Undermining Black families in Indiana: It's already bad, proposed legislation would make everything even worse

Indiana State Capitol - Photo by Warren LeMay

● If you are a Black child in Indiana, odds are four in five the family police WILL investigate you and your family. A shockingly high proportion of those investigations lead to foster care.  Now some lawmakers want to make it even easier to take you away and keep you away forever. 

● Among other things, they want to let those nice white, middle-class foster parents go to court on their own and try to take you and keep you forever – or at least as long as they feel like it. 

The Context:

The family policing system in Indiana has a number of distinctions – all of them bad.  

● Nationwide, 37% of children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  In Indiana, it’s 58%.  Nationwide, 53% of Black children will have to endure this trauma. In Indiana, it’s 79% - the highest rate in America. 

● It doesn’t stop with the investigation.  Eighteen percent of Black Indiana children will, at some point, be torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care.  That ties Indiana with three other states for the highest rate in America. 

● In any given year, among all children, Indiana takes them from their homes at a rate 66% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

● When going up against this family police juggernaut (a more accurate term than “child welfare system”) families often are almost literally defense-less – because their lawyers often have so little time and so many clients. Many Indiana counties want to keep it that way. One in five actually turns down federal funds to improve representation for parents and also for children. One county court administrator explained that county’s refusal this way: “[T]he system we have works well.” 

None of this is because Indiana is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than the national average.  In fact in Indiana in 2022, 85% of the time, when children were thrown into foster care their parents were not even accused of physical or sexual abuse. Forty percent of the time, there wasn’t even an allegation of drug abuse.

Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.  Indeed, in 17% of cases, Indiana family police admit they took the children because their families lacked adequate housing.

And now, some Indiana lawmakers want to make everything worse, with a bill that would move the family policing system in Indiana even closer to becoming the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own!

The bill:

The bill further stacks the deck against families in so many ways that just a summary listing all its proposed changes in current law – I count at least 40 of them -- runs to two-and-a-half single-spaced pages. Every one of those changes either makes it easier to take children away, harder to return them home or both.

To understand what may be the worst of these provisions, let’s leave the world of the poor – which is, of course, almost the entire world of family policing, and consider a hypothetical from the world of the rich:

Suppose in September you send your son off to boarding school. But when Christmas vacation comes around, he does not return. Instead, you got a letter from a lawyer for your son’s gym coach.

The lawyer explains that your son and the coach have “bonded.” An expert on “attachment theory” they’ve hired concludes it wouldn’t be in your son's "best interests" to return home. Instead, the coach is going to court to adopt your child – because he now has every bit as much right to your child as you do.

Ridiculous right? Well, ridiculous if you’re rich.  But in at least 15 states, if you are poor, and that poverty leads to your child being taken, and the middle-class foster parents simply decide one day that your child would be better off with them, they can march into court, bypass even the family police agency, file their own petition to terminate your child’s right to live with you (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) and adopt your child.  In Indiana, at least one lawyer already has found an entirely legal method to work the system in a similar way. This bill would would open the floodgates.

In some states, allowing foster parents who are likely to be white and middle class to be “intervenors,” declare themselves better parents for children who are less likely to be either of those things and then try to persuade a court has created an entire cottage industry – as eplained in this story from ProPublica and The New Yorker:

… It’s not acceptable in most family courts to explicitly argue that, if you have more material advantages to provide a child, you should get to adopt him or her. Outside the courtroom, though, intervenors are sometimes less discreet.

During a 2021 case meeting, according to a specialist who took notes, a foster parent and [attorney Tim] Eirich client said, of the prospect of reuniting a baby boy with his biological family, “He’s used to being raised by a maternal figure who stays home. We have 1.5 acres for him to run around, and they have an apartment.” Another foster parent and Eirich client told me that reuniting a baby girl with her birth mother would mean transitioning her from a “personalized nanny” to a “day care center with, you know, 50 kids running around, and sleeping on a little cot.” …

Oh, and if you want to see how much worse it can get, check out the follow-up story.

These stories focus largely on Colorado – where lawmakers have now had the decency to curb, though not to abolish, the right of foster parents to barge in this way.  But the Indiana bill would move in the opposite direction, making it even easier. 

That would come on top of an existing loophole in Indiana law.  The lawfirm of adoption attorney Grant Kirsh is the proud recipient of an Angels in Adoption award from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute.  In one of his many YouTube videos, Kirsh points out, twice for emphasis, that in Indiana “you can file a petition for adoption for anybody at any time!”

Of course it’s more likely to work in some cases than in others. As ProPublica explained:

Kirsh tells [foster parents] that, should the state’s child services agency move to return a child in their care to the child’s birth family, they can simply serve a notice of adoption, which the birth family will have only 15 days to contest. If there is no response in that time frame, the birth family loses the right to challenge the adoption.

