Category: Blog

June 10, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization 

Here and here I wrote about the federal criminal trial of wealthy Brazilians Carlos and Jemima Guimaraes.  They were charged, tried and convicted of aiding the abduction of their grandson, Nico, by his mother (their daughter) from Houston to Brazil.  She abducted him four years ago and the Brazilian courts have yet to order his return to the U.S.

Now, Nico’s country of residence is the United States inasmuch as he was born here and lived here his entire life prior to his abduction.  Accordingly, the courts there should have ordered his return shortly after his mother, Marcelle, turned up with him.  But, as things so often go in Brazil, the courts allow the plain meaning of the Convention to be flouted.

Now, Marcelle at some point began claiming that her ex-husband and Nico’s father, Houston physician Chris Brann committed domestic violence against her.  That has little-to-no bearing on the Hague Convention case because there’s no doubt that U.S. courts can deal effectively with DV cases including those that arise in child custody matters.  Indeed, they’ve done so in this case.

But claims of domestic violence can be a defense to the very criminal charge levelled against Carlos and Jemima.  Just why that should be is a bit of a mystery to me given that no one has ever claimed that Brann was violent toward Nico’s grandparents.  Still the law’s the law and they duly raised the issue in Houston federal court as a defense to the charge against them.

The jury didn’t buy it and found them guilty.  But, when I first wrote about the case, the judge, Alfred Bennett, announced his intention to consider acquitting them anyway based on their claim of DV.  At the time I pointed out that at least three finders of fact had already considered and rejected Marcelle’s claim that Brann had been violent toward her.  Those were the original family court in Houston, the Brazilian Attorney General and finally the jury in the criminal case.  I pointed out that to acquit Carlos and Jemima in the face of all those findings would be a travesty.

So the good news is that Judge Bennett has rejected the defendants’ motion and allowed the jury’s verdict to stand.  Sentencing will be on August 2 in Houston.  Meanwhile Carlos and Jemima are under house arrest and required to wear ankle monitors to forestall flight.

Chris Brann’s attorney has issued a press release.

Most interesting to me is this:

The decisions [by the U.S. State Department and the Brazilian Attorney General’s Office] also mirrored those of the Texas District Court for Harris County, Texas, which found Marcelle Guimaraes’ claims made during the divorce case were “false and made with malice” and granting divorce in favor of Christopher Brann on grounds of “adultery and cruelty.” 

Wow.  Judges are usually pretty circumspect in how they word their findings.  The judge in the Brann/Guimaraes divorce and custody matter was anything but.  He/she was clearly unhappy with Marcelle and her claims of domestic violence.  Given that powerful and unambiguous wording, I find it exceedingly strange that one of Texas’ best criminal lawyers, Rusty Hardin, would have attempted to use domestic violence as a defense.  Of course, like all lawyers, Hardin had to do the best he could with the facts of the case.  Apparently, those facts weren’t favorable to his clients.

That makes it all the stranger that Judge Bennett would have taken seriously Hardin’s motion to disregard the jury’s verdict.  But whatever his thinking on that, at least he got it right in the end.

The Guimaraes each face up to three years in prison.  I’d like to see them serve every day of it, but doubt they will.  Still, what Judge Bennett needs to consider is, first and foremost, the fact that parental child abduction constitutes child abuse.  Nico has now spent over half his life away from his home country, his father, his extended family, friends, etc.  Whatever Judge Bennett decides, it must reflect that most important fact.

Second, he must consider the fact that his sentence sends one message or another to those who would abduct their children and those who would assist them.  One message is that the judicial system takes seriously child abduction and its attendant abuse; the other is that it doesn’t.

Come August 2, we’ll see what message Judge Bennett sends.

In the meantime, I’ll have more to say on this case.

June 8, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The judiciary of Nebraska is at it again.  Readers will recall that, earlier this year, the Judicial Branch Education Advisory Committee published proposed amendments to existing rules regarding the public’s access to training materials used to educate judges.  In a nutshell, the JBEAC wanted the records of judicial training to be kept secret from the public that pays for those materials, the judges’ salaries, their courtrooms and courtroom personnel, etc.  That of course was in response to a lawsuit brought by Dr. Les Veskrna seeking the release of judicial training materials to the public.  His suit was successful and the public was duly apprised of the misleading and sometimes outright false “information” that had been presented to family court judges on the issue of the best interests of children as it relates to child custody and parenting time orders.

Not satisfied with the various court rulings requiring publication of judicial training materials, the judiciary sought to change the rules.  They sought to send those materials underground again, far from the prying eyes of We the People. 

As is required, the proposed rule changes were posted for public commentary until March 1 of this year.  Reading between the lines, my guess is that commentary was none too favorable to the rule of secrecy so beloved of Nebraska judges.  So now they’re trying again.  Here’s the Nebraska Supreme Court’s preamble to the proposed new rules.

On January 19, 2018, the Judicial Branch Education Advisory Committee submitted to the Nebraska Supreme Court proposed rules governing public access to Judicial Branch Education records. The Supreme Court published the proposed rules for a public comment period which ended on March 1, 2018. Thereafter, the Nebraska Supreme Court directed further amendments to Neb. Ct. R. §§ 1-501 and 1-513 be published for an additional public comment period.

