Child-Centered Advocacy with Roxanna Asgarian

- True story, media. - Hello, it's Andrea.

“And today, I'm sharing my unabashed conversation”

with journalist Roxana Osgarian,

who has featured in Season 7. I highly recommend Roxana's book about the heart case, which we're gonna discuss in this episode. It's called "We Were Once A Family"

and you can find it wherever you find books. I really appreciate it Roxana's spending time with us to talk about her work. It gave me so much to think about. It reminded that if you have any thoughts to share,

you can do so by sending this in email to [email protected]. And if you want even more for us, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to get two extra episodes a month.

That is a great way to support what we're doing over here in Nobody Should Believe Me. As is, just tuning in each week, we appreciate you. We'll be right back with my conversation with Roxana Osgarian.

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Shoppapoteek.com/goodbye. OK, Roxanna, we could start with. If you could just tell us who you are and what you do. So I'm Roxanna Asgerian. I am an independent journalist who is focused on the child welfare

and criminal legal systems. I've written for a bunch of outlets. And I am the author of a book called We Were Once a Family. Wonderful. So now I know you originally through your book.

We were once a family, which was recommended to me by a number of listeners.

“And it has really, really stuck with me, because I think it just, I think there's almost”

no story that brings together so many of the different issues that we talk about on the show and sort of puts a, I don't even want to say a different perspective, but maybe just a different lens on them and really, it's this perfect story to talk about for us. You know, we've talked about, we obviously talk about child abuse. We've also talked about transracial adoption on the show because of our season five case.

And so there's just so many things in here, you know, we, we are talking to abolitionists. So there's so many things in here that is just rich territory for us. So I wonder if you could just start with for folks that don't know this story. Can you tell us a little about the story that you covered in We Were Once a Family? Sure. So in 2018, in March 2018, a family was found at the bottom of a cliff in California.

It was two white women and there are six adopted black children. And it became clear pretty quickly that it wasn't an accident. And so that was a really big story. It made national headlines. And I got involved in it just a couple weeks afterwards because I was living in Houston, Texas.

And I got a breaking news assignment to find one of the birth families who lived there. So the kids were two sibling groups of three. So they came from two different families. So I did this breaking news assignment. It was for the daily paper in Portland or again, where the family had lived for a while.

And I just immediately realized that there was a much deeper story and that it wasn't being told. So I was following the coverage and it was very focused on the two women and their psychological motivations. And it was taking at face value a lot of things that they had said about the kids and their family histories. And so I spent the next five years delving into and finding members of the kids

birth families and trying to understand where did the kids come from and how did the system influence what ended up happening to them? Yeah. And something that you had said in an interview about this was that you felt like the way that the crime was covered with the focus on the moms was a way of really continuing the exploitation

in particular. Now obviously, again, I sort of have this different entry point where I have

“a sibling who is a perpetrator of this abuse. And so it's not to say that I haven't been”

focused on the childhood victims. But it was, you know, did begin as this exploration of the why, right, why someone would commit a crime like this. And that is often an intense focus of much hasn't by proxy cases because there is so much focus on, oh, this mental illness element and the longer time that I've spent with it, the more that I have realized that really impedes progress and is inhibiting us from coming up with ways to actually help children in this abuse.

Because we get so fixated in why I mean, I could give you so many examples of how this is used

in our case that we covered last season where she was caught committing this really horrific abuse

against one of her younger children. And then one of her children ended up dying. We believe as a result of his abuse, so horrible case where the kids were eventually given back. And there was a huge fixation on this being, oh, a mental break and sort of giving her all of this and taking many things that she said at face value. So lots of correlaries there. But, you know, this season we're talking about these stories that are very focused on the parental experience, right, where

people are saying and much of what they're saying is being taken by journalists at face value without a lot of examination. And so can you talk about how you saw that functioning in the media

“coverage about the heart family and how you saw the kids getting lost? Yeah, for sure. And I think”

in the case of the heart family, it was particularly egregious because Jen, one of the moms, was a big on social media and was posting very publicly about her beautiful, you know, multiracial family and very kind of detail descriptions of what they had experienced. And a lot of this did not have any evidence, at least in any of the case files that I was able to see, which was a good number of them from prior to their adoption. And so it struck me, you know,

that was actually part of the narrative, right? The narrative is she painted this picture of a perfect family and behind closed doors. She was abusing them. But for me, when I saw that and then saw like literally no interest or curiosity about where the kids came from before they were adopted,

“it made me realize that they were actually taking some at least of what she said at face value”

about how the kids must have been mistreated in their family homes. And it turned out that none of the kids were removed for abuse. They were all removed for neglect and there was various complicated situations in their family homes. But many of the kids had adults in their families that weren't their parents that really wanted to raise them. You know, earlier you mentioned that the story kind of brings together a lot of elements about the child welfare system that are

problematic. And I felt that way too. And I had been reporting on the child welfare system in this piecemeal way. And when I got started on reporting this as like this kind of hits so many of the problems. And it seemed like a perfect way really to delve into all of this stuff in a way that people could kind of hold in one story. Because it is the system is huge. It's, you know, 400,000 kids. There's lots of varied situations. It's a lot of nuance. And so this story just struck me

as like a very clear case of how the bias in how we report on these things kind of white washes really, what's happening in the system on the ground level. Yeah. And it's a hard thing sometimes with telling individual stories. Because no story is going to be a monolith. And you can sort of see these various issues showing up in different stories, right? Like we've covered a story where a child was adopted by family members. And that was an adoption story that was a wonderful story. And

then we have, you know, this other story where we have an adoptive mom who was abusive. And it was very similar to the heart story. She was a white evangelical. She was telling this story about adopting these children from Zambia. And, you know, this, them coming out of this horrible situation that, you know, nobody could confirm. And it was just, so it's you sort of have all of these

things. And it's, you can't really say, oh, like adoptions good or adoptions bad or it's always

the wrong thing to take the kids away or it's never the wrong thing to take the kids away. And I think

lessons? What can we learn from this? What does this mean? You know, a policy standpoint. And obviously

now our job is journalist isn't always to make those connections. But I really just, I wanted to

say to you that I really appreciate the extent to which I see you wrestling with these huge questions about how to handle these systems. And I wonder if you could tell us just a little bit about there was a story, you know, part of the story that you tell in the book about the mother of three of the heart siblings. Is a story about someone who is ultimately

