Soaring rhetoric, tepid recommendations: A new report suggests a child welfare establishment group fighting with itself

The real leaders of the movement for racial justice in child welfare
 need allies, not backseat drivers. (Image from depositphotos.com)

After years of ignoring, or impeding, racial justice in child welfare, the group calling itself “Children’s Rights” now claims it’s “driving” the conversation about that very issue. 

No, CR. You just climbed into the backseat.

 In a story about a new report on racism in child welfare from the group that calls itself Children’s Rights, The Imprint includes a question I posed:  Is this a sincere effort to change, or just a callous ploy to raise money?

The lead author of the report, attorney (and relatively new hire at CR) Shereen White had a good answer: 

“The answer will live in our work, whether it’s the recommendations we lay out in our report, or the actions we take in the future." 

The rhetoric in the report is terrific (regular readers of this blog might even find a phrase or two that’s familiar).  But the recommendations don’t live up to that rhetoric.  The report declares that “radical change at the front end of the child welfare system is … a moral and civil rights imperative…” but none of the recommendations involves radical change.  

● The report quotes others who want to repeal the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, a racist law that has done enormous damage to children of color – but is silent on whether CR will support such efforts, or even support more modest changes to ASFA.   

● The report acknowledges that another awful federal law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act “strengthened the child welfare surveillance state” (see what I mean about familiar phrases)?  Yet it is silent about the need to repeal or even amend CAPTA.  

● And while radical change means abolishing mandatory reporting – because it doesn’t work – and actually endangers children -  the report calls for only tiny changes to mandatory reporting.  

● The report discusses narrowing neglect laws. Yes, we should do that.  I first suggested that in a book I wrote in 1990.  But what I came to realize is that this does almost no good unless there is someone to enforce it (as is discussed below, the report does seem to recognize this much).  This is illustrated, by accident, when the report cites as a model the neglect definition in Iowa – but Iowa tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation. 

● Yes, we should require states to make “active efforts” to keep families together, not just reasonable efforts. But how does CR propose to enforce it, when even the requirement in current federal law to make “reasonable efforts” is not enforced?  Indeed, in Michigan judges admitted they lied and checked a box on a form stating reasonable efforts had been made even when the judges themselves didn’t believe it.  But though, CR has a lawsuit settlement in Michigan, discussed in detail below, that settlement is silent on this issue. 

The recommendations in the report are not bad; three are genuinely useful, most notably providing high-quality family defense – which would help do things such as enforce a narrower definition of neglect.  That means CR is going farther than all those other child welfare establishment groups who are just posting #blacklivesmatter statements on their websites and hoping the whole thing will blow over. And just having an establishment group using the rhetoric of real change may help.  

But many of CR’s significant recommendations, such as high-quality family defense, originated with other organizations, and that’s important for reasons I’ll discuss below in the section on CR’s marketing. 

So, by Ms. White’s criterion, whether this report represents real change or a marketing ploy all comes down to the actions CR takes in the future.  Those actions should involve undoing some of the damage they’ve done in the past. 

Throughout its history, Children’s Rights has occasionally been a force for good – often by accident. More often it’s brought McLawsuits that lead to settlements that make systems bigger without making them better.  In some cases, they have made systems worse. 

In Michigan, for example, as we explain in our publication The Children Wronged by Children’s Rights. 

Instead of requiring Michigan to do [cut caseloads] by controlling needless removal of children and bolstering programs to keep children out of foster care, the settlement allowed Michigan to slash its already meager funding of prevention and family preservation in order to fund a child abuse investigator/foster care worker hiring binge. And that’s exactly what the state did. 

The state also cut basic assistance to poor families – and said it wasn’t a problem because, thanks to the settlement, they also were hiring more child abuse investigators. 

The Michigan settlement also imposed strict new requirements forcing any relative who
wants to provide kinship foster care to meet the same rigid, hypertechnical licensing requirements as middle-class strangers.  Those requirements revolve more around middle-class creature comforts than health and safety.  And since relatives of poor children taken from their homes tend to be poor themselves, they often can’t meet them.  In many cases, relatives had to stop caring for children already in kinship care. 

