NY foster care agencies are being sued by survivors of horrific abuse. Their response: Taxpayers should bail us out!

Agencies that have failed kids for more than 100 years say they’re too big to fail. 

And why did the CEO of the agency that runs the notorious Pleasantville Cottage School get nearly $700,000 in compensation in 2022? 

It's been nearly 50 years since the New York Daily News series "Big Money, Little Victims"
exposed the power and the greed of private "child welfare" agencies, and abuse in their foster homes
and institutions.  Now, those "Little Victims" are all grown up - and some of them are suing.

George Orwell had a term for the ability to simultaneously accept two conflicting beliefs as truth.  He called it “doublethink.”  Here’s a perfect example: 

Our private foster care agencies are so wonderful, so essential to the public good that we absolutely must get a taxpayer bailout – so we can pay damages to the huge numbers of children abused for decades in our foster homes and institutions! 

Private agencies in New York State are trying to sucker the State Legislature into believing just that.  Not content with sponging off taxpayers for decades, to the tune of, on average, 90% of their income, now they’re demanding even more, in order to avoid true accountability for decades of horrific abuse. 

It’s all come about because, like other states, New York extended the statute of limitations for victims of child abuse to sue their abusers.  The primary target was predator priests, but lo’ and behold, more than 1,500 suits have been brought against the private agencies that run the group homes and institutions and, especially in New York City, oversee private foster homes as well.  

Their power is diminished from their heyday when, with boards of directors drawn from deep in the city’s business, civic and religious elite, they could say “Jump!” and public officials were expected to say “How high?” (For an excellent description of that heyday see Nina Bernstein’s masterpiece The Lost Children of Wilder.) But in the city, these agencies still are the foster care system.  They have been that system for more than 160 years – at least since Charles Loring Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society in 1852. 

That so many lawsuits would be directed against these agencies should come as no surprise.  As I told the Albany Times Union, which first pointed this out in 2020, predators go where the prey is. 

New York is not alone.  After California passed similar legislation, the Los Angeles Times reported that in Los Angeles alone, 

County officials predicted that they may be forced to spend between $1.6 billion and $3 billion to resolve roughly 3,000 claims of sexual abuse that allegedly took place in the county’s foster homes, children shelters, and probation camps and halls dating to the 1950s. 

But instead of responding by promising to clean up their acts once and for all (an impossible promise to keep in any event for reasons discussed below) the New York agencies are demanding that they be insulated from true accountability.  They say they’re not just too big, but too pure too noble and just too all-around-wonderful to fail and terrible things will happen if the rest of us don’t bail them out.  

In other words: We’re in danger of going out of business because we were the site of decades of horrendous child abuse, but we’re so wonderful we should get a taxpayer bailout so we don’t go out of business after being the site of decades of horrendous child abuse.  Doublethink. 

The agencies are demanding special help to get insurance, and $200 million from state taxpayers to pay what insurance doesn’t cover. (The fund also would be available for public school districts.) Where, then, is the incentive for these agencies to finally put a halt, or at least curb, all that abuse of children in their care?  

The New York agencies aren’t alone. Indiana agencies sought a law giving them immunity from most lawsuits by abuse survivors – and they almost got it, until the Indianapolis Star revealed what they were up to. 

“An industry-wide problem” 

It’s not as if the people running these agencies can say that, after all, the abuses were all in the past and we’ve fixed everything now.  On the contrary, not a week goes by without an expose of horrific abuse at some group home or residential treatment center somewhere in America. 

The Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at the Devereux residential McTreatment chain accidentally gave away the game when speaking not decades ago but in 2020, after the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed rampant abuse in Devereux facilities.  Said Leah Yaw: 

“This is not an aberration that happens at Devereux because of some kind of lack of control or structure.  This is an industry-wide problem." 

And like any other industry, the foster care industrial complex needs to be held fully accountable when children are abused in its homes and institutions. 

Want a New York example? Take Pleasantville Cottage School – please. 

The Times-Union story begins with a 13-year-old boy who says he was sexually abused by a teacher there in the early 1980s.  The abuser “told me that he had the power of whether I go home to my mother or not,” the survivor said.  His is one of at least 10 lawsuits just against Pleasantville, involving abuse dating back as far as 1973. 

