S07 E09: Who America Considers a Family

- True story media.

“Please note that this show discusses child abuse,”

which may be difficult for some listeners, for resources about abuse of head trauma, go to shakenbaby.org. Despite the vast amounts of media attention it's received and the successful state legislative efforts

it's inspired, the problem of caps over diagnosing child abuse, is as far as I can tell for my extensive research entirely invented.

Second opinion laws are put under the ever popular guys

of protecting children, but it seems more likely that they will create an additional loophole for parents like most of the ones featured in these stories. IE, white families who can afford to pay

for high-powered attorneys and experts who explain the way abusive injuries. We really do like to dress things up this way in this country, from banning drag performances to banning books, to prohibiting teachers from discussing

the existence of gay people in racism,

“all things that don't actually harm children.”

But these things do make some adults really uncomfortable, as does the notion that the state might remove the children of a middle-class white family. Child abuse pediatrician's kidnapping children is a made-up problem,

that the media is treating like a real problem,

all while ignoring the people who are actually disenfranchised by the child welfare system. Well, not everyone in the media is ignoring it. - 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. - I read Roxanna's book years ago and I really stuck with me.

I've had listeners recommend this book to me a number of times and in one instance, someone told me I should read it and my kicks and boss series. And this revealed something fascinating. The ways in which medical kidnapping,

a conspiracy theory with deep roots in the most extreme version of parents' rights, is masquerading as a matter of social justice. But reporters like my kicks and boss, who superficially present as progressive,

like to pay lip service to the grave disparities in the child welfare system, without actually engaging with the issue. Here he is discussing a piece of audio from his podcast that Melissa Bright recorded

of her interaction with CPS.

“- I was blown away and I really think that when I heard that audio,”

it kind of crystallized to me why this story was important because I think like nobody thinks that we shouldn't have CPS or that the state shouldn't step in when small vulnerable children are at risk of being abused or when there's clear signs of a pattern of abuse

or serious neglect, not just poverty-related issues. - But there is a group of people who say just that. Actually, there are two groups of people who say just that. On one end, parents' rights absolutists

who believe that the state should never have the right

to intervene between them and their children. And whether Mike is aware of it or not, this is the side he's carrying water for. This is the side who are helped by second opinion laws that paved the way for junk science

and attacks on child abuse pediatricians like the ones in Mike's reporting. But there is another group of people who believe quite strongly that state intervention is the wrong tool for the job. Child welfare abolitionists like Roxanna Ascarion,

Mike kicks in law and the others that followed in his stead are focused almost exclusively on the experiences of parents. And Roxanna's work has been about putting that lens back on the children who so frequently get rid of these stories. So in March 2018, a family was found at the bottom

of a cliff in California. It was two white women and they are six adopted black children and it became clear pretty quickly that it wasn't an accident. 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. I just immediately realized that there was a much deeper story and that it wasn't being told. (laughs) 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 how did the system influence

what ended up happening to them?

“The murders who aside of the heart family”

was a headline-grabbing story. And as is so often the case, especially when women are the perpetrators, the media coverage became hyper-fixated on the adoptive moms and their motivations for committing the horrific crime.

The six children who lost their lives became an afterthought. And that was the narrative Roxanna set out to correct with her book. I've thought so much this season about the children in the cases we covered, how the media covered up the truth

about what they endured and co-signed a false narrative that their parents self-servingly put forward. But I've also thought about those parents because while they ostensibly got what they wanted, being given a platform to air their grievances

and exact revenge on the doctors, did any of this really help them? It's more likely that most of the litigants and these lawsuits against caps will just end up with big legal bills.

To say nothing of the thousands

“they spent hiring experts to provide junk science”

medical testimony. And I wonder too about the harm the media coverage has caused to the families it featured, not only to the kids whose privacy had trampled on, but to the parents themselves.

No one deserves to be judged solely on the worst thing they've ever done.

But if they're never asked to face it head on,

that has its own price. Viviana Graham and John Stewart have been railing against Dr. Sally Smith for a decade now. The sympathy and attention from the media

obviously hasn't helped them move on. And as long as you're talking about the fake problem of doctors over diagnosing abuse, you're necessarily ignoring some of the very real children who are being harmed by the system.

People believe their eyes. That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make it through your day.

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Children in medical kidnapping stories are positioned in a very telling way, not so much as tiny human beings. But as props who belong with, or perhaps more accurately belong to their parents,

regardless of the evidence that they've harmed them. Elizabeth Bartholud recently retired from the Harvard Law School faculty. And for the last three decades plus, I'd focused my work on child welfare, child rights,

adoption, and related issues. Elizabeth Bartholud is a Harvard Law School professor Emerita and longtime civil rights advocate, whose career has focused on social justice and child welfare. After beginning her work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund

and founding the Legal Action Center in New York, she went on to found Harvard's Child Advocacy Program where she trained generations of lawyers in children's rights, family law and child protection. She's the author of several books and dozens of scholarly works

on adoption, foster care, and child maltreatment. And I thought she was the perfect person to help us unpack the idea presented in the opening moments of take care of Maya, that abuse investigations are a violation of parents' rights.