“had her children removed for reasons of medical neglect. And what that means in this context is I think”

something very different than what most people would think of when they think of a child that's medically neglected. So can you tell us just a little bit about her? Sure. So Tammy had three kids

Marcus, Hannah, and Abigail. And the kids were ultimately removed. You know, she had been on the

radar of CPS ever since Hannah had gotten bitten by a lot of ants at her birthday party and developed staff infection. And ever since that point CPS was sort of like she had a case worker since that point in time. And Tammy was low income and she had several mental health issues and she also had a documented history as a child in a psychiatric facility, a state run facility. And so I think all those things definitely factored in to the way that she was treated with her kids in the

system. So ultimately what led to their removal was one of them was really sick and had a high fever. And Tammy would rely a lot on her parents for babysitting, and stuff like that. And her oldest son

was not yet home from school. And she was trying to figure out how basically to get her youngest

child to the hospital because she was really severely ill. She didn't have a car and her parents were out of town. So their car wasn't around or available. And she was told that she couldn't ride with her other children in the ambulance, right, because really only one family member gets to ride. But she couldn't leave her children home alone. And so she was kind of stuck and she called her caseworker for help. And her caseworker came and picked all the kids up and took them to the hospital.

But when she arrived at the hospital, they had basically already filed paperwork and handed her

“papers for removal of her kids. And honestly, there's a race element here and that's like a major”

piece of the story in the book is the black families retreated very, very differently than the white adoptive parents who were actually convicted of abusing their kids and were allowed to keep their kids. And not just that, but were allowed to adopt more children. And so it's like an example because it's right, you can compare what happened to the birth families to what happened with the adoptive parents. It's very easy to see if you put their story side by side that there's a huge difference

in how they retreated. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I absolutely see the elements that race play in this and socioeconomic status and all of that. And I think like, and we'll talk about the parents' rights element in a moment. Because I've sort of seen, you know, I have this, I really need to get like a giant whiteboard and just start building myself a venn diagram. But I see a lot of I do think there are a lot of people that are engaged with this debate that have genuinely

a lot of care for children and what happens to children and have different ideas about how to implement that and that we can sort of allow for there being quite a lot of good intentions in this conversation. And then some not so good intentions, which I'll, we know what you'll talk about.

“But I think like I see that there are people who have these pretty opposing ideas about how to”

handle it. But where I see what they're saying is backed up by data and what they're, you know, what they're arguing is is obviously like very intellectually honest and and there's a genuine care for children at the center of it. I think most people understand that foster care while they're obviously, you know, many loving foster parents that do it for the right reasons, et cetera. There are high rates of abuse in foster families and especially, you know, in institutional care,

which also plays into the story of the heart siblings and their older brother. And so one of the policy ideas that has been implemented to try and fix this is the adoption and say families act. And the idea behind that is obviously to limit the time that that children spend in limbo, you know, while their parents are sort of going through the system. And now, of course,

And I think in the stories, I think of are those are abuse situations. And that's not to say, I guess, we should, we should make some room that like there are parents probably within the neglect cases that there is no intervention that could help them be capable of raising children.

“There, there are going to be those parents. But I think like there are probably interventions that”

could wipe out a lot of those cases from the system. I think that that's sort of been my, my impression. But I want to talk about this adoption and say families act as an intervention. And can you kind of, obviously, this is a case where there was a move to adoption that went very wrong. So can you kind of talk about that as an intervention and how it might not be the solution that it was intended to be?

For sure. So the adoption and say families act basically limits the amount of time that a kid

can have an open case and which essentially you have like the clock starts ticking when a kid is removed and you have a certain amount of time before if you aren't unable to reunify the parents rights get terminated. So the reason being you cannot get adopted if your parents have their parental rights, right? Cause you already have them, right? You already have parents. So the termination of parental rights is necessary to open kids up for adoption. So the idea, like you said, it's well

intention and it's saying we don't want kids to languish in care. We don't want them to cycle through multiple placements which we know harms kids, the more placements they experience, the more likely they

are to have busting trauma, attachment issues, that kind of thing. But ultimately what the adoption

and say family's act does is that it financially incentivizes adoption and it does not provide the same financial support for parents. So we do know that some of these much of this stuff does have to do with poverty, right? So for instance, if you go into foster care and you get placed with a family, that family gets a certain amount of money every month to look after you. The birth families don't have that option. So if we think about just at the front door, right? If we try that,

if we try that, because we actually have extensive research that kids do best in their homes. And if not in their homes at their parents, then in homes with their kin. So either their grandparents, their aunt uncle, somebody that they already know and have a lasting relationship with. Because it is hard to make new relationships, especially new parental new family relationships with people and a quick turnaround, right? And there's all these weird bureaucratic reasons that actually

make it hard for foster parents who want to bond with their kids, to be able to bond with them,

“providers change. You need to have a certain number of rooms and they're very specific about the”

like requirements of the home that you live in, right? That kind of thing. The other piece is that you get an adoption subsidy, both the people who adopt, right? Like so the heart women were receiving subsidies for each of the kids up until their murders. Okay? So Texas, state of Texas, where all the kids came from, was paying these monthly payments, which was not nothing. There were a lot of money without checking on the kids when there was an allegation of abuse that resulted

in Sarah Hart pleading guilty to domestic abuse of the kids. That didn't trigger Texas's involvement. It didn't trigger, you know, there was a CPS investigation in Minnesota where they were living at the

time, but the kids were allowed to stay. And that was before the second set of siblings adoption

“had gone through. But again, they got the money. They got the money for a decade, right?”

