NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 8, 2020

● All over America, millions have been placed on so-called central registries of alleged child abusers. It’s done with little or no due process.  Like so much else in child welfare, it harms the children it is meant to help.  What the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says in this excellent editorial about Pennsylvania’s registry applies to most of the others as well. 

● I have often written about how child welfare agencies use funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program as a child welfare slush fund. Money is diverted from TANF, which is intended to help poor people become self-sufficient. into payments for foster care and child abuse investigations. In this column for the San Antonio Express-News, Andrew Brown of the Texas Public Policy Foundation zeroes in on how this money is misused in Texas. 

● The “health terrorists” are hard at work in Michigan, conflating poverty with neglect and promoting that racially biased narrative about child abuse and COVID-19. NCCPR  has a column in Bridge Michigan: COVID-19 breeds a pandemic of fear, not a pandemic of child abuse. 

● In The Imprint, Kenyon Lee Whitman and Brianna Harvey write about The Disenfranchisement of Black Foster Youth. 

● And in the San Francisco Bay View Michelle Chan writes about how the child welfare system failed her as a child, and then failed her again as a parent. 

● What can be done about it? The founders of the upEND Movement examine the issues in depth in this article for the Journal of Public Child Welfare. 

UPCOMING EVENTS 

● TODAY at Noon Eastern: The Shriver Center on Poverty Law has a webinar on The Carceral Web: How the Foster and Criminal Legal Systems Perpetuate Injustice. You can register here.

● As we return to tighter restrictions as a result of the latest surge in COVID-19, we should not repeat the mistakes of last March, when it became an excuse to further undermine due process for families. That’s the message in this letter from the director of the federal government’s Children Bureau, Jerry Milner. 

Milner writes: 

As previously communicated in March, we strongly encourage all child welfare agencies to consider decisions thoughtfully regarding whether to file for termination of parental rights in instances where services and supports have been interrupted or have been less available, where family time has been inadequate, or where court operations are unable to offer hearings of needed breadth and depth. Such decisions should always be made on a child-by-child basis and include thoughtful review of the unique circumstances affecting the child and family. 

There will be more about this at a webinar on Tuesday December 15 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern sponsored by the Children’s Bureau, the National Center for State Courts, and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. The webinar will focus on “the critical need for continued access to justice and judicial oversight in child welfare proceedings during the ongoing public health crisis.” You can register here.

NCCPR in Bridge Michigan: COVID-19 breeds a pandemic of fear, not a pandemic of child abuse

The impulse is understandable.  For generations, we’ve read horror stories about parents beating, raping and murdering their children. The stories often are followed with statistics leaving the impression that there’s a child abuser under every bed.  No wonder people would assume that a decline in child abuse reports due to COVID-19 is cause for alarm.

But the claim is built on a foundation of myth. Accepting it risks scaring vulnerable families away from seeking assistance, it risks deluging caseworkers with false reports, stealing time from finding children in real danger. It even risks increasing the spread of COVID-19.

Read the full column here.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 1, 2020

● From the University of California Berkeley, a podcast explains how two common forms of discrimination in child welfare – against Native Americans and against the disabled -- compound each other.

 ● As noted last week, two federal agencies reached a settlement with a state where discrimination against disabled families has been particularly egregious: Massachusetts. The Imprint has a story about it.

 ● That kind of ugliness permeates Massachusetts child welfare as a result of decades of political demagoguery and mediocre leadership.  Will the state finally change course?  I have a column about it in CommonWealth Magazine.

● And on this day after #GivingTuesday, a note about the organization that presents this summary every week – and does much more – and why just a little bit of help can go a long way.

UPDATED: On Giving Tuesday: Want to know how effective NCCPR is? Just ask someone who probably wishes we’d go away!

 

This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on Giving Tuesday in 2018.

Of all the journalists who have covered child welfare, few are more keen on pushing a take-the-child-and-run approach than former Los Angeles Times reporter Garrett Therolf.  The issues with Therolf’s work at the Times were so serious that even someone who used to be an ideological soulmate  found serious problems in story after story.  The crescendo of criticism was such that LA Observed, a Los Angeles news site that closely tracks area media, took notice. 

