Nobody Should Believe Me - Child-Centered Advocacy with Roxanna Asgarian

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

In this extended conversation from season 7, Andrea sits down with journalist and author Roxanna Asgarian. Together, they explore how media narratives shape public understanding of child protective systems and the parents' rights movement. *** Try out Andrea’s Podcaster Coaching App: https://studio.com/apps/andrea/podcaster Order Andrea’s book The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/the-mother-next-door-9781250284273/ View our sponsors: https://www.nobodyshouldbelieveme.com/sponsors/ Remember that using our codes helps advertisers know you’re listening and helps us keep making the show!   Subscribe on YouTube where we have bonus content: https://www.youtube.com/@NobodyShouldBelieveMePod Follow Andrea on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreadunlop/ Buy Andrea's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Andrea-Dunlop/author/B005VFWJPI For more information and resources on Munchausen by Proxy, please visit: https://www.munchausensupport.com/ The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s MBP Practice Guidelines: https://apsac.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Munchausen-by-Proxy-Clinical-and-Case-Management-Guidance-.pdf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

True Story Media. Hello, it's Andrea, and today I'm sharing my unabridged conversation with journalist Roxanna Oskarian, who is featured in season seven. I highly recommend Roxanna's book about the heart case, which we're going to discuss in this episode. It's called We Were Once a Family, and you can find it wherever you find books. I really appreciated Roxanna spending time with us to talk about her work. It gave me so much to think about. A reminder that if you have any thoughts to share, you can do so by sending us an email to hello at nobody should believe me.com.

And if you want even more from us, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to get two extra episodes a month. That is a great way to support what we're doing over here at Nobody Should Believe Me, as is just tuning in each week. We appreciate you.

We'll be right back with my conversation with Roxanna Oscarian. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, A new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool.

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Wonderful. So now I know you originally through your book, We Were Once a Family, which was recommended to me by a number of listeners. And it has really, really stuck with me because I think it shows. I think there's almost no story that brings together so many of the different issues that we talk about on the show and sort of puts a, I don't even want to say a different perspective, but maybe just a different lens on them. And really, it's this perfect story to talk about for us. You know, we've talked about, we obviously talk about child abuse. We've also talked about transracial adoption on the show because of our season five case. And so there's just so many things in here. You know, we've, that we are talking to abolitionists. So there's, there's so many things in here that is just rich territory for us. So I wonder if you could just start with for folks that don't know this story. Can you tell us a little about the story that you covered in We Were Once a Family? Sure. So in 2018, in March 2018, a family was found at the bottom of a cliff in California. It was two white women and their six adopted black children. And it became,

clear pretty quickly that it wasn't an accident. And so that was a really big story. It made national headlines. And I got involved in it just a couple weeks afterwards because I was living in Houston, Texas. And I got a breaking news assignment to find one of the birth families who lived there. So the kids were two sibling groups of three. So they came from two different families. So I did this breaking news assignment. It was for the Daily Paper in Portland, Oregon, where the family had lived for a while. And I just immediately realized that there was a much deeper story and that it wasn't being told. So I was following the coverage and it was very focused on the two women and their psychological motivations. And it was taking at face value a lot of things that they had said about the kids and their family histories.

And so I spent the next five years delving into and finding members of the kids' birth families and trying to understand, you know, where did the kids come from? And how did the system influence what ended up happening to them? Yeah. And something that you had said in an interview about this was that you felt like the way that the crime was covered with the focus on the moms was a way of really continuing the exploitation of the kids. And that hit me so hard because that is a big thing that we're tackling this season in particular. Now, obviously, again, I sort of have this different entry point, right, where I have a sibling who

is a perpetrator of this abuse. And so it's not to say that I haven't been focused on the childhood victims, but it was, you know, did begin as this exploration of the why, right, why someone would commit a crime like this. And that is often an intense focus of muchhousin by proxy cases because there is so much focus on, oh, this mental illness element and the longer time that I've spent with it, the more that I have realized that really impedes progress and is inhibiting us from coming up with ways to actually help children in this abuse because we get so fixated. I mean, I could give you so many examples of how this is used in our case that we covered last season where she was caught committing this really horrific abuse against one of her younger children.

And then one of her children ended up dying, we believe, as a result of his abuse, so a horrible case where the kids were eventually given back. And there was a huge fixation on this being, oh, a mental break and sort of giving her all of this and taking many things that she said at face value. So lots of corollaries there. But, you know, this season we're talking about these stories that are very focused on the parental experience, right? Where people are saying, and much of what they're saying is being taken by journalists at face value without a lot of examination. And so can you talk about how you saw that functioning in the media coverage about the Hart family and how you sort of saw the kids getting lost?

Yeah, for sure. And I think in the case of the Hart family, it was particularly egregious because Jen, one of the moms, was big on social media and was posting very publicly about her beautiful, you know, multiracial family and very kind of detailed descriptions of what they had experienced. and a lot of this did not have any evidence, at least in any of the case files that I was able to see, which was a good number of them from prior to their adoption. And so it struck me, you know, that was actually part of the narrative, right? The narrative is she painted this picture of a perfect family

and behind closed doors, she was abusing them. But for me, when I saw that and then saw like literally no interest or curiosity about where the kids came from before they were adopted. It made me realize that they were actually taking some, at least, of what she said at face value, about how the kids must have been mistreated in their family homes. And it turned out that none of the kids were removed for abuse. They were all removed for neglect. And there was various complicated situations in their family homes.

