftermath. I worry about any unseen effects this had on our kids, on Chasten and me, and on the rest of our family. Even though the accusation was absurdly and obviously false, and was promptly rejected by law enforcement, I still worry about the harm it has done. Chasten and I worry about who else might try to do this kind of thing, to us or to others. … I am a reasonable man. I try to keep as calm and low-key as possible. But I cannot describe the mix of rage and sadness that I feel at the idea that someone brought our children into this. … this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began. 

Now, let’s consider the lessons: 

● In media, social and otherwise, the incident is being treated largely as some kind of bizarre outlier and a sign of the increasing ugliness and polarization of our politics. That’s largely how Buttigieg himself framed it. 

But perhaps the most important lesson in all of this is that it is not an outlier. Not by a longshot. 

While the motives are rarely political, thousands of children are victimized every year by the weaponization of child protective services. It can be educators, trying to bully parents who are fighting for the special education to which their child is entitled. It can be landlords harassing tenants, neighbors harassing neighbors, ex-spouses harassing each other. 

By definition, no one knows what percentage of calls are made maliciously. But in New Mexico, for example, it was so bad that officials at their hotline issued a plea to callers to stop using it for vendettas. 

The fact that it happened to the children of Pete Buttigieg simply brought it to the attention of millions of Americans – including Pete Buttigieg -- who had no idea the system worked that way. 

The danger of anonymous reporting

● It’s all made vastly easier by the fact that 48 states, including Michigan, allow anonymous reports. Many states even encourage them with constant reminders that callers don’t have to give their names. News stories about child abuse often end with the same great big notice, along with the hotline phone number. Buttigieg writes: 

To be clear, making a false report of this kind is a crime. That’s as it should be, both to protect the innocent from false accusations, and to preserve the integrity of a process designed to protect children from harm. I don’t know how much we can do about it, but so help me God, if there is any way to press civil or criminal charges over this, we will. Not just for our own sakes but to draw a line that I thought everyone already recognized: do not mess with someone’s kids. 

But he probably won’t be able to do a damn thing about it. And an entire child welfare establishment wants to keep it that way. That’s why so far only two states, New York and Texas, have had the courage to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. The accused still doesn’t know who accused them, but at least the hotline has to know. As for the fearmongering that’s used to defeat such laws, you can read a whole slew of news accounts and commentaries debunking it: 

amNY has a particularly good story about the New York law. The Imprint also has a story about the signing. So does the New York Daily News. And before it passed: ProPublica published a good story on the bill. Also: there was an excellent editorial from the Syracuse Post-Standard, a superb commentary in The Imprint, from Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, and another outstanding commentary from the lawyers who regularly represent children in these cases, concerning why this law is needed – and why 48 states and D.C. should follow New York and Texas in enacting such laws.  

The scope of the child welfare surveillance state

● Now consider the sheer scope of the intrusion by family police. Before they turn 18, more than one-third of all children and more than half of all Black children will be forced to endure much of what the Buttigieg children endured. For some, it will be better; for most, it’s likely to be worse. Most of the calls leading to these investigations are not malicious, but more than 80% of the reports are false, and many of the rest are cases in which poverty is confused with neglect. 

● Let’s go back to Buttigieg’s statement that “I am a reasonable man. I try to keep as calm and low-key as possible.” That was made easier for him by the simple fact that he has resources and a keen understanding of power and politics. In this case, it also was easier because the people who confronted him were not at all confrontational. On the contrary, Buttigieg takes pains to praise their politeness, professionalism and efforts to put the children at ease. 

But what if they weren’t? What if they’d pounded on the door in the middle of the night? What if they were harsh and demanding? What if they immediately stripsearched the children? What if their father had no clout, no resources and nowhere to turn?  What if all that caused a protective father to lose his cool? And what if that father were Black?  Would the twins be home now? 

In child welfare, where there's smoke there's usually just smoke

● There are many reasons Buttigieg should worry about the same thing happening again. In most states there is no such thing as crying wolf in child welfare. Often, if a call alleges something that, if true, would be child abuse, it’s screened in for investigation – no matter how thin the evidence, no matter how absurd the allegation and no matter how many times an anonymous caller has made similar unfounded allegations before. Obviously, that should change and screening should be tightened. 

But it’s even worse. In almost all states some sort of record is kept of every allegation, even those labeled unfounded, which is more than 80% of them. And keep in mind, for an allegation to be unfounded that means a worker found so little evidence she couldn’t even check a box on a form saying it was slightly more likely than not that the alleged abuse or neglect occurred. 

But those unfounded allegations are ticking time bombs. Whenever someone suggests they be expunged entirely someone in the take-the-child-and-run-all-families-are-guilty-until-proven-innocent crowd will insist they need to be kept to detect “patterns” because after all, they say, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” 

So if there’s another anonymous call made against Buttigieg the existence of the first call ratchets up suspicion  --  after all, where there’s smoke … 

It’s even worse in any community that relies on a predictive analytics algorithm. Those algorithms are likely to consider any previous report, unfounded or not, reason to raise the “risk score” on a family. 

And lawmakers love this stuff. A bill likely to become law in North Carolina requires what amounts to an extra push to take away children in any case where there are “three or more reports to Child Protective Services in a 12-month period” – no matter how ludicrous those reports may be. 

