Rethinking Child Welfare with Alan Dettlaff

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

“This week, we're sharing my extended conversation”

about child welfare and abolitionism with Professor and Hawthor Allendette left. Just as I said with my conversation that we aired last week with Elizabeth Bartholette, there is so much here that I am still thinking about.

The reality is that there are no simple solutions

when it comes to what to do about child abuse neglect. And even defining what falls into those categories is extraordinarily complex. I know for my work on this show that there are many abuse cases

that are never counted because the perpetrators are never held accountable. And as we covered last season, there are many abuse cases that end up being pledged down to neglect charges and criminal court.

It's definitely a morass and I'm so grateful to have an audience who can metabolize these tough nuanced conversations. You all had a lot of thoughts about my interview with Elizabeth Bartholette last week

and I know you will probably have equally as many thoughts about my conversation with Alan. So please share them.

“I love hearing your perspectives on all of this.”

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It's going to be a big one folks and in addition to our weekly episodes we're working on a couple of mini-series about cases and stories that you've been requesting. And if you're a subscriber,

you're going to get all of those at once to binge just like the big seasons. If you've got feedback to share, you can always hit us up at [email protected]. Listen, I know I hit these promos early and often,

but that is because nobody should believe me is 100% listener support it. So thank you for being here with us each week. We'll be right back with my conversation with Alan Dellf. - Well, hello Alan.

Thank you so much for being here with us. I read your book with so much interest and I am really happy to be able to have this conversation and I just really appreciate of you being here. So thank you.

You could start off with just telling us in your own words who you are and what you do. - Absolutely.

First, thank you for the invitation.

I'm really happy to be here. My name's Alan Dellf. I'm a professor and a co-founder of the Upin Movement and the author of a book called "Confronting the Racist Legacy

of the American Child Welfare System," the case for abolition. - Yeah, so if we can just launch right into talking about your book, which I just read and made so many notes notes in,

you make a really compelling case in your book and in your work that the current child welfare system that we have in America is really on a continuum with forced family separations that happened during slavery, on up through Jim Crow

and the sort of crack baby academic and all of these sort of various kind of iterations of racism and racist policies that happened over the decades. And so I wonder if obviously this is a complex history

but I wonder if you could sort of connect some of those dots for us about how we get from this practice, this incredibly brutal practice of separating parents and children during child slavery

to where we are today. - Yeah, it is a complex history, but I'll try to summarize it.

“I think first it's important to start on case people don't know”

what racial disproportionality is or what's called racial disproportionality in the child welfare system. And that refers to the overrepresentation of black children in the system

which has existed since the system, the modern system began in the 1960s. So since the system began, black children have been severely overrepresented in foster care,

meaning the proportion of black children in foster care is much larger than their proportion in the general population. And that's been true since the child welfare system began. I think the connection points are,

we tend to look at the era of child slavery and think about the family separations that occurred during slavery with children being sold away from their parents, black parents sold away from their children.

And we think about that as an isolated, horrific time in history. Then we think about other times in history after slavery was abolished, family separations continued through apprenticeships

or forced apprenticeships, which essentially allowed any black child to be taken from their parents if their parents were deemed somehow neglectful or unable to care for them. So people tend to think of those separations

that happened during child slavery as is isolated time in history.

separations continued through forced apprenticeships where essentially any black child to be taken away from their parents if their parents were deemed somehow unfit to take care of. And at that time, laws that were called the black codes

made it very difficult for formerly enslaved people to access employment or housing or any kind of financial resources. So it was very easy to say that a black parent was unfit.

And these apprenticeship laws even gave first bidding

of a black child to their former inslaver. So families continue to be separated continuously. Then we see other areas like in the war on drugs where black children were separated from their parents through incarceration,

mass incarceration criminalization. We see the crack baby era where black children were separated from their parents because of their mother's substance use. When I worked in the system during that time, there was no investigation of those cases at all.

If a mother was born positive for a crack cocaine, the baby was just instantly removed and placed in foster care.

“And I think that there's other periods in history”

where we see another good example is just recently when children were separated from their parents at the southern border of the 6th of the U.S. Mexico border. And I think that's a time in history

where people saw how horrific this practice

of separated children from their parents is. And there was so much outrage during that time that outrage actually led to the policy of the Zerotolerance policy being ended. But in that entire period of Zerotolerance,

about 5,000 children were separated from their parents. What people don't realize is that every year in the United States today, the state forcibly separates upwards of 200,000 children from their parents. And those separations go entirely unrecognized.

But the pain, the trauma that people saw on their TVs when they were watching children being taken from their parents during Zerotolerance is the same pain and trauma that Black children are experiencing now and have experienced for centuries in this country.

“- Yeah, and you talk about how those images”

and at this point we're talking about drawings and sort of storytelling imagery, but you talked about how those images of mothers and children being separated were a really potent tool in the slavery abolitionist movement

to getting people to understand the horrors of slavery and that that broke through in a way that obviously the entire institution of slavery was horrific on so many levels. But for some reason, that piece broke through

with the public consciousness. Can you talk a little bit about that? - Yeah, exactly. That's something that I learned about as I was researching the book.

I knew about the incredibly large numbers of separations that happened during slavery, but really didn't realize that that in many ways was the catalyst for the abolition movement.

“At the time there were a lot of abolition newspapers”

and abolition pamphlets that were done in a very underground way and then sent to the north so that white northerners could become aware of the problem of slavery. And they included many different stories

about slavery, the horrors that you just mentioned, the beatings, the rapings, the lipings, all of that. But it was stories of children being separated from their mothers and images that were drawn images, but images of babies being taken away

on it from their mother's arms or a mother on an auction block and her child in the audience grabbing her or reaching for her and crying. And the people who were developing these newspapers

realized that it was those stories that were really starting to break through. I think any parent can understand just the visceral horror of having your child literally taken out of your arms and sold away from you.