Then there was that time in the 1990s, when a 13-year-old at Pleasantville strangled another child to death. 

Then in 2002, a counselor was horrendously beaten and tortured for an hour, and, as Newsweek reported, “four boys tried to sodomize a fellow resident with a cucumber, two boys stole a school car and caused two accidents during their joyride, and another boy was charged with sexual misconduct.”  

And that was just in a single week. 

So, how have things been going lately? The online news site The City reports that 

“In 2019 … a young man on campus was paralyzed after being restrained by program staff and died a year later, according to Mount Pleasant Police Chief Paul Oliva. … Residents also regularly get into fights, break windows, assault staff and threaten to hurt themselves or someone else, police records show.” 

It's always someone else's fault

Of course, the people who run Pleasantville Cottage School have an excuse for all this – because remember, nothing that goes wrong at a residential treatment center is ever the fault of the residential treatment center.  No, it’s the kids' fault! 

Before I explain, please keep something in mind: Over and over again the excuse RTCs offer up for their existence is that they take the most difficult children – the ones who are so very, very difficult that no family could possibly handle them so they have to be institutionalized. 

This is not true. There is nothing an RTC does that can’t be done better and at lower cost with Wrapraround services brought directly into a child’s own home or a foster home.  But I mention this now because, confronted with the huge problems at Pleasantville Cottage School the director of the institution’s parent agency, a former head of New York City’s family police agency, Ron Richter, says, wait for it: The kids are too difficult!  

You see, they claim, it’s all because in 2014 former Gov. Andrew Cuomo cut back on inpatient state psychiatric beds, so these too-difficult-to-handle young people wound up at Pleasantville and similar institutions. 

Sadly, The City, usually a savvy news organization, believed Richter’s whole party line. -- even though the same institution made the same excuse in 2002 – twelve years before the cutbacks they blame now. 

In fact, the Times Union reports, the Pleasantville Cottage School counselor who made precisely that excuse to the equally credulous New York Times in 2002 has now been named as an alleged sex abuser in a Child Victims Act lawsuit! The survivor alleges that the counselor, whom she says is now dead, repeatedly raped her during the 1970s.  When she eventually worked up the courage to tell the then-CEO of Pleasantville Cottage School in the 1990s, she says, “he swept it under the rug.” 

But, if Pleasantville and all the other New York agencies are to be believed, they are the real victims, and they need a taxpayer bailout. 

Their argument boils down to: If we don’t get the extra money we’ll go out of business, all our wonderful services will end and all our employees will be out of work.  

Only the first part might be true.  

The rest is just a testament to their own arrogance: the bizarre assumption that no one else can run a foster care agency.  Obviously, someone is going to have to oversee the foster homes and, if we insist on having them, group homes and institutions – though, one hopes, this will be seen as an opportunity to phase the latter out, since they are demonstrably unnecessary. 

The reason abusive institutions can’t be fixed is that abuse is baked into the model. To understand why, imagine if we were starting from scratch.  Suppose somebody said: I have a great idea!  Let’s take a whole bunch of children who have been traumatized, either by what happened to them in their homes, or by being removed from their homes or both, all of them strangers to each other, and put them all together 24/7 right at the age when they are most vulnerable to peer pressure – and to predators.  What could possibly go wrong?  

Yet that’s what we’ve done.  But now we have a chance to do better.  The prospect of these old-line agencies going out of business is not something to be feared; it’s an opportunity to be seized and a cause to rejoice: It’s a chance to start over and build a system that is not dependent on institutionalizing children. 

If, as a result, the well-paid leaders of these agencies have to leave, (Richter alone pulled down more than half a million dollars in compensation in 2021 – and then got more than 30% more -- nearly $700,000, in 2022!) the message to them should be: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.  

From ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer

I’m not saying government actually will seize this opportunity.  I’m not saying they, or some new private entities would do it any better.  A large chunk of what Los Angeles may have to pay is thanks to that government-run hellhole MacLaren Hall, which closed in 2003. But it would be hard for anyone to do worse. 