This is one of the most fruit-out parts of the United States, the step period. It's unethical, and it's immoral. Parents have no right. Parents have no right.

So I wanted to ask you, do parents have no rights in this country? - And parents have extraordinarily strong rights in this country, and children are the ones that have very, very limited rights.

So in terms of the federal constitution, and most state constitutions of parents have very strongly protected constitutional rights, which means that legislation has to be written that honors parents' rights.

It means that courts decide any discretionary issues

whereas children have no constitutional rights.

No constitutional rights to be protected against abuse and neglect, whereas parents have very strong rights to hold onto their children, even if they're accused of abuse and neglect. - So talk to us about this idea of parents' rights,

“because I think most people, most reasonable people”

would agree, the parents should have rights that it's appropriate for parents to have rights with regards to their children. But talk to us about this sort of extreme of the spectrum. - Yeah, I've used the term parent rights absolutism

in talking about homeschooling, but I think it applies across the board

in the child welfare area,

because I think that our system in the United States, unlike the system in many other countries, does treat parent rights as near absolute, not as absolutely absolute. There's lots of legislation that purports to protect children,

but it's very important that the federal constitution only protects parent rights, not children's rights. So it means that all the legislation that may get written, which may look as if it's designed to protect children, it's still being read in the late of the constitution,

which says parents have very strong constitutional rights to hold on to their children. Children have no rights under the constitution to anything and certainly not to being protected against abuse. You know, every other country in the world

has ratified the convention on the rights of the child, international treaty, every other country in the world has ratified that. That convention recognizes children as having rights equivalent to those of adults.

It's significant that the United States has refused to ratify that. - What is the argument against ratifying the convention on the rights of the child in our country? - Well, I don't think there's really a strong argument.

There's the parent rights groups have opposed ratification and there's no question but that if we did ratify it would, it would signal a change in the U.S. approach and a recognition that children should have rights equivalent to adults.

“So I think politically it's been impossible”

or seemed impossible for us to ratify because the parent rights movement is as strong as it is. I mean, the parent rights movement also wants to make our constitution even more protective of parent rights than it already is. They've been pushing to amend the constitution

so that, you know, really anything else is and threats to the killer child would be up to the parent. - These stories of false allegations of abuse have managed to masquerade as social justice stories, but in looking at the arguments they're actually making,

medical kidnapping is not a social justice argument. It's a parent's rights argument and it's an extreme one. At least in the privacy of their Facebook group, the fractured family's folks don't seem to shy away from any of this and they've been active in the legislation that's been passed.

One of their founders, Reina Tyson, was very active in advocating for the passage of Texas House Bill 2848, which Hicks and Bos reporting also appears to have been instrumental in the passage of. This law requires that abuse investigations must allow for consulting with physicians who specialize in relevant conditions that can be confused with abuse.

It specifically mentions Ricketts, Elers Danlos Syndrome, osteogenesis imperfecta, and vitamin D deficiency. Of the conditions listed, only one genesis imperfecta, a rare genetic condition, is actually relevant to abuse investigations. And it's something that caps know about and for which there is a genetic test.

The others are straight out of the expert witness playbook, and a curiously high number of the children in fractured families seem to have these conditions. Parents commonly post in the group to ask who they can see to be tested for one of these things, and who can write them a report to say their child has it. And in all cases, they're searching for an alternate explanation

after an abuse diagnosis, one such post reads. So my son was four months when we discovered his vitamin D level is 15.7. He's formula fed and has multiple stages of healing fractures.

“Dot dot dot, how do I prove the vitamin D could have or did do this to him?”

What type of doctor and also what diseases/disorders, etc, could cause low vitamin D and fractures besides rickets? Just want to cover all grounds. The Texas law mirrors similar bills that have passed in Florida and Arkansas,

always support for members of fractured families.

One very vocal member of fractured families is a man called Zachary Colp. Colp was charged after his three-month-old son was found to have fractures and bleeding on his brain.

But later claimed this confession was coerced due to false promises made to him by the officer,

who he claims promised him he would go to bat for him with the prosecutor, get him counseling, and ensure he could still see his wife and son if he told the truth. I have very limited records on this case, but it did go to court where Dr. Michael Hallick testified that the injuries were due to a rare genetic condition. Following a hung jury, Colp pled guilty to a domestic battery charge. Despite his criminal conviction,

he was nonetheless able to successfully lobby the legislature to pass a bill in his son's name. Legislation that is referenced directly in the Florida legislation. Colp even ran for office, albeit unsuccessfully. It's alarming to see abuse denialism written straight into these laws, and Elizabeth has been seen this play out as well.