And so like you said, despite all of the horrors of slavery that many people were ambivalent towards, it was this horror of children being taken away from their parents that really started to break through. So much so that in some states laws were passed

to prevent children from being separated from their parents, because in slavers, we're trying to quail some of the outrage about this practice. And then I tell a story in my book

about Uncle Tom's cabin,

which was the second most widely sold book

of the 1800s, second to just the Bible, that featured stories of that my separation, one story in particular of a baby who was going to be sold away from his mother the main protagonist of the novel Eliza.

And that story captured people's attention, so much that it's said that when Abraham Lincoln first met Harriet Beatrice Doe, the author of Uncle Tom's cabin, that he said to her, so you're the little lady who's responsible for this great war.

of family separation had on the abolition movement and then ultimately started to the war.

- Yeah, that was an incredible point in the book.

And I found so many points of connection with the book in terms of storytelling and who are we paying attention to and whose pain matters and who do we find credible, which mothers do we find credible

because these are things that we are such strong themes of the show. And the image, illusion and realities of motherhood and how those sort of all converge are just such big themes of the show.

So I wanted to talk about this particular era in the evolution of the child welfare system because I realized in reading your book and there are many points in the book where I was just, yes, yes, and then there were some points

that were really challenging for me.

“And one of them I think was when you were talking about”

the 1960s and this moment where all this huge seismic social change is happening

and you have civil rights and you have the second wave of feminism

and you have these huge advances and also are understanding of child abuse. And a moment where I realized I was like, oh, this is such a different perspective on like, capital in particular, right,

which was this landmark legislation and the idea of mandatory reporting laws which is something I have spent no small time amount of time on the show defending and this really gave me a different perspective on them

that I really appreciated. And so I kind of wanted to talk through just that piece and you pointed to this landmark paper to the battered child syndrome, right? So for my vantage point,

and someone that talks to child abuse pediatricians and someone that is in the field of child abuse, right, with, you know, member of FAPSAC and that sort of my entry point into this was having a severe child abuse situation in my family

that this was really this moment where we had this first revelation about child abuse happening in the home and that it being parents primarily and that we had this sort of recognition

that oh, children are showing up in the hospital,

“so that's what this battered child syndrome papers about, right?”

Children are showing up with brain injuries and broken bones and like attitudes on corporal punishment have changed a great deal. But this was sort of the first time that there was this broad recognition

within the medical community and other communities of like, oh, this is maybe something that we should have laws about in protections about. And I think I have basically viewed those things as good and you present a very different viewpoint

on CAPTA and on mandatory reporting laws. And I wonder if you could talk us through that because I was particularly compelled by what you said which is this is something that stuck out to me for a while about tying abuse and neglect together.

So can you just give us a little bit of like, your perspective on CAPTA and why it sort of set the stage maybe for some of these problems that we now see? - Yeah, so as you mentioned, the battered child syndrome was published in 1962.

And really for the first time brought the issue

“of child abuse to the national public's attention.”

And it got an incredible amount of attention

on nightly news and the Saturday evening post and there were billboards about protecting children from abuse and it really led to what people at the time call the child abuse panic. Whereas before there was just not a lot of recognition

that children could be severely harmed like that by their parents. And as you said, the battered child syndrome talked about very severe abuse, multiple broken bones, head injuries, things like that.

These children showing up at the hospital and it being determined that it was their parent to a responsible for these injuries. Prior to that, even the concept of child welfare didn't exist.

Prior to the 1960s child welfare was really a pension for widowed mothers or mothers who were unable to enter the workforce for other reasons so that they could stay in home and raise their children. So there was no child abuse and investigations syndrome.

What the battered child syndrome paper did was launched the concept of mandatory reporting laws. So prior to 1962, there were no mandatory reporting laws in the country. The year following it, the US Children's Bureau,

which is the federal agency that oversees children's welfare, put out statutes, model statutes for states to develop. By 1968, it went from zero states having a mandatory reporting law to 50 states having a mandatory reporting law. Prior to the battered child syndrome,

there were about 500, 600 cases of severe child abuse that had been reported to law enforcement. By 1968, with mandatory reporting laws and effect, there were 11,000 cases being reported. But what we saw happened during this time

is the original intent of mandatory reporting laws was to capture these children who are being very severely

to protect them from further abuse.

“But very quickly as states adopted mandatory reporting laws,”

we saw the definitions of child abuse expand greatly. First, two things like malnutrition, then two things like the lack of supervision, then two things like not attending school, and the net just widened considerably,

even conditions of the home dirty homes, things like that. And by the late 1960s became the largest form of reports that were being called in these neglect cases. We also saw during that time that black children were immediately overrepresented.

Black children in that time in the '60s were about 8% of the population in the US, of the child population. They made up over half of all child abuse reports. And the connection I try to make in the book

is that what isn't always put together

is that moment in time between 1962 and 1968 when these mandatory reporting laws were being developed was the exact time of the civil rights movement. When there was incredible racial tensions and racial animists in the US,

“and you also had publication of what people call”

the Moynihan Report, which was a report developed by Patrick Moynihan, who basically said that civil rights legislation would not be enough to save black families because the problems in black homes were so severe.

And he attributed that to what he called a tangle of pathology, because black homes were being led by black single mothers. So he had these narratives out there about black single mothers raising boys who this report said would become the criminal underclass

of the future, really stoking people's fears at that time.

