When I started reading this series, I had no idea if the children in these two families ever should have been taken from their parents, or if they should have been reunified. Now that the whole series is over, I still don’t know.
My best guess is that in one case, removal might have been necessary, in the other it would not have been had the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare provided the right kinds of help. My guess is that reunification could have succeeded in the case where it failed, again had BMCW done its job, and it can succeed in the second case if BMCW does its job.
But I’m not sure. Not even close. Crocker Stephenson has failed to give me the information I need to make a truly informed decision either way.
Worse, however, he has placed these cases in a grossly-distorted context, in which any effort to keep families together is seen as a triumph of “parents rights” over “children’s rights.” This is discussed in the extended critique of parts one and two.
There are more examples of this false framing of the issue in part three. But in this discussion, I focus on some of the other failings in the reporting:
It’s been 34 years since I was in Journalism School, but one of the lessons I remember concerns not misusing your power as a journalist to belittle people.
You can’t cover up for them, and the pursuit of truth may require exposing not only their human frailty but also their misdeeds – or worse. But you don’t go out of your way to rub salt in the wounds just to make the story more colorful.
In particular, if someone is uneducated, you don’t go out of your way to expose their poor grammar, spelling or speech. You don’t clean up the quotes – and in a profile about a particular individual there may be no way around using them exactly as spoken. But under other circumstances, you may simply be able to paraphrase, and not use a direct quote at all.
Apparently, things have changed more than I thought.
THE “TROUBLE” WITH VERGIL
The photo essays accompanying the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s three-part series include captions suggesting that the villain of one case is the mother’s boyfriend, Vergil. The photo captions suggested he might now be the big obstacle to returning two-year-old Denice to her mother Danettea – and to the infant son the couple was allowed to keep. Even the judge expresses concerns about Vergil.
So one waited for the big revelation in today’s installment. Would it turn out that Vergil was a child molester? Was he beating up the children’s mother? Was he running a drug ring out of the house?
No. Vergil did serve three years for “a drug conviction.” But that’s not it. Apparently there are two huge problems with Vergil:
● He doesn’t trust the child welfare system
● He expresses himself forcefully – and with terrible grammar.
Actually, it’s reporter Crocker Stephenson who thinks the grammar is a big deal. So he decides to take the normally wise adage that journalists should “show, not tell” to extremes – making a point of quoting an example of Vergil’s poor writing.
I’ve spent so much time on this because of something else I learned in J-School: the value of “the little picture,” the example which may be small in itself, but illustrates the larger story.
In this case, seemingly adding a little color to the narrative while actually going out of his way to belittle Vergil illustrates the contempt for the poor Black families Crocker Stephenson writes about; contempt that lies just beneath a veneer of civility and empathy.
The story is replete with such examples – little digs, what my wife’s family would call “poonges.”
Like this: After a court hearing, an aunt, who was present but otherwise is entirely irrelevant to the story, is mentioned just so Stephenson can note that she “wore a T-shirt that said, ‘All stressed out and nobody to choke.’”
Or how about two poonges for the price of one: When Denice is visiting, coming to a home filled with other children, Stephenson writes, “A 50-inch flat screen television - purchased with the insurance proceeds of a fire at their previous apartment - remains on the whole time.”
How dare a poor person spend on a luxury item! And keeping it on all the time? That’s just not done in the homes of people like us. Doesn’t Danettea know that the proper way to handle these things is to “eat on the back deck under a blue sky” – the way the foster parents do it?
In contrast things that are relevant are overlooked or devoid of context.
There’s the judge who refuses to allow more visits between Denice and her Danettea because, he claims, that would be cruel if he subsequently terminates parental rights. How so? If the foster parents are as wonderful as Stephenson makes them out to be, there is no reason to think they won’t keep Denice’s mother in her life after termination. And I am aware of nothing in the scholarly literature about visitation which says that giving a child more joyous memories of the family she ultimately loses would be cruel. (Not to be morbid, but if you were suddenly diagnosed with a terminal illness would you want less or more time with your loved ones?)
Meanwhile, limiting visits reduces the chances for reunification, both because Denice can’t prove herself, and because it makes it easier for the county child welfare agency to play the “bonding card” – as in “Well, yes, your honor, maybe we never should have taken this child at birth, maybe there were better alternatives, and maybe we could have reunified sooner, but the foster parents are The Only Parents She’s Ever Known.” (Of course, if “bonding” trumps everything else that means, if I kidnap your child at birth, flee to Mexico, take really good care of her, and return two years later, presumably I should be allowed to keep her.)
BEHIND BRANDY'S RELAPSE
In the second case, reunification fails and the mother, Brandy, relapses. And no wonder. Children who have been traumatized by their removal by bouncing from home to home and from two failed reunifications suddenly are returned home. Brandy doesn’t know how to cope. She’s overprotective – yes, overprotective – of one child and that increases the tension. And it sounds like she’s very disappointed that the children are wary and sometimes hostile and it wasn’t the happily-ever-after she’d expected. So it all goes terribly wrong.