But many of the kids had adults in their families that weren't their... parents that really wanted to raise them. You know, earlier you mentioned that the story kind of brings together a lot of elements about the child welfare system that are problematic. And I felt that way, too. And I had been reporting on the child welfare system in this piecemeal way. And when I got started on reporting this, I was like, this kind of hits so many of the problems. And it seemed like a perfect way really to delve into all of this stuff in a way that people could kind of hold in one story because it is the system is huge it's you know 400,000 kids there's lots of varied situations it's a lot of nuance and so this story just struck me as like a very clear case of how

the bias in how we report on these things kind of whitewashes really what's happening in the system on the ground level. Yeah, and it's a hard thing sometimes with telling individual stories, because no story is going to be a monolith. And you can sort of see these various issues showing up in different stories, right? Like we've covered a story where a child was adopted by family members, and that was an adoption story that was a wonderful story. And then we have, you know, this other story where we have an adoptive mom who was abusive. And it was very similar to the heart. where she was a white evangelical. She was telling this very, you know, this story about adopting these children from Zambia

and, you know, them coming out of this horrible situation that, you know, nobody could confirm. And it was just, so you sort of have all of these things. And it's, you can't really say, oh, like, adoption is good or adoption is bad or it's always the wrong thing to take the kids away or it's never the wrong thing to take the kids away. And I think there is sort of endless nuance. And it's such a big job to sort of extract, okay, what are sort of the, lessons, what can we learn from this? What does this mean? You know, in a policy standpoint, and obviously now our job as journalists isn't always to make those connections, but I really just,

I wanted to say to you that I really appreciate the extent to which I see you wrestling with these huge questions about how to handle these systems. And I wonder if you could tell us just a little bit about, there was a story, you know, part of the story that you tell in the book about the mother of three of the heart siblings. Is a story about, someone who was ultimately had her children removed for reasons of medical neglect. And what that means in this context is, I think, something very different than what most people would think of when they think of a child that's medically neglected. So can you tell us just a little bit about her? Sure. So Tammy had three kids, Marcus, Hannah, and Abigail.

and the kids were ultimately removed. You know, she had been on the radar of CPS ever since Hannah had gotten bitten by a lot of aunts at her birthday party and developed staff infection. And ever since that point, CPS was sort of like she had a caseworker since that point in time. And Tammy was low income and she had several mental health issues and she also had a documented history as a child. child in a psychiatric facility, a state-run facility. And so I think all those things definitely factored in to the way that she was treated with her kids in the system. So ultimately, what led to their removal was one of them was really sick and had a high fever. And Tammy would rely a lot on her parents for babysitting and stuff like that. And her oldest son was not yet home from school.

And she was trying to figure out how basically to get her youngest child to the hospital because she was really severely ill. She didn't have a car and her parents were out of town. So their car wasn't around or available. And she was told that she couldn't ride with her other children in the ambulance, right? Because really only one family member gets to ride. But she couldn't leave her children home alone. And so she was kind of stuck and she called her. caseworker for help. And her caseworker came and picked all the kids up and took them to the hospital.

But when she arrived at the hospital, they had basically already filed paperwork and handed her papers for removal of her kids. And honestly, there's a rice element here. And that's like a major piece of the story in the book is the black families were treated very, very differently than the white adoptive parents who were actually convicted of abusing their kids and were allowed to keep their kids. And not just that, but we're allowed to adopt more children. And so it's like an example because it's right. You can compare what happened to the birth families to what happened with the adoptive parents. It's very easy to see if you put their stories side by side that there's a huge difference in how they were treated. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I absolutely

see the elements that race play in this and socioeconomic status and all of that. And I think like, we'll talk about the parents' rights element in a moment because I've sort of seen, you know, I have this, I really need to get like a giant whiteboard and just start building myself a Venn diagram. But I see a lot of, I do think there are a lot of people that are engaged with this debate that have genuinely a lot of care for children and what happens to children and have different ideas about how to implement that and that we can sort of allow for there being quite a lot of good intentions in this conversation and then some not so good intentions, which we know which I'll talk about. But I think, like, I see that there are people who have these pretty opposing

ideas about how to handle it, but where I see what they're saying is backed up by data and what they're, you know, what they're arguing is obviously like very intellectually honest and, and there's a genuine care for children at the center of it. I think most people understand that foster care while there are obviously, you know, many loving foster parents that do it for the right reasons, et cetera, there are high rates of abuse in foster families and especially, you know, in institutional care, which also plays into the story of the heart siblings and their older brother. And so one of the policy ideas that has been implemented to try and fix this is the Adoption and Safe Families Act. And the idea behind that is obviously to live.

limit the time that children spend in limbo, you know, while their parents are sort of going through the system. And now, of course, again, you know, you're going to find stories where an adoption was a life-saving intervention. And I think in the stories I think of are those are abuse situations. And that's not to say, I guess, we should make some room that, like, there are parents probably within the neglect cases that there is no intervention that kind of. And help them be capable of raising children. There are going to be those parents. But I think, like, there are probably interventions that could wipe out a lot of those cases from the system. I think that that's sort of been my impression. But I want to talk about this adoption, say, families act as an

intervention. And can you kind of, obviously, this is a case where there was a move to adoption that went very wrong. So can you kind of talk about that as an intervention and how it might not be the solution that it was intended to be? For sure. So the adoption NC Families Act basically limits the amount of time that a kid can have an open case, which essentially you have like the clock starts ticking when a kid is removed, and you have a certain amount of time before if you are unable to reunify, the parents' rights get terminated. So the reason being, you cannot get adopted if your parents have their parental rights. Right, because you already have them, right? You already have parents. So the termination of parental rights is necessary to open kids up for adoption. So the idea, like you said, it's well intentioned. It's saying we don't want kids to languish in care. We don't want them to cycle through multiple placements, which we know harms kids. The more placements they experience, the more likely they are to have lasting trauma, attachment issues, that kind of thing. But ultimately, what

the adoption and safe families act does is that it financially incentivizes adoption. And it does not provide the same financial support for parents. So we do know that some of these, much of this stuff does have to do with poverty, right? So for instance, if you go into foster care and you get placed with a family, that family gets a certain amount of money every month to look after you. The birth families don't have that option. So if we think about just at the front door, right, if we tried that, if we tried that, because we actually have extensive research that kids do best in their homes. And if not in their homes with their parents, then in homes with their kin. So either their grandparents, their aunt-uncle, somebody that they already know and have