In short, the Supreme Court is seeking another bite at the apple.  For readers of this blog, the salient feature appears here under records that must be made public:

(4) Records showing the content of education or training programs or presentations given by outside or private presenters, including all handouts, presentations, and recordings, except such portions of any recordings governed by subsection (C)(7) below, and as long as express written consent is granted by the author for the release of the materials.

I don’t know who they think they’re fooling.  Making publication of training materials subject to the approval of the presenter, author, etc. is nothing but a transparent dodge.  The public’s right to know should never be made subject to the whims of a single private person.  Indeed, that very issue was addressed by the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter in its response to the original Nebraska proposal.

It goes without saying that a third party should not be able to infringe another person’s Constitutional rights.

Well, when it comes to the Nebraska judiciary and the secrecy in which it wishes to operate, nothing “goes without saying.”  Still Arnold & Porter makes an important point – the secrecy sought by the Nebraska judiciary implicates the constitutional rights of all Nebraskans, specifically due process of law.

The disdain in which Nebraska’s judges hold the public is shocking to behold.  The notion that Nebraskans shouldn’t be able to know what their judges are being taught is an outrage.  It’s even more so since we now know that, under cover of that secrecy, what they were being taught about child custody and parenting time not only contradicts existing science, but disserves those parents and children who had the misfortune to rely on family court judges to get those matters right.

Back when Dr. Veskrna sued the state for the release of those training materials, the defendant – the Administrator of State Courts made no showing of any reason justifying secrecy.  Indeed his claims were disposed of by the trial, appellate and Supreme courts using language that left no doubt about the weakness of his arguments.  Since then, no one has come up with anything better.

Why then do we need to continue fighting this fight?  The arguments on both sides have been made and those promoting secrecy have lost, as well they might.  There is literally no sound argument in favor of secrecy.  This second attempt to deny to Nebraskans basic knowledge of what their paid officials are up to is as entirely lacking in merit as was the first one.

In the event this proposed rule should pass, there will unquestionably be a lawsuit challenging it.  In the meantime, the final day for comment is July 16.

Anyone desiring to comment on the proposed rules and amendments should do so in writing to the office of the Clerk of the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, P.O. Box 98910, Lincoln, Nebraska 68509-8910, or via e-mail to wendy.wussow@nebraska.gov, no later than July 16, 2018.    

June 7, 2018 By Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s Naomi Schaefer Riley’s response to the knee-jerk claims by Slate’s Rachelle Hampton that CPS agencies are racist (American Enterprise Institute, 6/4/18).

Interestingly, she quotes at length a Los Angeles County child welfare worker, Sharonda Wade, a black woman, who has her own take on the idea of racism in the system. According to her, because blacks have so often had bad experiences with a variety of state agencies, they’re not exactly open to friendly interaction with CPS. And, since CPS caseworkers are disproportionately black, a level of black-on-black racial animosity can crop up.

Indeed, Wade tells me that a black person working for child protective services (CPS) may actually make the situation worse from the perspective of black families. “Some people—even black people—feel like a black social worker won’t do a good enough job, that they’re not as educated, not as professional.” Even worse, “They see me as being a traitor.” During the four years she was an emergency response worker, clients would call her supervisor to complain. “They wanted a white social worker.” Others attacked her for working for CPS at all. “Some of the moms would be screaming: ‘How dare you work for CPS? You’re going to get your ass whupped for working for the man.’”

Plus, it’s often black neighbors/acquaintances/family members who call CPS to investigate black parents.

Moreover, CPS workers are often responding to complaints made by people of color who live and work in the same neighborhoods as these minority families, such as mandated reporters like teachers and doctors. In New York, for instance, 40 percent of public school teachers are nonwhite. And in Washington, D.C., almost half of all teachers are nonwhite. It is not nosy racist white ladies who are interfering in the lives of these black families. More often than not it is black people concerned about the welfare of black children.

Riley then gets to the nut of the matter that I touched on yesterday. The question of race, particularly as it concerns children’s welfare, is often a proxy for other issues, like poverty.

Wilson also worries that it is harder to place black children with extended family members because of the many other issues that affect these family members. He tells me: “If you don’t address poverty, unemployment, and lack of stable housing, then when you go to look for a suitable caretaker, one of those issues could impede that child to be placed there.”

This gets to the heart of the problem with the claim that the child welfare system is racist: It fails to acknowledge that certain social factors are correlated with child abuse and neglect—and those factors are more likely to be present in minority communities.

Exactly. Riley goes on to mention, as I did, poverty and single-parent families as (a) being more often found in black communities and (b) contributing to child abuse and neglect.

Amazingly, advocates for the “CPS is racist” position attempt to recruit to their cause the fact that so many reports of suspected abuse or neglect turn out to be meritless.

Critics of the system often cite the fact that of the three million reports of abuse or neglect made each year, only about a third are “substantiated.” 

Actually, the number of substantiated cases is more like one-fifth. But nowhere do those critics offer evidence that black parents are disproportionately likely to be (a) reported or (b) exonerated. Nor do they address the question that if an allegation is made, investigated and found to be without substance, isn’t that some evidence that the system is working as it’s supposed to?

