NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending November 17, 2020

● Why in the world would progressive child advocates be urging the incoming Biden Administration to keep in place the leadership team in the federal government’s Children’s Bureau?  Vivek Sankaran explains in this column for The Imprint.  Also, check out the interview with Sankaran on the Imprint’s podcast.  It starts at 29:46 in.

 ● Why would a progressive child advocate take part in a podcast produced by a conservative group?  Because child welfare crosses ideological lines in unusual ways.  Listen to NCCPR’s take on child welfare here.

 Two big developments in New York City concerning racial bias when hospitals test patients for substance use – tests that then may form the sole basis for calling in false allegations of child abuse:

 ● WNYC Public Radio reports that “New York City’s public hospitals will end a longstanding practice of drug testing pregnant patients without their explicit written consent, a policy that advocates say leads to unnecessary investigations and perpetuates racial disparities in the child welfare system.”

 ● And New York City’s Human Rights Commission has launched an investigation into whether three prestigious private hospitals are discriminating against Black and Latinx patients when they decide whom to test for drug use. The Imprint has a story about the investigation.

 ● No doubt, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services will throw up its hands and claim they can’t do anything about hospitals do, or what the state does – because buck-passing is what ACS does best.  In fact, ACS has a lot of influence over what hospitals do and some influence over the state.  And one thing ACS could do on its own is implement a true Family Assessment Response program (also called differential response), in which workers are sent out to offer voluntary help instead of an investigation.  But the ACS version of Family Assessment Response is essentially a big fake-out. The Imprint has a story about that, too.

 ● NCCPR has updated the Big City Rate-of-Removal Index.  On this blog I have a summary of what’s changed: Philadelphia gets a little better, Los Angeles gets worse, and the “professional kidnappers” are hard at work in Phoenix.

 ● One of the reasons Philadelphia has gotten a little better is explained in this story from Kensington Voice – and the lessons can be applied everywhere.

 ● Also in Pennsylvania – but applicable almost everywhere: Community Legal Services of Philadelphia has issued a report on the enormous harm done to children by the state’s central registry of so-called child abusers. As the report points out:

 Blocking off the ability of parents and caregivers to access employment in high-growth fields only serves to hurt the very children the child abuse registry is supposed to protect in the first place. The child abuse registry thus exacerbates child poverty and places vulnerable families in even more precarious circumstances. And all too often, placement on the registry is based on faulty or incomplete investigations, or on the caseworkers’ misapplication of evidence or misunderstanding of statutory definitions. In many cases, racial, cultural, or economic differences create an additional bias that factors into a caseworker’s determination of whether child abuse or neglect occurred.

In a column about the report for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, Janet Ginzberg and Saadiqa Kumanyika of Community Legal Services write:

 The investigator is the “judge and jury.” Without any hearing, they decide whether there was substantial evidence of child abuse and, if so,  they “indicate” the report, placing the accused on the registry. The criteria used to make these determinations is often unreliable and heavily influenced by the investigator’s personal biases.

 ● With the federal Indian Child Welfare Act under attack, New Mexico Political Report has a story about lawmakers moving to incorporate its provisions into state law.

 ● What happens when the “helicopter parent” is a school? One school refuses to let parents decide if their 9, 10 or 11-year old children are old enough to walk home alone (because, in a time of COVID-19, what could be safer than all going together in a school bus, right?)  Lenore Skenazy writes in Reason about the need for legislation to allow parents to give their children reasonable independence.

● And we end this week where we started: With a commentary from the head of the Children’s Bureau, Jerry Milner on the Rethinking Foster Care blog.

Big city child welfare: Philadelphia gets a little better, Los Angeles gets worse, and the “professional kidnappers” are hard at work in Phoenix

In addition to tracking the propensity of states to take children from their families, NCCPR does a separate index for America’s top ten cities and their surrounding counties.  These ten communities alone account for nearly one in eight children torn from their families in America each year. NCCPR has just updated its Big City Rate of Removal Index.  With one exception, Chicago, the data are from no later than the end of 2019, so they are not affected by COVID-19. The full Index is available here.

