The tattletale factor in “child welfare”

It’s why all those plans for kinder, gentler family policing won’t do much good – and might even backfire.  Connecticut is a case in point. 

It seems like a week doesn’t go by without some “child welfare” agency announcing an initiative that supposedly will make family policing kinder and gentler.  

There’s the longstanding “differential response” in which, in cases deemed less serious, caseworkers are sent out to do a supposedly family-friendly “assessment” and offer voluntary help, instead of an investigation with the accompanying risk of onerous surveillance.  On the one hand, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned that this leads to needless net-widening. On the other hand, another in a long line of studies suggests it may reduce foster care entries. 

Then there are “family resource centers” – drop-in centers, in which families can stop by and get help, including the concrete help families really need. 

But for these and similar interventions there is one huge catch:  Call it the tattletale factor.  

All of these alternatives are either run by the family police themselves or contracted out to agencies whose workers are mandatory reporters of “child abuse” and “child neglect.” At worst, this can wind up widening the net of needless intervention into families.  At best, this creates a deterrent to families coming forward to seek help because they never know if the “helper” will feel compelled to call the family police.  Prof. Kelley Fong, who’s done extensive research on this issue, summed it up in an article for Family Integrity and Justice Quarterly: 

“Seeking help is no easy decision when those in a position to assist are also potential tattletales.” 

The tattletale factor persists because no state or locality creating these plans has taken the one step necessary to make them work: surrendering some of their vast, untrammeled power to intervene in the lives of families. 

And that brings me to something included in Connecticut’s plan for how to use funds under the federal Family First Act.  Here’s how The Imprint describes the plan: 

The state is planning to support a community-based organization that will help steer some reports away from its surveillance-oriented hotline, known as the Careline. 

Funding for this venture — described wonkily in the Family First plan as a Care Management Entity (CME) — has already been included in the state’s budget negotiations this year, and department leadership are confident it will secure about $1.5 million for this venture. 

“We want to go further upstream and serve families without having them become known to us … and really do prevention in a more robust way other than cases accepted,” said DCF Deputy Commissioner of Operations Michael Williams. 

The idea is that reports of concern that do not rise to the level of abuse or neglect would come to the CME from schools or child care centers, law enforcement officials or the community. Parents could also come directly in search of help. 

The effort is probably sincere.  It may have been inspired by Prof. Fong’s research, some of which was done in Connecticut.  And when it comes to reducing needless foster care, over the past decade or so, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families has shown some real leadership and done better than other states (although using the Orwellian term “Careline” to describe the number you call to reach the family police does not inspire confidence). 

But the closer one looks at the fine print, the less there is to Connecticut’s plan. 

For starters, the claim that this entity will “serve families without having them become known to us”
isn’t quite accurate.  Under the plan, mandated reporters will keep right on calling the policing line (no way I’m calling it “Careline”).  Then, if the family police decide the report doesn’t rise to a level that needs investigation, the reporter will be told to call the CME instead. 

So this means that a second entity will, in fact, go out and knock on a family’s door in situations where that does not happen now, thus reinforcing fears that Family First opens the door to making needless intervention into families worse. 

And while it’s true that, in theory, this new entity is only there to help, there’s another catch: According to the plan “CME staff are mandated reporters and if they hear something that meets the statutory criteria of abuse or neglect, they will refer to the [family police].”  Why, then, should families be less afraid of the CME than they are of any other mandated reporter? 

Prof. Fong describes parents forced constantly to weigh whether to reach out for help and, if they do, what they dare not say to “helping” professionals: 

In communities highly exposed to [child protective services], the specter of CPS accompanies families to doctors’ visits, to parent-teacher conferences, to homeless shelters, to therapy

Appointments … Parents in need face a no-win situation: close off opportunities for support or open themselves up to the risk of state scrutiny and family separation. 

Connecticut’s plan doesn’t change this. 

A far better approach would be a plan that said: “We will seek legislation exempting CME staff from mandatory reporting requirements.”  That doesn’t mean they’d be prohibited from reporting, only that they’d be free to exercise their professional judgment without fear.  But that would require the family policing agency to relinquish some of its power. 

A good plan also would have included a provision allowing “mandated reporters” to fulfill their legal obligations by calling this new entity instead of calling the family police.  But that, too, would require the family policing agency to give up some of its power. 

The fact that this proposal is part of Connecticut’s plan to implement the so-called Family First Act creates additional problems.  Family First will only help states pay for a service if the service is provided for families where children are, using the law’s own Orwellian term, “candidates” for foster care.  That creates even more entanglement with the family police.  As the proposal itself says: 

…the CME will be expected to conduct an assessment protocol for all families coming through the CME. This will include 1) an evaluation of safety; if there is a safety concern the CME will make a call to the Careline for further evaluation, and 2) an assessment of risks, strengths, and needs to inform case planning, and service matching… 

So how can this be purely voluntary, if the family must allow all that “risk assessment”? Will a family that says: “no, thank you, we’re not interested” automatically become higher risk?  And how does all this constitute serving families “without having them become known to us”? 

At best, this seems no different from differential response, at worst is it simply subcontracting child abuse investigations by another name? 

Why entangle this with Family First at all?  Surely the richest state in America could come up with the $1.5 million needed for the CME without federal reimbursement. [UPDATE: I now understand the state is, in fact, going to come up with that $1.5 million without Family First.] As for Family First eligible services, with the strings that attach to them, savings from reduced foster care would cover the costs of any services the CME might arrange. 