CR settlements also threw up barriers to kinship care in Rhode Island and Wisconsin. And in Georgia, Mother Jones reports, the state did what Michigan did: "cut spending on child care and put the money into child protective services in the wake of a lawsuit against the state over the mistreatment of children in foster care." 

Show us the lawsuits 

So, had CR, at the same time as it released the report said that they were writing to the Governor of, say, Michigan and asking to reopen their settlement to conform to the principles CR now claims to espouse, that would have been impressive.  But they didn’t. 

And while the report suggests strategies for future lawsuits aimed at curbing needless removal of children from their homes, CR did not actually announce such a suit. 

Indeed, the report seems to reveal an organization at war with itself. 

In one of those preface-type “letters” almost nobody reads, CR’s executive director, Sandy Santana seemed to maybe, possibly sort-of apologize: 

“For Children’s Rights, writing about the history of Black experiences in the child welfare system has led us to critically reflect on our own history in child-focused civil rights litigation.  We recognize that in the past our overarching belief that no child should grow up in the foster care system blinded us to the ways in which our legal cases, and the reforms they delivered, did not always support the preservation of Black families.”

 But the very last paragraph of the report itself seems to say: Pay no attention to what Sandy Santana said at the beginning. The report closes by setting up a straw man: 

At the same time, Children’s Rights will not stop fighting to protect the rights of children and families already in the system. These children and families can never be forgotten or effectively viewed as casualties of a changing child welfare system, even as advocates successfully drive radical transformation, and ultimately abolition, of that system. 

No one has ever said CR shouldn’t protect the rights of children in the system.  What we have said is that much of their litigation makes things worse, because they have ignored the entire issue of wrongful removal.  Furthermore, though they say “These children and families can never be forgotten …” for decades CR’s litigation – the very litigation that closing paragraph defends – has forgotten families.

 Backseat driving … 

The reason I raised the issue of whether the whole thing is a fundraising ploy is because, whether intended or not, the marketing of the report comes across like an effort to bigfoot smaller organizations that have actually led this fight at a time when racial justice is an attractive cause for foundations. 

Even before releasing the report, CR started fundraising off it.  In a fundraising email, CR claims to be “driving a national conversation about the urgent need to end unjust government intervention in the lives of Black children and families.” [Emphasis added.] 

No. That conversation is being driven by, among others, Dorothy Roberts, and Joyce McMillan, and Movement for Family Power, and Rise and DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children,  and  #ReimagineChildSafety and the UpEnd Movement and the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, and Isuroon, and Kelis Houston and Vivek Sankaran, and Victoria Copeland, and Angela Olivia Burton, and Judge Ernestine Gray, and J. Khadijah Abdurahman and Maleeka (MJ) Jihad and Angeline Montauban and Jessica Pryce and Tehra Coles and Shanta Trivedi and Kelley Fong and providers of high-quality family defense all over the country.  It also was driven by groups that didn’t survive, even as CR raked in money at glitzy celebrity fundraisers, groups such as the Child Welfare Organizing Project, People United for Children and Concerned Citizens for Family Preservation, and so many other groups and individuals who were fighting this fight when CR was on the sidelines – or impeding it. 

The closest CR came to acknowledging any of this was having Prof. Trivedi speak at an event launching the report.  

In fact, if you really want to meet the drivers of the conversation, check out the presentations at next week’s Strengthened Bonds virtual conference commemorating the 20^th Anniversary of Prof. Roberts’ book: Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.  CR isn’t among them. 

Driving the conversation? No. Children’s Rights just climbed into the backseat.  

…and a meaningless “pledge” 

Similarly, in another email, CR asks people to sign something called “The Children’s Rights Pledge” in which you pledge to “disrupt institutional racism” in child welfare by – well, uh, by naming it.  If that doesn’t seem like much, take a closer look. The “pledge” is just a way to harvest email addresses for future fundraising pitches.  

The agenda CR released in its new report would have been an impressive, progressive agenda – in 1995. The people who are really driving this conversation are way ahead of this. 

So, how will we know that change at CR is real? 

● If they call for repealing ASFA and fight for it.  If the former head of the Children’s Bureau, Jerry Milner can do it – and he did - why can’t CR? 

