Child welfare on Long Island: The depths of family policing cruelty

Sometimes the cruelty inflicted on children in the name of “protecting” them boggles the mind. Consider the case of a two-year-old boy who, in June, must have wondered: Where did Mommy go?  Why isn’t she in the house? Why do I never see her? Did I do something wrong? 

Perhaps he’s still wondering – since I haven’t been able to find an update to this story. 

It’s a story about a mother on Long Island who made a mistake. When she stopped at an outlet mall, she left the two-year-old in the car for 20 minutes. The doors were locked, but the motor was running – probably so she could keep the air conditioning on, which she did. 

Someone called the police. They arrested her and called the family police - child protective services. 

At least the child was not placed in foster care; he was allowed to live with his father.  But the Assistant District Attorney handling the case claimed that the mother’s mistake made her such an extreme threat to the safety of her child that she should be banned from the home and her child denied all contact with her. 

And what exactly was the risk? That Mom would sneak out of the house with her son just to get her jollies by leaving him alone in a car again? Seems unlikely. 

But the judge, sitting at his literal bench and on his figurative high horse, bought it. Told by the mother’s public defender that her exile might leave her homeless … 

Judge Alonzo Jacobs was unswayed. Calling her actions “a real lapse of judgment,” Jacobs granted the protective order in full and rebuked the mother in open court. “I care less about the homeless situation and more about the child’s life,” Jacobs said. “He could have been kidnapped. He could have suffocated.” 

Well, yes, he could have been kidnapped. The odds are roughly 1 in 486,000 – assuming he were left in the car for an entire year. The odds of anyone suffocating in a car parked outdoors for 20 minutes with the air conditioning on also are extremely low. 

In contrast, the odds that the judge inflicted psychological harm on the child by leaving him feeling his mother abandoned him are a whole lot higher. Is that how one cares about a child’s life? 

Surely no one seriously believes this mom is going to do the same thing again. So while it surely was not his intention, the judge’s cruelty accomplishes nothing except to hurt the child.  

Nice going, your honor.

NCCPR news and commentary roundup, week ending August 19, 2025

● Gothamist reports on that big victory for domestic violence survivors and their children in New York. The city’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, must stop harassing them simply because they survived violence from their partners. From the story: 

“Essentially, the ACS policy at issue in this case permits it to surveil the mother simply because the child’s father committed acts of domestic violence against her,” Associate Justice Ellen Gesmer wrote in the court’s ruling. “We cannot condone a policy based on this faulty and unlawful premise.” 

And hear reporter Samantha Max discuss the story on WNYC Public Radio. In particular, check out the excerpt from oral argument at 4:13 in; listen closely for the brief moment of derisive laughter directed toward the ACS attorney’s argument by one of the judges. 

● There was another significant victory for families, this time in Michigan – thanks to some University of Michigan Law School students. 

● The Imprint reports on a bill passed unanimously by the New York State Legislature that, if it becomes law, would take the first step toward seriously regulating the insidious practice of “hidden foster care.” What is that first step? Finding out how much of it there is. 

From the story: 

[U]nder a recently passed bill in New York, these arrangements would be brought into the light, marking a first step toward fully understanding the extent of the practice and perhaps curtailing it. Critics say hidden foster care circumvents legal protections, relieves governments of their responsibility, and robs caregivers of vital support and resources that are available under the formal child welfare process. 

Bringing hidden foster care into the open would have one other advantage: It would be harder for family police agencies to pretend they take fewer children than they really do. 

● You’ve heard the child welfare establishment types yell Drugs! Drugs! Drugs! as the all-purpose supposed reason for taking away so many children. But if they meant that, they’d distinguish between when drug abuse genuinely endangers children and when it does not. 

And when it does, they would demand drug treatment – in particular, the kind that works best, where parents can stay with their children. But since Drugs! Drugs! Drugs! is mostly just an excuse to tear apart poor families so their children can be placed into “better” – i.e., whiter and/or wealthier – homes, the same establishment makes treatment as difficult as possible. Shoshana Walter, author of the new book Rehab: An American Scandal, discusses the problem for The Marshall Project. 

● In 2016, two legal scholars argued that, when it comes to the most sacred cow in child welfare, Court-Appointed Special Advocates, no matter how well-meaning the volunteers, the program is so steeped in unfixable racial and class bias that runs so deep, the program is, they said, “an act of white supremacy.”  And that was before, as The Imprint reports, this happened.

● WZTV reports on what a Tennessee family had to endure at the hands of the family police, even after a judge found them innocent.

● When one of Connecticut’s so-called STTAR home dumping ground shelters was engulfed in a scandal over rampant abuse, the Connecticut family police agency had the perfect answer! Spend more and change the acronym! (What, you were expecting real solutions?)  I have a blog post about it.

Child welfare in Connecticut: Here come the new shelters, just like the old shelters

Every state has them.  Short-term dumping grounds for children supposedly so difficult that no place else can handle them. 

The premise is false. The dumping grounds, like all institutional care, are a failed model. The homes that, with the right kind of help, can handle the children that supposedly can’t be handled are filled with children who never needed to be taken in the first place, and states are so busy pouring so much money into things like short-term dumping grounds, that they can’t invest in the Wraparound services that would make such placements work. 

In Connecticut, these dumping grounds are called Specialized Trauma-Informed Treatment, Assessment and Reunification Homes, or as a press release from Connecticut’s family police agency, the Department of Children and Families calls them, STAR homes. Or is it STTAR homes? Or STARR homes? DCF is so clueless it can’t even get the acronyms straight – the press release uses all three. 