A better approach would be to take the money the state would spend on the CMEs and give it to community-based community-run service providers, no strings attached, and let them figure out how to reach out to families and help them – in other words, what happened in New York City, not by design but by way of COVID-19.  But that would require the family police agency to relinquish some of its power. 

Short of that, there is one thing that would make this plan far more reassuring: If the mandate for the CME included immediately linking the family to high-quality interdisciplinary legal representation. 

But that would require the family police agency to – well, you know.

A devastating report on Iowa child welfare – from the state’s own consultants

Reports issued by consultants tend to be diplomatic documents. One has to use genteel language when criticizing the people who hired you in the first place.

Nevertheless, there’s no mistaking the message from a recent report by the highly respected Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group concerning child welfare in Iowa.  The report found that recent policy changes made by the state Department of Human Services in the wake of high-profile tragedies have made things worse.

And things weren’t good to begin with.

Iowa has long been an extreme outlier, tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in America.  Then, over a little more than a year, four high-profile cases of vicious, sometimes fatal abuse of children “known to the system” made headlines.

Given that, in every one of these cases, the alleged perpetrators were foster parents who had adopted the children they allegedly abused, one might think this might finally lead to reforms aimed at curbing needless removal.

But that underestimates the capacity of child welfare systems – and often, sadly, the press and the public -- for double standards.  Had there been four separate cases of horrific abuse by birth parents making the front page of newspapers in a relatively small state day after day we all know that everyone would be scapegoating efforts to keep families together and demanding that we take away more children.

Yet even in the wake of what newspapers would normally call a “spate” of child abuse tragedies involving foster and adoptive parents, there is no media outcry demanding that Iowa curb its obscene rate of tearing apart families.  (In fact, I don’t think policy in either direction should be based on horror stories – Iowa should curb its obscene rate of removal not because of horror stories, but because of the data on how harmful such removal is to children.)

DHS moves full-speed backwards

But DHS has done nothing to curb needless removal. On the contrary, even though the abuse occurred in foster care, DHS has made changes that actually increase the likelihood that even more children will be funneled into the very system where these children were tortured.

Sadly that is not unusual. As I first noted long ago, foster-care panics – huge spikes in removals of children from their homes in the wake of horror stories – almost never work in reverse.

So, the consultants tell us, Iowa curbed screening of reports alleging child abuse and neglect.  The proportion accepted for investigation soared from 50 percent to 65 percent.  And of the reports accepted, the proportion diverted to a more family friendly approach known as “differential response” was reduced.  That happened even though 25 separate studies have found that differential response is safe – and the Child Welfare Group found that Iowa’s differential response program “was working as intended and that outcomes overall were positive.”

Again the response is unsurprising. When the first of the horror story cases made headlines, supporters of Iowa’s take-the-child-and-run approach rushed to scapegoat differential response  -even though there was no evidence that the case in question ever involved the use of differential response.

The result of all this is a 43 percent increase in the number of families subjected to a child abuse investigation in Iowa.

Here’s what the consultants have to say about it:

These policy measures, the broadening of intake and the lowering of screen‐out rates, are familiar; they follow a pattern often taken by states in the wake of child fatalities or other high profile cases in well intentioned attempts to ensure children’s safety. They have, however, in the reviewers’ experience, seldom if ever had the intended effect. Such actions can, in fact, serve to place more children at risk by adding to workload requirements that are frequently already overwhelming and broadening the scope of intervention far beyond the expertise or experience of child welfare personnel.  

One fact that is frequently lost in child welfare reform efforts is that child protection intervention can, if too broadly targeted or poorly executed, cause great harm, inflicting trauma on children and families that has far worse effects than the maltreatment it is intended to prevent in all except the minority of particularly egregious incidents.

Other key findings

That was only the beginning. As I read the report, a theme emerging over and over is that almost everything that exists to help families and children on paper in Iowa doesn’t function that way in real life.

● On paper, Iowa embraces the concept of family team meetings, in which everyone important in a child’s life gets together to work out a plan to keep the child safe. In practice, extended family, friends and others often are left out, and the agency presents a “cookie cutter” service plan instead of something geared to what the family really needs. In other words, DHS does exactly what DHS would have done had there been no family team meeting.

● Although people interviewed by the consultants claimed that a wide array of services are available to families, as I read the consultants’ report, the services appear to be skewed heavily toward providing the kinds of help that make the helpers feel good – endless “counseling” and “parent education” instead of the help families need, which often involves concrete help with things like housing, child care and other supports to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.

Indeed some of those consulted by the consultants said that the workers who are supposed to support families actually do little more than monitor them. Others said the people who do these jobs are not well-qualified to do much else.

● DHS misuses and overuses the worst form of “care” – parking children in shelters.  One youth told the consultants: “No healing takes place in shelter care.”

●Foster parent complaints included “disrespectful treatment when, as often happens, they are subjects of unwarranted maltreatment reports.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of all maltreatment reports are unwarranted, regardless of who is accused. But I highlight this common complaint here because, just once, I’d like to hear an Iowa foster parent say: “The agency really needs us. If this is how they treat us, imagine how they treat the birth parents!”

● Both parents and children rarely saw their own lawyers at any time except at court hearings. The consultants were too polite to say that that means, so I will: It means neither parents nor children typically get anything approaching adequate legal representation.  It means everyone has to rely on DHS’ version of the facts. And that means DHS almost always gets whatever it wants.

