NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending March 4, 2025

● “They literally took her off my breast in the hallway with her screaming at the court hearing,” says Kristen Clark-Hassell, of the day her newborn was taken.  

It’s bad enough that Clark-Hassell had her daughter and other children taken by Georgia’s family police agency for reasons that sure sound like the confusion of poverty with neglect. It’s worse that she was subjected to constant drug testing even though there was no allegation of drug abuse. Worse still, The Current reports, when test results conflicted, the family police ignored the ones where results came out negative and relied on positive results from a company with a questionable track record for accuracy.    

They kept using the company even when they knew about the questions.  And, according to the story, the agency 

failed to notify the thousands of parents whose tests may have been faulty, nor sought to learn how tests processed by the company impacted custody decisions about their children. 

● Family police agencies are only supposed to take away a child on the spot in an emergency. Even rushing to a judge without giving the family a chance to defend itself is supposed to be reserved for emergencies.  But guess who decides if it’s an “emergency.” That’s why it’s so important that, at the very least, a full-scale hearing be held within days of children being torn, from their parents and thrown into foster care. But as the Boston Globe reports in this story, with comment from NCCPR, that often doesn’t happen either.  

● I doubt I will ever again agree with the Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court.  But in his recent State of the Judiciary address, he got the part about termination of children’s rights to their parents right. You can find his remarks, and a video link, in this NCCPR Blog post. 

● The Chief Justice also praised new Texas laws curbing the power of the state’s family police agency.  As KSAT-TV reports, contrary to the fearmongering when the laws were passed, the evidence shows child safety continues to improve. 

● When I saw The Imprint had published an op-ed by a former foster parent and former member of the board of the local “child advocacy center” – this wasn’t what I was expecting. 

● Last week’s round-up noted progress toward making a state version of the Indian Child Welfare Act permanent in Montana. But KUER Public Radio reports there’s been no such progress in Utah.

Texas’ Chief Justice: “When the State goes to court to take somebody’s children, it’s not opening up a collaborative therapy session.”

Texas Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock

This is probably the first time I've ever agreed with Texas Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock. There's a good chance it may never happen again.  But there are data to back up his words. 

Blacklock ended his State of the Judiciary Address with some remarkable comments about the new Texas laws curbing the power of the family police. And he called for limits on terminating children’s rights to their parents – a more accurate term than termination of parental rights. 

You can watch what he said here.   

Here’s the text of that portion of his remarks: 

Using the coercive power of the State to take children from their God-given parents—to destroy a family—should never be our first instinct. It should ALWAYS be our very last resort. I want to thank the Legislature for requiring DFPS to keep more families together. Senator Kolkhorst, Representative Dutton, and others have been leaders on this, and I urge you to continue those efforts this Session. 

One suggestion is to repeal what we call subsection (O)—it’s section 161.001(b)(1)(O) of the Family Code, and it allows a parent’s rights to be terminated forever if the parent fails to check every box on a long list of things the state wants them to do to get their child back. The thing is—there’s another provision that allows termination of rights if the parent endangers the child. So, the State only needs to use subsection (O) if it can’t prove that the parent has endangered the child. But if the State can’t prove that, then why on earth would we destroy that family? 

Termination of parental rights is the civil death penalty. When the State goes to court to take somebody’s children, it’s not opening up a collaborative therapy session. It’s initiating adversarial litigation of the highest stakes imaginable. We need to do more to ensure that desperate parents in these cases have vigorous representation, and we need to make sure the Family Code doesn’t stack the deck against the parent before the case starts. Repealing subsection (O) would be a good start. Representative Dutton has a bill that would do this, and I commend his bill to your consideration. 

As I said, his remarks are bolstered by data.  As KSAT-TV reported in this story and in this one, the latest state data show that in state fiscal year 2024 child abuse deaths in Texas continued to decline.  And reabuse of children left in their own homes remains lower than before the new laws were passed.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 26, 2025

Before the news: A big virtual event next week. You can register here to learn about “The Protective Power of Cash” at a virtual teach-in March 3 from 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm ET. 

In the news: 

● There’s a new issue of the Family Justice Journal out – filled with articles about “The Practice of Connection.” I particularly want to call attention to the Foreword on Page 8. It’s by Sandy Santana, executive director of Children’s Rights.  This remarkable essay makes clear that CR is backing up its recent change in rhetoric with action. I have a blog post about the transformation. 

Other articles in Family Justice Journal include: 

● Joyce McMillan introduces JMAC for Families’ curriculum to teach mandated reporters how to be mandated supporters. There’s more about it here. 