“So abuse of head trauma or age T, I think is this whole area is a prime example of what's been”

going on. So when I was teaching at Harvard Law School, I brought in one of the leading expert scientific experts on age T, who was also an expert on the research about age T, and the expert opinion among child pit petiatricians. And there's extraordinary near-unanimity among the reputable pediatric experts that age T exists as a diagnosis, as near-unanimity on how to how to diagnose it, and that it's real. And that you can tell if this, you know, child has been subjected to age T. And what

you have is a very tiny, really group of so-called experts who are hiring themselves out, making a lot of money as courtroom experts. They hired themselves out to the defense bar and they get paid, they testify, a handful of them testify in case after case. And yeah, unfortunately what happens in courts very often is the judges aren't experts. We've got an adversarial system where each side gets to call its experts. So you have judges and juries who

are faced with a lawyer on each side who's brought in an expert and hard for the judges and juries to know which are the legitimate knowledgeable experts and which are the hired guns who are willing

“to say what the defense bar wants them to say. And unfortunately I think in a lot of these cases”

parents are being little up when they should not be. And then there's this word being put out

by, you know, basically I'll just turn at the parents' rights movement in the press that many

of the media folk eat up about how, you know, this is unjust and terrible and this poor parent has has been lawfully convicted. The connection with parents' rights and magas/mahah is also crystal clear in the fractured family's Facebook page where there are numerous gushing posts about RFK Jr. There's even an acronym. Maxa make America's children safe again, not from their parents of course, but from child abuse pediatricians CPS and the state. And all of this abuse denialism

is dressed up under the banner of social justice and advocacy. I think this is going on throughout

“the child welfare world. So I think what you have is, you know, two things, both a false science”

phenomenon, phony research advocacy research dressed up as if it's real research, real scientific research. And then I think you also have parents' right movements that often get dressed up as something else that might be social justice or might be, you know, even though purport to be

representing children's rights to education, it's very powerful advocates that know how to present

their theories. There are some adults out there that are genuinely fighting for children, but everybody out there is going to claim that they're on the side of the child. Nobody wants to admit their anti child. So I think it's confusing for media. Everybody's claiming they care about the children and you can't really expect the children who are most in need of care and protection, toddlers, infants, young kids to be out there on the streets or, you know, demanding representation

and getting representation. So that's a major part of the problem. These parent rights groups are very organized. It's certainly in the areas I've looked at, for example, recently in the home schooling area. I don't think it's a particularly large group, just like the gun rights folk aren't, as large as the noise they make. But it's a single issue group that's highly organized. And so

who dies at home who is supposedly being home school. But in fact, we've gone from school because the child was observed by a teacher to be bruised in beaten. So the parent withdraws the child, child ends up dead. As someone I just thought, or says, oh, there's no regulation of home schooling.

“I think we should, for example, like check before you're allowed to home school if you've already”

killed a child in your custody. That sounds minimally reasonable. Proposes a bill. The next day, there'll be 200 or 500 people in that legislator's office. There'll be thousands of emails all from this home schooling movement because they put out the word to their members. Every state has a home schooling legal defense fund. You know, there's a immediate major pushback. Whereas there's

nothing on the side of, well, there might be. There's a little nonprofit, not very powerful.

There are a bunch of academics like me that write articles. There isn't anything like the equivalent lobbying group. So, so you get, you know, the the pressure and the legislature is all in one direction. Child abuse nihilists are an organized and vocal contingent online as well, which I know from

“being their occasional target. But I haven't seen any such backlash aimed at the preventionist,”

my kicks involved, or the filmmakers of Take Care of Maya, who are more likely to get strongly worthy of emails from polite professionals, and maybe a request for comment on their methodology. Still waiting on most of those. This movement, parents' right movement broadly defined, is strong enough that they're and smart enough. Savina, they're funding research as well as advocacy. So, in various areas, I've studied whether it's, you know, race issues in child welfare, homeschooling,

age T, a whole range of issues that have to do with children's rights. You get foundations and non-profits that believe in apparent rights. And, you know, and I'm sure some of them believes that parents can do no wrong or at least the state will be worse if it intervenes and that'll be worse for children.

