NCCPR in WitnessLA: Don’t shield private foster care agencies from accountability for abuse; the “crisis” facing Foster Family Agencies is an opportunity for real reform

Recent developments in California and New York make it clear: Foster care is now known to be so harmful to children—and there is so much abuse in foster care—that agencies providing it are becoming uninsurable. 

Private foster care agencies are, of course, portraying this matter as a crisis. As a result, they’re seeking various forms of immunity from liability for the horrible things done to some children on their watch. This should not be seen as a crisis that demands the kind of remedies that could eliminate the last vestiges of accountability and deny children justice. Instead, these developments should be seen as an opportunity—a chance to finally make meaningful change in a system that so often destroys children in order to save them ...

Read the full column in WitnessLA

NCCPR in WitnessLA: A Good California Supreme Court Decision Curbs The Family Police

A decision by the California Supreme Court sheds rare light on how family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) like the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services behave, and how that behavior hurts children. 

What makes this case stand out is that, aside from making it all the way to the California Supreme Court, it doesn’t stand out.  It’s not a horror story.  It’s just DCFS doing what it usually does as it usually does it, leaving everyone worse off for their presence. … 

Read the full column in WitnessLA: https://witnessla.com/a-good-california-supreme-court-decision-curbs-the-family-police/

NCCPR in Youth Today and WitnessLA: In child welfare, the racial bias is everywhere — even in the research

Consider this hypothetical scenario:

 A 10-year-old boy mouths off to a man on the street; His mother is with him. She slaps him in the face and yells at him, making clear he must never, ever do something like that again.

 Is that child abuse?

 According to the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence a widely touted survey from some of America’s leading family violence researchers, a survey used to measure the supposed prevalence of child abuse in America, the answer is yes.

 The survey asks this question: 

“Not including spanking on (his/her /your) bottom, did a grown-up in (your child’s/your) life hit, beat, kick, or physically hurt (your child/you) in any way?”

 Now let’s change the hypothetical slightly ...

Read the full commentary in Youth Today and WitnessLA

Child welfare in Los Angeles: Children still suffer when parents “flunk the attitude test” – but the suffering no longer is secret

More than two decades ago, when I was writing Wounded Innocents, my book about the American child welfare system, a lawyer in Los Angeles told me about “the attitude test” – and how it can lead to every kind of child welfare tragedy.

It works this way:

Parents who really are guilty, even of serious maltreatment, sometimes can get away with it if they are “system-wise” and know how to put on a good act for a caseworker.  The parent who says “Oh, I am so very, very sorry.  I know I need help.  Please bestow upon me your ‘counseling’ and your ‘parent education’” may get her child returned over and over again, no matter how serious the abuse.  The parent who says “I’m innocent, damn it!” because she is, in fact, innocent, may lose her child forever. 

The attitude test is alive and well in Los Angeles (and everywhere else in America) but given how reporters tend to stereotype families, they often refuse to believe it – unless, of course, they see it for themselves.  Certainly, it’s unlikely that Garrett Therolf of the Los Angeles Times would ever have believed it, had he not seen it for himself.

He could see it because in February, Presiding Juvenile Court Judge Michael Nash, opened hearings in what is called “dependency court” to the media and, sometimes, to the public.

So Therolf saw a classic example of vindictive caseworkers punishing children because their mother “flunked the attitude test,” and he wrote a very good story about it.  (See also this excellent summary and analysis of the story from WitnessLA.)  And be sure to read to the end: The final paragraphs perfectly sum up American child welfare.

In the story, Marlene Furth, who works for the contractor that provides defense counsel for these families, did a very good job of putting the case into context. 

[Furth] called it an "outrageous case" of retaliation that she sees too often. It is "not a daily occurrence, but it is also not highly unusual," she said in an interview.

"The problem that exists," she said, "is that there are very very many dedicated workers and they work extraordinarily hard to reunify families, and then there are many workers who don't - either because they are burned out, overworked or reached a point where they don't care."

But, of course, had Furth's firm had gotten its way, we’d never know about this case.  That’s because her firm, contrary to the interests and desires of many of its clients, has been fighting against keeping these court hearings open – in part, I believe, because it would expose the poor quality of representation families often receive.

