NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 11, 2023

● Once upon a time, the family policing establishment insisted that they never, ever took away children because of poverty.  Then, when it was pointed out that the disproportionate rate at which Black and Native American children were torn from their families just might have something to do with racism, they said: No, no! We’re not taking them because their nonwhite, we’re taking them because of poverty!  Of course in the ridiculous debate over whether families are needlessly separated because of race or because of poverty the answer is: Yes.  

All of which leads me to a fascinating new data analysis from the New York City Family Policy Project. They found that if you’re Black, affluence won’t free you from the family police.  Here’s what they found: 

Latino, White and Asian children all show lower investigation rates in neighborhoods where child poverty is lower. Neighborhood child poverty rates do not appear to have the same protective effect for Black children. In fact, Black children face extremely high investigation rates in dozens of well-off and majority white neighborhoods, such as Brooklyn Heights or Boerum Hill. [Emphasis added.]

And a friendly reminder to the rest of the country: The New York City system is horrible - but significantly less horrible than most.  So wherever you are, it's probably worse. 

● Vox is a news website known for explanatory journalism. They’ve just done a superb job explaining the family policing system.  From the story: 

It’s easy to fall back on imagining that more funding and more foster parents are the most urgent priority … But nearly everyone that Vox spoke with who works within the system itself thinks that foster care isn’t the answer and that the current child welfare system is one that traps families in poverty and then penalizes them for it. 

● Among those who understand this are the former director of the federal Children’s Bureau, Jerry Milner, and his Special Assistant, David Kelly. They now direct the Family Justice Group. In The Imprint they write: 

Relational health — the sense of connection, belonging and relationships that people have — is essential to our individual and collective well-being as human beings in the world. Somehow, however, this most essential and defining aspect of being human has been overshadowed or cast aside in the industry known as child welfare. 

Services reign supreme in the industry, and providers of them have an undue impact on policymaking nationwide. Their main interest is to remain in business. This has resulted in a fixation on clinical services and proprietary models rather than proactive family support. It sustains a narrative that pathologizes the conditions families are forced to live in or with, especially poverty and the trauma of racism. 

● Similarly, writing in Slate about the Netflix documentary Take Care of Maya, Dr. Mical Raz explains that 

The documentary’s dystopian depiction of child protection is not an anomaly. Children are regularly removed from their loving parents and placed in unsafe situations—from sleeping on couches in office buildings to foster homes where they are often abused—all in the name of child protection. … Yet this overpolicing of families and children is not a necessity and does not keep kids safe. Rather, the specter of child abuse has created a system that is harmful and even abusive. Perhaps Take Care of Maya, because of the unusual details of its case, will bring attention to the harmful impact of an overreaching family policing system. 

● ProPublica reports on how, with near-unanimous bipartisan support, the Texas Legislature passed a bill giving families facing the family police the equivalent of Miranda rights, while in New York legislative leadership blocked a vote on a similar measure.  The story notes that the Texas law  “will in many cases benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income families who often have their lives and homes upended by CPS officers” and that “child welfare issues often defy typical partisan binaries.” 

● Both of those concepts are apparently beyond the understanding of The Texas Tribune, which continues to push the idea that any bill providing due process for families is a nefarious plot by “parents' rights” activists – even though the Miranda rights bill and others passed the Texas legislature almost unanimously.  I have a blog post about it. 

● The Washington State Standard reports that Washington State is easing a policy that had required hospitals to automatically turn in to the family police the parents of any newborn “affected” by the mother’s substance use.  That’s the policy that, as Reveal and The New York Times Magazine exposed last week, has had tragic results for children across the country.  Of course, not everyone is happy about this.  In comments dripping with condescension, people at a center that institutionalizes these infants for days or weeks after hospital discharge don’t like this one bit. 

● There’s more about the harm of turning in substance-using mothers to the family police in this overview from Scientific American. The article cites multiple experts including Miriam S. Komaromy, medical director of the Grayken Center for Addiction at Boston Medical Center, who says: 

“It’s critical that a pregnant person feels able to seek help, but mandated reporting sets up a dynamic in which she feels afraid to acknowledge that she has a problem and maybe even afraid to seek any prenatal care because of the fear that a doctor will detect that she has a substance use disorder.” 

● When parents divorce and one parent has custody, a court may require that the other parent still be allowed contact with the child – indeed, if the parents can’t come up with a voluntary agreement it’s the norm.  Yet when adoptive parents want to cut children off from any and all contact with their birth parents, those birth parents usually have no recourse.  The Imprint reports on a bill passed – for the third time -  by the New York State Legislature that would change that.  