● In an article about “The False Gods of Social Change” Kevin Campbell, Cormac Russell and Elizabeth Wendell write: 

In practice, “service users” receiving aid from the government and charities exchange freedoms of self-determination, choice, participation, and control for the promise of subsistence, not equity, health, or even dignity. No freedom is considered too precious to take from a “service user” by a social, health, mental health, or justice system. The reality is people lose their

children, reproductive autonomy, sovereign claims to identity, personal liberty, associations, and even freedoms of movement in return for “services” to meet their “needs.”

In other news:

● When some Maine lawmakers recently learned that their mandatory child abuse reporting law has a clause that, under some circumstances, prohibits doctors from thinking, they were outraged – not because such an idiotic law exists but because, in their view, it is not being sufficiently enforced. I have a blog post about it. 

● In the United States there’s been a lot more talk lately about child welfare’s history of trying to eradicate Native America.  The talk has helped.  But in Canada, government is putting some money where its mouth is.  The Imprint reports that for First Nations Canadians: 

Those taken as children between 1991 and 2022 from “reserves” and the northwestern territory of Yukon are eligible to submit claims, as are their caregiving parents and grandparents. [Emphasis added, in case anyone thinks these are just crimes of the distant past.] … 

“While no amount of money can make up for the harms done by Canada’s racist child welfare system, March 10 will be a historic turning point to address these past wrongs,” National Chief Woodhouse Nepinak stated. “The $23 billion compensation settlement is an important recognition of the heroic representative plaintiffs and everyone who took part in the long process of negotiations that brought us to this point.” … 

Yet as the claims process moves forward, a far larger and more systemic reform sought on behalf of Indigenous children and families remains stalled. 

● And in Montana, The Daily Montanan reports that a bill to make permanent that state’s own version of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which its sponsor says is stronger than the federal law, has received preliminary approval by the State Senate. 

● Writing in CTMirror, a bioethicist, an adoptee rights advocate and a pediatrician make the case against so-called “baby boxes” where mothers can abandon their infants. They write: 

There is a misperception that these mothers do not wish to be with their children – and only need a box to “drop them off.” However nearly all women who surrender a child want to keep them, yet feel they may have no other option. Relinquishment is associated with unrelenting grief – and finances are the main reason relinquishment in 80% of the cases within the U.S. Even enough money to cover the cost of a car seat can make the difference for some families so they could keep their child. 

They also note serious problems with the safety of baby boxes, and they offer an intriguing alternative.

● Maryland is among the states considering enacting a “Family Miranda” law. Such laws do not give families any additional rights – they just inform them of the rights they already have. So you can see why family policing agencies don’t like them. The Maryland law was the subject of a remarkable hearing last week.  I have a blog post with a link to the full hearing, and a reprint of the testimony of Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore. 

● On LinkedIn Pulse Melody Webb of Mother’s Outreach Network writes about the changes urgently needed in Washington DC’s family policing system.  DC is one of the places where families are not even guaranteed a lawyer when up against the family police.

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

● I’m thinking the headline on this Wichita Eagle story is enough: 

‘Please do not make us get in the boxes’: Court doc details death of adopted girl buried in Rose Hill. 

A transformation at Children’s Rights

There's lots of good stuff in the latest issue of the Family Justice Journal
But in particular, don't miss the Foreword on Page 8, 

A few years ago, when the group’s rhetoric changed, I was skeptical about whether there’d be a change in substance.  I was wrong. 

For nearly 30 years no group has been in a better position to make real change for the better in “child welfare” than the group known as “Children’s Rights.”  But for much of the group’s history, they squandered the opportunity.   

In state after state, their media-savvy founder and first executive director, Marcia Lowry, became the “Godsource” for reporters – that one source treated reverentially in every story -- as the group brought what I came to call McLawsuits, essentially the same suit each time.  For reasons discussed in an NCCPR publication called “The Children Wronged by Children’s Rights” these McLawsuits almost never made systems better and sometimes made them worse. 

Then Lowry had some sort of falling out with her Board of Directors. She left to form “A Better Childhood,” another organization that churns out the same sort of McLawsuits.  A few years after Lowry was succeeded at CR by Sandy Santana, the rhetoric changed, so did the group’s public policy positions – they even called for repeal of the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  But would the change in outlook be backed by a change in the group’s strategy and litigation?  

The first sign that there would, in fact, be such a change came one year ago when, on behalf of the Minneapolis NAACP, Children’s Rights filed a federal civil rights complaint against the family policing systems in the two largest counties in Minnesota. The complaint deals head-on with needless investigation and surveillance, wrongful removal and racism in these systems. 

