INNOCENTS LOST TO SHODDY JOURNALISM
A Response
to the Miami Herald from
the
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
June,
2014
INTRODUCTION:
WHY THE HERALD STORIES HARM CHILDREN
In March, 2014, the Miami Herald published a series of articles called “Innocents Lost.” The central claim of the stories is this:
The
children were not just casualties of bad parenting, but of a deliberate shift
in Florida child welfare policy. DCF leaders made a decision, nearly 10 years
ago, to reduce by as much as half the number of children taken into state care,
adopting a philosophy known as family preservation. They also, simultaneously,
slashed services, monitoring and protections for the increased number of
children left with their violent, neglectful, mentally ill or drug-addicted
parents.
The
result: Many more children died.
This claim is almost entirely
false. Indeed, it is a repeat of The Big
Lie of child welfare -- that family preservation and child safety are at odds
and doing more to keep families together makes children less safe.
To bolster this error, the lead reporter
for the series, Carol Marbin Miller, and her colleagues have distorted data, taken information out of
context, gotten time frames wrong, and systematically left out facts that
contradict their point of view. We
document all of this, in detail, in the critique that follows.
Miller didn’t do this out of a desire to
sensationalize. She didn’t do it to “sell newspapers” (or generate
pageviews). We know Miller well and we
know she sincerely wants to make children safer. But that does not make her failings any less serious.
If Miller’s claims were true the series would
have been a huge success. In the first
full month since the series appeared the number of children torn from their
families in Florida skyrocketed by 40 percent.[1] No doubt the Herald will claim this makes children safer.
But it does nothing of the kind.
THE
HERALD STORIES HAVE MADE CHILDREN
LESS SAFE
The problem with a rush to needless
foster care is not that it hurts parents, though of course it does. The problem is that it hurts children.
It hurts
children because removal from their homes is so inherently traumatic that two
major studies of 15,000 typical cases
found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no
help fared better, on
average,
than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.
The Herald, and some readers of this
rebuttal, might respond: That’s too bad, but what else can we do to save
children from the kinds of horrors described in the Herald stories? But the
horrors described in the Herald stories
involve only a tiny fraction of the cases seen by workers for agencies like the
Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) and its counterparts across
the country. No one disputes that
children in these situations should be removed from their homes.
Where the Herald errs grievously is in claiming
the reason these children were not removed was because of some overarching
philosophy of family preservation. The
real reason, discussed below, is very different.
Typical cases are nothing like the horror stories described
in the Herald series. Far more often, they involve workers confusing
poverty with neglect. (See these NCCPR
Issue Papers for details: http://bit.ly/1nwOFn8; http://bit.ly/1tjMDqg.) That very fact helps explain those study
findings – the ones that conclude that, in typical cases, family preservation
is a far better option for children.
All that harm of
foster care can occur even when the foster home is a good one, as a majority
are. But study after study has found abuse in
one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, and the record of group homes and
institutions is worse.
Most
of all, the massive needless removal of children to foster care hurts children
by so overloading caseworkers that they have less time to find children in real
danger. That is the actualreason for the
failures documented in the Herald stories.
All over the country, these kinds of foster-care panics – huge surges
in child removals in the wake of reporting like that of the Herald – have been followed by increases
in child abuse deaths. And contrary to the Herald’s claim, that also has been the case in Florida.
Indeed, what is happening now is tragedy
repeating itself; a replay of events that took place in 1999 – and an
undermining of what had been one of the nation’s most successful efforts to
reform child welfare and make children safer.
THE
CONTEXT: KATHLEEN KEARNEY AND THE FOSTER-CARE PANIC OF 1999
A decade ago, the state of Florida was
the prime national example of failure in child welfare. News
organizations across the state flocked to Florida after it was revealed that a
foster child had been missing for 14 months – and was presumed dead – before DCF
even noticed.
In fact, NCCPR had predicted the
collapse of the Florida system in 1999, shortly after Kathleen Kearney, a
former Broward County judge, was named to run DCF.
