The first domino: There is a New York Times reporter who seems to believe everything she reads from the Manhattan Institute, an extremist "neocon" think tank that dominated New York City during the Giuliani Administration (where they did as much good for the children of New York as neocons have done for the children of Baghdad). This reporter takes the child abuse deaths that, tragically, occur in a huge city like New York every couple of weeks, and falsely labels them a "series." (It was a series, she would later say, "but not statistically.")
The second domino: The same reporter starts blaming all the deaths in this non-existent series on efforts by the city to keep families together.
The third domino: The particularly horrific case of Nixzmary Brown, occurring after the Times reporter already had begun her neocon crusade, dominates news coverage in every New York City daily. The tabloids play it straight in their news pages, but the Times, on the news side, (and the Daily News and the Post editorial pages) rush to scapegoat keeping families together.
The fourth domino: The Administration for Children's Services, instead of fighting for its own reforms, panders to the neocons; feeding a little red meat to the News editorial board by claiming its own caseworkers were doing too much to keep families together, and letting the Times reporter watch a meeting where they get tough with caseworkers who aren't tough enough on families.
The fifth domino: The message goes out from everyone from the Mayor on down, that every New Yorker should rush to report every suspicion, no matter how preposterous, to the state child abuse hotline. The pressure is particularly intense on schools.
The sixth domino: When the city Department of Investigation issues an absurd report, generalizing about the overall quality of casework based on the eleven worst cases it could find, ACS does nothing to defend its workers, embraces the report, and rushes to waste scarce dollars hiring retired police officers, just as DOI told it to.
The seventh domino: Every public message to frontline workers is the same: Take the child and run. You can take all the children you want and – while terrible things will happen to the children – your job is safe. But you'd better not have the next fatality on your caseload.
The eighth domino: Just in case the message still hasn't gotten through, ACS announces a draconian new policy to confiscate at birth children born to parents who already have lost a child to foster care.
The ninth domino: Workers do indeed get the message. The number of children taken from their parents, which was 4,800 in the year before the Times started pandering to the neocons, and ACS started giving in, reaches 7,000 per year.
The tenth domino: All that time spent taking away all those children is stolen from children in real danger – deaths of children "known to the system" set a record. But the newspaper of record never puts that record in the newspaper.
And when the dominoes come crashing down, the full weight of one of the largest child welfare agencies in the nation lands with full force on one little boy named Juan.
Juan's mother, Lillian Lucas-Dixon, did not beat him, or torture him, or sell him on the streets for drugs. As the Daily News reports, her crime was working to raise her youngest child.
She needed to get to her job as a subway station attendant. So she'd leave Juan, age 7, home alone after school until his 23-year-old sister got off work and could get to their Co-op City apartment to watch Juan.
"My choice was, do I lose my job or stay home with my son?" Lucas-Dixon, told the Daily News.
Juan mentioned this in his notebook at school. Poor Juan had no way of knowing that every school employee is on notice that their jobs are on the line if they don't call in absolutely everything to the hotline. So the school did. And, of course, Juan knows nothing about the "get tough" message caseworkers have been hearing for three years now, which explains why, instead of helping Juan's mother find after school care, they simply opted to take the child and run.
So now Juan is in a foster home of a total stranger, far from where he lived. And in a throwback to one of the most regressive practices of bad child welfare agencies, visits often are scheduled during his mother's working hours.
As to whatever happened to "Team Decisionmaking" – in which everyone is supposed to meet within 72 hours to work out solutions in cases far tougher than this one – we may never know. ACS refuses to comment on the case, even though New York is one of the rare states where, under circumstances like this, child welfare agencies generally are free to tell their side of the story.
As to the mother who is raising Juan, the Daily News reports that:
Her oldest eight have graduated or are in college or the military. The ninth is in high school. …
Her older children, now ages 15 through 29, say they always received Christmas presents, went on vacations, participated in sports and arts programs and that their mother knew the administrators and teachers at each of their schools.