● The lawyers don’t seem to be the only ones who are out of touch.  Consider one of the report’s top priority recommendations:

Review requirements for having face‐to‐face contacts with parents and other caregivers and for coordination between case managers and [caseworkers who work with families] to ensure that there is appropriate emphasis on having immediate, frequent, and purposeful contacts with parents, particularly parents of children in out of home care, to develop and implement a plan to achieve reunification or other timely permanency outside of foster care. Strongly consider requiring regular face‐to‐face contact with parents in their places of residence.  [Emphasis added.]

Now, let’s stop and think about that last sentence for a moment. 

What kind of child welfare agency is so backwards, so utterly out-of-touch with best practice - or even minimally adequate practice - that it needs outside consultants to tell it that workers who work with families actually ought to make regular face-to-face contact with those families in their own homes?

The one that has been destroying the lives of children in Iowa for decades.

Yes, you CAN reduce foster care – even in Ohio

Two counties embrace family preservation, one by “[taking] to heart” NCCPR recommendations.

In 2006, NCCPR released a report on child welfare in Ohio, with a particular focus on Butler County, just north of Cincinnati.  Ohio is one of the states in which individual counties run child welfare agencies.

Last week, a story in the Dayton Daily News about deaths of children previously known to those agencies all the way back to 2009 included this:

After the 2006 death of Marcus Fiesel, a Middletown boy who was bound and left in a closet by his foster parents, Butler County was the subject of a scathing report by [NCCPR], which said the system is too quick to yank children out of troubled homes and place them in foster care, where they may not get the same level of supervision. 

Butler County took many of the report’s recommendations to heart and has seen success in the years since, according to Butler County Job and Family Services Director Bill Morrison. 

The county has achieved a 20 percent reduction in removals and did not have a child death from abuse or neglect post-reunification in the years examined by this newspaper.

Butler was not alone.  Montgomery County, which includes Dayton, reduced needless foster care by embracing “differential response” an approach found to be safe by 25 of the 26 studies to examine it.  Montgomery County had the same excellent results as Butler concerning fatalities.

 Learning from an earlier “drug plague”

What makes these results all the more notable is that they come from Ohio which is, we are told in one news story after another, the “epicenter” of the latest “drug plague” – the opioid epidemic.

So how did foster care go down in these counties when it is going up elsewhere in Ohio? 

Perhaps these counties learned from an earlier drug plague, “crack cocaine.”

University of Florida researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.  Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

Similarly, consider what The New York Times found when it looked at the best way to treat infants born with opioids in their systems. According to the Times

a growing body of evidence suggests that what these babies need is what has been taken away: a mother.  Separating newborns in withdrawal can slow the infants’ recovery, studies show, and undermine an already fragile parenting relationship. When mothers are close at hand, infants in withdrawal require less medication and fewer costly days in intensive care.

“Mom is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent babies.

  

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with hopelessly addicted parents.  But it does mean that in most cases, drug treatment for the mother is a better option than foster care for the child. 

Butler and Montgomery Counties also seem to have done something else: They took a long, hard look at all the cases that did not involve drug abuse to see if those children really needed to be torn from everyone they know and love.

A caution about how results are measured

The results concerning fatalities do have to be looked at with caution.  Indeed, I have long argued that you can’t judge child safety simply by looking at fatality numbers. That is for a reason for which we all should be grateful.

Though each is among the worst imaginable tragedies, let us be grateful that the number of such tragedies is low enough to rise or fall due to random chance.  A child returned to his home in Montgomery County could die tomorrow. If that happens, you may be sure those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare will rush to scapegoat differential response.

So it’s not changes in the number of fatalities that prove you can’t have child safety without family preservation.  It’s a much larger “evidence base”:

●The reason we know differential response is safe is not because no child returned to his own home has died in Montgomery County since 2009. It’s because of all those studies.

●The reason we know Intensive Family Preservation Services is safe and effective is because of all the studies that prove it.

●The reason we know that rebuilding systems to emphasize safe, proven approaches to keeping families together works is because independent court-appointed monitors have found that it works, as, for example, in Alabama. (A member of NCCPR’s volunteer board of directors brought the lawsuit that led to the Alabama reforms.)

●The reason we know lower rates of removal can improve child safety is because of places such as New York City. In New York, key safety indicators  - the rate at which children “known to the system” were reabused and the rate of foster-care recidivism (children returned from foster care who had to be placed again) - improved when the city reduced needless removals of children.

That’s why other Ohio counties should be learning from Butler and Montgomery. And that’s why take-the-child-and-run does not have to be child welfare’s knee-jerk response to every new problem, or even to every new drug plague.

Opposition to differential response dealt heavy blow

There is a new study out from the federal government, another in a long line documenting that an approach to child welfare known as “differential response” is, in fact, safe.

Under differential response, some cases that formerly were subject to a full-scale investigation instead are assigned to caseworkers who “assess” the family and offer voluntary help.

The latest “revelation” that differential response (DR) is safe comes on top of many others. A 2011 literature review, looking at 23 studies, found none concluding that differential response compromised child safety.

Three more studies, all using random assignment and designed specifically to deal with alleged flaws in earlier research, have been published. Two found no indication that children in differential response were less safe; one found worse safety outcomes by one measure.

Of all these 26 studies, guess which was the only one to be the subject of a big story in the Chronicle of Social Change complete with the headline “Differential Response Dealt Heavy Blow.”