And now, Santana has presented a comprehensive agenda for a change in direction.  It comes in the form of the foreword for the latest issue of the Family Justice Journal (See Page 8.) I hope everyone will read it in full. 

Santana begins by telling his own remarkable personal story. Then he forthrightly acknowledges that the approach the organization had taken for decades had been wrong – and things are going to be different.  He writes: 

In the sometimes charged and polarized debate between advocates of parents’ rights and advocates of children’s rights, our organization historically leaned in favor of intervention to “protect” the child. In the years immediately following the passage of ASFA, perhaps blinded by our conviction that no child should grow up with the state as a parent, our child welfare reform litigation campaigns supported the enforcement of that law’s strict timelines for the termination of parental rights. As we know, that law created a new category of legal orphans, intensified the regulation and forced separation of Black communities and families, prioritized adoption over reunification, and does not align with our understanding of treatment, recovery, trauma, and the critical importance of t the parent-child bond. 

Over the past decade, under new leadership, we have reflected deeply on how the impact litigation cases we brought on behalf of kids in state custody and the reforms they delivered, did not always support the preservation of families – particularly Black families. Through this process, we listened closely to the voices of survivors, who not only described the deep trauma they experienced within the system but from being separated from their parents and

uprooted from their communities. We also heard from mothers who endured the terror of constant surveillance and the ineffable pain of losing their children. 

Those conversations profoundly transformed the organization’s long-standing conception of children’s rights. They made it clear that children do not exist in a bubble of autonomous rights disconnected from their families, communities, and cultures. 

The essay lists a series of concrete actions CR has taken or will take to back up these words, including: 

We are partnering with the Family Justice Law Center to explore constitutional challenges to warrantless home entries, invasive strip searches of children, and “emergency

removals,” often carried out in non-exigent circumstances without parental consent or due process protections. … 

We are co-leading with JMACforFamilies a collaborative of advocates, mandated reporters, legal professionals, researchers and lived experts to develop new mandated reporting policies and practices in New York State to prevent unnecessary family surveillance and separation. … 

We are exploring impact litigation to give teeth to the “reasonable efforts”* standard. 

And, perhaps most promising: 

In states where we have custodial consent decrees in place, we are using our leverage to press for front-end policy and practice changes that lead to more successful reunifications, increased extended family kinship placements without terminating parental rights, and driving toward a radically smaller foster system … 

That suggests some hope for the children of Michigan where the old leadership of CR, under Marcia Lowry, negotiated a particularly awful decree. 

Lowry herself, however, continues to do damage. A Better Childhood still does the same old harm in the same old way. 

As for that publication, “The Children Wronged By ‘Children’s Rights,’” The full name is “‘The Children Wronged by Children’s Rights’ (and ‘A Better Childhood’ too’”), it’s been updated to put the Children’s Rights criticism in the past tense.  I hope it always stays that way.

*Federal law requires family policing systems, a more accurate term than “child welfare” systems to make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together.  The law is routinely ignored.

Child welfare in Maine: Some lawmakers want to strengthen a law that prohibits doctors from thinking.

It’s taken more than half a century but slowly, some people in family policing (a more accurate term than “child welfare”) are realizing that mandatory child abuse reporting laws were a huge mistake.  These laws force many professionals who deal with children, and, in some states, everyone, to report their slightest suspicion of whatever state law considers child abuse or neglect. 

The research is clear: Mandatory reporting has backfired. It drives families away from seeking help. They fear that if they confide that they are under stress or take their child to the ER with a broken bone or even a bruise it might be confused with child abuse or neglect -- and they’ll be turned in to the family police who will inflict a traumatic investigation and, maybe, take the children. 

Mandatory reporting also deluges the system with so many false reports that workers have less time to find the relatively few children in real danger. In short, mandatory reporting makes all children less safe. 

One key solution is to replace mandatory reporting with permissive reporting – in which professionals exercise their professional judgment concerning when to report and when not to report.  Sadly, no state has yet gone that far.  Instead, there have been small tentative steps: A commission tasked with studying how to expand mandatory reporting in Massachusetts rebelled against its own chair and refused.  A commission in Colorado actually recommended removing one category of mandated reporter -- advocates for survivors of domestic violence – and narrowing the definition of “neglect.” A bill has been introduced to implement those recommendations. By the standards of family policing, those acts are revolutionary. 