I’ve argued long and hard that the system’s encouragement for over-reporting is one of its biggest flaws, taking time and resources away from child welfare agencies that are strapped for manpower anyway.

The proverbial bottom line is that racial disparities in parents investigated, children taken by CPS, children placed in foster care, etc. don’t necessarily mean the system is racist, but only that other factors that tend to predominate in the black community also tend to produce child abuse and neglect. It’s a fact that true believers like Rachelle Hampton will never admit because it conflicts with their chosen narrative.

Meanwhile, although Riley’s article is far better, far more informative and nuanced than is Hampton’s, alas, it doesn’t merit its headline, “No, the child welfare system isn’t racist.” On the whole, it probably isn’t, but there’ simply nothing definitive on which we can draw such a conclusion. My guess is that there are probably individual caseworkers who do treat black parents more harshly than white ones. But I very much doubt that the system is, generally speaking, racist.

Neither writer proved her case because there’s not sufficient information on which to base a firm

Neither writer proved her case because there’s not sufficient information on which to base a firm conclusion. For the time being though, the burden of proof must be on the Rachelle Hamptons of the world to prove that the child welfare system is racist. She neither got close to doing so nor in fact gave it much of a try. For her, a single anecdote and a single factoid add up to a system that employees tens of thousands of people bringing a racist’s animus to its work. That may be enough for Hampton and the social justice warriors. The rest of us demand more.

June 6, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I’m responding to this article today (Slate, 4/3/18). I’ll discuss Naomi Schaefer Riley’s rebuttal on the American Enterprise Institute’s website tomorrow.

The Slate piece would be just silly if it didn’t deal with such an important issue. Put simply, even if you agree with its thesis – that the child welfare system in the United States is racist – you have to admit that shoddy work like Rachelle Hampton’s does your cause only harm. That thesis, that bald assertion is about all there is to Hampton’s article. In support, she offers nothing but a single anecdote and a single factoid. Beyond that, her article is simply the ideology of the social justice warriors – that all outcomes that differ by race are per se indications of racism.

Hampton considers the case of Sarah and Jennifer Hart that was much in the news two months ago. They’re the white couple who adopted six black children out of foster care, were investigated for child abuse and neglect and died in infamy when they, apparently, drove their car, holding themselves and their children, off a 100-foot cliff.

Sarah Hart had already pleaded guilty to domestic assault in 2011, when a teacher discovered bruises across their then-6-year-old daughter’s stomach and back. For admitting to letting “her anger get out of control,” Hart was given a 90-day suspended jail sentence and a year of probation. The family was then allowed to move from Minnesota to Oregon with their six children, all black, and given no oversight. Before eventually relocating to rural Washington state, they started home-schooling their children without filing the proper notices to state agencies. According to a former neighbor, the six kids rarely went outside, even in nice weather. At least three of them had been identified as “potential victims of alleged abuse or neglect” by CPS. And now, the entire family is dead in a tragedy that officials are saying “may have been” intentional.

Hampton concludes from the fact that the couple had faced several allegations of child abuse and/or neglect, that the only reason they maintained custody of their kids was because they were white.

[T]he Hart’s story is a tragic case study in racial disparity. The ways in which Sarah and Jennifer managed to continually evade the notice (or action) of officials is a luxury that is by and large only provided to white parents.

Citation? None. Any factual support at all? No. By any stretch of the imagination, it’s an astonishing allegation to make. It’s all the more so given Hampton’s refusal to provide even a scintilla of evidence for her position.

Is it possible that she’s unaware of the countless cases we’ve seen and continue to see of black parents investigated time and again by CPS only to have something tragic happen to their kids? What about the white parents harassed by CPS for things as minor as letting the children walk unsupervised to a nearby park or play at the end of a cul-de-sac with their mother watching from her front porch?

I long ago stopped writing about almost all such cases simply because they’re so numerous. I could write a post a day about the individual failures of this or that caseworker in this or that state involving this or that set of facts. But I don’t because, as ever, it’s the big picture that matters. It’s the system of child welfare, including its underfunding, undertraining, secrecy, us-versus-them mindset, federal largess, anti-dad bias, etc. that leads to caseworkers overreaching in one case and failing to intervene in another. Hampton’s anecdotes add nothing to the debate.

The closest she gets to evidence comes here:

According to the Los Angeles Times, black children enter the foster care system at a rate five times higher than their white counterparts “and linger there, without being returned to their parents or being adopted, two months longer than white children.” 

But even a true believer like Hampton can’t seriously pretend that, due to that disparity, we can conclude that the child welfare system is racist. There are simply far too many factors that enter into the question of whether to take children into care to put down one disparity to a single cause. I’ve written many times about the difficulty caseworkers face in discerning the difference between parental poverty and parental neglect of kids. The one can look very, very much like the other and, when a caseworker is overloaded, as most of them are, making the right call can be hard. The poverty rate for black Americans (22%) is about 2.4 times what it is for while Americans (9%). That alone could explain why black kids are more likely to be taken from their parents.

But Hampton wouldn’t dream of mentioning the fact.