● The Boston Globe reports that Massachusetts is the latest state where some lawmakers are asking why the state is swiping Social Security benefits meant for foster youth and keeping the money for itself.  But the bill they proposed was tepid and still got nowhere.  Showing its signature callousness and cruelty, the state family police agency has dug in its heals in an effort to keep the kids’ money. 

● And the latest example of how the horror stories go in all directions comes from New Mexico.

UPDATED: When the journalism of child welfare fails, part three: Texas lawmakers are catching on; the Texas Tribune is not.

The state capitol in Austin

What the Tribune (and the Dallas Morning News) can’t face is that after decades of seeing the system that calls itself “child welfare” do enormous harm to children, people across the political spectrum are coming together and finding common ground. They've come to understand that due process for families is the best way to ensure children’s rights and child safety. 

The online news site Texas Tribune has improved its coverage of the family policing system (a more accurate term than “child welfare” system) compared to how it handled these issues when it was founded in 2009.  But it still has a long way to go. 

The Tribune is still pushing the Big Lie of American “child welfare” – the idea that any bill that protects children from being traumatized by the family police and forced into the hellscape of Texas foster care is a “parents’ rights” bill that supposedly comes at the expense of child safety.  And they do it with a slightly revised version of the standard Texas twist; the longstanding false claim that any such legislation must be part of a vast right-wing conspiracy! 

I previously discussed a fearmongering Texas Tribune story about one of the bills.  The theme of the latest story can be boiled down to: The Texas foster care system is horrible! How dare the legislature try to keep more kids out of it!  At one point, the reporter simply decrees on her own authority that one law is “extreme.” 

To understand the extent to which the Tribune keeps misleading Texans about these bills, we need to start with what the bills actually do. 

● One bill requires that families get the equivalent of a Miranda warning when the family police are at the door. That is, they must be informed of rights they already have.  Contrary to the Tribune’s latest story, they are not given any new rights. 

● That bill also curbs hidden foster care – or what should be called blackmail placements, in which families are coerced into “voluntary” placements of their children, usually with relatives, that are anything but voluntary.  The most recent data are old, but they indicate more than 60% of Texas placements occur this way – and they’re not even included in the figures Texas reports to the federal government, or to the public, as entries into care. 

● Another bill largely (though not completely) replaces anonymous reporting to the state’s child abuse hotline with confidential reporting.  That is, the accused still won’t know who accused them but, in most cases, the family police agency will. 

● Another bill bolsters legal representation for families – something that has been proven to curb needless foster care with no compromise of safety. 

● And another bill simply requires the family police and judges to document the “reasonable efforts” they made to prevent removal of a child to foster care and to prevent termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights).  

Again, this law does not give families any new rights. “Reasonable efforts” have been required by federal law since 1980 – and routinely ignored.  This bill doesn’t even stop Texas family police from continuing to ignore the requirement – they just have to state what, if anything, they did to comply with it! 

The vast bipartisan conspiracy 

All of these bills passed with bipartisan support – most of them nearly unanimously. 

That’s important because of a decades-long insistence by some Texas media on putting a false ideological framing on these issues.  (Some of the reasons for this are discussed in the report we issued on Texas child welfare nearly two decades ago.)  

In Texas media, particularly the Tribune and the Dallas Morning News, any attempt to curb the vast power of the family police supposedly is part of a far-right plot to place “parents’ rights” ahead of “child safety.” 

The Dallas Morning News truly outdid itself last year when it managed to blame both an expansion of family police power and a reduction in that power on the far right.  The latest Tribune story has come up with a new bit of spin to explain away the bipartisan support for these bills. 

So with that, it’s time for a close look at the latest Texas Tribune failure. 

The reporter’s preconceived notions are clear right off the bat.  Here’s how the story begins: 

Faced with a troubled foster care system and a 12-year-long lawsuit for putting children in state custody at risk, Texas legislators this year made sweeping changes to state agencies that look after vulnerable kids removed from their homes. 

But legislators’ focus was less on conditions for children in the system and more on reducing the number of kids entering state care. 

Translation: We want you to believe those awful right-wing lawmakers cared more about coddling abusive parents than fixing the state’s horrendous foster care system! 

On the contrary. The legislative priorities reflect the fact that, at long last, lawmakers are beginning to realize that you will never be able to fix the state’s horrendous foster care system as long as the state keeps shoveling children into it in huge numbers. 

But to sell these as “parents’ rights” bills, there’s a lot you have to leave out.  So a story written by a
reporter whose bio says: “She covers how inequity plays out for children and families with an eye on the state’s foster care system” makes no mention of that inequity, even though Black and mixed-race children are torn from their families in Texas at a rate 60% above their rate in the general population – a disparity these bills are likely to curb. 