Here are the highlights:

Activism gets results in Philadelphia 

After NCCPR and other advocates spent years of hammering home the message, media in Philadelphia are paying attention to the fact that the city long has been an extreme outlier, tearing apart families at either the worst or second worst rate among big cities.  That, plus activism by everyone from Councilmember David Oh, to Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, to the grassroots activists at DHS Give Us Back Our Children to other groups of families who are fighting back is making a difference. 

Philadelphia is still an outlier when it comes to taking away children, but it’s less of an outlier. 

In 2019 DHS took away 399 fewer children than in 2018.  Because Philadelphia got a little better, and Los Angeles got significantly worse, in 2019, Philadelphia took children at the third or fourth highest rate – it’s least bad showing since NCCPR started compiling these data. 

It’s important to remember, however, that the communities with the four highest rates of removal, including Philadelphia, are probably significantly higher than the remaining six. Philadelphia still takes away children at double the rate of New York City and Chicago.  

The decline in entries also is consistent with a similar rate of decline in the number of children in foster care on any given day reported in this excellent story from Broke in Philly.  The story focuses on the single most important reform Philadelphia can make to continue this improvement: expanding high quality interdisciplinary legal representation for families. 

The key now is to keep the pressure on. That’s going to happen. NCCPR is proud to be represented on a special committee of the Philadelphia City Council, created at the urging of Councilmember Oh and co-chaired by Oh and Councilmember Cindy Bass, examining child separation. 

Los Angeles: from bad to worse 

In part because Philadelphia got better, but mostly because Los Angeles County got worse, that system replaces Philadelphia in second place when it comes to family separation.  Both cities have long been outliers, and the naming of Bobby Cagle to run the county Department of Children and Family Services – fresh from presiding over a foster care panic in Georgia – did not augur well. 

To Cagle’s credit, when COVID-19 struck he did not impose a blanket ban on family visits – unlike many other child welfare agency chiefs.  But the data show that, when it comes to actual performance in sparing children the trauma of needless foster care, Cagle has lived down to his reputation. 

Arizona: Everyone got the message on those t-shirts 

You may recall that Arizona is the state where most of the workers in one field office thought it would be a great idea to dress up in t-shirts that said “Professional kidnapper” on one side and “do you know where your children are?” on the other. 

Those workers apparently were fired – but the data suggest that’s only because they said it out loud.  Among America’s biggest cities, number one for tearing apart families is Phoenix and surrounding Maricopa County. 

Not only is Phoenix the worst, no other big city even comes close. 

Even when you factor in rates of child poverty the rate of removal in Phoenix was: 

25% higher than Los Angeles

50% higher than Philadelphia

More than double the average for the ten cities and their surrounding counties.

More than triple the rate in New York City and Chicago. 

And, by the way, the rate of removal in metropolitan Tucson is even worse than  Phoenix.

Yes, it was only some workers in one field office who wore the t-shirts. But all over Arizona, the state’s child welfare agency is practicing what those t-shirts preached. 

Making all children less safe 

But hey, inflicting all that trauma on innocent families is worth it because at least in Phoenix there is never a child abuse horror story, right? No child “known to the system” ever dies because caseworkers are being “cautious” as they run around “erring on the side of the child” by tearing children from all they know and love; isn’t that so?  Same thing with L.A. and Philadelphia, correct? 

Didn’t think so. 

That’s because a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare so overloads systems with false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which poverty is confused with neglect that workers have less time to find children in real danger.  So in addition to exposing children to the enormous emotional trauma of needless foster care, and the high rate of abuse in foster care, the approach taken by cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles and, still, Philadelphia – and most of the rest of America – makes all children less safe.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending November 10, 2020

● You’ve probably heard both sides of the debate over that Supreme Court case involving religious agencies seeking the right to discriminate against LGBT foster parents.  But there’s a third side of the story. Prof. Nancy Polikoff writes about what almost everybody is missing in this column for The Imprint.

●  "White families and more well-off families do not have to carry the fear that asking for help will destroy their families."  That’s from New York City Council testimony from the parents at Rise.  Read their full testimony here. 

● In Nebraska, a state with a long, ugly track record of tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation, WOWT-TV reports on one grandmother’s desperate fight to save her grandchild from foster care.  As the grandmother points out: “Why would you bounce her from foster home to foster home? Why do you feel the system should raise this beautiful child who has issues when she has loving grandparents." 