As usual, in child welfare, the name is Orwellian. If anything, they are trauma-inducing, and they do nothing to help with reunification. They may even be one of the reasons Connecticut has one of the worst rates of reunifying children from foster care in the country. It also may help explain why Connecticut spends on “child welfare” at the third highest rate in the country, triple the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in, even as it backslides from progress it made during the last decade. (The problem isn’t the amount, it’s that so much of it goes to causing harm instead of helping.) 

As with so many of their counterparts across the country, really bad things can happen in Connecticut’s  STAR/STTAR/STARR homes. Here’s a small sample of what happened at one of them, according to a memo from a state trooper reported by Connecticut Inside Investigator. 

● The arrest of a 42-year-old male staff member for sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old female resident of the STAR home. 

● The arrest of a 39-year-old male staff member for physically assaulting a 17-year-old female resident after “kneeling and using bodyweight to hold her to the ground after slamming her to the ground several times.” 

● The arrest of an 18-year-old biological male who was transitioning to female for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old female in the home. 

● A melee involving four girls barricading themselves in the home, locking out staff, and requiring seven state troopers and multiple ambulances to be called to the scene, resulting in assaults on the state troopers and the arrest of the four juveniles. 

● The sexual assault of four female residents between the ages of 14 and 17 by a 25-year-old female staff member. An arrest warrant was being drafted for the staff member at the time of the memorandum. 

But don’t worry, DCF has a solution: Give the homes more money – and build more of them! (What? You were expecting a real solution?)

So now, in addition to the STAR/STTAR/STARR homes, Connecticut will have ITTC homes! That’s Intensive Transitional Treatment Centers. What’s the difference between an ITTC and a STAR/STTAR/STAR home? Well, says a DCF bureaucrat, “the budget is bigger, so it provides the opportunity for additional resources …” 

But would you trust any young person, let alone one who is troubled, in the hands of an agency that stuffs into its own press release a paragraph like this?: 

Youth who stabilize in these ITTC programs who cannot be provided a home setting in a timely manner will be referred to Therapeutic Group Home (TGH) level of care. Youth who continue to be acute and/or whose needs exceed the ability of what the ITTC can provide will be referred to psychiatric residential treatment facility (PRTF) level of care.

Got that? If the STTAR doesn’t work, ship ‘em to the ITTC, and then to the TGH or the PRTF. 

But perhaps most striking, and most indicative of the DCF mindset, is the fact that the new plan also will give each STAR/STTAR/STARR program $125,000 for “therapeutic recreational activities” which as CT Mirror explained, translates into things to do so the kids don’t get bored while they’re institutionalized. 

Young people really do need that, of course. But let’s contrast the acronym-laden, bureaucratic DCF approach with how the late Karl Dennis, the “father of Wraparound” dealt with the same problem.  

I have often embedded the video below, in which Dennis explains how he returned safely to his own mother a teenager so difficult the local jail couldn’t handle him. His mother was hesitant, so Dennis kept asking her what she would need to be able to take care of her son. This time, I’ve cued this link to the video to what Dennis did when faced with the same issue as Connecticut DCF. (Or watch the embed below, starting at exactly 10:00 in).

If only there were an acronym for that.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 12, 2025

● In his Reliable Sources newsletter last Friday, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter documents how the Trump Administration fans fear of crime with argument-by-anecdote to drown out the data showing that crime has decreased. Mainstream media aren’t falling for it. So why do so many keep falling for it when the topic is child welfare? I have a blog post about it, with a link to the full newsletter. 

● In a recent case in his state, Prof. Vivek Sankaran writes in Bridge Michigan 

CPS made the right call by not needlessly separating these children from their family.  But somewhere along the way, we’ve taken the right lesson — that poverty is not neglect — and twisted it into an excuse for inaction. … 

Michigan lawmakers should take this moment to separate the functions of child protection and child welfare. Let CPS investigate serious abuse and neglect. But create a parallel, well-funded infrastructure whose sole mission is to stabilize families, address poverty and keep children safe without separating them from their parents.

● The Imprint reports on what is believed to be the first national survey of current and former Native American foster youth.  One of those responding wrote: 

“Our connection to culture, land, and community is not optional — it’s vital. When those ties are broken by placement in non-Native homes or systems that don’t understand our identity, it creates deep, long-term harm. Too often, Indigenous youth in care are expected to adapt to systems that weren’t built for us — systems that have historically contributed to our displacement and trauma.’’ 

● In Reason, Lenore Skenazy reprints a letter from a Virginia mother whose family had been repeatedly harassed, and their children traumatized, when child protective services investigated them – for letting the children play outside.  Fortunately, Virginia has passed a Reasonable Childhood Independence law.  But even so, check out what families have to go through: 

[E]ven with the legislation we helped to pass, my kids are hesitant to exercise their independence. Few people know that parents have the right to decide what their children are capable of handling. I have equipped my kids with a "license" that they keep on them when they roam our small, rural neighborhood. It says across the top in big, bold letters "MY PARENTS KNOW I'M HERE" and includes information about SB1367 (Virginia's Reasonable Childhood Independence law) as well as my name and phone number. My children have been stopped by neighbors, produced their license, and thankfully were then left unbothered.

It's even worse, of course, in the 39 states that don’t have Reasonable Childhood Independence laws, so children can be caught playing outside without a “license.” 

● Also in Reason, Skenazy points out that all the restrictions on children’s ability to play freely and interact IRL are part of what’s driving their addiction to their phones. 

