We Were Once a Family

We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, by Roxanna Asgarian

I have, just once in my life, called CPS on someone. It was a complicated situation but I truly believed that the parent of a child my kid knew was escalating abuse in a way that could literally kill that child in the near future, so I made a report. And even though loaded guns were involved in that situation, I still wasn't sure I was doing the right thing. I think, in retrospect, it was: that child is still alive, got some services, was removed to a relative's home for a period of time while the parent got some services and then returned. That child is now almost an adult, and from what I hear isn't really thriving, but is still alive. Which matters.

I have wished, many times, that there was something else that could be done. There have been other situations that have come up in my life which have made me feel that I lacked the tools I needed. Kids I have known that maybe I should have called CPS on their caregivers, but didn't, because I was afraid of the system, or because I thought it wasn't 'bad enough' that outside intervention would even happen. I hate it. My earnest belief is that all adults have a moral duty to protect, nurture, and teach any child in our vicinity, blood-related or not--not overriding their primary caregivers, of course. Just, if a kid needs help, all adults should feel morally obligated to provide help. And I think I've failed to do that, at times. I think our society has failed at that.

I think our society is really having a moment of reckoning about how we treat children--I actually have this theory that a significant part of the conservative backlash happening in the US and around the world right now is because people want to own and control their children without interference, and it started to look like the world might not let them. The attacks on trans kids, the attacks on child abuse-trained pediatricians--in our local elections a few days ago, all the crypto-conservatives trying to get elected in a very blue area had candidate statements about how important 'parents' rights' are. And on the other hand, hunting and punishing pedophiles has never been more popular. We need to protect the children, you see, we're desperate to do that. But we keep not doing it.

This book is so interesting when paired with a podcast I've been listening to, Nobody Should Believe Me, which is about medical child abuse, the parents (usually mothers, usually white) who commit it, and what happens to the kids who suffer it. I think we under-react to some kinds of harm to children (like a mother deciding a healthy child should be sick and then making that child sick directly or indirectly) and we over-react to others (like a parent taking drugs other than alcohol but not doing other kinds of abuse to their child). Nobody Should Believe Me makes a pretty compelling case that medical child abuse is under-reported and under-investigated, and that kids should be taken from their parents way more frequently than they are in order to save them from often-deadly abuse. We Were Once a Family makes a pretty compelling case that when parents are young people of color, poverty and immaturity are often investigated like attempted murder, that kids are taken from their parents way too often, and that the foster-and-adoption system does some good and a lot of harm.

Of course both things can be true. Both of these problems are growing from the same root, the bias in the system. Some mothers are assumed to be good; some mothers are assumed to be bad. Racism in favor of white mothers hurts their kids, because the system isn't even watching, let alone removing those kids. I actually was surprised-but-not-really to see the ways the Hart parents used some of the same medical child abuse tactics uncovered in Nobody Should Believe Me, especially the manipulation of food and use of starvation, the isolation from the outside world via homeschooling, and the blogging intimate details of the kids' lives for a flattering audience.

We Were Once a Family is such a subtle look at the child welfare system in America. These kids maybe should not have been taken from their birth families. They probably should have been taken from their adoptive family. The system seems to be set up in a way that resulted in both errors in a really predictable way, that has happened over and over and over. Kids in white, middle-class, two-parent homes are not protected. Kids in poor Black homes are also at risk, just in different ways. A better child welfare system than this has got to be possible, I have to believe it.