News and commentary from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
concerning child abuse, child welfare, foster care, and family preservation.
● What happens to a social worker who rushes her
four-month-old to the hospital after the infant falls out of bed? It depends on
her race, of course. As you read this
story, from The Imprint that begins with the social worker’s
testimony at a City Council hearing in New York, please keep in mind: This
happened in New York City. Wherever you are, it’s probably worse.
● One area where New York City has done relatively well is
not taking away children just because their mothers are victims of domestic
violence (thanks to a class-action lawsuit
settlement for which NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs).
But sometimes, it seems, caseworkers “forget.” Check out how Gabbie Rodriguez, the
foster youth who wrote this
moving column for The Imprint, and her siblings, wound up taken from
their mother.
How much worse can it get?
● Check out Philadelphia, which takes away children at more
than double the rate of New York City.There, police are confident they can use the ultimate threat against a
Black family and the city child welfare agency will back them up. I
have a blog post about it.
● Or check out Indiana, which takes away children at one of
the highest rates in the country. It’s bad enough when family police agencies
tear apart families based only on a positive drug test. But in Indiana, they
contracted with a lab that allegedly falsified the results.WTHR-TV
in Indianapolis broke the story.
● Or check out Florida, where the USA TODAY Network exposed
the harm done to children by the state’s ongoing foster-care panic.WFSU Public Radio included NCCPR’s response
to the stories in a
round-up of reaction.
● The good news: Even that bastion of the child welfare establishment,
Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, has weighed in with an Issue Brief
countering the racist media-fueled master narrative about COVID-19 and child
abuse. I
have a blog post about it.On the
other hand, Chapin Hall has not apologized for pouring gasoline on the fires of
foster-care panic in Illinois. I
have a post about what’s happening in Illinois, too.
● And finally, a preview: I’ve often linked to the excellent
stories such
as this one by Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News concerning so-called “child
abuse pediatricians” and the tendency of some of them to find child abuse
whether it’s there or not.Starting Nov.
10, Hixenbaugh has a podcast on
the topic.
For a bastion of the child welfare establishment such as Chapin Hall, this is a big change.
Their latest Issue Brief debunks the
dominant, racist media myth about child abuse and COVID-19
In September I wrote a
post for this blog wondering if there’s been an epiphany at one
of the most regressive forces in American child welfare -- Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago.
I wrote that
For decades, Chapin Hall has been a bastion
of 19th Century-style “child saver” ideology and advocacy dressed up
as “scholarship.” You can read some
examples of their track record here
and here.
But Chapin Hall has probably been at its worst concerning the whole issue of
race.
What gave me hope was a
commentary in The Imprint by
Chapin Hall’s executive director Bryan Samuels and also the fact that they’ve
apparently withdrawn an “Issue Brief” from 2010 making the case that child
welfare practitioners are so wonderful, so pristine in their lack of bias, that
it is the one field in America that is immune from racism.
Now there is further reason for
encouragement. It comes in the form of a new
Issue Brief, published in September, this one about COVID-19
and Child Welfare. The paper lends the gravitas of Chapin Hall, long a
“Godsource” for journalists covering child welfare, to debunking the widespread
media-fueled myth that with fewer white middle-class “eyes” constantly watching
overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite kids, their parents will
unleash upon them a “pandemic
of child abuse.”
The Issue Brief does not say COVID-19 will do
no harm at all. The stress of increased
poverty probably will lead to some increase in child abuse. But to deal with that they suggest a novel
approach – well, novel for Chapin Hall: Target the poverty, not the parents.
In fact, they suggest carving out a large
portion of cases, and apparently taking them out of the jurisdiction of child
protective services agencies. I say apparently, because they’re a little vague
about this. According to the Issue Brief:
Child maltreatment categories should be
refined to distinguish and address poverty-related neglect from child
endangerment or abuse. … [H]otline reports of “neglect only” may be a phenomenon distinct from child endangerment.
While lack of supervision, food, clothing, or shelter can surely jeopardize
the safety of children, addressing these directly through concrete supports may
be more efficient and effective than initiating a child welfare case that
punishes families for living in poverty.
To which the proper scientific response is:
Ya think????