● It’s good to see the Minnesota Star Tribune widening the range of viewpoints it will publish on child welfare. In this column, Amelia Franck Meyer of Alia Innovations explains why Minnesota needs those great new child welfare laws to improve child safety and well-being. 

● But plenty of bad laws remain in Minnesota, including a draconian law that forces schools to call CPS on any family where a child under age 12 has had seven unexcused absences. In contrast, more than half the states don’t include “educational neglect” as part of CPS’ responsibilities at all. Educational neglect allegations also are a potent way for school districts to shut up parents who are demanding things like the kind of special education plan a child is entitled to by law. 

As the respected Vera Institute of Justice found long ago, for older children “educational neglect” should not be part of CPS’ domain, period, and for younger children there should be strict limits. Among other things, their study refuted the widely-held myth that “educational neglect” is a sort of “gateway allegation” signaling that horrible things are happening in the family. 

At a minimum, such reports should be discretionary. But in the absence of either getting rid of the category or allowing discretion, The Imprint reports, some school districts in Minnesota have received funding to reach out to help families first, so they never reach that seven-day mark. Unfortunately, the story gives unjustified credence to the whole “gateway allegation” myth, never mentions all those states that don’t deem “educational neglect” a CPS responsibility at all, and never mentions the issue of harassment. 

● On the NCCPR Blog, I write briefly about Paul Vincent and Karl Dennis, two heroes the child welfare field lost recently.  The Imprint also has stories about Vincent and Dennis.

The “irresponsible media megaphones” of child welfare

Friday’s Reliable Sources newsletter from CNN’s indefatigable media reporter Brian Stelter was all about the way many journalists still cover child welfare – though I’m sure Stelter didn’t realize it. In fact, the column says not a word about the “child welfare” system or, as it should be called, the family policing system. 

Rather, the column was devoted to politicians who exploit horror stories to boost the power of the traditional police. He cites this example: 

We can see it happening this week in the sudden storyline about Trump increasing federal law enforcement in DC while fear-mongering about crime being "totally out of control."

 

Responsible news outlets keep pointing out, as PBS "NewsHour" did, that "contrary to the president’s claims, violent crime in Washington, DC, last year hit a 30-year low." Nationally, as well, there is clear FBI data "showing crime down in every category," anchor Geoff Bennett said. …

 

But irresponsible media megaphones are engaging in argument by anecdote. They're citing highly visible crimes … to justify Trump's desire to exert more control in DC. For example, Fox's story about the show of force asserts "a concerning surge in violent crime" with no mention of data to the contrary. [Emphasis in original – it’s Stelter’s style.]

 

This has, of course, been the “child welfare” establishment playbook pretty much forever. There’s even a name for it: “health terrorism.” Take a horror story, generalize from it (argue by anecdote), and use it to demand a vast increase in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love in cases that are nothing like that horror story. Instead of making children safer, it traumatizes thousands of children with needless foster care, exposes them to the high risk of abuse in foster care itself and so overloads the system that workers have even less time to find those few children in real danger.

 

But, as Stelter points out, while mainstream news organizations aren’t falling for it when it comes from Trump, often they still fall for it in “child welfare” when it comes from extremists who happen to have “professor” in front of their names, or cushy posts at extremist think tanks. Or they fall for it when it comes from a grandstanding local pol or the head of the local so-called “child advocacy” organization.

 

The good news: Journalists are falling for it a lot less than they used to. When they still fall for it, politicians are less likely to respond with knee-jerk demands to tear apart more families. And when they fall for it, it’s usually just that; a blunder based on the revulsion we all feel when adults do horrible things to children and a failure to seek more context and a wider variety of sources, rather an reporters being irresponsible.

 

Oh, by the way: Look through back editions of the federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment report, and you’ll find that the rate of child abuse in America peaked in 1993. It’s declined more than 50% since then, reaching a record low in 2023. During the first few years of this time period, foster care numbers went up. For the rest, they went down.

 

So here’s a suggestion to reporters covering child welfare: The next time anyone tries to exploit a tragedy to stampede us into demanding that we tear apart more families, imagine that Donald Trump is uttering those words.  Then fact-check accordingly.

Child welfare loses two heroes

There are not many true heroes in child welfare. Recently, we lost two of them.

Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent died on July 25. Paul led the child welfare division of the Alabama Department of Human Resources when it was the subject of a pioneering class-action lawsuit that demanded the system rebuild to emphasize keeping families together. (A member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors, Ira Burnim of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.) Paul welcomed the suit and worked hard to make it succeed.  And it did. For a while, Alabama was the unlikely leader in doing child welfare right – to the point that it made the front page of The New York Times. 

Paul also served on the “Marisol Panel,” an advisory group that grew out of a class-action lawsuit settlement in New York City. The group was strictly advisory. But because of who was on it, and because the head of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, Nicholas Scoppetta, surprised almost everyone by taking a lot of the panel’s advice, it did a lot to set in motion some of the changes for the better in  New York City. 

Then Paul founded the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, which issues outstanding reports on systems across the country, including Iowa, Indiana and Philadelphia. You can read more about Paul here. 

Karl Dennis 

Karl Dennis, the "father of Wraparound” -- or, as he preferred to call it, Unconditional Care -- died in June.  In a tribute to Dennis in Youth Today, David Osher writes: 

Karl also understood that each person and each context was unique and that settings, programs and even systems had to adapt to the youth and family rather than the opposite. Just as Karl never wrote off a young person, he never wrote off families even though most or perhaps all Kaleidoscope youth had experienced trauma, and agencies claimed the parents were hard to find and would not comply. He believed in family ties and understood that family included aunts, uncles, grandparents, even close friends, neighbors, and the whole tribe. Because Karl viewed families as valuable resources — and Kaleidoscope worked hard to find them — when they found them they treated them with respect and worked to earn trust, believing that wraparound should be family-driven. 