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that nobody knew what the heart siblings were enduring because they did. And in, was that part of a

state by state thing? Because they were, you know, the children were adopted out of one state and

they were living in one state for a while and they moved to another state, which again is an element

“that, like, we have seen play out over multiple cases of very common. And I think, although there”

wasn't, you know, any evidence of specifically, like, medical child abuse in this case, I think it can sort of be understood along many of the same lines, right? Because you had that very exploitative piece of, they were using them as sort of objects on their social media and, like, it's a sort of portray, this idea of this, you know, sort of perfect post-racial family. And there was the famous picture of Devante hugging a police officer. And so I think it shares,

it shares a lot of DNA with those cases. And so the sort of, like, moving around to a Vita accountability seems like it was a piece of this. For sure. And also, I would say that the medical piece, these kids were severely malnourished and underfed. So there were six siblings, five of them because, again, they did have CPS investigations in, in every place that they had lived. So they had an investigation in Minnesota. They moved to Oregon. They were investigated in Oregon.

And right before the murder suicide, they had moved across the border to Washington and Washington had opened a CPS investigation. But, you know, in Oregon, when the doctors saw them, right, to check them for signs of abuse, five out of six of the kids were so small that they weren't even on the growth charts for their ages. So the doctors said, well, we don't know what they're biological situation is. So maybe they're just very small. It's like, these kids aren't all

biologically related, right, because they came from two different sibling groups. So the fact that five out of six of them were so small, really should have, wrong alarm bells, really, really should have. Like Hannah was so small that she was a teenager that looked like she was an eight-year-old. And

she had lost her two-front teeth, which were her adult teeth in a supposed accident that she never

got her teeth again, right? They should never fix that problem. So she had her two-front teeth missing and when was so small that it would, like, people would never guess that she was a teenager at the time of her murder. Yeah, and that, you know, all of those things sound very familiar for many of our cases. And we've spoken to two survivors or two siblings and then another, you know, and then we

“covered another case where it was this adopted case that I mentioned. And I think it's really”

interesting to me how actually adoption creates this, again, not in most cases, but in a case where you have an abuser, the adoptive parent, a sort of unique, opportunistic moment where they can say, "Oh, well, the child was exposed to drugs when they were in utero." And so they're having all these problems. And that explains why they're having these behavioral problems that are a result of abuse or in a case of much hasn't by proxy are being fabricated by the parent and sort of used.

And I think, like, it's, I love these tactics are really the same. It's about control. It's about getting what you want from the child rather than what's good for the child. It's about objectifying the child. It's about exploitation. It's this long-term pattern.

“And I think their, their again is is so much shared here. And it's really like, I think it's”

interesting in this case in particular sort of the who gets the benefit of the doubt as a parent and who gets the hammer down the minute that they make a mistake. And I think that disparity is pretty easy to see in this case. Yes, for sure. And I think that, you know, when the Oregon case

worker reached out to the Minnesota case worker. So that means that the Oregon folks actually knew

that there had been another investigation. And the case workers were going back and forth and it's

“in the case notes and they're saying problem is these women look normal. That's a quote, right?”

And it says, and they're able to explain away a lot of the suspicious things by pointing to the kids trauma histories. And, you know, it makes me think about how people who are able to, to use that language, right? Like, so if you think about the birth families and how they were treated, especially in the courts, where they weren't like fully aware of what the rules were, right? And their legal representation was not very good, right? And so, you know, I sat in on court

hearings with the birth family in like sort of the second generation of the case with their older brother

and his kit. And it was just very clear that they didn't understand what was going on and that the lawyer wasn't explaining it in a way they could understand and I found myself being kind of an interpreter of like, okay, here's the way that this works in court, right? And that really matters because if you make a misstep and it can be a little misstep, right? Because we're talking about you have this service plan and you need, if you don't check every single box of it, then that gives cause to

not reunify, right? And so if you don't understand the laws, then you don't understand what your rights are. And then you look on the other side where if you have the language of trauma, if you have the language of, and then you also have bias on your side, right? Because we do have this idea of especially in translational adoption, right? Which is usually black kids or kids from other countries in white homes, there isn't inherent power difference there. And these kids are teenagers and

they were making out cries of abuse and people weren't listening to them. And these ladies saying, oh, well, they have trauma histories, well, you know, of course they do. And everyone, you know, including those parents, those adoptive parents, they knew that, right? Kids in foster care have trauma histories. Yes, any kid, any kid who is in foster care is going to have a trauma history. Like there's no situation where you end up with a child removal that's not traumatic,

right? No, even if they're just born really, because it's an attachment thing, right? And we know that about moms and babies, right? We have that research there, too. And it doesn't mean, look, a lot of people have trauma histories and they go on to be healthy, happy people, right? I do,

“right? And that's something that I think is used against kids in foster care a lot as if they're”

damaged and not okay and not trustworthy and not believable. And then you look to the person who is clearly, I mean, the warning signs were such in this case. And you know, when the Oregon and Minnesota case workers were talking, they were actually like, this is such. Like they were not, they were like, something is wrong here. They clocked it, but it wasn't enough for removal, which is, again, illegal proceeding in a court. Yeah. And I mean, again, a huge mirror with so many

of our cases where you look at it. And it's like, someone to everyone knew. So there was something

wrong and nothing happened. And I wanted to get into the race element for a moment. And I always

kind of want to say to everyone listening, you know, in particular, my fellow white folks, everybody take a deep breath. We're not saying that it's an individual problem of, you know,