“It’s nuts,” Andrea Marsh, a family court lawyer in Indianapolis, said, calling the process “similar to intervention, but the nuclear option.” One of her recent clients, a birth mother in Indianapolis, was trying to follow her court-ordered treatment plan when the suburban foster parents who were caring for her child filed for adoption in their home county. (Court-shopping is a strategy that Indiana adoption attorneys use to circumvent a court that is still trying to reunify the birth family.) The mother failed to reply by the deadline and, when the adoption of her child was finalized, neither she nor the local child services office could do anything about it.

The Indiana bill would make it all even worse by setting up a legally sanctioned system of “intervenors” who could barge in sooner.  They would be full parties to the case at every stage, and they could file their own petitions to terminate children’s rights to their parents.  All this in what some measures suggest may already be the most racially biased family policing system in America.*

Excuses for this legislation

The excuses for compounding the racial and class bias that permeate Indiana family policing are depressingly predictable.

First, invoke horror stories:

So at a hearing on the bill, a foster parent spoke of how, if only she could have brought her own termination action, perhaps her foster child would not have been returned to the birth father who tortured and murdered him.

But as always, the horror stories go in all directions.

● If this bill becomes law, will there be more cases like that of 22-month-old Nova Bryant of Clay County? She was taken from her parents only to die in foster care. There appears to have been no allegation that the parents abused Nova, only that they couldn’t cope with her special needs.

● If this bill becomes law, will there be more children like Dakota Levi Stevens of Porter County?  She too died in foster care, her foster mother was convicted of reckless homicide. Family members spent years desperately trying to get Dakota out of the system, one after another offering to take her in. All were turned down in favor of strangers.  This bill would make such outcomes more likely.

When anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data.  The data show that, on top of the enormous
inherent emotional trauma of being thrown into foster care, there is a shockingly high rate of abuse in foster care itself. Study after study, including one specific to Indiana, 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 contrast, multiple studies find that in typical cases, not the horror stories, children left in their own homes do better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

And of course, with one provision of the bill after another making the system ever larger, it would only further overload caseworkers, leaving them even less time to find the relatively few children in real danger.

So if anything, this bill, backed by horror stories, might wind up causing more horror stories.

Misunderstanding permanence

The other argument for the bill is the same argument that stampeded Congress into passing the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. The claim that doing too much to help families was the reason children languish in foster care.

On the contrary, advocates of family preservation were the first to raise the issue of children languishing in foster care.  Advocates of tearing apart families then exploited the plight of these children to pass ASFA – a bill which, like federal legislation of the same era commonly known as “the crime bill” and “the welfare bill” targeted the same population: poor Black people, especially mothers.

But ASFA failed. It created a generation of legal orphans with no ties to their own families and no adoptive home either.  And it did nothing to reduce the time children spent in foster care. 

The real reason children languish in foster care is because overloaded agencies don’t have time to do anything else: They recklessly tear children from their families, then those children are filed away and forgotten as workers race on to the next case.  So it’s no wonder that in Indiana where, it seems, caseworkers have never encountered a Black family that isn’t suspect, and which tears apart families at such a high rate, children are trapped in foster care longer than in some other states.

By making it even more likely that children will be taken and less likely that reunification will be an option, this bill will only make it more likely that children’s time trapped in foster care will increase.

So the first step to reducing the time children spend in foster care is making sure that for more of those children that time is reduced to zero – by not taking them away in the first place.

The bill also misunderstands the whole concept of permanence for children.  The bill, like ASFA and much of American child welfare policy, is obsessed with one form of permanence – the paper permanence of adoption by strangers, in which children are cut off completely not only from Mom and Dad but also often from siblings, grandmothers, grandfathers, friends, teachers, and classmates. They are uprooted from everyone loving and familiar, their birth certificates changed, communication cut off, even mementos denied them. It’s all for the benefit and convenience not of the children, but of the, typically, white middle-class strangers who have taken them forever from everyone they know and love.

But as Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan School of Law explains, what children need is relational permanence. Children need to be able to stay connected to everyone who loves them, whether they can care for them or not.  Why in the world would you want to deprive any child of as many loving connections as possible?  Unless the system that constantly postures about “children’s rights” and “the best interest of the child” isn’t really about either. 

One more advantage to relational permanence: it’s likely to be more permanent. Depend entirely for permanence on one stranger, or perhaps a stranger couple, and what happens when that cute little tyke becomes a rebellious teen and the strangers give up on her or him?  We don’t know how often this happens, because family policing systems almost never ask questions to which they don’t want to know the answers, but the data we do have are concerning.  In contrast, weave a web of relational permanence and the odds are far better that someone will always be there for that child. 

This is why the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, which once had a project to expedite termination of parental rights, now has a project to end it.

That means doing more, not less, to avoid taking children away and more, not less, to reunify them when taken.  It also means doing more to facilitate guardianships by relatives and others close to a child.  But, of course, one of those 40 or so changes in the Indiana bill would make guardianships harder.

Indiana children need laws that put them first, instead of prioritizing the rescue fantasies of white middle-class strangers.

*-Most racially biased in the sense of anti-Black prejudice.  For anti-Native American bias, the data suggest the worst is Minnesota – though, at least that state’s lawmakers are trying to do something about it.  For anti-Hispanic bias, the worst might be Maine. 