● If they call for repealing CAPTA. 

● If they apologize, without reservation, for their own past role in at best ignoring at worst perpetuating the harm they now decry. 

● If they put their lawsuits where their rhetoric is and sue to stop needless removal of children. 

● If they seek to reopen their most harmful settlements. 

● If they leave the driving to those who have earned a place at the wheel.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 1, 2021

● Leaders of the #ReimagineChildSafety campaign, working with Black Lives Matter – Los Angeles on a social media campaign to explain to Los Angeles – and the rest of America – how “child welfare” really works, discussed the campaign on KPFK Radio’s Move The Crowd. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the link.) You can follow the campaign at @DontTakeOurKids  And here’s another of the excellent videos that are part of the campaign. 

● Remember the racist myth about how COVID-19 supposedly was going to lead to a “pandemic of child abuse”?   Not only did that not happen, it led one institution to realize kids were better off if it closed it’s entire “residential treatment” program.  I have a blog post about it. 

● This Texas Observer story begins with two cases in the same court on the same day. Almost identical circumstances.  But in one case Texas CPS says: Let the family stay together; in the other they recommend foster care.  You’ll never guess the difference! – OK, yes, you will.  But you may still be surprised to find that the problem in Texas may be worst in the liberal bastion of metropolitan Austin.

● In The Imprint, Vivek Sankaran reflects on the key turning point in the life of Ma’Khia Bryant – the crucial child welfare system blunder that ultimately contributed to her death outside her foster home. 

● The Imprint also reports on the departure of one of the most important child welfare reformers in the federal government.

And finally, 

● The next truly great book about the “child welfare” system will be published on October 4. Here’s a preview in the form of a tweet thread from the author.  Here’s where you can pre-order.  And here’s where you can get ready by reading (or re-reading) the masterpiece from 20 years ago that set the standard for everything that would follow, and sets the stage for this new story.

Child welfare in Upstate New York: Another “unintended abolition”

If there’s one thing we “know” about child abuse and COVID-19 it’s that the very worst cases have skyrocketed, right?  After all, that’s what all those fearmongering news accounts have been telling us almost since the start of the pandemic. 

And of course, since these are the children most hurt, they absolutely have to go into residential treatment – because, well, we don’t want them with their horrible parents – and foster homes just can’t handle them, right?  That’s why, although residential treatment providers really, truly regret it, we simply have to institutionalize some children, don’t we? 

Actually, no. 

In fact, the pandemic has taught precisely the opposite lesson.  Says who? Says a residential treatment center that’s going to stop providing residential treatment. Because it’s not necessary after all. 

It’s happening at the Children’s Home of Jefferson County, in Upstate New York.  Like so many such places, it began as an orphanage – in 1859 - and then rebranded as a “residential treatment center” a century later – notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that residential treatment doesn’t work. 

But unlike so many other such places, CHJC faced up to the evidence. And, even more remarkable, the pandemic helped them do it. 

“COVID taught us that kids and families can do much better if we work with them inside of their environment, rather than putting them in our environment,” the center’s director, Karen Richmond told WWNY-TV. 

At the same time, the story explains: 

the pandemic also resulted in new operational practices at all levels. With court closures, youth learning remotely, and services being provided virtually, there was a significantly reduced need for residential care. 

As a result, overall state trends of youth placed at the residential level of care also significantly decreased, allowing the home to identify alternative treatment options. 

In fact, instead of dozens of children institutionalized at CHJC, there are now only four.  Which shows, once again, that all the talk of how for “some” children only institutionalization works turned out to be so much b.s.  

And notice that line about how providing services remotely reduced the “need” for residential care.  This is still one more giveaway that the real purpose of institutionalizing children has been for the convenience of the institution.  Pile them up in one place, and all those “helpers” don’t have to run around from foster home to foster home and school to school. 

With COVID, that became unnecessary, in fact, it became impossible.  And, lo and behold, providing the services in the home, even remotely, turned out to work better. 