“like you listener being racist. I'm kind of kidding, but I do, I think people get very”

defensive when that element comes up, right? And to me, it's helpful to sort of look at, you know, and talking to Alan was so helpful in reading his book is so helpful. It's a sort of think about, you know, rather than like making racist elements like an individual problem of individual social workers or like people in the, you know, or like white parents who adopt black children or bad. Like obviously, that's not true. I think it's more thinking about like,

how do our histories bear down on us in this moment? How do the, how does the media that we consume bear down on us in these moments? And I think like Alan does a, especially deaf job of sort of tracing all of these things. And some of them from, from my lifetime, right, of the 90s, sort of crack baby academic and, um, or media storylines. And, you know, welfare queens and these ideas that we have that are very baked in and are operating upon all of us, whether we, you know,

recognize it or not. And so I think there is this element of like sort of who is a good and capable parent. And who is a desirable child? You know, I'm reading from, again, where I see all

the adoption, say family's act. But they were saying that there is this sort of hierarchy amongst kids that are put up for adoption of like, if you have a brand new, you know, white newborn, that that's the sort of more desirable adoptee than a traumatized black five-year-old. And sort of that that bleeds into this assumption that anybody who takes on raising, you know, a traumatized child that's a little bit older, we're just going to, especially if that's a white parent,

we're going to give them this sort of endless benefit of the death of Europe. Yeah. And we really saw that play out in the Sophie Hartman case because there was just this idea that like, you know, and she wrote this memoir about her time as a missionary in Zambia that just painted this picture of Zambia that was like not in line with reality as was most things that she said. But, you know, it was clearly sort of setting up this dynamic of like, I rescued these children from hell. And so

now no one can question me in any of my parenting choices. And so I think like that seems to have

“really played a role in this case. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's important to note that”

we definitely have this idea of a hierarchy of what's desirable as far as adoption. I will say that all six of those kids were desired and wanted by the family members who were in court fighting to get custody of them, right? And that's a piece that is the kinship

placements, again, which is like the second best option. It's actually federally recognized that you

need to try to place kids with family members before strangers. And, you know, these kinship families are against people, the court system that is biased, really it is. And it's very easy to see, right? Like with the first birth family that I spoke with, they had an aunt who had a good job in a hospital and she wanted all the kids to be together. Ultimately, what ended up happening there was that she had to go to work and her adult daughter who was usually the babysitter in these cases wasn't there,

it wasn't available and she called their birth mom to watch them for the afternoon, which was she wouldn't work. And the case worker stopped by an announced and removed the kids

on the spot and they were never reunited with any of their family members again. And she said,

I didn't realize that this was like an absolute never can I do it, right? She's like, it wasn't overnight, it wasn't at her house, it wasn't my house, she came over to watch them and it seemed like she wanted to, right? Like the mom obviously wants to see her kids. It wasn't again, like the mom had a drug problem at this time, essentially that was the main issue with her, but she still

“wanted to be a mom, she still wanted to see her kids. That was the sole like one chance, right?”

And that like one and done, we had an actually rock ten, I'll give you a perfect contrast to that. My sister, who is white upper mill class, it was investigated twice the second time. There's a

place investigation, she ended up with her kids back both times. During the second investigation,

so again, second investigation, second child for this form of abuse, she's been reported by like four different hospitals. I mean, like a lot that should have been working against her. The children were placed with her and was who broke all the rules about what they were supposed to do. They allowed her to be at the house up to 13 hours a day, they allowed her to be alone with the children, they allowed her feed the children, change their diapers, etc. All things she was not supposed to do,

she was not supposed to have any unsupervised contact with them. They admitted they'd done that, and they told the police that they thought the investigation was a witch hunt. And when the court was petitioned to change that placement, they didn't. So it's like you contrast those two stories, and the difference is pretty clear. Yeah, yeah, it was. This was someone who there was very strong evidence posed a lethal threat to her children. This was not an neglect case, and I'm not saying

that we shouldn't take neglect seriously and do, you know, have interventions to get children not of a situation where they're in danger because of neglect, however much more sympathetic that that may be. But I mean, it's just, it's such a contrast that I absolutely see it where you sort of get, like who gets a second chance, who gets the benefit of the doubt, who are we making assumptions

“about? And I think that seems to extend to family members, as well as the parents themselves.”

Definitely, definitely. And, you know, even, again, with the financial incentive, right? Like, that's another element of it because, at least in Texas, the kinship payments are not that they're less, right? You get less money than stranger or foster care payments. And there's

men, you also talk about how then also biological parents, if they are on a track where they're sort of trying to keep their kids, that they're going to have a bunch more financial barriers. Can you talk about, like, not only are they not receiving financial help, they're having additional financial barriers thrown in their way? Yes, yeah, they're given a whole list, right? This service, and again, in Texas, every state is different, right? A little bit here and there. And

Texas, I think, is kind of egregiously bad, because when a kid is first removed,

concurrently with the reunification, like, so the idea is, and you, this is federally mandated that

“you have to allow parents to try to reunify with their kids, but they also file for termination,”

right then, just right then on removal. So just in case, any missteps happen, they can just hop on to that track right away. And again, the idea is, we don't want kids to language, but what do you say to those parents first of all? It's a big threat. It's a threat, right? It's a sort of damn ugly. And also the states get money for the adoptions, right? The states get money. So that's another piece. Like, there is no reunification award, financial award for how many parents get

to reunify with their kids. And that's the big problem with Asfa, is that it is weighted, and again,

I think well-intentioned, but with a basis of what families are preferable. Well, and I think, like, for my perspective, it's like, it's bringing a lot of judgments. And we're talking about in a glove cases and we'll talk about abuse in a minute because it is different. It's bringing a lot of judgment into something that to my mind should be much more of a resource allocation conversation. It's like, if we have $50,000 say to like, allocate for this child to be better-taking care of,

could we try? I don't know, giving that $50,000, so like, if the parent is having, you know, especially some of these cases where we're not talking about there's extra complications of mental

health issues or drug addiction or why have you, which we are all obviously very judgmental about,

“like, as a whole, that I think should be handled more compassionally, but just sort of taking that out.”

