Working to help America's vulnerable children by changing public policy concerning child abuse, foster care, and family preservation
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Suppose, hypothetically, you’re a New Mexico journalist, or lawmaker, or other prominent public figure and someone decided to file a false, malicious child abuse report accusing you of the most vile crimes against children. So now, it’s happening to you, and the caseworker is at your door.
Private foster care agencies in California and elsewhere have been trying to get near-total immunity from lawsuits by survivors of abuse in homes or institutions they oversee – or at least a taxpayer bailout for their insurance costs. Here’s an example of who could be shut out.
At no point, it seems, has anyone in power asked the obvious question: Why are so many children so desperate to leave these places?
The task force opted for doing the hard work and finding real solutions that can make all of the county’s children safer. They've created a blueprint for child safety.
Break the cycle, confront Minnesota’s ugly history of needless family separation, and the system can be rebuilt to the point where the state won’t hesitate to shut down institutions and we can treat such closings for what they really are: cause for celebration.
In media, the incident is being treated largely as some kind of bizarre outlier and a sign of the increasing ugliness and polarization of our politics. That’s largely how Buttigieg himself framed it. But perhaps the most important lesson in all of this is that it is not an outlier. Not by a longshot.
The evidence is overwhelming that, for all sorts of reasons, some of those children the governor and her allies claim to have saved will die prematurely. Others will suffer other grievous harm. It will happen because they were taken needlessly.
Perhaps the most important contribution the New Yorker story makes, and what makes it so relevant everywhere, is the way it brings home the inherent trauma of removal, trauma that lasts long after the children are back home.
A scheme to create what amounts to a second, hidden foster care system in New York, without even the bare minimum due process protections in the formal system, has been shut down by the state’s highest court.
In the wake of two high-profile child abuse deaths, the Vice President of the County Board of Supervisors, Sylvia Arenas, and the San Jose Mercury News, in particular, reporter Julia Prodis Sulek, rushed to falsely scapegoat efforts to keep families together. Now, we can calculate the price.