Then, just as he was leaving the Times, Therolf demeaned the work of Black scholars while cheerleading for those who insist that child welfare is magically immune from racial bias. 

So, on this Giving Tuesday, who better to turn to for a testament to the power and influence of NCCPR – right? 

Not that he offered such a testament on purpose, of course.  I’m sure he didn’t even realize it. 

In November, 2018, Therolf was able to get a sugar-coated version of his L.A. Times-style reporting into a national magazine. (I’m not going to link to it, but you can use the quote below to Google it if you are so inclined.)  After noting how horror stories about deaths of children “known to the system” can drive increases in foster care, he discusses one of the very few cases in which it worked in reverse: 

Logan Marr, a 5-year-old girl from Maine [had] been removed from her home by the state’s grossly interventionist child-protective-services agency. In a gruesome twist, Logan was placed in the custody of a former caseworker, who disciplined her by gagging her with duct tape and leaving her in the basement, where she died. 

The case became the subject of a PBS documentary, and media attention made Logan a symbol of child-protective services’ overreach. The pendulum swung, and the United States saw a nearly 25 percent drop in the number of children in foster care from 2002 to 2012. [Emphasis added.] 

Therolf never mentions which organization drew all that media attention to the case of Logan Marr. He probably doesn’t know.  It was, of course, NCCPR.  We’re the ones who told producers for Frontline about the case. That's one reason why you’ll find an NCCPR op-ed on Frontline’s website for the programs. 

It was NCCPR that focused the discussion of this case, in Maine and nationally, on the fact that Logan was taken because her family poverty was confused with neglect.  And it was NCCPR that shifted the focus from the usual calls for tougher licensing standards and more visits to foster homes to the real issue: Maine was taking away far too many children.  There’s a detailed discussion of what we did and how we did it here. 

Some caveats: We didn’t do it alone. It wouldn’t have been possible without activists in Maine led by a fed-up foster parent.  Although one probably shouldn’t say this in a fundraising pitch, the attention we drew to the case of Logan Marr was not solely responsible for that big drop in foster care.  But it helped.  Something else we probably shouldn't say in a fundraising pitch: It's also true that, now that NCCPR has more limited resources, there's been backsliding in Maine child welfare.  But even now, it's a better system than it would have been had there been no NCCPR. 

NCCPR has changed the very language of the child welfare debate.  We put phrases such as “foster-care panic,” and “confusing poverty with neglect” into the child welfare lexicon. We were first to understand and bring to wide attention the implications of research showing that one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation – almost always due to a false report – before they turn 18. 

Nationally, this year, we have led the fight to counter the pernicious, racist false narrative about COVID-19 supposedly leading to a “pandemic of child abuse.” We helped reporters for national news organizations write stories setting the record straight. 

In Philadelphia we’ve made that city’s high rate of child removal such a big issue that it is referenced in almost every news story about the system  – and NCCPR’s director has been named to a special committee of the Philadelphia City Council to advise the Council on what to do about it. 

As the family preservation movement has grown, and as more and more advocates have realized the importance of changing child welfare systems by changing public perceptions, NCCPR has become a key resource for other advocates, providing the data and studies to back up what they see every day on the frontlines. 

We never charge for this technical assistance - because the organizations fighting this fight at the grassroots level need every penny they have to keep up that fight.  But that, of course, is why we need donations from those who can afford to give. 

There’s more about  our successes across the country here – including testimonials from child welfare leaders and journalists who actually like our work. 

And best of all, we do it on a shoestring.  Now that the entire staff (that’s me) is volunteer, all we need is a few thousand dollars a year for things like the phone bill, office supplies, purchasing overpriced studies (like the one that led to this) from scholarly journals, and – ideally – some travel to meet with journalists and local advocates, once travel is possible again.  But the very fact that we need so little makes it easy for people to assume someone else will do it.  Unfortunately, if everyone thinks someone else will make those few donations ... 

There are a lot of places well worth your support on this Giving Tuesday – but very few where a small donation can get so much done.

Thank you for your support.

NCCPR in CommonWealth Magazine on Mass. child welfare: Child safety and family preservation are not opposites

 IT’S NOT REALLY that hard to fix a child welfare system: just listen to your gut instinct – and do the opposite.