All of this is happening as mandatory reporting laws were being developed. So then we see this outcome of more than 50% of calls being made on black families for mostly neglect-related things. And then a few years pass, and Congress decides to federalize

the system of mandatory reporting laws. Prior to that, each state had separate definitions and there weren't really consistent definitions of maltreatment.

“So the federal government decided to federalize this”

under a law that's called the child abuse prevention and treatment actor, Capta. And what the point I try to make in the book is that there was so much evidence during those congressional hearings

that black children were being significantly harmed

by these mandatory reporting laws.

And that these issues that were being called neglect, that were largely related to poverty, had nothing to do with child harm were being the majority of cases that were being reported. Despite all of that, Congress pushed this law through.

After Capta passed, we saw the same patterns where black children have continued to this day to be overly reported and overly removed by the system. People today try to talk about Capta as or what happens to black children

in the overly overreporting over removals as an unintended consequence of the law. And the point that I try to make in the book is, if you know that a proposed law is going to significantly harm black children

and you know they're going to be overreported overremoved for issues related to poverty. And you pass that law anyways and then those severe consequences become reality, that's not an unintended consequence

that was the clearly foreseeable result of this policy. And that's the policy that we still have an effect today that continues to go over reporting black children. - I just got back from doing some reporting in the field with my producer Mariah,

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is a great way to support the show. I was so struck reading your book and thinking about this imagery and this idea of the power of storytelling from Uncle Tom's cabin on, right? And what I've talked about a lot on the show

over the past two years as I've been covering the Myakowalski case, which was really a big moment of emergence of the medical kidnapping panic. These stories anecdotal, not very transparently told

of doctors and there's a bunch of lawsuits that are attached to it. There was a huge case with the Myakowalski case, which was a bunch of us in case that ended up

with this huge civil jury award for over $200 million

for hospital in Florida and that just got overturned. And that was a big threat to mandatory reporting laws. Like it was something that had it stood mandatory reporting laws would have been sort of obliterated because the whole point is that you have protections

for mandatory reporters. They're being held accountable, possibly federally liable, criminally liable for not reporting abuse, so you can't then sue them in court if they're reporting abuse and good faith.

In this particular case, the actions of the doctors, I spent years reporting on this case or thousands of documents, et cetera. This is my area of expertise, much hasn't my proxy abuse.

Absolutely, the doctors interventions in that case saved that child's life. And so it was a specific case. And it was presented a specific way. And there was sort of this day-leash of media stories

that have been the same thing. And what they are alleging is that doctors are conspiring against parents to falsely accuse them of abuse and take their children away and then in the sort of quiet part

that doesn't necessarily make it into the media is what these groups who are supporting this belief is that it's a child trafficking scheme to traffic white children into adoption. So it's a conspiracy theory.

And what I think is so frustrating about this is that these parents, it is overwhelmingly focused on white middle-class parents who have been very credibly accused, charged in some cases convicted, a very severe abuse, right?

Which is, and that's obviously what I focus on on the show is cases where parents have broken their children's bones cause brain damage, killed their children, poisoned them, the really horrific cases of abuse. And these are the ones that are being presented

in the media as wrongly accused parents. And it's very insidious. And I've been dismayed to see the sort of way this is presented by the media because it will occasionally pull in these facts

and these statistics from the abolitionist movement, right? Like, oh, well, this system overly affects black. And I was like, but you're not talking about those families. Those are such word these stories. And you know, you express frustration in the book

about the media's unwillingness to tell those stories.

“And so I think we're doing what often happens, right?”

Where there's this very real problem of children not being protected from abuse. There's a very real problem of a bunch of families that do not need to be separated, being separated. And instead of devoting any resources

to either of those two very real problems, we are going to invent a third problem to distract everyone from them. And you know what I-- The ridiculousness of this.

Yeah, and it's like, it's very frustrating. And I feel like it is keeping us from having either of those two conversations. Because the solutions that are being advocated for

even accidentally help with the real problem

of black families being impacted by this system. There's this insidious sort of dog whistly thing to all these stories that I couldn't quite articulate until I read your book. And I thought, oh, this is what it is.

What these people are saying is, this system isn't supposed to come after us. This system isn't supposed to come after white middle-class families. And in that way, it's sort of this black mirror inversion

of the real problem with family separation. I wonder what you see, if you know, if you have a struggle opinion about this, a lot of the systems that you talked about are eight in the book are not necessarily the medical system,

although the medical system has a big role to play. And like in the battered child syndrome,

that was obviously written by doctors,

it's very interesting to read that now because there's this pathologizing of the parent. That sort of part of the language in the battered child syndrome was like, oh, they're not necessarily all psychopaths,

but there's like something wrong with a parent that will do this to their child. And like, on some level, yes, and on another level, you know what we know, especially about not specifically monetizing by proxy abuse, but abusive head trauma, broken bones,

like those kind of injuries that those do have a lot of factors of like, was that person abused by a child?

“You know, there are these sort of ways to prevent them, right?”

If we had a better side of those sort of functioning better, I think what's frustrating about the medical kidnapping stuff is I think they've identified entirely the wrong point of failure by putting the onus on child abuse pediatricians

who are identifying abusive injuries

after they have already happened and saying that doctor saying the thing is the problem. And I actually think that those doctors can be, you know, tell the abuse pediatricians in particular, can be part of the solution because looking at the data,

they rule out more cases of abuse than they confirm. And they are better at ruling out abuse than their less well-trained colleagues, which makes sense. And that that's actually a way to avoid some of the other prognets, not a solution, that that is a part of the system

that sort of in my mind should be protected whereas a lot of these other things. And I mean, we've seen, you know, as you said, like, you talk about the harms of the system and then this sort of idea maybe that some people have not me,

but some people have that like, child welfare system is doing a good job protecting kids. It's not. It didn't protect my niece and nephew. It didn't protect the children who ended up dying

by the hands of their abusers. You know, the person we covered last season had been already to jail for abusing one of her children. And then, you know, it completely failed to intervene. So it's hard to make an argument for it.