Open courts in child welfare: LA Judge takes a big step in the right direction

UPDATE, JAN 31: STILL ANOTHER INDICATION THAT OPEN COURTS WORK: Though only a minority of states have open court hearings in child welfare cases, they include some of the largest - New York, Texas, Illinois and Florida among them.  Once court hearings are opened in Los Angeles, nearly half of America's foster children will live in a jurisdiction with open hearings. Yet in all the years that these hearings have been open, no state has closed them again, and none of the fears of opponents has come to pass.


            Court hearings concerning cases alleging child abuse and neglect in Los Angeles County would be presumed open to the press, but remain closed to most of the public under a draft order issued Friday by the Presiding Judge of the county’s Juvenile Court.  Judge Michael Nash will hold a hearing on the draft order Monday. 

            If Judge Nash proceeds with this order as written, it will be a significant step forward in holding the county Department of Children and Family Services and the courts themselves accountable for what the system does to children and families in Los Angeles. [UPDATE: JAN. 31: At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Nash announced that he will issue a final order after making some minor changes to the draft.]  As we explain in our Due Process Agenda, none of the many other state and local systems that have opened these courts has closed them again because all the fears of opponents proved groundless.  The need for opening these hearings is superbly explained in a letter from Berkeley attorney Edward Opton, reprinted in the previous post to this Blog.

            The order also has some unfortunate limitations.  But in reading the reasoning Judge Nash offers in his draft order, it appears he considers this as far as he can go under existing law, based on rulings from California appellate courts.

            Under the proposed order:

Members of the press shall be allowed access to Juvenile Dependency Court hearings unless there is a reasonable likelihood that such access will be harmful to the child’s or children’s best interests.

Any party can raise an objection to a reporter’s presence, at which point the judge would have to rule on the issue of “reasonable likelihood” of harm.  The order offers no guidelines, no definition of harm, and no standard of proof that someone objecting to the presence of reporters must meet.  That gives lousy judges plenty of leeway to keep their courts closed whenever they don’t want reporters to see how those courts do their jobs. 

The provisions for the general public are a little more confusing, and a lot more restrictive.  According to the draft:

Members of the public shall be admitted to Juvenile Dependency Court hearings at the request of or with the consent of a child about whom a petition has been filed. Other members of the public may enter the courtroom and be present at a hearing if the court finds that such persons have a direct or legitimate interest in the case or the work of the court.  Upon request of the court, such persons shall specifically articulate the purpose of their presence.

            As I read it, this means that if the child (which often will really mean the child’s lawyer) wants someone in the courtroom, that person is allowed in no- questions-asked.  Anyone else has to prove a “legitimate interest.” [UPDATE, FEB 1: Judge Nash's final order clarifies that this is, indeed, what he meant.]

            But it’s possible that Judge Nash is saying that, for a member of the public to be admitted, that person would have to both have an invitation from the child’s lawyer and meet the legitimate interest test.  That’s unlikely, but if it is what Judge Nash is saying then it would set a terrible precedent.  It would give one party to the case a power denied to all the others, instead of leaving such decisions up to the judge.  This is exactly the kind of condition the sponsor of legislation to open California courts statewide wisely rejected.

            The other problem, of course, is that the order opens up the question of  what, exactly constitutes “the press”?

The appellate court decisions on which Judge Nash relies predate the Internet.  No doubt a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, even Garrett Therolf, would be considered a member of the press.   But the best coverage of child welfare in Los Angeles has come from WitnessLA, a Blog written and edited by Celeste Fremon, a former reporter for LA Weekly.  Is she a member of the press?  Given the strong reporting often seen at WitnessLA, I doubt that Fremon really would have a problem. But it illustrates how drawing the kind of distinction Judge Nash has in mind has become more difficult.

            The good news is that for decades Illinois and New Mexico have operated this way.  In those states juvenile courts are presumed open to the press and closed to the public.   Those states don’t seem to have encountered any difficulties.

