NCCPR in the Arizona Daily Star: COVID-19 is not leading to more child abuse, it’s cleaning the 'pollution' of false reports

Faced with the fact that COVID-19 led to a drop in calls to Arizona’s child abuse hotline but children are being torn from their families at the same high rate as before, Arizona Department of Child Safety Director Mike Faust jumps to the conclusion that there has been an increase in serious child abuse.

But there is a more likely explanation; one which is, in fact, good news and could point the way to remaking child welfare. ...

Read the full column here.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 9, 2020

● What does it do to a family to be terrorized by an angry, abusive ex-spouse calling in false child abuse reports and hiding behind the ability to make the calls anonymously?  One mother tells her story in Rise.  Also in Rise: Why survivors of domestic violence support legislation introduced in New York to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. 

● Sometimes it’s the caseworkers themselves who do the terrorizing.  A case in point from Arizona, in this excellent article from Phoenix New Times. 

● Speaking of Arizona, I have a column in the Arizona Daily Star about how, like so many others, the head of the state’s child welfare agency is drawing all the wrong conclusios about the decline in child abuse reports due to COVID-19. 

● And speaking of COVID-19, Ideastream, from Cleveland’s public broadcasters, has a very good story on all the harm done to families by limits on in-person visits and by delays in reunification. To its credit, at least Cuyahoga County did not impose a knee-jerk ban on all such visits in order to pander to selfish foster parents as was done in Washington State.  But the curbs that were imposed still caused great harm. 

Indeed, the story is an apt illustration of the need for Rep. Gwen Moore’s #stoptheclock bill, which would suspend the requirement in the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act that states petition to terminate children’s rights to their parents if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months – even when that was due entirely to decisions by the child welfare system itself.  (Community Legal Services of Philadelphia has more information about the bill.  And the Shriver Center on Poverty Law has a call to action. Click here to see how you can support the #StopTheClock bill.) 

There’s something else notable about the story, though.  As you read about the family at the center of the story and the reasons their children were taken – and what they must now do to get them back – please ask yourselves: If the same circumstances had been discovered in a McMansion in Shaker Heights, would the children ever have been taken at all? 

● The annual Child Maltreatment reports issued by the federal government include a specific warning about trying to compare data on things like rates of child abuse among states.  That hasn’t stopped Kentucky media, especially the state’s largest newspaper, the Louisville Courier Journal, from being profoundly reckless about making such comparisons. I have a blog post about why this does so much harm to children.

UPDATED: KENTUCKY FRIED DATA: Nobody knows which state has the “most” child abuse. So please, Kentucky media, could you stop claiming it’s Kentucky?

It’s at least as likely that what Kentucky really leads in is confusing poverty with neglect.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Child Maltreatment 2018

UPDATE, FEB. 3, 2021: This year, the Courier-Journal story (to which I am not going to link) headlined “Kentucky leads in child abuse for third year straight…” admits that the federal report they cite to back up that claim specifically warns against making comparisons.  Then the story proceeds to do it anyway. According to the story: 

The federal Child Maltreatment annual report, published in January, is based on data from the federal fiscal year 2019. While it cautions against state-by-state comparisons, because of varying reporting requirements within states, Kentucky has ranked consistently high, in the top 10 for more than a decade. 

In other words, if you make an invalid comparison often enough, it becomes valid!  

Of course, the story makes no mention of the fact that what Kentucky really may lead-in is confusing poverty with “neglect.”  But it does throw in a supportive nod to the widely-discredited, racist narrative about a supposed pandemic of child abuse because mostly white middle-class mandated reporters don’t constantly have their eyes on overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite children. 

There’s even a swipe at grieving parents who lose their children to suicide.

 [O]n Thursday, we shared the shameful story that Kentucky is the worst in America at protecting its children.  The U.S. Department for [sic] Health and Human Services has slapped this dubious title on our state: The rate of child abuse and neglect in Kentucky is the worst in the country.                                   – Richard Green, Editor, Louisville Courier-Journal, 2019.

 Kentucky still ranks No. 1 in the nation in rates of child abuse and neglect

                                                            – Louisville Courier-Journal, 2020

Kentucky still has highest child abuse rate in U.S….– Sentinel Echo, London KY

 Report: Kentucky, Indiana have highest child abuse rate in U.S. – WLKY-TV

 New AG vows to fight child abuse (Ky. ranks No. 1 in it)– Kentucky Health News

           

            The first claim, about how a federal agency “slapped this dubious title” on Kentucky is simply false.  Some of the rest might be true. Then again, it might not – and neither the people who wrote the stories nor anyone else has the faintest idea. 