Even more interesting is Chapin Hall’s
analysis of that whole “pandemic of child abuse” myth, and the related claims
that there will be a surge in child abuse discovered as more children return to
school, and with that, a surge in the number of children placed in foster care.
The Issue Brief points out that a sharp
decline in reports from teachers and other school personnel is not unusual – it
happens every summer. It is not followed
by a surge in actual child abuse in the fall.
If anything, these cycles suggest that, overwhelmingly, what’s really “missed”
during the summer are false reports.
And no wonder. When teachers are on the job
reporting “child abuse” they’re almost always wrong. Only 11 percent of their reports meet even
the incredibly low standard for “substantiating” an allegation – it can be no
more than a caseworker’s guess that it’s slightly more likely than not that the
abuse or neglect occurred.
But let Chapin Hall explain:
Education personnel report the most cases of
suspected maltreatment, but detect the smallest percentage of cases that reach
the threshold for substantiation … Additionally, historical seasonal
fluctuations in reporting that occur in response to school attendance largely
affect the rate of unsubstantiated cases. Typical drop-offs in reports relate
to concerns that do not reach the threshold of substantiated maltreatment;
teacher reports in summer months that do result in substantiation remain
steady. This suggests that in the current context, the number of reports that
result in substantiated maltreatment is unlikely to fluctuate due to reduced
teacher/school contact.
Thus, it is unlikely that the dramatic
reduction in hotline reports due to school closures will produce a rebound of
substantiated maltreatment. Instead, those concerned with the well-being of
children should shift their focus to the community drivers and economic
stressors that elevate the risk for child maltreatment. Rather than focusing on
how to increase mandatory reporting, efforts should be redirected to support
and stabilize families to prevent child maltreatment.
The danger of self-fulfilling prophecy
Unfortunately, there is one factor this
doesn’t take into account that may, in fact, make the return to school going on
now different: self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you tell teachers over and over again that
while their students were out of school, they were abused in pandemic
proportions, then the bruise that last year would have been seen for what it
was, an accident, suddenly is child abuse.
The hungry child for whom they might have called a food bank now becomes
a call to child protective services.
So if there is a surge in foster care
placements, it’s more likely to be the result of a generation of journalists
who grew up on “health
terrorism” –
the deliberate distortion of the nature and extent of child abuse by advocacy
groups supposedly seeking to “raise awareness” – buying into a fundamentally
racist myth about child abuse and COVID-19.
That Chapin Hall has made a modest
contribution toward countering this myth is welcome. But they could do a whole lot more. As I noted in my previous post about Chapin
Hall, in addition to once promoting the myth that there is no racial bias in
child welfare, just two years ago they threw
gasoline on the fires of foster-care panic in
Illinois, contributing to skyrocketing
needless removals of children in that state.
They need to apologize, loudly and publicly,
for both.
And even now, the current Issue Brief shows
an unfortunate, lingering fondness for the latest dangerous fad in child
welfare, predictive
analytics.
When Philadelphia cops literally took the child and ran,
they knew where they could get back-up if they wanted it.
Police smashed the windows of a mother's SUV, then dragged her and her children out. What came next was worse. (Video by Aapril Rice)
By now you’ve probably at least heard about the story;
perhaps you’ve seen the video.
In the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police version, a
two-year old was rescued from rioting by one of their officers. They posted
pictures with this caption:
“This child was
lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an
area that was experiencing complete lawlessness. The only thing this
Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child.”
Philadelphia police pulled a woman from an SUV during
unrest in West Philadelphia Tuesday morning, beat and bloodied her, separated
her from her toddler for hours, and kept her in handcuffs in the hospital, her
attorneys said Friday.
But here’s the part of the story I find striking.According to the mother’s lawyers
…police at the
scene refused to tell her where her child would be taken, saying only “he’s
gonna go to a better place, we’re gonna report it to DHS," presumably
referring to the Department of Human Services, the city’s child-welfare agency.
Fortunately, that apparently didn’t happen.The lawyers say that after hours apart,
during which the toddler was kept in the back of a police cruiser in his car seat,
(which reportedly still had glass from when the police broke the windows of the
SUV), and a trip to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to treat his injuries,
mother and child were reunited.
