UPDATED: “We move in silence”: Stories illustrate the constant threat to families from the child welfare surveillance state -- and how traumatizing children can be dismissed as just “an oopsy daisy.”

             

As schools start again, NPR is broadcasting a series of stories about how families are coping.  In one excellent story, Morning Edition anchor Rachel Martin interviewed a Black single mother struggling to hold down a job while her children learn online.

             “I have four children,” the mother told Martin.

 “Three boys and one daughter ranging from 13 - he's my oldest boy, you know, he likes to stay to himself, and he loves to draw, though; 11 - that's my sweetheart, my special little guy (laughter); 9 - that's my athlete, that's my busybody; and 7 - my daughter, that's my cheerleader.

             What emerges is a story of quiet heroism, as this mother, always poor and sometimes desperately so, moves heaven and earth for her children.  She’s also taking college courses online to earn a bachelor’s degree.  NPR wisely left in interruptions to the interview as the mother stopped to talk to one child’s dentist and help another get online; they were glimpses into how much this mother has to juggle.

             You can hear the story here:

             NPR did not use the names of the children – but they did use the full name of the mother and the city where the family lives.

             I wish they hadn’t.  Because the only thing standing between this family and the trauma of needless foster care for the children is random chance.  For six hours, while mom is working, the 13-year-old has to supervise the other three, including making sure they’re online for their classes.  The wrong caseworker could see that as “lack of supervision” or “educational neglect” or both.

           

 If someone, whether well-meaning or self-righteous or some combination, heeds the constant demands to report anything and everything to child abuse hotlines -- Go ahead and call!  Leave it to we professionals to decide!  You could be a hero! – and the wrong caseworker shows up, the children could be torn from their mother and consigned to the chaos of foster care.

 It’s clear from this excerpt from the interview that the mother knows the risk. She almost seemed to be speaking to child protective services:

 MARTIN: So there's a lot going on in your life and in your family's life. How does the school, the education part of it, complicate things, the fact that you don't have a safe place for kids to be during the day?

 [MOTHER]: Well, where we are is safe. It's just I don't have - like I say, my son is old enough to keep the kids, but it's not his total responsibility to make sure that everybody is doing what they're supposed to do. Now, I do have access, you know, to the phones, you know, so while I'm at work, I definitely call and do my check-ins. And at this point, you know, for me, that's the best that I can do, you know, because I don't look for handouts. I don't need no pity parties. I don't want nobody to feel, you know, sorry for me because there's so many other women and families out here that's going through the same thing, you know, and we move in silence.

 It could go the other way, of course. At least now the children can get online from home. They had to “borrow from the library to get internet access” until a local television station told their story and a donor stepped in.

 Perhaps the national attention will prompt someone to help the mother get a job she can do from home, or hire a sitter – if one can be found given the current risks. (That, after all would be in the grand American tradition of absolving ourselves of responsibility for what we do to millions by helping the one we hear about on radio or TV.)  And perhaps the national attention will protect the family if someone is callous enough or naïve enough to call CPS on them.

 But it’s a crapshoot. And because this family is poor and especially because this family also is nonwhite, every minute of every day this family has to worry about what the child welfare surveillance state might do to them.

 

The California case [See update]

 

If you think that’s farfetched, recall what’s happening in Massachusetts and New York City – or consider  What might be a strikingly similar case from California, as described  in this news account:

 A Taco Bell proved critical for two little girls who were briefly using its Wi-Fi for school -- something that almost proved tragic after the kids were nearly taken from their mother.

 A photo of two young girls sitting outside of a Taco Bell in Salinas, CA -- just outside of Monterey -- recently went viral ... which shows them plopped down on the concrete with their laptops and notepads out, while two TB employees come out to talk to them. … According to local community members who stepped in to help the family ... they were almost separated by cops and CPS officials, who apparently came knocking.

UPDATE: The original story has been updated with a statement from the police department saying they never had any contact with the family.  There is no word concerning CPS. 

When CPS is at the door

 

We also got a rare detailed look last month at what happens when CPS does come to the door, and how much harm it can do, even when they don’t walk out with the children.  We got that look as a result of a court decision in Kentucky.  The decision comes in a lawsuit by a Kentucky family, represented by the Home School Legal Defense Association.

 CPS agencies like to sell us on the idea that a child abuse investigation is no big deal – just a quick check if the family needs anything and, if there’s no problem, they go away. As the caseworker in the Kentucky case put it: “We’re just going to consider this an oopsy daisy.” Readers of this Lexington, (Kentucky) Herald-Leader story  might disagree.

 The Herald-Leader reports that it began in 2017 when Holly Curry left her six children in her minivan for five to ten minutes to run into a coffee shop and get muffins.  It was a cool day, the doors were locked and the engine and fan were running.  Someone called police. The officer did not charge the mother. But he did notify child protective services – something he now says he regrets.

