Sixteen current and former employees of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) have filed an amicus brief as part of a lawsuit trying to stop Gov. Greg Abbott from using the family police — a more accurate term than child protective services — to persecute transgender children. This is the money quote:
“Professionals at DFPS did not enter the child protection profession to remove children from loving homes with parents or guardians merely because they follow medical advice and a doctor’s care, only to place them in a foster care system that is riddled with actual abuse, sexual assault, and even sex trafficking…”
I emphasize that last line: “riddled with actual abuse, sexual assault, and even sex trafficking.”
Courtesy of Richard Wexler
Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
Among them, the 16 workers spent 129 years at DFPS. Most were there for at least five years. Some were frontline caseworkers, some were supervisors, at least two were managers. Six are still on the job.
Yes, they did the right thing in coming forward. Yes, it took courage for those who left their jobs. But consider what these workers are confessing: They freely admit that day after day, year after year, they took children from their parents and consigned them to “a foster care system that is riddled with actual abuse, sexual assault, and even sex trafficking.”
With this statement, the ultimate insiders have called out the claim that abuse in foster care is rare for the lie that it is. Abuse in foster care isn’t isolated — the system is riddled with it.
But that begs two questions: Why did all those workers keep throwing kids into a system they knew was riddled with abuse — and why did they only speak up now?
The answer seems obvious: When Abbott issued his order, suddenly it was white middle-class kids who were at risk of being placed in the system the caseworkers admit is so horrible.
Until now, such horrors were inflicted almost exclusively on poor children, especially poor children of color. And as long as that was the case, there were no mass resignations, no big lawsuits challenging needless investigations and needless removal — and no amicus briefs by angry current and former caseworkers speaking out against it.
Oh, there was one lawsuit. It was one of those great big class-action McLawsuits brought by the group that calls itself Children’s Rights. The litigation is still underway. But, as we predicted when the suit was filed, it has done no good because it avoided the issue of needlessly tearing apart families. In the years since it was filed, some awful institutions closed but, because there is no requirement to stop taking away children needlessly, children wound up warehoused in office buildings and hotels.
The current and former workers are speaking up now even though the horrors inflicted on transgender kids and their families are actually less than what is routinely done to poor and nonwhite kids. Parents of transgender kids have gotten ample warning before the caseworker comes to the door, and they are treated with compassion by caseworkers who know they shouldn’t be investigating these families at all. So far, at least, no transgender child has been taken away from their parents as a result of Abbott’s persecution. The point of making this comparison is not to diminish the suffering inflicted on these families; only to note that the suffering inflicted by typical investigations is worse, yet there is no comparable outcry.
• When DFPS caseworkers took the children of these parents from their loving home because of their makeshift housing arrangements, where was the outcry? Where was the lawsuit? Where were the mass resignations?
• When DFPS caseworkers took away five children from their loving home because their father was panhandling, where was the outcry? Where was the lawsuit? Where were the mass resignations?
Of course, the caseworkers who filed the amicus brief might argue that the examples above notwithstanding when they took all those other poor children, they were right to take them away. They may claim that, unlike the white middle-class parents of transgender kids, every one of those poor and/or nonwhite parents really was abusing their children. But then they need to explain why in Texas, Black children are in foster care at a rate nearly double their rate in the general child population — an even worse disparity than the national average.
As the Austin American-Statesman reported:
Two Texas studies conducted in 2008 and 2011 found that even though African-American children were considered at lower risks of maltreatment than white children, CPS workers were more likely to remove an African-American child from the home.
And no, it’s not because of conservative ideology. In the liberal bastion of Austin, Black children are nearly eight times more likely than white children to be taken.
They also need to explain why, for more than two-thirds of children in Texas foster care there was no allegation of abuse, and for 93%, there was an allegation of neglect, which often is confused with poverty.
What these current and former caseworkers really have done is given us a lesson in whose lives matter — and whose don’t.
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Richard Wexler is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