            In fact, the very report cited in all those stories specifically cautions against such comparisons.  So not only did the Department of Health and Human Services not slap any "dubious title" on anyone; Kentucky media have recklessly ignored HHS' warning about making any such comparison.

            It would be hard to read a story about child abuse in Kentucky that doesn’t include this claim – because it’s in the interest of so many people who write and promote the stories to make it.  Particularly in the state’s largest newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the claim often is paired with gruesome accounts of beatings torture and murder of children.  

That makes it easy for readers to jump to the mistaken conclusion that Kentucky is such a cesspool of depravity that the state is justified in tearing apart families a rate 70 percent above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.*   

And if they don’t jump to that conclusion on their own, the Courier-Journal is glad to help.  Here’s how one news story summed it all up: 

The Courier Journal reported last year that Kentucky led the nation in abuse and neglect with increasingly violent, sometimes fatal injuries to children so severe an outside panel classified some cases as torture.

 

Full details and sources are available here.

So it’s no wonder anyone reading the stories would be likely to conclude that the rate at which Kentucky tears apart families should be even higher.  And it’s no wonder neither readers nor the authors of such stories would want to listen to concerns about the enormous emotional trauma and terrible life outcomes often inflicted on children needlessly consigned to the chaos of foster care, and the high risk of abuse in foster care itself.  (When the Courier-Journal touches on these outcomes the premise is that foster care can be “even worse” than those awful birth parents, and it’s a shame more kids aren’t adopted.) 

            Kentucky’s take-the-child-and-run approach is one of the reasons the child welfare system is overwhelmed.  It is that overwhelming of the system with false reports, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect that almost always is the real reason children in real danger of brutality, torture and death - cases that are as rare as they are horrific -- sometimes are overlooked. 

            That’s because though each is the worst form of tragedy child abuse deaths and near deaths are needles in a very large haystack. 

            In 2017, using the larger of two different figures in Courier-Journal stories, we estimate there were between 29 and 58 child abuse deaths or near deaths in Kentucky.  (The graphic above assumes 58.) That year, Kentucky’s child abuse hotline received calls involving roughly 165,000 children.**  Clearly, making the haystack even larger by overloading workers with even more false reports, trivial cases, poverty cases and needless foster care, is only going to make it even harder to find the needles. 

            All this is why the misreading of key data by Kentucky media and advocates makes all Kentucky children less safe.

 Actually we DO need to “quibble about numbers.”

            Before I even start the process of analyzing the claim about child abuse in Kentucky, I need to repeat something I wrote recently about child abuse in Oregon when a data issue arose there:

When those pushing for more policing of overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite families, more massive surveillance and more removal of children to foster care get caught hyping the numbers, they have a standard response. Usually it’s some variation of: “How dare you quibble about numbers! Children are dying!  Even one case is too many!”

            

 The second two sentences are, of course, correct.  But precisely because we’ve been suckered by fearmongering, hype and hysteria for decades (at least one organization responsible for it effectively admitted as much) we’ve spent those decades embracing “solutions” that only make things worse.

As I noted above, the horror stories represent a tiny fraction of the cases seen by workers for Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services.  To get that tiny fraction down to zero requires a vastly different approach than an ever-expanding child welfare surveillance state, and doing what Kentucky keeps doing - tearing apart families, and traumatizing children with needless foster care, at an obscene rate.

            The related hyper-defensive response from some journalists to any attempt to provide context is some variation of: “Oh, so you don’t want us to report on children dying!”

Bullshit. What those of us who have been working for decades to reduce child abuse in all forms to zero want is better reporting on child abuse deaths – and every other aspect of the child welfare system (Why, for example, has the Courier-Journal never, as far as I know, run a story such as this such as this?) because the problem of massive, needless removal of children and the problem of child welfare systems overlooking children in real danger are directly related. 

            We damn well do need to “quibble about numbers.” So let’s start quibbling:

The table that launched those hype-filled headlines

            Where does that “worst-in-the-nation” claim come from?  Well, contrary to what the editor of the Courier Journal implied, it does not come from any statement from the federal Department of Health and Human Services. There is no press release or other document that declares “Kentucky is number one in child abuse.”  There isn’t even a ranking.

             What there is is a single data point on a single table in on page 30 of a 274-page federal report.  That same report (right upfront on page 5) comes with a crucial warning:

[R]eaders should exercise caution in making state-to-state comparisons. Each state defines child abuse and neglect in its own statutes and policies and the child welfare agencies determine the appropriate response for the alleged maltreatment based on those statutes and policies.