Drenched in trendy psychobabble, legislation in New Hampshire proposes to fight trauma with trauma.

A bill in New Hampshire effectively equates strong emotion with abuse.
The sponsors seem to have been inspired by the wrong Spock.

UPDATE, AUGUST 17, 2025: Fortunately, in this session, at least, the bill did not pass.

After decades of expanding the child welfare surveillance state to the point that more than one in three children – and a majority of Black children – will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation by the time they turn 18, some states have noticed: They’ve been doing the same thing over and over and getting the same lousy results. 

A few places have realized that prevention and policing are incompatible. No matter how often you say you only want vast police power so you can be kindly helpers, you just want to prevent small problems from becoming big problems, blah, blah, blah – that doesn’t work. It fails because even when you really mean it, under this system, the prerequisite for “prevention” is inflicting trauma on children and families by interrogating and stripsearching children in the middle of the night, at best, and hauling them off to the chaos of foster care at worst. 

Realizing that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, some states are trying something different. Texas dialed back the power of its family police agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency). So did Washington State.  Kansas lawmakers are considering doing the same. Other states are revising the training for mandatory reporters and even considering reducing the number of professionals who must report. (It’s not nearly enough, but until recently the only thing lawmakers did with mandatory reporting requirements was to expand them.) 

And then there are the states that still haven’t gotten the message – most notably, at the moment,  New Hampshire.  This is a state that already tears apart families at a rate nearly double the national average.  It is a state that uses the worst form of care – institutionalization – at a shockingly high rate.  More than one-quarter of New Hampshire foster children are institutionalized – triple the national average.  Clearly, the New Hampshire family police have all the power they need to intervene when they need to and already are intervening on a massive scale when they don’t. 

But some lawmakers think that power should be expanded even further.  They’ve introduced a bill, drenched in trendy psychobabble, that could, at some point, define every child in New Hampshire as abused or neglected. 

The sponsors don’t even seem to understand their own psychobabble.  They’re in love with that ever-popular buzzphrase “trauma-informed.”  But it’s hard to imagine a piece of legislation that is less informed about trauma and more likely to inflict it. Because this bill proposes to fight trauma with trauma.  It should be obvious that the results will be -- traumatic. 

Even if one assumes everything this bill labels as child abuse really is child abuse – and that’s a real stretch since the bill seems to encompass everything from genuine, serious abuse all the way to the normal vicissitudes of life – this bill will only make everything worse. 

That’s because few experiences in life are more traumatic for a child than a child abuse investigation.  Imagine you’re a small child.  In the middle of the night a stranger, perhaps more than one, pounds on the door and demands entry.  Your mother, knowing what could happen if she says no, lets them in.  They demand that your mother awaken you and bring you to the living room.  The strangers open every drawer, every cabinet, the refrigerator and the cupboards.  You’re scared because you can’t understand why these strangers are in your house rifling your possessions. Then they pull you aside and interrogate you about every aspect of your family life.  And finally, they stripsearch you looking for bruises. 

This is the norm – and this trauma is the minimum. The trauma is of course compounded if it leads to one of the worst “adverse childhood experiences” of all: being taken into the night, sometimes literally kicking and screaming, by the strangers and consigned to the chaos of foster care either in a home or, especially in New Hampshire, an institution.  Under this bill, all this trauma could be inflicted anytime a caseworker concludes that a child’s “physical, emotional or psychological welfare” is  “at risk.” 

There are times when inflicting all this trauma is necessary: when, for example, there is a credible allegation that a child is being beaten, tortured, raped or locked in a closet and starved.  That is, of course, a tiny fraction of the cases workers see.

Of all the New Hampshire children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in 2022, 88%
did not involve even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse.  Eighty-six percent did not involve even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

But the process I described applies in every case -- even if you say all you want to do is provide help.  Few things put a child’s “emotional or psychological welfare” more “at risk” than being the subject of a child abuse investigation.  Almost nothing puts it more at risk than foster care.  No, you can’t fight trauma with trauma. 

Invasion of the well-being police

This bill is a classic example of the terrible consequences that have cascaded down upon children ever since the family policing establishment took it upon itself to do exactly what this bill explicitly demands: expand its mandate from safety and permanence to include policing children’s “well-being.” 

I am a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it.  There are an enormous number of things government can and should do to improve children’s well-being.  Project Head Start improves children’s well-being.  Free school meals improve children’s well-being. So does affordable health care, and access to decent housing, and good child care.  Yes, these are aimed at children’s and families' material well-being – but that often does wonders for their emotional well-being. 

Where more targeted help is needed, government absolutely should make available quality mental health care – on a voluntary basis, from practitioners who families don’t have to fear will turn them in to agencies like New Hampshire’s Division for Children and Youth Services.  Mandatory reporting already scares families away from seeking help – this bill only will drive families further away. 

But this bill provides not one iota of additional help.  It simply turns DCYF into the well-being police.  

DCYF is not a benevolent helping agency – it is a police force; indeed it has more power than the police in blue uniforms. That’s why we call these agencies the family police.  There is a legitimate role for government in improving children’s well-being, but not for police. 

