NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 11, 2025

● More than 20 years ago, a lawsuit stopped New York City’s family police agency from tearing children from their parents just because the parent, usually the mother, was herself a survivor of domestic violence. But that didn’t stop the agency from harassing those mothers and their children.  Now, the New York Times reports, a New York appellate court has ruled that the agency, and its Upstate counterparts, can’t do that anymore either.  See also this story in the New York Daily News, this story in The Imprint and this story from Law 360. 

● It was just such an incident of domestic violence – one that did not involve the children’s father or even take place in their presence – that led to the removal of three children from their mother, Felicia Chandler, in North Carolina. That led to the tragedy exposed in this documentary from WRAL-TV, a tragedy allegedly including the murder of one of her children by the foster parent who adopted them.  Other adopted foster children allegedly were tortured. I have a blog post with a link to the documentary and some additional context. 

● Time Magazine has included author, scholar, law professor, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, and NCCPR Board Member Prof. Dorothy Roberts among “The Closers: 25 Black leaders working to end the racial equity gap” 

● Drenched in trendy psychobabble, a bill in New Hampshire tries to fight trauma with trauma. There is not a child in New Hampshire who couldn’t be deemed abused or neglected at some point if it becomes law. Citing NCCPR and HSLDA, Lenore Skenazy has an overview in Reason. 

● Skenazy is president of Let Grow, which is backing "reasonable childhood independence" legislation across the country.  Five states are considering such laws now.

● It’s no secret that I’m no fan of Court-Appointed Special Advocates.  But there are exceptions, such as the author of this insightful letter to the Daily Astorian in Oregon. 

● The Imprint reports on a study of “ambiguous loss” among Native American mothers whose children were taken from them forever. From the story:   

History weighs heavily on the experiences of Indigenous birth mothers, making them “distinct from other races as they have been disproportionately exposed to systemic practices of forced child removal,’’ [lead investigator Sandy] White Hawk’s team posited in the 2022 published article. Culprits include U.S. policies that coerced parents into relinquishing their children to boarding schools, and the Indian Adoption Project — a federally funded effort in the mid-20th century to force the assimilation of Native American children into white families. 

Also harmful, they wrote, is the ongoing disproportionate removal of Native children from their parents through the country’s child welfare systems. 

Though not mentioned in the story, the lead agency spearheading the Indian Adoption Project, from 1958 to 1967, was the Child Welfare League of America. In 2001 they tried to apologize for it and justify it at the same time. CWLA’s current slogan is “over 100 years of excellence.”  

Does that include 1958 to 1967? 

● The Imprint reports on how the second Trump Administration may roll back child welfare initiatives that include people with lived experience - including initiatives begun by the first Trump Administration.

● Foster care numbers have gone down in Hawaii – but not by enough.  I have a commentary about it in Honolulu Civil Beat. 

● The co-chairs of the Maine Legislature’s Human Services Committee issued a statement that includes this reminder: 

Maine’s definition of child abuse and neglect is broad, vague and conflates poverty with neglect. There is a long list of individuals who are mandated reporters. We must provide clarity about what is abuse and neglect, and what is a resource issue or challenge for a family that could be appropriately supported by the community. 

In this week’s (further) edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

● The Los Angeles Times reports that Los Angeles County faced a record number of lawsuits last year: 

The county’s Department of Children and Family Services was the most frequently sued, with 882 cases, followed by the Probation and Sheriff’s departments with 304 each. Both the Probation and Children and Family Services departments have been hit with thousands of lawsuits in recent years alleging that children were sexually abused in foster homes and at probation facilities and a former children’s shelter. 

● From the Texas Tribune:

The state has shut down a residential treatment center in northeast Texas, three months after one of its charges — an 11-year-old boy — died in an incident that foster care officials and local law enforcement are investigating. 

The boy died in a Greenville movie theater during an outing the day before Thanksgiving, according to three people who are familiar with the investigations. Other boys who lived at the center told Joe Sterner, the Lone Oak school district’s police chief, that the boy had complained about a stomach ache and had sustained a head wound in recent days. … 

The boy and his fellow housemates watched the movie and by the time it ended, the child was dead, one of the people familiar with the case said.  “The lights came up and the child had blood coming down his nose and he was deceased,” said one source …  

Adopted to death in North Carolina?