As for COVID supposedly putting children in more danger – the closing of this residential treatment program is further evidence that this, too, is largely b.s.  On the contrary, COVID allowed CHJC to discover that children do better when help is provided to children and families together.  Again, from the story: 

The COVID-19 pandemic changed previously long-term espoused child welfare beliefs and practices. Officials say one of its benefits was allowing youth and families, with support from children’s home service providers, to be successful in home-based settings. 

Or as Richmond put it: “You can’t fix the child if you don’t support the family.” 

This is not the first success due to unintended abolition, of course.  Prof. Anna Arons of New York University School of Law has shown how, when New York City’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, was forced to step back and community-run mutual aid organizations stepped up, children were safer. 

So now, all we need is for all the other “residential treatment centers” that constantly cry wolf when anyone tries to curb their longstanding dominance of “child welfare” to have crises of conscience, actually put the children first, and remake themselves in the way this one institution in Upstate New York is doing. 

Don’t hold your breath.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 24, 2021

A coalition of organizations, working with Black Lives Matter – Los Angeles has launched a week-long social media campaign to explain how the family regulation system really works.  Each day there are new Twitter threads and a video.  Here’s one of the videos. You can follow the whole campaign at @DontTakeOurKids 

What the death of George Floyd did to awaken America to the racism in policing, the death of Ma’Khia Bryant, killed by police outside her foster home, may be doing to awaken Ameerican to the racism in family policing – a.k.a. the “child welfare” system.  It is the theme of an extraordinary amount of very good commentary this week.

 ● In her “Unpack This” video for The Root, Felice Leon talks to Prof. Dorothy Roberts, author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, (and a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors) about how the system has been rooted in racism, all the way back to slavery. 

● The Imprint is publishing a series of essays, in prose and poetry, from those with lived experience, about the meaning of Ms. Bryant’s life – and death – in foster care.  

In one essay, Dominique Freeman writes 

Ma’Khia Bryant, like many other Black girls in foster care, is placed under the control of a system designed to protect, honor and shelter them, but does the exact opposite at an alarming rate. It inflicts physical and psychological harm, which can ultimately lead to death. 

In another, Angela Braxton writes: 

Even if we do figure out a way to navigate the system to bring our children home, there’s always another hoop we have to jump through as our children languish in care, being further traumatized with each new home or placement, being constantly reminded that their birth mother isn’t “good enough,” beating our Black children down mentally, physically and emotionally until they too believe they are not “good enough” or white enough to be worth anything. Reinforcing this by the words that “you’re a lost cause, you’ll be just like your parents,” told by those who were chosen to better care for them. 

● And in USA Today, leaders of the Juvenile Law Center, which, up to now, has not been particularly active on curbing needless removal of children to foster care, discuss how, as the headline puts it, “Cop killing of teen shows how child welfare, police derail young Black and brown lives.” 

In other news: 

● The issue of racism in child welfare took on new relevance in Colorado after a judge in child welfare cases resigned under pressure after her racist comments became public.  But what about all the other comments from all the other judges that no one ever hears – especially in most states, where child welfare court hearings are closed to press and public?  Colorado’s “Child Protection Ombudsman,” Stephanie Villafuerte writes about this for the Colorado Sun. 

● Villafuerte is unusual in her deep understanding that family regulation systems (a more accurate term than “child welfare”) err in all directions.  Far more common are “Child Advocates” like the one in Massachusetts, who is on a crusade to make that state’s child welfare surveillance state even bigger and more oppressive.  I have another blog post about how she’s doing it. 

● One of the ways she does it is to point to the fact that the Massachusetts family regulation agency has set up one-stop drop-in centers where families can go for help.  Lots of systems are trying to hide their coercive nature behind such centers.  It’s not that such places do no good, it’s that as long as they are run by agencies with the power to take away children – instead of by and for the communities most affected – people will be afraid to use them.  That’s why when New York City’s family regulation agency announced an expansion of such centers, the parents who write and edit Rise weren’t buying it.  Rise has a better approach. 

● One better approach is as simple as providing impoverished families with a little more money, or the equivalent.  Still more evidence for this comes from a new study showing that simply providing greater access to benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP – or what used to be called foodstamps) is enough to reduce what family regulation agencies call “neglect.” 