Gut instinct says: David Almond died a horrible death though he was well known to the Department of Children and Families and other agencies. So the solution must be to take away children more quickly and return them to their homes more slowly – if at all. 

Except, of course, that’s exactly what the state did after the deaths of Bella Bond and Jeremiah Oliver.  The high-profile tragedies set off a foster-care panic, a sharp sudden increase in the number of children torn from their families, in a state which has taken away children at rates well above the national average for decades. ... But Gov. Charlie Baker and his DCF director, Linda Spears, learned nothing from this cycle. ...

Read the full commentary here.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending November 24, 2020

 ● Last week we noted a report from Community Legal Services of Philadelphia on the harm done to children by the state’s central register of alleged child abusers.  In a Philadelphia Inquirer story about the report, CLS attorney Janet Ginzberg explains:

 “We have had a number of clients put on the child-abuse registry because the child had diaper rash and it got infected,” Ginzberg said. She said putting those parents on the registry is only keeping them in poverty — ultimately hurting their children, rather than protecting them. …

 Ginzberg said it’s up to state lawmakers to change this process — but doing so will take courage. After all, she said, no one wants to appear soft on child abuse. “I’ve had so many legislators say to me: ‘That’s awful! I had no idea how this works. But I’m not touching this with a 10-foot pole.’”

 ● Speaking of Philadelphia – and Los Angeles and Phoenix – WitnessLA has reprinted NCCPR’s commentary on big city rates of removal.

● Also last week, we noted a change that limits the ability of some New York City Hospitals to drug test pregnant women without their consent.  But, as the Movement for Family Power explains in this tweet thread, it’s only a small change, with plenty of loopholes. 

● In Rise, Prof. Kelley Fong of the the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech discusses her research on the harm of mandatory child abuse reporting laws: 

Because ideas of neglect overlap with material hardship, there’s a justified fear among parents that being open about struggles will lead to a CPS report. In my research, I heard from parents that these fears prevent them from getting support they need and want for their families. 

One parent was reported when she tested positive for marijuana during her pregnancy. When she found out, she felt set up by the prenatal clinic, which hadn’t told her that this could lead to a CPS report. Her baby remained with her, but she said she would think twice about opening up to the prenatal clinic again. She worried she was experiencing postpartum depression but also worried that if she shared what was going on, they might accuse her of not being able to take care of her child. We can see how this keeps parents from accessing support. … 

Sometimes, CPS can help with material needs. … [but] what does it mean to provide these supports through an agency that’s organized around surveillance and has the power to separate families? Why is it that the best way to get the diapers your family needs is to reach out to an agency that can take your child away? 

● The harm of mandatory reporting also was the theme of a webinar sponsored by the Shriver Center on Povery Law.  In this part of the webinar, Charity Tolliver, founder and project director of Black on Both Sides explains why, “however kindly intended, the foster care system is viewed as a looming threat for most Black families.”

 

 ● The Imprint reports on a bill introduced in Congress that could reduce needless family separation. It would allow federal judges “to consider whether it would be better for the whole family if the defendant [convicted of a federal crime] were to stay out of prison or probation and instead be ordered to receive a comprehensive range of services, under legislation introduced this week.

 ● The Marshall Project has an excellent story about the enormous harm done to poor familiies, especially poor families of color, when a dangerous media-fueled myth catches fire.  In this case it was the myth of the “superpredator” and the racist criminal justice laws it helped to spawn. But some of the same news organizations spread equally dangerous, racist myths about poor families that led to the passage of an equally dangerous law: the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.

 ● In a commentary for Youth Today, Alexandra Miller and Macon Stewart write that it’s time to

 

bring back the Black girls who are unnecessarily pulled out of their homes and placed into the foster care system. In 2018, Black children represented 23% of youth in foster care and 14% of the general youth population. Research …  overwhelmingly demonstrate[s] that Black families are more likely to have abuse reported, investigated and substantiated than white families. Relatedly, Black children are more likely to be placed in care and remain in care for longer periods of time than white children and are less likely to reunite with their families.