             Here's why:

            What that table actually measures is the percentage of the child population for whom  child protective services workers check a box on a form saying they think it’s at least slightly more likely than not that a parent or caretaker abused or neglected a child.  This can be little more than a caseworker’s guess.  In Kentucky workers check the box for a higher proportion of the total child population than any other state. 

            Now, let’s unpack this. 

            For starters, all those stories that claim even the data table said Kentucky leads America in “child abuse” are false – the figure is for alleged abuse and alleged neglect combined.            

            And there are indications that, in Kentucky, we are talking almost entirely about so-called “neglect.” Another table in the same publication, on page 41, shows that, on average 60.8 percent of so-called substantiated reports are for “neglect only.” But in Kentucky it’s 88.1 percent – the second highest such proportion in America.  In contrast, physical abuse and sexual abuse combined account for, at most 11.2 percent.  That compares to a national average of 32 percent. 

            Of course some in Kentucky might say: Well, of course we have a higher proportion of neglect cases, we’re a poor state!  There are two problems with this: First, child welfare agencies say they never confuse poverty with neglect – so that should be largely irrelevant.  Second, there are seven states where the rate of child poverty is as high or higher than Kentucky.  In all of those states, the percentage of cases involving alleged neglect is lower than Kentucky. 

            Perhaps most notable among these is Alabama, a state which became, relatively speaking, a national leader in child welfare when a lawsuit settlement required the state to rebuild its system to emphasize safe, proven alternatives to tearing apart families.  (A member of NCCPR’s volunteer Board of Directors was co-counsel for plaintiffs in that lawsuit.)  So it's worth repeating the graphic at the top of this post:

Source: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Child Maltreatment 2018

There’s been some backsliding in recent years, but Alabama still takes away children at half the rate of Kentucky – and independent monitors found that child safety improved.  Alabama did this in part by dramatically reducing the confusion of poverty with neglect.  In Alabama of all “substantiated” cases only 31.3 percent involved “neglect only.”

             So if you were to disaggregate the data and actually look only at abuse, it’s quite possible that, even by this grossly flawed measure, Kentucky is not number one. 

Defining “neglect.” 

            That leaves the Courier-Journal, which, for all its other failings, at least says the figure is for “abuse and neglect.”

            So now let’s consider how states define neglect.  Most states have extremely broad, vague definitions that invite the confusion of poverty with neglect.  Kentucky’s is among the worst. Its definition includes a parent who 

“Does not provide the child with adequate care, supervision, food, clothing, shelter, education, or medical care necessary for the child's well-being.” 

            There is hardly a poor child in Kentucky who could not be deemed neglected at some point if a caseworker chose to do so.  That alone may well explain the so-called “worst in the nation” claim.  

But it’s not just the vagueness of the definition.  Different state and local child welfare agencies have different cultures.  As noted above in the discussion of Alabama, there are a few agencies that take seriously trying to avoid confusing poverty with neglect.  But Kentucky does not appear to be one of them. 

On the contrary, Kentucky child welfare’s contempt for families was the subject of a scathing report by the child welfare agency’s own inspector general in 2007. At about the same time the state made national headlines over rushing children needlessly to termination of parental rights.  Recent Kentucky court decisions suggest attitudes haven’t changed.  The Lexington Herald-Leader has covered all this extensively – it is they only news organization in the state I know of that has offered a measure of nuance in its child welfare coverage. 

Defining “substantiation”

             The federal report upon which Kentucky media rely does not, in fact, measure child abuse or neglect. Rather it counts the number of times caseworkers allege abuse or neglect.

             The allegation does not mean there was a comprehensive investigation followed by a decision from a neutral arbiter.  Rather it means only that an often overwhelmed, underprepared caseworker checked a box on a form.  In Kentucky, as in 37 other jurisdictions, workers check the box when they deem it at least slightly more likely than not that what the state defines as abuse or “neglect” occurred.  Seven jurisdictions have a higher standard, seven have a lower standard (D.C. and Puerto Rico bring the total to 52) – still another reason states can’t be compared. 

            We do know that, as of 2017, in Kentucky, in the cases where families manage to make their way through an appeals process, with the appeal decided by the same agency that made the initial determination, well over half the time the decision to “substantiate” the allegation is overturned. 