The trauma of family policing compromises the very well-being that the sponsors of this bill say they want to improve.  That’s why my last presentation at a Kempe Center conference was called “Attn: Family Police: Children’s Well-being is None of Your Damn Business!” 

Every coercive government intervention into family life should have to pass a “balance of harms” test. That is, the harm you will inflict through coercive intervention must be less than the harm that prompts you to intervene.  This bill massively flunks that test. 

Consider the specifics

If this bill becomes law, any child in New Hampshire could, at some point, be deemed abused or neglected if a DCYF caseworker so chooses.  And if by some chance there is a child who would never be included in these definitions of abuse and neglect then that is a child smothered in so much emotional bubble wrap that s/he is likely to emerge as an adult incapable of dealing with the world – a true example of emotional harm. 

What is striking about this bill is the fear of emotion that pervades it.  It’s as if the sponsors, instead of being guided by the wisdom of Doctor Spock, the famous pediatrician, looked instead for guidance to Mister Spock, the Star Trek character who seeks to suppress all his emotions. 

At first one might be reassured that the expanded definition of neglect only includes things that cause “serious impairment.”  But “serious impairment” then is defined as any “adverse impact” on a child’s “psychological … well-being” resulting even from a “single event [that] …may be currently observed or predicted.”  In other words: Someone thinks you might at some point say or do something that at some point will have an “adverse impact” on a child’s psyche.  Among the circumstances to be considered in determining if there has been such impact: “Any single incident or occurrence of serious injury or illness.” 

The definition of psychological maltreatment includes “coercing, which shall include …  compelling to action using threat or force.”  In other words, under this bill, it would be child abuse to say to a child: “Clean up your room or you won’t get any TV tonight.” 

And it’s not just what parents themselves do that can get them labeled abusive. This also is neglect: 

Entrustment of the care of a child by a parent, guardian, or custodian to an individual who presents a risk of inability to provide safe care, and as a result of such entrustment, the child's physical, mental, emotional, or psychological wellbeing has suffered, or is likely to suffer serious physical or psychological impairment. 

The bill provides examples of those “presumed to present such risk” but you’re not off the hook if you entrust the child to someone not on the list.  You’re just going to have to be psychic. 

As for the specific categories, some make sense.  But others include “individuals convicted of violent crime,…” Yes, that makes sense too -- if it’s Cousin Fred who was just paroled after serving 20 years for murder.  But this definition would also include 70-year-old Grandpa Sam, who was convicted of punching a man 50 years ago.  It also includes “individuals with recent instances [that’s instances, not convictions] of substance abuse…” in a state where recreational marijuana is still illegal. 

Conditions that would create a rebuttable presumption that a child's “emotional, physical, psychological, or mental well-being has suffered or is likely to suffer serious impairment” include 

“exposure of a child to verbal abuse, or psychological maltreatment directed at the child, a sibling, the other parent or significant other or another person living in the home.”  

So for starters, if mom and dad ever lose their temper with each other, that creates a rebuttable presumption the child has suffered harm to their “emotional, physical, psychological, or mental well-being.”  

And, though the phrase “other parent” implies this clause is directed at parents, that’s never explicitly
stated. So given how gym coaches have been known to behave, if this becomes law it clearly will be irresponsible for any New Hampshire parent to let their child attend phys ed class.  Come to think of it, the bill doesn’t say the verbal abuse has to come from an adult, so it might be child abuse to send the child to school at all. 

But it’s striking that it isn’t just negative emotions that can be off-limits: 

Still another factor to be considered in determining “serious impairment” is 

Parentification of a child, which occurs when a child is regularly expected to take on parental responsibilities, including but not limited to providing emotional or practical support for a parent or another individual, beyond what would be reasonably expected for the child’s age and circumstances, instead of receiving that care and support themselves.

Yes, it’s possible for parents to demand too much of their children. But how does one define “reasonably expected” – and what are the qualifications and biases of those who would be empowered to decide? 

But also, I’m struck by the notion that emotional support is portrayed as an either/or proposition.  Right now across America, families of those who died in two recent plane crashes almost certainly are coming together to grieve. Parents are comforting their children and yes, children also are comforting parents and grandparents.  Emotional support is not a zero-sum game, it’s a way we all gain strength from each other.  No doubt, Mr. Spock would disapprove.  And speaking of fictional characters, if this bill passes, anyone like the Gilmore Girls probably should stay out of New Hampshire.*

Class and cultural bias 

Biases pervade this bill.  Let’s return to the “entrustment” clause. Remember that long list of people to whom, if you entrust them with watching your child it’s a rebuttable presumption of abuse or neglect?  Who has the fewest options when it comes to entrusting their child if there’s an emergency?  And who is more likely to encounter an emergency? 

And then there’s that “parentification” clause.  

As Lenore Skenazy writes in Reason, what the bill defines as “parentification” 

happens in incredibly dysfunctional families as well as in incredibly functional ones—say, when a child of immigrants proudly translates for their parents at the doctor's office or the auto repair shop.