● Those great stories from NPR and The Marshall Project about states effectively stealing money that rightfully belongs to foster children are getting results.  The Las Vegas Sun called on Nevada officials to end the practice.  And legislation to stop it has been introduced in Nebraska. 

● What happens to foster children who don’t want to go to some cruddy night to night group home placement?  According to KING-TV Seattle, this: 

Four people, who claimed they supervised foster kids overnight in cars and offices, said their managers encouraged them to use psychological tactics to make the youth miserable. They say they were told to do things like blast air conditioning or turn off the heat to make the youth intentionally cold. … Three workers said they were instructed not to allow youth to fall asleep throughout the night. [Emphasis added.] 

As I note in a blog post, though the story doesn’t mention it, sleep deprivation is commonly defined as torture – the CIA used it on prisoners at Guantanamo.

● And the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports on questions about still another of those “child abuse pediatricians.”

Washington State tries the Gitmo approach to child welfare

KING-TV in Seattle recently reported on something one wouldn’t expect even from a child welfare agency.    

Washington State foster children have spent thousands of nights in hotel rooms and offices. (Unfortunately, that’s not the unexpected part.)  But what happens when, often for good reason,  foster children don’t want to go to an office, or to some cruddy group home where the agency wants to force them to spend the night?  See for yourself:

 KING-TV found 

… a years-long pattern of Washington child protection workers dangling basic necessities like a safe, warm place to sleep as a way to get certain “hard to place” foster children to behave or follow orders. … The investigation … uncovered a DCYF culture where “punitive” actions toward some children and teens without placements are not only condoned but encouraged by some department leaders. … 

DCYF managers withheld hotel beds from some foster kids, and they instructed social workers to make the foster youth uncomfortable with inadequate sleeping arrangements, like in cars without blankets and in state offices without beds. This occurred when the kids acted out or refused to go to a placement at a foster home or group home, … 

And here’s where we get to the matter of what might be a reasonable topic for an international human rights inquiry: 

Four people, who claimed they supervised foster kids overnight in cars and offices, said their managers encouraged them to use psychological tactics to make the youth miserable. They say they were told to do things like blast air conditioning or turn off the heat to make the youth intentionally cold. … Three workers said they were instructed not to allow youth to fall asleep throughout the night. [Emphasis added.] 

Though the story doesn’t mention it, sleep deprivation is commonly defined as torture – the CIA used it on prisoners at Guantanamo. 

This still leaves a few questions. 

Why did some of these children resist going where DCYF wanted to put them? From the story:

Taylor Campbell, a 20-year-old woman in Washington state’s extended foster care program, said as a teenager, she turned down many placements where she didn’t feel comfortable — including one home where she said she was inappropriately touched during a prior stay. 

“The state, they take kids from people that do those things. And then to force a child to openly go through a home like that, that was just the turning point for me and I felt I was lost,” said Campbell, who became a ward of the state at age 15. 

She’s not alone in that assessment. 

“Bouncing around from hotel rooms to cars, not having a stable placement — it made these kids’ behaviors worse,” [a caseworker] said. “I feel like the system is hurting these kids more. It’s way worse than some of the scenarios they have come from.” …

 “It pisses me off that a parent can have their kid taken away for the same thing that we are putting them through,” said a current female after-hours social worker based in Kent, who agreed to speak to KING 5 only under the condition of anonymity. “It’s not healthy. It’s not productive. It’s not safe for the employees. It’s not safe for the kids.” 

Why does this constant moving from placement to placement happen? For starters, and this is one place the story was mistaken, it’s not because of a “shortage” of foster parents.  It’s because Washington State routinely tears apart families at a rate above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. (The lead in to the story, in which all of the children are described has having been "rescued from dangerous or neglectful homes, also is incorrect. More often they were needlessly taken when family poverty was confused with "neglect.")

Why are frontline workers allegedly required by their superiors to do these horrible things to children? That should be a question for DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter.  But perhaps the answer is rooted in the mentality revealed by the way Hunter himself responded to COVID-19  - one of the worst such responses in the nation. That response suggested a contempt for parents.  But the behavior KING-TV has revealed in his agency raises questions about how Hunter really feels about the kids.