And to the extent that there may be any visionaries willing to try, now’s a good chance. 

The harm done by New York’s big, old-line foster care agencies is nothing new.  In May 1975, the New York Daily News exposed them in a multi-part series.  It exposed not only the abuse but also how the agencies at that time were prolonging children’s time in foster care – because they were reimbursed for every day they held a child in their “care.”  I read that series a few months before starting Journalism school.  The stories started me on a nearly 50-year journey first as a reporter, now as an advocate. 

The series was called “Big Money, Little Victims.”  Today, some of the little victims are grown up.  Nothing can ever really compensate them for what they endured.  But they have a right to some of that big money.

Colorado shows how to get a task force on mandatory child abuse reporting – less wrong

The Colorado State Capitol

 In a surprising interim report, the task force says step one is narrowing definitions of abuse and neglect so they’re not conflated with poverty.

 

 The Task Force has agreed that it must first address Colorado’s current definition of child abuse and neglect. … Colorado’s current definition of abuse and neglect is too broad and conflates several circumstances – such as poverty – with child abuse. Without first addressing the definition of abuse and neglect, the Task Force cannot meaningfully recommend changes to the current mandatory reporting system or law.

--Interim Report of the Colorado Mandatory Reporting Task Force

 All over the country, there’s a knee-jerk response to a horror story that in any way may have involved a failure by someone to report child abuse: The state legislature rushes to expand which professionals are forced to report any suspicion of “child abuse” or “neglect.” (Except, of course, in the 18 states where these laws already apply to everyone.  In those states all lawmakers can do is further expand what must be reported.) 

As the research summarized in NCCPR’s new Issue Paper makes clear, this has backfired – creating a massive child welfare surveillance state that scares families away from seeking help, overloads the system with false reports, trivial cases and poverty cases, and leaves workers even less time to find the few children in real danger.  In other words, mandatory reporting makes all children less safe. 

When legislatures don’t actually expand mandatory reporting themselves, they create a committee/task force/commission or maybe even a blue ribbon commission to tell them how to do it.  The committee/task force/commission spends a year or two on a report that does just that. 

That was the original plan in Massachusetts.  The state’s most fanatical advocate for a take-the-child-and-run approach, state “Child Advocate” Maria Mossaides, was named to chair a commission on mandatory reporting.  She led the commission by the nose, let them hear only what she wanted them to hear, until, finally, she had to hold a public hearing.  Almost every witness told the Commission it was on the wrong track, and should recommend curbing or abolishing mandatory reporting instead of expanding it.  Having finally heard what Mossaides didn’t want them to hear, Commission members said they were “shocked” “surprised” and “taken aback.”  They wound up recommending nothing. 

Then it was Colorado’s turn.  It seems everyone in Colorado learned from Massachusetts’ mistakes – but no one learned quite enough. 

First, the good news 

The learning curve begins with the Colorado Legislature, which included in its charge to the Colorado Mandated Reporter Task Force a requirement to examine how implicit bias in mandatory reporting disproportionately affects families of color, people with disabilities and under-resourced communities. 

It continued with the chair of the Colorado Task Force, Mossaides’ Colorado counterpart, Stephane Villafuerte, the state’s “Child Protection Ombudsman.”  I’ve been quite critical of Villafuerte in the past, both concerning a different task force she chairs, on residential treatment, and her office’s previous work concerning mandatory reporting.  But this time, to her credit, she exposed the commission members to a full range of viewpoints. 

Yes, they heard from the usual suspects, such as Casey Family Programs and Colorado’s own Kempe Center.  But they also heard from Jerry Milner, once the federal government’s highest-ranking official overseeing child welfare, now co-founder of the Family Justice Group, and someone who has emerged as a leading opponent of the vast overreach of the current system.  They also heard from Prof. Kelley Fong, whose landmark book Investigating Families has quickly emerged as the gold standard for research in this field. 

Given that the Task Force heard from the full range of viewpoints, it shouldn’t have been a shock when
the Task Force concluded it would be a terrible idea to expand who must report and when they must report it until the Legislature first narrows down what it is they should report.  So the Task Force is actually going to put the horse before the cart and first address how to do that.  As the interim report explains: 

Colorado’s current definition of abuse and neglect is too broad and conflates several circumstances – such as poverty – with child abuse. This effectively requires mandatory reporters to report circumstances that may not involve the safety or well-being of children.