Another LA foster care story ignored by the LA Times

Sadly, we must begin the New Year picking up where we left off – with still another story of child welfare tragedy ignored by the Los Angeles Times and possibly caused in part by the Los Angeles Times.

On August 20, 2009 I was in Los Angeles, holding a news conference along with the excellent local grassroots group DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children.  We warned that bad journalism, (particularly the bad journalism of Garrett Therolf, the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Los Angeles Times) was likely to set off a foster-care panic – a sharp sudden surge in children needlessly taken from their parents.  (The material we released that day is on our website here).

As we would confirm by filing our own California Public Records Act request, not only was there such a panic, one of the worst months of the panic was August, 2009, with the number of children taken from their parents that month 20 percent higher than the same month the previous year.

Even as we issued the warning, on August 20, 2009, a little boy named Eamon was becoming a likely victim of that panic.

Pasadena Weekly told the story of Eamon, his sister, and their mother Mary O’Connor with rare insight and compassion last month.  That story, and a heartbreaking follow-up,  make clear that Eamon was born with three strikes against him.  His mother is poor.  She is, as the lawyer who handled an eviction case for her puts it, “a little odd” – but not in any way that indicated the slightest danger to her son.  And strike three for Eamon was being born when caseworkers for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services were especially paranoid about being scapegoated by Therolf for leaving a child in her or his own home and having something go wrong. 

FLUNKING THE ATTITUDE TEST

Actually, make it four strikes.  Ms. O’Connor flunked what a Los Angeles lawyer described to me decades ago as “the attitude test.”  She didn’t know how to put on an act of groveling before DCFS workers, begging forgiveness (not that there is any evidence that there was anything for which she needed to be forgiven) and promising to jump through every hoop set before her.  Instead, she fought back in ways even more likely to anger a judge and scare a DCFS worker.

None of which changes one basic fact: There was no problem in Ms. O’Connor’s home that couldn’t have been solved with help to cope with the concrete problems of poverty and the kind of mental health care that affluent families easily can buy. 

There are other factors that may be at play here as well.

It appears that Eamon was put on the adoption track very quickly – placed a middle-class couple of “UCLA graduates” who can’t wait to adopt the boy.  California law may be the most draconian in the nation when it comes to allowing this, letting DCFS to rush to seek termination for infants much sooner than required by federal law.   The alternative weekly in San Jose did a good story about this more than a decade ago.

THE PERNICIOUS PRACTICE OF “CONCURRENT PLANNING”

This case also illustrates the harm of a pernicious practice known as “concurrent planning,” in which child welfare agency workers supposedly do their very best to reunite a child with his birth parents while, at the very same time, placing the child with parents desperate to adopt.  This is like placing before a small child a bowl of broccoli and a bowl of ice cream and trusting that he will eat them both.

Similarly, middle class foster parents desperate to adopt a child are told: “now remember, your first job is to help work to reunite this family, but if by some chance you fail at that, then you get what you really want, a poor person’s child for your very own.”  As one such parent in New Jersey once told The New York Times, in real life the “mantra” for such parents is: “I'm on a plane to South America if they think they're getting this baby back.''

This also may be an example of the one and only time that that the racism that pervades child welfare may work in reverse.  Black families are more likely to be investigated, more likely to have cases substantiated and more likely to have children taken away than white families.  But then Black children tend to stay in foster care longer.

It’s a matter of supply and demand.  White infants are very rare in foster care systems, especially large urban systems – and caseworkers know that this is the one time when families will be lining up to adopt.

I’m not suggesting that DCFS is engaged in “baby-selling” or other similar allegations one sometimes hears.   I’m not even suggesting that DCFS is doing it for the bounty the agency will receive from the federal government, somewhere between $4,000 and $12,000, if the adoption exceeds a baseline number set by a federal formula.  (Funny, Garrett Therolf never writes about that financial incentive). Rather, I’m suggesting that human nature is at play, the common, albeit illegal “comparison shopping” that occurs when middle-class professionals have power over poor people -  as in workers thinking “This baby is so cute.  He’d be so much better off with this nice couple who are desperate for a child.”