Other unknowns

             How deep in the weeds do you want to go? The rate at which people call child abuse hotlines and the proportion of those calls that are accepted for investigation also vary widely from state to state.  Both of these affect how many children caseworkers actually see, which may affect the proportion of the child population alleged by caseworkers to be abused or neglected.  (Depending on how you choose to interpret these data they can be used to bolster either side of the “worst-in-the-nation” argument.)

             So, does Kentucky have the more “child abuse” than any other state, or does Kentucky simply confuse poverty with neglect at one of the highest rates in America?

             Obviously, I think it’s more likely the latter.  But I don’t know that.  And, Kentucky journalists and advocates: Neither do you.

 _____________________

*- Normally, when I use that “cesspool of depravity” phrase I’m being sarcastic, but in Kentucky, one of the Courier Journal’s favorite sources for fearmongering quotes – a child abuse pediatrician – actually said "I think Kentucky continues in some areas to have a fairly significant culture of violence."  In fact, this is someone who, however well-intended, has no qualifications I know of to measure the culture of an entire state.  Rather, her job requires her to focus almost entirely on the worst of the worst – which may distort her perspective.  Problems with the perspective of some child abuse pediatricians, have been well documented in The Atlantic and The Marshall Project, and by NBC News and the Houston Chronicle .

            ** Courier Journal stories give two different figures (from different state agencies) for child abuse deaths and one for near deaths.  Using the larger figures, the total is 107. Nationwide, 27.3 percent of child abuse deaths involve children in some way “known to the system” – which can mean no more than that at one time there was a call to the child abuse hotline.  That would mean there were 29 such deaths or near deaths in Kentucky. But just for the sake of argument, I’ve doubled the number in the graphic. 

           State data in the annual Child Maltreatment reports count the number of calls hotlines receive, but not the number of children per call. Other data in the report suggest that calls to Kentucky’s hotline probably involve an average of 1.5 children per call.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 1, 2020

● Three stories, one blog post: NPR’s Rachel Martin did a great interview with a Black single mother trying to hold down a job and also make sure her four children are learning online. But the only difference between this heroic mother and many who lose their children to foster care under similar circumstances is random chance. Indeed, I wish NPR had not identified her. A mother in what may have been a similar situation in California reportedly almost did have her children taken - though that story has been updated.  Meanwhile a Lexington Herald-Leader story about a court decision in Kentucky offers rare insight into what really happens when child protective services shows up at the door.  In this blog post I disucss all three stories, with links to the full stories.

 ● Emma Ketteringham, managing director of the family defense practice at The Bronx Defenders discusses the dilemmas faced by mothers like the one profiled by NPR, in an in-depth interview with Frank News:

 

You meet a family and you learn that the mother doesn't have childcare, so she's going out to her back to work welfare appointments, and leaving her children home alone in the apartment. And she's doing that because if she doesn't make those appointments, she will lose her benefits, which then would hurt her entire family. So she's taking a calculated risk. The response then to her is not to get her the childcare, it is to send her to a parenting class, to teach her not to leave her children at home, which guess what? I think she knew that.

Second of all, she'll probably end up, because her children have been removed from her, losing the very benefits she was working so hard to preserve because now her household has been reduced, so she no longer has the children in her care. And then we then give the money to the foster parent so that the foster parent has money for childcare.

 There’s much more, including this about encounters she’s had with caseworkers for New York City’s child protective services agency:

 You end up with a very fear-driven system where people are scared to not remove. What I have found over the years is that the case planners, the ones in the organization who are closest to the family, often call us and say, "I'm so glad you won that hearing to get the children home. Those children never should have been removed."

 And this, about some of the youth she has encountered when they’re old enough to find out what really happened to them:

 I've had many, many 18-year-olds come into my office and say, “Hey, you're a public defender. You represent the parents. This is my mom's name. Did you represent her? What happened in my case? Why didn't she want me?” And I've ordered the records and gone over them with them and showed them the fight their mother put up for them and helped them to understand the narrative that was hidden from them in the name of their own happiness.

 And this, about one of the reasons the system doesn’t change:

 It makes everybody feel really good - especially white liberals - to think that we're doing something for the children by saving them, when, in fact, we're doing them direct harm, destroying communities, and doing nothing about the things that actually pose the greatest risk.

 ● The Black Lives Matter movement continues to expand its reach into child welfare. The Imprint has a report on the discussions at the Black National Convention.

 ● New Mexico In-Depth has an update to a story about another kind of separation due to racial bias: A hospital that made assumptions that new mothers were more likely to have COVID-19 if they were Native American.  So the newborns were taken to another part of the hospital.