The Task Force also will be looking into two other areas that have the potential to lead to constructive recommendations: 

The development of warmlines and alternative reporting methods. 

This could be useful if these alternatives lead to places in no way connected with family police agencies, and if any mandated reporter who takes advantage of these alternatives is immune from any penalty for “failure to report.” (In other words, if these alternatives provide an off-ramp from the mandatory reporting expressway.) 

Consideration of possible exemptions for professionals working with legal representation teams and/or victims of domestic violence or sexual violence. 

Survivors of domestic violence are among those most adversely affected by mandatory reporting. Some survivors, usually mothers, are scared away from leaving their abusers for fear that their children will be taken away because they “failed to protect” the children from seeing them being beaten.  Yes, that really happens. 

And, obviously, the effectiveness of a social worker working with a family defense attorney to, say, craft an alternative to the cookie-cutter “service plans” typically issued by family police agencies is limited if they are, themselves, mandatory reporters. 

Now the bad news 

When it comes to mandatory reporting nibbling around the edges isn’t going to accomplish much.  Narrowing definitions is a good idea, but mandatory reporters are still going to be afraid not to report.  Exempting some professionals will still leave most professionals required to report and afraid to do anything else. 

When it comes to mandatory reporting, the most meaningful solution, by far, is to abolish it.  Abolishing mandatory reporting does not mean abolishing reporting; it would simply free professionals to exercise their professional judgment – and send a vital message that every family problem is not a family policing problem.  

Although the Colorado Legislature clearly didn’t contemplate this, the Task Force is free to give lawmakers whatever advice it pleases.  But, while not nearly as bad as Mossaides, Villafuerte appears to have foreclosed this option. 

The Legislature also appeared obsessed with promoting the least helpful solution of all – that all-purpose family policing establishment cop-out: more “training.”  But even if a few hours of “training” could magically cure a lifetime of biases, it still wouldn’t solve the problem of mandated reporters being afraid not to report.  

But at least the Colorado Task Force might get some people to think twice about mandatory reporting.  In most states, they’re not even thinking once.

For more on mandatory reporting in general, and the Colorado Task Force in particular, see this excellent story.

NCCPR's new Issue Paper: The Failure of Mandatory Reporting

Last week NCCPR published its first entirely new Issue Paper in 15 years.  We pull together in summary form, with links to sources, the ugly history and enormous harm of mandatory "child abuse" reporting laws.  It's available on our website, or you can read it right here:

NCCPR ISSUE PAPER #16: THE FAILURE OF MANDATORY REPORTING

Before termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than “termination of parental rights”), before children are torn from the arms of their families and consigned to the chaos of foster care, before someone from the family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) pounds on the door in the middle of the night, demands entry, interrogates and sometimes stripsearches the children as part of a traumatic investigation – before any of that, there is a call to a child abuse “hotline.” 

In rare cases there is good reason to make that call.  In many more cases, there is not.  And in some cases the people who make these calls know how much harm they will do, but feel they have no choice.  Because they are “mandated reporters.” 

Every state has a law requiring most professionals who work with children to report any suspicion of “child abuse” or “child neglect.”  In 18 states all adults are mandatory reporters.  

These laws are not evidence-based.  They were rushed into place more than 50 years ago, evidence-be-damned.  Nobody did any studies before putting them into place.  Mandatory reporting was a well-intended guess, born of hype and fearmongering.  We guessed wrong, with terrible consequences for children.  These are some of the consequences: 

● Even the original proponents of mandatory reporting didn’t call for what we have now. Rather they wanted a narrow requirement in which a few health professionals would be required to report suspicions of sexual abuse or abuse causing serious physical injuries.  But today, of every 100 calls to hotlines – most of which are made by mandated reporters – 97 turn out not to be “substantiated” cases of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse.  

Instead of a way of targeting horrendous cases of abuse, mandatory reporting metastasized into the foundation of a giant child welfare surveillance state, with disastrous consequences.  Today more than one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. 