 As the judge noted, when a Kentucky child abuse investigator, Jeanetta Childress and Hardin County sheriff’s Deputy Michael Furnish later showed up at the family home, “they knew the Curry children had been utterly unharmed while waiting in their climate-controlled car for the time it took Holly to run in a coffee shop.”

 Nevertheless, they got Curry to let them into the home – by threatening to come back and take away the children if she didn't.  Then, as the Herald-Leader reports:

 Writing in a court motion, Curry’s lawyers said that Childress “proceeded to strip search the children. Starting with the younger children, she pulled up their pant legs to look at their calves, then unbuttoned their pants, undid the buttons on their onesies, pulled them up to view their chests, stomachs and abdomen area, then undid their diapers and put her fingers down and looked inside.”

 For the older children who wore underwear, Childress pulled it aside, looked inside and put her hands down their underwear, the lawyers wrote.

 “Deputy Furnish was present while all six children were strip searched,” Curry’s lawyers wrote.

 Childress herself claimed such stripsearching is standard operating procedure.  As the judge noted: "Incredibly, Childress repeatedly testified that she believed she should ‘automatically’ strip search any child who was four or under.”  And well, if nothing is found, after all, it’s just “an oopsy daisy.”

The judge saw it differently:

 The judge wrote in his order last week that the social worker and deputy had no right to strip search the children in violation of their “fundamental dignity.”

 “Here, Childress lacked even a shadow of probable cause that the Currys physically abused their children,” the judge wrote.

 But, as the story notes, that didn’t stop Childress from allegedly issuing one last threat:

  “If we ever get a call against your family again, bad things will happen to you and we’ll take your children,” according to the Currys’ attorneys.

 The judge concluded his ruling this way:

 “Act One: An ‘attentive and loving’ mother gets muffins for her children.  Act Two: There’s a knock on her door and a threat by the government to take away her children. Act Three: Her children are strip searched without cause.”

 “America’s founding generation may never have imagined a Cabinet for Health and Family Services. But they knew their fair share of unwelcome constables. And they added a Fourth Amendment to our Constitution to protect against this three-act tragedy.”

But this drama has had a long, long run. And there’s no sign that the show is going to close anytime soon, unless we realize that, for the sake of millions of vulnerable children, it’s time to bring down the curtain.

Child welfare and civil liberties: When we betray our principles, we betray our children

First of two parts

Late last year, The New York Times published a story about the frightening amount of power, and the frightening lack of accountability, among some of America’s county sheriffs. It included this example:

This year, the sheriff in Worth County, Ga., ordered his deputies to enter the local high school in search of drugs. They lined up 850 students with legs spread and hands against the hallway walls. Deputies inserted fingers into girls’ bras, and touched their underwear and genital areas while searching in their waistbands or reaching up their dresses, according to the Southern Center [for Human Rights], which sued the sheriff.

The deputies had no warrant or other authority to conduct the search, the suit charged. No drugs were found. … The Georgia sheriff was recently indicted in connection with the mass search and has pleaded not guilty. The lawsuit resulted in a $3 million settlement.

Wow. A $3 million settlement and criminal charges – charges that included a misdemeanor count of “sexual battery.”  Just goes to show what happens when advocates of civil liberties mobilize.  Even authorities with all that power can be held accountable.

A random sample of the nearly 200 comments on the story found unanimous condemnation of the abuses outlined in the story (of which the example above was only one) – not to mention a rush to blame it on political conservatives.

Now, consider a far more common infringement on civil liberties, as described by The New Yorker:

You will hear a knock on the door, often late at night. You don’t have to open it, but if you don’t the caseworker outside may come back with the police. The caseworker will tell you you’re being investigated for abusing or neglecting your children. She will tell you to wake them up and tell them to take clothes off so she can check their bodies for bruises and marks.

Even though this story described the rule, not the exception, there were no cries of outrage from civil libertarians. And the letters to The New Yorker in response to the story defended the people inflicting this infringement on civil liberties on defenseless children.

Because, of course, the people doing this to children were not sheriff’s deputies, they were – and are

– child protective services workers.  The differing responses illustrate, once again, that the quickest way to get many liberals to renounce everything they claim to believe about civil liberties is to whisper in their ears those two magic words “child abuse.” (The Left has no monopoly on hypocrisy – it was that great “family values conservative” Newt Gingrich who proposed confiscating the children of the poor and throwing them into orphanages.)

Just say the magic words

But for many on the left, call it a child abuse investigation and suddenly, behavior which in any other context would be sexual abuse is deemed acceptable. Behavior like this concerning a six-year-old:

The caseworker says that she needs to take pictures of Jackie’s body. Her mother, visibly shaken, again expresses discomfort, but the caseworker tells her “Oh, don’t worry. It’s more stressful for the parent than it is the child.”

