NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 12, 2022

● While discussing her new book, Torn Apart, on public radio’s The Takeaway, Dorothy Roberts made host Melissa Harris-Perry gasp. Want to hear it? And see also this story in Jezebel. 

● Thanks to Greg Abbott, affluent white people are discovering that even “CPS-lite” is enormously traumatic for children and families.  As I note in this column for The Imprint, for Black, Brown, Native and poor white families it’s a whole lot worse. 

● How can families respond when the family police are at the door?  Following up on her brilliant reporting on the confusion of poverty with “neglect,” Suzanne Hirt of USA Today canvassed family defenders for advice. 

● A big victory for families in Washington State:  The Olympian reports on a new law that will put relational permanence ahead of paper permanence. 

● And bracing for a possible big defeat: With the Indian Child Welfare Act facing a challenge in the Supreme Court, The Imprint reports on states passing their own ICWA-like laws to protect Native children. 

● How do family policing agencies respond when their negligence leads to large damage awards? Do they A. Clean up their acts or B. Rush to the Legislature whining about their plight and demanding a cap on damage awards?  It’s B, of course.  

Agencies go on to blame a shortage of caseworkers.  They want money to hire more of them, of course.  But unlike most such stories, this one in Billy Penn quotes those favoring a better answer: 

Across the country, child welfare experts have issued recommendations to reduce the number of kids in foster care by 50-percent or more because most kids in the system are not actually there for reasons of abuse. [Susan Vivian Mangold, CEO of the Juvenile Law Center] sees the spate of civil suits and the workforce issues as reasons to embrace “right sizing” as a potential solution, allowing social service workers to pay more attention to the cases that require it. 

“These lawsuits should serve as a wake-up call that kids are being severely harmed in care,” concludes Mangold. “We need a different way of doing things.” 

● A new study finds that legalizing marijuana reduces the number of children torn from their families – and, perhaps, not just for the obvious reason. 

● And Law Week has a good overview of Colorado’s new right to childhood law – with a discussion of both of the cases highlighted in this blog post.

NCCPR in The Imprint: Affluent America Gets a Wake-up Call on CPS Intrusion

Ever since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott decided to wage war against transgender children there have been stories about the fear and anguish these children and their parents are enduring. For me, a front-page story in The Washington Post stood out. This excellent story ran under the headline “Dreading the knock at the door: Parents of trans kids in Texas are terrified for their families.” 

The story focused primarily on the family of Amber Briggle, an activist for the rights of trans kids. In 2016, the family even had Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over for dinner. Briggle thought they’d changed Paxton’s mind. She was mistaken. 

The Post story stood out because, for me, that framing was so familiar. Indeed, the headline  echoed, almost word for word, an essay by a 14-year-old girl in New York City, written in 2006. ... 

Read the full column in The Imprint

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 5, 2022

Is this on YOUR kindle yet?

● Twenty years ago, Penn Law Professor (and NCCPR Board Member) Dorothy Roberts changed the landscape of “child welfare” when she literally wrote the book on racial bias in family policing: Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.  Yesterday Basic Books published her new book: Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.  Check out Prof. Roberts’ interview with Boston Review. And read an excerpt from the book in Mother Jones

Prof. Roberts, Kassandra Frederique, executive director of Drug Policy Alliance and Dr. Virginia Eubanks, author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; (the book the Allegheny County Department of Human Services hopes you will never read!) will be the keynote speakers at this free virtual conference on April 27. 

● The extent to which even the mainstream is beginning to understand what Prof. Roberts’ first brought to light, can be seen in the headline on this press release: New York State Bar Association Finds Child Welfare System Replete With Systemic Racism, Pushes for Reforms (The release includes a link to the full report.) And this isn’t the usual let’s-slap-a-Black-Lives-Matter-statement-on-our-website-and-go-back-to-business-as-usual document.  The report is comprehensive, and scathing. The Imprint has a story about it. See also the story in the Albany Times-Union. 

● Who gave a damn about Harmony Montgomery? She’s a seven-year-old New Hampshire girl who has disappeared and is feared dead.  I have a column in CommonWealth Magazine about how the one person who cared is the person no one would listen to: her mother. 

● In Arizona, a story from the “this really shouldn’t have taken a court ruling” file. The Arizona Republic reports that 

A woman who used medical marijuana during her pregnancy did not neglect her pre-born child and should not be punished by being put on a list that could limit her employment, the state Court of Appeals has ruled. 