a lasting relationship with. Because it is hard. to make new relationships, especially new parental, new family relationships with people and a quick turnaround, right? And there's all these weird bureaucratic reasons that actually make it hard for foster parents who want to bond with their kids to be able to bond with them. Providers change. You need to have a certain number of rooms and they're very specific about the like requirements of the home that you live in, right? that kind of thing. The other piece is that you get an adoption subsidy. Both the people who adopt, right? So the heart women were receiving subsidies for each of the kids up until their

murders. Okay. So Texas, state of Texas, where all the kids came from, was paying these monthly payments, which was not nothing. There were a lot of money without checking on the kids when there was an allegation of abuse that resulted in Sarah Hart, pleading guilty to domestic abuse of the kids. That didn't trigger Texas's involvement. It didn't trigger, you know, there was a CPS investigation in Minnesota where they were living at the time, but the kids were allowed to stay. And that was before the second set of siblings' adoption had gone through. But again, they got the money. They got the money for a decade, right? Summer is upon us. Finally, and if you're looking to refresh your wardrobe with the change in seasons, Quince has got you covered.

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advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. That's a particularly horrifying piece of this story. The idea that, like, it wasn't that nobody knew what the heart siblings were enduring, because they did. And was that part of a state by state thing because they were, you know, the children were adopted out of one state and they were living in one state for a while and they moved to another state, which again is an element that like we have seen play out over multiple cases of very common. And I think although there wasn't, you know, any evidence of specifically like medical child abuse in this case, I think it can sort of be understood along many of the same lines, right?

because you had that very exploitative piece of they were using them as sort of objects on their social media and like it's sort of portray this idea of this, you know, sort of perfect post-racial family. And there was the famous picture of Devante hugging a police officer. And so I think it shares, it shares a lot of DNA with those cases. And so the sort of like moving around to evade accountability seems like it was a piece of this. For sure. And also I would say that the medical peace, these kids were severely malnourished and underfed. So there were six siblings, five of them, because again, they did have CPS investigations in every place that they had lived. So they had an investigation in Minnesota. They moved to Oregon. They were investigated in

Oregon. And right before the murder suicide, they had moved across the border to Washington, and Washington had opened a CPS investigation. But, you know, in Oregon, when the doctors saw them, right, to check them for signs of abuse, five out of six of the kids were so small that they weren't even on the growth charts for their ages. So the doctor said, well, we don't know what their biological situation is. So maybe they're just very small. It's like these kids aren't all biologically related, right?

because they came from two different sibling groups. So the fact that five out of six of them were so small really should have rung alarm bells, really, really should have. Like Hannah was so small that she was a teenager that looked like she was an eight-year-old. And she had lost her two front teeth, which were her adult teeth in a supposed accident, that she never got her teeth again, right? They never fixed that problem. So she had her two front teeth missing and was so small that it would, like, people would never guess that she was a teenager at the time of her murder.

Yeah. And that, you know, all of those things sound very familiar from many of our cases. And we've spoken to two survivors, two, there are two siblings and then another, you know, and then we covered another case where it was this adoptive case that I mentioned. And I think it's really interesting to me how actually adoption creates this. Again, not in most cases, but in a case where you have an abuser, that's the adoptive parent, a sort of unique opportunistic moment where they can say, oh, well, the child was exposed to drugs when they were in utero. And so they're having all these problems.

And that explains why they're having these behavioral problems that are a result of abuse or in a case of Munchausen by proxy are being fabricated by the parent and sort of used. And I think, like, all these tactics are really the same. It's about control. It's about getting what you want from the child rather than what's good for the child. It's about objectifying the child. It's about exploitation. It's this long-term pattern.

And I think there, again, is so much shared here. And it's really like, I think it's interesting in this case, in particular sort of the who gets the benefit of the doubt as a parent and who gets the hammer down the minute that they make a mistake. And I think that disparity is pretty easy to see in this case. Yes, for sure. And I think that, you know, when the Oregon case was being investigated, when the family was being investigated in Oregon, the caseworker reached out to the Minnesota caseworker. So that means that the Oregon folks actually knew that there had been another investigation. And the caseworkers were going back and forth.

And it's in the case notes. And they're saying, problem is these women look. normal. That's a quote, right? And it says, and they're able to explain away a lot of the suspicious things by pointing to the kids' trauma histories. And, you know, it makes me think about how people who are able to use that language, right? Like, so if you think about the birth families and how they were treated, especially in the courts, where they weren't like fully aware of what the rules were, right? And their legal representation. was not very good, right? And so, and, you know, I sat in on court hearings with the birth family

in like sort of the second generation of the case with their older brother and his kid. And it was just very clear that they didn't understand what was going on and that the lawyer wasn't explaining it in a way they could understand. And I found myself being kind of an interpreter of like, okay, here's the way that this works in court, right? And that really matters. Because if you make a misstep, And it can be a little misstep, right? Because we're talking about you have this service plan and you need, if you don't check every single box of it, then that gives cause to not reunify. Right.