A propaganda document from that commission in Massachusetts

Ever since public hearings of a commission studying mandatory
child abuse reporting in Massachusetts didn't go the way the 
Commission chair wanted, she's been trying to spin the testimony 
like, well, you know ... (Photo by wannapik)

The commission is meeting again today (May 20) at 10:00 AM. 

After spending nearly two years on the task, a Commission studying mandatory child abuse reporting in Massachusetts finally held public hearings on draft recommendations.  Almost all of the recommendations would expand reporting and one would even make it easier to confuse poverty with “neglect.”  The commissioners were not prepared for what they heard during the hearings.  Some members said they were “shocked,” “surprised” and “taken aback” by the hearing testimony.  

That’s because, at two virtual hearings lasting a total of four hours, almost every speaker was opposed to the recommendations.  Speaker after speaker talked about how the proposals would sweep more families, especially poor families of color, into the net of family policing, doing their children enormous harm in the process.  They spoke of how the recommendations would deter families from seeking help and further overload the system, making it even harder to find children in real danger. 

The reason some members of the commission were so shocked is that they’ve been misled by the commission chair (and the state’s foremost advocate of a child welfare surveillance state and a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare) state “Child Advocate” Maria Mossaides.  In addition to chairing the commission, her office staffs it. 

For nearly two years, Mossaides and her staff shut out the views heard at the hearings, handpicking speakers for presentations who would reinforce Mossaides’ desire to make the failed system of mandatory reporting even bigger and more powerful.  

That is likely to continue at a Commission meeting today, when a presentation on how screening of reports works will be given not by anyone who has studied it objectively but by, yes, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families.  That is, of course, the agency that does the screening, investigates the reports, and takes away children at a rate 60% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

To get the full impact of those public hearings, you had to be there.  Or at least listen to the recording of the hearings.  The staff has made that as inconvenient as possible, posting audio only. 

And in what seems to be the hope that commissioners won’t pour through all that testimony, Mosssaides promised a “summary.”   That summary was presented to the Commission at a meeting on May 10 – but withheld from the public, except for the portions we could make out while a staffer shared her screen during the virtual meeting.  It wasn’t until days later that they finally uploaded the document. 

The summary that’s not a summary 

It turns out it isn’t a summary at all.  Most of the testimony isn’t even mentioned – and readers get no sense of the scope and power of the arguments against Commission draft recommendations.  Worse, the summary is a propaganda document, misstating the arguments and misleading commissioners about the state of research on mandatory reporting.  So we’re going to go through parts of the document point-by-point and try to set at least some of the record straight.  In the sections below, excerpts from the “summary” document are in italics: 

Why mandated reporting?

The Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) requires that every state have provisions or procedures requiring the reporting of suspected child abuse and neglect. 

CAPTA does indeed require this, but the only penalty for putting children’s needs first and not adopting the failed regime of mandatory reporting is loss of a very small amount of federal funds.  Although Mossaides tried to scare the commission into believing $400 million was at stake, the real number is probably under $2 million. 

There are ethics arguments that children because of their age and abilities are particularly vulnerable to abuse or neglect (as can be seen with other vulnerable populations) and are at a disadvantage in exercising self-protection and self-care. 

Note the implication: If we don’t have mandatory reporting children supposedly are defenseless!  In fact, eliminating mandatory reporting does not eliminate reporting – rather, it allows professionals to exercise their professional judgment.  The failure to allow such judgment has made children less safe. 

Does mandated reporting “work?”

This is a complex question which depends on the framing of the question. 

No, actually it’s not complex at all.  If mandatory reporting makes children safer it works.  If, on the other hand, it deters families from seeking help and overloads the system with so many false reports that workers are less likely to find children in real danger, even as thousands of children, especially children of color, are traumatized by needless investigations and needless foster care, then it doesn’t work.  

The evidence is in: It doesn’t work. That’s why one after another, some of the most prominent proponents of mandatory reporting have had second thoughts. 

But it appears that none of this research and none of this scholarly analysis was shared with the commissioners for nearly two years. 

Also, if you now admit you don’t know if mandatory reporting works, Ms. Mossaides, why have you spent nearly two years desperately trying to expand it? 