The Chronicle took a more low-key approach to the latest study. This one examined the six states that have used DR the longest. Once again, the review found no compromise of safety. It also found that states making more use of DR had lower rates of re-reports of maltreatment and lower rates of “substantiated” re-reports than states using it less.

But instead of gushing, The Chronicle story declares, “It is worth noting that in January of 2015, Minnesota — one of the six states focused on in this study – moved toward discontinuing the use of DR.”

It is “worth noting” only in the sense that, once again, we see how scapegoating efforts to keep families together in the wake of a high-profile child abuse death – as happened in Minnesota – trumps research every time.

It’s been much the same in Massachusetts. There, re-abuse of children and deaths of children “known to the system” declined during most years DR was in effect. But deaths may have spiked in one year. (Even that isn’t certain; there are a lot of questions about data, definitions, and causes of death.) That was enough to get the program killed. It is worth noting that, in contrast, no one ever concludes that the death of a foster child means we should abolish foster care.

Opponents of DR have another answer to all those inconvenient studies. They say, in effect, all the studies we don’t like are biased! They say this in an article that is, in itself, striking for its intemperate, defensive tone.

The authors seem to have quite a chip on their collective shoulder. They spend much time bemoaning the way proponents of DR characterize the traditional, investigative approach. In that approach, caseworkers investigate a family, pry into the most intimate aspects of their lives, may strip search the children and/or subject them to traumatic medical exams, and then may, if they so choose, walk out with the children. The authors are deeply offended by the fact that backers of DR refer to this as “adversarial.”

The ironies don’t stop there. I am aware of only one systematic experiment to actually test the bias of researchers in the child welfare field. It found a profound bias in favor of publishing articles purporting to show benefit to removing children.

 Enter APSAC

And now, we have the so-called American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children presenting a “special issue” of one of its publications devoted to DR – or rather, devoted to bashing DR. Every article is from a DR critic, and the guest editor of the issue, Judith Rycus, is a co-author of the all-the-studies-we-don’t-like-are-biased article noted above. Another co-author of that article is a former APSAC president.

APSAC’s track record for getting child welfare issues right is less than distinguished. As Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker explain in their book, Satan’s Silence, APSAC was formed in the 1980s largely by well-meaning “professionals” who promoted claims of a supposed epidemic of mass molestation and satanic ritual abuse in day care centers.

“From its inception,” Nathan and Snedeker write, “APSAC’s leadership roster was a veritable directory of ritual-abuse architects.”  Kee MacFarlane, who led the questioning of children in the notorious McMartin Preschool case, served on APSAC’s board – and received the group’s “Outstanding Professional” award – a decade after McMartin.  And in 1997, three years after writing an article promoting the idea that there really were secret tunnels under the McMartin Preschool, Roland Summit, another former board member, received the group’s “Lifetime Achievement” award.

For those who are not familiar with McMartin, this New York Times video is an excellent primer:

Given that track record, anything APSAC says about differential response should be taken with at least a shaker of salt.

NCCPR op-ed in Youth Today: Attention Child Savers: Your Double Standards Are Showing

They’re following the script to the letter in Minnesota.

Act 1: A newspaper reports on the horrifying death of a child “known-to-the-system.”

Act 2: The ritual sacrifice of the agency chief.

Act 3: The naming of the OBRC — Obligatory Blue-Ribbon Commission.

Act 4: The invocation of the swinging pendulum. The OBRC declares that “Minnesota’s child protection system has moved from one end of the spectrum to the other since 1999,” and now supposedly puts too much emphasis on family preservation.

The report is seized upon by those who want to tear apart more families — those whose 19th-century counterparts proudly called themselves “child savers” — as part of an ongoing effort to discredit one of the few large-scale efforts to avoid needless foster care: differential response.

There’s just one problem. The pendulum never actually swung.

Read the full post in Youth Today

Child welfare in Minnesota: Investigate more cases, get more $

The previous post to this Blog discusses an impressive report from the auditing arm of the Minnesota Legislature.  The report documented the extent to which child welfare in that state is arbitrary, capricious and cruel.

The report’s authors gave ten hypothetical “vignettes” to workers who decide whether or not to accept a report alleging child abuse or neglect for investigation.  There was no unanimity on any of them and relative consensus on only three.

But the real bombshell in the report concerns an idiotic decision by the Minnesota Legislature concerning financial incentives.

I’ve written often about how financial incentives at the federal level encourage the misuse and overuse of foster care.  But in Minnesota, where child welfare systems are run by individual counties, the legislature has compounded the problem.

That’s because of the formula the legislature came up with for how the state Department of Human Services will distribute both state social services funds and federal social services aid under a program called Title 20.

Here’s how the audit report explains it:

The 2011 Legislature created the Vulnerable Children and Adults Act.   Among other things, the act specifies how DHS should distribute state and federal Title XX funds to county agencies.  Increasingly, the funds are to be distributed based on the number of vulnerable children and adults in each county.

The number to be used in the formula is the number of children who were the subject of screened-in maltreatment referrals.  Thus, agencies that cast wider nets for screening in child protection referrals could receive more funding, even if their caseloads reflect less-serious child protection cases than agencies that more selectively screen their referrals. [Emphasis added.]

So in Minnesota, if you subject children to the considerable trauma of a needless child abuse investigation, and waste the time of workers that could be better spent finding children in real danger, you get more money.