And so if you don't understand the laws, then you don't understand what your rights are. And then you look on the other side where if you have the language of trauma, if you have the language of. And then you also have bias on your side, right? because we do have this idea of especially in transracial adoption, right, which is usually black kids or kids from other countries in white homes. There is an inherent power difference there. And these kids are teenagers and they were making outcries of abuse and people weren't listening to them. And these ladies saying, oh, well, they have trauma histories. Well, you know, of course they

do. And everyone, you know, including those parents, those adoptive parents, they knew that, right? Kids in foster care have trauma histories. Yes, any kid. Any kid who is in foster care is going to have a trauma history. Like there's no situation where you end up with a child removal that's not traumatic, right? No, even if they're just born, really, because it's an attachment thing, right? And we know that about moms and babies, right? We have that research there too. And it doesn't mean, look, lots of people have trauma histories and they go on to be healthy, happy people, right? I do, right? And that's something that I think is used against kids in foster care a lot as if they're

damaged and not okay and not trustworthy and not believable. And then you look to the person who is clearly, I mean, the warning signs were such in this case. And you know, when the Oregon and Minnesota caseworkers were talking, they were actually like, this is suss. Like they were not, they were like, something is wrong here. They clocked it, but it wasn't enough for removal, which is, again, a legal proceeding in a court. Yeah. And I mean, again, a huge mirror with so many of our cases where you look at it and it's like someone to everyone knew so there was something wrong and nothing happened. And I want to dig into the race element for a moment. And I always kind of want to say to everyone listening, you know, everyone listening, you know,

in particular my fellow white folks, everybody take a deep breath. We're not saying that it's an individual problem of, you know, like you listener being racist. No, I'm kind of kidding, but I do. I think people get very defensive when that element comes up, right? And to me, it's helpful to sort of look at, you know, and talking to Alan was so helpful in reading his book is so helpful to sort of think about, you know, rather than like making racist elements like an individual problem of individual social workers or like people in the, you know, or like white parents who adopt black children are bad. Like obviously that's not true. I think it's more thinking about like how do our histories bear down on us in this moment. How do the, how does the media that we

consume bear down on us in these moments? And I think like Alan does an especially deaf job of sort of tracing all of these things and some of them from from my lifetime, right, of the 90s. these sort of crack baby epidemic and or media storylines and, you know, welfare queens and these ideas that we have that are very baked in and are operating upon all of us, whether we, you know, recognize it or not. And so I think there is this element of like sort of who is a good and capable parent and who is a desirable child. You know, I'm reading from, again, where I'm where I see all this sort of connective tissue and agreement, you know, somebody who is actually very pro the Adoption and Safe Families Act, but they were saying that there is this sort of

hierarchy amongst kids that are put up for adoption of like if you have a brand new, you know, white newborn, that that's a sort of more desirable adoptee than a traumatized black five-year-old. And sort of that that bleeds into this assumption that anybody who takes on, raising, you know, a traumatized child that's a little bit older, we're just going to, especially if that's a white parent, we are going to give them this sort of endless benefit of the doubt. Savior award. Yeah. Yeah. And we really saw that play out in the Sophie Hartman case because there was just this idea that like, you know, and she wrote this memoir about her time as a missionary in Zambia that just painted this picture of Zambia that was like not in line with reality, as was most

things that she said. But, you know, it was clearly sort of setting up this dynamic of like, I rescued these children from hell. And so now no one can question me in any of my parenting choices. And so I think like that seems to have really played a role in this case. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's important to note that we definitely have this idea of a hierarchy of what's desirable as far as adoption. I will say that all six of those kids were desired and wanted by the family members who were in court fighting to get custody of them, right? And that's a piece that is the kinship placements, again, which is like the second best option. It's actually federally recognized that you need to try to place kids with family members

before strangers. And, you know, these kinship families are up against people, the court system that is biased, really it is. And it's very easy to see, right? Like with the first birth family that I spoke with, they had an aunt who had a good job in a hospital and she wanted all the kids to be together. Ultimately, what ended up happening there was that she had to go to work and her adult daughter, who was usually the babysitter in these cases wasn't there, wasn't available. And she called their birth mom to watch them for the afternoon while she went into work. and the caseworker stopped by unannounced and removed the kids on the spot and they were never reunited with any of their family members again.

And she said, I didn't realize that this was like an absolute never can I do it, right? She's like it wasn't overnight. It wasn't at her house. It was at my house. She came over to watch them and it seemed like she wanted to, right? Like the mom obviously wants to see her kids. It wasn't, again, like the mom had a drug problem at this time. Essentially, that was the main issue with her, but she still wanted to be a mom.

She still wanted to see her kids. That was the sole, like, one chance, right? Like, one and done. Actually, Roxanne, I'll give you a perfect contrast to that. My sister, who is white, upper middle class, it was investigated twice the second time there was a police investigation. She ended up with her kids back both times. During the second investigation, so against, second investigation.

So again, second investigation, second child for this form of abuse, she's been reported by like four different hospitals. I mean, like a lot that should have been working against her. The children were placed with her in-laws who broke all the rules about what they were supposed to do. They allowed her to be at the house up to 13 hours a day. They allowed her to be alone with the children. They allowed to feed the children, change their diapers, et cetera. All things she was not supposed to do. She was not supposed to have any unsupervised contact with them.

They admitted they'd done that. and they told the police that they thought the investigation was a witch hunt. And when the court was petitioned to change that placement, they didn't. So it's like you contrast those two stories and the difference is pretty clear. Yeah, yeah, it is. This was someone who there was very strong evidence posed a lethal threat to her children. This was not a neglect case. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't take neglect seriously and do, you know, have interventions

to get children out of a situation where they're in danger because of neglect. however much more sympathetic that that may be. But I mean, it's just, it's such a contrast that I absolutely see it where you sort of get, like, who gets a second chance who gets the benefit of the doubt? Who are we making assumptions about? And I think that seems to extend to family members as well as the parents themselves. Definitely. Definitely. And, you know, even again, with the financial incentive, right? Like, that's another element of it because at least in Texas, the kinship payments are not, they're less, right? You get less money than stranger foster care payments. And there's really no reason. Well, it's interesting. It seems like, and I've thought about that a lot,

and then you also talk about how then also biological parents, if they are on a track where they're sort of trying to keep their kids, that they're going to have a bunch more financial barriers. Can you talk about like, not only are they not receiving financial help, they're having additional angel barriers thrown in their way. Yes. Yeah, they're given a whole list, right? This service. And again, in Texas, every state is different, right? A little bit here and there. And Texas, I think, is kind of egregiously bad because when a kid is first removed concurrently with the reunification, like so the idea is, and this is federally mandated that you have to allow parents to try to reunify with their kids. But they also file for termination right then, just right then on removing.

