Who Speaks for the Children with Elizabeth Bartholet

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“- Hello, it's Andrea and today I'm sharing an extended cut”

of my conversation with author and academic Elizabeth Bartholette. She has such an in-depth and fascinating perspective on child welfare and children's rights, and there is so much about this conversation that I am still thinking about.

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We will be right back with my conversation with Elizabeth Bartholette. (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language)

(singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language)

(singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) Professor Bartholette, thank you so much for being with us.

So if you could just start off with,

who you are and what you do? Elizabeth Bartholette recently retired from the Harvard Law School faculty and for the last three decades plus, I focused my work on child welfare, child rights,

adoption and related issues. So I wanted to start off with, previously on the show, we've covered much hasn't by proxy cases. We covered a big one that case that has been

in the headlines the last couple of years of my Kualsky case in Florida, which was the subject of a Netflix film that millions of people saw called Take Care of Maya. And in what we've come to understand is we've been looking

through that case and these other lawsuits around the country against doctors is that even if this is being positioned as a system reform movement, that it's really a parent's rights movement.

And the film Take Care of Maya starts off with this quote, it's the mother in question talking to an advocate and the advocate tells her, this is one of the most screwed up parts of the United States system period.

It's unethical and it's a moral. Parents have no rights, parents have no rights. So I wanted to ask you, do parents have no rights in this country? - 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, recognizing parents' strong constitutional rights, 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

“absolutism, because I think most people,”

most reasonable people would agree. The parents should have rights, but 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,

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 onto their children, children have no rights under the constitution, to anything and certainly not to being protected against abuse.

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 about 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 signal a change in the US 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 really anything other than threats to kill a child would be up to the parent. - Yeah, and I think that that is the quiet part that's not being set out loud in a lot of this media

about parents being falsely accused of abuse. And it's really striking that, and I know you don't know the qualsky case in particular, but this is a case where there was evidence, there was very strong evidence

that that child's life was being put at risk. And so holding that up and then many of these other cases that I've looked at have been cases of abusive head trauma where children were hospitalized and required brain surgery because of their injuries.

And because there was not criminal conviction with a jury trial, et cetera, in these cases, they're being held up as false allegations of abuse. And I'm really concerned about the sort of permission structure that that creates.

- I think you're right to be concerned. 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 leading expert scientific experts on A.H.T. who was also an expert on the research about A.H.T.

And the expert opinion among child pediatricians, and there's extraordinary near unanimity among the reputable pediatric experts that A.H.T. exists as a diagnosis. There's near unanimity on how to diagnose it.

And that it's real, and that you can tell if this child has been subjected to A.H.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, 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 is brought in an expert. And part 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 let off when they should not be.

And then there's this word being put out by 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 been lawfully convicted. - Yeah, it's really alarming.

And I think it's hard not to sort of start to connect the dots with the moment that we're in just in terms of being an anti-science anti-medicine moment.

that is organized into a group that we're reporting on called fractured families, which is a group of parents who claim to have been falsely accused of abuse and have been successful in getting legislation passed in Texas.

That specifically calls out the need for a second opinion

in abuse diagnoses and, you know, this five of the conditions that these parents are all claiming their children have. And there are, you know, a whole sort of cadre of expert witnesses that they like and share

about having a source that's in one of their private groups and they share about these experts. They say how much they cost. There's really a lot of coordination. And this has made its way all the way

into legislation in Texas and Florida.

“And I think they have been successful in rebranding”

their efforts as a social justice effort rather than a parent's rights effort, which I think is why it's getting by and from people and from journalists that it wouldn't necessarily get by.

And if it was being framed as adjacent to the anti-vax movement or the sort of extreme homeschooling movement, although I think those are, there are a lot of the same people. It's really easy to see where these movements share DNA,

but I think they've, I'm very fascinated by how they've sort of presented themselves as, oh, we're about system reform and we're about social justice for parents. They're sort of, again, the to not saying

the quiet part out loud. - Right, I think this is going on throughout the child welfare world. So I think we can have is 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, you know, education.

And so it's very powerful advocates that know how to present their theories. And I think part of the problem, two kinds of problems. So in terms of the advocacy, I think you've got parents or adults, kids or kids.

It really is hard for children to fight for themselves, okay?

So in the end, they're always depending on adults

to fight for the children. 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 boot, just like the gun rights folk.

All right, as large as the noise they make. But it's a single issue group that's highly organized. And so, for example, in the home schooling area, you get a legislator, we'll see a kid who dies at home who is supposedly being home school.

But in fact, with the blonde from school because the child was reserved by a teacher to be bruised in beaten. So the parent withdraws the child. And the child ends up dead.