Good thing the Buttigiegs don’t live in North Carolina. 

The premise behind retaining false reports is, itself, false. In child welfare, where there’s smoke, there’s usually just more smoke. And no one can see clearly through smoke. 

● It is striking how little Buttigieg knew about how the child protective services system works. He had no idea any of this could be done to his children. That’s not a knock on Buttigieg. It’s simply due to the fact that, even if you’re in public life and the family policing system isn’t part of your portfolio (it probably didn’t arise much at the Department of Transportation) you are unlikely to know any of this – if you are white and middle class. Though there are exceptions, white middle-class status provides a great deal of immunity from encounters with family policing – though being gay weakens that immunity, and the report against Buttigieg may illustrate that. 

In contrast, if you’re poor and nonwhite, you may not know your rights, but you know that the family police are omnipresent in your neighborhood and you need to factor that in to every decision you make, from when to seek help to how much to confide in a helping professional. (For an excellent discussion of this, see Prof. Kelley Fong‘s brilliant book, Investigating Families.) 

● Indeed, even with all Buttigieg’s knowledge and experience in power, it’s not clear if he even knew he could say no to the CPS worker and the police and demand they get a court order. He didn’t get a lawyer until the next day (and, of course, unlike the overwhelming majority of parents in his position, he could afford a good one). This is why all states should have “family Miranda” laws, requiring the family police to tell families their rights. 

Left and Right share responsibility

● And finally, a note about politics: Some of the social media commentary from my fellow liberals has been quick to blame it all on the hatred stirred up by President Trump and his followers. Concerning this particular case, I think they’re probably right. But there’s more to it. The system that allowed this to be done to Pete Buttigieg’s children wasn’t created by Donald Trump. In its modern form, it dates back largely to the 1960s and 1970s, a time when party control of the White House shifted back and forth and Democrats controlled Congress.

The giant child welfare surveillance state, the mandatory reporting laws, the permission and even encouragement of anonymous reporting, the massive power to tear apart families, the lack of any serious due process, and horrible laws like the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Adoption and Safe Families Act – almost all of it well-intentioned – are bipartisan failures.  

Or, to put it another way: The person who tried to fire a weapon of family destruction at Pete Buttigieg’s children may well have been from the extreme Right. But when it came to building the weapon, loading it, and handing it to the shooter, the Left has been complicit, and we need to own up to it. 

Even now, three Democratic governors have tweeted their sympathy with Buttigieg and his family. All are in states that allow anonymous reports. Will they move to change that? 

It took the worst elements of liberalism and conservatism to create this horrible system, it will take the best elements of both to fix it. Some of us are working on it – together – through a group known as United Family Advocates.

Race, class and child welfare: AEI gets it wrong again

The Charles Murray faction of the extreme right offers up a remarkable collection of half-truths, straw men, and statistics abuse. 

"So you see," says the child welfare establishment, 
"of course we'll accept your approach. All you have to do is clear the bar!"

The American Enterprise Institute is the right-wing think tank that is the longtime home of Charles Murray, author of the notorious exercise in what the Southern Policy Law Center aptly calls “racist pseudo-science” known as The Bell Curve. So it makes sense that AEI has become the center of what should be called child welfare’s “Caucus of Denial” – those who argue that child welfare is magically immune from the racism that permeates every other aspect of American life. They also deny that poverty is confused with neglect. 

While other conservatives, those who recognize the danger of abuse of government power, are among the leaders in bipartisan efforts to reform the system, (and conversely, I’m sorry to say, plenty of my fellow liberals are in denial as well) AEI is trapped in a Charles Murray mentality.  

AEI’s efforts to promote fallacies about race, poverty and child welfare are led by Naomi Schaefer Riley, who writes screeds with titles like “Wokeness Has Come for Child Protective Services” and who proudly analogizes her book attacking family preservation to another of Murray’s books. 

Riley’s book was given to the world by a publisher whose other titles include American Bolsheviks: The Persecution of Donald Trump, The Case To Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, The Myth Of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault On Clean Elections, Crime Inc.: How Democrats Employ Mafia And Gangster Tactics To Gain And Hold Power and Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting Covid Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again. 

So it’s not surprising that a charter member of the Caucus of Denial, Brett Drake, got AEI to publish a summary of the caucus’ major claims. In Drake’s Bizarro World, facts are myths and myths are facts. 

He squeezes a remarkable number of half-truths, straw men, statistics abuse, and distortion of what anyone who dares to disagree with him has to say into two pages. Let’s set the record straight: 

● Drake’s claim: He says the idea that there is widespread racial bias in child welfare is rooted in a single study, the third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3), but that study was flawed and the findings were not replicated in NIS-4. 

That’s a classic half-truth. NIS-3 was flawed and NIS-4 did not replicate its findings. But the case that child welfare is permeated with racism is not based entirely or even mostly on NIS-3.  There are a wealth of other, rigorous studies, controlling carefully for other variables that show racial bias in child welfare decision-making. Some of them are summarized, with citations, in this NCCPR Issue Paper.  

I found out about many of these studies when I read Shattered Bonds, the first book on this topic by Prof. Dorothy Roberts (a member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors). So Drake’s implication that Roberts relied mostly on NIS-3 also is incorrect. And, Drake does not mention the additional research cited in Prof. Roberts’ second book on this topic, Torn Apart. 