"She does for 10 of us what some parents do for one," said Princess, Lucas-Dixon's 20-year-old daughter, a student at Sullivan County Community College. "I just don't get it."
Lucas-Dixon brags that none of her kids have criminal records, were pregnant as teens or abused drugs. "If I was dumb enough to have a large family, I owe it to myself and the world to produce responsible citizens," she said.
In fact, there are millions of children like Juan, left home alone every day in America by single parents, usually mothers, who have no other choice. But Juan was in the wrong place, New York City, at the wrong time, a time when every ACS worker is running scared.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
The “evidence base” for kinship care is growing
There is still another study out showing that, if you must place a child in foster care, it's far better to place that child with a relative than with strangers. This is the abstract:
The documented growth of kinship care has boldly thrust this topic into the forefront of child welfare practice. This study compares the permanency, safety, and stability outcomes for a matched group of children placed in kinship care and foster care. After controlling for demographic and placement characteristics, children in kinship care had significantly fewer placements than did children in foster care, and they were less likely to still be in care, have a new allegation of institutional abuse or neglect, be involved with the juvenile justice system, and achieve reunification. These findings call for a greater commitment by child welfare professionals, policy makers, and researchers to make kinship care a viable out-of-home placement option for children and families.
The full study is available here.
Not only does the study show that kinship care is far superior to what should be called stranger care, it also shows that unlicensed kinship care – the kind that the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" is trying to thwart in Michigan – is just as good as the licensed kind. For more on CR's war against grandparents, see Kinship Care and the making of a President.
The documented growth of kinship care has boldly thrust this topic into the forefront of child welfare practice. This study compares the permanency, safety, and stability outcomes for a matched group of children placed in kinship care and foster care. After controlling for demographic and placement characteristics, children in kinship care had significantly fewer placements than did children in foster care, and they were less likely to still be in care, have a new allegation of institutional abuse or neglect, be involved with the juvenile justice system, and achieve reunification. These findings call for a greater commitment by child welfare professionals, policy makers, and researchers to make kinship care a viable out-of-home placement option for children and families.
The full study is available here.
Not only does the study show that kinship care is far superior to what should be called stranger care, it also shows that unlicensed kinship care – the kind that the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" is trying to thwart in Michigan – is just as good as the licensed kind. For more on CR's war against grandparents, see Kinship Care and the making of a President.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Two firsts for Florida
For many years, Florida was synonymous with child welfare failure. That's not true anymore. The state has begun a remarkable turnaround, a fact made clear from two remarkable "firsts" in 2007.
One of them has been known for some time. In 2007, for the first time in nearly a decade, there was a significant statewide decline in the number of children taken from their homes. It is likely that the number declined again in 2008.
The other "first" just became public this week. In 2007, again for the first time in nearly a decade, the number of child maltreatment deaths of children previously "known to the system" in Florida declined. The number had risen from 26, the last year before the Florida foster-care panic, to 54 in 2005.
Then in 2006, the chair of the state's Child Abuse Death Review Committee, Manatee County Sheriff's Department Major Connie Shingledecker, began putting pressure on local law enforcement and mandated reporters to call the state's child abuse hotline for all sorts of deaths that used to be considered accidents, notably drowning. (See Drowning in Misinformation Jan. 6, 2008.) So while the figures shot up still further in 2006, and, on the surface, that would further support my contention that foster-care panics endanger children, they're not really comparable to previous years. But 2007 can be compared to 2006 – and in 2007, deaths of children previously known to the Florida Department of Children and Families went down. (All of the committee reports are available here).
The committee, however, doesn't seem to want you to know this. Previous Annual Reports included bar graphs showing the three-year trend in deaths "known to the system" – that was when the deaths were going up, supporting the take-the-child-and-run rhetoric that permeates these reports under Shingledecker's leadership. In contrast, the graph in the 2007 report includes the 2007 figure only.