It's like, if we gave that parent money so that they could have better housing, so that they could have child care. I mean, child care is a crippling expense for parents. You know, like, it's so expensive. I think people who are non-parents maybe have no idea that, you know, that it's like, it rivals or outpices the cost of housing for a lot of people. And so, you know, if you don't have family members that you can rely on or obviously even family members, they're going to have

limited availability. That's not a solution for the most part. Like, if you could give that same amount of money to those people, so that they're not struggling with food insecurity, so that they're not making, being forced to make unsafe decisions, so that they do have access to proper health care and transportation and all of those things. It's not a matter of, can we spend more money?

“It's like, can we just reallocate that? Yeah. And I think it's because of this judgment that we have,”

you know, we have this America's this deeply individualistic place where we sort of see so many things in the framework of individual choices. And we're like, that parent's making bad choices. So if we give them more money, they'll just make bad choices with that money. I mean, do you, is that, is that where how you sort of see it playing out ideologically? I do think so. And I think that in this country, we blame people for being poor when, and you know, and a lot of

standards, you just gotta get those boots, you know, those mythological boots, yeah. And a lot of people who are not poor really have no awareness of what poverty is really like in this country. And I think that through reporting on this book and, and, you know, as well as this other reporting about child welfare, I have seen, you know, because I'm not, I didn't grow up in poverty. I'm middle class. Honestly, it was kind of horrifying for me to see up close to witness long-term

the struggle that having no money actually just compounds and makes things way more expensive, right? Because now you have interest. You've got a credit card and you can't pay that bill. And then, you know, your rent is due. And in order to pay the rent, you can't pay your light bill. And and then you get evicted. And then when you get evicted, you can't find another place to rent, because no one wants to rent for you or if you do, so you're in substandard housing.

This is a snowball that many people who live in poverty grew up in poverty, right? So it's not like, oh, you've made bad choices and landed yourself here. It's like, you were born in this. You haven't seen your way out. The idea is like, oh, you just have to be

really for most people insurmountable obstacles to just living a normal life.

Yeah, and I think I always think about that if you watch the TV adaptation of little fires everywhere.

So the reason why there's been character says to the Kerry Washington character, she's like, I have what I have because I made made good choices. And then Kerry Washington character says, no, you had good choices. And I just thought that's like such a sort of perfect encapsulation. It really strikes me looking at like CPS, and we'll talk about sort of again in the abuse thing in a minute. But it's sort of dysfunctional, entirely at both things, right? So it's not functioning

to protect kids from abuse. And it's also not functioning to help families out of situations where they're struggling. And the interventions and it's not because individual social workers

“don't care. I think most social workers care about kids a lot. I think that's why they get into it.”

And the options available to them are parenting classes. And these other things that are not

an adequate or necessarily helpful. You know, they may they may help some parents with some things. But like they're also another thing that a parent has to drive. Another great barrier obligation. Yeah. Right. There are obligations. Right. And it's a long list, right? So it often is drug testing. Even if drugs were not an issue in the removal, right? They'll give you people say call it like the kitchen sink. So you're just doing all of the things that they offer. And in

theory, these are the supports, right? But they in practice are not supports. They're actually like punitive measures, right? Because again, if you don't hit every single one of those marks and say your drug tests has to be from one of three places. And they're all across town for you. And you don't have a car. And also you're trying to keep a job. And sometimes like in these parenting classes, if you're 10 minutes, minutes late, you're absent. So you get across town. You get there.

The door is locked on you. And you can't do it. But it's like these people are taking the bus. And buses don't run like exactly on time. So it's the idea is like, oh, we're giving you these this chance. But really what it is is like, we are giving you a series of hurdles to jump through when you're already struggling. And if you weren't struggling, you wouldn't be on the radar of

CPS in the first place. And then when you don't hit everything perfectly, we're going to talk at

“you in the courtroom because parents don't have the chance to really speak for themselves, right?”

And kind of talk to you like your, you know, teacher who's mad at you, right? Yeah, come to the present office energy. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really frustrating for most parents who, I mean, look, I'm a parent. I wouldn't love being talked to you in that way. You know, I'm not a perfect parent. If you gave me 12, a list of 12 things that I had to go across town to do and pay for. And, you know, exactly on time, how would I do with that? I don't know.