● In another state with a horrible track record of family destruction, Arizona, the state is using a supposed increase in child abuse due to COVID-19 to do what it always does: Take the child and run.  NCCPR’s take is included in this story from the Arizona Daily Star. 

● In the 1990s, Congress passed three racist laws.  Many on the Left have had second thoughts about two of them; the welfare law and the crime law. But even as we face a racial justice reckoning, they remain silent – or worse – about the third.  On the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog I write about why it’s time to repeal the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. 

● I’ve often written that the solution to the problems of journalism is more journalism. The horrible journalism of the Miami Herald set off a foster-care panic in Florida.  Good journalism from the USA TODAY Network in Florida exposed the harm that panic has done to children.  I have a column in the Florida Times-Union about what do to about it. 

● Speaking of good journalism, the first two episodes of Do No Harm, the podcast from Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News about the harm done to families by some “child abuse pediatricians” are available now.

● The latest issue of Children’s Bureau Express includes several notable articles. 

From Sharon L. McDaniel founder, president, and chief executive officer of A Second Chance, Inc. who writes: 

Poverty, racism, and violence can threaten a family regardless of how resilient, stable, and confident they are. Reimagining child welfare means challenging and disrupting what has become the embedded tradition and culture of racism in policy and practice. 

From Kevin Campbell, Model Author of FamilyFinding, who writes: 

The emerging worldwide scientific consensus is clear; operating a foster care system makes its own contributions to distress and disease across the life course. Kinship care provides the best alternative to substitute care for children who cannot live safely with a parent. Children who can remain with a parent have the best long-term health and mental health outcomes. Institutions for children are disruptive to childhood development and harmful to health. We must continue the process of closing them. 

And from the Associate Commissioner for the Children’s Bureau, Jerry Milner and his Special Assistant David Kelly who write – well, you saw some of what they wrote if you read the ASFA column discussed above.

NCCPR in Florida Times-Union on fixing Florida foster care

I have often written that the solution to the problems of journalism is more journalism.

 Six years ago, bad journalism from the Miami Herald set off a foster-care panic in Florida.  (You can read about how bad here.)  Last month, good journalism from Gannett’s Florida newspapers and USA Today documented how Florida’s most vulnerable children are paying the price.  (And they didn’t flinch from saying that the Herald stories triggered it.) UPDATE: December 18, 2020: They published even more powerful stories this week.

And on Sunday, the Florida Times-Union published our response to the stories:

Investigation shines spotlight on child welfare reform

 Decades ago, in Illinois, the death of a child “known to the system” led to a surge in the number of children taken from their parents. With every caseworker terrified to have the next horror story on her or his caseload, they flooded the system with children who never needed to be taken from their homes.

 As a result, one advocate said, the child welfare system became “Like a laboratory experiment to produce the abuse of children.”

 Thanks to the outstanding stories published in the Times-Union and elsewhere by reporters for the USA TODAY Network, we know the laboratory didn’t close – it just moved to Florida.  Their reporting documents how the foster-care panic triggered six years ago by reckless scapegoating of family preservation for child abuse deaths led to thousands of children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love.

 Read the full column here: https://bit.ly/3lhlFlH

ASFA: The racist child welfare law from the 1990s that almost no one talks about*

*-UPDATE, DECEMBER, 2022: Until now. In 2022, upon the occasion of ASFA's 25th anniversary, a lot of people wrote about the harm it's done.  Here's a sample.

It’s time to repeal the law that turns child welfare into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.

           Pandering to our worst instincts about race and class is nothing new.  In the mid-1990s Congress passed three laws rooted in racism. It wasn’t just Republicans. All of the laws had the enthusiastic support of Democratic President Bill Clinton.

           The three laws combined devastated poor Black communities.  Many on the Left have now figured that out – when it comes to two of those laws, a 1994 “crime law” that accelerated America’s love affair with mass incarceration, and the 1996 welfare law that ripped away financial support for impoverished, struggling Americans.  Both laws, of course, disproportionately affect people of color.

           But there was a third bill, equally racist in its origins, equally harmful in its effects, that has largely evaded this recent reckoning.  That’s no surprise. It’s one more example of the classic problem of much of the American Left: Many of my fellow liberals will renounce everything they claim to believe in if you just whisper the words “child abuse” in their ears.

           That’s how we got the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA).       