Kearney’s approach to child welfare
could be boiled down to a single sentence: Take the child and run. During
her first year as DCF Secretary, the number of children torn from their homes
soared by 50 percent, the worst statewide foster-care panic we’ve
ever seen – though the one underway now comes close. And entries into
foster care stayed at this obscenely high level for seven years.
When the data are examined in full, not
selectively as the Herald has done,
it is clear that as entries into foster care soared, child abuse deaths
increased – as we noted above, this is a pattern seen across the country. This should come as no surprise. The real reason workers sometimes leave
children in dangerous homes is that those workers are too overloaded to
investigate any case properly. A
foster-care panic only overloads them some more.
NCCPR issued report after report on
Florida’s failure. And ultimately those reports, and other factors had an
impact.
A new governor, Charlie Crist, brought
in new leadership. First Bob Butterworth and then George Sheldon reversed
course and embraced safe, proven approaches to keeping families
together. Independent
outside evaluations found that the reforms improved child safety. The New
York Times did an in-depth
story on the state’s remarkable turnaround.
Child safety improved and, again,
contrary to recent claims by the Herald,
child abuse deaths decreased.
If anything, there is a need for more
such reform. Even in 2009 and 2010, when entries into care were at their
lowest, Florida’s statewide rate of removal still was 10
percent above the national average, and significantly above the rate
in states that take, proportionately, far fewer children – including the very
state that the Herald now singles out
as a model. So the notion that some kind of pendulum swung too far toward
preserving families is a myth.
But ever since Butterworth and Sheldon
changed course, opponents wedded to Kearney’s discredited approach have tried
to undermine the reforms. They’ve found an eager ally in Miller, the
longtime reporter on the child welfare beat for The Miami Herald. Miller is a skilled and tenacious
journalist. But somewhere along the line Miller went from reporter to
advocate. She decided that she knows so
much about Florida child welfare that she has the right to draw the conclusions
herself, instead of giving readers all the information they need to draw their
own conclusions.
That’s why in 2011 we created a website,
www.heraldvsfacts.blogspot.com in an effort to
set the record straight.
“Innocents Lost” repeats the same
failings of Miller’s earlier reporting:
● Data are taken
out of context. Data that would
contradict Miller’s thesis are omitted by choosing only start and end points
that support Miller’s claims.
● Similarly,
Miller misstates the time frames concerning when Florida DCF embraced a
take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, and when it was doing more to
keep families together. She draws
conclusions based on what DCF officials said, rather than the data that reveal
what they actually did.
● Miller and her
colleagues did their own examination of deaths during the years that, she
claims, DCF was emphasizing family preservation. They conclude there are more deaths than
shown in official statistics. But they
do no such analysis for the years in which the take-the-child-and-run approach
dominated the system, making an apples-to-apples comparison impossible.
● Miller
attributes a drop in deaths of children “known to the system” (an inconvenient fact
that contradicts her entire thesis) to a narrowing of the definition of
“neglect” – but never mentions that, earlier, the definition had been vastly
broadened. The change Miller cites
simply returned the definition to a middle ground.
● The stories rightly
point to Alabama as a model of doing child welfare right – but chose not to mention
that Alabama’s success is a result of doing far more, not less, to keep
families together. Indeed, Alabama takes
away children at one of the lowest rates in the nation, a rate 20 to 40 percent
lower than Florida, depending on how the data are calculated. (NCCPR can provide full details on rates of
removal in different states to anyone interested.)
● Florida has a
commendably broad open records law. But
instead of using this law to examine a statistically-valid random sample of
cases, in order to see how and how often the system errs – in all directions –
the Herald looked only at deaths of
children previously known to DCF. In
story after story, the Herald
isolates a few such cases and generalizes, with no evidence that the problem
cited permeates the system. No one would
laud an article on air travel safety that looked only at crashes, and failed to
gauge the overall record of safe flights.
Just as air travel is the safest form of transportation, family
preservation is the safest intervention for the overwhelming majority of
children, the overwhelming majority of the time.
[1] To
view the most recent entry into care data, click on this link on the Website of
Florida’s Center for Child Welfare: http://centerforchildwelfare.fmhi.usf.edu/Datareports/TrendReports.shtml
Then click on Child Welfare Services Trend Report.