As some legislator 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 homeschooling legal defense fund. And 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 body and group. So you get the pressure and the legislator is all in one direction. At the same time, this movement, parents' right movement,

broadly defined, is strong enough that they're and smart enough, savvy enough. They're funding research as well as advocacy. So in various areas I've studied, whether it's race issues in child welfare,

homeschooling, age T, a whole range of issues

You get foundations and nonprofits that believe in a parent rights. And I'm sure some of them believes

“that parents can do no wrong or at least the state”

will be worse if they'd enter the incident. That'll be worse for children. But in any event, 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 off including children if we don't get the state in. So now these savvy groups are not only savvy about

living, 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, nonprofits,

research people. And they're doing research, but it's not real research. It's advocacy research. It's designed to accomplish a policy purpose rather than to seek the truth and decide

where the truth leads in terms of policy outcomes. So in one area after another, most of my writing and research has been devoted to kind of looking at the social science in a variety of child welfare fields unpacking it

and realizing that actually most of the advocacy that pushes for these parent-friendly child unfriendly policies is advocacy research. And it can look very slick and fancy and have statistical charts.

But when you probe it, you see even if you're a non-social scientist as I am that it only superficially is what you might call research. - That's a piece that I'm really interested to unpack because there are two, or there's more than two, but there's two that are really on my radar in terms of non-profits

that look very legit.

“And they have doctors that have like fine credentials, right?”

It's not necessarily obvious quackery to the naked eye, but then you look at who founded them, who's coalesced around them, who's spending them. And one is mitochondrion, which is really sort of forwarding this idea that every parent that is falsely accused

of much housing by proxy. Abuse is actually, you know, just a child with a mitochondrial disorder. And then fractured families funds a lot of research with the Ellers Danlos Society.

And there's one doctor in particular, Dr. Hallek, who they really, they've fundraised for to keep this clinic open. They're just like, they're very actively supporting him in his research and then another one, you know, Dr. Patch. So there's sort of these like individual diagnoses

that they've fixated on that can serve as a catch-all in court, right, for anything. Well, that wasn't abuse, that was the southern thing, right? And here's our doctor that testifies about it. And here's like, look at this foundation.

“We haven't looked at all these other families”

that this has happened to, and what I can see from having, again, a source that's on the inside of one of these groups for the past couple of years. It's very obvious that they're not doing any due diligence with who they're sort of letting into the group.

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Quincy.com/believe. You can find that information in our show notes and remember the shopping our sponsors is a great way to support the show. - There's this organization called The Home School

that is going to fence fund that organizes the lobbying efforts. But it also tells all its members that if any of them part of the benefits that go with being a member is that if you are accused

of child abuse, you call HSLDA and they will give you a lawyer. And I believe they fund the lawyer. So any accusate, we don't screen, we don't tell what kind of child abuse

is there any proof of it? We just protect you against invasion by the state. Because they are similarly against any of the, basically of the child abuse protections. And second thing that comes to mind

is somewhat different. But when when I was teaching the course I taught in which I dealt with the issues, it's called the Art of Social Change. It should still be on my website

with under art of social change or under child advocacy program. And it's got my earlier courses and there was an expert on the research on AGT

“from I think he was from medical school in Minnesota”

or possibly Michigan.

And I had him twice lecture and he had amazing materials

which are also probably available on the website. But he just wanted to get a survey of like all the nation's pediatricians on whether they thought AGT was a genuine diagnosis or not and all of this stuff.

And it's on his work that I based this claim I made that it's sort of near unanimous agreement among respectable experts that AGT is a legitimate diagnosis, et cetera. - Chair point about the medical consensus.

You have consensus from the American of Academy of Pediatrics and the, I mean, all of this sort of internationally, even there's consensus on this. And yet it somehow has made it into both the courtroom and the media as, oh, there's all of this controversial,

you know, science and you're like, well, the science is not controversial. It's like people are creating a controversy around it but it's not a scientific one. And you were talking about sort of this legal defense fund

“and I think we can definitely talk a little bit about”

the connection between homeschooling and abuse because that's come up homeschooling, question has come up in a lot of our cases that we've covered. This debate has co-opted the innocence project. - Yes. - Because the innocence project

now lists shaking baby syndrome, you know, which is the older name for it, as junk science and which is so appalling to me. And I think this is where I'm talking about like, they're reframing it as a social justice movement.

- The week after this expert that I had present on AGT and my class, the week after that, I had a class in which I had somebody from the innocence program and he was on a totally different topic but he was so angry that I had had this expert the week before

as if he took advantage of being in this other class of mind to denounce all the AGT sciences, you know, completely fake and blah, blah, blah. - I mean based on what do you know? - Oh, I think it's based on the innocence project,

obviously became committed to people who had been falsely found guilty or given death sentences in that connection.

but I don't think that based on any science, it's just that I don't know because again, that wasn't supposed to be the topic of that class or I chose not to engage with the guy. Yeah, I knew they'd been co-opted.