In contrast, ProPublica’s latest story about the Miranda rights bill notes that it “will in many cases benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income families who often have their lives and homes upended by CPS officers.”  The story also explains that “child welfare issues often defy typical partisan binaries.” 

But that doesn’t fit the Tribune story’s entire parents vs. kids framing.  So the Tribune story ignores inequity and instead claims that lawmakers concluded: “parents facing abuse accusations are entitled to more rights.” 

For starters, that’s grossly misleading.  None of the provisions of new laws discussed in the story give parents – or anyone else -- more rights.  The bills do things like force the family police to tell families the rights they already have and document whether they have followed existing federal law.  The one provision that arguably gives more rights – to children -- the one that helps protect them from blackmail placements – isn’t mentioned in the story. 

But the bigger problem with the story is the claim that these are “parents’ rights” bills. 

● A law that reduces the chances that children will be forced to endure the enormous trauma of a needless child abuse investigation because an angry neighbor is hiding behind anonymity to phone in a false report is a children’s rights law. 

● A law that requires the family police to simply document what, if anything, they say they tried to do to keep a child safety out of the horrors of Texas foster care – so a judge can step in when, in fact, they did little or nothing -- is a children’s rights law. 

● A law that bolsters family defense, so families have a team that can propose alternatives to cookie-cutter “service plans” doled out by the family police -- again, to spare children the horror of Texas foster care -- is a children’s rights law. 

● And a collection of laws that, together, may reduce false allegations trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect” so workers have more time to find the few children in real danger is a collection of children’s rights laws. 

The ultimate unreliable source 

To bolster the false claim that these are parents’ rights bills, the reporter turns to what probably is the least reliable source in all of Texas, but a source guaranteed to support the reporter’s own view: Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).  Indeed, she relied on the chapter of that organization which did the most comprehensive study of all to determine if its program worked -- and found that it actually did harm: the chapter in Texas. 

CASA is a particularly odd choice for a reporter whose beat focuses on inequity.  CASA is the program in which overwhelmingly white, middle-class amateurs with no required qualifications and maybe 40 hours of training (plus in-service so it’s OK, right?) are allowed to march into the homes of families who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite and pass judgment upon them – judgments that, depressingly often, are rubber-stamped by the courts. 

That’s why a law review article aptly characterized CASA as “an act of white supremacy.”  

Furthermore, study after study after study shows that CASA backfires, often hurting the children it is intended to help. 

The most revealing of these was a study of Texas CASA – commissioned by Texas CASA itself.  It was released at the end of 2019.  According to that study: 

“Overall, children appointed a CASA have significantly lower odds than children without a CASA of achieving permanency.” [Emphasis added.]

Compared to children not burdened with a CASA on the case, Texas foster children with  CASAs were:

● Less likely to be reunified with their own parents.

● Less likely to find permanence in the form of guardianship by a relative.

● More likely to “age out” of foster care with no home at all.

When the study came out the Austin American-Statesman did a good story about it. The Texas Tribune ignored it. 

Yet somehow this is the organization we are supposed to trust when it invokes the false claim that child safety and family preservation are opposites that need to be balanced. 

So the Texas Tribune story gives us this: 

“We’re in a period in history right now where things are swinging very much towards having the smallest possible system, really prioritizing parents’ rights,” said Sarah Crockett, the director of public policy at foster kid advocacy group Texas CASA. 

For decades everyone in the system has claimed that they want the smallest possible system – that they only want to see children taken as a last resort.  Yet now, when some small steps are taken toward doing it, “smallest possible system” somehow is equated with “parents’ rights.” 

Crokett then offers the classic example of the Big Lie: implying that when you make the system smaller, children are less safe: 

“This system is traumatic and stressful for children and parents. I absolutely do think that we should do everything that we can to keep the child with their family,” Crockett said. “And it’s also true that child abuse is still happening. And so how do we balance those two things? 

Except that well over a decade ago, a Texas think tank – a liberal Texas think tank -- released a study debunking the idea that doing more to keep families together compromises child safety. On the contrary, it’s the massive overload of systems with all those false allegations trivial cases and poverty cases that makes it harder to find children in real danger. 

The bias of the center 

One of the problems for the Tribune in pushing the whole idea that these bills all spring from the minds of right-wing “parents’ rights” fanatics is the fact that so many of the bills passed nearly unanimously (something never mentioned in the story).  The solution is to stereotype both sides as extreme while groups like CASA – and the Texas Tribune -- are simply suggesting that, as journalists love to proclaim, the truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. 

So after accepting CASA’s false characterization the story declares that the new laws represent 

an approach supported by both ​​social conservatives who tout family values and progressive child welfare abolitionists who want to do away with the system. 