THE BIZARRE PRACTICE OF “CHILD WELFARE CHECKS”

There is another oddity in Minnesota worth noting: a practice known as a “child welfare check.”  Again, from the report:

[L]aw enforcement officers may conduct “child welfare checks” on their own initiative or at the request of a child protection agency. As its name suggests, a child welfare check involves going to a family’s home and asking about or observing the welfare of a child.  A child welfare check may result in a referral to a child protection agency if the officer sees conditions or actions that constitute child maltreatment. Finally, law enforcement officers may take a child into custody for emergency placement if the child is found in conditions that endanger or could endanger his or her health or welfare.

So what, exactly, is the difference between a “child welfare check,” which “involves going to a family’s home and asking about or observing the welfare of a child”  and a child abuse investigation, which, of course involves to a family’s home and asking about or observing the welfare of a child?

Now here’s where it gets weird: Workers at county child welfare agencies in Minnesota said they typically requested such checks on cases they screened out as not rising to the level where they needed an investigation.  In still other cases, the child welfare agency itself may do a “child welfare check” on a case that was screened out as not worthy of an “investigation.”

So in parts of Minnesota, if a case does not meet even the minimal standards to be screened in, it still may well be investigated.

The report cites some examples:

Staff at one agency stated that their city police make child welfare checks on every screened-out child protection referral. Staff at another agency stated that workers go out on almost every call that is screened out in order to do preventive work. However, other agencies do not perform child welfare checks or ask law enforcement to perform these checks.

While an initial child protection referral may be screened out, follow up from the agency or the police could result in an additional referral, which may be screened in for child protection. As a result, families in similar situations ultimately may be screened in to child protection by agencies that use child welfare checks, whereas families in the jurisdiction of agencies who do not use child welfare checks regularly may remain screened out.

Several respondents to the vignette portion of our screeners survey commented that a screened-out vignette could become a screened-in child protection referral after more information was learned through child welfare checks. … Another agency stated that they would screen out a vignette involving a teenager who had allegedly been punched by her dad, but added: "We would make a ‘strong’ Child Welfare visit. … If physical discipline continues we would very likely do a child protection family assessment in the future."

Making all this even weirder is the fact that Minnesota has pioneered the use of “differential response” for less serious cases that are screened in.  Under differential response families are not investigated or “checked.”  Rather they are offered an “assessment” and voluntary help.

So to sum up, in parts of Minnesota the system works like this:

● Reports deemed most serious: child abuse investigation.

● Reports deemed less serious but still “screened in:” voluntary assessment.

● Reports that are even less serious and so are screened out entirely: “child welfare check” – which is another term for a child abuse investigation.

Child welfare and race: Did the past meet the future at Chapin Hall’s forum?

Video of the presentations discussed below is available, in full, here.  The section discussed below begins about 30 minutes in.

            About two weeks ago, I wrote about some of the new findings on child welfare and race discussed at a forum convened by the Chapin Hall Center for Children last month.  But the forum itself was as interesting as the findings.

            During the forum, I got a glimpse of child welfare’s promising future, and a reminder of its failed past.  At least I hope that’s what was reflected in two competing visions.

            The future (I hope) was represented by Eric Fenner, who recently retired from a job running the child welfare system in metropolitan Columbus, Ohio.  Fenner took over from a longtime agency chief, John Saros.  Though Fenner was too polite to say so, Saros was the quintessence of all that is mediocre in child welfare.  Year after year, whenever I would read a John Saros quote in the Columbus Dispatch, I would envision a man shrugging his shoulders.

            Saros finally was eased out of Columbus (and promptly landed the same job in nearby Akron).  He left a huge mess behind.  In 2005 the rate of child removal in Columbus was so high that, were it a state it would be the worst in the entire nation.

That changed when Fenner, the first African American ever to run the agency, took over.  Before he ran the agency, Fenner said, there were 6,382 children on its caseloads, of whom 47 percent were African American, 43 percent were white and the rest were other races.  By 2010, the total caseload was cut by nearly one-third, to 4,435, of whom 44 percent were white and 41 percent were African American.

How did things change?  For starters, Fenner’s agency faced up to the problem, something many in child welfare – including, it seems, the very next speaker at the Chapin Hall panel - still refuse to do.  Said Fenner:

Racial bias specific to decision making as a case progresses through the child welfare system is a critically-important consideration in trying to explain [the overrepresentation of Black children in foster care].  If you don’t address racial bias in your organizational practices, I don’t think it really matters what else you do.  You will continue to experience overrepresentation and disparities when it comes to treatment and approaches.

But that does not mean bringing in someone to wag a finger in the face of all the white people in the agency and tell them what racists they are.  They’d actually tried that 25 years earlier, Fenner said, and it took decades for the agency to recover. Instead, Fenner drew a crucial distinction. 

            We began with the premise that individuals could not be racist.  They could be biased – and they probably held preconceived notions, but could not be racists – because [as individuals] they lacked one fundamental element: power.

Individuals can hold beliefs, but they can’t hold you in a repressive state of existence.  If I don’t like you I can move away from you, but if I don’t like how you investigate me  I can’t ignore you, you have authority to investigate me, you have the authority to tell me how I should raise my children, and you have the authority to terminate my parental rights. 

That’s power.  As a representative of that institution - that’s where the racism existed.

(Note how Fenner doesn’t hide behind the b.s. about “we don’t have any power only the courts can take children away” – he knows where the power really lies.)

REDISCOVERING A RESOURCE

Once the agency faced up to the problem, people realized they’d been overlooking a vital resource that had been part of poor communities in Columbus for a century: settlement houses.  “We had never connected with them and they had been there for 100 years,” Fenner said.