But where was the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare in all this? Always hovering during visits, not to help but to observe – they appear to have offered little or nothing after reunification to help the family adjust. What would have happened had there been, for example, an Intensive Family Preservation Services intervention when the children were reunified? Quite possibly, a very different ending.
Indeed, throughout this case, many items on the list of “services” Brandy went through sound more like a set of hoops she had to jump through to prove herself than actual help. Nothing on the list involved concrete help to ameliorate the worst problems of poverty.
But most revealing, had Stephenson chosen to pursue it, was the system’s response to Vergil. In making that point, I have to reprint what he wrote, and that means doing exactly what I criticize Stephenson for doing. But I don’t see a way around that, and I assume that almost everyone coming to this Blog already has read it.
Here’s that section of the story:
Vergil is trying to help get the children back. He used his time in prison to teach himself law. On Danettea's behalf, he filed a federal lawsuit, replete with spelling and grammar errors, alleging the removal of her children by the bureau was unconstitutional and demanding their immediate return.
Vergil's mistrust of the child welfare system is profound.
"I would like to inform you that I will not speak with you or any oneelse in regards to (Danettea's) CaseI will not and canttrust your organization who's job is to destroy functional families as we all ready no)," he writes in a letter to Denice's caseworker, Laura Reitz.
"I have no trust in you or anyone else in your organization, you have twisted facts and the truth."
"I have no trust in you or anyone else in your organization, you have twisted facts and the truth."
Vergil's legal efforts have thus far gone nowhere, other than to raise the question to Denice's caseworker and supervisor of whether Danettea is acting in her children's behalf or in thrall to her boyfriend. [Emphasis added].
Vergil's influence on Danettea was a factor in why her court-appointed lawyer quit in March.
In a motion to withdraw, Jon LaMendola listed among his reasons "requests by the client's significant other, (Vergil), to file motions that Attorney LaMendola believes are frivolous."
Presiding Children's Court Judge Marshall Murray raised this concern - Danettea's dependence on Vergil - during a hearing in which he appointed a new attorney, John Miller.
"You need to start listening to yourself," Murray warned.
"I am listening to myself," Danettea replied.
"You need to start listening to yourself," Murray warned.
"I am listening to myself," Danettea replied.
In other words, Vergil flunked what has been aptly called “the attitude test.” He failed to grovel before the caseworkers and others in authority. That makes it harder for even a mother to get her child back. And if the parent is a big Black man…
The attitude test cuts both ways. There have been several cases around the country in which children have been returned to extremely dangerous homes, and died there, because parents knew how to play the system – they knew how to act humble and grateful and give thanks for the “counseling” and “parent education” bestowed upon them.
(By the way, the vignette in which the lawyer quits is the only time a lawyer for a birth parent makes an appearance in this entire series – their views, which might contradict Stephenson’s “master narrative” are otherwise excluded.)
But instead of questioning why Vergil’s views of the system – or his grammar – are remotely relevant to whether Danice will be safe in the home, Stephenson piles on.
ONE STEP UP FROM VOODOO
So Stephenson writes skeptically about how reuniting families is based on things like “…the belief, in the case of Denice, that a mother who thinks it is not her but rather the system that is dysfunctional, can change.”
And that’s after two paragraphs piling on one negative assessment after another, lifted from what appears to be a psychological evaluation, though the exact source is unclear.
But you’ll never know from Stephenson’s work, that “psych evals” are one step up from voodoo. You can, however, find out how they really work in the story on Page 13 of this issue of the New York City publication Child Welfare Watch and in the Michigan Race Equity Review, which documents cut-and-paste "psych evals," in which evaluators take boilerplate they wrote about one case and apply it to another.
So the idea that the system may, in fact, be at least partly at fault is belittled. The implication is clear: Perhaps because of the machinations of that Svengali-with-poor-grammar, Vergil, Danettea is, to use that favorite child welfare phrase, “in denial.”
And then there is this one telling observation from Danettea, which suggests a lot more insight than the psych eval gives her credit for:
"I don't know how it is that I am fit to have my infant - who is the most defenseless - but can't have my other kids," Danettea says.
"I don't think they have any intention of giving my children back."
One can argue that the mistake is letting her keep the infant, or the mistake is keeping the two-year-old out of the house. But she’s right: It makes no sense to leave the infant in the home and the two-year-old in foster care.
Unless of course, the answer is that the two-year-old is in the home of those nice middle-class foster parents whom “we” like so much better – and wouldn’t she be “better off” if we just left her there?
Ultimately, Crocker Stephenson’s story sounds like a report written by some Child Protective Services caseworkers – and not the good ones. He’s ever-censorious, always ready with a wagging finger, always waiting for what one former foster parent calls “the gotcha moment.” Fortunately, there is less of this kind of casework than there used to be. And less of this kind of journalism, too.
There’s one other thing I learned in journalism school, that is relevant. It involves something I mentioned briefly in the detailed critique of these stories, but deserves more attention: When you write a news story, you’re not supposed to make stuff up.
I’ll return to that tomorrow.