An adoptive mother is charged with murder, torture, and crimes straight out of a horror film nightmare.  That’s an aberration. 

At least one of the children probably never needed to be taken from his mother at all.  That’s not an aberration 

A horror film debuted in North Carolina last week.  The story has all the classic elements: torture, starvation, teenage victims, and elements too macabre to describe here.  But you can’t “keep repeating it’s only a movie.” Because it’s not. 

This horror film is a documentary. At a time when most television stations don’t even have documentary units, WRAL-TV has one that just produced a superb example of the form.  It’s about children taken from their own homes, in at least one case for no good reason, only to disappear – their bodies found years later.  They were allegedly adopted to death.  The starvation, torture, murder and other horrors all were allegedly orchestrated by Avantae Deven, the foster mother who adopted them. 

There have been tragically similar horror stories in Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Iowa, and of course, Texas and Minnesota. Most of them involved children who never needed to be taken from their own homes. 

So watch the documentary here – but take the viewer advisory seriously – and then I’ll add some context, including the one place where I think the producers went wrong:

 

Now, that context:

Of course, most adoptive parents never harm the children in their care – like most parents, period.  And yes, I’m the one who always says don’t make generalizations based on horror stories.  But I’m also the one who offered a mutual moratorium on their use.  The family policing establishment (a more accurate term than “child welfare establishment”) has not yet taken me up on that, and I’m not about to unilaterally disarm.  That’s why our weekly round-up of family preservation news and commentary usually ends with a section called “The Horror Stories Go in All Directions.” 

More important, the only part of this story that’s unusual is the alleged torture and murder.  The documentary reveals other horrors that are common in North Carolina and across the country. 

The first horror was the removal of these children in the first place, in particular, the children of the mother profiled in the documentary, Felicia Chandler. 

There is no allegation that Chandler ever beat her children, tortured them, raped them – or harmed them in any way.  The only ground cited in the documentary for the removal of her children was the fact that she was herself a victim of domestic violence.  As we have noted often on this blog, there is overwhelming evidence that children taken under these circumstances are even more traumatized than when they are taken for other reasons.  One expert called it “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.” 

That’s why more than 20 years ago, New York courts made it illegal to take children the way Chandler’s children allegedly were taken.  And just last week, a New York appellate court ruled that family police harassment of these mothers and their children, even when the children are not taken, also is illegal.

But in North Carolina, it’s open season on domestic violence survivors and their children.  Indeed, Chandler’s isn’t the first such case in North Carolina to get headlines.  The same kind of wrongful removal was the focus of this story from WBTV and The Assembly. 

Of course, we get the usual excuse from the family police: Oh, there was something else, we just won’t tell you.  Not can’t tell you – the confidentiality laws family police agencies hide behind generally are there because the agencies want them there – so they can hide their failings. 

Enter Chandler’s former caseworker.  In comments dripping with condescension says: “I know know that she loves her children but I will also say something that I learned many years ago through this career is that often love is not enough.” 

What that usually means is: Love is not enough, because they don’t have enough money.  Money can buy whatever is missing.  

For example, according to the lawsuit discussed here, North Carolina took away the children of one mother because she was hospitalized – with cancer.  The children suffered horribly in institutions. But the family police agency didn’t want to give them back because the mother “might get cancer again.” 

Have you noticed? You never see a rich person’s child taken because “love is not enough.” 

And let's not forget Cherokee County, where the removal of children with no due process at all, in cases so weak the county knew it couldn’t get a judge to approve, led to criminal charges.  And let’s not forget this story. And this story. And this story. And this story. And this story.  And this story. And this story. 

Unlike the alleged torture and murder of the adopted children of Avantae Deven, the horrors of wrongful removal are not unusual – in North Carolina or anywhere else.  

And if there’s one these stories make clear, it’s this: When you leave children at the mercy of caseworkers and agencies that don’t love them – it’s never enough. 

