Confusing poverty with neglect, from coast to coast

Two stories in the news last week aptly illustrate that, no matter how deep in denial the child welfare establishment may be about it, they do indeed regularly confuse poverty with neglect. 

From Oregon … 

For decades, Oregon has torn apart families at a rate well above the national average. Things have improved, but as of 2025, it was still about 34% above that average when rates of family poverty are factored in. But that 34% figure is just a statewide average. Now, Investigate West reports that 

Since at least 2020, rural counties have consistently accounted for the highest rates of foster care involvement in Oregon, with some southeastern communities seeing rates three times higher than Multnomah County, the state’s most populous county. 

But that’s not because those rural counties are cesspools of depravity with triple the rate of child abuse. It’s for the obvious reason: Fewer services and more difficulty getting to them. From the story: 

KayCee Weeks … who oversees programs in rural Crook County, said many families she works with came to the attention of child welfare caseworkers because of parenting issues related to economic hardship. 

Some parents repeatedly missed their child’s health care appointments, because the provider was an hour away and they could not afford the cost of gas or repairs to a rundown vehicle, Weeks said. Others said they struggled to keep up with cleaning and maintaining their home, on top of everything else that is on their plate. 

Some of the responses in the story are disappointingly sanguine. They boil down to: We can’t do anything unless the state spends more. That’s not true. It would be nice if the state would spend more, but there’s no need to sit around waiting for that. While the data are old, Oregon probably already spends at a rate more than 80% above the national average, again, when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

So Oregon could accomplish a lot by shifting some of the money it wastes playing whack-a-mole with the state’s most vulnerable children. 

One other thing the story reveals, though it’s never mentioned: Oregon is engaging in a massive violation of federal law. That law requires that states make “reasonable efforts” to prevent children from being consigned to the chaos of foster care. 

Congress never defined that term. But common sense suggests that: “We don’t have anything except foster care so we’re throwing your kids into foster care” does not qualify. 

Unfortunately, in this respect, Oregon is not unusual. Across the country, ignoring “reasonable efforts” is far more the rule than the exception. 

… to Maryland 

In The Baltimore Banner, columnist Leslie Gray Streeter writes with rare insight and compassion about Kahliyah Gooding, a poor mother who was arrested after she left her children home alone. She quotes from the police report: 

“She leaves her children at home because daycare is too expensive and she has to work.” 

Yes, the usual crowd of affluent, censorious “professionals” can gleefully wag their fingers and say it wasn’t poverty “alone” because the house also was filthy. (Why, oh why didn’t she just hire a maid? Oh, wait…) 

Streeter knows better. So does Prof. Shanta Trivedi, associate professor of law and faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Family, Children and the Courts at the University of Baltimore. From the column: 

“… Most moms don’t want to leave their kids alone. I don’t think she left them because she thought it was a good idea,” Trivedi said. “She did what she had to do to put food in their mouths.” 

It’s possible Gooding’s children are now in foster care, though we don’t know. “The state will pay for other people to care for your children, but the same money could be used for daycare so that they could stay with their mom,” Trivedi said. “We put a lot toward foster care and adoption but very little on prevention.” … 

So why don’t parents in need avail themselves of the system? “Calling social services guarantees some sort of intervention, and you really run the risk of losing your kids anyway,” Trivedi said. 

This seems like a good place for a reminder that Maryland is planning to spend more than $1 billion over the next five years, just to buy 637 institutional beds to warehouse children.

Graphic by ChatGPT

When the journalism of child welfare fails, part four: A Washington State news site discovers the trauma and tragedy of false allegations of child abuse – well, sort of.

Wow. Things sure got tough for Silvia Zarate after she was falsely accused of child abuse.  She had to fight her way through a long, cumbersome appeals process before she could get overturned a determination by a caseworker for the Washington State family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) that the allegation against her was “founded.” 

But, as the online news site Investigate West explains: 

Zarate’s ordeal is far from finished, as she continues to struggle with her employment because the abuse charge still comes up on background checks. She said she has wiped out her retirement, gone into debt and has racked up more than $180,000 in attorney fees fighting the abuse allegation. 

She’s struggling with employment because she was fired from her job.  She also was criminally charged – charges ultimately dismissed.  As she explained to Investigate West: 

“Just because I won doesn’t mean I recovered anything. I still have to go through all this turmoil.” 

Investigate West goes on to tell us: 

To Zarate, it felt vindictive. She felt she was presumed guilty and needed to prove her innocence rather than the opposite. 

“They rushed to judgment,” she said. “They didn’t really investigate it well.” 