And there are, of course, any number of chores a poor child might have to do that a rich child won’t. So this clause is one more way to target poor families.  The solution to this kind of “parentification” is, of course, the material support I suggested earlier. 

Another clause in the bill lists among evidence for a rebuttable presumption of abuse or neglect “frequent illnesses that are not being adequately addressed or controlled.” Which families are going to have the most difficulty addressing or controlling children’s frequent illnesses? The ones who are more likely to live in environments that breed illness and less likely to have consistent medical care. 

There also is cultural bias at play.  In some cultures everything is loud: The laughter, the tears, the joy and also the anger.  So those parents may yell. They might even say things for which they later have to apologize.  (The children might say things for which they feel a need to apologize, too, but the sponsors of this bill might consider that “parentification.”)  This bill implies that the yelling in anger causes emotional harm.  Other cultures might express anger through stony silence.  But, for some reason, on that the bill is - silent. 

With that much bias built into the bill on top of the racial and class bias we know permeates family policing already, what happens if this bill becomes law and caseworkers get to decide what is usual, or reasonable, or whatever other vague term is in the legislation?

Two other dangerous clauses 

● The drive pregnant women away from prenatal care and hospitals clause: While other states move to narrow the grounds for intervention when substance abuse is alleged – because of the growing realization that any and all substance abuse does not, in fact, always endanger a child, the New Hampshire bill proposes to move in the opposite direction. 

Section after section of this bill ratchets up suspicion of anyone using drugs – but of course, it’s not really anyone.  It isn’t going to be applied to parents like the New Hampshire counterparts of the cannamoms next door in Massachusetts who were celebrated in Boston Magazine as they smoked pot during their kids’ play dates.  Nor is it targeting the drug of choice for affluent “wine moms” – street name “mommy juice” -- who do the same. 

Sometimes parental drug abuse really does put children at risk of serious harm – and sometimes it doesn’t. Any clause concerning child abuse and drug use should require that the particular drug use in question by the particular user in question is a genuine threat to their children. Because the greater danger is things like pregnant women being too scared to get prenatal care or too scared to tell their doctor they’re using drugs – for fear of being investigated and having their children taken away. 

● The full employment for child abuse pediatricians clause:  That’s the clause in the bill about how if your child is injured and you can’t explain why, it must be child abuse.  The stunning amount of harm that can cause to innocent families has been documented over and over.  

Skenazy also points out that the bill isn’t all bad.  There are a couple of provisions that attempt to expedite reunification for example. 

So the bill is only 95% bad.  That’s more than enough reason for New Hampshire lawmakers to take a truly “trauma-informed” approach and vote the bill down.

*-When I first wrote that, I thought it was a joke, but it turns out pop psychology blogs are full of condemnation of Lorelai.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 11, 2025

● More than 20 years ago, a lawsuit stopped New York City’s family police agency from tearing children from their parents just because the parent, usually the mother, was herself a survivor of domestic violence. But that didn’t stop the agency from harassing those mothers and their children.  Now, the New York Times reports, a New York appellate court has ruled that the agency, and its Upstate counterparts, can’t do that anymore either.  See also this story in the New York Daily News, this story in The Imprint and this story from Law 360. 

● It was just such an incident of domestic violence – one that did not involve the children’s father or even take place in their presence – that led to the removal of three children from their mother, Felicia Chandler, in North Carolina. That led to the tragedy exposed in this documentary from WRAL-TV, a tragedy allegedly including the murder of one of her children by the foster parent who adopted them.  Other adopted foster children allegedly were tortured. I have a blog post with a link to the documentary and some additional context. 

● Time Magazine has included author, scholar, law professor, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, and NCCPR Board Member Prof. Dorothy Roberts among “The Closers: 25 Black leaders working to end the racial equity gap” 

● Drenched in trendy psychobabble, a bill in New Hampshire tries to fight trauma with trauma. There is not a child in New Hampshire who couldn’t be deemed abused or neglected at some point if it becomes law. Citing NCCPR and HSLDA, Lenore Skenazy has an overview in Reason. 

● Skenazy is president of Let Grow, which is backing "reasonable childhood independence" legislation across the country.  Five states are considering such laws now.

● It’s no secret that I’m no fan of Court-Appointed Special Advocates.  But there are exceptions, such as the author of this insightful letter to the Daily Astorian in Oregon. 

● The Imprint reports on a study of “ambiguous loss” among Native American mothers whose children were taken from them forever. From the story:   

History weighs heavily on the experiences of Indigenous birth mothers, making them “distinct from other races as they have been disproportionately exposed to systemic practices of forced child removal,’’ [lead investigator Sandy] White Hawk’s team posited in the 2022 published article. Culprits include U.S. policies that coerced parents into relinquishing their children to boarding schools, and the Indian Adoption Project — a federally funded effort in the mid-20th century to force the assimilation of Native American children into white families. 

Also harmful, they wrote, is the ongoing disproportionate removal of Native children from their parents through the country’s child welfare systems. 

