NCCPR CHILD WELFARE BLOG, APRIL THROUGH JUNE,
2006
A few years ago, the Pew Charitable Trusts set up an OBRC
(Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commission) to study foster care.
There were some good child welfare leaders on the Pew
Commission on Children in Foster Care, but any group that demands a unanimous
report is only as good as its weakest member. And, as is often the case, the
deck was stacked. Members included a
foster parent, and an adoptive parent – but no birth parent who’d lost a child
to the system. A prominent judge on the
panel views permanence almost exclusively in terms of adoption.
Given
that, the final recommendations are remarkable for their adequacy. The key recommendation on changing child
welfare financing has a crucial technical flaw which would cause it to backfire
- - but in principle it’s a step in the right direction. Most of the recommendations for courts would
make them marginally better.
But
while the recommendations rate, at best, a C, Pew gets an A+ in one area:
Marketing itself. They’ve managed to
slap their name onto just about everything in child welfare, to the point where
the panel might better be called the Pew Commission on Promotion of the Pew
Commission.
So
while some saw that ABC Primetime program about foster care as just a
television program, and others saw it as an act of exploitation, Pew saw it as
something else – an opportunity for “product placement.”
The
day after the program ran, Pew’s flack rushed out two press releases wrapping
arms around it – one from the Commission itself and one from an allied
organization for whom she also does p.r. - - the Congressional Caucus on
Adoption Institute.
While
the CCAI release actually endorsed the program, the release for Pew was more
like a little kid jumping up and down yelling “Look at me! Look at me!” – mostly, it tried to get
reporters and others who saw the Primetime program to use the Pew
Commission as a resource.
Neither
release expressed the slightest concern about ABC showing the face and using
the real first name of an 11-year-old victim of sexual abuse.
I
wrote to both organizations about their linking themselves to a program which
had crossed a clear ethical line.
Neither wrote back.
But
Pew did respond. And the response boils
down to: The ends justify the means.
The
Commission co-chairs, former Congressmen Bill Frenzel of Minnesota and William
Gray of Pennsylvania are listed as authors of an op ed that has run in three papers
that I know of. Not only did they
express no concern about what ABC did, instead they wagged a finger at any
American who might have such concerns.
According to the op ed:
“These intimate portrayals have led some to
charge ABC crossed a line, violating the privacy of the youngsters profiled.
But if that is the chief response to the ABC coverage, then Americans are
guilty of violating something else - the responsibility we have to care for
these children.”
Translation:
As long as the program “raises awareness” and supports our take on these
issues, who cares what happens to one 11-year-old? And the way Frenzel and Gray minimize what ABC actually did makes
me wonder if they even saw the program at all; much less watched it and
thought: “What if she were my granddaughter?”
You’ve
got to hand it to the folks at Pew: They turned the controversy itself into
another opportunity for product placement.
But the Pew response did make me wonder about something else: It's been
interesting to see the extent to which, by and large, the good journalists I
know have been more outraged by what ABC did than the child welfare
establishment - - which says a lot about the real priorities of what I've come
to call the foster care-industrial complex. Pew’s ends-justify-the-means take
seems to be the norm.
So
maybe it's not ABC that deserves most of the blame here. Journalists often are going to push the
envelope. It's hard to expect
self-restraint when almost no one they talk to in the field is pushing back.
In
George Orwell’s1984, a functionary of the ruling party explains to
Winston Smith how their society has advanced control over dissent beyond that
of the dictatorships of the past.
While
the Inquisition simply executed heretics, and the Communists put on show trials
in which dissidents offered confessions they really didn’t believe, in Orwell’s
Oceania, dissidents must first believe in their own minds that they were wrong.
“We are not content with negative obedience,
nor even the most abject submission,” he says. “When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free
will.”
I
thought of that when I read a story in the
Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader last week, one of many the paper has
been running about what they have come to call “quick-trigger adoptions” – the
rush by some in the state child welfare agency to tear children away from poor,
loving homes forever in order to cash in on the bounties offered by the federal
government for increasing adoptions.
The NBC Nightly News
story on the topic was sparked by the Herald-Leader’s excellent
reporting.
Last
week’s story focused on Mary Henderson, who testified before a legislative
committee about how the deck was stacked against her. She explained how she’d done everything right after her four
children, ages one through five, were taken.
She did everything the state asked, and jumped through every hoop. The chair of the local Foster Care Review
Board did something almost unheard-of – she contacted the judge on behalf of
Henderson. And Henderson even had the
support of her children’s foster parents.