“I think another, the other point I wanted to make”

is how differently other countries think about these things. So it's not only the case that they've all signed the convention

on the rights of the child, which basically equates child rights

with adult rights, but in the area of homeschooling, I wrote an article, which is actually, it's a chapter of a book and it appears on my publications, it's slightly more recent than the article in Arizona, on homeschooling, and it basically talks about homeschooling

in the United States in terms of the larger international picture, and basically says, we're aboriginal. I mean, every other country either for bids homeschooling all together, outlaws it, or allows it strictly regulates that there are few countries that don't regulate it very strictly,

but they're all restricted than we are. So where are the countries that, and I think it largely relates to our constitution, which is famously a negative rights constitution. So it sort of protects against state interference.

It doesn't grant people the right to have the state interfere to protect you. So that's part of why we protect adult rights against state intervention, but what children need is active intervention.

So we don't have that, but other nations have positive rights, not just negative rights, and among the most popular rights in other country's constitutions, particularly in recent decades, our children's rights, rights to education, rights to protection against abuse and neglect.

Those are the most popular rights. - And what does that look like in practice, if a child has actual defined rights?

“Because I think a lot of people actually would assume”

that children do have those rights in America. - And that's just not quite true is what you're saying. So what would it look like if we were to sort of be a little similar to some of these other pronations? - Well, it varies, so I can't, just because other nations

have ratified the convention on the rights of the child, lots of them are countries in which kids are were softs and he or he and their child soldiers. There's, so it's not gonna be a perfect correlation. I'd say if you look at peer countries,

certainly in homeschooling, there's more regulation, more protection of the child. If you look at child welfare, I don't know that many other countries that well, but I know in England, the court cases, if they're thinking about something like child abuse

or visitation, they're analyzing it in term of child rights as well as parent rights. I have one article in which I talk about the convention on the rights of the child, and I talk a bit about how different

would things look in the United States if we ratified it if we took it seriously. So it's the only one of my articles in which the title includes convention on the rights of the child, so it's easily just by.

“- Yeah, and because I think that that's where the ultimate tension here is,”

what rights do you believe that children are entitled to? And obviously, I think we're not saying that five-year-olds should have the right to vote, and we're recognizing that children are minors that they're dependent, that there are things

that they're not gonna be equal to adults, but I think like, - Man, we need to change our constitution, so we recognize child rights. I think we should ratify the convention on the rights of the child,

but those things aren't gonna be enough. How do you get a child rights movement that's at all close to parent rights movement?

Part of the problem is that children are young,

and they don't vote, and they can't demonstrate it particularly the ones that are the most vulnerable. So how do you get protection for those children? So there's some devices like having um, but some for children, every state has one,

but they tend to be really powerless organizations with limited funding and limited staff. So you're gonna have to have a lot of changes to really build up greater protection for children. - Yeah, and it's interesting that you said

that you're talking about these power dynamics, because I think that that's where the conversation about child abuse pediatricians is really off the rails, because the argument that these various lawsuits and certainly the argument,

these parents are making in the media, is these individual child abuse pediatricians are just too powerful. I don't see that.

I don't see where they're powerful.

They don't have lobbyists. They're not organized in this way. They have a professional society, but it's not, you know, it's not, it's especially well funded.

I mean, it's just close of their professional role,

They've developed a commitment to children's health

“and well-being, and that's what's motivating them.”

So it's just their expertise and their voice that people are complaining about. - Yeah, yeah. So I wanna talk a little bit about some of to kind of broaden our scope a little bit here,

as we talk about how we could better protect children, because I've really noticed that they're seeing sort of, I'm sure there's more than three, but sort of, three pretty distinct arguments, as I see it, with maybe some overlap.

And so you have this idea of like stronger protections for the children and that focus on that, and you know, possibly more state intervention, more funding for that apparatus,

and then you have the parents' rights movement,

which I think the underlying sort of principle is, and I think this is why there's so much crossover with like the evangelical movement, heritage, foundation, et cetera, is that children are essentially not humans with human rights in the same way that, in particular,

the adult men are, but that they're property of their parents, and that what their parents choose to how they choose to educate them, Medicaid them, treat them, discipline them, is no one else's business, and that a family should be a closed system. Right, so you have those two arguments,

and then you have the abolitionist argument that I think is fundamentally different than the parents' rights movement.

“And so I think the child welfare abolitionist movement,”

where people are saying we really need to move towards not a punitive system, but really look at how we can get rid of the need for all of this intervention, and focus on that. - What do you say you think those are distinctive, 'cause I think they're actually quite related?