Karl understood the toxic impacts of language on people, worker-youth/family alliance, and organizational behavior. Karl insisted that his staff never applied the pejorative clinical language of “dysfunction” to families; rather, he saw systems that did not provide appropriate support to families and youth as dysfunctional. 

But it’s best to let Karl Dennis speak for himself, as he did in this presentation in 2009: 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 5, 2025

● All over the country, private foster care agencies are fearmongering in a desperate attempt to get taxpayer bailouts and/or near immunity from liability – because now that victims of child abuse on their watch can sue, there are so many lawsuits that the agencies can’t afford insurance. In Youth Today, NCCPR suggests a better idea. 

● In a column for The Imprint, one of a series documenting what it takes to stop families from being torn apart when their poverty is confused with neglect, Sarah Winograd of Together With Families writes about a case in Georgia which began with this ultimatum: 

Child Protective Services gave Maurice a deadline: fix your home, or your granddaughters will be placed in foster care. 

That’s pretty amazing, since foster care apologists keep telling us such cases don’t exist. The column documents how much it took to cobble together the support this grandfather needed to save his children from foster care. It reminded me of the question I posed concerning a similar example from Missouri: Why is foster care so easy and everything else so hard? 

● Also in The Imprint, Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, documents the enormous harm of anonymous child abuse reporting, and why New York Gov. Kathy Hochul should sign a bill to replace it with confidential reporting. 

● If we must have offices of Child Advocate/Ombudsman, then at least let's structure them to be unbiased and recognize error in all directions. In a column for the Maine Morning Star about what is currently one of the worst such offices, I suggest ways to do that. 

● The American Law Institute periodically issues what it calls “Restatements” of aspects of American law. They are massive undertakings, and until now ALI had not tried it with child welfare law. Now that they have, Prof. Martin Guggenheim has written a commentary on the Restatement for Family Court Review that also is an assessment of the current state of family defense – and the current state of the teaching of family defense in law schools.  

In the same issue, Prof. Shanta Trivedi writes that 

The family policing system separates families every day. As a result, children and their parents suffer lifelong, irreversible trauma and a host of other negative consequences. The Restatement acknowledges these harms and directs courts to consider the harms of removal throughout court proceedings when deciding whether a child should be removed from their parents or in determining if reunification is appropriate.

NCCPR in Youth Today: Seize the foster care insurance “crisis” as an opportunity — to curb foster care

As California faces a $12 billion budget deficit, here are some of the programs that were proposed for cuts: 

● Crisis services for foster youth

● Services for the homeless

● Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for the poor 

But one group not only isn’t being cut, they’re in line for a great big increase. They’re getting a $31.5 million taxpayer bailout for private agencies that operate group homes and institutions and oversee some family foster homes. There are far better answers, including not taking so many children needlessly in the first place. ...

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in the Maine Morning Star: Who watches the watchdog? Fixing the office of the Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman will take radical restructuring

We all know the cliché: Knowledge is power. The corollary, though, is that anyone who has a near-monopoly on knowledge will have enormous power to shape public perception. That enormous power brings enormous potential for abuse. 

Child welfare systems tend to be more secretive than the CIA. So whoever becomes a state’s ombudsman or child advocate often has enormous power. But while such offices are conceived as a way to watch over state child welfare agencies, lawmakers tend to forget a crucial question: Who watches the watchdog? 

So instead of simply further boosting the power of the Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman, which was among the oversight reforms proposed last legislative session, lawmakers need to restructure the office. …

Read the full column in the Maine Morning Star

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 29, 2025

● Can a total stranger really show up in your hospital room days after you’ve given birth and hand you a contract in a foreign language letting them take your child? Well, not if you’re affluent. But if you're poor …  And that’s not even the worst of the abuses uncovered in this story by Sandy West in the Texas Observer. I discuss some of the other horrors in this NCCPR Blog post. 

● The Texas Observer story focuses on alleged abuses by private agencies, but it also illustrates what happens when public agencies that are supposed to regulate them are willfully blind. For another example of willful blindness, check out the story from The Beacon in Kansas that is the subject of this NCCPR Blog post. 

● Some of the best research in child welfare is coming from scholars who are able to embed with the key actors and those who are acted upon – Kelley Fong’s book, Investigating Families is  one of the finest examples.  

Now there’s another. The Imprint interviews Katie Gibson, a post-doctoral fellow who embedded with the people who decide if foster youth will be given psychiatric meds, and those who review the decisions. From the story: 

In her dissertation research, she came away impressed by the professionals she observed, and grateful for their transparency. But she also began to question the medication “audit” oversight model. Gibson argues that while audit programs like the one she observed can contribute to improving some prescribing practices, they also deepen the foster care system’s reliance on stigmatizing mental health diagnoses that center children as the problem — instead of the troubled institutions that house them. 

● One mother ate a poppy seed bagel, another was given morphine for pain relief by the hospital where she gave birth. But in both cases, based on a single positive drug tests, the hospitals turned them in to the family police. Watch the joint investigation by The Marshall Project and CBS News Sunday Morning: 

● It’s not just the wrong bagel that can get you reported to the family police.  From Abortion, Every Day: 

And B’s arrest? It happened after she went to the hospital for medical care—and someone there called child protective services. 