But I wonder, kind of, what can you tell us about the medical systems part of this from your perspective because obviously there are also a lot of issues with how with the care that black people in black mothers in particular, the medical care that they receive in this country.

So how do you see sort of the medical system interacting with all this? I know that was a very lengthy setup to question. No, no, it's an important question.

“I think they play a very important role.”

I don't know how I can't remember how much I talked about it in the book and we haven't talked about it here. But I spent most of my career in the child welfare system investigating cases of very serious abuse. So I'm very aware that that happens.

There's critics of the abolition movement. We'll try to say, like, we don't think that children are really abused or we don't care about children being harmed or just ignore that whole area. And that's just not true at all.

I mean, I saw it firsthand over and over and over. I worked in a unit where I was housed with the Fort Worth Police Department, literally across from the children's hospital because that's where most of my cases originated.

And I relied very heavily on the child abuse petitions there. I learned a lot from her and from my interactions with them. I learned about how to tell that injuries that would present as what looked like a one-time injury,

when you looked at the x-rays, you could tell that there were multiple incidents of broken bones by calcine deposits on the bones. I mean, all kinds of different things I learned about that. And I relied on those doctors very heavily

to make a determination if something was abuse or not abuse.

“So I think they play a very important role.”

What I can say about it is that as it relates to the work that I do in trying to address these disproportionate harms to black children, that there are a number of studies, many have been done over the years, that show that child abuse pediatricians are more likely

to confirm that something is abuse when it happens to a black child and believe that something is an accident when it happens to a white child. Most of those studies have been done on abuse of head trauma,

that it's an accident if it's a white family. But if it's a black family, confirm that it's abuse, send the child for a long scan, meaning a scan of all of their bones to see if there's other injuries and make child abuse reports.

“So I think that child abuse pediatricians,”

even though they're very important to this process, are also subject to the biases that we've been talking about and contribute to the over-representation of black children in the system. That's not surprising, right?

Like given just the history of, I don't know, everything. And yeah, I mean, and medicine included, right?

And I think the medical system will always play a necessary role

in protecting children from my perspective and also could be improved. And I think that any conversation that doesn't include that is not in my opinion a good faith conversation. I would feel I think very differently

about these medical kidnapping stories if black families were at the forefront. I think part of the reason that I'm, I mean, part of the reason I'm so suspicious is because I have done huge deep dives on a ton of these cases

and they just do not stand up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny to continue to believe that the parents were wrongly accused. But I want to ask you about this nuance. I did know going into reading your book

that statistic about the sort of I've heard between sort of 26 and 30% of cases in the system

or abuse versus this much larger percentage of systems

“that are neglect, which I think should be treated very differently.”

But I really was very compelled by this idea of accidental versus non-accidental. And when an accident should also then be counted as neglect rather than just an accident. Like, who do we give the benefit of the doubt

to versus who do we not? Because I read this book. So when I had on the show, Dr. Jessica Price, who's an academic and she's a former social worker as well. And she followed a number of black mothers

sort of on their journey through the system. And one of them was an accidental injury that then they came down on that family really hard for. And I thought, well, that's something that could have happened. You know, I'm a parent.

I have seven-year-old and a three-and-a-half-year-old and you sort of think like, that's one of those things that like, they're better for the grace of God. Like, that could have happened in my house. So I think this idea of neglectful supervision

is also a really tricky one where bias can just run a muck. So can you kind of talk to us about, like, even especially maybe what you witnessed on the job in terms of how you saw these things manifesting, like, depending on who the parents were.

- The difficulty in this conversation or the assessment of accidents versus non-accidents is that so many children who are abused or who children who are injured, whether it's accidental or not accidental,

are pre-verbal and can't say what happened. There are some cases like we just talked about where doctors can make a determination by looking for certain things or x-rays, certain physical evidence to make an determination

that something was not an accident.

“But I think when you have children who are pre-verbal,”

then there are people all around that child who are making judgments about what happened to the child. And I think what research shows, what I've seen is that those people are more likely to believe that something is not an accident

if the injury is to a black tile. And more likely to believe that something is an accident, if it happens to a white child. I'm writing a new book now that's more of a memoir about children that I removed

that I think now did not need to be removed and how I was complicit in believing many of the biases that plague that system. And I tell a story about a neighborhood that I would go too often in Fort Worth

on the east side that was predominantly if not exclusively a very poor black neighborhood. I investigated a lot of cases there. And when I worked in the unit of investigators and when we would get an investigation

from that neighborhood, we would say to each other, we need to bring the car seat on this one. Meaning that we were deciding before we even went there that we were gonna be coming back to the office with someone's baby,

stripped into our car. How can that presumption not influence the actual outcome of the case?

And the reality is that I was afraid to say in the book

we did say, and still I'm really uncomfortable is that I was afraid to go to that neighborhood. That was the neighborhood that was the bad neighborhood on the news where there were crime and gangs. But if I'm going into this neighborhood

and I'm scared to be there, how then is that influencing what I'm thinking is happening behind someone's door?

in the suburbs, we're none of those things are going through my mind. That's where I think, you know,

“questions about accidents versus non-accessance”

and the assessments that humans who are prone to these biases or socialize to believe many of these things. That's where I think the problem lies.