● In Rhode Island, a story from the “this really shouldn’t have taken a federal civil rights complaint” file.  The Rhode Island family policing agency will be required to provide sign language interpreters when it investigates and takes children from deaf parents.  As The Boston Globe reports: 

Three complaints alleged that DCYF failed to provide sign language interpreter services to parents who are deaf during child protection investigations, even when DCYF removed the children from their homes. A fourth complaint alleged that DCYF based conclusions about a parent’s capacity on their epilepsy and intellectual disabilities and failed to provide reasonable modifications. 

● And finally, I have reposted NCCPR’s annual reminder that If it’s April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month.

NCCPR in CommonWealth on how two states failed Harmony Montgomery

Who gave a damn about Harmony Montgomery? 

I don’t mean now, as governors and other politicians fall all over themselves expressing shock and outrage.  I mean who gave a damn when no one else did? 

Not the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families and Massachusetts courts. They tore Harmony from her mother and placed her with her father Adam in New Hampshire,  — someone whose long criminal record included shooting a man in the face during a drug deal. 

Not the New Hampshire Division for Children, Youth and Families, whose overloaded workers seem to have performed, at best, cursory investigations, and didn’t want to hear that the child was missing. 

The one person who gave a damn is the person no one would listen to; the person who was written off from the start: Crystal Sorey — Harmony’s mother. ...

Read the full column in CommonWealth.

If it’s April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

 I've reprinted this post almost every year since 2010.  But for the past three years it's been especially relevant. You can be sure that this year, like last year and the year before that, the Astroturf fill-in-the-blanks op-eds that various advocacy groups send to their local chapters will be filled with references to an "epidemic" or a "pandemic" of child abuse - as though the moment white middle-class professionals can't have their "eyes" on poor children of color, their parents will rush to torture them.  This myth persists even though several national news organizations -- and multiple studies - have found that it's not true.  NCCPR has details here.

I hope that before pushing the send button on these generic submissions, people will at least have the decency to pause and think long and hard about just how racist that framing is. Precedent suggests, however, that they won’t.

In fact, given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, expect the usual op-eds to have token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as they propose making a profoundly racist family policing system even bigger and more powerful.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , UPDATED APRIL 1, 2018, MARCH 31, 2020, AND MARCH 31, 2021.

Back in 2003, one of the groups most responsible for fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse came remarkably close to admitting that they did just that – and that it had backfired. 

Rather like Dr. Frankenstein admitting he’d created a monster, in a 2003 Request for Proposals concerning how to improve their messaging, Prevent Child Abuse America wrote: 

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities. 

In 2020, PCAA went further. They actually branded what they had done “health terrorism” – but refused to apologize for it. 

This is especially worth remembering as we begin “Child Abuse Awareness Month” – a month, which, appropriately starts on April Fools Day. 

So I’ve reprinted below our 2010 blog post on the topic – with some updates and links to newer data – since, unfortunately, aside from those data, nothing has changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under control.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010:

Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op-ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse. 

There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fool’s Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real nature of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op ed column follows a standard formula: 

1.  1. Take the most horrifying case to occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.

2.   2. Jump immediately from that story to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports" alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror story. Rather, they often involve the confusion of poverty with neglect. Or…

3.   3.  Use only the total number of cases that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed" giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on a form, far more credibility than they deserve. A major federal study found that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.

4.   4. Pile hype onto hype by reasserting the racist, discredited COVID-19 “pandemic of child abuse” myth.

5.    5. Throw in huge lists of "symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be "signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number of other things.

6.     6. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" maltreatment, the same standard often used in law to guide "mandated reporters."  

      7. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity. 

It all comes from the same ends-justify-the-means health terrorism mentality behind, for example an egregiously-misleading report published by the group that calls itself Every Child Matters – the mentality that says: What's a little distortion and exaggeration in the name of a good cause? 

In fact, such distortion and exaggeration can do enormous harm to children.  

Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.  And right now it still. risks spreading a deadly virus. 

Reality check 

NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions: 

·        -- Issue papers on Understanding Child Abuse Numbers and False Allegations: What the Data Really Show

·        -- Our Solutions pages, Doing Child Welfare Right and our Due Process Agenda.

·        -- Our presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health approach.

If the people behind "Child Abuse Awareness Month"  (also known as "Child Abuse Prevention Month") really want to prevent "child abuse" then how about campaigning to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.  