Instead, Drake repeatedly cites one study – his own – purporting to show no racial bias. I analyze the many failings of that study in detail here.

● Drake’s claim: It’s supposedly a myth that most neglect cases investigated by child protective services (CPS) agencies are “just poverty.” 

This is simply a regurgitation of the puerile debate over whether a case is “poverty alone.” First of all, plenty of cases are poverty alone. Three separate studies found that 30% of America’s foster children could be home right now if their families simply had adequate housing. 

But whether poverty is “alone” or not ignores the central question: Do you need to tear apart a family to fix whatever might there along with the poverty? The answer is a resounding no.  The way to tell if a case is a poverty case actually is pretty simple: If the solution is money, the problem is poverty.  Study after study finds that in a great many cases, the solution is money.

When the problem is poverty alone the solution is money. But, as this article from 23 leading scholars explains, often when the problem is poverty plus something else the solution still is money – which makes sense since the “something else” often is caused by or exacerbated by poverty. I discuss the whole “just poverty” debate in detail in this presentation at a Kempe Center conference. 

● Drake’s claim: It’s supposedly a myth that neglect is less serious than abuse – and we know this because 76.4% of fatalities are due to neglect. 

But that tells us nothing about neglect allegations in general. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, family police agencies “substantiated” neglect allegations concerning 377,742 children. There were 1,252 fatalities attributed to neglect.  The fact that 33/100ths of one percent of “substantiated” neglect allegations involved fatalities tells you nothing about the other 99 and 66/100ths percent - yet this is the entire basis for Drake’s claim. 

Drake’s whole argument about neglect and fatalities is based on statistics abuse, but teasing out the facts gets a bit wonky. If there  happen to be any child welfare wonks out there who want to go into the weeds on this, I have a detailed explanation in this column for The Imprint. 

Drake sets up a straw man when he implies those who challenge the approach he champions, and which has dominated child welfare for more than half a century think neglect is “trivial or something that can be ignored.” 

On the contrary, we think it is urgent to address what agencies call neglect – by addressing the poverty that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is confused with neglect or caused by neglect; as opposed to tearing children from their homes at least 179,000 times per year and putting many more families under oppressive, traumatizing surveillance. 

● Drake’s claim: He says it’s a myth that anonymous reports are “unnecessary at best and are often simply harassment.” 

OK, now things are getting weird: Anonymous reports are among those least likely to be substantiated. In New York City, for example, 22.7% of all reports are “substantiated” – which means only that a worker checked a box on a form. For anonymous reports, it’s 6.7%.  To which Drake replies: Yes, but other categories of reporters have substantiation rates almost as bad! 

So, does that prove the need for anonymous reports, or does it prove the need to also replace mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, so workers are not deluged with false reports from all sorts of sources, stealing time from finding children in real danger? 

But wait, it gets weirder: Drake makes the case for anonymous reports by saying: 

Surprisingly, reports from “unclassified” sources (including anonymous, “other,” and “unknown or missing” sources) are actually slightly more likely to result in re-reports in multivariate models than are reports from professional sources. 

But that’s not surprising at all – if you understand that anonymous reports are, in fact, often simply harassment.  Of course someone engaged in harassment will “re-report”! 

By the way, those data from New York City come from this column in The Imprint calling for replacing anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. The column was not written by lawyers who represent parents; it was written by lawyers who lead an agency that represents children. They’re on the frontlines. They see the harm such reports do to children every day. Maybe lawmakers – and “scholars” like Drake -- should listen to them. 

And then comes a claim that’s weirder still … 

● Drake’s claim: “It’s a myth that CPS spends most of its resources investigating unnecessary calls.”  

This is a myth, Drake claims, because CPS spends even more of its money on things like holding children in foster care (and, though he doesn’t mention it, warehousing children in institutions that can cost well over $100,000 per year per child). 

Well, sure, Brett, we’re glad to second any claim that CPS is spending vast amounts of money on foster care! But of course, he’s missing the point. What we actually say is that of the resources – not just money but caseworker time and effort – expended on investigations, most of that is devoted to unnecessary calls. This is demonstrated by the huge number of investigations where workers themselves find that the allegation was false. And that steals worker time from finding the relatively few children in real danger. 

● Drake’s claim: It’s a myth that foster care is toxic to children. The basis for his claim: 

“The limited research we have is mixed, but the majority of well-controlled studies do not find that foster care is harmful to children, and it is sometimes found to be protective …” 

OK, let’s parse this one. 

“The limited research we have is mixed …” 

Let’s stop right there. There are multiple rigorous studies that find that foster care is indeed harmful; not for every child, but in typical cases children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

And consider what a low bar the system is setting for itself. These studies find foster care is worse even than leaving children in their own homes with little or no help to their families at all. Consider how much better still the outcomes would be compared to foster care if systems actually took some of that vast amount of money Drake rightly notes is spent on foster care and spent it on helping families instead. 

Now consider the implications of tearing nearly 200,000 children from their families every year  based, at best, on research that is “mixed.” 

No one denies that removal from the home is inherently traumatic – at least I hope not. No one denies that much of foster care is dismal.  