- It's always incumbent on all of us

who take these questions seriously to look at our own biases and the sort of heaviness of history that weighs on us all. And you make this very compelling case in the book of sort of this many layered ideas throughout the decades of thinking that black parents

were not capable of parenting their own children. All the way from these really horrific ideas during total slavery that like, well, they don't feel the way the rest of us feel. And so they'll be dancing the next day

after their children are taken away and just this absolute, well, they're just not like us. So they, you know, and sort of like how those things kind of echo throughout. And like obviously, you know, I was born in 1982

and so like I have, you know, teenage and young memories

of like the 90s and the like crack babies

and, you know, war on drugs, stuff and sort of super predators

“and like that, you know, all those sort of ideas, right?”

Which obviously seem absolutely horrific racist but those in retrospect with those are just like that sort of the, was just such an accepted viewpoint at the time and how could those not given that I'm only in my forties and it's like that's what was going on

where that was being blasted at me through the media when I was a young person it's like how could those things not affect all of us and the way that we see them? And I think what people can find very challenging

about these conversations is this idea that like, oh, you're saying I'm racist. And it's like, well, like kind of, yes, yes and no, right? Like that we all are that to sort of it's this bigger picture,

it's this bigger thing that sort of like weing on all of us

and sort of the way we look at black parents and the way that we look at black mothers in particular. And you know, you talked about this concept of white saviorism which is something we've talked about in previous seasons on the show.

We had a white evangelical missionary

“who was a perpetrator who adopted two black girls from Zambia”

so that was quite a heavy theme in that episode but you make kind of a really compelling case about how this is sort of permeated this idea of the child welfare system and who is working in the child welfare system who is the surveillance,

who is doing the surveillance, who is being surveilled and this idea that like this is not a community that is capable of making those decisions on their own. So can you talk a little bit about how this has sort of brought us

to today and even in some of these like philanthropic efforts to sort of solve this problem that we're sort of compounding it in ways that probably many well-intentioned individuals don't realize they're doing. Yeah, the concept of white saviorism

I mean, a lot of it is rooted in the international adoption movement like you just talked about, but a lot of it is born out of or began during the era of slavery as well where narratives were spread about black parents that they did not really care about their children

did not feel pain when their children were separated from them and couldn't really supervise their children well without some type of intervention by their white and slavers. And those were false narratives but narratives that were spread for the purpose of absorbing

and slavers and helping them feel better about selling their children away because they told themselves that they didn't really feel that much and didn't really agree for those children. But then we see those narratives continue

after slavery was abolished. We see those narratives continue with the idea that black people were lazy and living off of the government. Then that eventually evolved in the 1960s to the idea of welfare mothers

and black mothers that would have babies or the purpose of getting welfare money. And then that led to the welfare queen of the Ronald Reagan era and all of these and then the crack baby epidemic that wrote solely focused on black mothers

and their crack use and the narrative was that they didn't care about their children they cared about the drugs more. All of that's created an idea of black parents not really caring about their children and not being able to really take care of them

without some type of government intervention. And even that stereotype is widely believed today as it relates to welfare or financial assistance that black people in many ways are dependent on welfare and don't want to work

because then that will jeopardize their welfare benefits. All of those things that impact decisions that are made particularly around policies that the child welfare system is built on.

because it's created all of those myths over the centuries

“have created the idea that white intervention is needed”

to rescue black children from the tango of pathology that Moynihan talked about. Moynihan even specifically said in his report called on white people to intervene that the tango of pathology would spread

if white people didn't do something about it. So that's where white saviors have come from. And that's built into the policies, the structure of the child welfare. It part of mandatory reporting laws. It's part of built into the adoption and safe families act

which expedites adoptions for children who are in foster care for a certain amount of time. What some people don't understand is that it's not really about who is in the workforce because the workforce in many places, particularly in urban areas,

has a very large black proportion of caseworkers. But it doesn't really matter who the decision makers are. If they're implementing the policies of the agency, they're going to be doing actions that disproportionately affect black children.

It's not an individual racism. Right, right. I think that's it. That's really the point I wanted us to get to. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about

the adoption and safe families act because one of the stories that really impacted me reading about it in book called We Were Once a Family, which is, you know, the story of the heart family and, you know, the horribly tragic story where you had these children adopted out and there was a possible

manship placement in closer to their hometown that got passed over and they ended up being adopted out to a pair of white mothers that eventually drove them all off a cliff and made just a horrible horrible situation. I think that sort of really illustrates the harm with this idea of like adopting children out and that's also something that really dates

all the way back to this idea of like even sort of industrial revolution era families that were Eastern Eastern Western European immigrants

that they were like, well, the the solution is of these poor

perfect conditions people are living in. Send the children to the countryside to live with other families like rather than, you know, fix the conditions. And I feel like I see that those roots, but can you talk a little bit about that act and what it's sort of maybe again kind of as we were talking

about these sort of like the patina that it may have by proponents and that we recognize probably a lot of people really believed that, right? And then versus what it's actually accomplishing.

“Yeah, I think that's an important point to make about many”

child welfare policies that they sound good on paper. When you present the high level details to an average person that sounds like a perfectly rational policy that is needed to protect children. Like like mandatory reporting, who would be against mandatory reporting? Of course, if children are being harmed that should be

reported, it makes sense. The adoption of safe families act says that children who have been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months need to be need to achieve permanency, need to get to some type of permanent outcome. So either termination of parental rights or reunification. Most cases when it gets to that 15 month period,

those cases go forward with termination of parental rights so that those children can be adopted because it's usually ruled out by that point that they cannot be reunified or they would have been by the 15 months. Wait, that's interesting if we could pause for a moment because I think and your knowledge of all these systems is vastly more than mine.