- That's really interesting. I think mostly it's been from my conversations with people in the abolitionist movement. There are arguments seem a lot more supported by data and real lived experience, and a lot of them are,

you don't think so. - No, I think that, you were talking to someone, who's led that, and I think that all of them, no, I mean, I've been dealing with those people in connection with a huge amount of my work

of transracial adoption of child welfare, abuse, and neglect, et cetera. And I think they're a totally parent rights movement. They don't want the state intervening 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 phony arguments that this is consistent with child interest and they're claiming

that children are always better off

when they stay with their families. I think it's very, very similar. - That's really interesting, because I will tell you that in my sort of lengthy conversations with a couple of these folks,

my impression has been that they are a very minimum making a good faith argument in a way that the people who I see advocating for the medical kidnapping piece that I'm covering are just not. - And I disagree again.

I think there are several, it totally ignores the good social science doesn't footnote it, it doesn't deal with it. Marty Guggenheim, who's now probably less active, but again, totally ignores the good social science

and I think just tons of my work on racial adoption, racial disproportionality has all been dealing with those people and I think they're totally into the false science, they know it's false, they've locked up lots of social scientists 'cause they get funding

from the same foundations, Casey Foundation. So I think it is exactly the same dynamic that's just going on with home schooling. - That's really interesting. And yeah, I mean, so I want to talk about a few of these things

that you've pointed out, because maybe I'm observing them as different and maybe they're fundamentally not and maybe that's a bit on me. I have noticed that sort of like some of this stuff gets cloaked, I'm quite especially socially, like I'm quite

a liberal person, so it may be that there are things that are resonating with me about their movement, that just like the other sort of sector of the parent's rights, moving, that's mostly sort of evangelical question, just does not resonate with me at all.

So I do think it's really helpful to talk about the data and one data point that we've heard at Nazium

And so can you talk to us about, and I noticed that was something that you flagged in some of your research? So can you talk to us about what

“is the actual sort of underlying data and research on it?”

So less than 1% of the kids per year in foster care suffer abuse in neglect, less than 1%. Whereas if you look at the kids who are kept with their families after abuse in neglect is identified, but we do family preservation, we keep them there,

or if you look at the kids who are in foster care, and we return them to their biological families, somewhere between 50% and 2/3 are subject to repeat abuse in neglect. So less than 1% as compared to 50% or at abuse rates,

and yet they will talk all the time about the high rates of abuse in foster care. So it's just not-- - Where does that data research that they're using? Where does that come from?

Usually it's anecdotal, and there'll be a case of a kid who suffers in foster care, and then they'll say foster care is all--

the state's always a worse parent than the biological parent.

Sometimes they'll look at the statistics on who've been in foster care due later in life. Kids who graduate out of foster care do badly later in life. Well, those kids have been abused, neglected, kept with their biological families,

returned from foster care to their biological families, and maybe eventually freed up and put in foster care. So do they do badly later in life? - Yes, is it because of foster care almost certainly no most of the time?

- So you're sort of looking at ACE sort of ACEs that are difficult to distinguish from what happened to them to get them in foster care in the first place.

“That's why-- and you know what got them into foster care is”

almost always or at least I feel I know. Abuse and neglect a lot of suffering, a lot of bouncing back and forest. Now, these people would say that, oh, the kids were removed. When it wasn't really such a big problem. And so I go into a fair amount of that research.

I have a book, nobody's children, and where I go into a fair amount of that research in chapter three, and then in some of my books. I mean, oh, differential response. Oh, please, they're going to do so much better.

If we have these two tracks, one is voluntary, one is coercive, and, you know, again, phony research, and the decent evidence, which is hard to get, because it doesn't get funded, but the decent research indicates that no, it's more dangerous for kids

to be put on this voluntary track than on the potentially coercive track. Yeah, so that was definitely something I wanted to ask you about, because this is, you know, we've been talking a lot about a capta. And this was a major update right in 2010 to capta. So sort of incorporate this idea of differential response.

“And before that, the intensive family, the IFPS, I think,”

was sort of a similar, similar problem. So can you talk about those programs and what their sort of stated intentions were and insert what the outcomes of those programs? Well, they're all the same.

So one of the things I think I talked about in,

I think the first article that I suggested you might look at,

which was liberal dilemma. I think I talked about several of these movements. And basically, you get one movement after another that is a parent-right family preservation movement. And very often you get the movement,

you get research, you get some decent research, which shows its dangerous for children. And then finally, sometimes that movement gets beaten back. And then a new movement starts, which is the same idea but with a different name.

So, you know, for a while there was racial matching, we just make sure we don't remove any kids that can't go to racially matched families. Then we finally passed a law multi-ethnic placement act that said you can't use racers, the basis for placement.