How we got stuck with ASFA

           A series of trends coincided to bring us to ASFA.  One, of course, was the fearmongering and racism that pervaded 1990s politics. This was the era when House Speaker Newt Gingrich championed both ending welfare and putting poor people’s children into orphanages.

           Second was fear on the part of America’s foster-care industrial complex that the federal funds gravy train might be ending.  In 1993, for the first time, Congress put a little bit of real money behind help to keep families together. It was still a pittance compared with the giant open-ended entitlement for foster care, but suddenly scare stories started turning up in newspapers around the country about children left at home supposedly because of a fanatical desire to preserve families.

           One story in particular captured enormous national attention. The Chicago Tribune scapegoated family preservation for the death of a little boy named Joseph Wallace. Not only was that untrue, a family preservation worker nearly saved Joseph’s life.  The Tribune figured this out – eventually. But by then it was too late.  Even though the internet was in its infancy, for a variety of reasons, discussed in detail here, the story went viral. 

          

 Third, the child welfare establishment spread a related myth: They claimed that an earlier federal law, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, requiring “reasonable efforts” – and nothing more -  to keep families together, supposedly led to some children being left in dangerous homes and other children languishing in foster care.

This, too, is false. The problem of children languishing in foster care had been documented for decades before 1980; it was a major focus of the first story I wrote about foster care in my earlier career as a journalist – in 1976.

The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 was passed to prevent children from languishing in foster care.  But it did nothing to change the federal financial incentives that encourage foster care and discourage better alternatives. And the reasonable efforts clause – to this day – has never been enforced.

For example: Because federal funding is linked to claiming that reasonable efforts have been made, in Michigan 40% of judges admitted to lying and certifying such efforts had been made when they didn’t even believe it themselves.

So after a brief decline in the early 1980s, the number of children taken from their parents kept right on increasing in almost every year after that law was passed.  And though the federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment reports show that known cases of child abuse peaked in 1993, entries into foster care still kept going up. 

The reason children languished in foster care was not reasonable efforts, but the lack of reasonable efforts.  That's why children continue to languish in foster care today.  There were no efforts to curb needless removal and once in foster care the children were filed away and forgotten as overwhelmed caseworkers rushed on to the next case. 

Don’t say the O word!

             Meanwhile, in 1994, soon-to-be House Speaker Gingrich made that notorious proposal to force poor people’s children into orphanages.  Republican polling guru Frank Luntz sent House Republicans a memo telling them they could get what they wanted – if they stopped using the O word.

So suddenly, the Republicans started framing the issue in terms of adoption.  They told us millions of childless middle-class Americans were desperate to adopt foster children, but a Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy supposedly was trapping the children in foster care.

A lot of Republicans knew better, but they didn’t care; they were fine with orphanages.  For them, ASFA was the backdoor to the orphanage. A lot of Democrats were suckered by all the treacly talk about adoption.  ASFA passed nearly unanimously.

By 2000, one of the authors of ASFA, the late Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania - and a supporter of orphanagesw -- couldn’t resist a little gloating.  As he explained to the New York City publication Child Welfare Watch:

Initially, this was just supposed to be a safe families bill, not really an adoption bill at all. The adoption component was a way of sanitizing the bill, to make it more appealing to a broader group of people. Adoption is a very popular concept in the country right now. [Emphasis added.] 

What does ASFA do?

● ASFA blows huge holes in what little was left of the “reasonable efforts” requirement.         

● With limited exceptions, ASFA demands that states move to terminate children’s rights to their parents (which is what “termination of parental rights” really means) for any child in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months -  regardless of whether the child should ever have been taken at all, and regardless of whether the passage of time was the parents’ fault. 

As Jerry Milner, Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau in the Department of Health and Human Services and his Special Assistant David Kelly write in the latest issue of Children’s Bureau Express:

 In more recent times in public child welfare—with the passage of laws that place short time limits on efforts to help families regain custody of their children—we have created more legal orphans than children entering care without living parents. The underlying philosophies behind such laws placed value in getting tough on parents facing difficulties and has disproportionately affected poor parents, Black parents, and Native parents. We have fed a culture of blame.

 This should give us considerable pause.

 We have effectively tied parenting and family relationships to a calendar, and in so doing, one of the most sacred life experiences and purposes a human being can serve has been placed on a timer.