But
the state pressed on, determined to place the children, forever, with adoptive
parents they apparently just liked better – and, of course, the placement would
help them collect up to $24,000 in federal bounties offered under the so-called
Adoption and Safe Families Act. A
caseworker who spoke up for Henderson was fired, and the foster parents lost
their license.
The
case for Henderson was so strong that the judge did something unusual – he
didn’t rubber-stamp the state’s request.
He refused to terminate parental rights.
But
what may have been saddest of all is that even a mother brave enough and strong
enough to fight an entire state bureaucracy to save her family had been
persuaded by that same bureaucracy that the original removal of her children
was justified. She said so at the
hearing. After all, she was abusing
alcohol and prescription drugs, and somehow, according to an earlier Herald-Leader
story (available from the paper’s paid
archive) “the children had ingested trace amounts of a prescription
anti-anxiety medication, according to court records.”
So
thoroughly had she been beaten down by the demands of the system that she
“confess” and “repent” that she did not ask why the state did not offer drug
treatment and Intensive Family Preservation Services, a combination with a
better track record for safety than foster care – and a combination which would
have spared her very young children the trauma of needless foster care. She did not wonder if, had they been
parents, Rep. Patrick Kennedy and Rush Limbaugh would have had child protective
services at the door, ready to take those children away - -and keep them away
forever – when their substance abuse problems became public.
“When finally you surrender to us, it must
be of your own free will.”
Say this much for the people at ABC News – the ones I’ve
been criticizing for much of this month:
Unlike most of the rest of what I’ll call “Big Media” – the huge,
national news organizations like The New York Times, and some other
broadcast news organizations, at least they’re willing to listen.
Just over a week ago, I made my second request to ABC
News executives for a meeting. I said I
wanted to include in such a meeting members of the Child Welfare Organizing Project, an excellent
grassroots group in New York City, so they could hear the stories of birth
parents who not only deserved to get their children back (as these birth
parents did) but never should have had their children taken in the first place.
The answer surprised me.
I’d
expected to be turned down. It’s one
thing to ask to meet with an editorial board with which you have no grievance
or introduce yourself to the new reporter on the child welfare beat. Aside from some journalists at some of the
largest news organizations, almost all are willing to at least take time to
listen to a wide range of points of view.
But
it’s different when trying to meet with executives on the news side when you
have a complaint, particularly when one approaches Big Media. Big Media usually hates to meet with
advocates. We usually are dismissed and
disdained as “pressure groups.” They
hate even more to meet with advocates who are critical of their stories. And they especially hate to meet with
such advocates when they’re from very small groups that have no leverage other
than the force of their arguments.
This incident, recounted in a 2004 story in Columbia
Journalism Review is pretty typical:
…a group of doctors and scientists was … lobbying The New York Times to drop terms like “crack baby” from its pages. The group included the
majority of American researchers investigating the effects of prenatal cocaine
exposure or drug addiction. They were spurred to action by the paper’s coverage of a New Jersey couple found
to be starving their four foster children in late 2003. For years the couple
had explained the children’s stunted growth to neighbors and
friends by saying, among other things, that they were “crack babies.” The Times not only failed to inform readers that
crack babies don’t exist, but reinforced the myth by reporting, without
attribution, that “the youngest [of the children] was born a crack baby.”
Assistant
Managing Editor Allan Siegal refused to meet with the researchers, saying via
e-mail that the paper simply couldn’t open a dialogue with all the “advocacy groups who wish to influence
terminology.” After some haggling, he did agree to publish a short letter
to the editor from the researchers. …
But ABC was different.
The senior producer of the Primetime program, a field producer,
and the network’s Director of News Practices welcomed CWOP’s Executive Director,
the chair of CWOP’s Board, two other parent advocates and myself and discussed
child welfare with us for well over 90 minutes. They listened carefully as the parents told their personal
stories, and they asked good questions.
We even discussed terminology.
I don’t know how any of this will affect future programs,
if at all. A meeting is not an end in itself.
But it’s a beginning.
THE CASEWORKER SHORTAGE –
IT’S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT!
The Seattle Times
picked up an award yesterday for a story following one case, while the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer picked up an award for a story following one
caseworker. But apparently, in all of
Seattle, there is only one worker to follow:
Baby M was 2 days old when Mary Marrs, a veteran CPS investigator,
showed up. “Do you know why I am here?” she asked Liz and Mike.