But in any event, it's, it's strongly pushing the idea that it's always going to be better

to keep the state out of it. Whereas in other areas, like women's rights, we've come to recognize that when you have a less powerful player, you need the state to represent the interests of the woman or the person with disabilities of the person who's mentally incompetent. But in the area of children, you've got people pushing this line that everybody's going to be better up and including children if we don't get the state in. So, now, these savvy groups are not only

savvy about why being, but they're savvy about the uses of research. So, you get advocates and groups that are either doing the so-called research themselves, or they team up with other advocacy groups that present themselves as foundations, non-profits, research people. A lot of the research that's cited by doctors favored by fractured families is performed by those doctors who are making their living, not by treating patients or in research institutions,

but by doing expert witness work, often exclusively for the defense. The reality is that the

rights of white parents and the rights of white fathers in particular have never actually been under threat in this country, but not all parents are afforded equal rights. And as we talk

“about the best way to protect our most vulnerable little citizens, it's imperative that we look”

at the long-dark history of who America considers a family. True story, I was presenting in a conference recently where I got to meet a bunch of lovely listeners and one of them was so excited to let me know that she was wearing some very cute, very comfy linen pants from Quince. I really do love this brand. I've wear it all the time. My team loves Quince. My listeners love Quince. Quince has expanded their offering so much and I love going on

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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 first hand

over and over and over. This is Alan Dettlaff. I'm a professor. I'm the co-founder of the up-in movement and the author of a book called "Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System," the case for abolition. Before becoming an author and professor, Alan worked as a social worker in Texas and saw first hand the differences in how families are treated within the child welfare system. 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 and have shown that doctors will repeatedly say that it's an accident if it's a white family. But if it's a black family, confirm that it's a 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. As Alan says, no doctors are immune from bias. However, he shared with me some compelling research that caps with their advanced training could actually be an important part of the solution to racial disparities in child welfare. A 2023 paper from JAMA Pediatrics reveals that the

data suggests that caps could help reduce unnecessary CPS referrals and alleviate the racial and economic disparities in them to those interactions. One study shows that caps disagreed with referrals to CPS in about a quarter of their cases and another study found that when a cap changed the diagnosis and approximately one-third of the cases they evaluated, 81.6% of the time, they were changing the diagnosis from abuse to non-abuse. An older study found that doctors are

less likely to report abuse in families who are white and have higher incomes. One often cited report is an analysis of mist cases of abuse of head trauma from Dr. Carol Jenny Edel found that abuse of head trauma was more likely to be under-recognized in very young white children from intact families. 27.8% of the children in the study were re-injured and 40.7% suffered ongoing medical complications. The study found that four of the five deaths in the cohort could have been prevented

by a timely diagnosis of abuse of head trauma. So, if you want fewer families to be wrongly suspected of abuse, wrongly separated from their children and wrongly caught up in lengthy traumatic

court battles, part of the answer is more access to caps and if you want more children to be protected

“and not sent back to unsafe homes again, more caps. And none of this information is the secret.”

I have no doubt that Diane Neri and Mike Kicks and Bob have come across some of these same studies. Mike Kicks and Bob in particular does a great trick of bearing details in data in his lengthy pieces, far beneath the heart-wrenching parents' accounts and sad pictures. So why are these outwardly progressive journalists doing this? As a fellow white educated middle-class mom, who is statistically very unlikely to ever have my kids taken away, I have a theory.

I don't think that Neri and Hicks and Bob want things to change, because however much they might want to hedge semantically, what they're advocating for, getting rid of caps, is not only an anti-science

meaning that these decisions were in the hands of less well-trained doctors, who are more likely to report disenfranchised families. Hicks and Bob argues that CPS should listen to caps less, which the data suggest would make things worse for families of color, and worse for white children who are being returned to unsafe situations. And they're arguing that the system should be forced to entertain the opinions of abuse denialists when making their decisions, giving an off-ramp to

families who can afford it, and letting their children suffer the consequences. In short, I can only surprise that they don't want progress, they don't want forward momentum. They want to further protect the already protected class, the class that they and I belong to. I believe deeply that if you say you care about children and want to protect them,

“you have to care about all of the children all of the time. And I think child welfare abolitionists”

bring many good points to the table about what needs fixing. I think first it's important to

start out in 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 overall representation 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. 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 enslaver. So families continue to be

separated continuously. Then we see other eras like in the war on drugs where black children were separated from their parents through incarceration, mass incarceration, criminalization. We see the black baby era where black children were separated from their parents because of their mothers. 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 black 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 United States, the US, Mexico border. And I think that's a time in history where people saw how horrific this practice of separating children from their parents is. But there was so much outrage during that time that outrage actually led to the policy of the zero tolerance policy being ended. But in that entire period of zero tolerance, 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 zero tolerance is the same pain and trauma that black children are experiencing now and have experienced for centuries in this country.