So we want to talk about this other group. And I really appreciate it in one of the articles that you sent me. You hit the nail right on the head, which is that you've said that some of this abolitionist and reformist language is being adopted by people who are parents' rights advocates, who are really not in the same mindset about prioritizing the well-being of children to my mind. They probably wouldn't agree with that. But and I have seen this so much. And in fact,

what was so interesting about, you know, and as I said, a number of people recommended your book to me, which I, which I loved by the way, I just think it's like a beautiful, I just think it's like a masterpiece

“of of a book. But, you know, somebody had said, there was this impression. I think, you know,”

early in my reporting, something that I heard a lot was like, oh, you're not recognizing all of the harms that CPS causes. And I was like, well, I don't know why anyone thinks I'm out here to defend this system because, you know, I don't know, if you know anything about my backstory, but CPS completely failed my niece and nephew. And they ratted my mom out immediately. And so they completely like blew my family up and then didn't do anything to protect my niece and nephew. So it's not like

I'm a fan. It's like, I'm out here saying like, yes, they're doing a great job. And again, that wasn't necessarily because of the individual caseworkers or whatever, but just because the

talk about a lot on the show, much as a by proxy. And as I'm getting deeper into it, I'm like, yeah, I'm not sure it's doing a great job of protecting kids from any form of abuse. As I've unpacked these cases, these are stories of predominantly white parents. There's a couple of black families

“featured and we'll I will say like a bunch of my proxy abuse is not race specific. I think the”

parents are treated differently as in any other case in America, but like there are black perpetrators. We have talked about black perpetrators on the show, but like predominantly these stories are about white parents who have their children removed because they were hospitalized with abusive

injuries. And then in many cases, they ultimately got the kids back. And they use simply the fact that

their children were returned or that there was not a criminal conviction, they use that as evidence in and of itself that this was a false allegation by doctors. And the one does not equal the other by a mile. And so I have seen this exact thing that you were sort of talking about in Texas, of this is being embraced by people whose priority is parents' rights and in this sort of very absolute form, right? Where what they want is a world where there is no intervention that

happens in a parent's parenting of their children regardless of what that parent does to the child. There's all kinds of things that can keep these cases from ending with a criminal conviction, and it doesn't mean none of that means the abuse didn't happen. And so I wonder if we can sort of unpack and give people a framework for how to understand from your perspective that narrative of parents sort of using because it sounds like you have also observed this of parents saying,

"Oh, right, right, right, all these problems that someone like Roxana or Alan is pointing out about the system, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's me too when you're talking about a parent, not who was robed in because of neglect or poverty, you know, Jason reasons, but is someone who has caused, you know, in these cases we're talking about abusive head trauma, so like, you know, where their

“child has had to get brain surgery because of abusive injuries." Yeah, I think there's a lot to this”

question, right, I think this sort of fundamentally the difference between sort of the abolitionist perspective and the parents' rights perspective is the idea of agency, like a child having agency. That can be, I mean, just that the words, a child having agency, a parent's rights perspective would be, no, I get to say, I own my kids, right, and we know from they're trying to repeal like no fault divorce, okay, so like in history, a man owned his wife and his children, right, the legal element

was what is the coverage, right, like that once you're married, your husband is then the legal representative of the house, right, and like then children followed me too, and that was, yeah, and I think, you know, children have even less rights than women and marriages in this idea, in this traditional sense, because children have fewer legal rights, like they just do. Children don't have robust legal rights as it stands. No, yeah, they do have some, but they don't have the decision-making power for their

own lives, right, so the work I've done about child sexual abuse has centered around survivors who have essentially had their autonomy in their agency violated. Sexual abuse is a really intimate and intense type of violence and harm, and for a child who is for whom that's

not developmentally appropriate in the first place to have sexual interactions, it is fundamentally

it's an incredibly deep kind of developmental trauma that can result in a host mental health issues, you know, it's a very, very serious thing, and so when we're trying to help, because isn't about the point, right, we're trying to help kids who have been hurt, and I would say just to back

“up a little bit is that I think abuse is really common, child abuse is really common, so just”

because what the stats are saying about the cases in the child welfare system, the cases in the child welfare system, and the instances of child abuse, those are not the same thing, and I would argue many kids have had instances of abuse in neglect in their personal histories, right, and I have,

right, and that's kind of what brought me to the work. I was never on the radar of any legal system,

nor what I have wanted to be, to be totally frank with you. I think I kind of got out of it

kids don't have is a community of people who cared about me, I had save adults in my life outside of my family home, you know, some of the abuse that I experienced was outside the home, right, so that was

a kind of a byproduct of neglect because nobody was paying that much attention to me, but ultimately,

having this personal experience has helped me understand when I'm interviewing people who have been harmed in this way. We talk about trauma informed reporting, right, and that's basically being sensitive to the needs of the person who's experienced trauma as the priority over your story,

“over your questions, and so they're their agency, right, that's what it means. It means”

understanding this person who's had their right to bodily autonomy violated, they need to have agency over their story, over their nervous system, right, like if you if they're going, if you're pushing too hard and you're re-traumatizing somebody, that's on you, and I think it when we're talking

about abolition, we're talking about ways to increase agency for children, and that does not mean

children should be alone out there making decisions, right, that kids should be making developmentally inappropriate calls for their for their well-being, right, but it means we have to listen to them. We have to think of them as whole human beings. We have to recognize that what they're dealing with, especially kids who've been harmed, are dealing with stuff where they are the most impacted person. And so when we're putting this in the context of parents' rights, that's not,

it's just like completely, I would say, in antithesis, right, like to say, I own my kid, the way I parent is my right, I have the right parent, and there's another piece which is the new ones of this,

“which is that parents do have rights, right, parents have legal rights, and that is important.”