--Seattle
Times, December 8, 2005
"Why do you think I'm here?" Marrs asked the young mother,
beginning the same way she always does.
--Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, April 28, 2005
June 14, 2006
TIME OFF FOR BAD
BEHAVIOR?
In
Monday’s Blog, I quoted the “National Model Worker,” the Kentucky caseworker
ABC News followed around for its Primetime program about foster
care. At one point she says: "I hear crazy rumors out there like we get
bonuses for removing kids….”
As it happens, NBC News
also was in Kentucky recently, following up on some excellent reporting by the
Lexington Herald-Leader. The
newspaper disclosed pressure on caseworkers to remove children from their homes
needlessly and rush them to adoption, in order for the state to collect the
bounties offered by the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act.
And in this story, NBC reports that in
Kentucky, workers don’t get extra cash, but they can get extra time off. According to the story, “ States can earn federal bonuses for keeping
adoption numbers high, and in Kentucky workers can even get extra vacation”
[emphasis added].
Good thing somebody’s
checking those “crazy rumors.”
In one of his excellent mystery novels, Chinese émigré
writer Qiu Xiaolong tells us that in China, under Mao Zedong, the People’s
Daily sometimes would run stories about “National Model Workers,” designed
to inspire the masses. One also can
find such stories in the United States.
In fact, they’re a staple of child welfare reporting. You’ve almost certainly seen them. They’re the
day/week/month/year-in-the-life-of-a-caseworker stories. Sometimes, they are touted as an inside look
at the system. And sometimes, reporters
break the usual boundaries of the genre and achieve something close to
that. But often, they are a whitewash.
That’s not necessarily the fault of the journalists who
write them. No child welfare agency
lets reporters choose the worker at random.
They’re almost always, well, National Model Workers -- the ones
portrayed as having boundless enthusiasm, astonishing dedication, unusual savvy
and far more experience than the typical CPS caseworker, who only lasts a year
or two.
Such
was the case when Primetime did the National Model Worker story as part
of its report about foster care on June 1.
One actually saw very little of the NMW on the air. The follow-her-around segment was bumped to
a webcast and there also was a print story on the ABC News website.
The
story begins with a basic factual error, one of several in the program. It refers to all CPS workers as “social
workers.” The NMW is, in fact, a social
worker. But that’s actually
unusual. Typically, a bachelor’s degree
in anything and a quickie training course is the extent of the
qualifications. Thus, the impression
ABC News seeks to leave, that removal decisions are made carefully, by trained
professionals, often is incorrect.
A
staple of almost every National Model Worker story is a complaint like this
from the caseworker:
"If we remove we acted too quickly, and if we don't
remove and something bad happens, we did not pay enough attention."
That’s
a claim I addressed in this Blog on April 17:
“Caseworkers for child protection agencies are not
jack-booted thugs who relish destroying families. By and large they are dedicated and caring. But they’re often underprepared,
undertrained and overwhelmed. But I
lose sympathy for caseworkers when they complain that they’re subject to
terrible criticism and sanction if they take away too few children – or too
many. Countless news stories have accepted
at face value the claim by caseworkers that “you’re damned if you do and damned
if you don’t.”
“I have been following child welfare
for 30 years now, first as a reporter, more recently as an advocate. In all
that time, in child welfare agencies all over the country, I have never seen a
caseworker fired, demoted, suspended or even slapped on the wrist for taking
away too many children. All of these things have happened to workers who left
even one child in a dangerous home … caseworkers know full well
that when it comes to taking away children you’re not damned if you do and
damned if you don’t – you’re only damned if you don’t.”
Primetime’s
National Model Worker continues:
"I hear crazy rumors out there like we get bonuses
for removing kids. Removing kids is the saddest part of the job. We are
underpaid and overworked, but we do what is best for the children under our
watch."
No, workers don’t get bonuses for
removing kids. But states get bounties
for every finalized adoption over a baseline number, an issue that has arisen
in connection with adoption tragedies in Michigan and Ohio.
I’m sure the National Model Worker’s sadness about
removing children is genuine. But she
also said this:
"I believe that children have the right to an
education, to medical needs, mental-health needs and permanency,"
So far, so good. But she continues:
"And if that can't happen in the home with their
natural parents for one reason or another, if a parent is not providing those
needs, then the children need to be removed."