Just read what current and former foster youth themselves have to say about what foster care is really like. In this report, and this one, and this one. Yes, some foster youth believe, almost certainly correctly, that they needed to be taken away anyway. But that’s no excuse for ignoring so much lived experience to the contrary. And that is not the same thing as claiming that the system does not do harm. 

As for the inherent trauma of removal itself, just listen to the cries of children torn from their parents at the Mexican border during the first Trump Administration. No, seriously, Prof. Drake: Listen to them. Right here. Right now: 

Of course, unlike Trump’s Border Patrol, CPS workers almost always mean well, but the overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children torn from their families by those workers, yes, often when their poverty is confused with neglect, cry out the same way for the same reason.  Yet Drake defends doing this to children based on the claim that the research concerning whether they also will be, for example, more likely to be unemployed, become pregnant as teenagers or wind up in jail is mixed?

Now, back to Drake:

 … the majority of well-controlled studies…

 Note the hyphenated weasel-word there. Drake offers no definition of “well-controlled;” so it may just mean “the studies that reach the conclusion I want.”  But more important is the rest of that sentence: 

… do not find that foster care is harmful to children. 

Here again, what an astoundingly low bar the child welfare establishment sets for itself, particularly when compared to the enormously high bar set for any program that works to keep families together. We should keep on doing what so many current and former foster youth say traumatized them because there are some studies out there that find that foster care didn’t do harm? 

As for the studies supposedly showing it’s sometimes “protective,” at least one of those studies found that the improvement occurred after reunification. So it wasn’t the foster care, it was being back with their families. 

And Drake never even mentions all the studies showing stunningly high rates of abuse in foster care itself. 

Drake begins this section of his screed by declaring “There is near-universal agreement that keeping children in their families is best so long as the child is safe.” 

But if you really believe foster care is harmless and maybe even beneficial, why is keeping children in their families “best so long as the child is safe”?  After all, if it’s actually beneficial wouldn’t it be good for children who are safe but are simply being denied the “benefits” of being around white middle-class people? So I have to wonder how much confidence Drake really has in his own claims about the benefits, or at least the lack of harm, of foster care. 

In fact, foster care is toxic to children. Yes, on rare occasions it may be less toxic than the home from which the children were taken – particularly if you don’t actually do anything to make things better in the home. And even when it doesn’t result in foster care, investigations themselves can be enormously traumatic for children.  Because they are so toxic, they need to be used rarely and in very small doses. 

Instead, we have created a massive child welfare surveillance state that will force one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children to endure the trauma of investigation before they turn 18 – according to a study co-authored by Brett Drake. 

As for safety, consider what one of the architects of the current system, one of the many having second thoughts, has to say. 

Responding to a commentary co-authored by another member of the Caucus of Denial defending the current system, Dr. Richard Krugman wrote that he agreed with the commentary authors that …

“… just ablating CPS agencies is the wrong approach. BUT we now have 40 years of experience with this approach and have made no progress in reducing the mortality from physical abuse of children (decades with 1500-2500 children dying annually). … Doing the same thing for 40 years that doesn't seem (or can't be shown) to be working was someone's definition of insanity. [Emphasis in original; full quote here].

Deep in the heartless of Texas

Two cases illustrate the need for those good, bipartisan "child welfare" laws the Texas Legislature has been passing lately.

Two weeks ago I wrote about a news story concerning new laws in Texas that bolster due process for families.  In that story one lawyer pushes the idea that, “The failing in … [recently passed] laws is that the standard is so high now for a child to be removed.”  This apparently was a reference to a 2021 law tightening the definition of neglect before a child could be removed.  (None of the laws passed this year does anything to change the standard for removal.) 

The story also quoted a state legislator opposed to a new Texas law that, in most cases, replaces anonymous reporting of alleged child abuse and neglect with confidential reporting.  Said Sen. Jose Menendez: 

“None of us in this room want any child to suffer abuse or neglect. And I would hate for us to vote for a policy where the tradeoff is ... [having] a child possibly die from abuse or neglect.” 

But two recent cases illustrate that either the standard is still too low or, like so many laws intended to protect children from needless surveillance and foster care, this one isn’t being enforced.   One of the cases also makes clear that the near-ban on anonymous reporting came too late.  That case led to the ultimate tragedy.  To what should be the surprise of no one, both families are Black. 

A case in Houston 

A four-year-old is taken from her mother after they were found sleeping in their car – which was the only place they could afford to live.  This story, from KTRK-TV, gives the police version and the mother’s version.  But even if you believe the police version, this case was cause to find the family housing – not to throw the four year old into kinship foster care. 

In addition, the mother was arrested. But a condition of her release was that she not even see her child – or to put it another way: The child has been barred from seeing her mother.  What exactly did the child do wrong to deserve that? 

This seems to be a habit in Houston.  The case is remarkably similar to this one.  And this one. 

But it can get so much worse. 

A case in Harker Heights 

This is what happened in Harker Heights, a town between Austin and Waco, in  September 2022: Six children are taken away.  All of them, even the youngest, age 2, are institutionalized.  Now that child is dead.  According to KWTX-TV,  “this all happened because of a call alleging [the mother] was smoking marijuana.” KXXV-TV reports the mother passed numerous drug tests.  The television station also reports that the call setting this tragedy in motion was – anonymous. (KXXV also report there was an allegation of "violence" - but no indication there was even an allegation of violence against the children.)