That’s right, apparently in South Carolina, a miscarriage is cause for a child abuse investigation. As If/When/How attorney Farah Diaz-Tello told AED, “Once law enforcement decides they want to punish somebody, they're going to try to find a way to do it.” 

● It’s not all bad news. Law 360 reports on a big victory in New York City for survivors of domestic violence and their children. 

● Sadly, the reporting staff at the Minnesota Star-Tribune often has been clueless, or worse, about these issues for a little over a decade.  But at least one of the interns got it right, in this story about the appalling treatment of Native American families by county family police agencies. 

● There’s a new study out about foster parents feeling, as the headline puts it, “Undervalued, misled, & isolated.”  That’s probably true. But wouldn’t it be great if some of them stopped and thought: They really need me, If this is how they treat me, how are they treating the birth parents? And is all that bad stuff they told me about the birth parents really true? 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From Law and Crime, a story with the headline: “'Careful not to leave a mark': Florida family of 4 abused 'illiterate' foster and adopted children who don't even know their own birthdays, police say” 

A Florida family of four is behind bars after subjecting their adopted and foster children to myriad forms of abuse, law enforcement in the Sunshine State allege.

● From Capitol News Illinois:

A caseworker assigned to monitor Illinois foster child Mackenzi Felmlee — who later died in May 2024 — had a troubling past, including an arrest for a violent crime and orders of protection filed against her by eight women for alleged threats, harassment and abuse, court documents show.

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.

Willful blindness at the Kansas “child welfare” agency

 

Image designed by Wannapik

Here’s what the Child Advocate in Kansas, Kerrie Lonard, says goes on in the group homes and institutions in which Kansas warehouses foster children, according to this story in The Beacon: 

These facilities have drug use, violence between kids, excessive force among staff and property damage, Lonard said. There’s also lax oversight that makes it easier for children to run away. 

Hard to believe that could happen considering the way the Kansas Department of Children and Families keeps an eagle eye on them – just kidding! Actually, they’re inspected once a year, and the group homes are told in advance when the inspectors are coming. 

Lonard is proposing a radical solution – just kidding again. She recommends that they be inspected more often, and that the inspectors don’t let the institutions know when they’re coming. 

But why would DCF even need anyone to tell them that? Why would they make it a point never to do the kind of inspection likely to turn up the most serious problems?  Because DCF doesn’t dare.  

DCF tears apart families at a rate double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  And when you count Kansas’ unique form of hidden foster care, the real figure may be far worse. 

DCF is begging for beds, and beggars can’t be choosers. They don’t do inspections likely to turn up problems because they don’t want to see the problems. 

This also is why even switching to unannounced inspections won’t do much good. You can bet the inspectors will still turn a blind eye to all but the most egregious abuse – and maybe even that. In addition, when an agency investigates abuse or miserable conditions in group homes and institutions, it is, in effect, investigating itself, since they put the children there in the first place. 

It all creates huge incentives to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the casefile.  

All this helps explain why the official figures agencies publish about abuse in foster care are vastly lower than what is found by independent studies. 

But demanding unannounced inspections would solve a problem for one group: Kansas legislators. They then can issue chest-thumping press releases about the bold step they’ve taken to protect children, how “ensuring the safety and well-being in these settings must remain a top priority,” blah, blah, blah. 

Oh, wait, one lawmaker already has said the “top priority” part – while not even committing to demanding unannounced inspections. 

And did she say remain a top priority?

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 22, 2025

● You know that puerile debate over whether so-called “neglect” cases are poverty “alone”?  Here’s a better way to define a poverty case: If the solution is money, the problem is poverty. That brings us to the study described in this story from The Imprint.   

● Honolulu Civil Beat reports on a victory for children victimized by an approach to child removal in Hawaii aptly described as “grab and go.” 

● After they turn off the cameras and blow out the candles on the cakes at those “Adoption Day” ceremonies, when no one is looking anymore, some of those adopted foster children wind up shipped out of state to be institutionalized – their new “forever family.” The Imprint reports that California has decided that, at least, if the adoptive parents are going to do that, the state will stop paying for it. 

California already bans this practice for foster children. One person who really needs to learn from this: Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, who tried incredibly hard but, fortunately, failed to persuade her state’s legislature to make it easier to do this to foster children.

● In the Seattle Times, two actual experts on child welfare and addiction refute demagogic attacks on efforts to keep families together in Washington State from politicians who are neither. 

● “Growing up, I was told that the child welfare system was created to help protect children and to get them out of bad situations,” writes Danielle Robinson in The Imprint. “But that was not my experience. I feel like the child welfare system did the opposite for me.” 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go In All Directions: 

● Capitol News Illinois has more on the torture and death of Mackenzi Felmlee, allegedly at the hands of her foster mother and foster grandmother.  We still don’t know why she was taken from her mother. But we do know this: 

Three years after DCFS took custody of the former honor roll student, Mackenzi was diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and depression.  She reportedly was under psychiatric care.  She was also incontinent; Williams made her wear diapers tied with plastic bags to her legs to keep the waste from leaking, prosecutors said. 

● From KLAS-TV, Las Vegas: 

An investigation by the 8 News Now Investigators has revealed major failures at several juvenile group homes in Las Vegas, including active warrants for two former employees, numerous calls for service to police for runaways and suicide attempts, and a state audit that describes abuse and neglect. 

● From the Sacramento Bee: 

More than a dozen former foster youths have sued Sacramento County, alleging employees “did nothing” to prevent drinking, drug use, violence, underage sex and sex trafficking at several facilities in which the county placed them earlier this decade. …

According to the lawsuit: 

 A teenage boy was forced to participate in “cage fights” that adults paid to watch, the suit alleged. He also alleged a county employee texted pictures of his genitals to another foster youth. When he reported the employee, the employee physically assaulted him, according to the lawsuit. 