At last!  A big mainstream news organization in Washington State understands the enormous harm of false allegations, rushing to judgment, sloppy investigations and no meaningful redress!  

Well – not quite.  And if you don’t know what’s coming next, you don’t know either this Blog or Investigate West.  But here’s a hint: When it comes to covering “child welfare,” Investigate West isn’t really a news organization at all – it’s the de-facto p.r. arm of the Foster Parents Association of Washington State.  You can read about some of their long, ugly track record here. 

So you’ve probably guessed: The only reason this falsely accused parent got such sympathetic treatment – in fact, the only reason Investigate West talked to her at all – is because she was a foster parent, and the accuser was one of her foster children.  

I don’t think this is primarily the reporter’s fault.  She’s relatively new to Investigate West and this seems to be her first story about foster care.  The fault lies mostly with her editors who, at every turn, lionize foster parents and demonize birth parents.

As for Zarate, there’s something else worth noting: The job from which she was fired was caseworker for the state family police agency. 

So when the story ends with Zarate saying: “They have all the resources and us little people, foster parents, we don’t have those kinds of resources,” she doesn’t just forget who has even fewer resources – impoverished birth parents – she also seems to forget that, until her ordeal began, she was an integral part of “they.” 

What Zarate endured is, indeed, horrible.  I hope she wins the $9 million she is seeking from a state fund as compensation for her ordeal.  

But it is only a fraction of the trauma endured by poor families who don’t know the system from the inside, and don’t have $180,000 for legal fees.  But as we’ve seen over the years, Investigate West views birth parents as, at worst, evil, at best sick! sick! sick! – and certainly not worth talking to, much less doing an entire story about how they are guilty until proven innocent. 

And while the story mentions only the suffering Zarate endured, when this happens to birth families those who suffer most are the children – often traumatized by needless investigations and stripsearches at best, consignment to the chaos of foster care at worst. 

Nor does this story include the usual “Big Lie” of American child welfare that always turns up when
birth parents challenge the system.  No state legislator or leader of a mainstream “child advocacy” group coming out of the woodwork to say what they always say when the system traumatizes birth families: Yes, what happened is unfortunate, but we have to balance “parents rights” against child safety.  

On the contrary: The whole thrust of the Investigate West story is that this horrible treatment of foster parents is going to drive them away, and then boy will we be sorry!  So there! 

With no sense of irony, the co-president of the Foster Parents Association of Washington State complains that 

Once you get crosswise with the department, it’s really, really, really difficult to get back to where you want to be. 

Getting the priorities right 

Investigate West even finds a way to effectively blame the problems of foster parents on – birth parents! The story quotes a family police agency supervisor who 

said he’s heard foster parents increasingly express feeling underappreciated in their role in recent years, perhaps partially as an unintended consequence of Washington policy shifting to prefer kinship placements and increase family reunifications. 

“If kids can be with family, relatives, neighbors or friends, that’s going to do a better job in a lot of cases of being less disruptive to that child’s life,” [the supervisor] said. But, “I think the context of this is that foster parents kind of feel forgotten about and pushed to the bottom of the pile, by not just the agency, but the whole state. When the reality is, we absolutely need them.” 

So, in other words, the real purpose of the foster system is to pander to the egos and rescue fantasies of stranger foster parents. 

If, on the other hand, you believe the purpose of the foster system is to help children, then the priorities that supervisor describes are exactly right: Keeping children in their own families is almost always better for children’s wellbeing – and safer – than placement with stranger foster parents.  When that truly isn’t possible, kinship foster care has been shown to be far better than placement with strangers.  So yes, stranger foster care parents should be a lower priority – in fact the only worse option is group homes and institutions. 

Good foster parents, the ones who really care about the kids, get that. 

Are foster parents persecuted? 

As for foster parents being persecuted, the evidence suggests otherwise.  As of 2019, the most recent year for which I could find data, Washington State claimed to find abuse in only 0.06% of foster homes.  If that figure is correct, it means if you put 1,666 former Washington State foster children in a room and asked: “How many of you were abused during your last year in foster care?” only one would raise her or his hand.  

In contrast, independent studies, including one specific to Washington State and Oregon, consistently find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes (and the rate in group homes and institutions is even worse.)  That’s a rate at least 400 times higher than what Washington State’s family police agency claims to find.  (In fairness, the studies generally cover the entire time a child is in foster care, and, on average, children are trapped in foster care for a little under two years.  On the other hand, the study methodology often excludes some kinds of abuse. But, just to give Washington State the benefit of the doubt, let’s not just double but triple their official single-year estimate.  Then the independent studies find only 133 times more abuse in foster care.) 