And apparently the children were never in danger since, shortly after boy’s death, the Texas family police agency gave all the other children back and closed the case.

So yeah, tell us again, Texas lawyer, how “the failing in the laws is that the standard is so high now for a child to be removed.”  And tell us again, Texas lawmaker, how the "tradeoff" for banning most anonymous reporting is "[having] a child possibly die."

UPDATED: When the journalism of child welfare fails, part three: Texas lawmakers are catching on; the Texas Tribune is not.

The state capitol in Austin

What the Tribune (and the Dallas Morning News) can’t face is that after decades of seeing the system that calls itself “child welfare” do enormous harm to children, people across the political spectrum are coming together and finding common ground. They've come to understand that due process for families is the best way to ensure children’s rights and child safety. 

The online news site Texas Tribune has improved its coverage of the family policing system (a more accurate term than “child welfare” system) compared to how it handled these issues when it was founded in 2009.  But it still has a long way to go. 

The Tribune is still pushing the Big Lie of American “child welfare” – the idea that any bill that protects children from being traumatized by the family police and forced into the hellscape of Texas foster care is a “parents’ rights” bill that supposedly comes at the expense of child safety.  And they do it with a slightly revised version of the standard Texas twist; the longstanding false claim that any such legislation must be part of a vast right-wing conspiracy! 

I previously discussed a fearmongering Texas Tribune story about one of the bills.  The theme of the latest story can be boiled down to: The Texas foster care system is horrible! How dare the legislature try to keep more kids out of it!  At one point, the reporter simply decrees on her own authority that one law is “extreme.” 

To understand the extent to which the Tribune keeps misleading Texans about these bills, we need to start with what the bills actually do. 

● One bill requires that families get the equivalent of a Miranda warning when the family police are at the door. That is, they must be informed of rights they already have.  Contrary to the Tribune’s latest story, they are not given any new rights. 

● That bill also curbs hidden foster care – or what should be called blackmail placements, in which families are coerced into “voluntary” placements of their children, usually with relatives, that are anything but voluntary.  The most recent data are old, but they indicate more than 60% of Texas placements occur this way – and they’re not even included in the figures Texas reports to the federal government, or to the public, as entries into care. 

● Another bill largely (though not completely) replaces anonymous reporting to the state’s child abuse hotline with confidential reporting.  That is, the accused still won’t know who accused them but, in most cases, the family police agency will. 

● Another bill bolsters legal representation for families – something that has been proven to curb needless foster care with no compromise of safety. 

● And another bill simply requires the family police and judges to document the “reasonable efforts” they made to prevent removal of a child to foster care and to prevent termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights).  

Again, this law does not give families any new rights. “Reasonable efforts” have been required by federal law since 1980 – and routinely ignored.  This bill doesn’t even stop Texas family police from continuing to ignore the requirement – they just have to state what, if anything, they did to comply with it! 

The vast bipartisan conspiracy 

All of these bills passed with bipartisan support – most of them nearly unanimously. 

That’s important because of a decades-long insistence by some Texas media on putting a false ideological framing on these issues.  (Some of the reasons for this are discussed in the report we issued on Texas child welfare nearly two decades ago.)  

In Texas media, particularly the Tribune and the Dallas Morning News, any attempt to curb the vast power of the family police supposedly is part of a far-right plot to place “parents’ rights” ahead of “child safety.” 

The Dallas Morning News truly outdid itself last year when it managed to blame both an expansion of family police power and a reduction in that power on the far right.  The latest Tribune story has come up with a new bit of spin to explain away the bipartisan support for these bills. 

So with that, it’s time for a close look at the latest Texas Tribune failure. 

The reporter’s preconceived notions are clear right off the bat.  Here’s how the story begins: 

Faced with a troubled foster care system and a 12-year-long lawsuit for putting children in state custody at risk, Texas legislators this year made sweeping changes to state agencies that look after vulnerable kids removed from their homes. 

But legislators’ focus was less on conditions for children in the system and more on reducing the number of kids entering state care. 

Translation: We want you to believe those awful right-wing lawmakers cared more about coddling abusive parents than fixing the state’s horrendous foster care system! 

On the contrary. The legislative priorities reflect the fact that, at long last, lawmakers are beginning to realize that you will never be able to fix the state’s horrendous foster care system as long as the state keeps shoveling children into it in huge numbers. 

But to sell these as “parents’ rights” bills, there’s a lot you have to leave out.  So a story written by a
reporter whose bio says: “She covers how inequity plays out for children and families with an eye on the state’s foster care system” makes no mention of that inequity, even though Black and mixed-race children are torn from their families in Texas at a rate 60% above their rate in the general population – a disparity these bills are likely to curb. 

In contrast, ProPublica’s latest story about the Miranda rights bill notes that it “will in many cases benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income families who often have their lives and homes upended by CPS officers.”  The story also explains that “child welfare issues often defy typical partisan binaries.” 

But that doesn’t fit the Tribune story’s entire parents vs. kids framing.  So the Tribune story ignores inequity and instead claims that lawmakers concluded: “parents facing abuse accusations are entitled to more rights.” 