And then you get other things. So intensive family preservation, that they had some phony research supporting it, then they've got some decent research that showed really wasn't working very well.

Then you get something else, like differential response. So it things with different names, all of which are designed to keep kids at home after abuse and neglect is identified

on the series that kids are always going to be better off

with biological parents. - Yeah, and can we sort of distinguish for me in terms of like when we're looking at research on these programs, on their efficacy,

Help me distinguish between research

that people should understand as independent and trustworthy and where that would come from and research that is maybe less trustworthy because it's advocacy research that's being funded

by an organization that wants to support a certain outcome from that research. - Well, it's hard to distinguish. I mean, there are certain people

“who I think are good legitimate research people,”

but it is hard to distinguish and that's the problem. I mean, so that the people promoting these movements can easily come up with stuff that looks like research that has slick charts and how our legislators can distinguish, how we're judged.

- Well, so how do you distinguish them? When you're saying, oh, these people are sort of using phony research and there's good research that indicates that. - Yeah, I suppose, I mean, some of it, for example,

in differential response or the intensive family preservation program, some of the research claiming the success, the criterion for success turns out to be do we succeed in keeping the child at home? - So, you've got a program that is decided,

it's a good idea to keep kids at home. Then you do stuff and then you measure, have you succeeded in keeping them at home, and you say yes, and then you have a fancy chart that shows there's a correlation,

and then you've made the claim

“that keeping them at home is better for kids,”

but you don't actually prove that. You just prove you're keeping them at home, but you've got this nice looking statistical chart. So, it doesn't take a lot of sophistication and I don't have it, I'm not a social scientist,

but I feel as if, yes, that I was able to, with a lot of work, read these things and see through. I mean, some of it is blatantly obvious.

So, on differential response, when I first started reading

some of the fancy supportive research, it has surveys of parents. So, our parents happier when they're put on a voluntary track and told that there's not gonna be any coercive intervention, and that they can go to drug treatment

if they feel like it, but they don't have to, and they might get a rent stipend, or they happier when they're put on a potential in coercive track and told they ought to go to drug treatment and that if they don't shape up,

their child might be taken away. Well, surprise surprise, many parents are happier when they're put on the voluntary track and they get a rent stipend and they don't have coercive intervention

and they don't have to go to drug treatment, and so they check off happier, and then you could produce a really slick chart that shows happiness. So, it doesn't take a lot of sophistication,

I think, to say, oh, well, that's the wrong measure.

“You should be measuring whether children are abused”

and neglected more, children are at risk, to children are dying at higher rates, but unfortunately, I think what they're doing is good enough to persuade legislators, particularly when you have one group lobbying and nobody else.

When you've got your foundations that are pouring money into child welfare stuff, cases recently, Agna McConnell Clark before, and they're all committed to family preservation. So, you know, they're pouring money into promoting these programs

as well as promoting research. And they're going into states, I mean, on differential response, I document some of this, they go into the states and they say, you know, we'll fund a study of your state for you.

And we'll pay for it all and we'll staff it and we'll produce a report to tell you whether you should be doing differential response and how well it works. And the state says, yes, and then they get a report.

And, oh, this is what we should do and look at doing better. - Yeah, I mean, I was really interested in reading some of your work about the Casey family foundation

because we had a case that we covered last season that involved billionaire philanthropy. And so that's been on my radar and all of the sort of like how influential that can be behind the scenes

and when I think sort of operates, just completely out of view for most of us. - I've had good social scientists, people that I've gotten to know over the years, say that one of them, for example, did some work

that it was considered threatening to the family preservation agenda. And she was called in by the funder

from one of these big, powerful foundations

and told if you don't change the nature of the focus where you work, we will stop funding you. I mean, it's not subtle. I've had people on good social scientists say, great article, glad I could contribute to it, please don't

thank me in your law review. I can't afford to have you name me.

And then I said, well, it's published, can I cite the published work but don't cite the draft that you, you know, the others draft to send me. So they feel threatened.

They can't do their work without funding and the funders are for the most part these huge foundations. I did a joint uped on differential response with somebody who ran a kind of media program

that was concerned with child welfare and his program was partially funded by the Casey Foundation. And after he did a joint uped with me,

critical of differential response,

he was called in and told, you know, what are you doing? We weren't you against working with that force or that woman. On and on, there are about 2,013. We're in a fair agreement here.

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Start a, yet, a kosten-losen test of Shopify.com. - In talking to this sort of abolitionist idea,

I guess the big difference I see is

whether the interest is about more community and community support or less and with the parent's rights movement that I've sort of identified with the medical kidnapping, it's this idea of with homeschooling

“and the sort of evangelical Christian thing, right?”