In the Texas Tribune’s eyes, only extremists support these “parents’ rights” bills; whereas good, sensible moderates oppose them.  This is a classic example of what’s been aptly called “the bias of the center” – the idea that the truth always lies “somewhere in between” – and somehow taking that stand in a news story, and stereotyping everyone you disagree with as an extremist, isn’t bias. 

In this case there’s a particular problem: By that logic, almost every Democrat in the Texas Legislature is an abolitionist “who want(s) to do away with the system.”  If that were true you’d think they would have proposed stronger bills. 

No, what the Tribune (and the Dallas Morning News) can’t face is that after decades of seeing the system that calls itself “child welfare” do enormous harm to children, people across the political spectrum are coming together and finding common ground.  They've come to understand that due process for families is the best way to ensure children’s rights and child safety.  

So the Tribune presents us with a lawyer, who, apparently referring to these bills and one that became law in 2021 said: “The failing in the laws is that the standard is so high now for a child to be removed.” 

In fact, none of this year’s bills changes the standard for removal. The one that became law in 2021 (again after passing with huge bipartisan majorities) said only that before branding families guilty of neglect and tearing children from everyone they know and love there should be an “immediate danger” to the child.  That’s because if the danger isn’t immediate then there’s time to find ways to remove the risk instead of the child.  Why in the world wouldn’t you try that first? 

The anonymous reporting bill 

The first bill discussed specifically in the Tribune story is the one largely replacing anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. Here, the reporter doesn’t bother with the figleaf of finding someone else to say what she thinks, instead she simply declares flatly that the bill “takes an extreme approach to weeding out false reports.” 

The story’s discussion of this bill is misleading in several ways. 

The story declares that “the anonymity can protect those afraid of retaliation.” At no point does the story explain why confidential reporting, in which the accused still doesn’t know the name of the accuser, fails to do that.  

The story then repeats this from that previous misleading Texas Tribune story about the bill: 

About 1,000 of the 12,473 anonymous reports made in 2022 led to findings of abuse, according to Texans Care for Children. 

Like the previous story, this one leaves a whole lot out:

      ● “Findings of abuse” is a gross exaggeration.  The 1,000 reports were “substantiated,” but that means only that a caseworker checked a box on a form guessing it is slightly more likely than not that something that meets Texas’ definitions of abuse and neglect occurred. 

      ●  Of those 1,000 cases, it is likely that 770 did not involve sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse.

      So what the numbers actually show is that, of all anonymous reports alleging abuse or neglect in Texas in 2022, 92% were flat-out false.  That means caseworkers handling these cases spent 92% of their time harassing innocent families, inflicting trauma on their children – and wasting time that could have been used to find children in real danger.

      Add in the cases that were “substantiated” but involved neither physical nor sexual abuse, and the figure rises to more than 98%.  That’s 98% of workers’ time spent on cases that are nothing like the horror stories.

At no point in the Texas Tribune story is anyone quoted favoring the bill.  But, again echoing the previous story, the reporter gladly invokes the ultimate in fearmongering to oppose it: 

“None of us in this room want any child to suffer abuse or neglect. And I would hate for us to vote for a policy where the tradeoff is ... [having] a child possibly die from abuse or neglect,” [Sen. José] Menéndez said on the Senate floor. 

Texas Tribune readers never learn about that liberal think tank study showing that encouraging more reports, anonymous or otherwise, does not reduce child abuse deaths.  They never learn about the research showing that it is the overload of false allegations trivial cases and poverty cases that actually makes it more like that that you could have “a child possibly die from abuse or neglect.” 

Suckered by a McLawsuit 

Part of the blame for all this lies with the group that brought the massive doomed-to-fail Texas McLawsuit in the first place: the group that calls itself Children’s Rights.  Both CR and the group that spun off from it and which shares responsibility for the Texas McLawsuit, A Better Childhood, have abysmal records of filing almost identical suits across the country that ignore the problem at the root of all the others – needless removal of children.  Instead, they demand “solutions” that don’t always fail completely, but often leave states with the same lousy systems only bigger.  

That’s why Michigan’s leading child advocate recently blasted the consent decree resulting from a very similar Children’s Rights McLawsuit in that state, declaring that the Michigan consent decree has: 

if anything, made the situation much worse because it’s funneling money from front-end stuff to really fund our foster care system. 

The Texas lawsuit demands much the same – and it sounds like that’s exactly as the Texas Tribune thinks it should be.  

The Texas suit also is another example of CR’s excellent public policy work and its lousy lawsuits working at cross purposes.  In recent years CR has done bold work calling out racism in family policing and demanding things like the repeal of horrible laws such as the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. 