And so Jackie’s mother helps Jackie to take off her clothes. The caseworker asks Jackie to lie down on the bed and spread her legs. Despite having no training in this specialized work, she then “[takes] pictures of Jackie’s vagina and buttocks in a closed position, and then instruct[s] [her mother] to spread Jackie’s labia and buttocks, so that she [can] take pictures of the genital and anal areas.” For months afterwards, both Jackie and her mother suffer from nightmares, anxiety, and depression.

Finding no basis to substantiate its concern that the child may have been abused, the state closes its case file.

Or consider the case in which these questions ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court (which ducked the issue) – a case in which NCCPR’s Vice President served as pro-bono counsel for the family:

Nine-year-old Sharon [not her real name] was removed from her classroom by school officials and escorted to another room in the school where she was met by two men, one of them a uniformed deputy sheriff carrying a gun.  They had no permission from any court; no neutral arbiter had decided first if what these men were about to do really was necessary.

For two hours Sharon was interrogated.  She was badgered relentlessly when she did not give the men the answers they wanted to hear.  She was too scared to leave the room, too scared even to ask for a glass of water.   She realized that the only way out was to lie.

Needlessly to say, Sharon was not a criminal.  On the contrary, the two men thought that maybe Sharon had been abused, and this seemed to them the most convenient way to find out.

But the botched interrogation led only to lies and confusion.  And it set off a cascade of error that caused even more trauma to Sharon including a stripsearch, a highly traumatic medical examination and several weeks consigned to America’s chaotic system of foster care.

Should “speculation and hearsay” really be enough?

In their own brief to the Supreme Court authorities in Oregon, where the case arose, actually said they should have the right to do this to a child based on – their words – “speculation and hearsay.”

Not everyone on the Left turned a blind eye. On the contrary, the case was notable for the fact that groups on the left, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Center for Youth Law, the Juvenile Law Center and many groups that represent children in child welfare cases as well as groups on the right such as the Family Research Council and the Eagle Forum filed “friend of the court” briefs supporting the family.

But there were some notable absences. The American Civil Liberties Union remained silent. (That’s not unusual. At the national level, when it comes to the notion of applying civil liberties to child welfare, the ACLU tends to be AWOL.)  The group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” does not seem to think those rights should include the ones covered by the Fourth Amendment. And the National Association of Social Workers actually submitted a brief supporting the nearly unlimited power to subject children to this kind of trauma.  (The Clinical Social Work Association, in contrast, stood up for the children.)

Meanwhile, in still another appalling case, in which girls were stripsearched in front of a male police officer, a lawsuit has been brought for the family by a conservative group, the Home School Legal Defense Association.

The intrusion doesn’t have to rise to the level of a stripsearch to be traumatic.  The questioning alone can traumatize a child, particularly a young child.  As three of the leading child welfare scholars of the 20th century, Anna Freud, Joseph Goldstein and Albert J. Solnit wrote, in calling for far higher standards before ever intervening in families:

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 Baltimore Sun recognized this in an editorial cautioning against toughening “mandatory reporting” laws – even at a time when the pressure to toughen those laws was greatest, right after the crimes of former Penn State coach – and foster parent - Jerry Sandusky were exposed. As the Sun wrote:

Moreover, abuse investigations are inherently traumatic for children. They often involvehours of intensive questioning about sensitive issues of sexuality, shame and guilt as well as intrusive physical examinations that frighten and humiliate suspected victims. The stress brought on by such procedures can leave lasting emotional and psychological scars even on children who turn out not to have suffered abuse.

The new normal

That kind of intrusion is the new normal for Black families. Arecent study found that 53 percent of African American children will endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. 

Indeed, the very fact that the child welfare system targets almost exclusively poor families and disproportionately families of color helps explain the lack of outrage, especially in the media and among politicians. One can see that in Massachusetts when all of a sudden media and politicians did get outraged – when it happened to people of their race and their class: middle-class foster parents.

But that doesn’t explain all of it.  Stop-and-frisk targets the poor and it targets people of color. Liberals can be relied upon to be outraged by it. Yet many of the same liberals who will rise up in righteous wrath against infringements of the civil liberties of adults by law enforcement stand silent or, worse, defend the routine violations of children’s civil liberties in the name of “child protection.”

Similarly, some liberals who would never think it’s o.k. to throw a passenger off a plane just for speaking Arabic will gladly seek to instill paranoia in our children – and even promote the extremely dangerous practice of defensive driving – again, in the name of “child protection.”

After all, they will say, a child abuse investigation is different – it’s done to protect the child.  But infringements against civil liberties almost always are justified by invoking noble goals – that’s why defending civil liberties often is unpopular.  That sheriff in Georgia could argue that he, too, was simply trying to protect children – from the scourge of drug abuse.

All this explains why the due process protections we take for granted in most areas of law are largely absent in child welfare.  But whenever we on the Left betray our principles, we also betray our children.

Read Part Two here