          ● ASFA pays states bounties of thousands of dollars per child for adoptions over a baseline number.  Since the states can keep the money even if the adoption fails, it encourages quick-and-dirty slipshod placements.

● But even more important than any single provision, ASFA sent a message to the child welfare frontlines: You should falsely equate child removal with child safety and rush to take away more children. (That’s what Gelles meant by “a safe families bill” that was “sanitized” by the adoption provisions.) And, of course, it sent that message to a system permeated with class bias and racial bias.

 So even as child abuse continued to decline, the number of children in foster care on any given day kept increasing, peaking in 1999.  It didn’t fall below the number when ASFA became law until 2003.  The number of children taken away over the course of a year kept increasing until 2006.  There were a few years of slow declines, then an increase and now the number is declining again. (Details and sources here.)

So ASFA’s true effect was to make the system bigger, tear apart even more families needlessly, and consign more children to the very chaos from which they supposedly were going to be saved.

Legal orphans

           As for all those promised adoptions, the army of childless yuppies never showed up.  Adoptions increased modestly – continuing a trend that had begun before ASFA passed. But the average annual increase in adoptions over the year before typically equals about four-tenths-of-one-percent of the number of children in foster care on any given day.  And we have no reliable data on how many of these adoptions fail, with the adoptive parents giving up on the children and sending them back into the system.  What little we do know is disturbing.

           

Worst of all, every year more children lose their rights to their parents than are adopted.  The result: A sharp increase in children aging out of the system with no home at all, separated from their birth parents, but without an adoptive home.  In many cases, these were children whose rights to their parents had been terminated, making them, as Milner and Kelly remind us, legal orphans.

           We estimate that between 1997 and 2025, because of ASFA at least 121,000 more children aged out of foster care with no permanent home than would have aged out had there been no ASFA. 

ASFA and safety

             Those clinging to ASFA also try to smear anyone who opposes this racist law with  the Big Lie of American child welfare – that anyone who opposes ASFA would, as one backer of the law put it, “put the rights of parents over the safety of children.”

           On the contrary, there is abundant evidence that, almost always, family preservation is safer than foster care. The high rate of abuse in foster care itself is one likely reason that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically do better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  And, of course, ASFA’s enshrinement of a take-the-child-and-run mentality overloads systems so workers have even less time to find the few children in real danger.

           ASFA makes all vulnerable children less safe.

           But then there’s nothing new about hiding an agenda that oppresses poor people of color behind myths about safety.  Newt “bring back the orphanage” Gingrich does the same thing to justify oppressive police tactics such as stop-and-frisk. 

How ASFA plays out case-by-case

           ASFA exploits the child welfare system’s worst instincts. Here’s how it works for child protective services agencies (or, as they should be called, family police agencies). Not all of this process was created by ASFA, of course, but all was worsened by it:

           ● First take away children because the parents are poor.  Although any poor family is a potential target, racism ensures that poor families of color are even more vulnerable.

           ● Then place the children with white, middle-class foster parents who really want to adopt the child.

           ● Through a process called “concurrent planning” – encouraged by ASFA – tell the foster parents their first obligation is to help reunite the family. But if, by some chance, they fail at that then they get what they really want: Someone else’s children.  

           ● Give the middle-class foster parents all sorts of help denied to the poor parents, such as a significant monthly payment – tax free – other “allowances” and sometimes even childcare.

           ● Because you really prefer those middle-class foster parents, stall and stall for 15 months.

           ● Then, invoke the provision of ASFA, which, with some exceptions requires states to petition for termination of children’s rights to their parents after 15 months.           

(Though one ASFA proponent claims the law includes a provision allowing judges to intervene at this stage if a state failed to make “reasonable efforts” that is flat-out false.  The state itself would have to confess to this failure in order to invoke the “reasonable efforts” exception and not file a termination petition.  Judges get involved only after the petition has been filed and the case has gone to trial.)

             Result: The child welfare system becomes the ultimate middle-class entitlement: step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.

 As Prof. Martin Guggenheim, co-director of the Family Defense Clinic at New York University School of Law (and NCCPR’s President) explains:

 ASFA has been responsible for the massive destruction of black and brown families. More than 2 million children’s parents’ rights have been terminated ... since ASFA was enacted. … It is an unpleasant truth that many of the organizations whose collective voice is condemning racist police practices now have for decades celebrated the approach enshrined in law by ASFA, some by explicitly celebrating adoption and others using the euphemism “permanency.”