But in its Texas lawsuit Complaint (Paragraph 282) CR demands stricter enforcement of ASFA. 

None of this excuses how Texas has responded to the lawsuit – by fighting it tooth and nail instead of proposing an alternative: a consent decree that emphasizes services and due process protections to keep children in their own homes.  (It’s not too late to try that, by the way.) 

But none of this is hindsight either.  We knew the McLawsuit was doomed to fail and we said so early on.  Now, the Texas legislature is figuring out that the only way to fix foster care is to have less of it – whether the Texas Tribune or the Dallas Morning News like it or not. 

UPDATES, JULY 14 AND JULY 18, 2023:

KWTX-TV reports on a case in which six children were taken away.  All of them, even the youngest, age 2, apparently were institutionalized.  Now that child is dead.  According to the news story “this all happened because of a call alleging [the mother] was smoking marijuana.” And KXXV-TV reports the call was anonymous and the mother passed "numerous drug tests."  (They also report there was an allegation of "violence" - but no indication there was even an allegation of violence against the children.)

Apparently, the children were never in any danger, because shortly after boy’s death, the Texas family police agency gave all the other children back and closed the case.

So yeah, tell us again Texas lawyer how “the failing in the laws is that the standard is so high now for a child to be removed.”  And tell us again, Texas lawmaker, how the "tradeoff" for banning most anonymous reporting is "[having] a child possibly die."

When the journalism of child welfare fails, part two: A reporter in Scranton has her facts wrong – and her blunder is hurting children

Lackawanna County, Pa., County Courthouse

UPDATE, JULY 11: We reached out to the Times-Tribune and, to their great credit, they have removed the story from their website and are reviewing our concerns.  

UPDATE, JULY 17: The Times-Tribune published a new story about these issues. It still has serious flaws, but it is free of factual error and no longer implies that an alleged emphasis on keeping families together was responsible for the horror stories.

Most of the time, when I take issue with the journalism of child welfare, it involves reporters who mean well but have taken to heart decades of conventional wisdom.  They’ve been as conditioned by health terrorism as the rest of us.  That’s why I usually don’t name the reporter, or at least don’t emphasize it, and focus on institutional failures. 

But the lead story in Sunday’s Scranton, Pa. Times-Tribune by Terrie Morgan-Besecker is so breathtakingly flat-out factually wrong concerning the most basic statistics that I’m making an exception. 

The story involves classic, tragic horror story cases.  The local D.A. has taken advantage of it all, bringing criminal charges against caseworkers and supervisors.  And now Morgan-Besecker is piling on with the false claim that, as the headline put it: “Lackawanna County's child welfare agency places far fewer children in foster care than other counties.”  According to Morgan-Besecker, the main horror story case “reflects a pattern in Lackawanna County, which has consistently placed far fewer children in foster care than several similarly sized counties since 2017…” 

Normally at this point, I would discuss the research showing that there is no correlation between rates of child removal and horror story cases; sadly they happen everywhere.  So there is no “pattern.” In fact, the more you overload a system with false allegations, trivial cases, and cases in which poverty is confused with neglect the more likely it is that the cases that become the horror stories will be missed. And if the cases Morgan-Besecker cites supposedly show a "pattern" of taking too few children, what does the even more horrific case of the rape, torture and murder of foster and adopted child Susan Hunsicker (known in news accounts as Grace Packer) elsewhere in Pennsylvania say about a "pattern" of taking too many and taking them needlessly?  

The basic errors of fact 

But, as the lawyers would say, we don’t even have to reach that issue here.  Because Morgan-Besecker’s claim about Lackawanna County taking fewer children is simply wrong on its face.  She piles error on top of error on top of error.  Let's go through them one-by-one.

● Morgan-Besecker compares Lackawanna County to five other counties: Berks, Erie, Lehigh, Luzerne and York.  Using data from an annual report from Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children she gives a figure for raw numbers for each county and then claims that the “similarly sized counties” had “significantly higher placement rates.” 

But it turns out the counties are not so similar.  When you compare the actual rates – that is numbers compared to child population -- two of the five comparison counties have lower rates than Lackawanna and a third is only slightly higher. 

Here’s how it comes out: 

County            Children “served” in foster care per thousand

Berks               4.4

Lehigh             4.5

Lackawanna  5.3

York                5.7

Erie                 8.2

Luzerne           11.2

It’s not as if Morgan-Besecker would have to go find population figures and run these numbers herself.  Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children obligingly provides the rate per thousand right under the raw number.  Like this: 

But that’s only the start of the problem. 