Though not mentioned in the story, the lead agency spearheading the Indian Adoption Project, from 1958 to 1967, was the Child Welfare League of America. In 2001 they tried to apologize for it and justify it at the same time. CWLA’s current slogan is “over 100 years of excellence.”  

Does that include 1958 to 1967? 

● The Imprint reports on how the second Trump Administration may roll back child welfare initiatives that include people with lived experience - including initiatives begun by the first Trump Administration.

● Foster care numbers have gone down in Hawaii – but not by enough.  I have a commentary about it in Honolulu Civil Beat. 

● The co-chairs of the Maine Legislature’s Human Services Committee issued a statement that includes this reminder: 

Maine’s definition of child abuse and neglect is broad, vague and conflates poverty with neglect. There is a long list of individuals who are mandated reporters. We must provide clarity about what is abuse and neglect, and what is a resource issue or challenge for a family that could be appropriately supported by the community. 

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

● The Los Angeles Times reports that Los Angeles County faced a record number of lawsuits last year: 

The county’s Department of Children and Family Services was the most frequently sued, with 882 cases, followed by the Probation and Sheriff’s departments with 304 each. Both the Probation and Children and Family Services departments have been hit with thousands of lawsuits in recent years alleging that children were sexually abused in foster homes and at probation facilities and a former children’s shelter. 

● From the Texas Tribune:

The state has shut down a residential treatment center in northeast Texas, three months after one of its charges — an 11-year-old boy — died in an incident that foster care officials and local law enforcement are investigating. 

The boy died in a Greenville movie theater during an outing the day before Thanksgiving, according to three people who are familiar with the investigations. Other boys who lived at the center told Joe Sterner, the Lone Oak school district’s police chief, that the boy had complained about a stomach ache and had sustained a head wound in recent days. … 

The boy and his fellow housemates watched the movie and by the time it ended, the child was dead, one of the people familiar with the case said.  “The lights came up and the child had blood coming down his nose and he was deceased,” said one source …  

Adopted to death in North Carolina?

An adoptive mother is charged with murder, torture, and crimes straight out of a horror film nightmare.  That’s an aberration. 

At least one of the children probably never needed to be taken from his mother at all.  That’s not an aberration 

A horror film debuted in North Carolina last week.  The story has all the classic elements: torture, starvation, teenage victims, and elements too macabre to describe here.  But you can’t “keep repeating it’s only a movie.” Because it’s not. 

This horror film is a documentary. At a time when most television stations don’t even have documentary units, WRAL-TV has one that just produced a superb example of the form.  It’s about children taken from their own homes, in at least one case for no good reason, only to disappear – their bodies found years later.  They were allegedly adopted to death.  The starvation, torture, murder and other horrors all were allegedly orchestrated by Avantae Deven, the foster mother who adopted them. 

There have been tragically similar horror stories in Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Iowa, and of course, Texas and Minnesota. Most of them involved children who never needed to be taken from their own homes. 

So watch the documentary here – but take the viewer advisory seriously – and then I’ll add some context, including the one place where I think the producers went wrong:

 

Now, that context:

Of course, most adoptive parents never harm the children in their care – like most parents, period.  And yes, I’m the one who always says don’t make generalizations based on horror stories.  But I’m also the one who offered a mutual moratorium on their use.  The family policing establishment (a more accurate term than “child welfare establishment”) has not yet taken me up on that, and I’m not about to unilaterally disarm.  That’s why our weekly round-up of family preservation news and commentary usually ends with a section called “The Horror Stories Go in All Directions.” 

More important, the only part of this story that’s unusual is the alleged torture and murder.  The documentary reveals other horrors that are common in North Carolina and across the country. 

The first horror was the removal of these children in the first place, in particular, the children of the mother profiled in the documentary, Felicia Chandler. 

There is no allegation that Chandler ever beat her children, tortured them, raped them – or harmed them in any way.  The only ground cited in the documentary for the removal of her children was the fact that she was herself a victim of domestic violence.  As we have noted often on this blog, there is overwhelming evidence that children taken under these circumstances are even more traumatized than when they are taken for other reasons.  One expert called it “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.” 

That’s why more than 20 years ago, New York courts made it illegal to take children the way Chandler’s children allegedly were taken.  And just last week, a New York appellate court ruled that family police harassment of these mothers and their children, even when the children are not taken, also is illegal.

But in North Carolina, it’s open season on domestic violence survivors and their children.  Indeed, Chandler’s isn’t the first such case in North Carolina to get headlines.  The same kind of wrongful removal was the focus of this story from WBTV and The Assembly. 

Of course, we get the usual excuse from the family police: Oh, there was something else, we just won’t tell you.  Not can’t tell you – the confidentiality laws family police agencies hide behind generally are there because the agencies want them there – so they can hide their failings. 

Enter Chandler’s former caseworker.  In comments dripping with condescension says: “I know know that she loves her children but I will also say something that I learned many years ago through this career is that often love is not enough.” 

What that usually means is: Love is not enough, because they don’t have enough money.  Money can buy whatever is missing.  

