NCCPR in Youth Today: Children suffer when child welfare ignores the evidence base

In an evidence-based world, one recent landmark study of foster care would be enough to give America’s child welfare establishment second thoughts. Add to that a second study — with findings the study author called “staggering” — and it should be enough to turn the entire system on its head. 

These studies undermine the entire rationale for a child welfare surveillance apparatus so huge that more than one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children, will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18 — and almost always it will turn out to be a false allegation or a case in which family poverty is confused with neglect. And though entries into foster care have declined in recent years, more than 170,000 children are torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care every year. … 

Read the full column in Youth Today

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

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

● Crisis services for foster youth

● Services for the homeless

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

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

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in Youth Today: New York’s mandatory reporter training wants to have it both ways. That’s an improvement.

Long ago, when I was a reporter in Albany, New York, I was approached by a colleague who covered health. He was about to cover a training session for health professionals required to report any suspicion of child abuse and neglect under New York’s “mandatory reporting” law. Knowing I’d just written a book on the failures of the “child welfare” system, he asked for suggestions for questions to ask the trainers. I suggested he ask whether, in addition to telling medical professionals what to report, they also taught them what not to report. 

When he returned, he said he did indeed ask, but “they didn’t understand the question.” The idea of actually explaining to a mandated reporter when not to report was incomprehensible to the trainers. By and large, across the country, that’s still true. But in New York, at long last, they’re learning. 

I just took New York’s new online mandated reporter training course. It is significantly less awful than anything I’ve seen before. It actually does attempt to teach when to report and when not to report. But it still has serious flaws … 

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in Youth Today: In child welfare, if the solution is money, the problem is poverty

 In the beginning, the builders of what would become a system of massive intrusion into families, and, ultimately, the separation of millions of children from their parents, all in the name of “child welfare,” insisted that poverty had nothing at all to do with what they labeled “child abuse” and “child neglect.”

“Child abuse crosses class lines” was the mantra in the 1970s and 1980s. In the effort to pass the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), discussion of poverty was suppressed. Unless parents — and not economic inequality — could be blamed, there was no way CAPTA was going to pass. Not surprisingly, the result was a law that has led us in the wrong direction for decades.

But then, when people noticed that nonwhite families were surveilled and had their children removed at vastly disproportionate rates, the child welfare establishment had a problem. There was no way they were going to admit to racial bias, so they said: It’s because those families are poor! (Spoiler alert: it’s actually both.)

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in Youth Today on why the rocket scientists can stick to their day jobs

A concept some of us have been pushing for decades has suddenly become a centerpiece of the child welfare debate: Family policing agencies routinely confuse poverty with neglect.  It follows, therefore, that an enormous amount of what we call “child maltreatment” can be solved through a two-step process.

1.     Find the poor people.

2.     Send money.

Research bears this out.  Or, as one speaker at a recent symposium put it “It’s not rocket science.”

That was challenged by another speaker at the same symposium: Michael Wald, professor emeritus of law at Stanford University. ...

Read the full column in Youth Today 

NCCPR in Youth Today: When the product is poor people’s kids, it’s always a bull market

            A new study from the Children’s Bureau in the federal Department of Health and Human Services reveals some shocking findings.  It turns out we now know exactly how to target intervention to rescue children from those awful parents.  Science now tells us that the worst parents, by far, are the parents of infants.  The most salvageable are the parents of 14-year-olds.  Given the nobility of child welfare practitioners, any other explanation is unthinkable. 

            Here’s how we know ...

Read the full column in Youth Today

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

NCCPR in Youth Today: Child welfare’s response to COVID-19 is sickening

All over America, there are people who can’t stay home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some always knew their jobs carried risks: Doctors and nurses, police and firefighters, and, yes, child protective services caseworkers. Others were, in effect, drafted into the fight: Letter carriers, pharmacists, truck drivers and all those people stocking shelves and running cash registers at grocery stores. And then there are the people who simply volunteer — like those delivering meals to the elderly.

But while so many others are stepping up, some foster parents in New Mexico and Kentucky are whining because they can’t step away. They’re complaining because — at least for now — they are not allowed to cut their foster children off from all in-person visits with their own families.

Worse, these states may soon be an exception. Other states and localities have, in fact, cut off in-person visits between foster children and their families — and even their siblings in separate foster homes. Many court systems, while continuing to hold hearings to rubber-stamp taking children away from their parents, have shut down hearings to send them home again — so foster children will not only be further isolated from their own families, the isolation will be prolonged. …

I’m sure there are individual foster parents who are extending themselves heroically to keep foster children in touch with their families. There are caseworkers putting themselves at risk both to investigate actual child abuse and to help families stay together when their poverty is confused with neglect. As always, the bad news gets the attention.