It's like taking your child out of the community and having fewer community members sort of involved in your child's life and being able to really restrict your child's sort of access to other ideas that may not be your ideas and sort of this idea

that like that children are not a community, like children are not members of community. And I think when I've talked to the abolitionist about what they see as sort of solutions, they are talking about with the recognition

that these things are likely very far off. Because we know there's this connection to the abuse in neglect and poverty, which obviously you've also identified, that if we had a stronger social safety net

and even when you were talking about sort of what rights do children have? Like rights like sort of this idea that children have the right to be safe in their homes. Like when I think about what rights

I would like children to have and to be preserved, right? That I would like children to have the fundamental rights to be in a safe and nerve-during home free from abuse in neglect that they should have enough to eat,

that they should have access to adequate medical care and access to education.

“And like those are things that I really believe.”

And I think that abolitionists, at least some of them, seem to really hold those things dear as well and that if we lived in a world where children had that kind of regardless of whatever struggles their parents were

going through and that if we provided that support to every child, that there would be far less family separations necessary and to my mind that's sort of what it's working towards. I just kind of wonder where you think about this

because I think what I've observed is like, especially with medical kidnapping and why I feel so egregious, is that it's not the time to talk about resources for a family prevention, et cetera, when your child's in the hospital because of abuse, right?

It's like there's a place for those prevention conversations that I think is really important. And the time is not when a child has been hospitalized because they have a brain injury from abuse. Like then we're not talking about prevention,

we're talking about a child who's already been subjected to very bizarre. Well, I recognize the way the abolitionists talk, but I think it's funny. So one of their big pitches is there's this distinction

between neglect and abuse. And yeah, we would agree that in those rare cases, where kids are beaten near to death or to death, gee, that's bad. And we should have a system that intervenes

to protect kids against that. But that's very, very rare. And overwhelmingly, the cases where kids are removed are, quote, neglect cases. And that really equates, this is, I'm speaking to them,

that equates with poverty and dirty home and social workers using white gloves and finding dust on the shelves. And that's this huge neglect category.

“So I think that is completely phony and they nobody is.”

So truth at the great majority of cases in which kids are removed are categorized as neglect cases. And typically, they would be like the case in Massachusetts

where a kid just died in home never had been removed

after three years of social workers visiting and seeing the feces on the floor,

were abusing drugs and alcohol, multiple visits,

“it's categorized as neglect and the kid dies in the end, OK?”

So neglect cases are overwhelmingly probably in the 90% range, more or less, all than neglect cases are serious drug abuse cases, drug and/or alcohol. They are not minor poverty dusty house cases.

They are serious neglect cases. I mean, of course, they're going to be mistakes, but I think it's hard to document this, but one of the pieces of evidence for this is if you look at the kids who end up dead,

kids in the neglect category end up dead at the same rate as kids in the abuse category. This is not dusty house, this is not minor neglect. It's overwhelmingly serious drug abuse. And these are the cases that the abolitionists are saying,

basically, they were saying in all the movements

I've dealt with, the racial disproportionality, the anti-transferacial adoption, the differential treatment. They're all saying these kids shouldn't be removed. We should keep them at home, we should do support. We should build up community support.

So I don't think there's any reason to think that the kind of intensive family preservation services is assuming we could build those supportive systems that those are enough to help these families. They have not been enough in the past.

And yeah, we could build better systems, but profound ongoing substance abuse is not something that just gets fixed because you're saying, we'll send a social worker to you every week.

- I mean, to your point, when you were talking about the sort of differential response that track of being six weeks of help, and I was just like, "Blas, not enough to fix anything."

It's always hard to tell.

“I think much like I think in some of these,”

I'm very focused on one piece of this, right? And I never want to focus to be the same as exclusion. And want to recognize the bigger picture. Obviously, my own experience is that, and I'm the white middle class family,

my sister was investigated twice once by the police reported numerous times. I have no idea how many times CPS has been called on her. And her children remain with her. And because we are there other family members have no rights

to see them, we are completely estranged. The evidence against her was extremely strong. And I now sort of had these opposing conversations of reunification being the mandate or not. Certainly in the cases that I've seen,

I only know one bunch housing by proxy survivor

who was ultimately separated from their abusers.

There's two cases where they've been separated. And it's very rare. It's rare that there's a criminal conviction. It's rare that children are personally separated and now are permanently separated.

And now that I'm getting into these other abusive head trauma cases and broken bone cases, it seems similar, right? And to your point about neglect, something I've noticed is we're sort of talking about how these cases get longer to the medium, right?