That figures. Manatee County, where Maj. Shingledecker is in charge of child abuse investigations, has lagged behind the rest of the state in changing course and abandoning the take-the-child-and-run approach that dominated Florida for so long. Indeed, in 2007, a child was more likely to be torn from his or her parents in Manatee County than any other region of the state except one. (For details, see NCCPR's Florida Rate-of-Removal Index.)
Of course, I have often warned that one should not make too much of changes in child abuse fatalities, even in jurisdictions as huge as Florida where it might be possible to see some pattern in the numbers. So if the decline in fatalities were the only indication that Florida's change in course toward family preservation was paying off, then there would be reason to view it with extreme caution. But the decline in fatalities comes in addition to years of evidence from better measures – reabuse of children left in their own homes and foster-care recidivism – and by these measures, regions in Florida that take proportionately fewer children tend to do better than those which take more.
The likely reason: As fewer children are taken, workers have more time to find, and rescue, the children in real danger.
But Maj. Shingledecker continues to ignore the lessons from her own data. For instance, this year's report from her committee repeats a recommendation to create a special group the real purpose of which seems to be to intimidate the state's judges. The idea is that if a judge dared to disagree with the state Department of Children and Families, and allowed a child to stay in her or his own home – or did anything else less restrictive than DCF asked for – and then the child died, the committee would "review" the judge's decision.
In fact, the far bigger problem is judges routinely rubber-stamping DCF when the agency seeks to remove a child or keep that child out of the home. As a result, the child may bounce from foster home to foster home, emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone. The child might be abused, or even die, in foster care. Yet Maj. Shingledecker has no interest in setting up a committee to review those decisions.
So now that we have still more evidence that Florida is keeping children safer as it reduces entries into foster care, there is one recommendation for improving child safety that should take precedence over all others: Ignore those, like Maj. Shingledecker, who remain wedded to the failed policies of the past.
One of them has been known for some time. In 2007, for the first time in nearly a decade, there was a significant statewide decline in the number of children taken from their homes. It is likely that the number declined again in 2008.
The other "first" just became public this week. In 2007, again for the first time in nearly a decade, the number of child maltreatment deaths of children previously "known to the system" in Florida declined. The number had risen from 26, the last year before the Florida foster-care panic, to 54 in 2005.
Then in 2006, the chair of the state's Child Abuse Death Review Committee, Manatee County Sheriff's Department Major Connie Shingledecker, began putting pressure on local law enforcement and mandated reporters to call the state's child abuse hotline for all sorts of deaths that used to be considered accidents, notably drowning. (See Drowning in Misinformation Jan. 6, 2008.) So while the figures shot up still further in 2006, and, on the surface, that would further support my contention that foster-care panics endanger children, they're not really comparable to previous years. But 2007 can be compared to 2006 – and in 2007, deaths of children previously known to the Florida Department of Children and Families went down. (All of the committee reports are available here).
The committee, however, doesn't seem to want you to know this. Previous Annual Reports included bar graphs showing the three-year trend in deaths "known to the system" – that was when the deaths were going up, supporting the take-the-child-and-run rhetoric that permeates these reports under Shingledecker's leadership. In contrast, the graph in the 2007 report includes the 2007 figure only.
That figures. Manatee County, where Maj. Shingledecker is in charge of child abuse investigations, has lagged behind the rest of the state in changing course and abandoning the take-the-child-and-run approach that dominated Florida for so long. Indeed, in 2007, a child was more likely to be torn from his or her parents in Manatee County than any other region of the state except one. (For details, see NCCPR's Florida Rate-of-Removal Index.)
Of course, I have often warned that one should not make too much of changes in child abuse fatalities, even in jurisdictions as huge as Florida where it might be possible to see some pattern in the numbers. So if the decline in fatalities were the only indication that Florida's change in course toward family preservation was paying off, then there would be reason to view it with extreme caution. But the decline in fatalities comes in addition to years of evidence from better measures – reabuse of children left in their own homes and foster-care recidivism – and by these measures, regions in Florida that take proportionately fewer children tend to do better than those which take more.
The likely reason: As fewer children are taken, workers have more time to find, and rescue, the children in real danger.
