The problem with child welfare journalism

....hard cases do make bad law

Like the poor journalist I am, I’m going to bury the lede here.

Over 2.6 million children live with relatives in “kinship care,” often informally but also under state custody or supervision. Children who can’t safely be at home but who have a nearby relative with whom they have a bond can stay with family and maintain their friendships, their activities, their close connections, and often their school setting.

For many years, agencies have used “safety plans” to keep children with relatives and out of foster care while the agency worked with the parents to make the home safe for the child. Agency staff would get an “agreement” from the parent that the child would stay with a relative during a child protective services investigation. Problems with the implementation of safety plans included parents being coerced into signing them; allegations that child welfare agencies were improperly closing cases after the child went to live with the relative; and a lack of due process. Those problems have resulted in litigation in a number of jurisdictions. As State Child Advocate in Georgia, I used to get many calls from folks who found themselves caring for a relative’s child through a safety plan with no follow-up from the agency.

Increasingly, however, states have put guardrails on the use of safety plans, ensuring they are voluntary and time-limited. Most jurisdictions require that, if the parental issues are not resolved within a reasonable time, the agency must take the case to court. There are also significant efforts going on around the country to provide parents with “pre-petition” legal advocacy — a legal professional who can advise them on such issues as whether to sign a safety plan.

With the advent of the Family First Prevention Services Act, it’s likely there will be more efforts to keep children out of formal state custody and with relatives they know. That law allows us to use federal funds to support families and children outside of foster care. More and more, jurisdictions are adopting “voluntary kinship” programs that surround the extended family with services while the agency works to address problems within the parental home. Voluntary kinship programs can be combined with court oversight to ensure both the child’s safety and legal protections for the parent.

There are also programs that ensure children remain with kin when they must be removed by the court. One of the best is in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where DHS partners with “A Second Chance” to keep children safe with family. Whenever there’s the possibility that a child may be removed, Dr. Sharon McDaniel and her team assign a kinship navigator to work with the parent to identify possible kinship caregivers. They vet those family members, ensure they have the services and support they need, and continue to work with the caregiver while the case remains open with the agency and court. Since 1994, Dr. McDaniel’s organization has served over 35,000 children, and 96% of the kinship caregivers they have worked with have become licensed placements.

So here’s the buried lede: Despite all this good work and progress on kinship care, one widely-distributed but poorly-sourced article in a national publication can bring it all down. As the old adage goes, “hard cases make bad law.”

I’ve written previously about how media coverage of tragic (and rare) outcomes can drive policy and legal changes that significantly affect our child welfare system. Although child deaths from abuse and neglect are rare, for example, media coverage of them has a significant effect on state policy that itself can have terrible unintended consequences: e.g., Florida.

Writing about complex child welfare issues is made more difficult by the fact that the daily work of agencies, courts, attorneys, and providers is often shrouded in confidentiality laws. The public and the media have little idea of how the system works except in those outlandish cases that are so severe they enter the public spotlight.

Enter into this discussion the New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, whose recent piece on “Shadow Foster Care” throws unwarranted shade on what should be a commendable practice of keeping families together and out of the foster care system whenever possible. The publication took an extreme, criminal case and used it to paint the entire system of kinship care with a tarred brush.

The article revolves almost completely around criminal practices in Cherokee County, North Carolina, a rural area in the western part of the state. In North Carolina, each county’s child welfare agency is a fiefdom, and none more so that Cherokee, where the child welfare agency director was married to the Sheriff.

To avoid dealing with “difficult” families, Cherokee County agency leadership and their attorney began schlepping children off on relatives, and sometimes on people who didn’t even know the children, via an extrajudicial “visitation and custody agreement.” You can read all about the history of this mess via some good journalism done by Carolina Public Press, collected here. The Times/ProPublica piece focuses on several children and youth who were caught up in this particular scheme.

The Times article uses the example of these children to condemn the entire kinship movement. Left to the lower depths of the article are some critical points that essentially destroy its narrative that voluntary kinship is always a bad thing. First, what these officials did was illegal, the officials involved were indicted, and the county director was recently convicted. Second, the Cherokee practice violated North Carolina DHS rules. The article acknowledges in its latter paragraphs that “under North Carolina policy, the department couldn’t close a case without going to court if a child was still living with another caregiver in a safety plan.”

The folks I talk to tell me there are still places like Cherokee County where the agency foists children off on relatives with no due process for the parent and closes the case, leaving everyone in limbo. But to tell that part of the story without telling the progress we’ve made in kinship care serves no one well.

Many years ago, I invited a young journalist into my juvenile court to cover what we did there, with the understanding she wouldn’t use names or take identifying photos. The result was, in my opinion, journalism that fairly explained the complexities of the child protection and juvenile court system. As child welfare professionals, we need to do more to explain to the media what we do, why we do it, and how it helps. Otherwise, we’ll end up with more stories like this one — one-sided, skewed, and liable to influence policymakers to kill our ability to fulfill the child’s right to be in his or her own community, with family, supported, and not constrained by state custody.