● Morgan-Besecker never explains why she chose these particular counties except to say they’re similarly sized.  In fact, there are several other counties that are closer in population to Lackawanna than some she included.  Look what happens when they are added to the mix: 

County            Children “served” in foster care per thousand

Butler              3.6

Berks               4.4

Lehigh             4.5

Westmoreland 4.5

Cumberland    4.8

Northampton    5.3

Lackawanna  5.3

York                5.7

Monroe           5.7

Erie                 8.2

Luzerne           11.2 

● In any event, Morgan-Besecker used the wrong line in the Pennsylvania Partnerships report for each county.  She used a line clearly labeled “Unduplicated Number of Children Served – All children in Foster Care During the Year.”  This is a figure that combines entries into care over the course of a year with the number of children already in care at the start of the year.  Check out the description:  

This figure can vary for all sorts of reasons.  It does not, in fact, measure what Morgan-Besecker claims it measures: “the number of children placed in foster care … in 2021, the latest year for which data is available.” 

There actually is a line in the Pennsylvania Partnerships report for each county that does measure this.  It’s the last line on the same page.  It’s the one conveniently labeled “Children Entering Foster Care – All Entries into Foster Care During the Year.”  This is what it looks like: 

When you use those figures, even the raw numbers tell a different story.  Berks County actually took fewer children and Lehigh took only six more.  Oh, and one other thing: The rate of removal in Lackawanna County turns out to be almost identical to the Pennsylvania statewide average.  (Unfortunately, this line does not compare rates, but the population data for such a comparison are readily available from the Census Bureau.) 

This still doesn’t tell the whole story.  Because poverty is both a cause of actual abuse and, far more often, something confused with neglect, the fairest way to measure rates of removal is to compare entries into foster care with the impoverished child population in each jurisdiction. Do it that way and, looking only at the counties Morgan-Besecker chose, the results are – the same. The rates of removal are lower – in fact, they’re a lot lower – in Berks County and Lehigh County.  And the rate of removal in Lackawanna County is very close to the state average.  (Again, you can get these data by comparing entries into care to Census Bureau data for impoverished children in each county.) 

An odd county to use as a model

The first county Morgan-Besecker singles out in her skewed comparison does indeed take away far more children than Lackawanna County or any of the others.  It’s Luzerne County.  But then, Morgan-Besecker has shown a fondness for that county’s approach for decades. 

I first noticed Morgan-Besecker’s byline on a story from 2002 when she was at the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre.  The story no longer appears to be available online, but it's in NCCPR's database of "child welfare" news coverage. The headline on that one was: “From families first to kids first: The death of a girl in 1999 is a local case that brings into focus the new stress on protecting a child over preserving a family.”  The story goes on to quote the then head of the Luzerne County family police agency (a more accurate term than "child welfare" agency) almost bragging about the increase in the numbers of children his agency tore from their homes. 

The ugliest quote came from Pennsylvania’s single most fanatical advocate for tearing apart families, Frank Cervone.  Then, and until quite recently, Cervone ran Philadelphia’s rough equivalent of a CASA program. Here’s what he said in that 2002 story: 

"What AFSA has done is it says to the family, 'get well or get on.' We can't spend years trying to rehabilitate a family if those years are going to cost the child their childhood." 

As for opponents of ASFA, they were dismissed as “parents’ rights advocates” – the classic Big Lie of American child welfare - and one we were permitted by the Times-Leader to rebut in an op-ed column at the time.  

Now, in fairness, a lot of reporters believed the b.s. in Morgan-Besecker's 2002 story at the time. We didn’t yet have as much data showing that it was ASFA itself that would cost hundreds of thousands of children their childhoods – though the trend already was clear.  That's why plenty of children's rights advocates opposed it then and oppose it now.  Back then, Cervone was the Godsource for Pennsylvania media – and that’s one reason why, until recently, Philadelphia tore apart families at one of the highest rates among America’s biggest cities.  

And it wasn’t until five or six years later that the Juvenile Law Center exposed the kids-for-cash scandal that would make Luzerne County notorious across America. 

In the intervening years, Morgan-Besecker did write the occasional story about Luzerne County families who said their children had been wrongfully removed, and about failures in the county’s public defender office leading to missed deadlines for appeals.  And she covered the kids-for-cash scandal.

But now comes a story in which she still seems to think Luzerne County is some kind of model.  While other reporters have learned to treat his pronouncements with skepticism, Besecker still backs up the misleading out-of-context figures in her story with inflammatory quotes by, yes, Frank Cervone.

And once again, the token comment warning that the criminal charges against the caseworkers are likely to lead to more removals is presented solely as something that would be “unfair to families who don’t deserve to have their children removed” – as opposed to unfair to children who don’t deserve the trauma of needless foster care and the high risk of abuse in foster care just because their caseworker was scared of the district attorney – and/or the local newspaper. 