             The Movement for Black Lives also has condemned the law, as have many other organizations advocating for racial justice.

How to fix it

 We can fix this if we learn the right lessons from the past 23 years.

Imagine what would have happened if, instead of passing a racist, regressive law such as ASFA, we’d put our effort into actually enforcing that earlier law, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980.  Think how many fewer children would have languished in foster care – because they wouldn’t have been taken at all and, for those who were taken, workers would have had more time to reunite them or, when genuinely necessary, get them adopted.

As Milner and Kelly write:

 During this time of reckoning, veils are being lifted and society is becoming increasingly aware of barriers to equity and the impact of laws that may appear neutral on their surface but cause harmful consequences. Child welfare legislation should not escape scrutiny. ... [W]e should pay thoughtful attention to the design and impact of our laws—old and new—to determine if they represent the knowledge we have about what families and children need to thrive and when they need it.

 So we know how to fix this. In fact, it’s a simple two-step process:

 ● Repeal ASFA.

● Enforce “reasonable efforts.” 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending November 2, 2020

● What happens to a social worker who rushes her four-month-old to the hospital after the infant falls out of bed? It depends on her race, of course.  As you read this story, from The Imprint that begins with the social worker’s testimony at a City Council hearing in New York, please keep in mind: This happened in New York City. Wherever you are, it’s probably worse. 

● The City also covered the hearing, focusing on the ongoing problem of false allegations of “educational neglect” against parents who can’t get their children online for school.  The New York Daily News also took a close look at that issue. 

● One area where New York City has done relatively well is not taking away children just because their mothers are victims of domestic violence (thanks to a class-action lawsuit settlement for which NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs). But sometimes, it seems, caseworkers “forget.” Check out how Gabbie Rodriguez, the foster youth who wrote this moving column for The Imprint, and her siblings, wound up taken from their mother. 

How much worse can it get? 

● Check out Philadelphia, which takes away children at more than double the rate of New York City.  There, police are confident they can use the ultimate threat against a Black family and the city child welfare agency will back them up. I have a blog post about it. 

● Or check out Indiana, which takes away children at one of the highest rates in the country. It’s bad enough when family police agencies tear apart families based only on a positive drug test. But in Indiana, they contracted with a lab that allegedly falsified the results.  WTHR-TV in Indianapolis broke the story. 

● Or check out Florida, where the USA TODAY Network exposed the harm done to children by the state’s ongoing foster-care panic.  WFSU Public Radio included NCCPR’s response to the stories in a round-up of reaction. 

● The good news: Even that bastion of the child welfare establishment, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, has weighed in with an Issue Brief countering the racist media-fueled master narrative about COVID-19 and child abuse. I have a blog post about it.  On the other hand, Chapin Hall has not apologized for pouring gasoline on the fires of foster-care panic in Illinois. I have a post about what’s happening in Illinois, too. 

● The text of the inspiring keynote address form Lisa Sangoi of the Movement for Family Power at the upEND Movement virtual convening is now available online. 

● And finally, a preview: I’ve often linked to the excellent stories such as this one by Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News concerning so-called “child abuse pediatricians” and the tendency of some of them to find child abuse whether it’s there or not.  Starting Nov. 10, Hixenbaugh has a podcast on the topic.

Another sign of progress at Chapin Hall

For a bastion of the child welfare establishment
such as Chapin Hall, this is a big change.

Their latest Issue Brief debunks the dominant, racist media myth about child abuse and COVID-19

 In September I wrote a post for this blog wondering if there’s been an epiphany at one of the most regressive forces in American child welfare  -- Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. I wrote that

 For decades, Chapin Hall has been a bastion of 19^th Century-style “child saver” ideology and advocacy dressed up as “scholarship.”  You can read some examples of their track record here and here. But Chapin Hall has probably been at its worst concerning the whole issue of race. 

What gave me hope was a commentary in The Imprint by Chapin Hall’s executive director Bryan Samuels and also the fact that they’ve apparently withdrawn an “Issue Brief” from 2010 making the case that child welfare practitioners are so wonderful, so pristine in their lack of bias, that it is the one field in America that is immune from racism.