▪ A county employee sexually assaulted a teenage boy, the lawsuit alleged. 

▪ A county employee sexually assaulted a teenage girl, the lawsuit alleged. 

▪ Eight teenage girls were routinely sex trafficked, “and abused by pimps operating openly outside and within the facilities,” the lawsuit alleged 

Upcoming event:

Healthy and Free Tennessee is hosting a conversation with Mary Anne Mendenhall, Porsha Sha'fon Venable, and Miriam Mack about the rise of and problems with child abuse pediatricians (CAPS) on Tuesday, July 29th at 12:30 pm CT / 1:30 pm ET. They will livestream the conversation to their Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/healthyfreetn/) and post it to our YouTube Channel the day after. 

And here’s a reminder of the kinds of problems they’ll probably be discussing.

NCCPR news and commentary roundup, week ending June 15, 2025

● On the Maine Monitor Radio Hour, reporter Josh Keefe discusses his story about a mother who had to learn the rules of life in a child welfare surveillance state the hard way: Conform precisely to middle-class, white-picket-fence child-rearing norms or lose your child. I have a blog post about the case with a link to the original story. 

● The Iowa Capital Dispatch reports that a mother forced to endure the trauma of a needless investigation and then fight her way off a state blacklist of alleged child abusers, all because of what she says a false positive drug test when she gave birth, is suing the lab. 

In this week's edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

● KSDK-TV has story about a case in Illinois, in which a foster mother and a foster grandmother have been charged in the murder of one of their foster children, Mackenzi Felmlee. The story begins with this headline: “Foster mom laughed while teen lay dying at bottom of stairs, court evidence reveals.” And there were other videos: 

Another piece of evidence showed Felmlee standing in front of a wall, forced to repeat phrases. One phrase was, "I am a doof, I hate myself," as [the foster mother] recorded and yelled at Felmlee while hitting her with an object. 

Other videos showed Felmlee begging for food and water. 

More videos and pictures showed Felmlee's injuries and bruises from her face to her arm. 

Other disturbing videos and pictures showed Felmlee forced to wear a soiled diaper on her face. … 

Other foster children also said they were abused: 

A child who resided in the home from 2013-2015 also reported [the foster mother] and said they were getting hit and threatened.

They said, "He'd rather die in the cold than live there." 

The family of Felmlee’s birth mother issued a statement. Here are some excerpts:

Mackenzi’s mother fought for her. 

She begged the courts for a second chance. She got sober. She got stable. She did the work. She tried to reunite with her children. But her voice wasn’t heard. The system didn’t want to look back at a woman’s redemption it only saw her past. So instead of being returned to her mother, Mackenzi was placed in a home with multiple prior abuse complaints all ignored by Illinois DCFS. … 

Mackenzi should be alive. 

Her mother should have been given the chance to be her mother again. 

Now, all we have is truth and we will not let it be buried by lies. 

The foster mother and foster grandmother deny the charges. Their defense attorney pointed out that the Illinois “child welfare” agency determined that all of the abuse allegations against them were unfounded. 

● In New Mexico, scene of America’s worst foster-care panic in 2023, and where the Governor has just further ratcheted up that panic, all in the name of child safety, of course, Searchlight New Mexico reports that this happened. 

● And in Pennsylvania, Statecollege.com reports: 

A former Centre County resident was arrested Tuesday on charges that he repeatedly raped a foster child in his care over a period of more than two years in the State College area.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 9, 2025

 ● You may think you know all about the horrors inflicted on children and families by some “child abuse pediatricians” – but these extraordinary stories from ProPublica add all sorts of insights, including how, in one state, a foster-care panic helped start the problems. And here’s the inevitable NCCPR Blog post discussing the implications. 

● A remarkable story of bravery from The Imprint: Horribly abused in a notorious New York State institution, she worked up the courage to seek justice – in her 80s. She’s able to try thanks to the extension of the statute of limitations for such crimes. (Those are the same laws that have left private agencies trying to pressure states into either making them virtually immune or giving them taxpayer bailouts. Unfortunately, in California, they got their bailout.) 

● The Reason Foundation is proposing model legislation concerning child welfare and substeance use. Provisions of their proposal include: 

requiring informed consent for drug testing, prohibiting automatic reporting [to child protective services or law enforcement] based on positive tests alone, and ensuring that substance use during pregnancy is not treated as grounds for criminal charges or automatic family separation. 

Here’s why:

This punitive approach to mothers struggling with substance use disorders has backfired spectacularly. States that criminalize maternal substance use see 41% higher rates of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome—where infants experience drug withdrawal—and worse health outcomes for both mothers and infants. Why? Because fear pushes pregnant people away from care and proper management of their substance use, putting both mother and child at extreme risk. 

States that offer voluntary treatment without the threat of legal punishment, by contrast, see higher engagement in treatment, better recovery outcomes, and healthier births. ...

● Washington Post columnist Leana Wen writes about medical-legal partnerships – when the specialist a child needs most is a lawyer. Some examples: 

In large multiunit apartments, a dozen or more children could be suffering asthma exacerbations from the same environmental trigger. “The answer isn’t to give more medications to one kid,” [Dr. Robert] Kahn said. “It’s to make sure that the property owner is addressing the fundamental issues of roof leakage and mold.” 