● That has made all children less safe.  In addition to the trauma inflicted on children forced to undergo interrogations and stripsearches, caseworkers are drowning in false reports, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect, leaving them even less time to find the few children in real danger.  As one study explained:  “more reports made but without sufficient evidence can divert valuable but limited resources from endangered children who are actually in need of protection.” 

So it’s no wonder that in the years since mandatory reporting was enacted child abuse deaths have increased – and states in which the rate of reporting is lower have proportionately no more child abuse deaths than where the rate is higher.  As Dr. Richard Krugman, former director of the C. Henry Kempe National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect, said of this approach: “Doing the same thing for 40 years that doesn't seem (or can't be shown) to be working was someone's definition of insanity.” 

● Mandatory reporting laws terrify impoverished families, driving them away from seeking help.  As Stephane Land, author of Maid and Class writes about her years of poverty: 

“I couldn’t admit to [my child’s] teacher or the principal that we sometimes didn’t have enough to eat. I was scared someone might report me to child protective services and I might lose custody.”

And rather than face clandestine drug testing and suspicion from medical professionals who are mandatory reporters, pregnant people stay away from prenatal care and giving birth in hospitals. 

● Mandatory reporting is where the racial bias that permeates family policing begins.  Mandatory reporters are more likely to suspect abuse or neglect if a family is nonwhite – even when everything else is identical.  

● Among those who suffer most: Children of domestic violence victims.  Terrified that their children will be taken under laws labeling them bad parents for “allowing” their children to see them being beaten, a national survey found that domestic violence survivors fear seeking help – often for good reason.  As one mother said, after exactly that happened: “I should have just let my ex-husband beat my ass.” 

ALMOST FROM THE START, FORMER PROPONENTS HAD SECOND THOUGHTS

● 1983: Dr. Eli Newberger of Children’s Hospital in Boston writes that "had professionals, like me, known then what we know now, we would never have urged on Congress, federal and state officials broadened concepts of child abuse as the basis for reporting legislation." 

● 1998: The National Research Council concludes that “Mandatory reporting requirements were adopted without evidence of their effectiveness; no reliable study has yet demonstrated their positive or negative effects on the health and well-being of children at risk of maltreatment, their parents and caregivers and service providers.” (As we’ve seen, in the years since, studies have shown that the effects of mandatory reporting are overwhelmingly negative.)

● 2011: In the wake of the scandal involving former Penn State football coach (and former foster parent and group home operator) Jerry Sandusky, there are calls to vastly expand mandated reporting.  But another one-time proponent of these laws, Prof. David Finkelhor says: "Maybe it's better that people use discretion ... If everybody obeyed the letter of the law and reported a suspicion of abuse, the agencies would be completely overwhelmed with reports." 

WHAT CAN BE DONE INSTEAD 

First of all, “training” is not enough.  “More training” is the all-purpose cop-out the family police always propose to avoid real change.  True most existing training is horrendous – in fact, it’s not really training at all, just never-ending exhortations to report! Report! Report!  But even less awful training, as has been initiated in New York State, can accomplish very little.  That’s because, while there are no penalties for false reports if made in “good faith,” there are civil and criminal penalties for failure to report.  So mandated reporters make “CYA referrals.”  

Here's what should be done: 

● Abolish mandatory reporting.  Abolishing mandatory reporting does not mean abolishing reporting.  Professionals would remain free to exercise their professional judgment and report when they felt it was genuinely necessary.  

● Provide an “off-ramp.”  If states are unwilling to repeal mandatory reporting outright, they should at least provide an alternative to professionals who prefer to be what activist Joyce McMillan calls mandatory supporters instead of mandatory reporters.  So, for example, a teacher who made sure a hungry child got food, or a child without warm clothing in the winter got clothing would be relieved of any obligation to confuse that child’s poverty with neglect by calling a child abuse hotline. 

● At a minimum, exempt witnessing domestic violence from grounds to report “child abuse” or “neglect” and exempt professionals who primarily deal with domestic violence survivors from mandatory reporting requirements. 