What about single parenthood? Unquestionably, single parents are more likely than married or partnered ones to abuse or neglect their kids. Some 72% of black children are born to a single mother. That’s also 2.4 times the rate for white kids. Does that play a role in how many black vs. how many white children are taken into care? Of course it does.

But again, Hampton is silent on that oh-so-pertinent fact.

Hers is a reprise of another familiar notion that holds that the use of deadly force by police is done in a racist manner. But carefully done studies, such as one by the National Bureau of Economic Research found no such racism. What it found was that the use of deadly force was in proportion to the likelihood of being involved in crime. In other words, there was a disproportionate number of black suspects killed by police because there was a disproportionate number of black suspects.

And then there’s the fact that, implicitly, Hampton is arguing for greater and greater interference in family life by state agencies. Is she sure that’s really what she wants? Notice that she’s not saying black families should be freer from CPS involvement, but that white families should be less so. Ms. Hampton, there are many, many reasons why that’s a very bad idea.

I’ll say more about this tomorrow, but for now will only note that the matter of child welfare authorities taking – or not taking – children from families is extremely complex. Efforts like Hampton’s are a poor substitute for reasoned, factual discourse.

June 4, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I was going to respond to this article (New York Times, 5/14/18) a couple of weeks ago, but other posts intervened and now Dr. Leonard Sax has beaten me to the punch (ahem) (IFS Studies, 5/29/18). The Times piece is just the usual baying at the moon on the part of the Social Justice crowd. Sax rightly rebuts it, but leaves out one very important point that I’d like to add.

The NYT article is about a new toy for boys – a doll. Yes, I know, those who believe that gender is a social construct have tried to peddle dolls to boys before and yes I know they failed miserably. But hey, why not try the same thing again? Maybe this time they’ll get different results!

Why do boys need dolls and not action figures or trucks or footballs? Because they lack empathy, because masculinity is deficient and it would greatly improve if it were more like femininity. Ergo, boys need to play with dolls. Needless to say, there’s not a word in the article about biology, not a word about the fact that gender isn’t constructed by the culture, but decided in the womb, not a peep about the fact that, when we meet a new person, the very first thing our minds register is his/her sex.

And of course the many “experts” quoted in the Times article never once broach the subject of whether playing with dolls or the particular doll in question changes boys. As Sax points out,

One might reasonably expect that the author of the NY Times piece would provide some shred of evidence that such dolls do, in fact, nurture boys’ empathy: that boys who play with such toys actually become more empathetic. But no such evidence is provided—because no such evidence exists.

Yes, one might expect that if one weren’t quite so inured to the Social Justice way of doing things. SJWs have their take on various issues like gender and have never and I suspect will never allow facts that contradict that take to either get in the way or even be acknowledged. It is an article of faith with these people that (a) gender is fluid, (b) gender is a cultural phenomenon, (c) masculinity is defective and (d) men would be better if they’d behave more like women.

Therefore of course masculinity needs to change and, if we want to do that, we must begin as early in a child’s life as possible. That denying a male child his legitimate desires and his legitimate self might qualify as a particularly odious form of child abuse never occurs to these people. (One commenter to the piece suggests, sardonic tongue in cheek, that the Ludovico Technique, a.k.a. aversive therapy, would work better than dolls.) They have the received wisdom, you see, so why should they second-guess themselves?

Part of that wisdom they received from on High is that males lack empathy, hence the need for a doll that, mysteriously and magically, gives it to them. But do males lack empathy? What do these people do with the knowledge that, throughout history, our standards of love and generosity have so often been male? Have they ever heard of Jesus, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama? Have they ever seen a father caring for his child?

I suppose not.

But the issue of fathers and children is the one I’d like to add to what Dr. Sax had to say. To the extent boys lack empathy and grow into adults who do likewise, there is a very clear cause we can point to and it has nothing to do with dolls or the lack thereof. It has to do with dads. More precisely, it has to do with the absence of fathers from children’s lives and the terrible toll that takes on them lifelong.

I’ve written before about the various mass murderers who’ve made the news over the past several years. Almost all of them grew up deprived of his father. Fathers’ special form of caring for children, including rough-and-tumble play is one of the chief sources of empathy, particularly in boys. If we’re truly serious about a lack of empathy in some boys and men, we need look no further than our society’s headlong drive to separate fathers from their children.

We do that of course in a wide variety of ways, including through our laws and practices regarding child custody, child support, adoption, paternity fraud and the like. We also wield our popular culture as a bludgeon against the very idea of fatherhood and yes, masculinity.

Any article that pretends that dolls have something to contribute to the empathy level of boys, published in a newspaper that would never dream of telling the truth about the many ways fathers are marginalized in their children’s lives, is an article that cares not one whit about the issue of boys and empathy. It’s like hanging a mobile above a child’s bed in hopes that the pretty colors will take its mind off its troubles instead of cuddling and caring for the child so those troubles go away. The NYT piece is just an effort to deflect attention from the real issue that the self-proclaimed “paper of record” has never taken on in any serious way.

Meanwhile, thanks to Leonard Sax for taking down the absurdity of the Times piece. It has no basis in fact, only in a bankrupt ideology that, for whatever reason still holds in thrall many people who should know better.