BIAS AGAINST EXTENDED FAMILIES

What also may be at play is the way the bias against birth parents often extends to their extended families. I say that because there is another middle-class professional couple that stands ready to adopt Eamon: Mary O’Connor’s own parents.  But they’ve been turned down.  Nobody knows why (DCFS can get away with keeping all that secret).  In addition to bias against birth parents’ families another possibility is simply the fact that the grandparents live in Illinois, and interstate placements are a huge hassle.

As Celeste Fremon writes in discussing the case on WitnessLA today:

while is no doubt true that the UCLA grads can give Eamon far more in the way of opportunities than Mary O’Connor likely ever can, let us hope we are not yet parceling out other people’s children on that basis.

And now, as Pasadena Weekly explains, the same fate may befall Eamon’s sister.  That’s partly because, as O’Connor acknowledges, she “panicked.”  When parents panic the system may punish their children forever.  When caseworkers panic and rush to tear apart families, the workers suffer no consequences at all.  (Contrary to what workers claim, they are not “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”  When it comes to taking away children, they’re only damned if they don’t.)

What is happening to Mary O’Connor and her children could have happened in any child welfare system at any time.  But it was more likely to happen in Los Angeles County in August, 2009.  No wonder the Los Angeles Times is ignoring the story.  Actually, that’s just as well – were the Times news side to get interested, it would probably be only to trash Mary O’Connor for every mistake she’s ever made and rejoice over the loss of her children.

WEDNESDAY: A post to the website of The Washington Post illustrates the perils of paying foster parents too much.

Witness LA blasts Therolf's child welfare reporting

The lead item on the very smart blog WitnessLA.com, a project of the Justice and Journalism Fund, blasts  Garrett Therolf's misreporting of the  child welfare story - and the failure of his editors at the Los Angeles Times to correct it.


Citing Daniel Heimpel's column in The Huffington Post, WitnessLA editor Celeste Fremon writes that

Heimpel’s research and reporting-on-the-reporting—including re-interviewing people quoted by the Times— is much too solid and detailed to ignore. ...


Listen: I realize that all of these articles-–Daniel Heimpel’s included—can seem like so much inside baseball to those unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the foster care politics.
But much is at stake when the state’s largest newspaper starts using some high profile tragedies to push—without adequate factual basis and no visible thoughtful consideration—for a change in policy that would result in more kids snatched unnecessarily from non-abusive families into the trauma that is foster care.
“In the name of helping children,” said Heimpel when we talked on Tuesday about the Times’ coverage, ” it may very well result in a lot more children to be hurt.”

Hmmm.  First The Huffington Post, then LA Weekly, now WitnessLA.  Maybe it's time to start calling Garrett Therolf the embattled reporter for the beleaguered Los Angeles Times 

Foster care in Los Angeles: The L.A. Times Sleaze machine goes into overdrive

            Los Angeles Times reporter Garrett (I really really want that Pulitzer) Therolf has a story about another case in which the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services left a child in a dangerous home.

            If the story is correct (and given Therolf’s penchant for selective reporting, one never knows) then DCFS workers closed a case on the family after a shoddy, superficial investigation.  Then (and this we know for sure) the family moved to another county where the same child was discovered tortured in ways that would tax the imagination of Augusto Pinochet or Saddam Hussein.

            As usual with a Therolf story, the problem is what was left out when he pretended to put the horror story in some kind of context.

            Therolf claims: “More than 65 children have died of abuse or neglect since the beginning of 2008 after being referred to the department, according to county statistics. The rate of such deaths has increased over that period, and county officials have acknowledged that many involved case management errors.”

            Therolf neglects to mention: As a recent Times op ed column by two county supervisors points out, we don’t really know if deaths have increased or not.  

            If they have increased, it’s almost certainly because of the foster-care panic set off, in large measure, by Therolf’s own reporting.

            Therolf claims: "Based on a review of county data, a researcher hired by the state found that, since 2007, children left by the department in their homes after an investigation increasingly have experienced abuse again within a year."

            Therolf neglects to mention that even with this one-year rise, the same measure of reabuse, using the same time frame, still is more than 20 percent lower than it was in 1998, when the county was taking away even more children than it’s taking now and had vastly more children trapped in foster care.  