Regardless, it seems, of whether the parent is at fault. That is a brief
for the confiscation of the children of the poor. If that’s now the model
workers feel, what about the rest?
The NMW is heard making this comment after taking children from parents
whose children were, according to Diane Sawyer “not being sent to
school and left dangerously unsupervised.” That’s it, aside from the claim that child protective services had been “monitoring this family for years.” Perhaps things would be different had they
tried helping the family – not with a
cookie-cutter “service plan” full of meaningless “counseling” and “parent education” but with concrete help geared to what the family actually needed.
But now that they’ve been taken
away, Sawyer tells us that “the children are
frightened, but safe.” Frightened?
Definitely. Safe? Maybe – given the rate of abuse in foster care, no one can be sure.
But the National Model Worker was the personification of restraint compared
to Diane Sawyer. She accompanies our
NMW to check up on a single mother, who like many impoverished single mothers,
sometimes gets overwhelmed and yells at her child. The camera is there for what Maine foster parent Mary Callahan
would call the “gotcha” moment, when the
child imitates her mother yelling at her.
That child is not removed – yet. But there is no indication that this mother
is getting anything but the usual “counseling” and “parent education” – nothing to actually ease the burdens overwhelming her. So what happenes after they “work” with her for years?
Back in the NMW’s car, the
multi-millionaire anchorwoman who probably hasn’t had to cope with
a mundane chore of day to day living – much less the
stresses of poverty – in decades asks
the NMW: “What keeps you from wanting to take
some of these parents and just shake them and say: What’s the matter with you?… these are your
kids! Come on!”
This prompted the following response from Charles Baker, the retired CEO of
the Presbyterian Child Welfare Agency in Kentucky:
“Instead of
"shaking her," shouldn't we be shaking Congress for failure to raise
the minimum wage? Or for any commitment to provide adequate hosing or health care
for all US children? Shouldn't we be shaking the media for not interviewing a
single expert for any alternative to child rescue?”
Later this week: Primetime saves the worst for last.
June 6, 2006
Friday’s
blog offered an overview of the failings of ABC News’ Primetime report
on foster care. Today, the start of a
look at the program segment-by-segment.
Much
of the program is devoted to a staple of mediocre journalism: The puff piece
about a “residential treatment center” in this case Maryhurst in Louisville,
Ky. And Maryhurst knew it would be a
puff piece. Days before the program
aired, the institution was promoting it, complete with a picture of CEO Judy Lambeth posing with Diane Sawyer.
Like many other Residential Treatment Centers (RTCs), Maryhurst has
lovely grounds and a slick p.r. operation.
RTCs know how to sell themselves.
They know how to explain how things like not being able to so much as
open the refrigerator to get a snack without permission actually is part of the
“therapeutic milieu” and is simply the “structure” that the children need. Actually, it’s needed to keep the
institution running when you take a bunch of troubled children at an age when
they are most influenced by peers and put them all in one place. (As I noted yesterday, I expect Maryhurst to
claim that having an 11-year-old’s face on camera as she told about being
sexually abused, and abusing others, was “therapeutic” for her).
They
always have a couple of anecdotes about success ready – well, maybe one. But the anecdotes don’t match the data. Residential treatment is among the biggest
failures in child welfare.
· A U.S. Surgeon General's report found only "weak
evidence" of residential treatment’s effectiveness.
· Another study found that within six years, 75 percent of the
children released from the centers were back to living in the only places they
understood - institutions - either mental health facilities or jails.
· A comprehensive review of the
literature by the University of North Carolina School of Social Work found that
"when community-based services are available, they provide outcomes that
are equivalent, at least [to RTCs]."
· Even the head of the trade association for child
welfare agencies nationwide, the Child Welfare League of America, admitted that
they lack “good research” showing the effectiveness of residential treatment
and “we find it hard to demonstrate success…”
How does Primetime deal
with this? By ignoring the facts in favor of pretty pictures and syrupy
music. Maryhurst doesn’t even claim
success - -except for one former resident who now works there on the
staff. In other words, even the one
success story could be comfortable as an adult only at the institution. (An almost identical puff piece on another
institution, on Now with Bill Moyers a couple of years ago, also could
show only one success story, also someone who came back to work at the
institution. As a result, that
institution’s innovative new CEO is trying to reduce institutionalization. Now would find a very different story
if they went back).