And the neglect case is like an abusive head trauma case, for example, where you have two parents and neither of them is talking. Neither of them will say what happened. Those often get classified as neglect

because the only criminal charge can be you failed to protect your child from this abuse because if you can't identify a timeline and a perpetrator and so to your point, I wonder about how many of these abuse cases actually get classified as neglect.

If they're being classified at hand-- - Absolutely right. And it's one of the things I write about a lot of the reasons that there's so many are classified as neglect is that it's harder to prove abuse.

So you can go into the house and you can see there's no food in the refrigerator. They're dog and cat feces all over the floor where the kids don't have clothes. They're starving.

But if they have bruises, how do you prove who did the bruise? So you can say neglect and you can't realize that it's neglect. - Like this child is something bad is happening to this child. You might identify what's happened to the child

but not who the perpetrator is. And we really only have a system that set up to deal with perpetrators. I think this idea is confronting. I think especially for liberal people, such as maybe such as myself, even though--

- Which is me too, okay. - So this is interesting that you've been identified as conservative as a conservative. And I was like, I know that doesn't seem to track-- - I mean, my life has been liberal progressive.

Civil rights lawyer and a lot of my struggles in this field has been to say to the people I've worked with all my life, hey children are the most powerless of all groups.

“You should not be taking the side you're taking.”

One of the things also that goes on this is field is that people like you and me

You have to be willing to be called a racist,

a fascist, you know, all of these things.

“You have to be willing just that is the price you pay”

because they know, they know that by calling people that they're gonna silence people. And they have successfully silenced lots of people that way. - That's so hard to grapple with because on the other hand, you have people

who are complaining about being called racist and fascists who are legitimately racist and fascists. And it was sort of said, it's like, oh, well, it's just woke culture and right. - Right. - Ironically, like those are the same sort

of parents, rights, evangelical people, who say stuff like that. - In the homeschooling area, we have teaching Nazi ideology and teaching white supremacist ideology to homeschool children and say,

we don't want them exposed any of this integration or this woke stuff or this LGBT. So you know, one comment I wanted to make about the abolition

is, so the first battle I fault I had to do

was transracial adoption.

“So they took the position that the other side,”

which has become the abolitionists, that better the black social worker statement was better that black children stay in foster care than that they go to a white family, okay? Even if, yeah, staying in foster care

until they aged out was better, then letting them be placed with often the foster parent who was already fostering them who happened to be white. In the area of international adoption, the same battles going on, international adoption

has almost been entirely shut down. So we used to have 23,000 kids coming into this country. We now have something like five or six thousand per year coming in and it's all because the good guys of the world, UNICEF, save the children

and the Dorothy Roberts' folk are all saying, "Nope, the international adoption, like transracial adoption, like all adoption, is a form of slavery and colonialism." So what's happening to those kids?

They're growing up either on the street or in institutions or abroad. Is this just death for children or it's suicide? Or it's the way kids or it's sexual slavery if they live out institutional life in other countries.

And that's what these forces that are calling people like me racist and fascist, that's what they're doing. They're saying anything is better than this removal to loving home that's something other than the home that you started in and the biology.

So I think this whole idea that biology is always better

and kids should always belong to. To me, it's a very aggressive idea. The kids should be seen as property of, as belonging to the birth parents, the racial group, the nation of origin.

No, I think kids should be seen as having rights of their own and those rights, the most fundamental rights are basically healthy, nurturing childhood because otherwise you're not going to enjoy the rights of adulthood.

“And that's what I think these people are denying.”

Now, do I agree with them that we should have a reformed world in which only people who really wanted to give birth and could take care of their kids had them and they were all wealthy enough to do that? Yes, I think that would be great.

But we don't have that world. And in the meantime, I think this other side is sacrificing children to this idea. And it's not really helping children nor do I think it's helping the larger group.

If I, I thought it, I think it'd be a tough question. If we really thought it would empower black people, poor people or poor nations to say, you can all keep your kids. If we thought that would empower them,

maybe it would be a close question, even if it was hard for the kids. But I don't see any evidence that it helps poor nations to say, okay, we're not going to take your kids. You keep your kids Brazil or Korea or Indonesia or whatever.

No, I don't think it helped Native American tribes when in 1978 we passed a law saying, okay, Native American tribes, your kids are yours. You can keep them. It was a symbolic gesture.

Congress didn't wanted to both the money to jobs or housing or economic opportunity for Native American. So we'll say, keep your kids. And that looks like, believe you need skilled looks good, but it doesn't help the larger nation

and it certainly doesn't help the kids. And I don't think any of these movements, all of which are related, they're all in them and we related, I don't think any of them help, either the larger group or the kids.

- Yeah, it's a lot to grapple with. And I think there is poor liberal person, right?

oh, like racial bias in the court system doesn't exist.