NCCPR in WitnessLA: A Good California Supreme Court Decision Curbs The Family Police

A decision by the California Supreme Court sheds rare light on how family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) like the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services behave, and how that behavior hurts children. 

What makes this case stand out is that, aside from making it all the way to the California Supreme Court, it doesn’t stand out.  It’s not a horror story.  It’s just DCFS doing what it usually does as it usually does it, leaving everyone worse off for their presence. … 

Read the full column in WitnessLA: https://witnessla.com/a-good-california-supreme-court-decision-curbs-the-family-police/

NCCPR news and commentary roundup weeks ending January 9, 2024

● Looks like another task force on “mandatory reporting” laws might be pushing  a bit beyond  what back a bit against the lawmakers who appointed it had in mind. [This new language reflects a correction: To it's credit, the Colorado Legislature gave the task force more leeway than I'd realized.]  It was a clear case of pushback in Massachusetts when the members of a task force in that state found out that the chair, the state’s “Child Advocate” Maria Mossaides, had been misleading them.  But in Colorado, things may be different. 

In Colorado the task force also is led by the state’s child advocate, Stephanie Villafuerte, – called the “ombudsman” in that state.  But the legislature’s charge to this task force was a little broader than: “Who else should we force to report?” From the beginning Villafuerte said this task force wouldn’t just look at how to expand these laws – which have been shown to backfire, driving families away from seeking help and deluging the system in false reports.  

And from the beginning, she allowed the task force to hear from a wider range of perspectives than the one in Massachusetts.  Now the Colorado task force members say they won’t recommend a damn thing about who should report and when they should report it until they first come up with proposals to the Legislature for ways to narrow the definitions of “abuse” and “neglect”  According to The Denver Post:

Colorado’s definition of criminal child abuse and neglect is too broad and should be narrowed to avoid conflating circumstances like poverty or homelessness with neglect and abuse, the task force members wrote in the report. 

The 12-page report itself is well worth reading. 

● The case is unusual only in that it made it all the way to the California Supreme Court – where it led to a very good ruling.   But in every other respect, it’s like thousands of others mishandled by the Los Angeles County family police and its counterparts across the country.  I write about six key lessons from the case for WitnessLA.

● In Iowa, a father tells the Des Moines Register: 

“The sad part is that these doctors don’t realize that even if the kids aren’t taken away, even if the parents are innocent, how it can mess up an entire family.  They have no understanding of what it does when somebody comes to your door unannounced with the threat of taking away your kids.” 

I have a blog post on the case, with a link to the Register story. 

● St.Louis Public Radio reports on a bill that would curb an inherent conflict of interest built into the family policing system in Missouri.  But the bill doesn’t get to the heart of the problem with Missouri’s so-called Juvenile Office – the fact that it shouldn’t exist.  I wrote about that in 2021. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

● Among the many ways the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act fosters adoption-at-all-costs is a national Adoption Excellence Awards program. (That’s in addition to the bounties the law pays for every finalized adoption over a baseline number, even if the adoptions later fail.)  

Wyoming News Now reports that the winners of one of those awards now are in the news for a different reason: 

Natrona County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Steven Marler, a formally nationally recognized foster parent.  Over the years, Marler and his wife, Kristen, have fostered over 60 children at their home on Casper Mountain. Now, Steven Marler is facing 26 felonies, including counts of child endangerment. 

Cowboy State Daily reports that one of those counts of endangerment is for allegedly kicking a child off a roof and not getting him medical attention.  The charges also include 20 counts “related to alleged sexual abuse of minors involving four children.” 

● And in Rhode Island the headline on this Providence Journal story about a “residential treatment center” sums things up well: Overdoses, assault and restraints: Inside a damning report on St. Mary's Home for Children

In Iowa, one more family finds out what it’s like to be on the wrong end of family policing

 

In Iowa the family police agency has grown since it used this logo.
Now it's the Department of Health and Human Services

“It really does change your whole perspective when a government body can accuse you of something you haven’t done, and they can remove your children.” -- Emily Donlin                                                               

Impoverished parents, especially impoverished Black and Native American parents already have that perspective.  For them, intervention by the family police is, literally, the norm.  