But, of course, there also are states that haven’t gotten the memo.  In Washington State, some lawmakers, and media, remain obsessed with allowing the family police to, in effect, barge into the confessional, by forcing clergy to be mandated reporters. 

And then there’s Maine, where some clueless politicians and advocates have spent more than a decade undoing reforms that once made the state a national leader in getting child welfare right. 

Among the foolish changes was a clause in the state’s mandatory reporting law that takes away what little professional judgment medical professionals are allowed to exercise in certain cases of alleged physical abuse. 

At issue are what some child abuse pediatricians – you know, the ones who see child abuse where it is and, too often, where it isn’t – are fond of calling “sentinel injuries.” Definitions of sentinel injuries vary, but while the age of the child and location of the injury are factors, severity often is not.

Backers of this theory cite research claiming that children found to be abused are more likely to have had such injuries at some point than children who are not found to be abused.  But that is not the same as saying every child or even most children with a “sentinel injury” got that injury because of abuse or is likely to be abused in the future. 

I discussed the research and its limits in detail in this Blog post. That post focused on a paper by two doctors who actually told their colleagues that when there is a sentinel injury they should “think less, screen more.” 

But even the most fanatical devotees of thinking less argue for more medical tests and consultation with specialists – such as child abuse pediatricians, of course.  That alone can bring down a world of trauma on children and their families. But at least they’re not advocating writing an anti-thinking clause into state law. 

But Maine already has such a clause – thanks to the same governor who began the dismantling of the state’s reforms, the state’s former “Trump before Trump” governor, Paul LePage.  

Since 2013 Maine’s mandatory reporting law demands that in any case where there is a so-called “sentinel injury,” medical professionals must suspend all professional judgment, do no thinking at all, and automatically report the family to Maine’s family police agency, whether the medical professionals think the cause of the injury is child abuse or not.  Then, caseworkers who, of course, have far less medical expertise than medical professionals, launch their investigation and make the call as to whether it’s child abuse. 

During a legislative committee meeting earlier this month, some lawmakers heard about this and were appalled.  But alas, they weren’t appalled that Maine has a clause in state law that is almost literally brain-less.  No, they were appalled that it’s not being enforced. They were shocked that no one has made an example of some doctor somewhere who dared to exercise what they thought was their right, indeed their duty to think, and decided not to report a child with a “sentinel injury” because, in that doctor’s professional judgment, the injury was not caused by child abuse. 

Indeed, debate at the committee meeting appeared to revolve almost entirely around whether it was
better to educate doctors that they have no right to think in these cases or punish them for thinking. The headline on one news account reads: “Gap in Maine’s mandated reporter law raises questions about accountability for mandated reports.”  

Much of the impetus for making thinking more difficult seems to come from Mark Moran, a social worker who chairs Maine’s Child Death and Serious Injury Review Panel. In 2021, the panel devoted a huge section of its annual report to “sentinel injuries.” But the panel’s credibility might be viewed as compromised by the report’s very next section. That section dealt, entirely uncritically, with “shaken baby syndrome” – only the report prefers another term.  Perhaps because Shaken Baby Syndrome has been called into question so often one court has called it “junk science,” the Maine committee has adopted the new preferred euphemism: abusive head trauma.  

By 2023, the report was no longer talking about shaken baby syndrome – by any name – but it still was talking up sentinel injuries.  But even that report said in such cases the child should receive “a careful, multidisciplinary evaluation” – which is not the same thing as a knee-jerk call to the family police. 

But Moran certainly isn’t against the law.  According to the Maine Morning Star: 

“We’re looking to identify what the problem is, fix the problem and put the family back together,” Moran said.

I’m sure he means it. As with so many in and around family policing, I don’t doubt that his motivation is to save lives. 

But scaring families away from going to doctors and subjecting children who are taken anyway to traumatic investigations and, perhaps, hauling them off to foster care doesn’t seem like the best way to identify a medical problem. 

As for the whole punish-or-educate dilemma, Moran says: Why choose?  From the story: 

Moran said the panel is more interested in changing people’s behavior than handing out punishments, but it doesn’t have to be one or the other; it could be both. 

He may as well have added: But for God’s sake, medical professionals, stop that damn thinking!

Maine legislators need to think twice about a law that doesn't let doctors think even once.

Prof. Shanta Trivedi on a bill that “puts marginalized families on an equal footing with their more privileged counterparts.”

Witnesses testify in favor of the Maryland "Know Before They Knock" bill.
You can watch the entire video here.

If you don’t know your rights, you don’t have your rights. When impoverished families hear that pounding at the door in the middle of the night from a worker for child protective services, often they don’t know their rights.  