For example, according to the lawsuit discussed here, North Carolina took away the children of one mother because she was hospitalized – with cancer.  The children suffered horribly in institutions. But the family police agency didn’t want to give them back because the mother “might get cancer again.” 

Have you noticed? You never see a rich person’s child taken because “love is not enough.” 

And let's not forget Cherokee County, where the removal of children with no due process at all, in cases so weak the county knew it couldn’t get a judge to approve, led to criminal charges.  And let’s not forget this story. And this story. And this story. And this story. And this story.  And this story. And this story. 

Unlike the alleged torture and murder of the adopted children of Avantae Deven, the horrors of wrongful removal are not unusual – in North Carolina or anywhere else.  

And if there’s one these stories make clear, it’s this: When you leave children at the mercy of caseworkers and agencies that don’t love them – it’s never enough. 

Felicia Chandler never got her surviving children back and, since her children’s rights to be with her were terminated, she almost certainly never will.  But she continues her fight.  The documentary ends with her speaking directly to her children, wherever they are, telling them how much she loves them, in the hope that they might see it. 

About those deck chairs

And that brings me to what I see as this outstanding documentary’s one failing: Having raised the issue of wrongful removal, and followed Felicia Chandler on her quest for justice, the documentary doesn’t circle back to the issue of wrongful removal when discussing solutions.  Instead, it focuses on rearranging the deck chairs on the North Carolina family policing Titanic.  Unfortunately, that focus is all the rage in North Carolina right now. 

That, too, is not unusual.  Reorganization is what agencies and lawmakers do when they don’t have real ideas. 

So sometimes, in states where the family police are a freestanding agency, there are proposals to make it part of a bigger agency.  Where it’s already part of a bigger agency there are proposals to make it a freestanding agency.  Where the work is largely done by public agencies you hear cries to privatize.  Where it’s mostly private you hear about the need for the accountability only a public system is said to bring.  Where states run these systems you sometimes hear proposals to have counties do it, because they’re supposedly closer to the people. Where counties run these systems – as in North Carolina – you hear the state should do it, or at least give the state more power to supervise.  

But there is no evidence that any one of these structures is any better, or worse, than the others.  The many terrible systems, and the few that are not so bad, come in all shapes and sizes. 

That’s true even when it comes to the kind of horrors exposed in the WRAL documentary.  I mentioned similar horrors in five other places. Pennsylvania has a county-run system. So does  Minnesota. But the systems in Hawaii, Iowa and Texas are state-run. 

As for North Carolina, what good is giving more power to the state oversight agency when a top official of that agency, interviewed by WRAL, insists the system isn’t broken?  

Yes, it might make some marginal difference around the edges.  But the fixation on organization diverts attention from the elephant in the room: all those children needlessly taken.  Wrongful removal drives everything else.  Ending it alone won’t fix these systems, but it’s the prerequisite for fixing these systems. 

UPDATE, FEB 15: Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, in a follow-up story, when lawmakers were asked what they were going to do about this, their answers were all about the deck chairs (with a quick mention of those other failed stand-bys "silos" and "background checks").

Similarly, it would be a huge mistake to spend more to make the system even bigger.  Rather, additional spending should focus on bolstering services and supports to families whose children often are taken when family poverty is confused with neglect.  That will ease any artificial “shortage” of foster homes and reduce worker caseloads, so workers have more time to find children in real danger and do their jobs well. 

In other words, spend more, but spend smarter. 

Two other notes

● Another proposal discussed in the documentary is one that always comes up when adoptive parents are accused of abusing their adopted children: require government monitoring of the family even after the adoption.  

Here’s the problem: Adoption by strangers should be very rare; almost always there are better ways to assure safe, permanent homes for children.  But when it does happen, then adoptive parents are parents, period. Before the adoption, they should be subject to intense scrutiny.  After the adoption they should be subject to no greater monitoring than birth parents.  Otherwise, it’s just foster care by another name.  As such it denies children the security and permanence they need. 

And to those who say: Well, adoptive parents often accept government checks so they should have to accept government supervision, well, I also get a government check every month. It’s called Social Security – and no one gets to make unannounced visits to my home to see if I’m spending the money wisely. 

● There’s one more thing to keep in mind, one more factor that can lead to quick-and-dirty slipshod placements in adoptive homes: Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, for every finalized adoption over a baseline number, states receive a bounty from the federal government of $4,000 to $10,000.  Avantae Deven adopted five foster children. So North Carolina may have collected anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 for tearing these children from their own parents and placing them with the adoptive mother now accused of murder and torture.  And get this: Under ASFA North Carolina doesn’t even have to give the money back. 

NCCPR in Honolulu Civil Beat: Hawaiʻi Foster Care Numbers Are Down. But Not Down Enough

In a comprehensive story about a new report from the Child Welfare Services Branch, Civil Beat posed an important question: Can the decline in the number of children Hawaii holds in foster care be attributed to a shortage of caseworkers? 

The answer is no. Because shortages don’t work that way. 

Even at their best, family policing systems (a more accurate term than “child welfare” systems) are arbitrary, capricious and cruel. They routinely make terrible mistakes in all directions. They leave some children in dangerous homes even as they take many more from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help. 