But Maj. Shingledecker continues to ignore the lessons from her own data. For instance, this year's report from her committee repeats a recommendation to create a special group the real purpose of which seems to be to intimidate the state's judges. The idea is that if a judge dared to disagree with the state Department of Children and Families, and allowed a child to stay in her or his own home – or did anything else less restrictive than DCF asked for – and then the child died, the committee would "review" the judge's decision.
In fact, the far bigger problem is judges routinely rubber-stamping DCF when the agency seeks to remove a child or keep that child out of the home. As a result, the child may bounce from foster home to foster home, emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone. The child might be abused, or even die, in foster care. Yet Maj. Shingledecker has no interest in setting up a committee to review those decisions.
So now that we have still more evidence that Florida is keeping children safer as it reduces entries into foster care, there is one recommendation for improving child safety that should take precedence over all others: Ignore those, like Maj. Shingledecker, who remain wedded to the failed policies of the past.
Friday, January 9, 2009
If you really want to control entitlements, Mr. President-Elect …
…I know a great place to start.
President-elect Obama says he's going to take a long, hard look at federal spending on "entitlements" – programs for which spending is automatic, and spent on every American who fits eligibility criteria. Social Security and Medicare are classic examples of entitlements.
Entitlement spending takes up a large part of the budget, but usually such spending at least does some good. Things like Social Security and Medicare are expensive, worthwhile entitlements.
But there is at least one entitlement that actually does harm: That is the entitlement states get for throwing children into foster care. For every eligible child (slightly fewer than half of foster children nationwide are "eligible") the federal government picks up anywhere from 50 percent to 83 percent of the tab; it varies from state to state. But there is nothing like that for safe, proven alternatives to taking children from their parents. That's the key reason why federal spending on foster care vastly outstrips federal spending on better alternatives.
And there is a possibility that President-Elect Obama may inadvertently make this worse.
The amount that states get back for foster care is linked to the amount they get for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poorest Americans. So, for example, if State X is reimbursed 70 cents for every dollar spent on Medicaid. It also gets 70 cents back for every dollar spent on foster care for an "eligible" child. As the Medicaid rate rises or falls, the reimbursement for foster care (and also some adoption assistance) rises or falls with it.
Some child welfare groups expect that a new economic stimulus package will include an increase in this "match rate." So that state that was getting back 70 cents on the dollar might get back 75 cents or 80 cents on the dollar. Such an increase for Medicaid would be good. But if Congress does this, the reimbursement for foster care also will rise by the same amount, automatically, unless Congress acts to apply the increase to Medicaid only.
And that's exactly what the new President should ask Congress should do – apply any increase to Medicaid only. Then the additional dollars that would have gone to foster care should be directed instead to family preservation. It would be a tragedy if one of the new president's first acts actually increased the already huge financial incentive for states to take children needlessly from their homes.
But President Obama should not stop there. He should end the open-ended entitlement for foster care entirely. As things stand now, safe, proven alternatives to foster care cost less in total dollars, but throwing a child in foster care sometimes can cost a state less – because the federal government picks up so much of the tab. That is insane.
The way to restore sanity to the system is to estimate the amount that states would get under this system, and then give it to them as a flat grant, indexed to inflation. But instead of limiting the funds to foster care, let states use the money for alternatives as well.
Suddenly, billions of dollars previously available to states only for foster care also would be available for better options. Of course, it couldn't all go to alternatives – some children really need to be in foster care. But the flat grant should be structured so that, as foster care is reduced, the grant does not go down – the states get to keep the savings, as long as they plow the money into more help for families. That's the carrot. The stick is that states that experience foster-care panics, huge sudden surges in needless removal of children, will have to foot the entire bill for those panics. And that's the whole idea. States might be a little more reluctant to tear apart families needlessly if they had to pick up the entire tab.