A lot of CPS agencies want to keep it that way.  But five states have passed what are commonly known as “family Miranda laws,” requiring the agency to tell families their rights – including their right to consult a lawyer.  In Maryland, a bill to do that, HB 223, is called “Know Before They Knock."  It was the subject of a hearing before the Maryland House of Representatives Judiciary Committee last week.  It’s well worth watching the hearing, available here. 

Below, I’ve reprinted the testimony of one of the many witnesses speaking in favor of the bill. 

Prof. Shanta Trivedi teaches and writes about the child welfare system at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She is the faculty director of the Meyerhoff Center for Families Children and the Courts. She has also represented parents who have had their children removed without knowing their rights. [Emphasis in original]: 

Imagine CPS knocks on your door in the middle of the night.  They say that they’re going to search your home. They will search your medicine cabinet, your bedroom.  They’ll ask questions about your romantic partners, about how many glasses of wine you have each week.  They’ll ask to speak to your children without you being present and to inspect their naked bodies. How would you respond? Welcome them in? I doubt that. I know that I would tell them come back with a warrant, and I would call a lawyer immediately, because I know my rights. You know your rights.  But, of course, not everyone does. 

This bill simply puts marginalized families on equal footing with their more privileged counterparts.   This bill would establish that constitutional protections apply in child welfare investigations and would allow parents to make informed decisions throughout the process. 

To date, Connecticut, Texas, Florida, Montana and Arizona have all passed these laws and New York and Delaware have introduced similar legislation.  The question is whether we want to join those states in respecting parental rights for ALL parents or just for the privileged few. 

Rather than making children less safe, states that have passed similar laws have found that they keep children safer because transparency from the agency encourages families to be more forthcoming.   Further, the law already provides for law enforcement and DSS to be able to enter in emergency situations.  This bill would not change this. 

I know that opponents do not want DSS to be perceived as a policing agency but unfortunately, many parents already feel this way because of the intrusive nature of investigations and the threat that their children can be taken. Regardless of what the perception is, the fact remains that removing one’s child directly impacts both the parent and child’s rights to family integrity and the parent’s right to care, custody and control of their children.  This is true regardless of whether the police do it or if DSS does it.  Whether or not we advise parents of how to protect those rights, they still exist.  

The goal of the child welfare system is to protect children, and research shows that most children do best with their families. Because I believe this bill is an important step toward protecting family integrity. I urge you to support HB223.

P.S. I just caught up with Sunday's edition of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. In the course of discussing immigration raids he said something that could apply to any government agency that pounds on people's doors in the middle of the night and demands entry:

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Feb. 18, 2025

● Responding to reporting from WXIA-TV, the family police agency in Georgia is taking steps to curb the abuses of “child abuse pediatricians” – steps they should have taken all along, such as allowing families to get second opinions. 

On this blog: deep dives into two bad bills: 

● In New Hampshire: drenched in trendy psychobabble, legislation proposes to fight trauma with trauma. 

● If you are a Black child in Indiana, odds are four in five the family police agency will investigate you and your family. Now some lawmakers want to make it even easier to take you away and keep you away forever.  One way they propose to do it: Just let foster parents march into court as “intervenors” and file their own petitions to terminate the rights of children to live with their own families. 

● Tennessee already allows this.  WZTV has the story of a foster parent who tried it – then realized she’d been misled by the family police agency, changed her mind, and worked to reunite her foster children with their own mother. 

● Not all the laws are bad, of course. State law in Colorado declares that “In order to heal from the generational trauma, we must confront the past and shed light on the hidden cruelty.’’  The cruelty in question: Child welfare’s attempt to eradicate Native America. So the state created the Federal Indian Boarding School Research Program.  The Imprint discussed the work with Colorado’s State Archeologist.

● New York University School of Law profiles the role of NYU’s pioneering Family Defense Clinic in a big recent victory: an appellate court decision barring the city’s family police agency from harassing domestic violence survivors and their children.   

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

● Remember that story in last week’s round-up about the horrifying death of a child from a Texas residential treatment center? This follow-up from the Texas Tribune should surprise exactly no one: 

A Greenville foster care facility linked to the death of an 11-year-old last November had a history of sexual misconduct and physical abuse, including organizing fights between children and restraining one boy so severely he was hospitalized, according to a federal report filed Tuesday.

● From Courthouse News Service: 

The New York Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a former foster child Tuesday, finding that Cayuga County was negligent in failing to prevent rampant sexual and physical abuse in her foster home.