of all. So just in case any missteps happen, they can just hop onto that track right away. And again, the idea is we don't want kids to languish. But what are you saying to those parents, first of all? It's a big threat. It's a big threat, right? It's a sort of Damocles. And also, the states get money for the adoptions, right? The states get money. So that's another piece. Like, there is no reunification award, financial award, for how many parents get to reunify with their kids. And that's the big problem with ASFA is that it is weighted. And again, I think well-intentioned, but with a basis of what families are preferable. Well, and I think, like, for my perspective, it's like it's bringing a lot of judgment. And we're talking about neglect cases, and we'll talk about

abuse in a minute because it is different. It's bringing a lot of judgment into something that, to my mind should be much more of a resource allocation conversation. It's like if we have $50,000, say, to like allocate for this child to be better taking care of, could we try? Well, I don't know, giving that $50,000. So like, if the parent is having, you know, especially some of these cases where we're not talking about there's extra complications of mental health issues or drug, you know, drug addiction or what have you, which we are all obviously very judgmental about, like, as a, you know, whole that I think should be. handled more compassionally, but just sort of taken that out. It's like, if we gave that parent

money so that they could have better housing so that they could have child care, I mean, child care is a crippling expense for parents, you know, like it's so expensive. I think people who are non-parents maybe have no idea of that, you know, that it's like it rivals or outpaces the cost of housing for a lot of people. And so, you know, if you don't have family members that you can rely on or obviously even family members, they're going to have limited availability. That's not a solution for the most part. Like if you could give that same amount of money to those people so that they're not struggling with food insecurity, so that they're not making, being forced to make unsafe decisions so that they do have access to proper health care and transportation

and all of those things. It's not a matter of can we spend more money. It's like can we just reallocate that. Yeah. And I think it's because. of this judgment that we have. You know, we have this America's, this deeply individualistic place where we sort of see so many things in the framework of individual choices. And we're like, that parent's making bad choices. So if we give them more money, they'll just make bad choices with that money. I mean, do you, is that how you sort of see it playing out ideologically? I do think so. And I think that in this country, we blame people for being poor when, and, you know, and a lot of people. You just got to get those boots.

You know, those mythological boots, yeah. And a lot of people who are not poor really have no awareness of what poverty is really like in this country. And I think that through reporting on this book and, you know, as well as this other reporting about child welfare, I have seen, you know, because I'm not, I didn't grow up in poverty. I'm middle class. Honestly, it was kind of horrifying for me to see. up close to witness long term the struggle that having no money actually just compounds and makes

things way more expensive, right? Because now you have interest. You got a credit card and you can't pay that bill. And then, you know, your rent is due. And in order to pay the rent, you can't pay your light bill. And then you get evicted. And then when you get evicted, you can't find another place to rent because no one wants to rent for you. Or if you do, so you're in substandard housing. This is a snowball that many people who live in poverty grew up in poverty, right? So it's not like, oh, you've made bad choices and landed yourself here. It's like you were born in this. You haven't seen your way out.

The idea is like, oh, you just have to be completely perfect and do everything right. And it does happen, right? But it's like these are really for most people, insurmountable obstacles to just. just living a normal life. Yeah, and I think, I always think about that if you watch the TV adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere. So the Reese Wetherspoon character says to the Carrie Washington character, she's like, I have what I have because I made good choices.

And then Carrie Washington character says, no, you had good choices. And I just thought that's like such a like sort of perfect encapsulation. It really strikes me looking at like CPS. And we'll talk about sort of again the abuse thing in a minute, but it's sort of dysfunctional entirely at both things, right? So it's not functioning to protect kids from abuse. And it's also not functioning to help families out of situations where they're struggling. And the interventions, and it's not because, you know, individual social workers don't care. I think most social workers care about kids a lot. I think that's why they get into it. And, but like the options available to them are parenting

classes and these other things that are not an adequate or necessarily helpful. You know, they may, they may help some parents with some things, but like they're also another thing that a parent has to drive to, another barrier. Right. Right. Their obligation. Yeah. Right. Right. And it's a long list, right. So it often is drug testing, even if drugs were not an issue in the removal, right? They'll, they'll give you, people say, call it like the kitchen sink. So you're just doing all of the things that they offer. And in In theory, these are the supports, right? But they in practice are not supports. They're actually like punitive measures, right? Because again, if you don't hit every single one of those marks and say your drug test has to be from one of three places and they're all across town from you and you don't

have a car. And also you're trying to keep a job. And sometimes like in these parenting classes, if you're 10 minutes late, you're absent. So you get across town, you get there, the door is locked on you and you can't do it. But it's like, these people are taking the buss and buses don't run like exactly on time. So it's the idea is like, oh, we're giving you this chance. But really what it is like, we are giving you a series of hurdles to jump through when you're already struggling. And if you weren't struggling, you wouldn't be on the radar of CPS in the first place. And then when you don't hit everything perfectly, we're going to talk at you in the courtroom because parents don't have. the chance to really speak for themselves, right? And kind of talk to you like your, you know, teacher who's mad at you, right? Yeah, yeah. Come to the principal's office energy. Yeah. And it's really frustrating for most parents who, I mean, look, I'm a parent. I wouldn't love being talked to

you in that way. You know, I'm not a perfect parent if you gave me a list of 12 things that I had to go across town to do and pay for and, you know, hit exactly on time. How would I do at that? I don't know. So I want to talk about this other group. And I really appreciated in one of the articles that you sent me, you hit the nail right on the head, which is that you've said that some of this abolitionist and reformist language is being adopted by people who are parents' rights advocates, who are really not in this same mindset about prioritizing the well-being of children to my mind. They probably wouldn't agree with that. And I have seen this so much.