I have been under the impression and because this is how it's played out in the cases that I've looked at which have been, I mean, there was we looked at one case, you know, because we're talking about my child's in my proxy case and we do deep dive so we don't have necessarily this gigantic, you know, number of cases that we're looking at sort of population

level data of any kind, but like, you know, have been white parents, right? We've understood that there is a strong mandate for reunification. So is that not what you have seen and experienced? That's not what I've seen and experienced. Now, on a paper, there's a strong mandate for reunification. It's not usually how things play out,

or that's not how I've seen things usually play out. What I've seen happen and it's usually related to asphalt because of this 15-month period, states have what they call concurrent planning.

“So because you have to begin a termination preceding once you get to these 15 months”

and you don't know from the very early stages if you're going to be able to reunify, you start planning for termination from the very first day.

So when you always have in the back of your mind that as the case worker, the supervisor,

that termination is a potential possibility because you're working towards that concurrently to working towards reunification. What I've seen often happen, good examples of how asphalt really harms parents and disproportionately harms black parents are I think of parents who are in prison

removes, the supervisor has said, "Oh, this is a termination case."

“Because they know that the person is in prison and not going to be able to do the mandated”

services that they're required to do. Or think of a parent who is struggling with substances, substance use, and how often people relax and how difficult it is for someone who has a substance addiction to recover from that addiction. Sometimes that can't happen in 12 to 15 months, but if it doesn't happen in 12 to 15 months, their rights will be terminated. And when we have systems that over criminalize over incarcerated by people, they're more subject to these

termination laws. The other thing that I've seen over and over, which makes me think that

re-unification is not prioritized. I've seen many cases where very young children are placed in a

foster home. And because most states have what's called foster to adopt laws, meaning that foster parents are licensed to foster, but also licensed to adopt, many foster parents get into fostering because they're an option motivated. So then you have a young child go into a foster care placement, who bonds with the foster parents, because that child only has a once a week, one hour visit with their parents. Months go by, the parent may be working their plan to work towards

reunification, maybe they've had some slip-ups. But what happens is the state, the case workers, the supervisor, start to see how well this child is doing with this nice, often white foster family.

And they see how the child is bonding with that foster parent. And then things that don't have

anything to do with harm to the child start coming into the equation. So the case worker starts thinking about all of the access that this child will have if they stay in this nice foster home, the good schools that they'll be able to go to, the good neighborhood that they're growing up in, comparing it to the environment they would be going back to if they were unified. And all of those things start to factor into the decision making. And I've seen many cases where the state

will argue for termination, even when the mother of the parent has been doing what she's supposed to do to get her child back, they'll argue for termination because they will say the child has formed an attachment to the foster parent and is no longer bonded to the mother. Even though it was the state that created that lack of bad or dissolved the bond by refusing any contact other than these once a week visits. So it's not because there's a risk of harm for the child going back,

it's because they will bring an experts to say that the child is now bonded to the foster parent and it would be harmful to take them out of their room. I also share in Maldonado and when the child is in the same position as the other platform that I tested with Ambe Nutzer. I have already thought about the future. All tools that are important for the development of the government are, for example, from law to law, are found directly in the dashboard. The state now has a

“cost-in-law test on shoppyfire.com. There is this fundamental fear and I think it's a particularly”

one amongst white parents, especially particularly among white evangelical parents, outside influence on children. And community in the church, yes, but community beyond that, no. And the thing that they're reacting to is this idea of not just state intervention, but community intervention, because I see the sort of, and I understand they're connected, but the state being kind of one thing, right? And again, don't think it's functioning well. But I see, again, I'm

a parent, teachers, doctors, these other adults that we trust with our children. As part of our community, and I see reporting of abuse by doctors, specifically, which obviously is very important in medical child abuse cases, as being, that's a community member. And I understand that there's a state intervention that follows that. But I kind of have this sense that we've got to pull it apart a little bit, because otherwise we're going to kind of throw the good part out with the bad, right,

“which is that, like, I believe two things very strongly that I'm trying to get to how we sort”

of accomplish these things. And I think that we probably share some values here. I believe that children have an inalienable right to be safe in their homes. They're vulnerable. They cannot speak for themselves. They do not have legal rates. I believe that there should be an intervention, if children are, if children are being harmed by their parents. If it's severe enough to put them in the hospital,

should be protected from that. I don't believe children are the property of their parents.

I don't believe that we should just be completely hands-off, and that we should take no stake as a community in what is happening to children inside their homes. There are people that believe that. They're plenty of them. I believe that children deserve to be protected. And I believe that children are members of a community. And I believe that it's all of our jobs to protect

“children. And that's what I want as a parent. I want my children to be part of a community that”

believes that it's it's job to protect them. Because my children are not with me all the time. I believe that we should all have a shared stake in the children in our community. So I believe those

two things really strongly. And you said something in the book that was really beautiful right at

the outset about an abolitionist mindset. And I think it is about like breaking us out of this paradigm a little bit that we have, right, of these like either or we're looking at these sort of two harmful sides of this coin. And you said abolition is not about simply ending the child welfare system. It's about creating a new society where the need for the child welfare system is obsolete. So take us there. I would start by saying, I believe in those two things too that you just said.