June 3, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

As I said last time, this article appears bent on finding a scandal where there is none (San Antonio Express News, 5/29/18). Yes, the fact that 1,707 children ran away from Texas foster care last year is important. But so is the fact that almost 1,500 returned within a few days, a point not mentioned by the article.

What the writer hopes to convince her readers with is this:

Texas had 245 foster children listed as runaways as of Tuesday, and they are at high risk of falling prey to sex traffickers, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

The only problem with the claim that the runaways are “at high risk of falling prey to sex traffickers” is that it’s not true. Indeed, there’s no definition of “high risk” that describes a runaway’s actual chances of being trafficked for sex. The writer, Allie Morris, cites the Texas DFPS as her source, but the department’s own report on runaways plainly shows the opposite of Morris’ claim.

To begin with, the data in the DFPS report on sex trafficking of minors has nothing to do with children running away from foster care. The data reported come from a statewide hotline to which allegations of child abuse or neglect can be reported and, if necessary, investigated. Again, that has nothing necessarily to do with foster children, much less those who’ve run away.

In fiscal year 2017, the hotline recorded 697 allegations of child sex trafficking. Of those, an investigation resulted in 40 being termed “Reason to Believe.” Now, the report nowhere defines that term, but it apparently means that someone decided that the claim that a child was trafficked for sex seems more likely than not. That’s about 5.7% who may have been trafficked into sex work.

Later on, the DFPS report states that 35 runaways reported being trafficked for sex, i.e. 2% of the runaways. In other words, the claim that foster care runaways are “at high risk” for being trafficked for sex is pure bunk.

And it’s likely worse than that. Perhaps the single definitive study of child sex-workers was conducted by researchers at John Jay College. They studied underage sex workers in New York City. They found that almost none of the kids had been trafficked.

Although several said that they felt peer pressure to join in, their narratives were generally less about being pressured to participate in CSEC (Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children) markets as they were about economic necessity, fascination, and curiosity with what appeared to be an emerging lifestyle…

We did not find that market facilitators, or pimps, were key actors for initiating youth into the market (8%) or controlling them once they were in the market. Only 10% of the sample (6% of the boys and 14% of girls) reported that they had a market facilitator at the time of the interview.

The point being that neither the Express News article nor the DFPS report makes any effort to explain what they mean by “trafficking.” Many people assume that, if a minor is a sex worker, then he/she must have been forced to do so. Emphatically, that’s not true.

The simple fact is that no one knows the rates of human trafficking for sex, and the DFPS itself admits it in a separate report.

Establishing prevalence is a critical component in the conversation of human trafficking. Prevalence drives all aspects of response from funding to policy, resources to direct service needs, and finally breadth of the continuum of care. Currently, there is no recognized methodology for capturing human trafficking rates within the United States.

The typical elision of the difference between sex work and sex trafficking is reflected in the DFPS report itself. In a section on human trafficking, the report contains this statement:

In the Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth, 5 percent of youth reported having exchanged sex for something of value.

Again, exchanging sex “for something of value” is the definition of sex work, not being forced to do it by someone else.

In short, the Express News article wants a scandal and its writer wasn’t to be deterred just because there’s not one. And, since nothing stirs the blood of readers like imagining droves of children forced into sex work, Allie Morris does what every bad journalist does; she makes stuff up to sell the product.

Texas foster care has a lot of problems and runaways are one of them. But, overwhelmingly, they’re a problem because they reflect the often horrible conditions inflicted on them by CPS and the foster care system, not because some few of them might turn to sex work to make ends meet. Allie Morris would do well to stick to what matters – the many deficiencies of Texas CPS and the foster care system and stop hyperventilating about a problem that, compared to those deficiencies, looms rather small.

June 1, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This will be a two-part post. I’ll follow up this one with a second on Sunday.

First, we learn that Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, of which Child Protective Services is a part, saw 1,707 kids in foster care run away last year (San Antonio Express News, 5/29/18). Of those, 223 haven’t been found and have been missing on average for 13 weeks. In other words, most of those kids will never be found by CPS or the police. They may return of their own accord, but they won’t be found.

Unsurprisingly, the kids run away often because they don’t like being in foster care and/or don’t like CPS. The 2017 Annual Foster Youth Runaway Report by the DFPS notes the fact.

Some 1,707 children and youth ran away during fiscal year 2017. The top seven reasons children and youth gave for running are listed below:

Dislike of rules of placement (23%)

Anger at CPS or the system (20%)

Desire to be on one’s own (20%)

Desire to see family/relatives (16%)

Frustration / anger with caregivers (14%)

Desire to be with boyfriend or girlfriend (10%)

Desire new placement (10%)

Now, the linked-to article is long on indignation and short on reasoned analysis. Of course runaways from foster care are an important issue, but equally important is balance. Last year there were, on average, about 30,000 kids in foster care in Texas. Seventeen-hundred is about 5.6% of that total and of course the great majority of those runaways returned after a short time. (The kid who takes a day to see his girlfriend is technically a runaway, but he shouldn’t cause a crisis.)