 ● And two scholars who have studied trans-racial adoption, write about that white speaker at the Republican National Convention who has said it would be “smart” for police to racially profile her adopted biracial son.

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.

NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending August 25, 2020

● We start with the call to action from the Shriver Center on Poverty Law.  Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), with some limited exceptions states are required to petition courts to terminate children’s rights to their parents (that’s what termination of parental rights really means) if the children have been in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months. This applies even if the children never should have been taken, and even if the time in foster care was prolonged due to agency failure.

That’s bad enough for children in normal times. Now, COVID-19 has placed new barriers in front of these children, often denying them in-person visits that are crucial for reunification, and denying families the services to which they are entitled in order to meet requirements imposed on them by agencies themselves. (Often the services are little more than hoops to jump through, but now even the hoops have been moved farther away.)

That’s why Rep. Gwen Moore, (D-Wis.) has introduced legislation to suspend the ASFA timelines in a time of public health crisis – such as now. Community Legal Services of Philadelphia has more information about the bill.  And the Shriver Center on Poverty Law has a call to action. Click here to see how you can support the #StopTheClock bill.

● There’s been a lot written over the past year about a medical specialty called “child abuse pediatrics” and the disconcerting habit of some of the specialists to see child abuse whether it’s there or not.  But now Stephanie Clifford, the author of the landmark New York Times story about foster care as the new “Jane Crow” adds a whole new dimension.

Writing for The Atlantic and The Marshall Project, she zeros in on potential conflicts due to the fact that child abuse pediatricians often get part of their salary from child protective services agencies.  And she looks closely at how racial and class bias are effectively baked in to the model. She writes:

 To be certified, child-abuse pediatricians must “understand the influence of caregiver characteristics,” such as young parental age and military service, on abuse risk, along with “family poverty” and “family race and ethnicity,” according to an American Board of Pediatrics’ examination guide for the specialty obtained by The Marshall Project.

Doctors overdiagnose abuse in children they perceive as being lower-income or nonwhite. In a 2017 study, researchers gave child-abuse pediatricians cases of potential abuse with certain socioeconomic cues about the victims’ families, such as unemployed caregivers. When researchers reversed those cues—for example, by telling the doctors the caregivers were professionals—they found that diagnostic decisions changed in 40 percent of cases. A 2002 study showed that hospitals are more likely to report Black, Hispanic, and Native children for potentially abusive fractures, while other studies show that lower social class leads to more screening for abuse.

See also the excellent reporting on this topic from NBC News and the Houston Chronicle including this story about a hospital in Wisconsin where even other doctors are afraid to take their children if their children suffer an accidental injury.

● The same mindset that plagues child abuse pediatrics plagues so-called “children’s advocacy centers” where children sometimes are taken for what is supposed to be an objective determination of whether abuse actually took place.

But the head of their own trade association effectively declared that every child they are not seeing this year because of fewer referrals during the pandemic was, in fact, abused.  Again these are children the centers didn’t see – but somehow they just know every one of them was an abuse victim.  

She also urges people to call child protective services if they hear their neighbors yelling.  That’s far more likely to spread COVID-19 than to actually find there’s a child beater, torturer or rapist next door.  I have a blog post about all this, and the Washington Post’s shameful coverage of it.

● In the Boston Globe, Bianca Vázquez Toness reports on school districts harassing families with “educational neglect” reports when they couldn’t get their children online for classes. I have a blog post on it, with a link to the full story. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Schools often read into situations involving children of color, imagining “something bad happening where there is nothing,” said Elizabeth McIntyre, attorney with the School to Prison Pipeline Intervention Project at Greater Boston Legal Services. One client she represented, a Black mother who worked as a hairdresser, was reported to DCF when she didn’t answer phone calls from the school when her child was having an emotional crisis. They called her three times within a 30-minute period, McIntyre said. “If she were a white parent who worked at a big law firm downtown ... the district would not file a [report].”

Now, the COVID-19 crisis and school closings have given schools new ways to surveil and punish parents, said Leon Smith, executive director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice. That’s happening both through the close attention to online absenteeism and video conferencing that allows teachers to see inside a family’s home.

Schools aren’t calling DCF “in the suburbs, where kids are blowing off their online schooling,” he said. “It’s happening in communities of color.”

● This also has been a problem in New York City, where there was another protest against the city’s child welfare agency over the weekend.  News12 The Bronx reported on it.