Those actual legal protections for parents are important for the, all those people, all those neglect cases, all those people in poverty who are fighting the system, they have to know that they have legal rights as parents. Just as, like, say, you're accused of a crime, right, we have the right to remain silent, we have a right to an attorney, like, these are things that we all know because we talk about them openly, and we don't talk about the actual legal rights of parents in that

way. Now, that makes things really confusing though, right? Because I'm like, yes, I do believe parents have rights. I mean, it is, that's the other thing that's weird. It is in a constitution, like, the state constitution, and it's federally protected, you know, that parents have the rights to parent their children. And we're talking about Jen, her using the language of trauma to essentially continually traumatize her adopted kids. These folks are using the language, the sort of

abolitionist framing for a purpose that is unsafe. Kids should not be completely isolated, just generally. That's the first thing, right? Like, so, and it a lot of, this has the origins in the, in the homeschooling movement, right? Like, I should be able to homeschool my kid, okay? And there's, there's obviously nuance to that whole conversation, but ultimately, in the case of the heart family, they were homeschooled, i.e. they did not see any adults,

besides their adoptive parents, and less explicitly sanctioned by their adoptive parents,

which means they never saw adults outside of family occasions. We were their adoptive moms were right

there. Yeah, and the homeschooling piece, it is such an, and it's been a strong element in the cases that we've covered, and a lot of montage by proxy abuse, medical child abuse is sort of the more of the, like, legal framing of that, that form of abuse, which is usually focused on, sort of, physical harms that come to a child, but a lot of that abuse spills over into the educational realm, and that's where we see it showing up in, I really, every case I've covered,

is, you know, especially if there's some heat on a mom because of some of the more dramatic surgeries or what have you, they'll say their child has learning disabilities or autism spectrum disorder, or, you know, this, that, and the other thing, and they need all these extra accommodations, and they need an IEP, and they're pulling them out of school all the time, and they're just preventing their child from having a normal experience that would be healthy and connected to their peers

“and connected to other safe adults. And I think even school, as a mitigation strategy, is massive”

for abuse cases, right, because we've talked to someone, and again, like, I love when you talk about in this TNR piece about we have to listen to, like, give children, whatever sort of age

you have wanted? What was the intervention that you've wanted? You're, you're telling me that you

would not want, have wanted state intervention. You think you were better off, like, that's meaningful, and we should listen to that, and it's going to be, to some degree, individual situations,

“but I think, like, listening, listening to the person, listening to the person, we've had so many”

survivors that have told us that there was, like, even if the interventions weren't successful in that they got them out of their abuser's house, just having an adult that was a safe person, just having that relationship, having, you know, and it sounds like that was true for you as well, right? Like, having those connections with the community, having a respite, right? Just like, having, like, okay, the school day is a period of time every day where I'm not under this intense

fear of physical abuse or dealing with this, like, age-shelts situation, even if it just means

that that child gets a break. And I think actually, like, the abolitionist conversation in the parents' rights, even though there might be some individual reforms that they both support, as you talked about, you know, like, randomizing, you know, parents' and Texas, and that kind of thing,

“there's almost no common ground, whereas I think, like, someone that supports FAFSA and those kind of”

things, you probably actually have a lot more common ground with than a parent's rights person, because of the element of community. Can you talk a little bit about how, with an abolitionist conversation, how, in contrast to something like, a parent's rights conversation, which is just saying, hands-off, doctors shouldn't have the right to intervene. Teachers shouldn't have the right to intervene. The state shouldn't have the right to intervene. This is my business. Can you sort of talk about

that difference is about what solutions we're talking about, potentially, here to this problem? Yeah, you know, we talk a lot about sort of survivor-focused interventions, but I think, I think, sometimes, like, we can start using words that start to lose the deeper meanings, right? When we talk about, like, survivor-focused. So, you know, it's easy to just say, I'm survivor-focused, who isn't? Ideally, you want a kid to actually, I don't think everyone is. I mean,

“I think that's where the parent's rights conversation stands out to me. I don't actually think”

that the parent's rights management has the welfare of children at its heart. I think it sees children in a very different context. So, I, well, I appreciate what you're saying, because I think that's an easy piece of language to layer on to any intervention. I actually think that that is something that needs to be identified and sort of called out, because there is a lot of disagreement, and I think there are a lot of people that have different ideas about how to solve these problems

that really genuinely do have the well-being of children and supportive survivors at the center. There are pieces of this conversation that absolutely do not. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I also would say, though, that there is a sort of paternalistic care for children that involves sort of like, I know what's best for you. You know what's going to do? I don't have children at the heart, right? Even if they really do have to say, it's a potent political football for sure.

Yeah. And I think that the parent's rights mentality is, I wouldn't call that well-intentioned, right? I wouldn't call it that. But I also think that some well-intentioned people who want more intervention without kind of recognizing the specific needs of what a kid might want, or what their ultimate healing might look like, because what happens to you in your childhood stays with you for your entire life. And we know this, because we're all talking, I mean,

body keeps the score is number one for the sixth year in a row, or whatever. Like, so we're all dealing with the impacts of our own childhoods. I think it is actually pretty radical to say, like, listen to kids, and hear them, listen to them, and hear them as people. Because this savior idea, we have created a system that makes it easier for people who have a sort of savior complex where need to be self-aggrandized through another human being. You could call it

narcissistic tendency. You could call it all sorts of different things. But the idea is that you're using a kid as a tool for your own self-image. The system makes it so easy for us to do that, and that deserves some scrutiny. Why is it so easy? And I think our culture and society very often don't see children as full human beings. And again, I'm not saying do whatever no rules, your whole, you know, whatever. But it's saying like, really treating children and their humanity

as equal to yours. I'm a human being, and you're a human being. And you are the human being

who actually, whose needs are most important in this moment. Because we have this idea, we say that,

but then we do this punishment thing where it's very clear that we're more focused. So like,

whether in the child welfare system, or in the criminal system, or often in both, right? Like

two tracks that they're going down. Those two systems are completely outside the control of not just the kid, but they're parent and any of their advocates. It starts a whole thing that is not in the control of the kid. And this kid has had, again, they're very self-violated. So not listening, you know, whether that's not believing them, or just not listening to me say, like, I'm not ready to start this