For starters, that’s grossly misleading.  None of the provisions of new laws discussed in the story give parents – or anyone else -- more rights.  The bills do things like force the family police to tell families the rights they already have and document whether they have followed existing federal law.  The one provision that arguably gives more rights – to children -- the one that helps protect them from blackmail placements – isn’t mentioned in the story. 

But the bigger problem with the story is the claim that these are “parents’ rights” bills. 

● A law that reduces the chances that children will be forced to endure the enormous trauma of a needless child abuse investigation because an angry neighbor is hiding behind anonymity to phone in a false report is a children’s rights law. 

● A law that requires the family police to simply document what, if anything, they say they tried to do to keep a child safety out of the horrors of Texas foster care – so a judge can step in when, in fact, they did little or nothing -- is a children’s rights law. 

● A law that bolsters family defense, so families have a team that can propose alternatives to cookie-cutter “service plans” doled out by the family police -- again, to spare children the horror of Texas foster care -- is a children’s rights law. 

● And a collection of laws that, together, may reduce false allegations trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect” so workers have more time to find the few children in real danger is a collection of children’s rights laws. 

The ultimate unreliable source 

To bolster the false claim that these are parents’ rights bills, the reporter turns to what probably is the least reliable source in all of Texas, but a source guaranteed to support the reporter’s own view: Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).  Indeed, she relied on the chapter of that organization which did the most comprehensive study of all to determine if its program worked -- and found that it actually did harm: the chapter in Texas. 

CASA is a particularly odd choice for a reporter whose beat focuses on inequity.  CASA is the program in which overwhelmingly white, middle-class amateurs with no required qualifications and maybe 40 hours of training (plus in-service so it’s OK, right?) are allowed to march into the homes of families who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite and pass judgment upon them – judgments that, depressingly often, are rubber-stamped by the courts. 

That’s why a law review article aptly characterized CASA as “an act of white supremacy.”  

Furthermore, study after study after study shows that CASA backfires, often hurting the children it is intended to help. 

The most revealing of these was a study of Texas CASA – commissioned by Texas CASA itself.  It was released at the end of 2019.  According to that study: 

“Overall, children appointed a CASA have significantly lower odds than children without a CASA of achieving permanency.” [Emphasis added.]

Compared to children not burdened with a CASA on the case, Texas foster children with  CASAs were:

● Less likely to be reunified with their own parents.

● Less likely to find permanence in the form of guardianship by a relative.

● More likely to “age out” of foster care with no home at all.

When the study came out the Austin American-Statesman did a good story about it. The Texas Tribune ignored it. 

Yet somehow this is the organization we are supposed to trust when it invokes the false claim that child safety and family preservation are opposites that need to be balanced. 

So the Texas Tribune story gives us this: 

“We’re in a period in history right now where things are swinging very much towards having the smallest possible system, really prioritizing parents’ rights,” said Sarah Crockett, the director of public policy at foster kid advocacy group Texas CASA. 

For decades everyone in the system has claimed that they want the smallest possible system – that they only want to see children taken as a last resort.  Yet now, when some small steps are taken toward doing it, “smallest possible system” somehow is equated with “parents’ rights.” 

Crokett then offers the classic example of the Big Lie: implying that when you make the system smaller, children are less safe: 

“This system is traumatic and stressful for children and parents. I absolutely do think that we should do everything that we can to keep the child with their family,” Crockett said. “And it’s also true that child abuse is still happening. And so how do we balance those two things? 

Except that well over a decade ago, a Texas think tank – a liberal Texas think tank -- released a study debunking the idea that doing more to keep families together compromises child safety. On the contrary, it’s the massive overload of systems with all those false allegations trivial cases and poverty cases that makes it harder to find children in real danger. 

The bias of the center 

One of the problems for the Tribune in pushing the whole idea that these bills all spring from the minds of right-wing “parents’ rights” fanatics is the fact that so many of the bills passed nearly unanimously (something never mentioned in the story).  The solution is to stereotype both sides as extreme while groups like CASA – and the Texas Tribune -- are simply suggesting that, as journalists love to proclaim, the truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. 

So after accepting CASA’s false characterization the story declares that the new laws represent 

an approach supported by both ​​social conservatives who tout family values and progressive child welfare abolitionists who want to do away with the system. 

In the Texas Tribune’s eyes, only extremists support these “parents’ rights” bills; whereas good, sensible moderates oppose them.  This is a classic example of what’s been aptly called “the bias of the center” – the idea that the truth always lies “somewhere in between” – and somehow taking that stand in a news story, and stereotyping everyone you disagree with as an extremist, isn’t bias. 

In this case there’s a particular problem: By that logic, almost every Democrat in the Texas Legislature is an abolitionist “who want(s) to do away with the system.”  If that were true you’d think they would have proposed stronger bills. 

No, what the Tribune (and the Dallas Morning News) can’t face is that after decades of seeing the system that calls itself “child welfare” do enormous harm to children, people across the political spectrum are coming together and finding common ground.  They've come to understand that due process for families is the best way to ensure children’s rights and child safety.  

So the Tribune presents us with a lawyer, who, apparently referring to these bills and one that became law in 2021 said: “The failing in the laws is that the standard is so high now for a child to be removed.” 

In fact, none of this year’s bills changes the standard for removal. The one that became law in 2021 (again after passing with huge bipartisan majorities) said only that before branding families guilty of neglect and tearing children from everyone they know and love there should be an “immediate danger” to the child.  That’s because if the danger isn’t immediate then there’s time to find ways to remove the risk instead of the child.  Why in the world wouldn’t you try that first? 