● Lenore Skenazy writes in Reason about a recent court decision in a Kentucky – in a case that never should have required a court decision. She writes: 

Good news, parents: If you let your kids wait in the car for less than 10 minutes on a cool day—doors locked and fan on—a caseworker and sheriff are actually not allowed to come to your home, threaten to take your children away, and strip search the kids.

 These very basic rights were just vindicated the hard way: by a Kentucky mom in federal court.

And finally ...

● Earlier this month I wrote about a fearmongering story in The New York Times, the theme of which boiled down to: Oh my God! Children are being horribly abused because selfish caseworkers and their evil union have cut back on in-person visits, thereby preventing the same level of intrusion into the homes of overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite kids as occurred before COVID-19.

This week CBS8 in San Diego broadcast a story about a caseworker who did exactly what the Times story demanded – Well, actually it was a story about a memorial vigil for the caseworker. 

Great news: We no longer need children’s advocacy centers! (If the head of their own trade association is to be believed.)

Turns out they know all the answers before they even ask the questions – so why bother?

The head of the trade association also says we should turn in our neighbors if we so much as hear yelling next door. That's far more likely to spread COVID-19 than it is to find actual child abuse. 

             The latest in a long line of stories repeating a stereotype about child abuse and COVID-19 that is rooted in racial and class bias contains at least one nugget of good news: We no longer need “Children’s Advocacy Centers”!  Well, at least if we can believe the head of their own trade association.

             I’ll explain how I reached this conclusion below, but first a recap.  The story, by Samantha Schmidt, was published online Wednesday in The Washington  Post.  I’m sure it never occurred to Ms. Schmidt that, at base, the assumption underlying it, and so many other such stories is racist:  Now that fewer mostly white, middle-class professionals have their “eyes” constantly on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children, their parents supposedly will unleash savagery upon them in pandemic proportions.

             

Yes, COVID-19 is putting more stress on everyone.  But why do we rush to assume that for poor people in general and poor Black people in particular the only way they’ll cope with it is to beat up their children?

             The myth has been debunked by the Associated Press, The Marshall Project  and Bloomberg CityLab  The AP story specifically calls into question a key element of Schmidt’s earlier reporting – but she repeated that reporting in her most recent story.

             Right now this racist stereotype is more dangerous than ever: It’s being used by right-wingers such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to put children in vastly more danger – by rushing them back to school in the middle of a pandemic.

 Decades of hype and hysteria

             The key problem is decades of conditioning, some of it intentional, through hype, hysteria and a barrage of horror stories, leading us to believe that there’s a child abuser under every bad, and beatings rape and torture are rampant.  They are not.  In fact, 97 percent of all calls to child abuse hotlines are false reports or “neglect” cases – which often means a family is poor. 

 

Results of calls to child abuse "hotlines."

(Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,"Child Maltreatment, 2018."

Detailed discussion here.)

           But journalists absorb the images and the stereotypes just like everybody else. Without ever intending to, they perpetuate a cycle of misunderstanding. Then, people such as DeSantis take advantage of it, sending the false, ugly message that parents, particularly poor nonwhite parents, are more of a danger to their own children than the coronavirus.

             Schmidt indulges these fears with the rhetoric in her story. She tells us that the lack of mostly white eyes on disproportionately nonwhite children makes it “terrifyingly difficult to keep a watchful eye on children who are being abused.”  

             So let’s stop right here: Imagine if a reporter wrote that curbs on stop-and-frisk policing make it “terrifyingly difficult to stop a crime wave.”  The claim would be denounced for what it is: racist.  So why are standards for journalism and for racial justice so easily abandoned as soon as someone whispers the words “child abuse” in our ears?

             In fact, just as stop-and-frisk does not reduce crime, research makes clear that the surveillance state approach to child abuse  – all those “watchful eyes” calling child abuse hotlines to report anything and everything – has backfired and made all children less safe.  That is what should really terrify us.            

           The rhetorical overindulgence continues when Schmidt characterizes the decline in reports to child abuse hotlines.  Yes, there have been significant declines in the number of calls, but at the current rate, several million children still will be subjected to such reports this year – and more than nine out of ten are likely to be false reports.

 No data justify concluding that calls have dropped nearly to zero. But Schmidt still writes, in two stories, as if that’s what happened. She refers to  “the few reports getting through to hotlines…” 

The advocacy center survey

             The heart of the story is a survey conducted by a trade association for “Children’s Advocacy Centers.”  They say that from January through June of 2020 they saw 40,000 fewer children than during the same period in 2019 – a decline of 21 percent.