“This piece from Allen really struck me because I think it gets at a huge reason why these stories”

about falsely accused white parents are impactful. Take care of Maya, shows you the pain, Beatis Children are experiencing at the loss of their mom. Hicks and Boy uses audio collected by the brights as their story is unfolding in real time to potent effect. No, it's my children, I can't fall down. I'm not gonna do that. And so we can't see our children until then, my breast pet son, you are taking him from my breast. You are responsible for taking my child away

from my breast. And the reality is, once our emotions have been hijacked in this way,

children out of our arms. Are we really going to listen to stats about how child abuse pediatricians

“rule out more cases of abuse than they rule in? Are we going to factor in that Texas children's”

and an outside expert diagnosed the Bright's son's injuries as abusive? No, we want to sympathize with Melissa Bright. Hicks and Boy knows this, and so he says here, here's a Harvard trained radiologist telling you that this nice lady didn't hurt her baby. Sure, the hospital says this doctor is an abuse denialist, but she says that's not true. Hicks and Boy manages to give

you the facts without letting you see the truth because he knows that your heart will always be

way ahead of your brain. And I want to say that I'm not immune to any of this. Children being separated from their parents will always be traumatic, full stop. On the fractured families page, there are many anguish posts from parents and lengthy court battles to regain custody of their kids. Their pain is real, and I don't doubt that there are many parents in this group who really love their kids. It doesn't mean that a doctor falsely accused them of abuse. Ironically,

“I think I have a lot more sympathy for abusive parents than most people do. As I was researching”

the families we covered this season, I looked at a lot of news coverage that came out around the time of their arrest. These were usually accompanied by mug shots of the parents, and if these stories were posted on social media, the comments were brutal. But when these very same parents were presented as innocent, with lovely photos of their children, the iron turned straight towards the doctors, who the audience had been led to believe tried to take them away. In my opinion, no good

faith conversation about child welfare can happen without acknowledging both the pain and trauma of child separation and the stakes of leaving vulnerable children with those who may harm them. Both sides of the coin are highly emotionally fraught, and while the horror of family separation has been with us much longer, Allen's work traces the roots of the current system back to child

“separation during slavery. The horrors of child abuse are something we're only much more recently”

grappling with on a societal level. The better child syndrome was published in 1962, and really for the first time brought the issue of child abuse to the national public

attention, and it got an incredible amount of attention on nightly news in the Saturday evening

post, and there were billboards about protecting children from abuse. 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 better 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 parents who are 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 investigation syndrome. What the better child syndrome paper did was launch the concept of mandatory reporting laws.

So prior to 1962, there were no mandatory reporting laws in the country. The year following it, the U.S. 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 better child syndrome, there were about five or six hundred cases of severe child abuse that

had been reported to law enforcement. By 1968, with mandatory reporting laws, and in fact, 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 physically abused and doing something about that 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 then not just widened, considerably, even conditions of the home dirty homes, things like that. By the late 1960s, became the largest form of reports that were being called in these neglect cases. The idea that a large percentage of these reports would be much better handled by a different mechanism is well supported by data. Between seven

and eight million children are reported to CPS each year. About three million of those results in

an investigation with 600,000 sub-stantiated cases a year, and about 200,000 removals a year.

neglect or failure to supervise if a perpetrator can't be identified. However, the stories about

“falsely accused parents are overwhelmingly stories of children who suffered injuries that were medically”

determined to have been inflicted. Many are about abusive head trauma cases, the most deadly form of child abuse. And as we've discussed at length, there is no reason to believe that the system targets middle-class white parents. So it's not the right lens for a critique of CAPTA.

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 U.S. And you also had publication of what people called the Moiner Hand Report, which was a report developed by Patrick Moiner Hand, 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 "tingle 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 percent of calls being made

on black families for mostly neglect-related things. And then a few years past, 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 third. 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. Congress at that time in the 70s knew all of this. People today try to talk about Capta as or what happens to black children the over-reporting 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 over-reported over-remove 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 the over-reporting of black children. Both abolitionists and medical kidnapping proponents ultimately want to overturn Capta,

but the reasons they want this and what they think should happen instead of state intervention are extremely different. And stories about middle-class white families who've had their children removed, mostly temporarily, because of positive findings of abuse, are not examples of the systemic injustice Allen is talking about. Interestingly though, they tell us about what privilege gets you in this equation, who can afford to hire good attorneys, who can pay experts to come to court,

who can rally the media and the community to their side. These disparate outcomes align with the research that black children are reported at approximately twice the rates of white children, and that these cases are more likely to result in removal of the children for longer periods of time and take longer to resolve in court. By avoiding the abolitionist conversation, people like kicks and bog gets to have it both ways. They get to give the appearance of fighting the system,

while actually only deepening the status quo, that preserves the rights of white middle-class families who can afford defense attorneys and pay thousands of dollars for a second opinion, and by completely disengaging with the actual issues, they also get to avoid any of the pushback that comes with actually trying to change things. And going back to the story of the heart family featured in Roxana Skarring's book, we see both types of failures play out. This was also an

extreme example of how willing we are to accept the narrative of even the most abusive parents,

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 had adults in their families that weren't their parents that really wanted to raise them. People tend to have strong

binaries about what it means to be a good parent and a bad parent. And the reality is there's a

lot of nuance and there are a lot of parents who are struggling and could benefit from help. As Roxana explains about one of the birth parents of the hearts adopted children. 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 caseworker since that point in time. And you know, 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 had 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, you know, 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. And 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. This is the reality of who gets their kids taken away in this country.