The anonymous reporting bill 

The first bill discussed specifically in the Tribune story is the one largely replacing anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. Here, the reporter doesn’t bother with the figleaf of finding someone else to say what she thinks, instead she simply declares flatly that the bill “takes an extreme approach to weeding out false reports.” 

The story’s discussion of this bill is misleading in several ways. 

The story declares that “the anonymity can protect those afraid of retaliation.” At no point does the story explain why confidential reporting, in which the accused still doesn’t know the name of the accuser, fails to do that.  

The story then repeats this from that previous misleading Texas Tribune story about the bill: 

About 1,000 of the 12,473 anonymous reports made in 2022 led to findings of abuse, according to Texans Care for Children. 

Like the previous story, this one leaves a whole lot out:

      ● “Findings of abuse” is a gross exaggeration.  The 1,000 reports were “substantiated,” but that means only that a caseworker checked a box on a form guessing it is slightly more likely than not that something that meets Texas’ definitions of abuse and neglect occurred. 

      ●  Of those 1,000 cases, it is likely that 770 did not involve sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse.

      So what the numbers actually show is that, of all anonymous reports alleging abuse or neglect in Texas in 2022, 92% were flat-out false.  That means caseworkers handling these cases spent 92% of their time harassing innocent families, inflicting trauma on their children – and wasting time that could have been used to find children in real danger.

      Add in the cases that were “substantiated” but involved neither physical nor sexual abuse, and the figure rises to more than 98%.  That’s 98% of workers’ time spent on cases that are nothing like the horror stories.

At no point in the Texas Tribune story is anyone quoted favoring the bill.  But, again echoing the previous story, the reporter gladly invokes the ultimate in fearmongering to oppose it: 

“None of us in this room want any child to suffer abuse or neglect. And I would hate for us to vote for a policy where the tradeoff is ... [having] a child possibly die from abuse or neglect,” [Sen. José] Menéndez said on the Senate floor. 

Texas Tribune readers never learn about that liberal think tank study showing that encouraging more reports, anonymous or otherwise, does not reduce child abuse deaths.  They never learn about the research showing that it is the overload of false allegations trivial cases and poverty cases that actually makes it more like that that you could have “a child possibly die from abuse or neglect.” 

Suckered by a McLawsuit 

Part of the blame for all this lies with the group that brought the massive doomed-to-fail Texas McLawsuit in the first place: the group that calls itself Children’s Rights.  Both CR and the group that spun off from it and which shares responsibility for the Texas McLawsuit, A Better Childhood, have abysmal records of filing almost identical suits across the country that ignore the problem at the root of all the others – needless removal of children.  Instead, they demand “solutions” that don’t always fail completely, but often leave states with the same lousy systems only bigger.  

That’s why Michigan’s leading child advocate recently blasted the consent decree resulting from a very similar Children’s Rights McLawsuit in that state, declaring that the Michigan consent decree has: 

if anything, made the situation much worse because it’s funneling money from front-end stuff to really fund our foster care system. 

The Texas lawsuit demands much the same – and it sounds like that’s exactly as the Texas Tribune thinks it should be.  

The Texas suit also is another example of CR’s excellent public policy work and its lousy lawsuits working at cross purposes.  In recent years CR has done bold work calling out racism in family policing and demanding things like the repeal of horrible laws such as the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. 

But in its Texas lawsuit Complaint (Paragraph 282) CR demands stricter enforcement of ASFA. 

None of this excuses how Texas has responded to the lawsuit – by fighting it tooth and nail instead of proposing an alternative: a consent decree that emphasizes services and due process protections to keep children in their own homes.  (It’s not too late to try that, by the way.) 

But none of this is hindsight either.  We knew the McLawsuit was doomed to fail and we said so early on.  Now, the Texas legislature is figuring out that the only way to fix foster care is to have less of it – whether the Texas Tribune or the Dallas Morning News like it or not. 

UPDATES, JULY 14 AND JULY 18, 2023:

KWTX-TV reports on a case in which six children were taken away.  All of them, even the youngest, age 2, apparently were institutionalized.  Now that child is dead.  According to the news story “this all happened because of a call alleging [the mother] was smoking marijuana.” And KXXV-TV reports the call was anonymous and the mother passed "numerous drug tests."  (They also report there was an allegation of "violence" - but no indication there was even an allegation of violence against the children.)

Apparently, the children were never in any danger, because shortly after boy’s death, the Texas family police agency gave all the other children back and closed the case.

So yeah, tell us again Texas lawyer how “the failing in the laws is that the standard is so high now for a child to be removed.”  And tell us again, Texas lawmaker, how the "tradeoff" for banning most anonymous reporting is "[having] a child possibly die."

No, 1,000 Texas children won’t die if the state replaces anonymous reporting with confidential reporting

 A bill to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting
has passed the Texas Legislature.

UPDATE, JUNE 20, 2023: The governor signed the bill!

I have written often about how the entire debate over what to do about child welfare has been poisoned by “health terrorism,” the misrepresentation of the true nature and scope of a problem in the name of “raising awareness.”  I did not make up the term. It comes from a group that admits to having practiced health terrorism for decades, Prevent Child Abuse America.  (They say they’ve stopped, the evidence suggests otherwise.) 