But that’s not the real revelation in the story.

 Children sometimes are taken to such centers to be interviewed and given a medical examination by child abuse specialists.  At their best, such places have the potential to reduce the trauma of investigation for children; they need only be interviewed once, on videotape in a safe and welcoming setting.  But that assumes that the people doing the interviewing and the examining are open-minded about the central question: Was the child, in fact, abused?

             The real revelation is that the centers, or at least their trade association, have already made up their minds before they even see the children.  Says the head of the association, Teresa Huizar:   “What we really believe” says Huizar, is that 40,000 fewer children seen means “there are 40,000 fewer kids who haven’t been saved from abuse.” [Emphasis added.]

             Well then, if you already know this, why bother putting the children through the exam and interviews at all? Why have a center to  pose a question to which you already claim to know the answer?

             What this really reveals is the mindset of much of child abuse medicine when it comes to parents or other family members: You’re guilty until proven innocent and you can’t really prove yourself innocent.  As it happens,  Schmidt’s story ran on the same day as this expose in The Atlantic and The Marshall Project of “child abuse pediatricians” and the whole culture they represent – something exposed earlier by NBC News and the Houston Chronicle.

             Those stories included one about a hospital where even other doctors said they would be afraid to take their own children if they had an accidental injury because the “child abuse pediatricians” were so fanatical about seeing abuse – whether it was there or not.  And the Atlantic story noted that “Doctors overdiagnose abuse in children they perceive as being lower-income or nonwhite.”

            In fact, the story reveals, bias is baked into the training for child abuse pediatricians:

             To be certified, child-abuse pediatricians must “understand the influence of caregiver characteristics,” such as young parental age and military service, on abuse risk, along with “family poverty” and “family race and ethnicity,” according to an American Board of Pediatrics’ examination guide for the specialty obtained by The Marshall Project.

             Huizar’s remarks reveal how deep the same sorts of biases go at children’s advocacy centers themselves.  And the center Schmidt’s story discusses most, in Washington, D.C., has a particularly disturbing record. 

An earlier story reflects the same mindset

             These are the same sorts of sources Schmidt relied on for an April 30 story using anecdotes from a handful of hospitals to suggest a nationwide surge in serious cases of abuse – along with the implication that there may be vastly more such cases hidden because all those mostly white, professional “eyes” weren’t spotting them.  It was bad enough relying on so little evidence then, but in June, the AP called the claim into question.  According to the AP story:

            When the coronavirus pandemic took hold across the United States …  many child-welfare experts warned of a likely surge of child abuse.

             Fifteen weeks later, the worries persist. Yet some experts on the front lines, including pediatricians who helped sound the alarm, say they have seen no evidence of a marked increase. 

            Among them is Dr. Lori Frasier, who heads the child-protection program at Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center and is president of a national society of pediatricians specializing in child abuse prevention and treatment.

            Frasier said she got input in recent days from 18 of her colleagues across the country and “no one has experienced the surge of abuse they were expecting.”

             Yet in Wednesday’s story,  Schmidt repeats the outdated claim, citing her earlier story.

             She goes on to quote with obvious approval efforts to turn people who still see children into spies:

             Some school districts have sought to train staff in how to spot potential signs of abuse virtually, in online classes or meetings. In some cases, children’s advocacy centers have tried to reach children in new ways, slipping messages into supply bags or into homework lessons.   

 In the earlier story she cited with obvious approval a school district training employees delivering meals to impoverished children at their homes to do some spying while they’re at it. 

How it hurts children 

            All of this hurts children in so many ways: 

            ● It makes children more vulnerable to enormously traumatic needless investigations and stripsearches.  One study found that this trauma will be inflicted on more than half of all Black children before they grow up. 

            ● It makes children more vulnerable to being consigned to the chaos of foster care – an inherently devastating experience emotionally,  often leading to devastating outcomes in later life, and one where the likelihood of abuse is shockingly high.

             ● The constant demands to turn helpers into spies drives people under stress away from seeking voluntary help.  Would you accept a meal delivered by someone who’s also supposed to spy on you and report the slightest suspicion that you are abusing or neglecting your kids?

             

              ● It increases the risk of COVID-19, not only by helping people like Ron DeSantis force schools to reopen, but also through needless investigations in which caseworkers march through homes, interview people at close quarters and poke through closets, cupboards and refrigerators – and then move on to more homes to do the same.

             ● And it does something else: It perpetuates the biggest real barrier to finding the very few children in real danger: caseworkers so overloaded with false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect that they don’t have time to investigate any case properly.