And it's a reality most of the media seems completely unconcerned with.

People who've never had any interaction with the system may have an impression that,

oh, CPS is there to take kids away if parents are abusing their children. And yet that accounts for, you know, this small percentage and much smaller percentage of cases, can you kind of talk about that element a little bit? Yeah. So about 75 percent of cases, so three quarters of the cases involved neglect. And that's sizeable. You know, that is the vast majority. And basically, the child welfare system is 100 percent focused on people who live in poverty. And, you know,

you actually hear a lot of stories of middle class and upper middle class families who are kids who have been in abusive situations. That felt like CPS just took a look around their house and said, oh, you're probably fine. So we know that there is a problem of like allocating attention, like what we're focused on, right? Because if three quarters of the cases are involved

“are involving neglect, and that has a lot to do with, um, can you pay your electric bill?”

And do you have food in the fridge? And like, you know, kids should live in a house with electricity and food in the fridge. But does that mean that their parents don't care for them? If they, if they are living in poverty and can't, and can't provide those things, the other piece that's really important here is that the foster system is extremely dangerous for children. So we have this idea, like you said, that the child welfare system is there to protect

loving homes. And that's, you know, that happens in some cases, and it really doesn't happen in

a lot of cases. And the data shows that going into the foster system increases your risk for abuse,

“for sexual abuse, for physical abuse. And so those are the things that I think we fail to”

reckon with when we're very focused on what parents are doing wrong, right? Because we are society generally, not just in this context, but generally is really hard on parents, right? We're really judgmental. And like you said, we don't provide support. You know, we don't provide child care. Everyone has to pay their own daycare bill, right? We are all struggling with that across economic classes, right? And then you find people who are very much struggling with poverty.

There's really no way to adequately, I mean, they're put in a possible situation, you know?

So many families are struggling. And there's plenty of research that all of this stress on parents has a multitude of negative effects on their children, not least of which putting them at higher risk for abuse. Many of the families we've talked about this season were dealing with significant hardship, domestic violence, financial struggles, addiction issues. It doesn't excuse their actions, but the best outcome wouldn't be throwing the ball in jail. It would be preventing the

abuse from ever happening. I don't want the status quo. The status quo is designed to protect people like my sister, and it has at the expense of her children. I've talked to many extremely dedicated child welfare workers and crimes against children detectives over the years, but the system isn't working to protect kids, and it's causing a lot of harm in the process. I want something better.

So what might a solution actually look like? Contrary to some of the bad faith arguments lobbied at abolitionists, much of their focus is on how to prevent these issues before the children end up in the system. Through community care and affordable child care, food, and safe housing,

“I want all those things too. I believe that every family deserves them, but what about the”

people who have all of those things and still abuse their children? What do we do about them? I think that most of us would agree that there's a line that people can cross, where they should no longer be allowed to be unsupervised around children. Or maybe you don't agree. I don't know. Tell me. I think the new one's to that is I'm not. I don't think it should be the state, the government

that makes those decisions on behalf of people. I think that when in cases where children are harmed, and obviously this is not going to be work for every case, but I think in cases where children are harmed, that the responsibility to decide what should happen to address that harm should be up to that child's extended family loved ones, network of people that love and care about their child. An example I give about thinking about abolition often is to think about

your family, your network of people that you love and care about, and imagine that a child is harmed

“by someone else in that net. I don't have to imagine. Right. What would you want to happen?”

Would you want your network of people who love and care about them to figure out what should happen and do what's best for that child to protect them from harm, or would you want the government to come and take that child away and make those decisions on behalf of the family? And here I have to pause and wonder. Did all of the involvement from CPS in the state make anything better for my sister's children? The reason our relationship with Megan became severed 15 years ago

is because CPS revealed to her that my mother had reported concerns to a doctor treating her child. After the first investigation, which resulted in no action from the state, I remember feeling like these people came in and blew up my whole family for nothing. The second investigation did lead to a dependency case, but the state lost likely compromising any possibility of criminal charges being filed in the process. And yet, all those eyes on the children slowed down a terrifying escalation.

I've seen how cases like this can end. My niece and nephew are still with my sister, but they're alive. But was there some other better way that this could have all played out?

I always start by thinking of another case that I worked on, where there was a child, a young girl

I was very new on the job and I went to interview her at school because we did it want to run the risk of scheduling an interview and then having the child be coached or threatened or something like that. I went to interview her at school. And as soon as I got there, she said, "Is this about my brother?" And I kind of deflected because I didn't want to lead her into going any particular place. I asked her some other kind of benign questions. Eventually,

asked her if anyone had been touching her inappropriately, harming her in any way. And she was very

quiet at first, and then she said, "If I tell you, will you promise that you won't take me away?"