But what does it say about the culture of Philadelphia law
enforcement and Philadelphia child welfare that the first instinct upon
encountering a Black mother and her young child trying to slowly and carefully drive
away from trouble is to, literally, take the child and run, apparently
secure in the knowledge that Philadelphia DHS would back them up? How many
other times have police threatened Black families with needless separation of
their children because they knew the child welfare agency is their eager
partner?After all, Philadelphia tears
apart families at one of the highest rates
among America’s big cities.
In fact, the child was at risk of needless removal at least
twice. The mother is lucky that Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia didn’t simply
assume she must have caused the toddler’s injury and call DHS – given their well-known
hair trigger for such reports, and the fact that Philadelphia DHS
encourages just that.(I’m assuming
they didn’t actually call DHS. So far there are no reports of a caseworker
showing up at the family home.)
Though it’s more likely to happen in Philadelphia than in
many other big cities, this could have happened anywhere. All over America you
can do almost anything you want to a Black family as long as you claim that “The
only thing [you] cared about in that moment was protecting this child.”
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?”
History doesn’t repeat itself,” it’s been said, “but it
rhymes.” In Illinois, child welfare
history is rhyming, and that is bringing down tragedy upon the state’s children
in ways old and new.
In 1993, Joseph Wallace, a child ‘known-to-the-system” was
murdered by his mother. The casefile had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day
Parade. There was a rush to condemn any
and all efforts to keep families together.
In the foster-care panic that
followed the number of children torn from their homes skyrocketed. By 1997, a
child was more likely to be trapped in foster care in Illinois than in any
other state. An already bad system was
plunged into chaos. Thousands of
children were traumatized when they were taken from parents who were nothing
like Joseph’s mother.
All of it was done in the name of ending child abuse deaths.
But those deaths increased – probably because workers became even more
overloaded, so they had less time to find the relatively few children, like
Joseph, in real danger.
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services
learned from those mistakes. A bold DCFS leader, Jess McDonald, embraced
efforts to keep families together. The
number of children taken from their parents went down – and independent court
monitors found that child safety improved.
In 2003, the lead monitor told the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch that “Children are safer now than they were when the
state had far more foster children.” Their
2018 report shows that safety continued to improve all the way through
about 2011, when the agency was undermined by budget cuts.
But memories are short. The death of A.J. Freund prompted
the same knee-jerk reaction, with the same tragic results.
Between fiscal years 2018 and 2020 the number of children
torn from their homes in Illinois has skyrocketed
30%. The 17% increase in 2019 alone
was the second highest increase in the country that year and it came at a time
when nationwide, entries into foster care were declining. In fact, even as the number of children taken
nationwide approaches a
21-year low, the number taken in Illinois has hit a 21-year high.
To understand the consequences think back to the family
separations on the Mexican border.
Unlike what happened there, DCFS workers almost always mean well. But the trauma endured by children separated
from everyone they know and love is no different.
That’s because most cases are nothing like the horror
stories. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect. Others fall
between the extremes. That helps explain
why at least six separate studies, two
of them massive in scope and looking
specifically at cases from Illinois, have found that, in typical cases,
children left in their own homes typically fare better in later life even than
comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. It’s all coming down hardest on Black
children who are in Illinois foster care at
triple their rate in the general population.
All that trauma occurs even when the foster home is a good
one. The majority are. But study after study
has found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The record of group homes and institutions is
even worse.
In one respect history is not rhyming: This time there’s
harm to children that’s brand new. All those
additional removals mean more caseworkers inspecting more homes from top to
bottom, stripsearching children, walking out with those children, placing them
in cars that have transported many others, and sometimes taking the children
from place-to-place before finally depositing them with strangers. In short, this time the foster-care panic
also increases the risk of transmitting COVID-19 to children, families and
caseworkers themselves.
Some might argue even all that would be worth it if it saved
lives. But on that score, history seems to be rhyming again. We can’t be sure
yet, since cause-of-death in many cases from FY 2020 is not yet
determined. But it is likely that deaths
may have decreased slightly from 2019 – when the number of fatalities was unusually
high - but were higher than the three previous years, when removals were much
lower.