This also would be a great chance for the new President to show that he means what he says about bipartisanship. Because this particular idea came from the Bush Administration. They proposed to offer it on a purely voluntary basis. But the foster care-industrial complex, the network of child welfare agencies with a huge vested interest in keeping children in foster care, and its dutiful allies, made sure that got nowhere. Instead, the administration offered a similar plan to some states and localities in the form of a "waiver" from federal regulations.
Only one state took them up on it: Florida. And it's made a huge difference.
The waiver is one of the key reasons that Florida, once a national symbol of child welfare failure, has begun a significant turnaround. In Florida alone, more than $100 million a year formerly restricted to foster care now is available for alternatives. And that's one reason why, in 2007, Florida saw its first significant decline in entries into care in nearly a decade. Now, with Florida hit particularly hard by the collapsing economy, the progress is in danger. But while the waiver won't completely make up for state cutbacks, it will help cushion the blow.
In California, where individual counties run child welfare, Los Angeles and Alameda Counties accepted waivers.
Michigan, on the other hand, won't get that cushion. Michigan also accepted the waiver. The state Department of Human Services bragged about it publicly, and it was the subject of news accounts. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, with no public announcement, it was gone. At the very last minute, someone at DHS changed her or his mind, and the waiver was dead. It does not appear that the agency didn't even had the guts to explain who did it or why.
Michigan's fiscal cowardice leaves its children entirely at the mercy of an economy that probably is collapsing faster in the home state of the American auto industry than anywhere else.
But this is one time the federal government could offer a "bailout" that won't cost any money. All it has to do is end the foster care entitlement and require that the other 49 states do what only Florida and those two California counties had the guts to do on their own.
President-elect Obama says he's going to take a long, hard look at federal spending on "entitlements" – programs for which spending is automatic, and spent on every American who fits eligibility criteria. Social Security and Medicare are classic examples of entitlements.
Entitlement spending takes up a large part of the budget, but usually such spending at least does some good. Things like Social Security and Medicare are expensive, worthwhile entitlements.
But there is at least one entitlement that actually does harm: That is the entitlement states get for throwing children into foster care. For every eligible child (slightly fewer than half of foster children nationwide are "eligible") the federal government picks up anywhere from 50 percent to 83 percent of the tab; it varies from state to state. But there is nothing like that for safe, proven alternatives to taking children from their parents. That's the key reason why federal spending on foster care vastly outstrips federal spending on better alternatives.
And there is a possibility that President-Elect Obama may inadvertently make this worse.
The amount that states get back for foster care is linked to the amount they get for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poorest Americans. So, for example, if State X is reimbursed 70 cents for every dollar spent on Medicaid. It also gets 70 cents back for every dollar spent on foster care for an "eligible" child. As the Medicaid rate rises or falls, the reimbursement for foster care (and also some adoption assistance) rises or falls with it.
Some child welfare groups expect that a new economic stimulus package will include an increase in this "match rate." So that state that was getting back 70 cents on the dollar might get back 75 cents or 80 cents on the dollar. Such an increase for Medicaid would be good. But if Congress does this, the reimbursement for foster care also will rise by the same amount, automatically, unless Congress acts to apply the increase to Medicaid only.
And that's exactly what the new President should ask Congress should do – apply any increase to Medicaid only. Then the additional dollars that would have gone to foster care should be directed instead to family preservation. It would be a tragedy if one of the new president's first acts actually increased the already huge financial incentive for states to take children needlessly from their homes.
But President Obama should not stop there. He should end the open-ended entitlement for foster care entirely. As things stand now, safe, proven alternatives to foster care cost less in total dollars, but throwing a child in foster care sometimes can cost a state less – because the federal government picks up so much of the tab. That is insane.
The way to restore sanity to the system is to estimate the amount that states would get under this system, and then give it to them as a flat grant, indexed to inflation. But instead of limiting the funds to foster care, let states use the money for alternatives as well.
Suddenly, billions of dollars previously available to states only for foster care also would be available for better options. Of course, it couldn't all go to alternatives – some children really need to be in foster care. But the flat grant should be structured so that, as foster care is reduced, the grant does not go down – the states get to keep the savings, as long as they plow the money into more help for families. That's the carrot. The stick is that states that experience foster-care panics, huge sudden surges in needless removal of children, will have to foot the entire bill for those panics. And that's the whole idea. States might be a little more reluctant to tear apart families needlessly if they had to pick up the entire tab.