 

● Mike Hixenbaugh, the NBC News reporter who’s done outstanding reporting about the harm done to families by some so-called “child abuse pediatricians” – including a new podcast, -- tells the story behind the story. 

● In 2015, two federal agencies, the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services issued a scathing letter blasting the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families for discriminating against still another category of family that is often targeted for needless destruction: parents with disabilities.  Now, DCF has reached a settlement with the federal agencies.  WBUR Public Radio has a story about it. And this HHS press release has a link to the full agreement. 

● And on this blog, I’ve reprinted our annual salute to National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day.

Adoption of children from foster care: National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day, 2020

 This post originally appeared in 2008. Since the event is annual, I've reprinted it on several occasions since, with revisions and updates as appropriate.  

How do we know what's really important to a person, or to a corporation, or to an institution?

    One way, of course, is how we choose to spend money, and I've written before about how child welfare agencies do that. But there's also another good measure: what we choose to celebrate.

    The father who has memorized the schedule of his favorite football team but always forgets his children's birthdays is sending a message. So, too, is the child welfare agency which claims that its first priority when a child is taken away is to reunify that child with her or his birth parents, with adoption as the second choice, but chooses to celebrate only the supposed second choice.

    Often, adoption is the right second choice; for some children it is the right first choice. Adoption can be, both literally and figuratively, a life saver for a child; it should be one important component of any good child welfare system; and there is nothing wrong with celebrating it as one avenue to permanence.

How child welfare systems view keeping families together

How child welfare systems view keeping families together

But if the true intent of child welfare systems is revealed by what they celebrate, then one of the most noble concepts in child welfare, giving children permanence, has been perverted into a synonym for adoption and only adoption. 

Reunification gets lip service until everyone in the system, from frontline workers, to agency chiefs to top judges can get what they really want: children taken from poor people and placed with middle class families; families like their own. 

The real agenda of most child welfare systems, and most of the people in them, is made apparent every year on National Adoption Day; or, as it should properly be called, National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day.

Everybody knows the drill

How child welfare systems view adoption

    The day actually is celebrated on different dates in different states, but it's always in November and most places will hold their celebrations on Saturday. 

You know the drill. Open the court on a Saturday, bring in cake and balloons, finalize foster-child adoptions en masse – and reinforce every stereotype about how the system rescues children from horrible birth parents and places them with vastly superior adoptive parents. 

And, of course, get a guaranteed puff piece in the local newspaper, with no tough questions. This one, from the St. Petersburg Times (Now Tampa Bay Times) in 2008, is typical:

In general, a courthouse is not a happy place. People go there to get divorced, to fight eviction, to file for bankruptcy, to watch loved ones sent away to prison. You see a lot of suffering, and you hear it in the cries and cursing that echo through the hallways. Forty children, sugar-laden with sheet cake and bouncing around a lobby with balloons, made Friday an exception at the county courthouse in Tampa. As part of a National Adoption Day celebration, they were legally united with "forever families," mothers and fathers giving them a one-way ticket out of the foster care system. …

The treacle aside, it's almost certainly inaccurate. Given what we know about adoption "disruption" for some of the children, it may well be round trip. And, as is discussed below, stories like this one make such tragedies, and others, a little more likely.

(As for how the Tampa Bay Times regards birth parents – see this post from 2017.)

If nothing else, this is the day when almost all the people in almost every child welfare system in the country, from frontline workers to agency chiefs, show their true colors. This is the day that makes them genuinely happy. Yet all these same players will turn on a dime and blather on about how their first priority is reunification. 

Well, if that's your first priority, why aren't you celebrating it? Why do so many fewer communities take part in National Reunification Day, a project that only began in 2009? Why is there no happiness expressed over doing what you yourselves claim is priority #1?  Why don't reporters note that, when a child finally gets to return to the birth mother she loves after months or years needlessly separated, that, too, can bring some happiness to a courtroom?