He cited other cases: A child with multiple medical conditions was living in a home without a refrigerator or working air conditioner. So a legal advocate filed a complaint with the city that pressured the landlord to fix those problems. 

Though the column cites multiple benefits from these programs it doesn’t mention one of the most important: It helps doctors resist the temptation to confuse the poverty with neglect and call the family police.

● Thanks, CBS12 West Palm Beach, for an unflinching look at child abuse horrors that delves into the real reasons such cases are missed, including NCCPR’s perspective, and offers real solutions.  The story also illustrates how the horror stories go in all directions.  Speaking of which … 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

From The Boston Globe: 

A New Hampshire woman who sued her adoptive parents for abuse she suffered as a child was granted $29.6 million in damages by a New Hampshire Superior Court judge on Tuesday, an award her attorney called one of the largest ever in New Hampshire. …

ProPublica’s child abuse pediatrician exposé breaks new ground, revealing failures of medicine, government – and journalism.

Images by chatGPT, (with thanks for the caption to Andrew Brown of the
Texas Public Policy Foundation whose op-ed in The Hill used it as the headline.) 

A brief preface for any journalists who may be reading this: 

OK, all you reporters and editors, admit it: You’ve gotten the calls or the long emails from parents insisting that the child protective services agency that took their children lied.  But they can’t see you when you roll your eyes and think: Yeah, right. After all, the CPS workers are hard-working, underpaid, mostly well-motivated, white-collar professionals – just the sort of people reporters can identify with.  

That person who sent the long email – the one that runs two pages with no paragraph breaks – well, they’re probably child abusers, right? They conjure up images of the worst case you’ve ever covered. So why check out what they have to say? 

When you read about the visit supervisor who called out her own colleagues for lying – and who was pressured to lie herself – you may wish to reconsider. 

The context: child abuse pediatricians 

It’s become a staple of investigative journalism: Every few months, some news organization exposes the horrors inflicted on children and families by some child abuse pediatricians – the doctors who are supposed to find child abuse where it is – but sometimes also find child abuse where it isn’t. 

There was the stunning series by Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News and more stories by Hixenbaugh and Keri Blakinger, then with the Houston Chronicle. There are the stories from Wisconsin Watch, the Anchorage Daily News and even excellent reporting from The Alligator, the student newspaper at the University of Florida, all dealing with the same child abuse pediatrician who kept getting run out of one job after another. Then there’s this story from Illinois, and this story from Texas, and these stories from Georgia. And of course, there was the reporting from the Sarasota Herald Tribune on the case that was the subject of the documentary Take Care of Maya. 

The most recent stories, from ProPublica, co-published with Minnesota-based APM Reports, add some new elements to consider. 

● They zero in on the extent to which child abuse pediatrics appears to be a closed club, a small group that constantly reinforces each other, tolerates no dissent and demands absolute deference. (Indeed, some child abuse pediatricians have suggested publicly that other doctors should stop doing so much thinking!) 

● The stories show how the harm caused by this culture can extend far beyond the harm done to families directly affected by their blunders. 

● The stories illustrate the extent to which child protective services agencies can be complicit.  

● And the stories illustrate a couple of embarrassing failures by a big local newspaper. 

At the center of all of it is Dr. Nancy Harper, the child abuse pediatrician who leads a team at the University of Minnesota’s Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children. The bill of particulars alleged concerning Harper is much like those concerning the child abuse pediatricians in all those other stories: An unwavering belief in the validity of “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” a refusal to consider any other explanation for injuries, running roughshod over anyone, including colleagues who disagree and leaving a trail of despair for children and families needlessly separated. 

As one of the ProPublica stories notes: 

[T]wo federal lawsuits filed recently accuse Harper of ignoring or even concealing alternative explanations for children’s injuries. And, more broadly, medical and legal experts are increasingly questioning a leading child abuse diagnosis, shaken baby syndrome, which is also known as abusive head trauma. 

But this may be the scariest thing of all about Dr. Harper: As the ProPublica story puts it: 

By Harper’s own estimation, she’s never been wrong.

 When the family police are complicit 

The role of the family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) in Hennepin County, Minnesota, itself is aptly illustrated by a case discussed toward the end of one of the stories:  

In this case, a child had multiple bruises and fractures. No one called to report the parents, they saw the bruises, they were alarmed, they brought the child to the hospital. Harper immediately said: child abuse. Not only did authorities take the child on the spot, the county attorney immediately filed for termination of parental rights. 

Here’s what happened next: 

The baby was placed in foster care with a woman who worked as a nurse. … While in the care of the foster parent, the baby developed new bruises and Harper evaluated him again. 

Instead of considering that her diagnosis might be wrong – and remember, Dr. Harper says she’s never wrong. 

A new abuse investigation was opened against the foster parent, and [the child] was moved to a second foster family — in this case, a pediatrician and her husband. Once again, the baby developed new bruises, according to his visitation supervisor. 

So would Harper change her mind now? No way! Instead, she said maybe those bruises weren’t really bruises. 

But prosecutors came up with something even more outlandish: They alleged the parents were finding a way to abuse their son clandestinely during visits – even though all visits were supervised by a professional whose job is – to observe visits. 

And here’s where the whole issue of lying comes in. The visit supervisor 

provided a sworn affidavit saying that she did not witness any abusive behavior from the parents, and that she’d become so stressed in part from the pressure to say she had witnessed abuse that she asked to be taken off the case. She also wrote that CPS workers were lying to and about the couple, claiming that the foster parents spoke Spanish, which they did not, and that [the Spanish-speaking parents] were unreliable about keeping visitation appointments. 