And I think those are part of an abolitionist future. I also believe that people have the right to housing, that people have the right to quality public education, that people have the right to health care and mental health care and childcare that's free and accessible to everyone. And I believe that people have the right to eat healthy food that is not dependent on how much of this thing called money that they have. And I think if we can create a society where those things

exist, the incidents of child harm would be much less. It will not be eradicated, but I also believe the other thing that I would add to the things that I believe is that when children are harmed,

“that we should not do things to them that harm them more. That's what I think an abolitionist”

reality is about. How to do that? Like at a 10 point plan, I can't give people. But I do think we need to start figuring it out. We need to try things. We need to say we can't continue to do this. I think a point I tried to make in the book is that slavery eventually became abolished because people realize we just cannot accept this in a moral society, the society that we want to be. And I think we need to get to that point today to say we cannot accept that the state is

forcibly separating 200,000 children from their parents every year and putting them in homes with strangers where they're even more likely to be harmed. We have to say we just cannot accept that. We don't have to know exactly what we're going to do in order to say we're going to commit to stopping doing this. And then we can figure it out as we go forward. I know some of those things involve the things I was just saying, housing, medical care, education, safe schools, all of those things.

And then we can try other things and then we can try other things to see what's going to happen

“to see what's going to happen to see what's going to happen. You know, I think some people listening”

to this will have a very fearful reaction of the idea of getting rid of these systems. There's a piece of the system that I'm defending vigorously and it's a very specific piece and that's doctors and their ability to be protected when they report abuse because the reality is, as you mentioned, and you framed it as wealthy families have the ability to deal with some of these things internally. And I think that's true. They also have the ability to get away with it

in a way that is not helpful. When I look back on it, my other naivete, you know, going into this, was like, oh, CPS is involved. They're going to help the situation. No, they're not. And

my sister is a wealthy, you know, she's a, she's a white lady with means. No, like they're never

going to know. Like the chances that she was ever going to be held accountable, zero. I think that's why it's so frustrating to see the face of this. I don't think the face of the abolition movement should be wealthy, white parents who've been held accountable for abusing their children, right? I don't think that conversation is going to get us anywhere near where we need to go. So the piece that I defend vigorously is that doctors, especially those who are very knowledgeable about abuse,

and I'm not saying they never make mistakes. You've pointed out that they do. The last thing I

I don't want to exclude that because I'm focused on this other thing. But like, if doctors are

terrified out of reporting abuse because they're going to be sued and made the villain of a Netflix film and harassed with an inch of their life, the way that Dr. Sally Smith has, the way that the doctor who reported my niece and saved her life was. Again, that's not going to get us where we need

“to go. And I think there is for me and I think for many people who are listening, especially in”

the medical profession, a fear of like, well, yes, we can recognize this system and we shouldn't think it's acceptable and agree with you. But there is a fear of if mandatory reporting laws are abolished, then so to are the protections for people who report abuse and are acting as protective community members and doctors who are the only people who are capable oftentimes of identifying that abuse are then not protected. So put this in a context for me where like, I can

have this conversation in a more holistic way. Yeah, I always thought like to point out how I don't

have all the answers. I know, I just realize I asked you like the trickiest question and the time it's okay. I don't know if this is the right context. I don't know if this is the right answer. When I thought of as you were saying that particularly as you talked about the doctor who was fearful of reporting because of potential consequences, the first thing that popped into my head was the teenage girl who's being sexually abused by her father, who's afraid to tell anyone about it

because she thinks if she does, she'll be taken away from her family. That to me is the counter and in some ways to that, that we have to do something about that too. If we really care about protecting children, then we have to acknowledge that some children do not report the harm they're experiencing because they're so definitely afraid of being taken from their parents. That's so real and one of the trickiest things with medical child abuse in particular, but I think with all abuse

and one of the most heartbreaking and things I learned early in this journey, was exactly that that abuse children do not want to be taken away from their parents. And medical child abuse is specific because unlike this heavily pathologized idea that we started off with with

“battered childrens and remember that we learned a lot more about why people commit those types of”

abuse. On the severe end, having grown up with my sister, who grew up in a nice middle class family where she had access to everything, she could have possibly had, et cetera, et cetera, doesn't have any of those sort of risk factors. I suppose that we would, you know, which I think we could actualize that differently, but just as, you know, as it stands, I don't know that there's anything that could have deterred her. And that's tricky. And I've both seen survivors who were

left to be raised by their abusers and will never recover from that experience that truly it's

hard to imagine a situation that they could have been raised in that would have been worse. And there's also children that died that just did not make it out and much hasn't by proxy abuse in particular has a very high death rate as does abuse have had trauma, right? So, and a live child, in my book is always going to be better than one that doesn't survive. And there are so many situations where it's really hard to make that determination of which side of that are we on.

“And the consequences to an error in that decision making are so high. And I think that anyone who is”

not grappling with both sides of it is not having to good faith conversation. No, I agree completely. It's particularly complex when we're talking about these really serious problems of abuse, medical challenges, being one of them. Because there's just not easy answers to those questions. But I think we need to be having the conversations and we need to, I think one thing that frustrates me that I find disingenuous about some aspects of the anti-evolution movement

are people that care so much about children being safe from harm in their homes. But completely disregard the harm that the system inflicts. We have to be talking about both of those things and what to do to eliminate both of them. And I think if we could get to the point where we agree that both of those things need to stop, then we could figure out the solutions. Yeah, and I mean, I think I obviously carry these stories of what happens when there's no

intervention with me in the way on me. But can you tell us a little bit more about what we know about what happens to children who are removed? Because we talk about it a little bit, but I want

One, we know that just the act of family separation severely harms children. And we know this particularly in recent years from all of the doctors and pediatricians and psychiatrists who called out that harm during the Zero Tolerance Policy of 2018. There were doctors who said that forcibly taking children away from their parents is tantamount to torture. Because of the harm that it causes children, the severe psychological harm that it causes to children.