And I froze. I didn't know what to say. And I had not encountered that before. And before I said anything, she told me everything that happened, like just blurted it out. And the whole time I was thinking, "Should I stop her?" Should I say, "I don't know what's going to happen?" And I really didn't know what was going to happen. I mean, a lot of different scenarios couldn't play out. But ultimately, then my supervisor decided that she didn't need to be removed because of the severity of the abuse.

And when I got to the their home later that day, as soon as I stepped out of my car, the girl came running out of her front door, screaming at me, "You promised you wouldn't take me away, you promised you wouldn't take me away." And I didn't understand it at that time. But what I came to later understand and understand now, that in many cases, for most children, children want the harm they're experiencing to stop, they don't necessarily want to be taken away

from their parents. Like there are two totally different things. And right now, we have a

“system where the state equates those things, that the only way to make it stop is to take the child out.”

So I always start from there by recognizing children don't want to be taken. Most children don't

want to be taken from their parents. They want the harm to stop. And we have to, the solution is to figure out some other way to make the harm stop without having to forcefully separate them. Should all of the kids featured in these medical kidnapping compendiums have been taken away? Should the perpetrators have all gone to prison? I don't know. I can tell you that as a family member, I wanted what else it's talking about. I wanted the abuse to stop them.

That doesn't mean, and I'm not saying that no child should be separated from their parents. There are children who need to be separated from their parents for their safety. I think that there should be some system, and it would probably look different in every family. I don't know that it would be like a mandated prescribed policy system. But I think there should be the ability for families communities to get together and figure out what should happen to protect

each other, to protect that child. Because I think the reality is what we kind of mentioned at

the very beginning about white families, not feeling like they should be impacted by the system, a lot of times they're not because they are figuring these things out for themselves. There is abuse that happens in white families. There are substance problems that happen in white families, wealthy white families, particularly mental health concerns. Child protective services never gets involved in those cases. But the people around them get

“together and in many cases figure out how to protect the children in those homes. That's what I think”

every family should have access to. But then that also means that every family needs access to resources and supports that cost money. So I think in many ways the solution, part of the solution, is that people have access to the financial resources that they need to get help when they need help to get treatment for substance use that's free and accessible when they want it, to get mental health care that's free and accessible when they want it. And I think if people have

access to all of those resources that they need, then families communities would be able to get together and come up with a plan to protect a child from harm when a child is harmed. Abolitionists talk a lot about the need to imagine a better system than what we have. I think there can be a desire to defend the system we have out of fear of what would happen if we didn't have it. But I like to imagine that what we have now is not the best we can do.

“Is there a way we can balance the safety and well-being of children with the rights of their parents?”

Does it have to be one or the other? I see Alan and other abolitionists as being pretty distinct from what I consider to be the parent's rights movement. But Elizabeth Bartholette for what it's worth didn't agree with me on this point. I've been dealing with those people in connection with a huge amount of my work of translational adoption of child welfare, abuse, neglect, etc.

because in abuse and neglect cases, it may remove children from their parents. And it disproportionately removes black and brown and poor children. Because that's where drug abuse and alcoholism and unemployment and other things that statistically relate to abuse and neglect occur. And they're

“against that removal. And I think they're totally into parent rights and not child rights. And I”

think they're making up the same phoney arguments that this is consistent with child interests

and they're claiming that children are always better off when they stay with their families.

So I think it's very, very similar. I really respect Elizabeth's work and I acknowledge that she's been in this arena for many more decades than I have. But still, I found a lot of common ground with the points that both Alan and Elizabeth were making. I think that's where this conversation or these ideas become difficult is because if there is not a state oversight like this, I think people have a lot of distrust that people would do the right thing that they would follow

through to protect children or do what's necessary to protect children. I think that what

where that becomes difficult though then is that the alternative to that is the system we have now,

a state, a system that prescribes that these children will be taken. They'll be put in the home of strangers. And we can't say that because we don't trust every family community to do the right thing to protect their child that we then have to revert, we have to accept what we have now. We have to accept the system that we have now that's harming hundreds of thousands every year, not just through family separation, but like you said, by not protecting children that need to be protected.

And another thing we haven't mentioned yet that you probably covered with children who are in

foster care are two to three times more likely to be sexually abused in foster care than they are

in the general population. So the system is exposing children to harm in multiple ways. So in some ways this becomes reduced to a binary kind of thing. You either completely trust everybody to take care of kids on their own with no government, oversight at all, or you have this horrible government system that takes hundreds of thousands of children away from their parents. I don't know the perfect solution to the middle of that, but I know we have to find it.