Felicia Chandler never got her surviving children back and, since her children’s rights to be with her were terminated, she almost certainly never will.  But she continues her fight.  The documentary ends with her speaking directly to her children, wherever they are, telling them how much she loves them, in the hope that they might see it. 

About those deck chairs

And that brings me to what I see as this outstanding documentary’s one failing: Having raised the issue of wrongful removal, and followed Felicia Chandler on her quest for justice, the documentary doesn’t circle back to the issue of wrongful removal when discussing solutions.  Instead, it focuses on rearranging the deck chairs on the North Carolina family policing Titanic.  Unfortunately, that focus is all the rage in North Carolina right now. 

That, too, is not unusual.  Reorganization is what agencies and lawmakers do when they don’t have real ideas. 

So sometimes, in states where the family police are a freestanding agency, there are proposals to make it part of a bigger agency.  Where it’s already part of a bigger agency there are proposals to make it a freestanding agency.  Where the work is largely done by public agencies you hear cries to privatize.  Where it’s mostly private you hear about the need for the accountability only a public system is said to bring.  Where states run these systems you sometimes hear proposals to have counties do it, because they’re supposedly closer to the people. Where counties run these systems – as in North Carolina – you hear the state should do it, or at least give the state more power to supervise.  

But there is no evidence that any one of these structures is any better, or worse, than the others.  The many terrible systems, and the few that are not so bad, come in all shapes and sizes. 

That’s true even when it comes to the kind of horrors exposed in the WRAL documentary.  I mentioned similar horrors in five other places. Pennsylvania has a county-run system. So does  Minnesota. But the systems in Hawaii, Iowa and Texas are state-run. 

As for North Carolina, what good is giving more power to the state oversight agency when a top official of that agency, interviewed by WRAL, insists the system isn’t broken?  

Yes, it might make some marginal difference around the edges.  But the fixation on organization diverts attention from the elephant in the room: all those children needlessly taken.  Wrongful removal drives everything else.  Ending it alone won’t fix these systems, but it’s the prerequisite for fixing these systems. 

UPDATE, FEB 15: Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, in a follow-up story, when lawmakers were asked what they were going to do about this, their answers were all about the deck chairs (with a quick mention of those other failed stand-bys "silos" and "background checks").

Similarly, it would be a huge mistake to spend more to make the system even bigger.  Rather, additional spending should focus on bolstering services and supports to families whose children often are taken when family poverty is confused with neglect.  That will ease any artificial “shortage” of foster homes and reduce worker caseloads, so workers have more time to find children in real danger and do their jobs well. 

In other words, spend more, but spend smarter. 

Two other notes

● Another proposal discussed in the documentary is one that always comes up when adoptive parents are accused of abusing their adopted children: require government monitoring of the family even after the adoption.  

Here’s the problem: Adoption by strangers should be very rare; almost always there are better ways to assure safe, permanent homes for children.  But when it does happen, then adoptive parents are parents, period. Before the adoption, they should be subject to intense scrutiny.  After the adoption they should be subject to no greater monitoring than birth parents.  Otherwise, it’s just foster care by another name.  As such it denies children the security and permanence they need. 

And to those who say: Well, adoptive parents often accept government checks so they should have to accept government supervision, well, I also get a government check every month. It’s called Social Security – and no one gets to make unannounced visits to my home to see if I’m spending the money wisely. 

● There’s one more thing to keep in mind, one more factor that can lead to quick-and-dirty slipshod placements in adoptive homes: Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, for every finalized adoption over a baseline number, states receive a bounty from the federal government of $4,000 to $10,000.  Avantae Deven adopted five foster children. So North Carolina may have collected anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 for tearing these children from their own parents and placing them with the adoptive mother now accused of murder and torture.  And get this: Under ASFA North Carolina doesn’t even have to give the money back. 

NCCPR in Honolulu Civil Beat: Hawaiʻi Foster Care Numbers Are Down. But Not Down Enough

In a comprehensive story about a new report from the Child Welfare Services Branch, Civil Beat posed an important question: Can the decline in the number of children Hawaii holds in foster care be attributed to a shortage of caseworkers? 