Equally important is the fact that kids in foster care are abused. They may have been abused by their parents, but they were certainly traumatized by the process of being taken from their families and placed with strangers. Then of course their treatment by foster parents is notoriously worse than their treatment by their parents. They’re more likely to be physically abused, sexually abused and placed on powerful psychotropic medications in foster care than anywhere else. The only surprise here is that more kids don’t run away.

But the San Antonio Express News article is bent on finding a scandal and stirring up controversy where, in all probability, there is none.

Texas had 245 foster children listed as runaways as of Tuesday, and they are at high risk of falling prey to sex traffickers, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

No, actually they’re not. But that’s a larger topic, so I’m leaving it till my next post.

Meanwhile, the Express News takes the grab-bag approach to reporting the information on Texas CPS. It tosses in many facts, most of them unrelated to the recently-released report on runaways, just to make sure readers remain outraged at, well, something.

So we learn that there’s a class-action suit against Texas CPS. Of course it has little or nothing to do with runaway kids, but the Express News avoids mentioning the fact.

We also learn that a few kids have to spend nights in “state offices, hotels or shelters” while the agency finds them foster homes. That’s undeniably an ongoing problem with a chronically underfunded agency, but again it has nothing to do with runaways.

Few have been more critical of Texas CPS than I have. That’s almost exclusively stemmed from the fact that the pinch-penny state legislature has never, until the past year, provided sufficient funding to run the agency properly. Many of the problems, like a shortage of foster parents, are holdovers from that long policy of pretending that CPS can do its job with too little money, too few caseworkers, investigators, foster parents, etc.

The lawsuit against CPS in which the agency was excoriated by federal Judge Janis Jack and found to have violated the civil rights of its young charges was what it took to spur change. Texas legislators don’t like federal officials telling them what to do, but at least they finally responded to Jack’s decree. To date, essentially any criticism of Texas CPS is necessarily a criticism of the legislature. Better funding is now being provided, but all problems can’t be solved overnight.

Perhaps aware that CPS is trying to turn itself around and concerned about the possible absence of a tried-and-true scandal to write about, the Express News writer opted for the grab-bag approach.

And the most exciting part of that is the claim that runaways are “at high risk” to be trafficked for sex. It’s a dubious claim at best.

May 31, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This article by the Heritage Foundation’s Emily Kao is over two months old. Still, it’s worth mentioning. It responds to the shooting at the Parkland, Florida high school that so shocked the nation. It does so by examining the most important aspect of the problem we face of mass shooters – fatherlessness. That’s a good thing and Kao does her topic justice. She not only knows the problem of fatherlessness, she feels it deeply.

And yet…

And yet, like so many similar articles, Kao’s fails to address the major source of the problem. It’s right there in front of her, begging to be shown to the world, but Kao doesn’t see it.

As another mass school shooting stuns Americans, it is time to talk about not just how to protect students from shooters, but also about what must happen so that fewer students become shooters in the first place.

It is crucial to talk about how more American children can grow up with the emotional, psychological, and spiritual security that comes from relationships where one is deeply cared for, connected, and known.

For what lies inside so many school shooters is a deep void of identity and relationship that they tragically seek to fill through nihilistic violence.

There is a sobering theme repeated over and over in the biographies of school shooters—the fatherlessness of a broken or never formed family.

All true. It is indeed past time for us to come to grips with the scourge that is fatherlessness. Mass slayings are just the most gruesome, horrifying and therefore attention-getting of the problems associated with absent fathers. Others are too numerous to mention and, in any event, I’ve done so before.

The young men who choose to slaughter others have a void of identity due to the lack of a father. Their horrifying actions can be seen as suicides. Few of the shooters survive their day of reckoning and their targets are others who look much like them. The killers are figuratively killing themselves, watching their own death before ending the day dead. Their act is one of deepest self-loathing.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, scholar Brad Wilcox called attention to the work of criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, which found the absence of fathers to be one of the “most powerful predictors of crimes .” He explained that fathers are role models for their sons who maintain authority and discipline, thereby helping them develop self-control and empathy toward others, key character traits lacking in violent youth.

Fathers and mothers tend to parent differently. Typical fathering includes rough-house play that teaches the child his/her impact on others and plants the seed of empathy. Many fatherless kids are easy to spot. They’re the ones who don’t have a sense of boundaries, of where to stop, of what risks to avoid. And they’re the ones who don’t seem to care about others.

The problem of fatherless kids is far from new and yet we allow it to grow unchecked.

Since the 1965 Moynihan report, the breakdown of the American family has been hotly debated. Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s finding that fatherlessness would lead to poorer outcomes for African-American children was published at a time when only 25 percent of African-American households were led by a single parent. Today, 24 percent of white non-Hispanic families are headed by a single parent and the rate has reached 66 percent among African-Americans. If we don’t reverse current trends on marriage, the number of fatherless children will only grow.

That’s 53 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his report. That’s 53 years during which we’ve largely ignored the problem of fatherless kids. We now have mass slaughters of children occurring every few months that fairly scream for our attention, and yet still we, like Kao, barely notice what’s right in front of us.

What’s right in front of us is that fatherlessness doesn’t just happen, it’s caused. Fifty years ago, fatherlessness in this country was mostly a problem for the black community, and not much of one for it. Now it’s an enormous problem for the whole country. The problem has grown so, not due to any force of nature, but because of public policies that everywhere promote it and see it flourish.