Clearly, reunification is not priority #1. Priority #1 is carrying out those middle-class rescue fantasies – taking children from people like them and placing them with people like us; people of the same race and, especially the same income level, as your average caseworker, judge, lawyer – or reporter. (No newspaper took the whole "people like us" thing as literally as Foster's Daily Democrat and its sister papers in New Hampshire. In 2008 -- a four story 4,900-word Sunday package of glop and goo about adoption day included a sidebar in which the saintly foster mother – who kept complaining about not getting enough taxpayer money for her adoptions – was none other than the newspaper's managing editor!)

For almost everyone working in the system, the truth is that keeping families together is the broccoli on the child welfare menu and adoption is the dessert. National Child Welfare Hypocrisy Day is another way to bring out the dessert tray before anyone's eaten their broccoli.

The exceptions are few and far between. The first to recognize the hypocrisy was Marc Cherna, long-time reform-minded leader of the human services agency in Allegheny County, Pa. He was the first to create an annual celebration of reunified families and push it at least as hard as the adoption celebration. After NCCPR started spreading the word about this, a few other communities followed suit.

Then the Parents’ Representation Project of the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law sponsored the first National Reunification Day – but even now that's it's become National Reunification Month, relatively few places take part, compared to the hundreds of Adoption Day events.  And some of the best reunification events are sponsored not by child welfare agencies or courts, but by groups like the Family Defense Center and Legal Services of New Jersey.

The dangers of Adoption Day

    It's not just hypocritical, it's also dangerous.

When the only kind of "permanence" that receives any reward is adoption, the message to the frontlines is obvious: Don't try to reunify, rush to terminate children's rights to their parents (which is what termination of parental rights really means). And that's exactly what happens. In Kentucky it led to a scandal, as the Lexington Herald-Leader exposed "quick trigger adoptions" with workers rushing to terminate parental rights in cases where children may never have needed to be taken from their parents. 

The only difference between Kentucky and the rest of the nation is, in Kentucky, the Herald-Leader was paying attention. That caught the attention of NBC Nightly News which offered an excellent overview of the Kentucky scandal.

But there are other dangers as well. Year after year, terminations of parental rights outrun actual adoptions. The result: A generation of legal orphans with no ties to their parents and little or no hope of adoption – with or without cake and balloons - either. The combination of these non-financial incentives, plus the adoption bounties paid by the federal government goes a long way to explain the sharp increase in the number of children who "aged out" of foster care over the past 20 years. 

We estimate that the mad rush to embrace adoption-as-panacea has contributed to creating more than 120,000 additional children who age out with no permanent home.  And data compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation show that of all the children who leave the foster care system at age 16 or older, half have no permanent home.  It's even worse for nonwhite foster children.

And then there is the matter of where these children wind up.

Another reason for the mad rush to adoption-at-all-costs is the fact that getting those adoption numbers up is the one time a child welfare agency is guaranteed good press. Everyone knows the reporters will write a story like the one quoted above and not ask any tough questions about whether the children really needed to be taken, and how carefully the adoptive parents were checked out. 

And then, the same journalists will wonder how it could happen that children like Ricky Holland and Timothy Boss in Michigan and others across the country could be murdered by adoptive parents - in effect, adopted to death. In 2017, in Iowa alone, there have been four cases of horrific, sometimes fatal abuse, involving children adopted from foster care.

Of course abuse in adoptive homes is rare – just like abuse in birth parent homes. The bigger problem is adoption "disruption," when agencies rush children into a bad match and the parents change their minds. No one really knows how often that happens – child welfare systems almost never ask questions to which they don't want to know the answers. Some rough estimates are in NCCPR's Issue Paper on adoption.  And journalists rarely follow up on those adoption "happy endings" - unless the adoption itself got an exceptional amount of attention - as happened here.

But whether the problem is legal orphans, disruption or, rarely, severe, even fatal abuse in adoptive homes, it's all encouraged by adoption bounties and the adoption day mentality, both of which promote quick-and-dirty, slipshod placements.

Even Marcia Lowry, who used to run the group that calls itself "Children's Rights" has said that "… Congress should realize that far too many states … when they do, for example, raise their adoption numbers, are doing so by including many clearly inadequate families … along with the genuinely committed, loving families who want to make a home for these children, just to 'succeed' by boosting their numbers." That her own lawsuit settlements have been known to push states the same way is a contradiction someone might want to ask her about someday.