Once again, a foster-care panic is making all children less
safe.
In the 1990s, Illinois proved it could stop a foster-care
panic. It can stop it again. But DCFS, the legislature and the governor need to
act fact. Because history is rhyming –
but it’s not a nursery rhyme.
● Racism in child welfare isn’t
just a matter of caseworkers jumping to conclusions when they know the family
they are investigating is Black, serious as that problem is. So it isn’t
something that can be fixed only with anti-bias training or even smart,
necessary innovations such as “blind removal meetings.” It’s a matter of
scholars with the best of intentions allowing racial bias to worm its way in,
even in places where no one — well, none of us who is white — might have
expected – such as a prestigious scientific study purporting to measure the
rate of child abuse in America. NCCPR in
Youth Today on how “In
Child Welfare the Racial Bias is Everywhere -- Even in the Research.”
● The revelation that parents
can’t be found for 545 children torn from them at the Mexican border by the
Trump administration has put that kind of family separation back in the
news.But don’t let it obscure the other
kind of family separation – the kind that happens 250,000 times every
year.The motivation behind that kind of
family separation is different, but the trauma inflicted on the children is the
same – and it’s almost always unnecessary. I
have a post about it on this blog.
One parallel is particularly
striking.The Inquirer story
included this stunning admission from Devereux’s Senior Vice President and
Chief Strategy Officer Leah Yaw:
“This is not an
aberration that happens at Devereux because of some kind of lack of control or structure.This is an industry-wide problem.”
Now look at what Will Francis, executive director of the
Texas chapter of the National Association of Social Workers told Asgarian:
“Any time you put a kid in an RTC, you are probably
expecting some level of abuse. And that’s heartbreaking. We need to rethink
where our dollars go. We need to stop putting them towards these warehouses.”
Asgarian’s
story also documents how Texas authorities routinely turn a blind eye to abuse
at RTCs – something to keep in mind when apologists for tearing apart families mislead
you with official figures purporting to show that the rate of abuse in substitute
care supposedly is low. (Extensive research
says otherwise.)
So,
at long last, can we at least agree that anyone who uses the words “rotten apples”
and “residential treatment” in the same sentence – except to deride the idea – should
not be trusted?
As
for why so much excellent journalism hasn’t done much good, it’s because no one
is willing to face up to what it will really take to fix the problem. I suggest
some answers in
this column for The Imprint.
No matter
who does it and no matter why they do it, for the children the trauma is the
same.
A column by Washington Post Deputy
Editorial Page Editor Ruth Marcus begins this way:
545.
That is
the number of children still separated from their families by the Trump
administration — separated deliberately, cruelly and recklessly. They might
never be reunited with their parents again. Even if they are, the damage is
unimaginable and irreparable.
545.
Even one
would be too many. Each one represents a unique tragedy. Imagine being ripped
from your parents, or having your child taken from you. Imagine the desperation
that the parents feel, the trauma inflicted on their children.
You’re right, Ms. Marcus. Except for
one thing. The number isn’t 545. It’s
more like 424,000.
The 545 figure is the one in the headlines recently, because that’s the number of
children torn from their families at the Mexican border for whom parents can’t
be found despite a court order requiring reunification. The revelation has put back in the news the
barbarity of Trump’s family separation policy at the border, in which children
were torn from their parents and, literally, caged. It even was a topic at the
final 2020 presidential debate.
But regardless of where it happens, which agency does it and
what is their motivation, the trauma inflicted on children is the same. So the real number we should be talking about
it 424,000.* That is the number of children known to be in American
foster care on any given day, taken away by American family policing agencies
(a.k.a. child protective services).
Almost all of them were torn from their parents involuntarily. Almost none of them needed to be.
Even that underestimates the extent of the problem. The 424,000
figure is the number on any given day. More
than 250,000 children are taken from their families every year.
No, the situations aren’t
identical. But they are more similar
than they are different.
The differences:
1. Unlike those 545 children and the others separated at the
border, authorities know the location of the families of most of the 424,000
children in foster care. The children
sometimes even get to visit their parents, though often only for only an hour
or two every week or less in sterile visiting rooms under constant surveillance
by caseworkers. No more than half are
actually likely to be returned to their parents someday. But even for many of them, the damage will be, in Marcus’
words “unimaginable and irreparable.”