Primetime
avoids confronting all this failure by saying, in effect: What do you
expect? The kids are so troubled. In a comment that is astounding for its
arrogance, CEO Lambeth declares that "If we're not successful, no one can be.
These are the children that nobody else can handle.”
Wrong.
There are better
alternatives that have shown more success with exactly the same kinds of
children.
In 2002, the Journal-News in Westchester County, N.Y.
looked at Wraparound, pioneered in Milwaukee, as part of a comprehensive
examination of residential treatment.
They found that “[Wraparound] cut
the number of Milwaukee children in RTCs by 90 percent, dramatically shortened
their stays, reunited hundreds of families, reduced the incidence of crime and
saved millions of dollars in treatment costs. It became a national model for
treating emotionally disturbed children, offering a more effective and
economical means of helping youngsters without the traditional reliance on
costly and controversial institutions. …”
Of
course, the institutions didn’t shrink without a fight.
“I
remember meeting with groups of people and folks saying, 'Let's get some
reports out that show they [Wraparound] are going to start hurting kids now,'
" the head of a large institution told The Journal News. "Well, nobody could ever bring the
reports to the meetings, 'cause there were none that existed that said we were doing
anything all that great. We didn't really have any solid anything that
demonstrated we were able to fix kids. … I think, looking back on it now, what
we’re doing for kids today [with Wraparound] is far more helpful.” The full story is available here.
And sometimes, institutions have crises of conscience.
After studying their own program and finding it didn’t work, EMQ Child and
Family Services of California closed 100 of its 130 institutional beds. Now they serve more children at less cost in
their own homes or foster homes.
According to this story
in the authoritative trade journal Youth Today, EMQ’s biggest obstacle
was “the group home industry” which tried to stop the state from funding EMQ’s
alternative approach.
Youth
Villages in Tennessee also embraced community-based care after finding that
residential treatment failed – and their biggest problem also was getting the
state to fund it, even though it costs less.
Says Youth Villages’ visionary director, Patrick Lawler: “In the 28 years I have been entrusted with
caring for other people's children, some of whom come from dire circumstances,
I have learned firsthand there is no substitute for a child's birth family. I
used to think we could do a better job of raising these children. We know
better now. The best way to help a child is to help his or her family.”
And that includes adoptive families. Primetime is a mass of internal
contradictions and one of them is seen here.
Even as the program pushes adoption-as-panacea, it chronicles an
adoption that is failing; the adoptive parents are returning their adopted
child, -- the 11-year-old seen on camera -- and shipping her off to
Maryhurst. For this child, the “forever
family” – wasn’t. Perhaps things
wouldn’t have come to that were Wraparound services available. But as long as RTCs like Maryhurst bleed
systems of so much of their limited funds, there won’t be alternatives.
Of
course ignoring community-based alternatives in favor of residential treatment
has another advantage: A residential treatment center is a great source of
horror stories about the relatively few birth parents who really are brutally
abusive and really should have their children taken away.
But
intriguingly, even one of the cases highlighted by Primetime involves a family
that might have been saved, the family of a girl who desperately misses her
mother. This child’s mother did not beat
her or torture her or starve her. She
may have neglected her because she used marijuana and cocaine. We see the child visit her mother in jail,
and we hear Diane Sawyer’s contempt as she makes clear the child is naïve to
chink that mom won’t let her down once again.
But
what if, early on, her mother had been offered family-based drug treatment, at
a place where parents can live with their children? Such places have excellent
track records. What if Maryhurst had been such a place, instead of an institution
that scarfs up $186 per child per day for a program that can’t show success?
As it happens, Louisville is
home to two safe, successful alternatives to substitute care: Community
Partnerships for Child Protection and Family to Family (a project of the Annie
E. Casey Foundation which helps to fund NCCPR). We predicted that Primetime would ignore these
programs. We were wrong. Elements of one of them were mentioned for
all of one minute and 40 seconds, barely noticeable between the endless parade
of horror stories about the brutes and the sadists. There also was a brief mention of the programs on the ABC News
website. It misconstrued how they work
and what they’re about.
These
programs involve working with families, not demonizing them or patronizing
them. These programs recognize how
often “neglect” is really poverty. But
that’s not the Primetime worldview. So
instead of demonstrated success, Primetime
lavishes attention on a proven failure:
residential treatment.
Later this week: The “National Model Worker” story.
June 5, 2006
I’d planned to devote this blog entry to discussing in
detail the failings in one part of Thursday night’s Primetime program
about foster care, the part extolling residential treatment. But that can wait until tomorrow. There’s more that needs to be said about the
program’s most egregious failing: exploiting an 11-year-old-child.
