Chapter 2 Changing the Narrative in Child Welfare Cases

LibraryRepresenting Parents in Child Welfare Cases: Advice and Guidance for Family Defenders (ABA) (2015 Ed.)

CHAPTER 2 Changing the Narrative in Child Welfare Cases

Matthew Fraidin

Women. The poor. People of color.

Those are the parents ensnared in the child welfare litigation process. Those are the respondents in dependency court.

What would it mean to ask them questions like these?

• "Who are you?"

• "What do you do?"

• "What do you know?"

• "Whom do you love?"

• "What was your greatest success?"

• "What is your dream?"

• "What is your favorite food?"

• "What's the most frivolous thing about you?"

• "What makes you laugh?"

If lawyers asked these questions, we would learn things about parents accused of inadequacy that never get revealed in court, in part because those topics are not even regarded as relevant. This chapter suggests that those questions can make a difference.

Lawyers for parents in child welfare cases face many challenges, but none more daunting than helping parents overcome the stereotypes, assumptions, and false expectations that smother them, and which pervade child welfare decision-making processes. Indeed, in child welfare cases, parents and their lawyers can be forgiven for believing that the die are cast before the litigants even walk into the courtroom. Parents in child welfare are infused with unattractive stereotypes that blind decision makers to the qualities and characteristics of the individuals actually before them. As a result, judges and social workers—and their lawyers, too—make judgments and decisions based on assumptions, rather than facts. And parents are separated from their children unnecessarily and to the children's detriment. Children remain in foster care far longer than they should, enduring more harm than good, often punishing them for being the children of parents no one gets to know.

This chapter describes the unfair, inaccurate, dehumanizing, and harmful stories told about parents in child welfare, and suggests ways for parents' lawyers to reframe their clients and cases. The questions listed above, and others like them, are designed to unearth more about parents than simply the acts captured in the Petition. They are tools to help lawyers discover all parts of a family's reality, including the admirable ones. By doing so, lawyers can deepen their investment in their clients and their commitment to them, and rewrite the stories they tell the social workers and judges.

The assumptions and stereotypes that govern child welfare cases cumulatively function as a "grand narrative"—a unifying, overarching story that seems to explain everything about its subject. In the context of child welfare, the accepted narrative is of terrible parents who inflict unfathomable terrors on children. According to the narrative, parents of children involved in child welfare are bad people, who are too dangerous to be allowed to raise children.

The narrative functions as a filter affecting the way child welfare participants understand information in every case. It is filled with harsh, inaccurate beliefs about parents of children in child welfare, rooted in racial, gender, and class-based stereotypes. As a consequence, parents are unreflectively regarded unsympathetically and punitively. This narrative—our unconscious, collective beliefs—is driven by relentless media coverage. Over 90 percent of news stories about children are about violence by and against children focused on a discrete incident. One researcher...

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