An overloaded system makes all of this worse. What should be an examination of a case becomes a look; a look becomes a glance.  There are more snap judgments, and they can go either way. … 

Read the full column in Honolulu Civil Beat

NCCPR news and commentary roundup, week ending February 2, 2025

● When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act, that challenge came from Texas. Now, The Imprint reports, the most comprehensive legislation anywhere in the country to expand the protections of ICWA to all children has been introduced – in Texas. If anything this law would go further than ICWA, in that it’s more specific about the obligations the courts and the state family police agency would have to meet. 

● ICT News and the Montana Free Press report that Montana lawmakers are proposing to reauthorize and expand that state’s version of ICWA. That law applies only to Native American children, but in Montana, that’s a lot of children. Native Americans make up 9% of the state child population – but 35% of children in foster care. 

● Writing in The Imprint Nora McCarthy and Jeremy Kohomban remind us that even when a family police investigation doesn’t lead to foster care, it still can do enormous harm to children.  They write: 

Investigations can leave enduring negative impacts on the family. Research finds that, after an investigation, parents limit social networks and help-seeking to reduce the risk of another investigation. This social isolation places children at even greater risk, and children can suffer when parents fear discussing family needs with educators, doctors and other helping professionals who are required by law to report child safety concerns. 

Clearly, to keep children safer, we must reserve an investigatory approach for children facing real danger. For children at low risk, we must develop methods to address family distress that inflict less harm. 

● In this Newsweek story NCCPR points out the harm of such investigations, and notes that "every parental misjudgment—if that is what happened here—is not child abuse." 

● For another example of how the family police system can be the ultimate middle-class entitlement -- step right up and take someone else’s child for your very own! -- check out this story from WZTV in Nashville. 

● The Imprint has an update on criminal charges against a foster youth advocate – charges that never should have been brought and which the relevant prosecuting agency and/or judge should have had the decency to dismiss out of hand. 

● On the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog: a short trip into the weeds concerning how a state spins “child welfare” data, with lessons for those looking at such data everywhere. 

● Some good news: The University of North Carolina soon will join the growing list of law schools that have family defense clinics. 

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

● From the Topeka Capital-Journal: 

Police in a Wichita-area town have arrested the adoptive parents of a girl whose body was found buried in a backyard five months ago, while officials with the state child welfare agency haven't yet released a summary of its involvement. 

The Rose Hill Police Department on Monday arrested the adoptive parents of the girl, whose birth name was Natalie Garcia and adoptive name was Kennedy Schroer. Her adoptive parents are 50-year-old Crystina Elizabeth Schroer and 53-year-old Joseph Shane Schroer.

Maine family police agency’s “good news” may not be so good

...unless you're a child taken by the Maine family police - in 
which case you might never go home.
(Photo by Jimmy Emerson)

The Maine Morning Star has a good story about some data from Maine’s family police agency, the Office of Child and Family Services.  OCFS is spinning the data, touting the simple fact that more children are leaving Maine foster care than entering as some kind of good news attributable to their efforts.  More likely, it’s what one would expect due to inertia.  It might be good news; it might not.

The exit/entry figure is more likely to mean simply that the foster-care panic in Maine is finally slowing down – as usually happens after a couple of years. So what does that mean? If you suddenly start taking away huge numbers of additional children then, of course, a couple of years later exits will exceed entries – simply because all those children needlessly taken are leaving the system one way or another, while entries have slowed from full-out panic levels. 

Of course, the fact that the panic may be slowing is itself good news – though it’s not slowing nearly enough.  This can be seen in another number: The claim that OCFS took away 900 children in 2024.  Two years ago, Maine took away 1,130 children. 

So IF – and it’s a big if – that 900 figure is accurate, it would mean that Maine’s rate of removal fell from more than double the national average (even when rates of child poverty are factored in) to “only” about 70% above the national average. The state still is a long way from returning to the years when it came so close to getting child welfare right. 

The reason for that big “if” has to do with the data sources.  The 2022 figure is the most recent available from the federal government’s Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System.  AFCARS gets the numbers from the states – but there are specific definitions for an entry into care.  When states publish their own data for the public they can define an entry any way they want.  Several times over the years I’ve found discrepancies between what states tell the public and what they tell AFCARS – and always, the number they give the public is lower. 

I am not saying that is happening here. I suggest only that it would be prudent to ask OCFS if the 900 figure conforms strictly to AFCARS definitions and to check past OCFS self-reported entry data against past AFCARS reports.  (The actual number reported to AFCARS won’t be identical, since AFCARS data are reported by federal fiscal year.) I tried doing that myself, but could not find entry figures on the OCFS website. 

One other bit of clearly bad news: In a state that tears apart so many families needlessly, it is outrageous that more children lose their birth parents forever because of adoption than are allowed to return to their own homes. This begs the question: Is OCFS getting the numbers down with a mad rush to deprive children of their parents forever (that’s what termination of parental rights really means) rather than by doing enough to avoid needless removal?