In this episode, Albany Law School Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic Dale Margolin Cecka joins us to discuss anonymous reporting to Child Protective Services and the investigation involving former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his family. Dale also discusses her recent law review article, Don’t Just Ask the Kids: Toward a More Deliberate Approach to Child Advocacy , and her longstanding work examining the use of anonymous reporting in the child welfare system. The conversation explores how anonymous allegations can trigger intrusive CPS investigations, the constitutional questions raised when investigators arrive at a family’s home, and what happens when parents refuse entry or interviews. Dale also discusses how common these investigations are, whether anonymous reporting actually helps identify child abuse, what parents can do if CPS arrives at their door, and what reforms could help prevent the misuse of the child welfare system. The EPPiC Broadcast is hosted by Michael Ramey, President of the Parental Rights Foundation. Stay informed on parental rights news by signing up for email alerts at https://parentalrightsfoundation.org/get-involved/ .
Sometimes success looks like somebody else’s news article. Such was the case last week when Lauren Peace and Teghan Simonton of the Tampa Bay Times released their investigative report, “Hillsborough’s Foster Agency Celebrates Keeping Families Intact. It Separated Hundreds Off the Books.” If you’ve been following us for any length of time, you know a lot of the work of the Parental Rights Foundation happens in coalitions, and a lot of it happens behind the scenes. Part of that work was drafting a model bill with the Coalition to End Hidden Foster Care to preserve families’ rights when they’re facing the kind of separation Peace and Simonton wrote about. See, while Hillsborough, Florida, celebrates having fewer children in foster care, it turns out they’ve only lowered those numbers by sending children to live with relatives instead. The parents had no more say in it than if the children were taken to foster care, although it happens under a guise of “consent.” Parents sign the paper, but only because they’re threatened with losing their children to foster care if they don’t. And who wouldn’t choose to send their children to live with grandma or an uncle if the only other option is a stranger? But this form of “Hidden Foster Care” robs families of crucial legal safeguards. They don’t ever get their day in court. The caregivers don’t get supports that regular foster families do. And often there is no exit strategy, no path by which the kids eventually come home. All of these problems are highlighted in the Times article. They’re problems our model bill seeks to address. And they’re problems we’ve been highlighting for years, both in this email newsletter and on our EPPiC Broadcast podcast, which launches its thirteenth season on Tuesday (September 8). In fact, three of the experts quoted in the Times article have been guests on our podcast already: Listen to Andrew Brown’s episode on Child Welfare Reform bills in Texas Listen to Josh Gupta-Kagan’s Child Welfare analogy from Star Wars Listen to Shanta Trivedi’s talk on the hidden harms of family separation That these experts have been on our podcast and are also featured in the Times article is no accident. No, I don’t mean that the Times writers came to our podcast site looking for experts to quote. (I suppose they could have, but I have no evidence that they did.) But these experts, like your Parental Rights Foundation, have been working tirelessly for years to call attention to the problems of Hidden Foster Care. Just like us (and in concert with us, as it were), they have been working to change the narrative. Now, this article in The Tampa Times is the latest proof that our efforts are working. See, so much of our work in the field of child welfare reform is about shaping the narrative. When I started here, “everyone knew” that if CPS came knocking on your door, you must have done something wrong. There was shame in just being investigated. But over the last decade and a half, more and more people are waking up to the reality: five of every six CPS investigations nationwide are ultimately closed as unfounded or unsubstantiated. Five times out of six, the family that was investigated had done nothing wrong. That’s what changing the narrative looks like: it’s taking us from “everybody knows you must’ve done something wrong” to “everybody knows innocent families get investigated, too.” Only, with hidden foster care, it’s a little different. With hidden foster care, it takes a change of narrative for there to be any narrative at all. The practice is, after all, hidden. It’s off the books. And it’s off the public radar. It is a major win that a paper the size of The Tampa Times is talking about it at all. And that’s just the kind of change we’re looking for every time we invite Andrew, or Josh, or Shanta back on our podcast. Every time we talk about the problems of hidden foster care, it’s with the hope that an investigative reporter might hear something worth looking into and find it happening in their own backyard. I can’t claim that’s what happened in this case. But I can promise you we will continue to do our part, both to call attention to the problem on our podcast, and to offer solutions through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and in your state legislature. Thank you for standing with us to protect children by empowering parents, and by bringing hidden foster care into the light of day.