And in fact, what was so interesting about, you know, and as I said, a number of people recommended your book to me, which I loved, by the way, I just think it's like a beautiful, I just think it's like a masterpiece of a book. But, you know, somebody had said there was this impression, I think, you know, early in my reporting something that I heard a lot was like, oh, you're not recognizing all of the harms that CPS causes. And I was like, well, I don't know why anyone thinks I'm out here to defend this system because, you know, I don't know if you know anything about my backstory, but CPS completely failed my niece and nephew. And they ratted my mom out immediately. And so they completely like blew my family up

and then didn't do anything to protect my niece and nephew. So it's not like I'm a fan. I'm out here saying, like, yes, they're doing a great job. And again, that wasn't necessarily because of the individual caseworkers or whatever, but just because the system's not set up, I don't think, to protect kids from this form of abuse in particular that we talk about a lot on the show, Munchaus and My Poxy. And as I'm getting deeper into it, I'm like, yeah, I'm not sure it's doing a great job of protecting kids from any form of abuse. As I've unpacked these cases, these are stories of predominantly white parents. There's a couple of black families featured. And I will say. Like, a bunch house in my proxy abuse is not race specific. I think the parents are treated

differently as in any other case in America, but like there are black perpetrators. We have talked about black perpetrators on the show. But like predominantly these stories are about white parents who had their children removed because they were hospitalized with abusive injuries. And then in many cases, they ultimately got the kids back. And they use simply the fact that their children were returned or that there was not a criminal conviction, they use that as evidence in and of itself that this was a false allegation by doctors. And the one does not equal the other by a mile. And so I have seen this exact thing that you were sort of talking about in Texas of this

is being embraced by people whose priority is parents' rights. and in this sort of very absolute form, right, where what they want is a world where there is no intervention that happens in a parent's parenting of their children regardless of what that parent does to the child. There's all kinds of things that can keep these cases from ending with a criminal conviction, and it doesn't mean, none of that means the abuse didn't happen. And so I wonder if we can sort of unpack and give people a framework for how to understand from your perspective that narrative of parents sort of using because it sounds like you have also observed this of parents saying, oh, right, right, right, all these problems that someone like Roxanna or Alan is pointing out about the system. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's me too when you're talking about a parent not who was roped in because of neglect or poverty adjacent reasons, but is. someone who has caused, you know, in these cases, we're talking about abusive head trauma. So like, you know, where their child has had to get brain surgery because of abusive injuries.

Yeah. I think there's a lot to this question, right? I think the sort of fundamentally, the difference between sort of the abolitionist perspective and the parents' rights perspective is the idea of agency, like a child having agency. That can be, I mean, just the words, a child having agency, a parents' rights perspective would be, no, I get to, I get the say. I own my kids, right? And we know from they're trying to repeal like no fault divorce. Okay.

So like in history, a man owned his wife and his children, right? The legal element was, what is it? coverature, right? Like that once you're married, your husband is then the legal representative of the house, right? And like, then children fall into that too. And that was, yeah. And I think, you know, children have even less rights than women in marriages in this idea, in this traditional sense, because children have fewer legal rights, like they just do. Children don't have robust legal rights as it stands. No, yeah. They do have some, but they don't have the decision-making power for their own lives, right? So the work I've done about child sexual abuse has centered around survivors

who have essentially had their autonomy and their agency violated. Sexual abuse is a really intimate and intense type of violence and harm. And for a child who is, for whom that's not developmentally appropriate in the first place to have sexual interactions. Um, It is fundamentally, it's an incredibly deep kind of developmental trauma that can result in a host of mental health issues, you know. It's a very, very serious thing. And so when we're trying to help, because isn't that the point, right? We're trying to help kids who have been hurt. And I would say, just to back up a little bit, is that I think abuse is really common.

Child abuse is really common. So just because what the stats are saying about. the cases in the child welfare system, the cases in the child welfare system and the instances of child abuse, those are not the same thing. And I would argue many kids have had instances of abuse and neglect in their personal histories, right? And I have, right? And that's kind of what brought me to the work. I was never on the radar of any legal system, nor what I have wanted to be, to be totally frank with you. I think I kind of got out of it. better than most by not having any interfacing with the state. What I did have, though,

and what many kids don't have is a community of people who cared about me. I had safe adults in my life outside of my family home. Some of the abuse that I experienced was outside the home, right? So that was a kind of a byproduct of neglect because nobody was paying that much attention to me. But ultimately, having this personal experience has helped me understand when I'm interviewing people who have been harmed in this way. We talk about trauma-informed reporting, right? And that's basically being sensitive to the needs of the person who's experienced trauma as the priority over your story, over your questions. And so, like, their agency, right? That's what it means. It means understanding this person who's had their right to bodily autonomy violated,

they need to have agency over their story, over their nervous system, right? Like, if you're pushing too hard and you're re-traumatizing somebody, that's on you. And I think it, it, when we're talking about abolition, we're talking about ways to increase agency for children. And that does not mean children should be alone out there making decisions, right? That kids should be making developmentally inappropriate calls for their well-being, right? But it means we have to listen to them. We have to think of them as whole human beings. We have to recognize that what they're dealing with, especially kids who've been harmed,

are dealing with stuff where they are the most impacted person. And so when we're putting this in the context of parents' rights, that's not, it's just like completely, I would say, in antithesis, right? Like to say, I own my kid, the way I parent is my right. I have the right to parent. And there's another piece, which is a nuance of this, which is that parents do have rights, right? Parents have legal rights. And that is important.

Those actual legal protections for parents are important for all those people, all those neglect cases, all of those people in poverty who are fighting the system. they have to know that they have legal rights as parents. Just as like say you're accused of a crime, right? We have the right to remain silent. We have a right to an attorney. Like these are things that we all know because we talk about them openly. And we don't talk about parent, like the actual legal rights of parents in that way.