PERCENT OF CHILDREN ABUSED IN FOSTER CARE

So if there is a systematic campaign by the Washington State family police agency to persecute foster parents with false allegations of child abuse – they’re not very good at it.  

The vast undercount of abuse in foster care is precisely because when they investigate abuse in foster care family police agencies are, in effect, investigating themselves.  After all, they put the child in the home where she or he was abused.  It’s also because they don’t want to lose foster homes, and go through all the work of finding new placements for foster children.  So when it comes to abuse in foster care, there is an enormous incentive for caseworkers to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file. 

And remember: Washington State is where a stranger foster mother and foster grandmother could allegedly kidnap the foster child in their care and flee all the way to Vietnam, and it was days before the family police agency even noticed.  I probably do need to remind you, since Investigate West never bothered to cover that story.  Neither did the Seattle Times.  You can be sure had birth parents kidnapped their child from a foster home, both news organizations would be all over the story – and Investigate West would do a huge feature about foster parents “living in fear.” 

The story about Zarate isn’t even the first pity-the-poor-falsely-accused-foster-parents story Investigate West has done. They did essentially the same story in 2020 (and I wrote pretty much the same blog post in response).  

No one should have to endure what Silvia Zarate endured.  But it would have been easier to sympathize if at some point she’d said something like this: “I wonder sometimes, did I do this to any families on my caseload? Did I get it wrong, substantiate an allegation when I shouldn’t have, and put some other family through this?  Did I inadvertently traumatize their children? And if this is how horrible it is for me, what is it like for birth parents who can’t fight back?” 

And if there really is a systematic campaign to persecute foster parents it would have been nice if someone at Investigate West had thought to say: “They really need foster parents – if this is how foster parents are treated, how are they treating birth parents – and what is that doing to their children?  Maybe we should do a story about that.” 

But there is nothing like that in the story from either Zarate nor the head of the foster parents association.  Either they didn’t say it, or they did but it never got into the story. 

There is only a hint that some of this may have occurred to Zarate.  She’s not actually quoted, but the reporter does say: 

Zarate said she hopes the department takes impacts such as she’s endured more seriously when approaching investigations of foster parents as well as biological parents. 

The words “biological parents” (and biological is pejorative, by the way) are words # 1,730 and 1,731 in a 1,761-word story.

Flawed system, flawed journalism: COVID-19 brings both into stark relief

In Washington State, as in many other places, the flaws in the child welfare system are mirrored in the flaws in how child welfare is covered.  But at one online news site there are the first signs of improvement.

Second of two parts. Read part one here.

            The story was a searing expose of ill-treatment visited upon families by a child protective services agency. It told of families repeatedly being harassed, threatened and treated with disrespect. 

            Did I say families? Sorry, I meant mostly white, middle class foster families.  Because for the online news site Investigate West in Washington State, they have been the only families who really counted.

            The story dealt with repeated acts of alleged retaliation by the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families against foster parents who dared to challenge the agency.  But apparently, in the entire 4000-word story, it never occurred to any of those foster parents, nor to the reporter, to pose one simple question:

            The state really needs foster families. If this is how they are treated, how do you think the agency treats birth families?

            For Investigate West, and many other news organizations, the real answer is: Who cares? 

They are more subtle about it, more genteel (and more grammatical) than the  crude, cruel petition posted by a Washington State foster parent demanding a wholesale cutoff of visits between foster children and their parents due to COVID-19 (something discussed in detail in the previous post to this blog). But the message is similar: Birth parents, overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite, are essentially so subhuman they’re barely even worth speaking to.  Sure, they may not be evil, but they’re all sick, sick, sick! If they’re ill-treated, they brought it on themselves. 

            Investigate West also presents as fact the claim that there is a shortage of foster parents in Washington State.  But Washington State doesn’t have too few foster parents, it has too many foster children – because it tears apart families at a rate well above the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in.  Investigate West also accepts at face value claims about child welfare and substance use.  Once again, they shouldn’t.  And they’ve bought into the conventional wisdom about the supposed need for more group homes and  residential treatment. Again, a mistake.

         

   The problems with the attitude reflected both in the petition and in much of Investigate West’s reporting are legion, but here’s the most important: Almost always, when you take that kind of swing at parents, the blow lands on their children.

            Most recently, those blows come in the form of states, including Washington, cutting off all in-person visits between foster children and their parents.  Wholesale cutoffs of visits, as opposed to case-by-case decisions, are contrary to federal recommendations, and are not necessary to curb COVID-19.