Every year in the United States, more than 50,000 children lose their rights and access to their own parents through a process myopically called “termination of parental rights,” or TPR. A proposed bill in Pennsylvania, House Bill 133 , looks to address this problem in a modest way: by providing a process by which TPR can be reversed in certain situations. Not all circumstances lend themselves to this kind of reversal. First, after the passage of time, the parent must show that the underlying problems that led to the TPR order have been addressed. Parents who lost their children due to addiction, for instance, might need to show that they have successfully completed treatment and remained sober for some period of time. Second, the child must still be in need of a permanent home. Children who have been successfully adopted will not suddenly be uprooted from their new home and sent back to their parents. But children still languishing in the foster care system can be sent home with the court’s approval. Right now in Pennsylvania, a child can bounce from placement to placement and ultimately age out alone, even when there is a fit and loving parent just waiting to bring them home. The courts there have no path, no legal authorization, to return that child to a parent after TPR. Pennsylvania is not the first state to tackle reinstatement of parental rights. California passed the first such law in 2005 and ten states had passed similar statutes by 2010. Today, twenty-six states have some kind of parental reinstatement law on the books: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania HB 133 was introduced by Rep. Rick Krajewski (D-Philadelphia) in September of last year. The bill has fifteen cosponsors, including one Republican, Rep. Sheryl Delozier of Cumberland County. In legislative parlance, that 14-to-1 ratio makes this a “partisan bill,” Delozier’s support notwithstanding. But it shouldn’t be. Parental rights are a vital interest to all Americans, regardless of party, and restoring those rights whenever possible should be important to those on both sides of the aisle. Fortunately, support for the bill was bipartisan when it counted: the bill passed the 202-member Pennsylvania House of Representatives in June by a vote of 191 to 11. Every Democrat and 89 of 100 Republicans voted in favor. Now the bill is in the Senate, where it was referred to the Judiciary Committee on June 25. Frankly, I’d love to see TPR abolished entirely. Terminating parental rights should at least be used as a last resort, when the compelling governmental interest in a child’s safety cannot be met by any other, less restrictive means. (If parental rights are fundamental rights— and they are —then shouldn’t the termination of those rights require the ‘strict scrutiny’ standard accorded to other fundamental rights?) This is a conversation change that will take some time to bring about. Legal scholars Michael Farris and Vivek Sankaran contributed to it with their own discussion in season nine of our EPPiC Broadcast podcast. Now Krajewski’s bill provides another opportunity to move that conversation forward. If you live in Pennsylvania and your state senator is on the Senate Judiciary Committee , please take a moment to reach out and encourage them to take up HB 133 in committee and vote in favor. Urge them to recognize that the rights it would restore are important to all families , Republican and Democrat alike. If you don’t live in Pennsylvania, look for your state on the list above. If it’s not there, perhaps the effort could be taken up in your legislature in the coming session. Why not ask your state lawmaker to look at HB 133 and consider bringing the same law here? Working together, we can shift the conversation, and we can start to bring the children home—in every state. Thank you for standing with us to protect children by empowering parents through reinstatement laws like the one being discussed in Pennsylvania this year.
Last week I attended the policy summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an association of conservative policy organizations, private sector organizations, and state lawmakers, to present the need to take up reform legislation. Specifically, I presented the need to replace “anonymous reporting” with “confidential reporting” to child abuse hotlines. The following is taken from…
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Ideas that take root in the United Nations have an unsettling tendency to eventually make their way into America’s courtrooms. That’s why the Parental Rights Foundation submitted a comment to the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Child Privacy last month, urging respect for the privacy of the child’s family and home, and not just the…
The post Do Children Have a Right to Family Privacy? appeared first on Parental Rights Foundation.
The second season of the Parental Rights Podcast launched Tuesday, under a different name: the EPPiC Broadcast. Launched in January of this year, the Parental Rights Podcast’s first season featured such guests as the Jennifer Pelletier family, law professor Maxine Eichner, New York City activist Joyce McMillan, and constitutional law professor William Wagner. Season one…
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