Now there is further reason for encouragement. It comes in the form of a new Issue Brief, published in September, this one about COVID-19 and Child Welfare. The paper lends the gravitas of Chapin Hall, long a “Godsource” for journalists covering child welfare, to debunking the widespread media-fueled myth that with fewer white middle-class “eyes” constantly watching overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite kids, their parents will unleash upon them a “pandemic of child abuse.”

 In doing so, they join the Associated Press, The Marshall Project and Bloomberg CityLab in pointing out the flaws in this racially biased mythology.

 

The Issue Brief does not say COVID-19 will do no harm at all.  The stress of increased poverty probably will lead to some increase in child abuse.  But to deal with that they suggest a novel approach – well, novel for Chapin Hall: Target the poverty, not the parents.

 In fact, they suggest carving out a large portion of cases, and apparently taking them out of the jurisdiction of child protective services agencies. I say apparently, because they’re a little vague about this. According to the Issue Brief:

 Child maltreatment categories should be refined to distinguish and address poverty-related neglect from child endangerment or abuse. … [H]otline reports of “neglect only” may be a phenomenon distinct from child endangerment. While lack of supervision, food, clothing, or shelter can surely jeopardize the safety of children, addressing these directly through concrete supports may be more efficient and effective than initiating a child welfare case that punishes families for living in poverty.

To which the proper scientific response is: Ya think????

Even more interesting is Chapin Hall’s analysis of that whole “pandemic of child abuse” myth, and the related claims that there will be a surge in child abuse discovered as more children return to school, and with that, a surge in the number of children placed in foster care. 

The Issue Brief points out that a sharp decline in reports from teachers and other school personnel is not unusual – it happens every summer.  It is not followed by a surge in actual child abuse in the fall.  If anything, these cycles suggest that, overwhelmingly, what’s really “missed” during the summer are false reports. 

And no wonder. When teachers are on the job reporting “child abuse” they’re almost always wrong.  Only 11 percent of their reports meet even the incredibly low standard for “substantiating” an allegation – it can be no more than a caseworker’s guess that it’s slightly more likely than not that the abuse or neglect occurred. 

But let Chapin Hall explain: 

Education personnel report the most cases of suspected maltreatment, but detect the smallest percentage of cases that reach the threshold for substantiation … Additionally, historical seasonal fluctuations in reporting that occur in response to school attendance largely affect the rate of unsubstantiated cases. Typical drop-offs in reports relate to concerns that do not reach the threshold of substantiated maltreatment; teacher reports in summer months that do result in substantiation remain steady. This suggests that in the current context, the number of reports that result in substantiated maltreatment is unlikely to fluctuate due to reduced teacher/school contact. 

Thus, it is unlikely that the dramatic reduction in hotline reports due to school closures will produce a rebound of substantiated maltreatment. Instead, those concerned with the well-being of children should shift their focus to the community drivers and economic stressors that elevate the risk for child maltreatment. Rather than focusing on how to increase mandatory reporting, efforts should be redirected to support and stabilize families to prevent child maltreatment. 

The danger of self-fulfilling prophecy 

Unfortunately, there is one factor this doesn’t take into account that may, in fact, make the return to school going on now different: self-fulfilling prophecy. 

As I explained in a previous post: 

If you tell teachers over and over again that while their students were out of school, they were abused in pandemic proportions, then the bruise that last year would have been seen for what it was, an accident, suddenly is child abuse.  The hungry child for whom they might have called a food bank now becomes a call to child protective services. 

So if there is a surge in foster care placements, it’s more likely to be the result of a generation of journalists who grew up on “health terrorism” – the deliberate distortion of the nature and extent of child abuse by advocacy groups supposedly seeking to “raise awareness” – buying into a fundamentally racist myth about child abuse and COVID-19. 

That Chapin Hall has made a modest contribution toward countering this myth is welcome.  But they could do a whole lot more.  As I noted in my previous post about Chapin Hall, in addition to once promoting the myth that there is no racial bias in child welfare, just two years ago they threw gasoline on the fires of foster-care panic in Illinois, contributing to skyrocketing needless removals of children in that state. 

They need to apologize, loudly and publicly, for both. 

And even now, the current Issue Brief shows an unfortunate, lingering fondness for the latest dangerous fad in child welfare, predictive analytics. 

But hey, I said epiphany – not miracle.