This also would be a great chance for the new President to show that he means what he says about bipartisanship. Because this particular idea came from the Bush Administration. They proposed to offer it on a purely voluntary basis. But the foster care-industrial complex, the network of child welfare agencies with a huge vested interest in keeping children in foster care, and its dutiful allies, made sure that got nowhere. Instead, the administration offered a similar plan to some states and localities in the form of a "waiver" from federal regulations.
Only one state took them up on it: Florida. And it's made a huge difference.
The waiver is one of the key reasons that Florida, once a national symbol of child welfare failure, has begun a significant turnaround. In Florida alone, more than $100 million a year formerly restricted to foster care now is available for alternatives. And that's one reason why, in 2007, Florida saw its first significant decline in entries into care in nearly a decade. Now, with Florida hit particularly hard by the collapsing economy, the progress is in danger. But while the waiver won't completely make up for state cutbacks, it will help cushion the blow.
In California, where individual counties run child welfare, Los Angeles and Alameda Counties accepted waivers.
Michigan, on the other hand, won't get that cushion. Michigan also accepted the waiver. The state Department of Human Services bragged about it publicly, and it was the subject of news accounts. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, with no public announcement, it was gone. At the very last minute, someone at DHS changed her or his mind, and the waiver was dead. It does not appear that the agency didn't even had the guts to explain who did it or why.
Michigan's fiscal cowardice leaves its children entirely at the mercy of an economy that probably is collapsing faster in the home state of the American auto industry than anywhere else.
But this is one time the federal government could offer a "bailout" that won't cost any money. All it has to do is end the foster care entitlement and require that the other 49 states do what only Florida and those two California counties had the guts to do on their own.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Britain, land of sunshine
Long ago, when I was in journalism school, I was taught how fortunate American reporters are when they have to cover trials. Be glad you're not a reporter in Britain, we were told, where draconian laws keep the press out and bar reporters from publishing a fair proportion of what they manage to find out anyway.
But in one sphere of justice, Britain is about to leap ahead of most of the United States. Starting in April, reporters will be allowed to cover Family Court proceedings, and accused parents will be allowed to talk about their cases, and provide documents. Journalists will not be allowed to name the families, however. That will leave Britain behind the 17 American states that allow reporters into these hearings – but ahead of all the rest.
Of those states which have opened courts, not one has closed them again – even though courts often were opened at first as pilot projects or other experiments with "sunset" provisions. The courts have remained open because the Chicken Littles were wrong. None of the supposed harms to children predicted by critics actually happened, and over and over again, the critics became converts to openness. There are a variety of reasons for that, and they are discussed in detail in NCCPR's Due Process Agenda. See also the outstanding Pittsburgh Post Gazette series "Open Justice." And while opening courts has not worked miracles, it has improved the quality of justice in some systems, and brought justice to individual families in others.
And yet, no matter how many times states succeed, every time the issue arises anew in the United States, the same critics – mostly people in the system who like wielding absolute power in secret – raise the same hypothetical scare scenarios.
The opening of Britain's Family Courts was due in part to a concerted campaign by British newspapers, notably The Times of London. (In contrast, some American newspapers, normally so quick to wrap themselves in the First Amendment, have been surprisingly sanguine about this issue.)
Among the stories told by The Times – to the limited extent allowed:
● A 17-year-old who approached the newspaper, wanting to tell his story. His sister had been taken, wrongly, before he was born. His mother was denied all chance to see her, then parental rights were terminated because the child had "bonded" with the foster mother. The boy almost was taken as well. But he couldn't say more because, as The Times reported,
"[H]e cannot be named until his 18th birthday and his social services referral sheet, which nearly separated him from his biological mother, cannot be published … {He] told The Times: "It's disgusting. It's my life and I want to talk about it, I want people to know so that maybe this sort of thing can be avoided in the future. It took me ages to get my court documents and even though they're mine, I can't make them public. Social services just get to cover things up and it's wrong."