The answer is no. Because shortages don’t work that way. 

Even at their best, family policing systems (a more accurate term than “child welfare” systems) are arbitrary, capricious and cruel. They routinely make terrible mistakes in all directions. They leave some children in dangerous homes even as they take many more from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help. 

An overloaded system makes all of this worse. What should be an examination of a case becomes a look; a look becomes a glance.  There are more snap judgments, and they can go either way. … 

Read the full column in Honolulu Civil Beat

NCCPR news and commentary roundup, week ending February 2, 2025

● When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act, that challenge came from Texas. Now, The Imprint reports, the most comprehensive legislation anywhere in the country to expand the protections of ICWA to all children has been introduced – in Texas. If anything this law would go further than ICWA, in that it’s more specific about the obligations the courts and the state family police agency would have to meet. 

● ICT News and the Montana Free Press report that Montana lawmakers are proposing to reauthorize and expand that state’s version of ICWA. That law applies only to Native American children, but in Montana, that’s a lot of children. Native Americans make up 9% of the state child population – but 35% of children in foster care. 

● Writing in The Imprint Nora McCarthy and Jeremy Kohomban remind us that even when a family police investigation doesn’t lead to foster care, it still can do enormous harm to children.  They write: 

Investigations can leave enduring negative impacts on the family. Research finds that, after an investigation, parents limit social networks and help-seeking to reduce the risk of another investigation. This social isolation places children at even greater risk, and children can suffer when parents fear discussing family needs with educators, doctors and other helping professionals who are required by law to report child safety concerns. 

Clearly, to keep children safer, we must reserve an investigatory approach for children facing real danger. For children at low risk, we must develop methods to address family distress that inflict less harm. 

● In this Newsweek story NCCPR points out the harm of such investigations, and notes that "every parental misjudgment—if that is what happened here—is not child abuse." 

● For another example of how the family police system can be the ultimate middle-class entitlement -- step right up and take someone else’s child for your very own! -- check out this story from WZTV in Nashville. 

● The Imprint has an update on criminal charges against a foster youth advocate – charges that never should have been brought and which the relevant prosecuting agency and/or judge should have had the decency to dismiss out of hand. 

● On the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog: a short trip into the weeds concerning how a state spins “child welfare” data, with lessons for those looking at such data everywhere. 

● Some good news: The University of North Carolina soon will join the growing list of law schools that have family defense clinics. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From the Topeka Capital-Journal: 

Police in a Wichita-area town have arrested the adoptive parents of a girl whose body was found buried in a backyard five months ago, while officials with the state child welfare agency haven't yet released a summary of its involvement. 

The Rose Hill Police Department on Monday arrested the adoptive parents of the girl, whose birth name was Natalie Garcia and adoptive name was Kennedy Schroer. Her adoptive parents are 50-year-old Crystina Elizabeth Schroer and 53-year-old Joseph Shane Schroer.

Maine family police agency’s “good news” may not be so good

...unless you're a child taken by the Maine family police - in 
which case you might never go home.
(Photo by Jimmy Emerson)

The Maine Morning Star has a good story about some data from Maine’s family police agency, the Office of Child and Family Services.  OCFS is spinning the data, touting the simple fact that more children are leaving Maine foster care than entering as some kind of good news attributable to their efforts.  More likely, it’s what one would expect due to inertia.  It might be good news; it might not.

The exit/entry figure is more likely to mean simply that the foster-care panic in Maine is finally slowing down – as usually happens after a couple of years. So what does that mean? If you suddenly start taking away huge numbers of additional children then, of course, a couple of years later exits will exceed entries – simply because all those children needlessly taken are leaving the system one way or another, while entries have slowed from full-out panic levels. 

Of course, the fact that the panic may be slowing is itself good news – though it’s not slowing nearly enough.  This can be seen in another number: The claim that OCFS took away 900 children in 2024.  Two years ago, Maine took away 1,130 children. 