“The parents attended every visit. They never cancelled,” the supervisor wrote. “Even when their tire popped on the way to their first supervised visitations, they got an Uber and were only about five minutes late.”

The collateral damage 

The other key figure in the main ProPublica story is another pediatrician, and one with a distinguished record in his own right. Dr. Bazak Sharon could be difficult with his colleagues, but was notable for his compassion for his patients and their families. He was also the one and only doctor in Minnesota, and one of the few in the nation, who was an expert at treating a rare, traumatic childhood condition known by the acronyms PANS or PANDAS. 

But when Dr. Sharon dared to challenge Harper, and especially when he put his concerns in writing (which can be really embarrassing if there are ever, you know, lawsuits) – he was forced to resign.  That reduced the number of doctors to whom Minnesota parents could turn to treat their children’s PANS/PANDAS to zero. (One nurse practitioner treats it, but she works for a clinic that doesn’t take insurance.)  But the hospital that forced Dr. Sharon out did have a solution. They told parents to try a program in Madison, Wisconsin, four hours away. 

The journalistic failure 

And that brings us to the other key player in all this – one not mentioned in the ProPublica story: The Minnesota Star Tribune. 

When Dr. Sharon was forced to resign, ProPublica notes, parents were so upset that “they went to the local newspaper.” That’s the Star Tribune. On Nov. 6, 2023, they published a good story about the plight of the families. And then they came within inches of another urgent story – and missed it.  The only mention of the child abuse pediatrician issue was this one sentence: 

Sharon said he feels terrible for his PANS/PANDAS patients but that he resigned from University of Minnesota Physicians because of an unrelated dispute over the clinical management of head trauma in infants. 

That should have been a “Wait – what?” moment for the Star Tribune. Child abuse pediatricians have been controversial for some time now and, in particular, it’s well known that there is considerable controversy over “the clinical management of head trauma in infants.” 

So one would hope the Star Tribune would dig into the resignation – which could have led them to the revelations that ProPublica would report nearly 18 months later. 

But I can find no follow-up. I found nothing at all about the controversy until Dr. Harper was sued. Then the Star Tribune wrote about the lawsuit. 

Would at least some of the harm done to children and families since November 2023 have been averted had the Star Tribune then done the reporting ProPublica has done now?  Why didn’t that happen? Did the Star Tribune make a concerted effort to find out more, but simply couldn’t get the story? Did it not occur to them to try? Or is it that the whole notion of false allegations and wrongful removal makes the Star Tribune uncomfortable? 

I sent two emails and a text message to the reporter who wrote the Star Tribune’s 2023 story seeking comment. I have received no reply.

This brings us to the second Star Tribune failure that contributed, albeit indirectly, to this tragedy.  Here’s how the ProPublica story explained it: 

Harper’s arrival in Minnesota coincided with the fallout of a high-profile tragedy: the 2013 death of 4-year-old Eric Dean.

Dean lived with his family in sparsely populated Pope County, in west-central Minnesota. According to an investigation by The Minnesota Star Tribune, teachers and caregivers reported signs that Dean was being abused to child protection workers at least 15 times before his stepmother threw him across a room, causing injuries that would kill him. She is in prison serving a life sentence. 

In response, then-Gov. Mark Dayton signed an executive order in 2014 creating the Governor’s Task Force on the Protection of Children. The next year, along with a slew of other reforms, the state Legislature created a $23.35 million grant to give counties money based partially on the number of open child protection investigations. 

The number of child abuse cases soared. For instance, in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, cases of physical abuse more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, before dropping over the next several years.

The lawsuit suggests an even bigger jump: 

In 2016—after Harper arrived  and her … policies and procedures were put into place – 5,709 children in Hennepin County were reported as alleged victims of physical abuse, an increase of 228% over the previous eight-year average. In one calendar year, physical abuse cases in Hennepin County rose by 223%. 

The lawsuit also has more about the financial incentives that may have been at play, alleging that the Bremer Trust Center itself was “offering substantial financial bonuses for the identification and prosecution of child abuse.” 

But what does any of this have to do with the Star Tribune? 

It wasn’t the death of Eric Dean itself that set all this in motion. It was the Star Tribune’s hype and hysteria-filled coverage of the death of Eric Dean, and the foster-care panic it caused – in a state already tearing apart families at a rate far above the national average -- that set all this into motion. It was the Star Tribune’s blunders that led to the Task Force, which compounded the blunders. More about how the Star Tribune and the Task Force failed can be found in this NCCPR report. And in this column for the child welfare trade journal, The Imprint. 

This kind of failure is bad enough done once, but the Star Tribune not only learned nothing, it tried to do the same thing again in 2023. Fortunately, Minnesota lawmakers seem to abide by the adage “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” They did not repeat their mistakes – they even passed legislation intended to curb needless removal. 

But the damage done by the first foster-care panic has yet to be undone.  As of 2023, Minnesota still was tearing apart families at a rate double the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in.  And now, thanks to ProPublica, we know about some additional collateral damage. 

The stories told by ProPublica involve families who were able to fight back. We’ll never know if there are others whose children may have been misdiagnosed by the child abuse pediatrician who says she’s always right. 

At a minimum, families accused under these circumstances should be entitled to obtain a second opinion from an expert of their choosing at no cost. 

Also, ProPublica reports: 

Hennepin County has a contract with Harper’s employer, University of Minnesota Physicians, to provide medical consultation, expert witness testimony and case consultation with county attorneys. 

That contract should end. 

Oh, and wouldn’t it be great if the University of Minnesota apologized to Dr. Sharon and offered him his job back?