This is a very well written piece on the Adoption Safe Families Act, including its background which has been omitted from any main stream media coverage.
I cringe each time Hillary Clinton touts her child welfare partnership with Tom Delay.
Selling chattel is the oldest form of survival.
Enjoy. I surely did because there are no civil rights in child welfare.
We all know about the crime law and the welfare law. But she pushed a third law that’s just as bad – and she’s still bragging about it.
Let me get three things out of the way right at the top: I run a small nonprofit child advocacy organization. Often I repost items from that group’s blog here. This is NOT one of them. I’m speaking only for myself.
- I will vote for Hillary Clinton over any Republican. Poverty is at the heart of almost every problem in child welfare, and while I don’t know that Hillary will make that problem better, the Republicans will make it much worse.
- Since foster care has not become an issue in the campaign, I don’t know if Bernie Sanders’ views are any better than Hillary Clinton’s.
But Hillary still needs to account for the awful laws she supported during her husband’s presidency. Michelle Alexander did a great job in The Nation calling her out for two of them, the welfare law and the crime law. (I disagree with Alexander’s ultimate conclusion – she says she’s “inclined to believe” it would be better to form a third party. That strikes me as self-indulgent, in the sense Susan Faludi suggests in the course of doing the best job I’ve seen of making the case for Hillary.)
But there is a third law Hillary backed that was just as bad as the other two. And unlike the other two, no one can say “that was Bill, not Hil – don’t blame her for what he did.” This law was pushed by Hillary. And while she’s backed away from the crime bill, she still brags about this law. When she says “I worked with Tom DeLay, one of the most partisan of Republicans, to reform the adoption and foster care system,” this is the law she’s talking about.
The law is called the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). But that’s one of those Orwellian titles Congress loves. It’s not about adoption and it’s not about safe families. Passed in 1997, one year after the welfare law, it had exactly the same target. ASFA was about demonizing impoverished women, especially women of color, and taking away their children.
Here’s what ASFA did:
- ASFA encouraged a take-the-child-and-run mentality on the frontlines of child welfare. Thousands more families, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately families of color, were destroyed by wrongful removal of the children.
- Instead of reducing the foster care population, ASFA increased it, trapping thousands more children in a system that, according to one major study, churns out walking wounded four times out of five.
- ASFA effectively turned the child welfare system into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.
- And when the army of childless yuppies didn’t show up to adopt in anywhere near the numbers predicted, ASFA created a generation of “legal orphans” with no ties to birth parents and no adoptive homes either — probably at least 100,000 more such “legal orphans” than had ASFA not become law.
ASFA encouraged the misuse and overuse of foster care in much the same way as the crime bill encouraged mass incarceration. And just as the crime bill hurt entire communities of color, so does ASFA. As Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in her book Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, the removal of all these children “disrupt[s] the family and community networks that prepare children to participate in future political life.” And this needless removal of children reinforces the very stereotypes about Black families that are used to excuse such removals in the first place.
It happened because ASFA was built on a foundation of false premises:
False premise #1: Any parent who loses a child to foster care is a sadist, a brute, or a hopeless addict who “puts drugs ahead of the children.”
Fact: Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect; other cases fall between the extremes. So it’s no wonder that two massive studiesinvolving more than 15,000 typical cases found that children left in their own homes fared better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.
False premise #2: An earlier federal law, passed in 1980, requiring “reasonable efforts” to keep families together supposedly led to some children being left in dangerous homes and other children languishing in foster care.
Fact: The law did nothing to change the federal financial incentives that encourage foster care and discourage better alternatives. So the number of children taken from their parents kept right on increasing in almost every year after that law was passed. And though known cases of child abuse peaked in 1993, entries into foster care still kept going up. The reason children languished in foster care was the failure to make reasonable efforts to keep families together.
Meanwhile, in 1994, soon-to-be House Speaker Newt Gingrich made his notorious proposal to consign poor people’s children to orphanages. Republican polling guru Frank Luntz sent House Republicans a memo telling them they could get what they wanted – if they stopped using the O word.
So suddenly, the Republicans started framing the issue in terms of adoption. They told us millions of childless Americans were desperate to adopt foster children but a Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy supposedly was trapping the children in foster care.
The Republicans knew better; a lot of Democrats were suckered. ASFA passed nearly unanimously – Bernie Sanders voted for it, too.
By 2000, one of the authors of ASFA, Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, couldn’t resist a little gloating. As he explained to the New York City publication Child Welfare Watch
Initially, this was just supposed to be a safe families bill, not really an adoption bill at all. The adoption component was a way of sanitizing the bill, to make it more appealing to a broader group of people. Adoption is a very popular concept in the country right now. [Emphasis added.]
ASFA blows huge holes in what little was left of the “reasonable efforts” requirement. It pays states bounties of thousands of dollars per child for adoptions over a baseline number. And since the states can keep the money even if the adoption fails, it encourages quick-and-dirty slipshod placements.
Most important, ASFA sent a message to the child welfare frontlines: Rush to take away more children. And it sent that message to a system permeated with class bias andracial bias. So even as child abuse continued to decline, the number of children in foster care on any given day kept increasing, peaking in 1999. It didn’t fall below the number when ASFA became law until 2003. The number of children taken away over the course of a year kept increasing until 2006. Now, after slow declines, both figures are increasing again.
Notwithstanding all the talk, and the bounties, adoptions increased marginally, while the number of “legal orphans” children who languish in foster care for years and then “age out” with no home at all, soared 40 percent.
As I said, a lot of Democrats were suckered. I remember in 1997 being lectured on how horrible any mother who lost children to the system must be, in terms worthy of the worst Republican stereotypes – but this lecture came from a staffer for Sen. Ted Kennedy.
But there was one Democrat who knew or should have known at the time that the premises behind ASFA were false. And she certainly should have realized by now that the law has backfired. That is the Democrat who did more than any other to push ASFA through Congress:
Hillary Clinton.
Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©
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