Psychological harm that results in things like sleeping disorders and depression and learning disabilities, substance use problems later in life, suicidal behaviors. So there's just the act of family separation that's harmful. But then think of what happens after family separation. Children go into a home with strangers. They're often moved multiple times. They change schools multiple times. And what we know is that children who spend time in foster care as adults

have significantly poor outcomes. More likely to be incarcerated, more likely to have substance use problems, mental health problems, more likely to be unemployed, living at poverty, houseless, the gamut of social problems that people can experience are all more likely to be experienced by people who have been in foster care. So just one kind of final question. And again, I know I'm giving you, I'm giving you really hard questions. I appreciate you engaging with

that we really do. We typically very strongly encourage people to report suspicions of abuse. Particularly for medical child abuse cases, they take so long, it takes so many reports, it takes

so many interactions and what I have seen in medical child abuse cases in particular, we always

really encourage people to report abuse and to try and get law enforcement involved because I understand that in those cases in particular, that intervention even if it's unsuccessful can still

“mean the child's life is saved because it's this escalating pattern of abuse. For me, as a person who shares”

so many of your goals and so interested in really continuing to explore this viewpoint and and open us towards what better, what a better world could look like, right? As a person with a large platform and a lot of people who are involved in the system in various ways, we have a lot of doctors, we have a lot of social workers and all kinds of folks that listen to the show, is there better framing, is there better advice that I could be giving people than that in your opinion?

I think I would say it's important for people to know what we were just talking about, how harmful family separation is, to understand that the concerns they had about children being separated from their parents in 2018 are the same concerns they should have now every time they consider making a report. They should know that in many cases there might be alternatives to a report, particularly when those concerns involve some poverty related type thing. People should know

that in many cases, once people become involved in the child welfare system, both parents and children are severely harmed by that system. Even the process of going through an investigation, even if it's unfounded can be incredibly stressful and dramatic for families and children.

“So having all those things in mind when they're considering making the report, I think is important,”

knowing that the harm that results from a report could be greater than whatever harm they're

concerned about in the home, not always as we've talked about in extreme cases, but in some cases.

And then I think the other thing that I'd say that I tried to think more and more about now and we're actually writing a series about this end up in, one paper you might be particularly interested in because it was written by Roxanna Escarion wrote a paper about what should happen if there is no child welfare system what should happen to children who are sexually abused. So Roxanna wrote that paper and all of her ideas in that paper come from talking to survivors

of sexual abuse. So I think what we need to do more of is talk to survivors and ask them what would they have wanted to happen because in many cases it's not being taken away from their parents

and not even just us regular adults, the system particularly never asked children what they want to have.

Yeah, that's it, right? Survivors are most important resource in solving these problems.

“And I think, again, what is sort of so frustrating to me is about the way that this is being presented”

now is that the children are disappeared from the story. You do not hear what happened to the child

and in that way you have disappeared the experience of the child. And I think just as you are saying

“that those of us that may be making a report that is going to enter someone into the system need”

to grapple with whether or not that is going to be the more or less harmful choice and it doesn't mean don't report but it means grapple with it, right? And not everyone's not going to get it right 100% of the time but we all need to be grappling it's like we need to be in the same reality-based conversation and the experiences of the children what is best for the child has to be at the center of any good faith conversation. And I would just add and you can't

know what's best for the child without asking the child without getting the child's input as well.

Obviously that's not always possible with preferable children but right now I don't think we

do a good job asking children what they want. Yeah and I don't know that there's a way to prevent on an individual basis and so much of what you talk about in the book is this sort of like relentless, very American focus on individuals and individual solutions and like having been raised with one of these people I'm like yeah I don't think there's like an

“intervention that would have worked on her so to speak but I think she could have stayed in”

her children's lives and her children could have been protected if there was more of a community

approach allowed if doctors were able to say okay this parent is not going to make medical

the same for their child anymore and we need to have a system around that and if there was this like sort of again family community-based thing where it wasn't just isolating into like the parents have rights and we either take those rights away or we leave those intact and if we leave those intact the parent can do whatever they want to their child and if we take those away then all of these other harms are focused right like that just feels very the wrong paradigm

to me. Can you talk a little bit more about your work with upend and and what what you what you're

“doing over there? Yeah so the upen movement is a national initiative that's focused on ultimately”

raising public awareness, building public education, political education about the realities of the telephoto system. So we want people to understand the harms that result from telephoto system intervention, the reality that any removals are poverty-based and to identify solutions to that. So a lot of the work we do is put out resources, educational materials to educate people about the system. We recently put out a short documentary film that's kind of a vision of abolition

where we worked with youth who are both homeless and many of whom have had been in the foster care system talking about their ideas for what a future without a telephoto system could look like. And right now the current things, a couple of things that we're doing is we have a podcast and the podcast is going to focus on this idea of what should happen to children who are harmed if there is no telephoto system because we initially called that the elephant in the room,

paper series because that's the question that the most difficult question but that's the what we really want to take on. So we have a couple of papers out the one by Roxanna about sexual abuse and then we have one out about parents who have mental health disorders and we'll have one coming up hopefully next month about children who live in homes where there's substance abuse and then we'll be doing the podcast that's a companion to that. Well thank you so much for

telling me all about that this is such a productive conversation for us to be having and it's a really hard one. I just I really really appreciate your work and I appreciate your willingness to to just get to a team gauge with us on this topic. Nobody should believe me is produced and hosted by me Andrea Dumwamp. Our editor is Greta Stromquist and our senior producer is Mariah Gosset and Minister of Support from Nola Carmush.

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