I took a lot out of both sides of this conversation and there are certainly no easy solutions, but like Allen says, we have to start figuring it out. There has to be something better than this. You said something in the book that was really beautiful right at the outset about an abolitionist

“mindset. And I think it is about breaking us out of this paradigm a little bit that we have right”

of these 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 is about creating a new society where the need for the child welfare system is obsolete. So take us there. I would start by saying that people have the right to housing that people have the right to quality public education that people have the right to

healthcare and mental healthcare and child care 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

wind 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 in the ten-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 this is 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

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 up 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, 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 work. One of the pieces of this system that I find at the hardest to imagine parting with, and something I've spent no small amount of time defending, are mandatory reporting laws.

And I put this question talent. 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 do you have any sense, like what can we, what we can can we tell sort of my listeners, like put this in a context for me, where like

I can have this conversation in a more holistic way.

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 then 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 deathly 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 things I learned early in this journey was exactly that that abuse children do not want to be taken away from their parents. And yet, and medical child abuse is specific because unlike, you know, 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, et cetera, it doesn't have any of those sort of risk factors, I suppose that we would, you know, try to, we could contextualize 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? 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 a good faith”

conversation. No, I agree completely. It's particularly complex when we're talking about these really serious forms of abuse, medical child abuse, 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

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, that then we could figure out the solutions. One of the articles Alan sent me pointed out that the reasonable suspicion of abuse standard is terminology imported from law enforcement that doesn't fit very well with medicine with all of its gray areas and differential diagnoses,

which is why this paper suggests working it out first in a medical arena in a medical way

by consulting a specialist. I asked Alan what perspective he might want to share with the many

“mandated reporters who listen to this show. 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 a 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 try 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 Esgarian, 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? And I agree with Alan that we should be asking more survivors

for their input, which in addition to her journalistic work on this is a perspective Roxanna Esgarian brings to the conversation. When it comes to mandated reporting, I think that mandated is the key piece, right? So like people can choose to report at any point, right? And should, if they feel inclined to do so, the issue with mandated reporting specifically, especially widespread, right? Like in Texas every adult is a mandated reporter. That means no adult is a safe person to disclose to

if you as a kid are not prepared ready, need time to process. There's no way, no safe way to feel that out without triggering an investigation right away. And I think that, especially for older kids, that is a big barrier to disclosing abuse. The balance with mandatory reporting is tricky as Roxanna and I discussed, because while reporting suspected abuse can be life-saving, it's not what's best for the child in every situation. And if professionals are worried about

losing their license or their job, they might not use their best judgment when reporting. And on the other hand, if doctors, the frontline for the most severe abuse cases, are worried about being sued or made examples of in the media for reporting. The consequences for the child can be catastrophic. I think there's a lot of ways to work on the laws that we have right now to make them more effective and better. You know, I think the other main thing is that it floods the system.

It's like what you're doing is putting a needle in a haystack rather than saving the report for the thing that is an act, you know, particularly like very dangerous situations, right? Because we all know, like if you see something, and yes, it's traumatizing, but if you're

“in a situation where you think someone's life is at danger, right? You're going to report,”

you need to report, you got to make the call, right? Yeah, it shouldn't be, that shouldn't be in the same bucket as all of the things people feel like they wouldn't, they don't actually think are

and the stakes are high. It's easy to feel despair that my colleagues in the media are stroking

a moral panic about child abuse pediatricians rather than engaging with any of this. Our world feels like such a mess right now, but we cannot. We must not, given to despair. It's important to hold

“an idea for about for things to be better. I do think that's important. I think that's a main component”

of the burnout, right? It's hard to look around. It's hard to be 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 land at the end of the rainbow, whatever. It's about 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 a now thing. It's basically a way of looking at the

world that helps you make decisions, right, in the current moment. And it helps you be involved as a human too, because if you're treating, if you're in your community, if you're not just working with kids, but if you know kids, if you're, 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 everyday people. It always helps me to remember that even in the midst of all this chaos,”

there are good, smart people, diligently trying to make the world better for kids, however they can. And for the people who once wore those kids, there was a doctor that Tom and I was 13 that not only saw the harm but that recognized the very likely psychological abuse that was happening behind closed doors. Dr. Smith, everything she said in her report was not just true, but like remarkably true in a way that no one else that dealt with me seemed to grasp. That's next week on the

season finale of Nobody Should Believe Me. Nobody Should Believe Me is written reported and executive produced by me, Andrea Tomlob. Our co-executive producer is Mariah Gosset. Our editor is Greta Stromquist, Story Editing by Nicole Hill, Research and Fact Checking by Erin Agai, additional research by Jessa V Randall, mixing and engineering by Robin Edgar. Our production manager is Nola Karmish, music from blue dot sessions, sound snap and slipstream.

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