We started to put more money into settlement houses. … Many of those settlement houses were within walking distance of the kids we were serving.  It’s so much easier to go to an after school program two blocks away, than to see a therapist on the other end of town once a week.  … Most of those kids really had issues and problems that could be addressed on a voluntary basis.

And Fenner had a way to make voluntary help work: Franklin County became one of a number of Ohio counties piloting “differential response,” an approach embraced by progressive child welfare leaders across the country.  Under differential response, low-risk cases are referred for an assessment instead of a full-scale investigation.  Twenty-three separate evaluations of differential response have found no compromise of child safety.  Every evaluation found lower rates of subsequent reports alleging abuse for families diverted to a differential response assessment.

In part, this new approach was rooted in Eric Fenner’s own life experience:

I grew up in inner-city Washington DC, in a poor neighborhood.  …  If you didn’t have a chance to meet me and know me, or come to the neighborhood I grew up in, just saw it on a datamap, you’d walk away with one perspective. But if you came to the neighborhood and you if you spent a few days with children and families you would walk away with very different perspective.  It’s more than the data and the research, it’s really about the people and who they are and where they came from.

THE BLAST FROM THE PAST

If the very next speaker was listening to any of this, it had no apparent impact on his presentation.  That speaker; the one who, I hope, is the blast from the past, was John Mattingly, now back at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which he’d left in 2004 to run the New York City Administration for Children’s Services.

As I’ve noted before, NCCPR would not exist if not for John Mattingly – he recommended that Casey fund us back in 1998.  So whenever the topic is John Mattingly I have to choose between being a hypocrite - ignoring statements and decisions I would criticize had they come from anyone else - or an ingrate.  Once again, I choose ingrate.

Mattingly’s presentation was defensive and, at times, disturbingly arrogant.  Just moments after Fenner’s clarion call to face up to the fact that racial bias is “a critically important factor” in the overrepresentation of Black children in foster care, Mattingly said, in effect: Well, the jury’s still out – much the way tobacco companies spent all those years saying we still don’t really know if smoking causes cancer.

But here’s the statement that should make jaws drop.  Apparently John Mattingly is a strong believer in the Myth of Child Welfare Exceptionalism; the notion that people who work in child welfare are just plain better than the rest of us mere mortals, and have developed an immunity to prejudice.  Or, as Mattingly put it:

While rigorous research has demonstrated that racial bias and discrimination exists in key public systems, including financial lending, employment, education, juvenile justice and housing. I personally know of no studies that can accurately claim the same for child welfare systems.  Certainly the doubt must be there that racial bias and discrimination also exist in our nation’s child welfare systems, yet we have no reason to believe that racial bias is the only or even the primary cause of disparities. 

Right.  It’s only all those other places – financial lending, employment, education, juvenile justice, and housing where it’s a problem. Child welfare?  Well, maybe a little, but we’re oh, so special. (By the way, there is in fact, plenty of evidence for bias in child welfare.)

Mattingly’s big, overarching fear is that somehow, somewhere in America there is a Black child who has been denied the benefits of having a child protective services agency barge into her or his family’s life, because of his race.  The fact that there is only one state in America where Black children are in foster care at a lower rate than in the general population  has not quelled his fears.

And by intervention, Mattingly does not mean something smart like “differential response.”  On the contrary, he’s opposed it for at least a decade, and blocked its implementation in New York City.  No, a typical case when Mattingly ran ACS was more like the appalling example discussed in this previous post.

Yes, Black children are overrepresented in foster care, Mattingly says, but that’s just because Black parents are more likely to be child abusers.  Or, as Mattingly put it:

Recent evidence shows significant difference in the need for child welfare intervention by race. African American children are, in fact, at greater risk of child maltreatment than white children across the entire society. That should be no surprise given the correlation between child maltreatment and poverty and the higher rates of poverty and social disorganization facing African American families.

But that is not, in fact, what “recent evidence” reveals.  Rather, a great deal of this so- called “greater risk of maltreatment” is a consequence of labeling.  Poverty itself often is labeled neglect.  Since Black families are more likely to be poor, their children are more likely to be labeled “neglected.”  This example from Houston is a classic case in point.

So what the recent evidence shows is a need not for intervention by child protective services but rather for intervention to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty – the kind of thing done through options like differential response, which John Mattingly opposes.

One can only hope that this really is the past, and that Eric Fenner really does represent the future.  The reverse is too depressing to contemplate.

Child Welfare in New York: Everyday Horrors

An abridged version of this post is available on the website of the trade journal Youth Today.          


UPDATE, OCTOBER 6: At the end of this post see why the organizers of today's webinar will NOT be answering the questions raised in this post


  I read about a horror story last month.

            It wasn’t one of those cases where a child died even though the case file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade.  Nor was it one of those cases where a child was taken from parents who could have been mother- and father-of-the-year only to die in foster care.

            Those horrors are the extremes and they are very rare.

            What made this case so horrible is the fact that it’s so typical.  It’s also the kind of case child protective services (CPS) agencies almost always hide behind confidentiality rules.

            This one became public – minus identifying information and with all names changed – thanks to a webinar about ChildStat, the pride and joy of John Mattingly, former commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS).  At ChildStat meetings, ACS officials go over data from one region and pour over one case, chosen at random.

            It’s the 12-page narrative of that one case that provides this rare x-ray of the soul of a CPS agency.   They never got to it during the webinar, but they might during a follow-up webinar tomorrow.  They asked for questions in advance.  I've put mine at the end of this post.