“I think it would be very hard for me to accept”

that white mothers don't get the benefit of the doubt in court in a way that like black mothers would not be afforded because of archetypes as recent as the sort of welfare queen and all of our history, right? I think it's impossible for me to think

that it doesn't bear down. Maybe, but I'll just say a lot of my work, I've done employment discrimination work and I, there's implicit bias and I, but I would say the child welfare system

is significantly different. So you've got social workers are wages proportionately black compared to other workforces and also black and white social workers are all massively socialized in social work school

and in their work environment to believe that kids should

be kept with their birth parents, they should be returned to their birth parents, birth is better, transracial adoption is bad, et cetera, et cetera.

“So I think it is a different world than many other worlds”

where we can assume this kind of biases exists. So I would encourage you, I know it's a lot to get through but to read my differential response and racial disproportionality articles which really grapple with some of the social science

and with the issues you raise. And I truly just don't think there's this distinction that you're drawing between the homeschooling world and the abolitionist world. I think that's abolitionist world is really

scarily dangerous in terms of child rights.

Do you think there is attention between an ideal situation

and the best possible situation in bad circumstances? Because I think like we actually talked in depth about transracial adoption for a previous season because we had a way to evangelical adopted mom and so we talked to someone who is that

this has lived experience and he's an expert. And he talked about not that this was bad, he loved his parents, he had a good childhood and everything but talked about sort of like here are some extra considerations

“you have to make if you're in that situation.”

- Right, it is different than raising a child that's the same race and so I wonder if some of this tension is like, yeah, I think we can all accept that like an ideal circumstance for a child would be to be born into a safe loving home

where their biological parents could raise them and that if a child is not in that situation then it's probably because of something almost necessarily because of something bad that is happened and that when we're in that situation

when a child is in that situation and you're talking about a very difficult either or. Yeah, there's might be a lot of tough things about foster being in a foster home, however, most of the time that's gonna be better than being

in an abusive home. Right, you're sort of talking about, you're not talking about perfect choices. I mean, do you think that's kind of where some of this? - I guess I have a complicated answer to that.

So I'm the parent, two of my three children are adopted, their transracial international adoptees. I'm very conscious of the parent of the challenge of raising children who have birth parents. We made an effort to meet the birth parents.

I'm conscious of the challenges of raising black and brown children when I haven't been through that experience myself. I'm conscious of, yeah, a lot of the challenges in terms of them, in terms of their experience, in terms of my ability to be as good a parent,

as I'd like to be for them. If I back off and look at the larger society, if I look at immigration, if I look at the increase in transracial marriages and interracial families overall,

I think it's a great thing for society that there are more interracial marriages. When I looked at the research on transracial adoption, so before I did my article on transracial adoption, I actually believe some of the stuff

that there must be problems because people wrote about the research as if it indicated they were problems in transracial families. So when I read the research, this completely different from the way it was described.

And it was actually amazingly positive to read the closeness between siblings of different races and these adopted families, the closeness of the families. It seemed like G and a society world wide, which is torn apart by racial and national conflicts.

Why wouldn't people think it's a good thing? To see transracial and international adoptive families that are overwhelmingly, the research shows loving good families. I mean, it may also show challenges,

but these families actually work for kids. They manage to help kids who suffered a lot

But they create these loving families

across these boundaries that are tearing the larger society parts. So overall, I actually think transracial international adoption, just like interracial marriages, immigration, all of this,

“I think our overall world would be way better off”

if we had more of this. So I'm not ready overall to think it's this

way second best kind of sacrifice alternative.

But yeah, do I want a world in which almost everybody could get pregnant or not as a matter of choice could be able to raise a child if they chose to children could be raised by the parent who gave birth to them.

Yeah, that would be a better world. And I'd like to see that. I just don't think that helping kids today get the best homes they can get in any way gets in the way of that larger goal.

“If anything, I think raising kids who are abused”

neglected kept at home when they shouldn't be kept in foster care kept in institutions means kids who are going to raise the next generation to have a lot of problems. Yeah, because we know how cyclical it is.

And I really so appreciate you having this conversation with us. I think my sort of final question is, from your perspective, you know, both your sense of research and also your lived experience, do you think that we should

be less attached to the idea of the biological nuclear family being family and that part of what might help us here is if we had a more holistic idea

“about who should be responsible for raising children?”

Absolutely. I think that we should be less attached to the idea that parents own and should govern their children to the exclusion of the state being able to protect children. And I think that what I've often called biological bias,

this idea that biology should be seen as all powerful

and determining family. We should get away from those ideas. Nobody should believe me is produced and hosted by me, Andrea Zammop. Our editor is Greta Stromquist

and our senior producer is Mariah Gossett, administrative support from Nola Karmusch. [BLANK_AUDIO]