               None of this seemed to occur to Huizar when, in a similar story promoting her survey in Insider, she frantically urges us all to report our slightest suspicions – even hearing neighbors yelling at each other, Huizar says, should be enough to bring down the full weight of the child abuse police upon families who are almost always poor and disproportionately nonwhite.  Declares Huizar:               

"If you suspect that, turn it over to professionals who are absolutely able to suss out whether it's the normal pressures of COVID that's causing the yelling next door, or if it's something truly abusive and traumatic going on."

             This is wrong on so many levels.

             ● For starters when you call a child abuse hotline, the person who comes to the door to check out the yelling probably won’t be much of a professional. More likely s/he’ll be essentially an amateur. In most states child protective services investigators (the child abuse police) need have only a bachelor’s degree in fields vaguely related to the work and a short training course.

             ● These professionals’ track record for racial bias and class bias has been documented over and over.  And, as noted above, the same goes for the medical "professionals" who examine children who allegedly have been abused.

            

             ● Right now, in addition to all the other trauma inflicted on children by needless investigations, investigating a family just because a neighbor hears them yelling is more likely to spread COVID-19 than it is to reveal that a child is actually being beaten or tortured.

             ● And Huizar herself has said there is nothing to suss – she’s already made up her mind that every child not being seen by children’s advocacy centers due to the reduction in reporting has been abused.  (She said it again in the Insider story.)

An endless loop of confirmation bias

             A motif throughout Schmidt’s reporting boils down to “See, we told you so!”  So, child abuse physicians predict there will be more child abuse and now, see?  Sure enough!  She quotes Huizar: “What we were dreading did, in fact, happen.” While promoting the story on Twitter, Schmidt herself tweets:  “We already knew child abuse was going undetected.”

             Actually, we don’t know that.  We know that some child abuse always has gone undetected.  It’s possible more is undetected now. It’s even more likely that more real abuse is being found – because workers are not being deluged with as many false reports, trivial cases and cases in which poverty is confused with neglect, leaving them more time to find children who might be in real danger.

             There is actually a hint of this in the story itself.  In Washington D.C. from January through June, calls to the district’s child abuse hotline declined by 32 percent, but the number of children seen at the children’s advocacy center declined by only three percent.  That suggests that most of the decline in hotline calls does indeed involve calls that never should have been made in the first place. (The decline in children seen is greater in Virginia and Maryland, but the story provides no comparison figure for the decline in hotline calls in those states.)

             Schmidt’s reporting on this issue is part of an endless loop of confirmation bias: The doctors say they know what’s going to happen – so that’s what they see. The head of the trade association for children’s advocacy centers declares every child they see to be abused – before they’re even seen.  They tell the reporters. The reporters also were expecting this to be the case, so they don’t talk to anyone who will challenge that master narrative.  The doctors read the stories and it confirms what they “knew” all along.            

 Schmidt has not broken free of the bubble of sources who confirm what she already thinks.  What would she find if she went out into poor communities?  What if she spoke to leaders of the Movement for Black Lives? They have a very different take on the whole system, (Click on the link and scroll down to “Foster care and child welfare”.)  What if she consulted scholars such as Prof. Dorothy Roberts, author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (and an NCCPR Board Member)?  What if she spoke to the authors of this report from the Movement for Family Power?  What if she reached out to  the people marching in the streets of New York City who think children would be safer if the entire child welfare agency were abolished? 

             You don’t have to agree with their perspective to understand that a journalist’s job includes seeking out well-informed perspectives with which s/he is not comfortable – and sharing them with readers.

            Schmidt’s source bubble is the equivalent of covering criminal justice by talking only to police and prosecutors. That was never a good idea, but now journalists understand this when it comes to police. So why not when it comes to child welfare?

           Kendra Hurley understood this when she reported her story for CityLab.  This is some of what she found:

           Some parents living in neighborhoods with historically high rates of child welfare investigations say the dramatic dip in maltreatment reports [due to COVID-19]  feels more like the pollution lifting — a much-needed respite from the intense and relentless surveillance of low-income moms, and especially those who are black and Latinx. …

 One parent told [family advocate Joyce McMillan]: “They’re not opening my refrigerator. They’re not opening my dresser drawers. They’re not strip-searching my children and they’re not asking me to take their clothes off for the camera, because that would be child pornography.”

             The data from D.C. are one more indication that what we really may be seeing is not some kind of silent pandemic of child abuse. We may simply be seeing the pollution lifting.