But Emily and Michael Donlin of Monroe County, Iowa, have discovered that it can happen to white middle-class parents like themselves, too.  Because here’s the deal with the family police: Anything that makes you different from some kind of stereotypical 1950s “norm” for a parent makes you a suspect.  

For the Donlins, their nightmare at the hands of the family police, known in Iowa as the Department of Health and Human Services, consisted of eight months of hypersurveillance and an attempt to take away their young children.  It may well have begun because their second child was born just a little too soon – and definitely in the wrong state. 

As the Des Moines Register explains, the baby was born healthy, but so quickly there wasn’t time to get to a hospital first.  In addition, Emily takes a “holistic approach” to her family’s health that includes “declining certain medical interventions during her pregnancies and declining to vaccinate her sons.” Emily says that same same holistic approach prompts her to avoid any drugs of any kind. She says she doesn’t even take ibuprofen for headaches. 

It all happened in Iowa, among the states most fanatical about tearing apart families.  Their rate of child removal is the 12^th highest in America – more than 80% above the national average.  Of course, it’s even worse if you’re Black or Native American.  In Iowa, those children are taken at rates more than double their rates in the state child population. 

All this explains why those other decisions concerning medical care, and the unintended home birth may well have triggered a “risk assessment,” based on secret criteria, which led the hospital to test the blood in the baby’s umbilical cord for drugs.  State guidelines say hospitals are not supposed to test mothers without their consent, but they can go right ahead and do it to the babies, making the guidelines effectively meaningless. 

The test came back positive for cocaine.  The test could have been a false positive. It could have been switched with another sample by mistake.  But based on that one test and nothing else the hospital reported the parents as child abusers.  And based on that test one and nothing else – no investigation, not so much as a word to the family or anyone they knew -- Iowa family police declared the allegation “founded.” 

The Donlins asked the hospital to retest the sample.  The hospital refused.  Once the case was “founded” Emily was ordered to take one additional drug test after another; seven in all.  All came back negative.  None of it mattered. 

After six months of this surveillance and orders to jump through hoop after hoop, the Donlins had had enough. They dared to stop cooperating with Iowa’s family police.  The family police retaliated – against the children; the infant and his two-year-old brother.  They hauled the family into court and threatened to throw the children into foster care. 

Remember, for six months after the allegation was “founded,” the family was living safely together. 
The only thing that had changed was their decision to stop saying "How high?" when the family police said “Jump.” (Even this is better than what likely would have happened to a Black or Native American family.  Given Iowa’s track record, odds are a child in such a family under identical circumstances  wouldn’t have been allowed to go home with his parents right from the start.)

The children caught a break: The case was so weak even the “guardian ad litem” assigned to advocate for children’s “best interests” thought the family police should just leave the Donlins alone.  A judge agreed. 

But they’re still “guilty” 

But in the eyes of the family police, they’re still guilty.  So Emily Donlin remains on Iowa’s central registry of supposed child abusers.  As in almost every state, Iowa caseworkers can do that entirely on their own, there’s no hearing beforehand.  The family police put you there and, if you’re lucky, you may be able to fight your way out again someday.  That’s difficult under any circumstances, even more so if you can’t afford a lawyer. 

Family police apologists offered all the usual excuses – including the Orwellian claim that random nonconsensual drug testing is just a way to help families like the Donlins.  The medical director of another Des Moines hospital explained how this kind of testing 

“gives a great layer of support to the mother, and it also gives a great layer of support to the baby when they’re born.” 

Because nothing makes a child more supported than bringing the enormous stress of a family police investigation down on his parents, right?  For some reason, the Donlins see it differently: 

As Michael Donlin told the Register: 

“The sad part is that these doctors don’t realize that even if the kids aren’t taken away, even if the parents are innocent, how it can mess up an entire family.  They have no understanding of what it does when somebody comes to your door unannounced with the threat of taking away your kids.”

Said Emily: 

“It changes your whole worldview because you believe you can trust these parties. We trusted that they were going to do what’s right, and that they would see what’s actually going on and that we’re not doing drugs.  But we quickly realized that we actually can’t trust them.” 