Now that makes things really confusing though, right? Because I'm like, yes, I do believe parents have rights. I mean, it is, that's the other thing that's weird. It is in the Constitution. Like, well, the state constitution and it's federally protection. you know, that parents have the rights to parent their children. And we're talking about Jen Hart using the language of trauma to essentially continually traumatize her adopted kids. These folks are using the language, the sort of abolitionist framing for a purpose that is unsafe. Kids should

not be completely isolated, just generally. That's the first thing, right? Like so, and a lot of this has the origins in the in the homeschooling movement, right? Like I should be able to homeschool my kid. Okay. And there's there's obviously nuance to that whole conversation. But ultimately, in the case of the Hart family, they were homeschooled, i.e., they did not see any adults besides their adoptive parents unless explicitly sanctioned by their adoptive parents, which means they never saw adults outside of family occasions where their adoptive moms were right there. Yeah, and the homeschooling piece, it is such a, and it's been a strong element in the cases that we've covered. And a lot of Munchausen by proxy abuse, medical child abuse is

sort of the more of the legal framing of that, that form of abuse, which is usually focused on sort of physical harms that come to a child. But a lot of that abuse spills over into the educational realm, and that's where we see it showing up in really every case I've covered is, you know, especially if there's some heat on a mom because of some of the more dramatic surgeries or what have you. They'll say their child has learning disabilities or autism spectrum disorder or, you know, this, that, and the other thing. And they need all these extra accommodations and they need an IEP and they're pulling them out of school all the time. And they're just preventing their child from having a normal experience that would be healthy and connected to their peers and connected to other safe adults. And I think even school as a mitigation strategy is massive for abuse cases, right?

Because we've talked to someone. And again, like, I love when you talked about in this TNR piece about we have to listen to, like, give children whatever sort of age level agency is appropriate. And then also like speaking to survivors, you know, what would you have wanted? What was the intervention that you've wanted? You're telling me that you would not have wanted state intervention. You think you were better off. Like that's meaningful and we should listen to that. And it's going to be, to some degree, individual situations.

But I think like... Listening, listening to the person. We've had so many survivors that have told us that there was like, even if the interventions weren't successful in that they got them out of their abuser's house, just having an adult that was a safe. person, just having that relationship, having, you know, and it sounds like that was true for you as well, right? Like, having those connections with the community, having a respite, right? Just like having, like, okay, the school day is a period of time every day where I'm not under this intense fear of

physical abuse or dealing with this, like, eggshells situation, even if it just means that that child gets a break. And I think actually, like, the abolitionist conversation and the parents' rights, even though there might be some individual reforms that they both support, as you've talked about, you know, like Mirandizing, you know, parents in Texas and that kind of thing, there's almost no common ground. Whereas I think like someone that supports FAFSA and those kind of things, you probably actually have a lot more common ground with than a parents' rights person because of the element of community. Can you talk a little bit about how with an abolitionist conversation, how in contrast to something like a parents' rights conversation, which is just saying hands off, doctors

shouldn't have the right to intervene, teacher shouldn't have the right to intervene, the state shouldn't have the right to intervene, this is my business. Can you sort of talk about that differences about what solutions we're talking about potentially here to this problem? Yeah. You know, we talk a lot about sort of survivor-focused interventions, but I think sometimes, like we can start using words that start to lose the deeper meanings, right, when we talk about like survivor focus. So, you know, it's easy to just say, I'm survivor focused. Who isn't? Ideally, you want a kid to Well, actually, you know what I'm at work. I don't think everyone is. I mean, and I think that's where the parents' rights conversation stands out to me. I don't actually think that the parents' rights

movement has the welfare of children at its heart. I think it sees children in a very different context. So I, well, I appreciate what you're saying because I think that's an easy piece of language to layer on to any intervention. I actually think that that is something that needs to be identified and sort of called out because there is a lot of disagreement. And I think there are a lot of people that have different ideas about how to solve these problems that really genuinely do have the well-being of children and supportive survivors at the center. There are pieces of this conversation that absolutely do not. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I also would say, though, that there is a sort of paternalistic care for children that involves sort of like,

I know what's best for you. No one's going to say they don't have children at that are, right? Even if they really don't. They're going to say it's a potent political football for sure. Yeah. And I think that the parents' rights mentality is, I wouldn't call that well-intentioned, right? I wouldn't call it that. But I also think that some well-intentioned people who want more intervention without kind

of recognizing the specific needs of what a kid might want or what their ultimate healing might look like because what happens to you in your childhood stays with you for your entire life. And we know this because we're all talking. I mean, body keeps the score is number one for the like six year in a row or whatever. Like so we're all dealing with the impacts of our own childhoods. I think it is actually pretty radical to say like listen to kids and hear them. listen to them and hear them as people. Because this savior idea, we have created a system that makes it easier for people who have a sort of savior complex or need to be self-aggrandized through another human being. You could call it narcissistic tendency. You could call it all sorts of

different things. But the idea is that you're using a kid as a tool for your own self-image. The system makes it so easy for us to do that and that deserves some scrutiny. Why is it so easy? And I think our culture and society very often don't see children as full human beings. And again, I'm not saying do whatever, no rules, your whole, you know, whatever, but it's saying like, really treating children and their humanity as equal to yours. I'm a human being and you're a human being. And you are the human being who actually whose needs are most important in this moment. Because we have this idea, we say that, but then we do this punishment thing where it's very clear that we're more focused. So like if a kid reports child sexual abuse, that triggers mandated reporting. That starts a legal

process, whether in the child welfare system or in the criminal system or often in both, right, like two tracks that they're going down. Those two systems are completely outside the control of not just the kid, but their parent and any of their advocates. It starts a whole thing that is not in the control of the kid. And this kid has had, again, they're very self-violated. So not listening, you know, whether that's not believing them or just not listening to me saying, like, I'm not ready to start this process or I need like,