In Texas, masters of health terrorism include the people at Texans Care for Children. When it comes to children’s issues, they’re also the “Godsource” for Texas media  – whatever they say is taken as Gospel. A classic example of health terrorism – and how easily media are suckered by it – can be seen in a recent story from The Texas Tribune. 

The story deals with a bill passed by the Texas Legislature and now awaiting action by Gov. Greg Abbott. [UPDATE: He signed it!]  The bill would largely replace anonymous reporting of suspicions of child abuse and neglect with confidential reporting – that is, the accused still wouldn’t know who accused them, but the state family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare agency”) would.  This both would curb the use of false reports as a way to harass families, and free up more time for workers to find children in real danger.  It would make all Texas children safer. 

If anything, the bill is too weak. It specifies that if the operator at the state child abuse hotline can’t persuade the accuser to leave her or his name, the operator is to tell the accuser s/he remains free to call law enforcement anonymously – and if law enforcement thinks the report is credible they can refer it to the family police for investigation. 

But watch how Texans Care for Children uses health terrorism, to distort the issue, and how the Texas Tribune helps them. According to the story: 

In 2022, there were 12,473 anonymous calls to the state and about 1,000 of those calls resulted in a substantiated finding of abuse or neglect, said Kate Murphy, director of child protection policy with the advocacy group Texans Care for Children. 

“Unfortunately, if this bill were to pass, those 1,000 children would be left to continue experiencing abuse and neglect or worse,” she said on Thursday, hours before the bill passed.

“Leaving children in danger can have disastrous consequences. Last year, 182 Texas kids died of abuse and neglect.” 

By the time Murphy and the Tribune are done, piling leaps of logic on faulty data, it’s no wonder readers might come away thinking “Oh my God, if Gov. Abbott signs this bill 1,000 children will die!”

 That’s how health terrorism works. 

What Texans Care for Children didn’t say

To understand all the misrepresentations we need to go back and parse Murphy’s claims point by point:

 Here’s what Murphy does not say, and the Tribune does not explain: 

1.     Substantiated means only that a caseworker checked a box on a form guessing it is slightly more likely than not that something that meets Texas’ definitions of abuse and neglect occurred. 

2.     Of those 1,000 cases, it is likely that 770 did not involve sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse 

S    So what the numbers actually show is that, of all anonymous reports alleging abuse or neglect in Texas in 2022, 92% were flat-out false.  That means caseworkers handling these cases spent 92% of their time harassing innocent families, inflicting trauma on their children – and wasting time that could have been used to find children in real danger.

      Add in the cases that were “substantiated” but involved neither physical nor sexual abuse, and the figure rises to more than 98%.  That’s 98% of workers’ time spent on cases that are nothing like the horror stories.

      Now consider the leap of logic behind this claim:

 “Unfortunately, if this bill were to pass, those 1,000 children would be left to continue experiencing abuse and neglect or worse,” she said on Thursday, hours before the bill passed. Last year, 182 Texas kids died of abuse and neglect.” 

Keep in mind that if this bill becomes law, the accused still won’t know who accused them, only the family police will know.  So what Murphy is saying, and the Tribune never questions, is that people who sincerely believe children are in danger of horrific abuse won’t come forward if they merely have to give their names to the family police – nor will they take advantage of the loophole allowing them to report anonymously to law enforcement. 

Journalists in particular should be skeptical about this one.  Reporters deal with anonymous sources all the time. Policies vary among news organizations, but typically, when a source demands anonymity, the reporter will say: “I will not put your name in the story, but I need to know who you are and my editor has to know who you are.”  In my own experience as a reporter, almost always, whistleblowers coming forward out of a sincere concern about some sort of injustice will agree to those terms.  With children’s lives at stake - and that’s exactly Murphy’s claim – why does she think people won’t do the same? 

As for those 182 children who died – that happened under the current system, which allows anonymous reporting.  Some of them probably died because Texas caseworkers are so desperately overloaded with all those false reports -- and anonymous reports are those most likely to be false, -- that they didn’t have time to investigate any case carefully. 

It also would have been helpful had the Tribune reminded readers of the report issued in 2009 by a liberal Texas think tank that used to be Texas media’s Godsource on these issues, a think tank whose then director used to crusade for tearing apart more families.  That stopped after they studied child abuse fatalities in Texas and found that none of the traditional investigative and "police" functions of child protective services contribute anything to raising or lowering the rate of child abuse fatalities.  You’ll never guess what does – actually, you will. 

No system can save every endangered child.  But which is more likely to lead to a child dying: Requiring people who report child abuse to disclose who they are to the family police?  Or continuing to force caseworkers to drown in a tsunami of false reports and poverty cases that occupy up to 98% of their time? 

If only the Texas Tribune had thought to ask that question.

As the Dallas Morning News pointed out in an editorial about the bill:

It is no secret that [Family Police Agency] employees are understaffed, overworked and, in some cases, undertrained, and that the agency bobs from crisis to crisis in a sea of chaos that victimizes children caught in the system. 

Oh wait: the Dallas Morning News used this as a reason to oppose the bill -- which just goes to show the extent to which overexposure to health terrorism can addle your brain.