To really get the picture, the entire narrative needs to be read, because, in every sense of the term, the devil is in the details.  I hope readers will take the time to go through it, and then compare this example of typical practice to an example of best practice from the latest newsletter of one of the smartest groups helping child welfare agencies improve, the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group.  Readers also might want to consider these questions:

●How would your own family rate under the kind of scrutiny the family in the New York City case was forced to endure? 

●Can you imagine a government agency trying to micromanage a white, middle-class family the way ACS did in this case?

            Meanwhile, I’ll try to summarize.

            For starters, in half the states, this case never would have brought a CPS agency to the family’s door at all.  The allegation was “educational neglect,” something discussed often on this Blog.  According to a comprehensive study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a study commissioned by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, half the states wisely leave such cases to the schools to sort out.

            The allegation was that the older child, age 8, missed 25 days of school between September and early April, and was late 44 times.  The parents had gotten lots of warnings and they allegedly were too lenient when the child said she was sick. 

            That’s it.  No allegations of beating, torture, or starvation.  Nothing about sexual abuse or parental drug abuse.

            The parents are Hispanic, their income is about 140 percent of the national poverty line – and remember, this is New York City.  They sleep on a queen size bed.  (I have no idea why that is relevant to anything, but it’s included in the narrative.)

Clearly the family has plenty of reason for stress to begin with.  Nevertheless, the picture that emerges, in spite of the narrative, is of parents who love their children, have been trying their best and are guilty of, at worst, human fallibility.  They also had tried, without success, to get the school to help with the children’s problems – possibly engendering the hostility of the teacher who, by the mother’s account, treated her like dirt – and then reported her to ACS.

LIVES TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN

            But this one allegation against this admirable family was enough to turn their lives upside down for at least a month (the case was still open when the narrative was written).  There was one inspection visit after another.  Over and over the children were questioned about the most intimate aspects of their lives.  Had anyone touched them inappropriately? (No.) Did their parents ever hit them? (Yes, they got spankings.) Did the parents ever hit each other? (No.)  Do they argue? (Yes – imagine that.)   Because of the spankings the caseworker was ordered to be sure she “assessed the children for marks and bruises each time she visited.”  I wonder what the children had to endure to meet that requirement?

           

            The parents underwent a similar grilling.  When ACS wasn’t at the door at all hours, ACS was dragging them down to the borough office.

            Though best practice in child welfare says you assess a family’s strengths as well as their weaknesses, from day one these parents were treated only as suspects.  Every alleged failing was documented in the most minute detail, creating a 12-page litany of finger-wagging. 

            “The parents denied any domestic violence substance abuse or problems with physical and mental health,” the narrative says.  Denied?  They’d never been accused of anything like that in the first place. Yet throughout the narrative that word, - denied - is used over and over to describe the parents’ responses.  The same information could have been conveyed to the ChildStat meeting by writing “the parents said they did not…” 

            And the denials were never enough.  When asked, the younger child, age 6, says Dad sometimes drinks alcohol.  So the caseworker is instructed to go back and grill the child about “what he drank and his behavior.”  The children repeatedly say there’s no domestic violence.   But a supervisor says “domestic violence assistance was also a possibility.” Another supervisor tells the worker to “inquire more about Joy’s [the older child’s] exposure to her parents’ arguments and how it might affect her.” 

            The Child Protective Manager (CPM), the highest-ranking official to look at the case,  

noted that her concern was that Joy held herself responsible for getting her mother into trouble because she did not want to go to school. The CPM added that the mother should have provided Joy with more structure regarding her school attendance.  … She added that [the mother] should take full responsibility for having not provided structure for her children.

            The caseworker concluded that the parents did not “demonstrate developmentally appropriate expectations of all children” and did not “attend to the needs of all children and prioritizes [sic] the children’s needs above his/her own desires.”  Apparently this was based on the fact that when the bus was late, they didn’t find another way to get the children to school.

            It wasn’t just the parents put through the wringer.  The amount of time put into the case by the caseworker boggles the mind.  At one point, the caseworker came out of a meeting with her supervisor with “a list of at least 22 follow-ups … to complete” including “counseling the parents about inappropriate uses of corporal punishment” though there was no allegation or evidence that this was a problem.  No wonder caseworkers are drowning in the demands placed upon them and may well miss a child in real danger, as is well documented in an excellent New York Magazine story.  According to the Vera Institute study, fully 19 percent of the cases investigated by ACS are allegations of “educational neglect.”

THE PRICE OF “SUCCESS”

            At no time were the children taken from the home.  What happened to this family was probably the minimum amount of trauma a CPS investigation can inflict. In the end, the intervention by ACS may have improved the children’s attendance and prompted the school to get them some help the parents couldn’t get on their own. 

            But the family paid way too high a price for this “success” - and it was entirely unnecessary.

            In one of the seminal works of the 20^th Century about child welfare, the late Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert J. Solnit write that:

Children react even to temporary infringement of parental autonomy with anxiety, diminishing trust, loosening of emotional ties, or an increasing tendency to be out of control. The younger the child, and the greater his own helplessness and dependence, the stronger is his need to experience his parents as his lawgivers, safe, reliable, all-powerful, and independent.

            And that’s even without all those assessments looking for bruises from spankings.

            In this case mom is faulted for being too lenient, too willing to accept it when her daughter said she was too sick to go to school.  But what happens now, when she tries to be more assertive, after ACS has spent a month badgering the family and undermining mom’s authority?