● And then there's the case of the six-year-old who had a nosebleed. His father wiped his nose and took him to school. But his teacher noticed some dried blood. When the teacher asked what happened, the boy named his father and made a wiping motion. The father was exiled from the home for months. They were going to be reunited, but ultimately both the six-year-old and his younger brother were taken from both parents because, during supervised visits, the parents supposedly showed "inconsistent emotional warmth." (Yes, their system is just like ours.)
Of course, the British child welfare establishment is no happier about the prospect of accountability than its American counterpart; they claim it's not a matter of secrecy, just privacy. But as Times columnist Camilla Cavendish, a reporter well aware that the errors go in all directions, wrote:
[I]f you are a parent wrongly accused of abusing your child, you do not want the kind of privacy which gags you from discussing your case. If you are a child tortured by a relative under the nose of the state, you do not want the kind of secrecy which protects professionals from scrutiny.
In explaining his decision, Britain's Minister of Justice, Jack Straw, said that "Justice must be seen to be done."
But I still think Judith Kaye, who recently retired as Chief Judge of New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, put it best. Said Judge Kaye: "Sunshine is good for children."
But in one sphere of justice, Britain is about to leap ahead of most of the United States. Starting in April, reporters will be allowed to cover Family Court proceedings, and accused parents will be allowed to talk about their cases, and provide documents. Journalists will not be allowed to name the families, however. That will leave Britain behind the 17 American states that allow reporters into these hearings – but ahead of all the rest.
Of those states which have opened courts, not one has closed them again – even though courts often were opened at first as pilot projects or other experiments with "sunset" provisions. The courts have remained open because the Chicken Littles were wrong. None of the supposed harms to children predicted by critics actually happened, and over and over again, the critics became converts to openness. There are a variety of reasons for that, and they are discussed in detail in NCCPR's Due Process Agenda. See also the outstanding Pittsburgh Post Gazette series "Open Justice." And while opening courts has not worked miracles, it has improved the quality of justice in some systems, and brought justice to individual families in others.
And yet, no matter how many times states succeed, every time the issue arises anew in the United States, the same critics – mostly people in the system who like wielding absolute power in secret – raise the same hypothetical scare scenarios.
The opening of Britain's Family Courts was due in part to a concerted campaign by British newspapers, notably The Times of London. (In contrast, some American newspapers, normally so quick to wrap themselves in the First Amendment, have been surprisingly sanguine about this issue.)
Among the stories told by The Times – to the limited extent allowed:
● A 17-year-old who approached the newspaper, wanting to tell his story. His sister had been taken, wrongly, before he was born. His mother was denied all chance to see her, then parental rights were terminated because the child had "bonded" with the foster mother. The boy almost was taken as well. But he couldn't say more because, as The Times reported,
"[H]e cannot be named until his 18th birthday and his social services referral sheet, which nearly separated him from his biological mother, cannot be published … {He] told The Times: "It's disgusting. It's my life and I want to talk about it, I want people to know so that maybe this sort of thing can be avoided in the future. It took me ages to get my court documents and even though they're mine, I can't make them public. Social services just get to cover things up and it's wrong."
● And then there's the case of the six-year-old who had a nosebleed. His father wiped his nose and took him to school. But his teacher noticed some dried blood. When the teacher asked what happened, the boy named his father and made a wiping motion. The father was exiled from the home for months. They were going to be reunited, but ultimately both the six-year-old and his younger brother were taken from both parents because, during supervised visits, the parents supposedly showed "inconsistent emotional warmth." (Yes, their system is just like ours.)
Of course, the British child welfare establishment is no happier about the prospect of accountability than its American counterpart; they claim it's not a matter of secrecy, just privacy. But as Times columnist Camilla Cavendish, a reporter well aware that the errors go in all directions, wrote:
[I]f you are a parent wrongly accused of abusing your child, you do not want the kind of privacy which gags you from discussing your case. If you are a child tortured by a relative under the nose of the state, you do not want the kind of secrecy which protects professionals from scrutiny.
