The Charles Murray faction of the extreme right offers up a remarkable collection of half-truths, straw men, and statistics abuse.
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"So you see," says the child welfare establishment,
"of course we'll accept your approach. All you have to do is clear the bar!" |
The American Enterprise Institute is the right-wing think
tank that is the longtime home of Charles
Murray, author of the notorious exercise in what the Southern Policy Law
Center aptly calls “racist pseudo-science” known as The Bell Curve. So
it makes sense that AEI has become the center of what should be called child
welfare’s “Caucus of Denial” – those who argue that child welfare is magically
immune from the racism that permeates every other aspect of American life. They
also deny that poverty is confused with neglect.
While other conservatives, those who recognize the danger of
abuse of government power, are among the leaders in bipartisan efforts to
reform the system, (and conversely, I’m sorry to say, plenty of my fellow
liberals are in denial as well) AEI is trapped in a Charles Murray
mentality.
AEI’s efforts to promote fallacies about race, poverty and
child welfare are led by Naomi
Schaefer Riley, who writes screeds with titles like “Wokeness Has Come for
Child Protective Services” and who proudly analogizes her book attacking family
preservation to another of Murray’s books.
Riley’s book was given to the world by a publisher whose
other titles include American Bolsheviks: The Persecution of Donald Trump,
The Case To Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden, Ashli: The Untold Story of the
Women of January 6, The Myth Of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault On Clean
Elections, Crime Inc.: How Democrats Employ Mafia And Gangster Tactics To Gain
And Hold Power and Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting Covid Fascism
with a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again.
So it’s not surprising that a charter member of the Caucus
of Denial, Brett Drake, got AEI to publish a
summary of the caucus’ major claims. In Drake’s Bizarro World, facts are
myths and myths are facts.
He squeezes a remarkable number of half-truths,
straw men, statistics abuse, and distortion of what anyone who dares to
disagree with him has to say into two pages. Let’s set the record straight:
● Drake’s claim: He says the idea that there is
widespread racial bias in child welfare is rooted in a single study, the third
National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3), but that study was
flawed and the findings were not replicated in NIS-4.
That’s a classic half-truth. NIS-3 was flawed and NIS-4 did
not replicate its findings. But the case that child welfare is permeated with
racism is not based entirely or even mostly on NIS-3. There are a wealth of other, rigorous
studies, controlling carefully for other variables that show racial bias in
child welfare decision-making. Some of them are summarized, with citations, in this
NCCPR Issue Paper.
I found out about many of these studies when I read Shattered
Bonds, the first book on this topic by Prof. Dorothy Roberts (a
member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors). So Drake’s implication that Roberts
relied mostly on NIS-3 also is incorrect. And, Drake does not mention the
additional research cited in Prof. Roberts’ second book on this topic, Torn
Apart.
Instead, Drake repeatedly cites one study – his own –
purporting to show no racial bias. I
analyze the many failings of that study in detail here.
● Drake’s claim: It’s supposedly a myth that most
neglect cases investigated by child protective services (CPS) agencies are
“just poverty.”
This is simply a regurgitation of the puerile debate over
whether a case is “poverty alone.” First of all, plenty of cases are
poverty alone. Three
separate studies found that 30% of America’s foster children could be home
right now if their families simply had adequate housing.
But whether poverty is “alone” or not ignores the central
question: Do you need to tear apart a family to fix whatever might there along
with the poverty? The answer is a resounding no. The way to tell if a case is a poverty case
actually is pretty simple: If the solution is money, the problem is
poverty. Study
after study finds that in a great many cases, the solution is money.
When the problem is poverty alone the solution is money.
But, as this
article from 23 leading scholars explains, often when the problem is
poverty plus something else the solution still is money – which makes sense
since the “something else” often is caused by or exacerbated by poverty. I
discuss the whole “just poverty” debate in detail in this
presentation at a Kempe Center conference.
● Drake’s claim: It’s supposedly a myth that neglect
is less serious than abuse – and we know this because 76.4% of fatalities are
due to neglect.
But that tells us nothing about neglect allegations in
general. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, family
police agencies “substantiated” neglect allegations concerning 377,742
children. There were 1,252 fatalities attributed to neglect. The fact that 33/100ths of one percent of
“substantiated” neglect allegations involved fatalities tells you nothing about
the other 99 and 66/100ths percent - yet this is the entire basis for Drake’s
claim.
Drake’s whole argument about neglect and fatalities is based
on statistics abuse, but teasing out the facts gets a bit wonky. If there happen to be any child welfare wonks out there who want to go into the weeds on this, I
have a detailed explanation in this column for The Imprint.
Drake sets up a straw man when he implies those who
challenge the approach he champions, and which has dominated child welfare for
more than half a century think neglect is “trivial or something that can be
ignored.”
On the contrary, we think it is urgent to address what
agencies call neglect – by addressing the poverty that, in the
overwhelming majority of cases, is confused with neglect or caused by neglect;
as opposed to tearing children from their homes at least 179,000 times per year
and putting many more families under oppressive, traumatizing surveillance.
● Drake’s claim: He says it’s a myth that anonymous
reports are “unnecessary at best and are often simply harassment.”
OK, now things are getting weird: Anonymous reports are
among those least likely to be substantiated. In New York City, for example,
22.7% of all reports are “substantiated” – which means only that a worker
checked a box on a form. For anonymous reports, it’s 6.7%. To which Drake replies: Yes, but other
categories of reporters have substantiation rates almost as bad!
So, does that prove the need for anonymous reports, or does
it prove the need to also replace mandatory reporting with permissive
reporting, so workers are not deluged with false reports from all sorts of
sources, stealing time from finding children in real danger?