The majority of cases reported to DCF come from mandated reporters. Reports from mandated reporters are screened-in at a higher rate than reports that come from non-mandated reporters. 

Again, notice what Mossaides and her staff are trying to do here: imply that without mandatory reporting more reliable reporters somehow will be shut out.  But if there were no mandatory reporting, teachers, doctors etc. still would be free to report.  They simply wouldn’t have to report when, in their professional judgment, they felt there was not actual abuse or neglect or when they thought the report would do more harm than good.  And they wouldn’t have to file “CYA” reports for fear of what would happen to them if they don’t (such as the fines the Commission may recommend increasing up to ten-fold). Eliminating mandatory reporting would increase the reliability of reports. 

Data shows us that there is disproportionality in the rates of Hispanic/Latinx and Black children coming to DCF’s attention relative to their proportion in the Massachusetts population. The data available however is not broken down by mandated reporters versus non-mandated reporters nor is it broken down by reporter type. 

In other words: Maybe mandatory reporters are so wise that they aren’t the cause of the racial bias in the system. Well, if they’re that wise, shouldn’t they be trusted about when to report and when not to report, instead of being forced to report? 

The Commission has also discussed at several meetings the success of the Family Resource Centers in Massachusetts which provide services to families throughout the Commonwealth and who served 10,869 unduplicated families in 2019 providing such services as help with food instability, parenting groups and classes, assistance with housing instability, accessing resources for children including child care and after school care as well as physical products such as diapers, and so on. 

The implication here is: See? People aren’t deterred from seeking help because they go to Family Resource Centers!  But actual research shows that mandatory reporting is a pervasive deterrent to seeking all sorts of help.  The fact that some people are willing to risk being turned into the child abuse police if they go to a family resource center tells us nothing about how many are deterred from reaching out.  

And now, let’s look at the heart of Mossaides’ effort to salvage her awful recommendations: 

It can be true both that some families will retreat from available services feeling they cannot trust mandated reporters and there is no safe place where they can express their needs or be fallible individuals (as we all are), and it can also be true that DCF provides relevant and critical services to communities and families who identify themselves as needing help and are able and willing to access that help through the avenues that are available to them. 

So then the question is: How do we provide the help without forcing any families to retreat? Answer: Abolish mandatory reporting.  And make those “relevant and critical services” available through an agency that does not also have the power to take away children. 

It can be true that mandated reporters operate on implicit bias and that structural racism affects both experiences and perceptions of experiences, it can also be true that mandated reporters serve as critical lifelines to children who urgently need help. 

No, actually it can’t.  Reporters can serve as such lifelines – the fact that they are mandated to report does not make them any more likely – and probably less likely – to be such a lifeline.  Mandatory reporting impedes the lifeline function for the reasons noted previously. 

It can be true that many cases are screened-out by DCF at the screening stage, and it can also be true that a screen-out does not mean that the reporter was incorrect in their analysis of the situation. 

This is one of the most misleading statements in the entire summary.  The canard about screenouts and unfounded reports not being false has been around for decades.  As is so often the case, there is a molehill of truth under a mountain of hype and distortion. 

Obviously, every decision to screen out a report won’t be correct, just as every decision to label a case unfounded after investigation won’t be correct. But, and somehow Mossaides forgot to mention this, every decision to screen in or substantiate a report won’t be correct either. 

But guess which is more likely. 

The only study we know of to actually second guess worker decisions found that they are two to six times more likely to wrongly substantiate an allegation than they are to wrongly declare one to be unfounded.  So the fact that, nationwide, 91% - ninety-one percent – of hotline calls wind up screened out or unfounded is representative of the overall accuracy of a system built on mandatory reporting – in fact, it overstates the accuracy of that system.  It means that false allegations are flooding the system at every turn; again, making it less likely that workers will find children in real danger. 

Now, let’s move on to how the document misrepresents the actual testimony, when it summarizes criticism of mandatory reporting: 

Mandated reporting is surveillance of families that has a far more detrimental effect on society and children than does the abuse or neglect that although real, is less common than is suggested by DCF over-involvement with families. 