But the predominant institutional response of child welfare systems reveals greed, fear and selfishness. All sorts of other businesses are donating to help fight COVID-19 — including breweries converting their production lines to make hand sanitizer and already hard-hit restaurants donating meals. They say the same thing: We help now; we’ll figure out the money later. But not child welfare. 

In short, child welfare’s response to COVID-19 is sickening. …

  Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in Youth Today on why mandatory child abuse reporting laws belong on the dustbin of child welfare history

Last week, a committee of the Idaho Legislature did something that, in the politics of child welfare, is revolutionary. The committee took a look at the state’s “mandatory reporting” law for child abuse and neglect — and actually voted to narrow it. Right now, in Idaho everyone is a mandated reporter. The bill would change that to only certain professionals who come into contact with children.

What’s so revolutionary about that? Only the fact that in 50 years, states have moved to broaden who has to report their slightest suspicion of child abuse hundreds, probably thousands of times. As far as I know, this one legislative committee in Idaho is the first to say: Maybe we should follow the evidence.

More than half a century after they were enacted — passed in an early flurry of hysteria over child abuse, with no evidence that they would work — the research finally is catching up. The research shows the laws do nothing to actually reduce child abuse, while causing enormous collateral damage. The research shows that mandatory reporting laws contribute to undermining the fabric of entire poor communities. 

Some cases in point:

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR in Youth Today on who’s first on line to scarf up scarce $ thanks to the Family First Act. Hint: It’s not families

Remember the Family First Act? That’s the vastly overhyped federal legislation touted as a revolutionary change in how child welfare is financed. Supposedly, under Family First, lots of money that used to be reserved only for foster care will, at last, go to better alternatives. That was never going to happen. Very little additional money actually will go to those better alternatives.

And now it looks like the very first to benefit from Family First may not be families at all. It may be “providers” of the worst form of “care” in a state that is always a candidate for foster care capital of America. Yes, the first beneficiaries of Family First may be residential treatment centers (RTCs) in Wyoming, a state that regularly tears apart families at a rate nearly triple the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.

Read the full column in Youth Today.

NCCPR in Youth Today: Want to Prevent Child Abuse? Behold the Transformative Power Of Cash

Half a century ago, as the Vietnam War still raged, President Nixon began bombing neighboring Cambodia — without bothering to mention it to Congress or the American people. After the New York Times found out about it, this became known as the “secret bombing” of Cambodia

But as Garry Trudeau pointed out in “Doonesbury” four years later, it wasn’t a secret to the Cambodians. “Secret bombings?” a Cambodian says. “Boy, there wasn’t any secret about them. Everyone here knew. I did. And my wife, she knew too! She was with me, and I remarked on them.”

I think of this whenever people in child welfare declare themselves shocked by something that everyone who has to deal with child protective services already knows. The latest case in point: a commentary for a medical journal by Dr. Katherine Campbell, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah. The headline reads: “Prevention of Child Maltreatment as an Unexpected Benefit of Social Policies.”

 “Unexpected”? Not for those who are poor or ever have been poor. I suspect they’d say: “It’s not unexpected to us. We remarked on it.”

The commentary concerns a study that found that reports of what child protective services agencies deem “neglect” declined in states that took advantage of the option to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and increased in states that did not take advantage of this option.

Read the full column in Youth Today

News and commentary round-up, week ending May 13, 2019

●Last week I posted a link to an op-ed column by a family defender in New York City about the kind of family that doesn’t have to worry about having child protective services in its life.  This week: Another family defender writes in the New York Daily News about the kind of family that does.

●From Honolulu Civil Beat: An excellent story about a family faced with two kinds of trauma. First, the children were needlessly taken because the mother was herself a victim of domestic violence.  And now, the mother may be denied the career she’s wanted all her life because she can’t get off the state’s central registry of alleged child abusers – a registry she never should have been on in the first place.

●I have a column in Youth Today about how the foster care-industrial complex is trying to get legislation through Congress that would more than double federal foster care spending – and remove the last federal fiscal brake on needless foster care.

●Vivek Sankaran has a column about how his own experiences illustrate what’s revealed by a new study: High-quality family defense, using the model pioneered in New York City, dramatically curbs needless foster care, with no compromise of child safety.  And this story discusses East Bay Family Defenders, which is bringing the New York model of family defense to Alameda County, California.

●In another column Sankaran talks about foster youth who endured years of abuse in foster care, finding strength in their relationship with each other – and their mother.