But wait, it gets weirder: Drake makes the case for
anonymous reports by saying:
Surprisingly, reports from “unclassified” sources
(including anonymous, “other,” and “unknown or missing” sources) are actually
slightly more likely to result in re-reports in multivariate models than are
reports from professional sources.
But that’s not surprising at all – if you understand that
anonymous reports are, in fact, often simply harassment. Of course someone engaged in harassment will
“re-report”!
By the way, those data from New York City come from this column in The Imprint calling for replacing anonymous reporting with
confidential reporting. The column was not written by lawyers who represent
parents; it was written by lawyers who lead an agency that represents children. They’re
on the frontlines. They see the harm such reports do to children every day.
Maybe lawmakers – and “scholars” like Drake -- should listen to them.
And then comes a claim that’s weirder still …
● Drake’s claim: “It’s a myth that CPS spends most of
its resources investigating unnecessary calls.”
This is a myth, Drake claims, because CPS spends even more
of its money on things like holding children in foster care (and, though he
doesn’t mention it, warehousing children in institutions that can cost well
over $100,000 per year per child).
Well, sure, Brett, we’re glad to second any claim that
CPS is spending vast amounts of money on foster care! But of course, he’s
missing the point. What we actually say is that of the resources – not just
money but caseworker time and effort – expended on investigations, most of that
is devoted to unnecessary calls. This is demonstrated by the huge number of
investigations where workers themselves find that the
allegation was false. And that steals worker time from finding the
relatively few children in real danger.
● Drake’s claim: It’s a myth that foster care is toxic to
children. The basis for his claim:
“The limited research we have is mixed, but the majority
of well-controlled studies do not find that foster care is harmful to children,
and it is sometimes found to be protective …”
OK, let’s parse this one.
“The limited research we have is mixed …”
Let’s stop right there. There are multiple
rigorous studies that find that foster care is indeed harmful; not for
every child, but in typical cases children left in their own homes typically
fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.
And consider what a low bar the system is setting for
itself. These studies find foster care is worse even than leaving children in
their own homes with little or no help to their families at all. Consider how
much better still the outcomes would be compared to foster care if systems
actually took some of that vast amount of money Drake rightly notes is spent on
foster care and spent it on helping families instead.
Now consider the implications of tearing nearly 200,000
children from their families every year based, at best, on research that is “mixed.”
No one denies that removal from the home is inherently
traumatic – at least I hope not. No one denies that much of foster care is
dismal.
Just read what current and former foster youth themselves
have to say about what foster care is really like. In
this report, and this
one, and this
one. Yes, some foster youth believe, almost certainly correctly, that they
needed to be taken away anyway. But that’s no excuse for ignoring so much lived
experience to the contrary. And that is not the same thing as claiming that the
system does not do harm.
As for the inherent trauma of removal itself, just listen to
the cries of children torn from their parents at the Mexican border during the
first Trump Administration. No, seriously, Prof. Drake: Listen to them.
Right here. Right now:
Of course, unlike Trump’s Border Patrol, CPS workers almost
always mean well, but the overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite
children torn from their families by those workers, yes, often when their
poverty is confused with neglect, cry out the same way for the same
reason. Yet Drake defends doing this to
children based on the claim that the research concerning whether they also will
be, for example, more likely to be unemployed, become pregnant as teenagers or
wind up in jail is mixed?
Now, back to Drake:
… the majority of well-controlled studies…
Note the hyphenated weasel-word there. Drake offers no
definition of “well-controlled;” so it may just mean “the studies that reach
the conclusion I want.” But more
important is the rest of that sentence:
… do not find that foster care is harmful to children.
Here again, what an astoundingly low bar the child welfare
establishment sets for itself, particularly when compared to the enormously
high bar set for any program that works to keep families together. We should
keep on doing what so many current and former foster youth say traumatized them
because there are some studies out there that find that foster care
didn’t do harm?
As for the studies supposedly showing it’s sometimes
“protective,” at least one of those studies found that the improvement occurred
after reunification. So it wasn’t the foster care, it was being back with their
families.
And Drake never even mentions all the studies showing stunningly
high rates of abuse in foster care itself.
Drake begins this section of his screed by declaring “There
is near-universal agreement that keeping children in their families is best so
long as the child is safe.”
But if you really believe foster care is harmless and maybe
even beneficial, why is keeping children in their families “best so long as the
child is safe”? After all, if it’s
actually beneficial wouldn’t it be good for children who are safe but are
simply being denied the “benefits” of being around white middle-class people?
So I have to wonder how much confidence Drake really has in his own claims
about the benefits, or at least the lack of harm, of foster care.
In fact, foster care is toxic to children. Yes, on
rare occasions it may be less toxic than the home from which the children were
taken – particularly if you don’t actually do anything to make things better in
the home. And even when it doesn’t result in foster care, investigations
themselves can be enormously
traumatic
for children. Because they are so toxic,
they need to be used rarely and in very small doses.
Instead, we have created a massive child welfare
surveillance state that will force one-third of all children, and more than
half of Black children to endure the trauma of investigation before they turn
18 – according to a
study co-authored by Brett Drake.
As for safety, consider what one of the architects of the
current system, one of the many having second thoughts, has to say.
Responding to a
commentary co-authored by another member of the Caucus of Denial defending the
current system, Dr. Richard Krugman wrote that he agreed with the commentary
authors that …
“… just ablating CPS agencies
is the wrong approach. BUT we
now have 40 years of experience with this approach and have made no progress in
reducing the mortality from physical abuse of children (decades with 1500-2500
children dying annually). … 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.
[Emphasis in original; full quote here].