So IF – and it’s a big if – that 900 figure is accurate, it would mean that Maine’s rate of removal fell from more than double the national average (even when rates of child poverty are factored in) to “only” about 70% above the national average. The state still is a long way from returning to the years when it came so close to getting child welfare right. 

The reason for that big “if” has to do with the data sources.  The 2022 figure is the most recent available from the federal government’s Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System.  AFCARS gets the numbers from the states – but there are specific definitions for an entry into care.  When states publish their own data for the public they can define an entry any way they want.  Several times over the years I’ve found discrepancies between what states tell the public and what they tell AFCARS – and always, the number they give the public is lower. 

I am not saying that is happening here. I suggest only that it would be prudent to ask OCFS if the 900 figure conforms strictly to AFCARS definitions and to check past OCFS self-reported entry data against past AFCARS reports.  (The actual number reported to AFCARS won’t be identical, since AFCARS data are reported by federal fiscal year.) I tried doing that myself, but could not find entry figures on the OCFS website. 

One other bit of clearly bad news: In a state that tears apart so many families needlessly, it is outrageous that more children lose their birth parents forever because of adoption than are allowed to return to their own homes. This begs the question: Is OCFS getting the numbers down with a mad rush to deprive children of their parents forever (that’s what termination of parental rights really means) rather than by doing enough to avoid needless removal?

NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending Januaruy 28, 2025

● The Imprint asks if the new Secretary of the Interior, Doug Berman will 

continue the ongoing project to document the harms of Indian boarding schools? 

Interviews with boarding school survivors, child welfare leaders and tribal members reveal a mix of concern and cautious optimism that the work [former Interior Secretary Deb] Haaland set in motion will continue. 

● Child welfare’s crimes against Native Americans aren’t just in the past.  In The Imprint, Baz Hawk, a Native American survivor of the system writes that “America’s Favorite Pastime is Failing Native Foster Youth.” Hawk writes: 

Every time I was placed, it was in a non-Native household. When I was put into foster care, the government removed me from my Native grandmother and placed me with my white father who was a rapist and pedophile with prior convictions. After some predatory events occurred, I was put into foster care with my three half-siblings. The two younger children were placed differently, and I only saw them a few times after that. Then, my brother and I were placed four times. Each of those four times, I was placed in a non-Native household. 

● The Baltimore Banner reports that Maryland is the latest state to discover how much it owes children abused in its care – now that the survivors are allowed to sue. 

● While in the Baltimore Sun social work student Jumara Perry writes about the racial bias that permeates “child welfare.” 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

From WRTV Indianapolis: 

A Morgan County couple faces over 100 combined charges for extensive allegations of abuse stemming from their roles as foster parents. In December, prosecutors filed charges against Brian and Sonja Stafford, both aged 60, totaling 121 counts related to child neglect, battery, human trafficking, molestation, and other offenses. 

A 155-page probable cause affidavit revealed over 13 years, the couple had mistreated at least 33 children who were in their care through fostering, adopting, or housing foreign exchange students. 11 specific victims have come forward with testimonies detailing severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.

NCCPR in the Oregon Capital Chronicle: Oregon DHS needs to stop playing whack-a-mole with vulnerable children

For nearly a decade, Oregon’s approach to child welfare has amounted to a pathetic game of whack-a-mole.  The “solution” to one crisis begets another, while everyone ignores the issue at the root of it all: Oregon tears apart families needlessly at a rate well above the national average. 

This sick game began in earnest when news accounts exposed horrific abuse at one private agency’s group homes. They also revealed that the Oregon Department of Human Services knew about the abuse and did nothing. That investigation whacked the state into raising standards for foster homes. It wound up warehousing foster children in offices and jails. 

So — whack — a child advocacy group brought a lawsuit to prohibit the practice. DHS settled.  And children promptly wound up warehoused in hotels. Whack — there was another lawsuit and another settlement. 

Then DHS shipped children to horrible out-of-state institutions.  That was exposed, so DHS went back to warehousing children in what they called  “repurposed juvenile jails.” 

Now, the game of whack-a-mole may come full circle: …

 Read the full column in the Oregon Capital Chronicle