And, of course, the family police apologists invoked the Big Lie of American child welfare – the false claim that inflicting this kind of trauma on families is part of a “balancing act between supporting families who might be struggling while ensuring the safety of children.” 

But the Donlins weren’t “struggling” until the family police intervened.  And when families really are struggling, they need a family police investigation about as much as a young Black man needs to be repeatedly stopped and frisked on the street. 

How the family police hurt everyone 

Now, consider how the family policing mindset hurt everyone in this case. 

● The family was put under enormous needless stress – that can’t be good for the children. 

● Even had the drug test been valid, as family advocate Joyce McMillan says: “a drug test is not a parenting test.”  In fact, a major study found that even when children really are born with cocaine in their systems, such children still do better in their own homes than when placed in foster care. 

● How might a family like this handle medical care during a future pregnancy?  Will they be comfortable knowing that everyone they turn to for prenatal care is a “mandatory reporter” of suspected child abuse – and if one of those mandatory reporters turns them in, the family police will already see that a parent is on the state’s central registry?  If the birth happens to take place at home, will they be willing to go to a hospital at all?  

We know the answers: Mandatory reporting laws and nonconsensual drug testing drive families away from medical care.  That is the real danger to children. 

As for ensuring the safety of children: In addition to the enormous emotional trauma, foster care is simply not safe.  One independent study after another finds abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.  In Iowa, the dismal state of the system and its rush to needlessly investigate families were documented by the state’s own consultants. 

● Even that is not the end of it: All the time money and effort wasted surveilling this family and others like it, making them jump through hoops and hauling them into court was, in effect, stolen from finding some other child we may never know who is in real danger.  So Iowa’s approach in this case, and so many others, makes all children less safe. 

In this case, if not for an unusually wise recommendation from one guardian ad litem, two very young children would have been taken from a safe home only to be put at serious risk of abuse in Iowa’s dismal system of foster care.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 2, 2024

● Want to see how easy it is for the foster care system to become the ultimate middle-class entitlement – step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own? Check out KUSA-TV Denver’s story about how this case turned out in Colorado.  And if you want to know more about the lawyer who won, check out Eli Hager’s story for ProPublica and The New Yorker. 

● Even Scrooge didn’t go this far.  All over the country, states and localities have been swiping Social Security Survivor and Disability benefits to which some foster youth are entitled.  More than a year ago Philadelphia passed a law prohibiting the city’s family policing agency, the Department of Human Services, from doing this.  But apparently, the three ghosts never showed up at Philadelphia DHS - because, as Resolve Philly reported on the day after Christmas in this story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, they’ve done right on illegally taking the money.  So tell us again DHS, why are we supposed to trust you to determine what’s in children’s “best interests”? 

● Gothamist reports that 

Black communities in New York City have long said the city's child welfare agency has subjected them to an unmatched degree of scrutiny and that their families have borne the brunt of forced separations. 

Now, a new analysis of city data by the New York Civil Liberties Union finds that the agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, has furthered racial disparities the group and other advocates say are a hallmark of the child welfare system.

● In a commentary for Honolulu Civil Beat John Hill poses this hypothetical: 

[I]magine that you are a parent wrongly accused of abuse or neglect. Imagine that the [guardian ad litem, who recommends whatever s/he thinks is in the child’s “best interests”] has submitted a report to the judge arguing that your child should be taken away and put in foster care. Imagine you then find out that the same judge is on the board of directors of the nonprofit who provided the GAL, and that several other courtroom players are on that same board. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions:

● The Arizona Mirror reports teenagers in foster care in that state told a legislative committee why they run away: The group homes in which they are placed are so horrible that, at first, even the streets seem like a better alternative. 

● From the Oregon Capital Chronicle

The Oregon Department of Human Services has agreed to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit filed by four former foster children who were sexually and physically abused in a foster home, court records show. … One of the victims in the case endured sexual abuse that led to a 30-year prison sentence for a former foster father in 2017. With detailed documents and testimony, the lawsuit alleges caseworkers repeatedly ignored signs of abuse and tried to cover up the abuse of one child who suffered seven broken bones – even as a criminal prosecution was underway.