And in 2019, 71,000 of those children had their rights to
their parents terminated (that’s what termination of parental rights really
means). They had no contact at all. Some
won’t ever see their parents again unless they find them after becoming adults.
2. In a very small number of cases, when CPS workers take
away a child there really is no other alternative; it’s genuinely essential to
keep children safe.
3. Most of the time, the people who work for and run CPS
agencies are not engaging in deliberate, calculated cruelty. They usually mean well.
No wonder the child welfare
establishment has tortured logic in its desperate attempts to draw false distinctions
between the two kinds of family separation.
I outlined the excuses, and why they don’t hold up, in this column for Youth Today in November, 2018, so I won’t repeat
them here.
But I will repeat this:
Even the good intentions can have a downside. They are likely
to shield needless removal of children into U.S. foster care system from the
kind of intensive scrutiny the Trump family separation policy is likely to get
when Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in January [2019].
That, unfortunately, is exactly what
has happened. It’s not just Marcus’
column.
Right after Thursday’s debate, I
watched anchors on MSNBC describe being shaken by Trump’s callous remarks about
the children his administration separated – and caged – at the border. They recalled how they cried when they first
saw the detention centers in person or heard the audio smuggled out of one of
them by ProPublica:
I’m sure most journalists felt the
same way.But now, two years later, many
of those same journalists have no trouble buying into the U.S. child welfare
establishment’s false, racially biased master narrative about child abuse and
COVID-19.
They’ve been pumping out story after
story with some variation on this theme:
Now that fewer mostly white middle class professionals have
their “eyes” constantly on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite
children, their parents supposedly will unleash upon their children a “pandemic
of child abuse.” Yes, the pandemic 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?
A few major news organizations, notably the Associated Press, The
Marshall Project and Bloomberg CityLab debunked
the myth. Yet it continues to spread –
encouraging our own “child welfare” agencies to go in, with all their smiles
and good intentions, and do to these children what was done to the children at
the Mexican border. (Marcus’ paper, The Washington Post, has been among the worst offenders.)
I didn’t make up the phrase
“health terrorism.” I learned it from
the group that perfected the art in child welfare – Prevent Child Abuse
America. They don’t do it anymore, but
they’ve never apologized, and they’ve made no serious effort to explain to the
public, and to a generation of journalists that grew up on this mythology that
it is dangerously wrong.
The family police are shielded by something else as well. I doubt that very many journalists are
personal friends with agents of the Border Patrol. But plenty probably have friends who are
social workers and foster parents – they are, after all, mostly the same race
and the same class and have similar education levels. Those caseworkers and foster parents are such
nice people. So what they do
couldn’t possibly hurt children, even unintentionally.
So two false stereotypes are set in stone: Caseworkers and
foster parents: Good. Parents: Sick and/or evil.
Perhaps the only way to shock
us out of this complacency is a vivid reminder that, while most of the time,
the people who work for such agencies, do indeed mean well, that’s not always
the case.
The video in this story which, be warned is very hard to
watch, doesn’t involve the border patrol.
It’s a raid by police and child protective services in Colorado. The mother’s young child had wandered off in
a park and been out of her sight for about one minute - so of course, this
supposedly was necessary.
This video from this story isn’t the Border Patrol either. They just needed
to get to a child who had a high fever and hadn’t been vaccinated, so they
could take away the child and his siblings:
And when a group of people who
run around taking away children posed wearing matching T-shirts that said “professional
kidnapper” on one side and “do you know where your children are?” on
the other, they weren’t Border Patrol agents.
They were child protective services workers about 280 miles north – in
Prescott, Arizona.
So listen again to Ruth Marcus:
Even one [child]
would be too many. Each one represents a unique tragedy. Imagine being ripped
from your parents, or having your child taken from you. Imagine the desperation
that the parents feel, the trauma inflicted on their children.
Now, imagine it happening
250,000 times every year.
*-424,000 is
the number that U.S. state and local family policing agencies report to the
federal government. Other children are
in what Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan of the University of South Carolina School of
Law calls “hidden foster care.”
