We Were Once a Family

You know one thing That really pisses me off. It's the way we handle child welfare in America. Periodically on the state or national level parents will do something totally horrendous resulting in their child(ran)'s death. The Media operating under the mantra of it bleeds it leads (and attracts listeners/viewere/readers enhancing cash flow) will saturate coverage with grim and grizzly details. Their audience will become outraged and demand that somebody DO SOMETHING NOW!!! Agencies and legislators will fast track policies and procedures to appease the public, many of which will do more harm than good. And the public will be sedated until the next horrific event.
What I appreciate most about Roxanna Asgarian's We Were Once A Family is that it didn't fall into that pattern. It very well could have. The central incident, a couple driving off a cliff with their six adopted children, would have outraged just about anyone, especially with the children being heavily sedated beforehand hinting at premeditation. And after the tragedy evidence emerged that contrary to the idyllic life style depicted by one of the moms on social media, the children actually experienced deprivation, abuse, and increased isolation. By sticking to the customary narrative Asgarian would have more than enough material for a book. Fortunately that wasn't the book she wanted to write.
"In the media frenzy over the Hart family tragedy, the deeper story got largely overlooked. While many of the big stories focussed on Jennifer and Sarah Hart, stories about the children—who they were, where they came from, what happened to their birth families—were mostly absent. Most of what was written about the kids concentrated only on their harrowing abuse—even as major questions about the child welfare system's role in the deaths went unanswered."
Over a period of five years Asgarian sought to provide the missing information and answer the unanswered questions. She conducted extensive interviews with birth family members and professionals involved in their cases in one way or another. She studied "thousand of pages of foster care case files, criminal case records, and law enforcement investigation documents". The narrative of the harm done to the children and their birth families by supposedly protective agencies will break your heart. And a short history of shifting policies and procedures will probably have you wondering, what were they thinking?
A paragraph in the epilogue really caught my eye. But I want to ease into it with an experience that has haunted me for about 23 years. My older daughter, Amber, wanted to wear a sweater to school and I insisted she wear a coat. She told me Chelsea was wearing a sweater. I said, "But Chelsea lives up on Ridgeview; we live in the trailer park." Later that day I ran into an acquaintance who was a social worker and asked if I was being paranoid and she said absolutely not. Imagine knowing that even if you're a really good parent you could be investigated for the slightest thing because of where you live.
"CPS has the duty to keep children safe, but the scales of harm are imbalanced. For one, in virtually all cases, CPS steps in when a family is already marginalized, whether by poverty, race, class, mental illness, drug use, disability or LGBTQ or immigration status. Their offered support is implicitly or explicitly coercive, and the threat of removal to ensure compliance may leave parents in worse shape than they were before CPS entered their lives. Our punitive approach to families that likely need some form of help that the state is not willing to provide does nothing to help the children CPS is tasked with caring for."
This book dovetails ever so neatly with Without Children which we just looked at. Recall it advocates replacing a society in which the isolation of the nuclear family is the gold standard with a more communal one in which we don't just pay lip service to the idea that it takes a village to raise a child. Asgarian ends the book with this paragraph:
"Each child deserves a safe place to call home. So, too, they deserve a community of people who love them, who care for them, and who step in when their own parents can't. This should be the standard of care each child receives. In this respect, we are failing far too many."
On a purrrsonal note, this has been a great weekend. Yesterday Eugene took me to Governors for breakfast. I had perfect weather for hanging out my laundry. Today Eugene and I went on a road trip which we ended with a stop at Goodwill. I got cat winter pajamas, a shirt, and JEANS THAT FIT ME PERFECTLY, all on the children's racks.
A great big shout out goes to Asgarian for doing due diligence and writing truths that will piss off a lot of people.