           Therolf neglects to mention that when the same measure is used with the standard time frame used across the country by the federal government, the reabuse rate is continuing to decline. 

           Therolf neglects to mention that Los Angeles County continues to tear apart families at one of the highest rates among large metropolitan areas.  When you do that, caseworkers tend to be overloaded and make horrible mistakes – in all directions.

            As usual, it was up to Celeste Fremon of Witnessla.com to provide some of the context that Therolf left out. (The full item is the fourth one down when you click here).   She writes:

At one end of the spectrum you have horrors like this one. At the other end, you have kids who should absolutely positively not be taken away from their parents, but are—and suffer dreadfully for it—because somebody decides that it’s a swell idea to yank them. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly. Frankly, in most of the latter cases, law enforcement is involved and the entry of DCFS has to do with someone in the household—not necessarily the parent— being arrested on a drug charge. No abuse or neglect required.

Will someone at the County please explain this insane discrepancy? I would find it helpful. [Emphasis in original.]

            While it would indeed be nice if someone at DCFS were candid enough to explain that they are so overloaded with false allegations and trivial cases they are bound to screw up in all directions, explaining insane discrepancies in the workings of government is really the job of great big newspapers with lots of reporters (and, relatively speaking, the L.A. Times still qualifies).

            Garrett Therolf and his colleagues know full well that the errors go in all directions.

For example, for months, the grassroots group DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children has been trying to get the Times to report on a horrific case involving a grandmother so beloved by DCFS that they were pressuring her to adopt the baby grandchild in her care.  But when grandma asked too many questions, and became so upset at the pressure that she had a seizure, DCFS seized the baby – even though other relatives were ready to take the baby immediately.

             DCFS Give Us Back Our Children has documented the emotional damage inflicted on the child by being needlessly placed in foster care, before she was returned to her family.

            The Times simply has chosen to ignore this case, and the other cases which, as Fremon points out, “happen repeatedly.”

            And the Times has chosen to ignore the extent to which the errors are related: The more time an agency wastes on wrongful removal, the less time it has to find children in real danger.

LA Times foster care coverage: The case of the misleading lead

Talk about blowing the lead. The first 12 words in yesterday's feeble attempt by the Los Angeles Times to add some context to its child welfare coverage are grossly misleading, and possibly flat wrong. Those 12 words are: "As deaths among abused and neglected children have mounted in recent months…"

But the story offers no evidence of any such thing.

Rather, once again, the Los Angeles Times is repeating the New York Times fallacy: confusing an increase in media attention to child abuse deaths with an actual increase in deaths. And, amazingly, given the misleading lead, later in the story, the Times essentially admits as much.

According to yesterday's story, there have been about 35 deaths of children "known to the system" since January, 2008. That would be an average of one such tragedy every 23 days. There may have been an increase of three deaths in 2009 compared with 2008 – but the figures for both years are below the figure for 1998, when more children were taken from their homes, and vastly more were in foster care on any given day.

If there is any evidence that this rate has increased "in recent months" – whatever "recent months" means, the story does not provide it. Indeed, if the two such deaths that have been the subject of Times stories in 2010 are the only such cases, then the rate has declined. And either way, it tells us absolutely nothing about whether the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services is doing a better or a worse job of keeping children safe.

When you are talking about an average of roughly 18 deaths a year among children "known to the system" in a city with 3.2 million children and a child welfare agency with thousands of workers, it should be obvious that the fatality number alone can rise and fall due to random chance, and trying to judge whether an agency is getting better or worse based on that number is idiotic. (It also helps explain that major new study which found that investigating more cases and taking more children does nothing to curb fatalities, while focusing on prevention and ameliorating poverty does.)

LEVELING WITH READERS – AT LAST

Indeed, much farther down in the story the Times finally hints at the real story – and contradicts the lead. According to this part of the story:

Under [DCFS Director Trish] Ploehn, a 30-year department veteran, the agency's failings have come to light more readily than in the past, largely because of a state law that opened previously confidential records. Before the law took effect in 2008, virtually all information about children's deaths from abuse or neglect was kept from public view, ostensibly to protect the privacy of victims and their families. Reports about horrific cases leaked out sporadically.