In explaining his decision, Britain's Minister of Justice, Jack Straw, said that "Justice must be seen to be done."
But I still think Judith Kaye, who recently retired as Chief Judge of New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, put it best. Said Judge Kaye: "Sunshine is good for children."
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Self-justifying claptrap from Texas CPS
As a work of fiction, it's not bad. As a report, the document released today by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services concerning the raid on the FLDS compound last April is nothing but self-justifying claptrap. Indeed it is frightening that the parent agency of Texas Child Protective Services apparently has learned nothing from all the harm it inflicted on hundreds of innocent children.
For starters, the report says that 12 children were abused by FLDS. In contrast, more than 400 children were abused by Texas CPS. The act of tearing these children from everyone they know and love was abusive in itself – some of these children probably never will recover from the trauma.
The abuse was compounded by the hideous conditions at the kiddie-Gitmo where the children and their mothers were interned during the first days after the raid. There is an Orwellian cast to the report's repeated claims about keeping the children safe, healthy and comfortable. These claims are directly contradicted by the only independent witnesses to the children's internment – 11 therapists contracted by the state itself. For anyone who has forgotten, those statements are available here.
In the case of the 263 other children Texas CPS claims were abused, that means that they were allowed to live in households where underage marriages allegedly took place. But that problem could have been solved by removing the alleged abusers. And, indeed, criminal prosecutions now are underway. As we said at the outset, there never was a need to take these children from their mothers and traumatize them through their needless internment. That is made clear by the fact that all of the FLDS children except one is home, and only 15 are even under state supervision. What happened? Mostly, the mothers took a couple of parenting classes. Surely that could have been accomplished without traumatizing all those children with needless foster care in the first place.
But even if one were to assume that every single one of the 275 children Texas CPS claimed were "abused" needed to be taken – a claim I would argue is preposterous – that brings the total to 275. That still leaves 174 children who, Texas CPS now effectively admits, were taken for no reason whatsoever.
In effect, Texas CPS has admitted to engaging in child abuse on a massive scale.
And there is no acknowledgement at all of the misleading statements CPS made throughout the children's ordeal. Remember when Texas CPS implied that there were massive amounts of physical abuse at the FLDS compound – all those claims about high numbers of broken bones? Buried in an appendix to the the report is the fact that not one case of physical abuse was substantiated – and 388 allegations of physical abuse were "ruled out" – meaning CPS actually found the families innocent.
CPS also continues to take its "expert witness" Dr. Bruce Perry, out of context. They still don't acknowledge that even Perry said the youngest children did not need to be separated from their mothers. Perry himself has a lot to account for. He stood silent throughout the ordeal he helped to start.
Perhaps worst of all, Texas CPS falls back on the same all-purpose excuse it used throughout the FLDS case – explaining that the procedures followed are what they always do. They're right about that. And, in fact, the procedures are standard in most of the rest of the country as well.
And that means, away from the public spotlight, thousands of Texas children, and children in most other states, must endure the same needless trauma, the same state-sanctioned child abuse, that was endured by the FLDS children – with nobody watching out for them, and nobody speaking up for them.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
More families vindicated
Out of more than 400 children torn from their families at the YFZ ranch in April, only 19 now remain under any kind of court supervision. Only one child has been returned to foster care.
In every other case, the families are entirely free of oversight by Texas CPS. The only difference is all the harm done to the children by the ordeal CPS put them through – first by tearing them from everyone they knew and loved, then by interning them in dreadful conditions in a kiddie-Guantanamo, and then by scattering them around the state, until appellate courts intervened. Even if one believes some of these children really were abused, or really might be abused someday, it should be obvious by now that Texas' exercise in mass child confiscation did nothing to protect those children. It only left some of them traumatized – and highly unlikely to tell authorities if, at some time in the future, they really are abused.
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