The child poured out her secrets about being sexually
abused, and about abusing younger children, on camera, her face visible
throughout and her real (and unusual, so therefore memorable) first name used.
As I noted on Friday, there was no one in this child’s
life with the moral right to give informed consent. Her adoptive parents were in the process of
abandoning her to the residential treatment center, and the RTC had a vested
interest – getting a puff piece from ABC.
And ABC is likely to cite that permission to justify its
exploitation. The network also may cite
an outpouring of sympathy for the child, including people coming forward to say
they want to adopt her. But there are
plenty of effective recruitment techniques that don’t require a child to
describe on camera how she abused other children, with her face visible the
entire time. (One poster to a message
board on the ABC News website, whose comments leave the impression that s/he is
a foster parent, already has warned people away from adopting her,
describing her as both a “ a victim AND a predator” [emphasis in original].)
Incredibly, two national child welfare organizations put
out press releases associating themselves with this program – after it
aired. One is the Pew Commission on
Foster Care, one of those OBRCs (Obligatory Blue-Ribbon Commissions) that often
pop up in child welfare. This one is
different, though: While its recommendations rate a C, it’s marketing is
A+. They never miss an opportunity to
get their name out there. While the
Commission did not explicitly endorse the program, it did seek to use the
program to gain publicity for itself, when it should have condemned the program
for its exploitation of a child.
The second press release, from the Congressional
Coalition for Adoption Institute, was worse.
It actually said that ABC News should be “commended” for its
efforts. Perhaps CCAI feels that as
long as a television program shares the organization’s adoption-at-all-costs
mentality, the ends justify the means.
But there is another possible explanation. The press releases came out within minutes
of each other, via US Newswire, with the same contact person for each. So perhaps the problem is simply one flack
with very poor judgment.
NCCPR has e-mailed both organizations urging them to
dissociate themselves with the program, and condemn ABC’s exercise in child
exploitation.
June 2, 2006
If nothing else, it’s convenient. Just about everything wrong with how
journalists typically cover child welfare, in about 48 minutes. I’m speaking of the special edition of the
ABC News magazine Primetime which aired last night concerning foster
care. That program, and related material on the ABC News website, are filled
with misleading data, horror stories, grievous sins of omission and plain
factual error. Each segment of the
program is an archetype, regurgitating conventional wisdom. And they topped it off with the shameful
exploitation of a young child.
And that makes the program dangerous to children. It’s the kind of journalism which, when
repeated over and over, encourages foster-care panics. And over and over again, foster care
panics not only drive children needlessly into the very system ABC News rightly
condemns, they also have been followed by more child abuse deaths.
Indeed, the extent of the harm of this kind of journalism
can be seen in a poll ABC News commissioned.
Among
the questions: “In the case of a child
who has been removed from home because of abuse or neglect, which of these do
you think should be the main goal of the foster care system –to send the child
back to live with his or her parents once the parents have gone through
counseling or rehab, or to permanently place the child with another family?”
Scarier
than the way the question itself stigmatizes families (any parent who loses a
child must need ‘counseling or rehab’) was the answer: Fully 44 percent said
the goal – for each and every child – should be to tear him from his parents
forever and place him with another family.
Think of what that says about people’s assumptions concerning who loses
children to foster care and why. For
this huge proportion of the population, the notion that a child could be in
foster care for any reason other than heinous maltreatment is, literally,
unthinkable.
Where
are they getting that impression?
The program, and related material on the ABC News website
also are filled with internal contradictions.
On the website, a “letter form Diane Sawyer” declares that it is time to
stop “lurching from horror story to horror story.” Too bad she began the same letter with two horror stories about
children brutally abused or horribly neglected by birth parents. And the program itself offered a litany of
such horrors, taking a tiny fraction of what child protective workers see, and
treating it as the norm.
This isn’t a case of journalists trying to
sensationalize, and score ratings points.
It’s worse. The producer of this
program is sincere, and that makes it even harder to get him to consider other
perspectives. We spoke a few years ago,
and he’s on NCCPR’s list of journalists – the one that gets a child welfare
news story once or twice a week. He
believes passionately in the cause of helping children through journalism. But he also believes the conventional
wisdom: that the system used to bend over backwards to coddle abusive parents
and the primary solution is adoption. And he’s flat wrong.