How can we look at no-fault divorce, the wholesale denigration of fathers and men generally in every aspect of popular culture, family courts marginalizing fathers in children’s lives, a domestic violence industry that zealously opposes fathers’ access to their kids, an adoption industry that shuns fathers whenever it can, a child support system that drives fathers into hiding and jail while, along with alimony, encouraging mothers to divorce the fathers of their kids, and pretend to be mystified at the tsunami of fatherlessness that’s sweeping over this land?

We made this problem and we can unmake it. Sadly, Kao has little concept of the source of or the solution to the problem.

A good starting place would be to reduce the marriage penalties that have been built into our welfare system. A next step would be to elevate the contributions of ordinary men doing the extraordinary work of fathering. And if we directed 1 percent of the attention and media coverage we give to athletes, musicians, and movie stars toward fathers, perhaps more boys would grow up seeing them as role models.

That’s all jolly good, but it barely scratches the surface of what really matters – public policy. We can tinker with the welfare system all we like, and I think we should. But doing that while ignoring the various public policy issues I mentioned above is a sure way to do nothing about the problem while congratulating ourselves on our commitment and wisdom.

Face it, we need to change our laws and change the popular narrative about men and fathers. We need to start telling the truth about children’s need for two parents. And we need to educate public officials about the science on child well-being as it relates to their family arrangements.

Until we do those things, we’re just pretending. Sad to say, Emily Kao knows the gravity of the situation, but neither its source nor its solution.

May 30, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

New Zealand’s Ministry for Women has produced a study of the work habits of mothers and fathers. I’ve seen no indication of what it cost to do the study and the write-up, but if it was a dollar, it was a dollar too much. Its 44 pages can be summed up with a simple “duh.” A more articulate response might be “Yes, we already knew this.”

The study’s authors, by contrast, appear a bit mystified about their findings. The study has throughout a tone of subdued bafflement. I suspect that’s because the ideology that holds that women are systematically deprived of what they really want to do – work for a living – is dominant at the Ministry and reflected by the study’s authors. More on that later.

By any stretch of the imagination, the study’s findings are non-controversial. They’re so unsurprising that, I suspect, people 50 years ago would wonder that the study was done at all. It takes a lot of “progress” to be that regressive, but that’s what happened. Truly, we’re learning anew what we’ve known for eons.

The researchers used large datasets to examine how men and women behave, particularly regarding paid work, before and after becoming parents for the first time. Guess what. Prior to having a child, men work somewhat more than do women – about 42-43 hours per week versus about 37-38 for women. Once little Andy or Jenny comes along, men’s hours remain the same and women’s hours drop to 27 per week on average. Men’s earnings increase post-birth and women’s decline.

As I said, “duh.” Similar information is available in countless different countries throughout the English-speaking world and elsewhere.

The study goes on to find that, when women return to work, they tend to earn less than they did before, even on an hourly basis. That’s likely because most take almost a year to return to work and 31% haven’t returned to paid work at all 24 months after the birth. Those mothers of course have less seniority and less recent work experience than do non-mothers and may be perceived by employers to be less connected to paid work.

Interestingly, in no quintile of female employees do those who become mothers ever return to their pre-child earnings. Nor do women’s employment rates ever return to their pre-birth levels. Fathers’ earnings and employment rates, by contrast, remain little changed. And of course the longer a woman is out of work, the lower her earnings after the birth of her child.

The average monthly earnings of employed women fall dramatically when they become parents, driven by the combination of fewer hours and lower hourly wages. Their monthly earnings do not return to their pre-parenthood trends within ten years, meaning their lifetime earnings are substantially reduced.

Again, there’s nothing new or unexpected here. For those who know the data in, for example, the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the New Zealand figures are just more of the same. For those with a clue about the natural tendencies of men and women, the facts that women prioritize motherhood over paid work and fathers prioritize providing for their families comes as no surprise.

And yet the tone of the study’s write up is, well, pouty. It’s pervaded by notions like the “parenthood penalty” suffered by mothers. The idea is absurd of course. If there were a “penalty” to be paid simply for becoming a parent, then fathers and mothers would both pay it. But they don’t. They don’t because their responses to parenthood are different. With the arrival of the first child, women tend strongly to opt for motherhood, while men tend to work harder to support both the new arrival and to take up the slack produced by Mom’s fewer hours and lower pay.

If John works 40 hours a week and Jim only 30, would anyone say that Jim is assessed a “penalty?” No, we’d all agree that he earns less because of his choice to work fewer hours. But for the true believers at the NZ Ministry for Women, mothers who work less are made to pay a penalty. That’s because, you see, what they really want to do is paid work, but somehow are prevented from doing so.

That of course brings me to that ideology at the Ministry.

“It could make a difference to women’s careers if fathers dropped 3 hours a week and women worked 30 hours. It could build a family’s economic resilience and allow more shared parenting,” the Ministry of Women’s policy director Margaret Retter said.