“process. Or I need, like, you know, instead of asking them, like, hey, what, what do you need to”

feel safe, right? Because we know being safe, right? You might need to remove them. You might need to remove the person who did the harm depending on how they're situated. But asking them, what would you need to feel safe? Sometimes that's a different question. What I need to feel safe is, to be acknowledged, I need people to stop talking about me when I'm right there. I don't want to have to go give my statement for a time to the police. Whatever. These are things that are,

and they're all valid, right? And for me, an abolitionist framework isn't saying there is never

in need for serious intervention that could include punishment, right? Like, I think it's reworking where we put punishment into the context of harm, because as we know, a lot of harm doers are survivors, right? This is we're in an intergenerational cycle. And like I said, I think a lot,

“a lot of people have experienced abuses, that's children, of some type. And I think it's about being,”

it's about recognizing that instead of assuming that it's this kind of thing that happens to other people that we pity those people, right? Because a child also knows when you're pitying them, and they don't need that pity. Yeah, like you're, you're writing about child sex abuse and, and writing about, you know, it really was like, it was very moving. And, you know, one of the things you were talking about was this, a gal who was her, herself a survivor that was doing non-profit

work to help survivors. And one of the things you talked about that's so resonated with me is this idea that like, this is not something that our criminal justice system is a depth at dealing with, that you have this, you know, 2% conviction rate, like many interpersonal crimes. I mean, like sexual assault of adults same thing, right? The conviction rates are not in any universe reflective of the incident rate. And that really hit me because one of the things that I've become so concerned

about with these work like my kicks and bogs and take care of Maya and Diane here in, you know, and and and and where they're elevating the stories of the parents and they're giving them a microphone to say, I was the victim. I was falsely accused. And these are people who have had the abuse confirmed by CPS, where the abusive injuries were diagnosed by very skilled doctor, no reason actually to believe these people were falsely accused of anything. And I think like,

yes, you don't have to prove your innocence in court. But if you are going to the media and claiming

“you were falsely accused, then I think that that is a story that you need to prove. And I think the”

media should be really diligent and really careful about elevating that story, not because we shouldn't be talking about the systemic issues and and everything else. But there's a lot of danger there and not least of all, to the children of those people in abusive head trauma cases in particular, those are often babies under the age of two, maybe they're like five or six by the time those media stories are coming out. But those children have no voice. And the person actually in that

setup that is sort of representing their voice is often the doctor. And when I've talked to child abuse pediatricians, which is such a difficult job, not particularly full of glory and praise or well-paid or anything. And I want to get your opinion on sort of the child abuse pediatricians in this in this whole part of the system, because obviously we've talked a lot about sort of CPS and social workers. The way that many of them have described you know using various sort of in various ways,

how they see their job is to be an advocate for children because they're evaluating abusive cases and there's already a concern for abuse if they're evaluating the child, right? So there's

a fair amount of cases that are screened out that never get to them. And then in less than half

of the cases, they're making a determination of abuse. But you know, when they make a determination of abuse, they really see them themselves. I think as and a lot of them have described their role to me as like somebody has to tell the medical story, you know, the story of the medical evidence layout, what happened to this child because otherwise it will be a mystery because this child can't

the story of the parent. And then demonizing the person who is probably telling a truth about what

happened to this child and completely erasing the child themselves. And so I just sort of see this as a sort of worst case scenario about how we could talk about child abuse in the media.

“Yeah, I think that cases of all these really young children are super challenging across the board”

because like for their attorneys, like there's a lot of people who have to speak for young children because they actually cannot and are not able to speak for themselves. I also think that one major thing like is the power dynamics involved. The, you know, I know that Texas, I think did this

pass a lot about having second opinions, right? And I think in one way that can be really a good

thing for everyone involved because it's saying because like you said, it's a hard job. There's a lot of jobs involving children and in the child welfare system are very, the stakes are very high. You were talking earlier about how case workers are usually people who really care about kids, right?

“I think the entire industry, right? Child welfare industry, all the people who do jobs related”

to child welfare, it's super easy to get jaded to get burnt out. And I mean, I mean, it's almost like impossible not to get burnt out when you're looking at abuse all day every day. I mean, I got burnt out. Right? I mean, yeah, I experienced well, you start, you know, and you start seeing, you start seeing things in a really negative way. So I think it's helpful. The more people we can get involved in cases to give you that backstop, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think maybe just to end with this

question of like, yeah, to people that say the abolition, I get it, it's a great idea, but like, it feels too far off to even conceptualize that world's given where we're at right now. Like, can you kind of give us a reframe to getting out of that sort of stuck place of just like, yeah, I'd love, I'd love to live there too, but like that's not that's not where any of this is going.

“So what's the point, and even dreaming about such a world? Yeah, I think it's important to hold”

an idea for about it for things to be better. I do think that's important. I think that's a main component of the burnout, right? Is that it, it's hard to look around. It's hard to be in this, in this milieu and not get overcome with despair. So there's that. I do believe there's a place where hope. But I also think that the abolitionist framework is about reconceptualizing what keeps kids safe. It's not about waiting for the, you know, the land at the end of the rainbow,

whatever. It's it's about how do we, how do we challenge the things that are for sure not working, and how do we rethink things in a way that centers the kids and centers the family, right? And centers this, not just the safety, not just the physical safety, but the emotional well-being

of children. And so it's, it's a now thing. It's like, and it's basically a way of looking

at the world that helps you make decisions, right, in the, in the current moment. And it helps you be involved as, as a, as a, as a human too, because if you're treating, if you're in your community, if you're, if you're, not just working with kids, but if you know kids, if your kids friends are, you know, like, you are the community to the kids around you. And so having that framework and that ethos and that, like, respect for kids is actually the thing that really will help.

Like, that is the measurable help that we can do as just every day people. Nobody should believe me is produced and hosted by me, Andrea Dumlop. Our editor is Greta Stromquist and our senior producer is Mariah Gosson and administrative support from Nola Karmuch.