instead of asking them like, hey, what do you need to feel safe, right? Because we know being safe, right? You might need to remove them. You might need to remove the person who did the harm, depending on how they're situated. But asking them, what would you need to feel safe? Sometimes that's a different question. What I need to feel safe is to be acknowledged. I need people to stop talking about me when I'm right there. I don't want to have to go give my statement four times to the police. Whatever. These are things that are, and they're all valid, right? And for me, an abolitionist framework isn't saying there is never a need for serious intervention that could include punishment, right? Like, I think it's reworking where we put punishment

into the context of harm, because as we know, a lot of harmdoers are survivors, right? This is, we're in an intergenerational cycle. And like I said, I think a lot, a lot of people have experienced abuse as children of some type. And I think it's about being, it's about recognizing that instead of assuming that it's this kind of thing that happens to other people, that we pity those people, right? Because a child also knows when you're pitying them. And they don't need that pity. Yeah, like you're, you're writing about child sex abuse and, and writing about, you know, it really was like, It was very moving. And, you know, one of the things you were talking about was this, a gal who was herself a survivor that was doing nonprofit work to help survivors. And one of the things you talked

about that so resonated with me was this idea that like, this is not something that our criminal justice system is adept at dealing with, that you have this, you know, 2% conviction rate. Like many interpersonal crimes, I mean, like sexual assaults of adults, same thing, right? the conviction rates are not in any universe reflective of the incident rate. And that really hit me because one of the things that I've become so concerned about with these work like Mike Hicks and Boggs and take care of Maya and die in here and, you know, and and and and, where they're elevating the stories of the parents and they are giving them a microphone to say, I was the victim, I was falsely accused. And these are people who have had the abuse confirmed by CPS, where the abusive injuries

were diagnosed by a very skilled doctor. No reason actually to believe these people were falsely accused of anything. And I think, like, yes, you don't have to prove your innocence in court. But if you are going to the media and claiming you were falsely accused, then I think that that is a story that you need to prove. And I think the media should be really, diligent and really careful about elevating that story, not because we shouldn't be talking about these systemic issues and everything else, but there's a lot of danger there, and not least of all, to the children of those people, in abusive head trauma cases in particular, those are often babies under the age of two. Maybe they're like five or six by the time the media

stories are coming out. But those children have no voice. And the person actually in that setup that is sort of representing their voice is often the doctor. And when I've talked to child abuse pediatricians, which is such a difficult job, not particularly full of glory and praise or well paid or anything. And I want to get your opinion on sort of the child abuse pediatricians in this whole part of the system, because obviously we've talked a lot about sort of CPS and social workers. The way that many of them have described, you know, using various sort of in various ways, how they see their job is to be an aspect. advocate for children because they're evaluating abusive cases and there's already a concern for abuse

if they're evaluating the child, right? So there's a fair amount of cases that are screened out that never get to them. And then in less than half of the cases, they're making a determination of abuse. But, you know, when they make a determination of abuse, they really see them at themselves, I think as, and a lot of them have described their role to me as like, somebody has to tell the medical story, you know, the story of the medical evidence, lay out what happened to this child because otherwise it will be a mystery because this child can't speak for themselves. So, you know, you sort of have this media story where you're prioritizing the story of the parent and then demonizing the person who is probably telling a truth about what happened to this child and completely erasing the child

themselves. And so I just sort of see this as a sort of worst case scenario about how we could talk about child abuse in the media. Yeah, I think that cases involving really young children are super challenging across the board because, like, for their attorneys, like, there's a lot of people who have to speak for young children because they actually cannot and are not able to speak for themselves. I also think that one major thing, like, is the power dynamics involved? The, you know, I know that Texas, I think, did this pass a lot about having second opinions, right? And I think in one way, that can be really a good thing for everyone involved because it's saying, because like you said, it's a hard job. There's a lot of jobs involving children and in the child welfare system are very,

the stakes are very high. You were talking earlier about how caseworkers are usually people who really care about kids, right? I think the entire industry, right, child welfare industry, all the people who do jobs related to child welfare, it's super easy to get jaded, to get burnt out. And I mean, it's almost like impossible not to get burnt out when you're looking at abuse all day, every day. I mean, I got burnt out, right? I mean. Yeah, I experienced that as well. Yeah. And you start seeing, you start seeing things in a really negative way. So I think it's helpful. The more people we can get involved in in cases to give you that backstop, right? Yeah, yeah.

And I think maybe just to end with this question of like, yeah, to people that say the abolition, I get it. It's a great idea. But like it feels too far off to even conceptualize that world, given where we're at right now. like can you kind of give us a reframe to getting out of that like sort of stuck place of just like yeah I'd love I'd love to live there too but like that's not that's not where any of this is going so what's the point in even dreaming about such a world yeah I think it's important to hold an idea for about for things to be better I do think that's important I think that's a main component of

the burnout right is that it it's hard to look around It's hard to be in this, in this milieu and not get overcome with despair. So there's that. I do believe there's a place for hope. But I also think that the abolitionist framework is about reconceptualizing what keeps kids safe. It's not about waiting for the, you know, the land at the end of the rainbow, whatever. It's about how do we challenge the things that are for sure not working and how do we rethink things. in a way that centers the kids and centers the family, right?

And centers not just the safety, not just the physical safety, but the emotional well-being of children. And so it's a now thing. It's like it's basically a way of looking at the world that helps you make decisions, right, in the current moment. And it helps you be involved as a human too. Because if you're treating, if you're in your community, if you're not just working with kids, but if you know kids, if your kids' friends are, you know,

like you are the community to the kids around you. And so having that framework and that ethos and that like respect for kids is actually the thing that really will help. Like that is the measurable help that we can do as just everyday people. Nobody should believe Meek is produced and hosted by me, Andrea Dunlop. Our editor is Greta Stromquist. and our senior producer is Mariah Gossett, administrative support from Nola Karmouche.