The problem isn’t that what he believes is wrong. The problem is that on this program and
others he’s produced, he allows no dissenting point of view to be heard.
Viewers probably will be able to find real solutions
on ABC – briefly, tonight. A segment of
World News Tonight scheduled to air this evening (June 2) deals with the
reformed system in Pittsburgh, which has dramatically improved child safety by
emphasizing safe proven programs to keep families together. But apparently real solutions are not ready
for Primetime.
Given the producer’s track record, the result was
predictable. As a matter of fact, NCCPR
predicted it in a long e-mail to Kerry Marash, the Vice President for Editorial
Quality at ABC News. It was sent on May
30. The letter predicted what the
program would include and what it would leave out. We got it about 90 percent right. To date we have received no response. But what would have been the worst segment of the program, about
a child taken from loving foster parents only to be returned to the aunt and
uncle now accused of killing her, was deleted.
Whether this was in response to us or to the fact that ABC’s live
coverage of the National Spelling Bee ran long, and Primetime was
truncated to end at 11, I don’t know.
Yes, helping to keep families together gets token
attention. And no, birth parents aren’t
all portrayed as evil. Some of them are
simply sick.
Thus, it may be o.k. to reunite a family – but
only if the parent has repented, seen the error of her ways, accepted all the
“counseling” and “parent education” the system has to offer and so been
appropriately “rehabilitated.” Anchor Diane Sawyer repeatedly presented the
issue in terms of how many “chances” a parent should be “given.” In Primetime’s
world there is no such thing as a parent who loses her child when it’s not her
fault – when poverty is confused with neglect.
There is no such thing as an innocent parent. There is no such thing as wrongful removal.
Even a good story on Nightline, about the problems
faced by children “aging out” of the system, was tainted by this bias. The program focused on an 18-year-old who’d
been placed in foster care at age 14 because, according to reporter Cynthia
McFadden, “his mother drank.” Nothing
more. By the end of the segment the
evidence is overwhelming that helping the mother with her drinking problem would
have been far better for this young man.
But reporter McFadden strives mightily to disabuse us of the notion,
explaining that the child was taken because: “His father left long ago. His mother drank. But like most kids in foster care, he still defends her”
[emphasis added].
In other words: Pay no attention to the children; they
don’t understand how sick and/or evil their parents are – isn’t it sad that
they delude themselves so. And that’s
because anything else would contradict ABC News’ message, which is that the
only solutions are: Become a foster parent, hire a lot more caseworkers,
warehouse children in residential treatment, and adoption, adoption,
adoption. Diane Sawyer’s repeated calls
upon viewers to get involved always revolve around adoption or other actions to
support the children in isolation.
There is, so far, not a word about getting involved by helping birth
families. This is exactly what we’ve
tried to do for generations, most fanatically for the past ten years, thereby
creating the mess we’re in now. To the
journalists at Primetime, that, apparently, is irrelevant.
But perhaps worst of all was what Primetime did to
a child.
I
am a strong proponent of openness in child welfare; I believe in open courts
and open records and I believe agencies should not only be allowed to discuss individual
cases, in many situations it should be required – because I think it’s the only
way to hold these systems accountable.
In fact, just last week, I made the case to an official in a child
welfare system that such accountability is so important that it is in the best
interests of children even when it might embarrass a child.
But that kind of openness does not require what ABC did.
The longest single segment of the program focused on an
11-year-old girl. It included a
discussion of both the sexual abuse she endured and the fact that she now was
inappropriately touching younger children – indeed she spoke of it
herself. Cameras also were rolling at
the moment she found out her adoptive parents were, in fact, abandoning her to
a residential treatment center, and she’d never go home to them again.
Through it all, ABC used this child’s real first name, a
name that is unusual and, therefore, memorable. And her face was on camera throughout.
There is no way an 11-year-old can give informed consent
to something like this. And whatever
the law says, there was no one in this child’s life with the moral authority
to give such consent. There were only
adoptive parents about to give up on her, and a residential treatment center
selling the public on what a wonderful place it is.
There was no issue of accountability here. On the contrary, were this child alleging
abuse by the treatment center, you can bet they’d be screaming
“confidentiality” and not letting journalists anywhere near her.
And ABC could have gotten a story with just as much
impact while changing the child’s name – and 90 percent of the impact while
obscuring her face.
This same producer was similarly exploitative of a birth
parent in an earlier Primetime program.