●I have a blog post about why Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services is the Kellyanne Conway of child welfare agencies. They both have a fondness for “alternative facts.”  (And, of course, they’re both deeply involved with the needless separation of families.)

● Youth Today has a story about a court decision that stops the New York City Administration for Children’s Services from sending out the police to arrest foster youth who run away.

● And The New York Times has an op-ed that says not one word about foster care or the child welfare system – and yet explains exactly how to fix it.

NCCPR in Youth Today on the little law that couldn’t

The law is the so-called Child Abuse Prevention and Treatmente Act (CAPTA).  It codifies everything wrong with how we “fight” child abuse.

The idea of using CAPTA as the organizing framework for coping with child abuse, or even thinking about it, is absurd. And the notion that somehow a more powerful CAPTA with more money and more enforcement would somehow help children is profoundly dangerous.

Read the full column in Youth Today here.

NCCPR in Youth Today on forced, illegal separation of children from their parents - in Florida

Young children torn from their parents, sleeping in a different bed every night. Families torn apart needlessly - and illegally -- over and over again.  But this time it's not the U.S.-Mexico border.  This time it's Florida.

Who says it's illegal? A report commissioned by the state itself.

Why is it happening? In part because caseworkers are terrified of "media consequences" if they leave a child in her or his own home and something goes wrong.

Details in NCCPR's latest column for Youth Today

NCCPR in Youth Today: Child welfare policy on drug abuse lives at the intersection of ignorance and arrogance

Everybody knows it's a bad idea to leave children unsupervised at a dangerous intersection.

Unfortunately, that's how America's child welfare establishment has responded to the "opioid epidemic."  They've put our most vulnerable children at the intersection of ignorance and arrogance.

Read NCCPR's column in Youth Today

And for more on one part of the problem, child welfare's hostility to medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction, see this excellent 2015 Pacific Standard story from Mais Szalavitz.

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 Nebraska: Never mind the deck chairs, SAVE THE SHIP

Today, NCCPR releases a comprehensive report on child welfare in Nebraska, where the child welfare system sometimes seems to exist just to make the others look good.  This link   goes to the full report and supporting material, including more graphics like the one below, illustrating the state’s obscene rate of removal: 

Number of children taken from their homes

per thousand impoverished children, 2010:

                                                 IL    AL   US*   ME   FL    NE
                                                                              *National Average

Also today, on our blog at the trade journal Youth Today, we look at one of Nebraska's key child welfare failures:  a truancy law that eliminates all distinction between an excused and an unexcused absence from school.  The law turns children into criminals, and subjects their parents to child abuse investigations, if they keep the children home from school for too many days for any reason – even serious illness.

On our Blog at Youth Today: How “Fostering Connections” fosters more failure

             The child welfare establishment couldn’t stop gushing over the Fostering Connections and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008.  It was sold as the panacea that would significantly reduce the dismal outcomes for foster youth. 

            Now, two studies from that bastion of child welfare establishment “scholarship,” the Chapin Hall Center for Children, shed some light on how this is all working out. 

            On our Blog at the trade journal Youth Today: The fundamental failure of “Fostering Connections”

On our Blog at Youth Today: Foster care in America: It’s not the recession, it’s the RESPONSE to the recession

The long decline in the number of children in foster care on any given day is slowing way down.  And the decline in the number of children taken  away over the course of a year stopped entirely in 2010.

America’s latter-day “child savers” will claim, almost gleefully, that this is a result of the recession supposedly causing more child abuse.

But it’s not.  The real reason is discussed on our Blog at the trade journal Youth Today.


And on Monday: A major magazine article reveals the failed legacy of a child welfare agency leader.

On our Blog at Youth Today: How "risk assessment" puts kids at risk

Every year or so, the child welfare community finds a new way to prove the adage “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

It works this way. Researchers publish a study or some committee (Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commission) issues a report which determines that “X” is a risk factor for child abuse. In other words, if someone who is an “X” or has “X” or does “X” is in the home, that person is more likely to abuse a child.

Having been officially deemed a risk factor, “X” then makes it onto various “checklists” and “risk assessment” forms that child protective services workers take with them when they investigate an allegation of alleged child maltreatment.

If a parent has too many risk factors, the CPS worker may well walk out with the child – not because the child has been abused but because the “risk factors” supposedly tell us the child might be abused sometime in the future. It’s a bit like the science fiction movie Minority Report, in which people are arrested for crimes they haven’t yet committed based on predictions of three psychics in an oversize bathtub – only the psychics in the movie were more accurate.


Continued on NCCPR's monthly Blog at Youth Today