No one said that all “abuse or neglect” is inherently less serious than surveillance – by summarizing testimony this way Mossaides wants you to believe all those witnesses were minimizing child abuse.  

Rather, what those witnesses said is that overwhelmingly, the reports are false, and many of the rest are poverty cases – and in those cases the real harm to children comes from the surveillance, the investigation and, worst of all, needless foster care.  At the same time – and yes it’s worth repeating again – the system so deluges workers with false reports that finding the children in real danger is harder. 

Oh, but wait, the summary does address this issue – and promptly distorts it, summarizing the position of critics as follows: 

There will so many new filings, mostly unsupported and biased filings, based on this expansion that DCF will be so burdened current case practice will suffer. DCF would need significant additional resources to handle this burden. 

Except that, during the spoken testimony at least (I didn’t read all of the written submissions) nobody uttered that second sentence.  Rather Mossaides is teeing up the idea that she will try to get her Commission to recommend to the State Legislature both an expansion of mandatory reporting and spending vast new sums of money to cover it. 

But, of course, she knows the new spending is unlikely to be forthcoming.  Then, when she gets the vastly bigger surveillance state she wants and the system is overwhelmed she can say: Well, that’s not my fault, we told the legislature to spend more money! 

But even if you could get the money, we did not hear anybody say even more money would work. If you simply go on still another caseworker hiring binge, all the new workers chase all the new false reports and all you get is the same lousy system only bigger.  This can be seen by the fact that Massachusetts already spends on child welfare at one of the highest rates in the country – because all those needless investigations and all that needless foster care is expensive. 

Not in the summary, but … 

It’s also worth noting here something that’s not in the summary document but that Mossaides mentioned at the last Commission meeting: She argued that there won’t really be a flood of new reports because the last time categories of mandated reporters were expanded there wasn’t much of an increase. 

But that previous occasion included a much smaller expansion than the Commission contemplates recommending now.  And in a state like Massachusetts, which already tears apart families at a rate 60% above the national average, any expansion of false reports endangers children. 

Bottom line: The Commission can’t rely on the summary document to understand what happened at the hearings, or to understand mandatory reporting.  It’s a big ask, but the commissioners really need to listen to all the testimony. 

If they do, they may well be even more shocked, surprised and taken aback.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 18, 2021

● Well what do you know?  The workaround used by a North Carolina family police agency to tear apart families when judges refused to rubber-stamp their requests is illegal. Carolina Public Press reports on a big victory against the scandal of hidden foster care.  And we have additional context in this blog post. 

● Remember those great stories a team of USA Today Network Florida reporters did about the harm done to children when they are taken from mothers whose only “crime” is to be, themselves, victims of domestic violence?  Think it can’t bet any worse? Check out this story from First Coast News in Jacksonville, and think again. 

● Then check out the harm done to other Florida children when their grandmother dared to make a simple request for help. 

● But there is also progress.  For decades one of the most regressive forces in child welfare was the American Academy of Pediatrics.  Then, at long last, they decided to actually listen to families.  Their new approach still isn’t everything it should be but it represents significant progress. 

● And Texas has a new law bolstering access to lawyers for families under investigation by the family police and narrowing the definition of “neglect” to make it harder to confuse it with poverty.

● The Imprint looks at the importance of the Indian Child Welfare Act through cases handled by Minnesota’s ICWA Law Center. 

● After a year in which almost all parents had to become homeschoolers, at least in part, you would think there would be higher priorities even on the part of those desperate to tear apart more families than further harassing homeschoolers.  But for those who think every family needs to be under omnipresent surveillance, apparently there’s no time like the present.  Jim Mason of the Home School Legal Defense Association responds in National Review.  But this isn’t just an issue for the political right. The rationale for ratcheting up child welfare surveillance of homeschoolers is identical to the rationale applied to nonwhite families during the worst of COVID-19. 

● There’s a follow-up to those outstanding stories by The Marshall Project and NPR about states using a legal loophole to steal money from foster children to help fund their child welfare systems. The radio stories are here, here and here.  Now The Marshall Project has a state-by-state breakdown of how much is stolen and a step-by-step guide for foster youth to find out if they’ve had money stolen from them and, if so, how to fight back.