Responding to the data (or whatever he was told about the data) the D.A. declared that "The numbers speak for themselves.” 

They do.  But they’re not saying what either the D.A. or Terrie Morgan-Beseker says they’re saying.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 5, 2023

● After more than a year of digging and 100 public records requests Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and The New York Times Magazine expose how a one-word change in a part of the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act has wrought havoc in the lives of thousands of children and their families.  Contravening all the science and every major medical society with expertise in the area, the change has led to the confiscation of newborns at birth even when the only drug a mother was using was a legally-prescribed medication to counter the effects of opioids.  Indeed, it can endanger the fetus to suddenly stop using such medication when pregnant. 

But the story doesn’t stop there.  It also touches on the sham of “team decision-making,” the harm of forcing parents to pay part of the cost of children’s foster care (a payment that should properly be called “ransom”) and the evil of a practice known as “concurrent planning.” 

In short, this story gets right everything The Boston Globe got wrong when it published a story that included some similar issues. 

● Think you already know about the enormous harm done by the vast unchecked power of so-called child abuse pediatricians? The Netflix documentary Take Care of Maya still has the power to shock.  Netflix has not released a trailer, only this clip:

Here’s an example of what can still shock: One expects the medical professionals to show contempt for Maya’s falsely-accused mother, but their texts and overheard conversations revealed the extent of their contempt for Maya – the child they supposedly were “saving.” 

I’m glad the documentary credits the outstanding work of Gannett reporter Daphne Chen, who, with Nicole Rodriguez,  broke the story and went on to do so much more excellent reporting on family policing. 

● After you watch Take Care of Maya, check out this suggested list of additional reading from Vanity Fair about not only the harm done by so-called “child abuse pediatricians” but the vast unchecked power of the family police in general. 

● When the family police agency in Massachusetts found that their determinations of “child abuse” and “neglect” were  overturned after a hearing half the time, guess what they did:

A. Fixed their process.

B. Invented a way to evade the hearings.

Of course you know the answer.  But you might want to read our blog post about it anyway. 

● There have been plenty of news accounts about transgender children threatened with removal from their homes in certain states if their parents provide gender-affirming care.  Mostly, these stories have focused on white, middle-class families.  But sexual orientation, whether of a child or a parent, has made families a target of the family police for as long as there have been family police.  And, as Rewire News illustrates in this story, the threat is even greater if the family is not white or middle-class.  

● In the Journal of Law and Policy, family defender Joshua Michtom explains why vigorous family advocacy in the courtroom is not enough – family defenders must explain to the general public the enormous harm done by this system.  He writes about what he tells new lawyers: 

Child protection trials are meant to provide just enough due process to legitimize a system that efficiently ratifies the decisions of the child protection agency.  These are not neutral proceedings of unknown outcome.  As trials go, they are a scam.  As a lawyer representing parents, you will be part of the scam … Certainly we must be skilled fixers, zealous advocates, and tireless litigators.  But if that is all we do we will be nothing more than collaborators enabling the system by lending it an undeserved veneer of due process … [P]arents’ lawyers must take on a moral and strategic duty to report the system’s abuses to the public.

Court stops Mass. family police from crushing minimal due process rights for families

The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families found that their determinations of “child abuse” and “neglect” were being overturned after a hearing half the time. Guess what they did: 

A. Realized their process for labeling people child abusers was rife with error and fixed it.

B. Invented a way to evade the hearings.

(After a court saw through DCF’s ploy, the agency started providing the hearings).

Every state has some version of a “central register” of people accused of child abuse or neglect.  The process and the consequences vary from state to state, but they have one thing in common: It is extremely easy to be put on these registers and extremely difficult to get off again.  They amount to state databases of rumor and innuendo. 

In almost every state, getting on the register requires only that a caseworker check a box on a form stating it is slightly more likely than not that you are a child abuser – or simply slightly more likely than not that you are guilty of “neglect,” a label that can be slapped on almost anyone who is poor, if a caseworker is so inclined.  In some states, including Massachusetts, the standard is even lower. 

Sometimes a supervisor has to check the box, too.  That’s it.  There’s no independent factfinding beforehand, no chance to present a defense, no neutral arbiter evaluating all sides. The caseworker’s word is law.  Once on the register, you have to fight your way out.  The process varies from state to state, but again, there’s one thing in common: If you can’t afford a lawyer you’re unlikely to get one.  It’s you, on your own, vs. the entire family police bureaucracy.  And since overwhelmingly the people labeled “child abusers” are poor, well … 

All this does enormous harm to children.  A listing on a central register can be a barrier to a huge number of jobs – often the very jobs most likely to be open to poor people. So the listing drives them further into poverty, harming their children and, of course, making it more likely that the poverty will be confused with neglect. 