            And then there’s the incident with the lamp.

            Sometime after the investigation began, the older child explained that Danny, the six-year-old, “burned himself on a lamp when he attempted to fix a light bulb that blew out. She said that Danny’s teacher told him that he needed to help his mother more and so her brother wanted to fix the light bulb. Joy said that the lamp hit Danny in his face, but he did not cry. Joy denied that her parents have been arguing.”

            Yes, Danny explained the incident the same way, a pediatrician confirmed that this was a credible explanation and, fortunately, the caseworker accepted it.  But try to imagine the fear this family endured when it happened, knowing they were in the middle of a CPS investigation.


            The rationale for doing all this to a family, of course, boils down to “you never know.”  Like the fanatical drug warriors who see marijuana as a “gateway drug” today’s “child savers” to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts gave themselves, see educational neglect as a gateway allegation. The child missed school.  So maybe mom’s a drunk and dad’s a pervert – you never know, right?


            But there is no evidence that children suffer more abuse in the states that don’t require their CPS agencies to investigate “educational neglect.”  And after doing a comprehensive reading of a random sample of cases, the Vera Institute researchers found that the notion that educational neglect is the "tip of the iceberg," is nonsense. The study found that generally, "educational neglect" is the tip of nothing except some kind of school problem, often one that is not the parent's fault.  Sending a CPS worker to the door only makes the family defensive and makes it harder to solve whatever problem may be causing absenteeism.

            As regular readers of this Blog know, the study authors recommended that if New York must keep investigating “educational neglect” it should be done through “differential response” in which either the CPS agency or a private contractor sends out a worker to offer a helping hand instead of a wagging finger.   Had that been done here, the same potential positive results would have been achieved with no cross-examination of young children, no comprehensive visual inspections for bruises and no documentation in the case file of the size bed on which the parents sleep.

            State after state has adopted this approach.  Every study finds no compromise of child safety and some find that safety improves. 

            But for at least a decade, since before he ever got to ACS, John Mattingly has opposed differential response.  Finally, late in 2009, he agreed to pilot it in some educational neglect cases.  Several months later, and without announcing it publicly, he put the pilot on hold indefinitely, something uncovered by some enterprising journalism students.

            So right now, some other New York City family is enduring the same trauma as the one in this narrative.  It happens all the time.  That’s why it’s a horror story.

                    Some questions for the webinar 
                   (and why they won't be answered)                               

Tomorrow, the same people who held the original webinar will conduct a follow up webinar.  They asked for questions in advance.  Here are mine:

●The narrative repeatedly uses the word “denied” to characterize comments by the parents and the children, as in “denied any domestic violence” “denied use of any drugs” etc.  In the absence of any evidence contradicting the “denials,” why wasn’t neutral wording such as “said he did not use any drugs” used in this narrative – and what does this say about the mindset of ACS workers and the author of this narrative?

●There is repeated discussion of alleged deficits in this family, and no explicit discussion of strengths.  Why not?

●On page 12 it states that “The supervisor told the CPS that she needed to “document that she assessed the children for marks and bruises each time she visited.”  How, precisely, are such “assessments” done?

●What did these children gain from this process that outweighed their being repeatedly questioned about the most intimate aspects of their lives and “assessed” on every visit for marks and bruises? 

●What did the family gain that outweighs the stress of a full-scale child abuse investigation?

●What did they gain that couldn’t have been accomplished, without the collateral damage, through a family assessment (differential response) instead of an investigation?

●Was all of the time and effort expended on this case the highest, best use of the time of the caseworker and the supervisor?

●According to a study by the Vera Institute of Justice in roughly half the states a case like this would not be subject to the jurisdiction of the child protective services agency at all.  What evidence do you have that children who miss a lot of school in those states are less safe or more poorly served by other interventions short of CPS involvement than children in New York City?

●The Vera study recommended that cases like this one be handled through “differential response.”  Every evaluation of differential response across the country shows that it does not compromise safety and some show safety improvements. Why did ACS at first agree to try differential response in some educational neglect cases and then renege on that promise?

UPDATE: And here is the response I got from the organizer of the webinar concerning why these questions will not be answered:

Thank you for sharing your blog posting with us. You have raised some very important case practice issues that merit further dialogue and debate. The focus of our webinar/learning lab is on the implementation of ChildStat, not on ACS case practice or policy decisions. Of course, many of the issues you outline are the very ones that the ChildStat initiative itself was designed to address - by providing time for managers and administrators to review and critique case narratives such as this one, to "get on the balcony" and observe what is actually happening on the frontlines, the agency can really examine "the devil in the details," as you put it, and have an open, honest dialogue about what happened, why it happened, and what needs to happen going forward to better reflect best or promising approaches.


Our national webinar series, including learning labs like this one, provides information about what it takes to implement specific workforce and leadership improvements - helping states, tribes and counties learn about promising macro-level approaches from one another, not analyzing case practice on the frontlines in a particular jurisdiction. This case narrative was provided as a learning tool, to illustrate the information provided to ChildStat session participants, and was not intended to be discussed in detail during the session. That said, we can certainly ask what might have happened in a session when presented with a case such as this one. I also hope you will raise any questions you may have about ChildStat as a tool for improving case practice and systems functioning on the call today.


Thanks, Sara

Sara T. Munson, MSW

National Dissemination Coordinator
National Child Welfare Workforce Institute
University at Albany School of Social Welfare