            In fairness, we know about Washington State’s appalling behavior in large part thanks to a story from Investigate West.  Those failures are discussed in detail in the previous post to this blog. 

This most recent story is a real improvement. This time, two birth parents actually are quoted – and some parents’ attorneys are included.  The federal guidance is noted. The story also exposes DCYF’s false claim that, in banning all in-person visits, the agency is just following orders from Gov. Jay Inslee. And it exposes DCYF’s failure even to provide the necessary technology so all foster children can have video visits with parents too poor to afford it themselves.

It’s also the case that, when it comes to the journalism of child welfare, there is far worse out there.  This most recent story, and the general output of Investigate West, are worth a close look precisely because it is so typical.

Flunking the “balance of harms” test

            As with so much about both child welfare and the journalism of child welfare, the story flunks the “balance of harms” test.

            The story plays up the serious and real risks of coronavirus, without also discussing the enormous risk to children posed by the trauma inflicted when visits are cut off.  In contrast, this story form the Chronicle of Social Change gets it right.  Here’s some of what parents said:

It breaks my heart that I can’t see my child right now.  I can’t hold her. I can’t comfort her when she’s getting frustrated.

She sees me on the screen and then she’s looking around to see if I’ll pop out. She’s reaching out to me, she wants to grab me but she can’t. She tries. It’s a very unbearable thing.

My kids are hurt, they’re crying. They don’t understand. My daughter is thinking we don’t want to see her.

You won’t find that in the Investigate West story.  Instead, the deck is further stacked by suggesting the issue is a matter of public health vs. parents’ rights. Thus we are told that:

The emergency measures are raising the issue of whether Washington officials and judges have the authority to limit the legal right of birth parents to see their children in person … 

But the real issue is whether foster children have the legal right to see their parents in person.

The foster care system itself is described as a place for “young people whose parents have been unable or unwilling to care for them.” In some cases, of course, that’s true.  In other cases it’s for young people whose parents were simply caught being poor or nonwhite or both. 

One of the lawyers Investigate West cites in their story, S. Annie Chung, earlier told Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka

A vast majority … of the families that are in the dependency system are actually struggling with the effects of poverty and structural racism.  These families are struggling, but they’re not bad parents. They don’t have less love or less of a bond with their children.

If Chung pointed this out to Investigate West, they weren’t interested.

Fortunately, Ishisaka was. She wrote:

Poverty should not be punished with the lasting psychological and emotional damage of family separation. In the meantime, a one-size-fits-all visitation policy will not work.

            In contrast, Investigate West presents the selfishness of foster parents as almost noble:

Foster parents got that public health message and they acted on it.

            Or consider this paragraph, which combines subtle class bias with condescension:

State legal requirements make reuniting foster kids with the birth parents the paramount goal, in line with national recommendations. Yet those birth parents often are struggling with poverty, addiction or other issues that caused the state to remove their children in the first place. Often the hope of recovering their kids is what drives them to do better, child-welfare advocates say.
 

            Strip away the genteel veneer and this is what Investigate West is saying: Not only is it perfectly o.k. to tear apart a family when parents are “struggling with poverty,” the removal is just the kick in the pants those lazy good-for-nothings need to “drive them to do better.”  There is no acknowledgement that some of “them” were doing just fine as parents until child protective services entered their lives.

Investigate West also neglects to mention that the goal of reunification is based on decades of research showing that, in typical cases, children placed in foster care fare worse even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

What the headline writer knew

          

             The overall message sent by the story is clear from what one headline writer made of it.  Reporters almost never write the headlines for their stories (something almost every reporter really wants you to know, by the way) but the overall impression a story leaves sometimes can be gleaned from what a headline writer made of it.

            The Investigate West headline was simply: “Birth parents fight to visit kids in foster system during pandemic.”  But at Crosscut, another online news site which reprints Investigate West’s work, someone added a lurid “subhead,” (sometimes called a “deck”). It reads:

Seeing their children in person may put parents, as well as foster families and social workers, at risk, but can the state stop them?

I hope that wasn’t really the message Investigate West was trying to send.  If it wasn’t, then I hope they will go back and try again – and try not to see every child welfare issue almost exclusively through the eyes of white, middle-class foster parents.

In  an outstanding column urging child welfare systems to rise above their fears and their prejudices, Jerry Milner Associate Commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services Children’s Bureau and his Special Assistant, David Kelly, wrote:

There will also be leaders and individuals who will learn from these difficult times and chart a new course, inspired by this stark reminder of our common humanity. For such leaders, this crisis is an opportunity to reorient our system.

Perhaps there also will be journalists inspired to chart a new course and reconsider the assumptions that have guided their coverage.