And the listing increases the odds that, even if the children weren’t thrown into foster care this time, it will happen if the family is reported again – because the listing raises suspicions, whether it’s the guess of a human caseworker or a computer algorithm raising a family’s “risk score.” 

In spite of the way the deck is stacked, a stunning number of people who fight these determinations win. 

So in Massachusetts, where you can seek an administrative hearing to fight your way out, even though the burden of proof is on you to show you are innocent, families win about half the time.  

One might hope that a record like that might give a family police agency second thoughts; that they might think: Hey, wait a minute, if as soon as a neutral arbiter looks at this, despite the way we’ve stacked the deck, the arbiters say we’re wrong half the time maybe that means we’re wrong half the time and we need to fix this. 

As far as I know, that’s never happened.  Not in Massachusetts and not in other states where the rate at which these findings are overturned on appeal can be even higher. 

But only Massachusetts DCF came up with this oh-so-clever little workaround: make up an entire new category out of whole cloth, make it slightly less harmful than the really bad category  and unilaterally deny families fair hearings!  

Until 2015, DCF had two boxes a worker could check: “supported” and “unsupported.”  An unsupported finding did not lead to a listing in the central register and other adverse consequences, a supported finding did. 

But then, faced with all those supported findings being overturned on appeal, DCF suddenly decreed
the existence of a third category: “substantiated concern.”  There’s supposed to be a formal rulemaking process, complete with public comment, before a Massachusetts agency does something like that; but hey, they’re the family police – rules are for other people, right?  They just pulled this new category out of their – uh, imagination.  Only after the lawsuit described below, did DCF go through the rulemaking process (which was, of course, a foregone conclusion since they already had the rule). 

Here’s what made this new category so dangerous: 

DCF unilaterally decided that victims of “substantiated concern” findings are not entitled to fair hearings.  Instead, they can write to DCF itself and ask them to please reconsider. 

So-called “substantiated concern” determinations don’t result in a listing in the central registry – but they still go into DCF’s internal database.  That means they can still be used, by humans or computers, to ratchet up suspicion if there’s another report, increasing the risk of needless foster care placement.  The new category means DCF can stay in the family’s life for months or more, placing them under constant onerous, stressful surveillance. 

The new category also imposes limits on whether someone so listed can become a foster parent.  That’s what happened to a mother known in court documents as Jane Doe.  She sought to appeal the “substantiated concern” finding and was told that wasn’t allowed.  So she used the only appeal mechanism open to her – writing to DCF – and lost. 

Then she sued.  And won. 

As Superior Court Justice Katie Rayburn wrote in her ruling: 

[M]ore than half* of the DCF’s initial “supported” determinations were wrong.  There is no obvious reason that the DCF’s determinations of “substantiated concern” would be any more accurate than its “supported” determinations.  As such, there is a great risk that DCF will make “substantiated concern” determinations which would be more likely than not to be overturned on a quasi-judicial appeal proceedings. 

In fact, the odds of injustice may be even greater with this category, as a story in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly explained, citing Susan Elsen of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. MLRI and the firm of Brown, Rudnick represented Jane Doe.  From the story: 

By its nature, the “substantiated concern” finding is designed for cases in which there is a low risk of harm to a child, making it that much more important to provide parents a means to challenge DCF’s initial findings, Elsen says. 

DCF’s intervention is not “benign,” Elsen notes. … “Once DCF intervenes, the family lives in fear that their child will be taken from them.”… 

Elsen expects that families facing “substantiated concern” determinations may be even more successful in fair hearings, given that it is an even vaguer standard requiring less evidence and thus less likely to withstand a “competent, careful administrative review.” 

And Elsen raised another vital issue: 

From the beginning, Elsen says, one concern was that the creation of the “substantiated concern” category would only perpetuate racial bias in the child welfare system. 

Statewide, Black and Latinx families are reported to DCF more than three times as much as white families, according to Elsen, while in the Boston area, the numbers are even starker, with Latinx families and Black families reported at more than six and nine times the rate of white families, respectively. 

DCF is now providing administrative hearings for those who appeal “substantiated concern” determinations.  But what about the thousands of families slapped with this label since 2015?** (There were 7,929 such determinations in 2021 alone.) 

And who is going to stop DCF from running amok like this the next time it comes up with a similarly brilliant idea? 

*-The “More than half” statement is based on 2020 figures, when DCF was reversed 54% of the time. The Boston Globe reports that in 2022, DCF did better – they were reversed only 48% of the time. 

** - News accounts make clear that the category took effect in 2015, though it’s not clear if all of the harm dates back that far.  The Globe story says the designation was “revised” in 2020.