Last week, the Journal Sentinel published Crocker Stephenson‘s three-part series “When Family Fails — A Child’s Stability, A Parent’s Rights,” tracing two separate parents trying to be reunited with their children after allegations of chronic abuse or neglect, along with the story of foster parents hoping to adopt one of the children.
Stephenson’s series, written with a strong narrative voice, sought to take readers through the legal and emotional twists and turns of the two cases. Summarizing one of them and putting it in context, he wrote:
The brothers are two of more than 2,000 Milwaukee County children who live in temporary homes, having been removed by the state-run Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare because of abuse or neglect.
The bureau says the safety of these displaced children is paramount.
But horrifying stories of torture and abuse can make people wonder.
The series, photographed for the paper by Kristyna Wentz-Graff, is told in often-riveting detail. It sparked some enthusiastic praise (as well as criticism) in comments and in online chats. But was it good journalism?
A longtime critic of the Journal Sentinel‘s child welfare coverage – and of much media coverage of the topic nationwide – says no. In fact, Richard Wexler was so unhappy with the outcome that he took to the blogosphere just two days after it began to issue a point-by-point critique of the opus, saying that it “is going to hurt a lot of children.”
Wexler isn’t just some isolated crank. He heads a small nonprofit, the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, based in Alexandria, Va., just outside the nation’s capital. The JS Crossroads section has published some of his past criticisms of Milwaukee County child welfare practices.
He established the organization a few years after publishing a book, Wounded Innocence, taking on what he contends is the over-eagerness of many child welfare agencies to pull kids from homes unnecessarily. Wexler says bad reporting and journalistic sensationalism help drive those practices, and his organization focuses as much on media coverage as on how agencies do their work.
Wexler wrote the book while he was a reporter for the Albany Times-Union newspaper in New York. But it’s a subject that he covered repeatedly in a reporting career that took him from Wisconsin Public Radio to jobs in Rochester, N.Y. (where we briefly crossed paths) as a public television reporter and later writing for an alternative weekly there, and subsequently to Albany.
In the first entry of the blog “Censored in Milwaukee,” which he set up last week, Wexler calls Stephenson’s new series
… a throwback to the worst child welfare reporting of the 1990s, resurrecting a series of false premises and distortions that were common at the time. Those distortions contributed to the near collapse of many of America’s child welfare systems (most of which never were very good to begin with). Those distortions are a major reason that in 1999, more than 550,000 children were trapped in foster care on any given day. They are a major reason why the number of children torn from their families over the course of a year escalated year after year, peaking at over 307,000 in 2005 — all during a time when actual child abuse was declining.
An accompanying PDF report elaborates on his critique. Citing this story in particular, Wexler told PressroomBuzz this week that Stephenson “went beyond the facts, and he imposed upon the facts a master narrative. He imposed a theory that parents’ rights trump children’s rights” in decisions about child placement and family reunification. “That is absolutely not true. It is entirely at variance with how the system works.” Moreover, he added, “the family preservation movement is in fact a children’s rights movement,” aimed at preventing the “needless removal of children.”
Stephenson hasn’t yet offered any direct response to Wexler’s criticisms. [Update: This morning, he declined my request for his reaction.] But the reporter linked to Wexler’s blog on his own Facebook page. And in an online chat in which Wexler posted some of his criticisms, Stephenson replied:
Thanks, Richard, for you compassionate work in behalf of children and your eagle eye on how this issue is covered (or not) by the media. I encourage everyone to visit Richard’s web site.
Readers: What do you think? Is Wexler wrong? Or was Stephenson’s series off-base? Offer your comments below or e-mail me privately if you prefer. I’d love to hear from you, as I might write more about this issue in the future.
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