The problem is, Commissioner Spence is a Harvard Law School graduate who appears to subscribe to the “social eugenics” implicit in ASFA. {The so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act] See: http://www.casanet.o…
A major change in ASFA was the weakening of the requirement that families receive services before losing their children.
For an excellent analysis of ASFA: http://www.nccpr.org… Note the frequent confusion of poverty with neglect.
Under ASFA there is a new provision where families can be “bypassed” and children placed directly on a permanency [i.e. – adoption – track].
Under Commissioner Spence, currently, only 20% of families receive any services at all, and a layer of “out sourced ” private consultants controls access to services and placements. This concerns me a great deal and I believe that a true commitment to families and social justice would be better served by a change of commissioner for DSS.
Currently, DSS is far more interested in adoption than in strengthening families, at least based on my experience in the field. Children are not sacks of groceries to be picked up in one place, and set down in another. Kinship, ethnicity, and heritage also have value and are in my view critical in personality development. Merely moving children to “a better class of people” by taking them out of their birth milieu in my experience has often added to the trauma a child faces, and led to termination of parental rights when the parent was ready willing and able to care for the child albeit in a far more financially stressed household than the adoptive parents.
Often, it appears to me that poverty is seen as neglect by the advantaged elite. Homelessness is not neglect, and the Unicef finding that the United States provides the worst support to parents and families in the developed countries is born out by the meagre services and condescending, punitive treatment families of color, or who are impoverished receive all too often in this state.
… why ASFA is “social eugenics”. And why Harry Spence’s being a Harvard Law grad has anything to do with that.
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And it seems to me that in adoption, “safety, love and support” should far outweigh “kinship, ethnicity and heritage”, even if you’re right about the possible traumatic effects of neglecting the latter. I have to imagine that many adopted kids have been through some significant trauma anyway.
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I’m willing to be proven wrong.
I think the tone of my post was strongly affected by the fact that I spent most of the Friday the 13th, Saturday the 14th and today, Sunday the 15th at the American Bar Association’s 12th National Conference on Children and the Law, which was jointly sponsored by the ABA Center on Children and the Law and the Harvard Law School Child Advocacy Program (CAP).
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The introduction to this conference was given by Lewis [Harry] Spence, the current Commissioner of DSS. I heard no commitment to family preservation in what he said. If someone else who was at the conference and reads this disagrees, I would love to hear another perspective.
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My comments also have deep roots in the number of child welfare cases I have handled, some pro bono, some private, some by court appointment to represent a child or parent and some as a guardian ad litem. DSS never involves the parent or parents, parent’s counsel, or any of the parent’s providers [wlinicians, etc.] in developing the so-called “Service Plan” – and the vast majority of service plans are all tasks, no services, no supports.
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Also, the culture of CAP at Harvard seems to be strongly pro adoption, as opposed to having an equal – or even substantial – support for family preservation by good social service case work and providing real support of any kind for financially stressed families.
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As a reminder, whether it is housing, education, health care, or support for working parents this country, the USA, is at the bottom. For that information, in detail: http://rawstory.com/…
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For example, Finaland pays a stay at home parent “the average weekly wage” to ensure parent child relationships, to stay home and be a full time parent. I have had judges terminate parental rights, while subsidizng an adoption, saying that the birth parent has to work, and the child is better off with a foster/adoptive parent who is full time.
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The public may believe all children are removed from parents only for heinous abuse and neglect. This is just not the case. Being homeless “too long” is enough to lose your children.
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As for “social eugenics”, I heard many members of the academic community make statements that, at least to my ears, seemed to support the philosophy of social eugenics. Here is a social eugenics web site: http://www.eugenics…. This is a very live movement.
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The idea is that those who are better educated, healthier, and wealthier deserve to reproduce, and those who are not well educated, or have lower IQs or other disfavored qualifications should not only NOT reproduce, but it would be better if the children of “defective” or “less than” folk were raised by their betters.
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When I hear an academic, with the apparent support of the Harvard sponsors of this conference, discuss the possible ways to bypass – and increase the bypass – of the provision of services to the unworthy poor with adoption by “better families”, it sounds like social eugenics to me. The specific program was “Coercive Intervention at Birth and in EArly Infancy: New Initiaqtives, Their Constitutionality, and the Policy Pros & Cons” James Swyer, Professor of Law at William & Mary was passionate about the appropriateness of removal at birth with no services for those children whom he felt would have their best interests served by never knowing their parents. He felt quite comfortable discarding entire classes of folk, including “the mentally ill”. Yes, I was greatly troubled.
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Adoption in and of itself is neither good, nor bad; it is a solution to the creation of legal orphans, or mass die-offs, such as that occuring from HIV in some countries.
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ASFA is the first federal statute to establish the bypass language, and also further weakens reasonable efforts while making the train ride to adoption faster, and providing a bounty to any state for adoption and funding for foster care, but no funding for services such as therapy or transitional housing.
at William & Mary Wythe Scool of Law, Williamsburg, Virginia
Many parents and potential kinship placements offered safety, love, and support but lost their children anyway. I cannot name names of “my” cases, but Dontel Jeffers and his grandmother seem to me to be a very public example.
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Again, that does not make adopting parents evil – but there are many myths in action here, and parents who have their children taken may be entirely capable of safety, love, and support…even if they actually needed short term help with housing, or a similar issue.
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Babies wind up “on the adoption track” in the United States – and often not because there was abuse or neglect.
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The statistics are certainly concerning. One presenter at the same conference showed the rate of removal in one California County [adjusted for population] was only 10% of that in another; the variation state by state is enormous…and abuse and neglect are unlikely to vary by 100% or more between Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, say.
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There is a lot more information here: http://www.nccpr.org…
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Anyway, thanks for asking and I apologize if I have gone on too long in reply.