In other words, as far as anyone can tall, the deaths haven't mounted, the Los Angeles Times has simply decided to pay attention.

Still absent from Times coverage are two salient facts: Even people with no love of family preservation, like Deanne Tilton Durfee, probably America's most quoted "expert" on child abuse fatalities, who, according to the competing Los Angeles Daily News "agreed the increase in deaths [in 2009 compared to 2008] is not a 'significant increase in the larger spectrum of things.'" And, for those who absolutely insist on using this measure, as noted above, such deaths actually are down from 1998 decade ago – a time when DCFS was taking away more children.

Garrett Therolf, the lead reporter on the Times stories, claims that the way deaths are measured has changed since 1998. But he actually made that claim not in the Times but in the excellent Blog Witnessla.com, which he apparently contacted to object to something they'd written. He's done the same with this Blog – utterly oblivious to the irony in his constant demands that everyone else tell his side of the story, even as he systematically omits those who favor family preservation from his own reporting. Why hasn't he raised the issue of comparing rates of child abuse deaths in the Times itself? Perhaps because then he'd have to mention the fact that, by at least one measure, deaths have declined. And then he'd have to deal with whole issue of whether you can evaluate DCFS based on fatalities. And then the whole house of cards on which the Times coverage has been built collapses.

FAMILY PRESERVATION ADVOCATES STILL SHUT OUT

That blackout of family preservation advocates continued yesterday, as the story, apparently meant to be some kind of overall assessment of DCFS Director Trish Ploehn's performance, left out anyone from DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children, the grassroots group arguing that DCFS isn't doing enough to keep families together. (That group turned up only when Therolf apparently thought he was writing family preservation's obituary in Los Angeles.)

Yesterday's whole story reads like tokenism – the story to point to when people say the Times coverage lacked any context. Do it once, get it out of the way, and then back to business as usual.

And even as tokenism, it's not very good. Because totally absent is any guidance for readers to allow them to determine if, in fact the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services has made children safer over the past decade and whether it is likely to do so in the future. How are readers supposed to know? The implication is that you know by counting the number of deaths. But what if that number rises this year, just because the EMTs who might have saved lives in a couple of cases went to the wrong house or got stuck in traffic? What if it falls because someone shot at a child – and missed? What if it changes because deaths that one year are considered accidental the next year are considered "neglect" – or vice versa? That gives some idea of how absurd it is to try to use deaths of children known-to-the-system as a measure. Better measures exist – the Times simply hasn't discussed them, much less committed, in advance, to actually using them.

Still, the story did serve one useful purpose: It included a lot about how the county Board of Supervisors loves to preen and posture about these cases, and pronounce itself shocked – shocked! – by things it had every reason to know about all along.

TOMORROW: THE CASE OF THE SELECTIVE SIDEBAR

Foster care in Los Angeles: An LA news blog sorts it all out

Losing track of who said what when in the LA foster care debate? Losing track of why it matters? Witnessla.com "the online source for daily coverage of social justice news" sorts it all out, and cuts to the chase. The full post is here. And here's the conclusion:

Unfortunately one point has become obscured by these several days of the Times and DCFS parsing who meant what: Abuse can take place at both ends of the spectrum. Every week parents come before the LA County Supervisors and plead for help in getting their children back from the foster care system. Most of the time nothing comes of it.

I hear from some of those parents on a regular basis. Right now, I don't have the staff to investigate their cases. (I intend to begin to change all that later on this year.)

But the LA Times, despite its staff cuts, does have the capacity to at least look into some of these troubling stories of kids yanked into the trauma that is foster care for reasons that are filmsy at best. [Times reporter Garrett] Therolf has demonstrated in the past, that he is more than talented enough to do it.

Let us hope he can persuade his editors to allow him to investigate some of the individual cases that show the other sad end of the DCFS continuum.

Such coverage would provide a much needed balance to the horror stories that are still threatening to drive the County into a child-snatching panic.