Hmm. Yes, it could make a difference. It would mean families earning less, men being dissatisfied that they weren’t doing more to take care of their families and women being dissatisfied that they weren’t doing more for their children. Meanwhile, employers would see their male employees going from full-time to part-time work along with their part-time-working wives. In short, everyone involved, including the baby, would be unhappy. And for what? The idea that working 30 hours instead of 27 would make any substantial difference in a woman’s career is pure nonsense. And besides, as Jordan Peterson points out, the huge majority of people have jobs, not careers.

As for shared parenting, needless to say, I’m all for that. But the idea that shifting three hours per week between spouses will make a particle of difference in parenting is dubious at best. The fact is that people work out their work-family balance to suit themselves and children always manage to attach to both parents quite nicely, as long as both do some hands-on care.

It’s a study that never should have been conducted because we already know what it tells us. We’ve known for ages that women tend to prefer motherhood to paid work and men tend to up their earnings when little Andy or Jenny comes along. Only in the minds of those at the Ministry for Women is that controversial and in need of change. For the umpteenth time, the rest of us know better.

May 28, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Continued from yesterday.

So the Brazilian courts and the U.S. State Department have, simultaneously if not in concert, managed to violate, in the case of Brazil the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and, in the case of the U.S., the Sean and David Goldman Act. In doing so, they’ve deprived a little boy of his father and the father of his son. Kidnapping of children, if it’s allowed to continue for long, is child abuse, but the two countries wink at that when it comes to Nico Brann, who’s now eight.

That of course is bad enough, but the case just may get worse. Indeed, a federal judge in Houston, Alfred H. Bennett, may get in on the act.

As I said yesterday, Nico’s Brazilian grandparents Carlos and Jemima Guimaraes, we arrested in Florida and brought to trial in Houston on the criminal charges of conspiracy and aiding the kidnapping. A Houston jury returned a verdict of guilty on the aiding charge and not-guilty of conspiracy. In other words, the jurors found that the two had assisted their daughter’s abduction once it was done, but not that they’d planned it with her.

So at least there’s some justice, right? Carlos and Jemima face up to three years in prison for their part in their daughter’s ongoing crime.

Or do they?

A federal jury Friday found an affluent Brazilian couple guilty of aiding in the international kidnapping of their Houston-born grandson in a rare prosecution that drew national attention to the U.S. government’s lackluster efforts to return thousands of children taken abroad amid custody disputes.

But, in unusual move, U.S. District Judge Alfred H. Bennett did not formally accept the jury’s decision, saying he wanted more time to consider defense attorneys’ request that the couple should be cleared because of allegations raised in the trial that their daughter was fleeing domestic violence.

That’s right, what little justice Nico and his father Christopher Brann can get from the criminal convictions may be taken away by a federal judge who likely doesn’t know the first thing about domestic violence. Judge Bennet wants to “think about” the case.

Well, here are some facts for him to consider:

First, Christopher Brann committed no act of DV against Carlos or Jemima.

Second, Christopher Brann had joint custody of his son when his ex-wife Marcelle abducted the child to Brazil. That means one of two things. Marcelle either didn’t raise the issue of DV before the family court or, if she did, the judge found that it either didn’t happen or was not of such a nature as to deprive the child of contact with his father.

Third, “Just days after her arrival and without Brann’s knowledge, she appeared before a civil judge in Brazil with documents showing she had a home and a job at her mother’s school in the beachside town of Salvador, Bahia, and that Nico was enrolled at the school.” In other words, she didn’t mention domestic violence to that judge.

Plus, “In the Brann case, the governments of the U.S. and Brazil both concluded Nico was illegally abducted in violation of civil law.” That strongly suggests that there has been no finding of domestic violence on the part of Christopher Brann sufficient to deny him custody or the “protection” of the Hague Convention.

Now, Brann admits to having behaved badly in the past.

Brann said under cross-examination that he had written an email at his wife’s direction saying he was sorry and acknowledging that he had pulled her hair, pushed her to the floor, hit her in the face and arms and kicked holes in the wall. He said she was violent toward him, and that he defended himself.

In short, he and his ex were mutually abusive to each other, but not to the extent that the family court judge believed either shouldn’t have joint custody of their son.

Brann testified that the relationship between him and his then-wife had become violent. Marcelle raised the issue of domestic violence in her divorce petition in Harris County.

Finally, since DV is a defense to the crimes with which Carlos and Jemima were charged and their lawyer raised the issue and adduced evidence in the trial in federal court, it’s clear that the jury considered the evidence and rejected it.

So apparently every fact-finder who’s heard the evidence has found it to be insufficient to decrease Brann’s contact with his son. The Texas family judge did, at least one court in Brazil did and now a criminal court jury has done so.

None of that is enough for Judge Bennett who may simply substitute his own opinion on the matter and, in so doing, deprive Christopher Brann of the smidgen of justice this five-year-old case has afforded him.

And of course, if he rejects the jury’s verdict and finds Carlos and Jemima not guilty, Bennett will send the unmistakable signal that, on the flimsiest of pretexts, child kidnapping is really OK after all. There need be no finding of abuse, only an allegation. A little mutual and apparently non-injurious DV must stop the wheels of justice in their tracks; denying a child a relationship with his father meanwhile gets a pass from everyone.