Poverty increases the stress that can lead to actual abuse and, as noted above, poverty itself often is confused with "neglect."  This can be seen by the fact that study after study shows even small increases in income significantly reduce what child welfare systems call "neglect."

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness" campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems even worse.

If only there were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 29, 2022

Lots of news this week, but one story stands out above all: 

● This story is more evidence that the solution to the problems of journalism is more journalism. Bad journalism by the Miami Herald set off a foster-care panic in Florida.  Now great journalism from USA Today Network Florida reporters is exposing how much that has hurt children.  Combining heartbreaking personal stories with rigorous data analysis, it is the definitive story about the havoc caused when poverty is confused with “neglect.” This story should fall under the heading “drop everything and read.”  I hope you will. 

OK, now that you’re back – in other news: 

● In New York City family defense is going on offense.  The Family Justice Law Center “will use affirmative litigation to seek justice for families mistreated by the child welfare system. It will challenge systemic abuses of government power that lead to the illegal separation of children from their families. It will seek redress for harms, while promoting change that would help families survive and thrive.” As Law 360 explains in this story, founder David Shalleck-Klein 

said he was drawn into family defense practice by injustices and lack of due process families are confronted with in Family Court.  "The criminal justice system pales in comparison," he told Law360. "Even people who work in the criminal justice field are shocked when they see what happens in Family Court." 

See also stories about FJIC in The 74, The Imprint and Gothamist. 

● The Biden Administration is proposing some significant changes – for the better – in child welfare finance.  The changes are not nearly enough, but if the fine print matches this overview from The Imprint, and if the changes are passed by Congress – that’s a big if – they would be a real step forward.  Other administrations have made better proposals, but they got nowhere. 

From Maine to Hawaii, state legislators seem determined to respond to child abuse tragedies in ways that would make their systems worse.  

● In Maine, the state’s equivalent of the GAO got suckered by the Big Lie of American child welfare. I have a blog post about it.  

● In Hawaii, at the very same meeting where a key lawmaker refused to vote to fund jail expansion because “Basically, you’re putting people in jail because they’re poor,” the same lawmaker demanded that the state spend more to take away children  — who often are taken because they are poor. I have a guest column about it in Honolulu Civil Beat. 

● Two important books that focus heavily on failures of the family policing system won J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project awards.  The book prize went to Andrea Elliott’s book, Invisible Child.  The judges call it “a tour de force of immersive reporting and a meticulous and unflinching depiction of intergenerational American poverty.” 

One of two awards for Works in Progress went to Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family: The Hart Murder-Suicide and the System Failing Our Kids The judges write that “With an ever-present lens on poverty and racism, Asgarian’s investigation illuminates the innumerable ways child welfare agencies failed these six young Black children, indicting the ways the most vulnerable among us are imperiled by the very systems created to protect them.”

● The Columbus Dispatch reports on a bill intended to curb still another way family policing agencies harm children – discriminating against their parents if those parents are disabled. 

● Colorado Newsline reports on a “right to childhood” bill that passed the legislature. If the governor signs it, it may reduce the likelihood of cases like those described in this post – or at least reduce the likelihood of cases like the first one.

● Also in Colorado: A reminder that the horror stories go in all directions. 

● And in Los Angeles, the Reimagine Child Safety coalition has launched its website.

NCCPR in Honolulu Civil Beat: Hawaii Should Curb ‘Grab And Go’ Mentality In Child Welfare Services

Lawmakers should take the money earmarked for more personnel and use it to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty.

 Case No. 1: Six-year-old Ariel Sellers is taken from her home by Child Welfare Services. Relatives are ready to take Ariel in, but they say CWS ignores them. Instead Ariel is placed with strangers, Isaac and Lehua Kalua. Ultimately, they adopt her and change her name to Isabella. 

Now the Kaluas are charged with murdering Isabella. She allegedly died trapped in a dog cage with duct tape covering her mouth and nose. CWS still won’t place her siblings with relatives. 

Case No. 2: Bella is in her fifth-grade classroom when suddenly she is told her father has come to her school to pick her up. But the man is not the man she considers her father — rather it’s a man she barely knows — indeed a court order bars any contact. 

But that doesn’t stop CWS. In what a judge would call a “grab and go” CWS flies Bella to the other end of the state and leaves her with the father she barely knows. … 

Read the full column in Honolulu Civil Beat