Nobody Should Believe Me - Who Speaks for the Children with Elizabeth Bartholet

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

During our Season 7 conversation about the parents' rights movement, Andrea spoke with Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who recently retired from Harvard Law School after more than three decades focused on child welfare, children's rights, and adoption. In this bonus episode, we're sharing more of that important conversation as they dig deeper into children's rights, the influence of advocacy groups on child welfare policy, and the broader debates shaping how abuse cases are understood in the media, the courts, and beyond. *** 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 an extended cut of my conversation with author and academic Elizabeth Bartholet. She has such an in-depth and fascinating perspective on child welfare and children's rights, and there is so much about this conversation that I am still thinking about, and I know you will enjoy here again. As always, if you want more than our weekly episode, you can listen to Nobody Should Believe Me After Hours by subscribing on Apple and Patreon, and you will get two bonus episodes a month, or three, if you subscribe to the highest here on Patreon, where you get to hear my behind the scenes updates each month in my

Nobody Should Believe Me Diaries series. If monetary support is not an option, rating and reviewing the show is a huge help because while we have incredible supportive listeners, there are also people who don't want us to be talking about the things that we talk about on this show. So positive reviews are always a very welcome and appreciated balance to those other ones. And just by being here, just by listening each week, you are also supporting us, and we thank you. We will be right back with my conversation with Elizabeth Bartholet. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025.

Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and online. Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive.

The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or something. someone close to you. Peace contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario.

Professor Bartholet, thank you so much for being with us. So if you could just start off with who you are and what you do. Elizabeth Bartholet, recently retired from the Harvard Law School faculty, and for the last three decades plus I've focused my work on child welfare, child rights, adoption, and related issues. So I wanted to start off with previously on the show we've covered Much Hasen by proxy cases. We covered a big one that, a case that has been in the headlines the last couple of years, the Maya Kowalski case in Florida, which was the subject of a Netflix film that millions of people saw called Take Care of Maya. And what we've come to understand is we've been looking through that case and these other lawsuits around the country against doctors is that even if this is being positioned as a system reform movement, that it's really a parents' rights movement. And the film Take Care of Maya starts off with this quote. It's the mother in question talking to an advocate.

And the advocate tells her, this is one of the most screwed up parts of the United States system period. it's unethical and it's immoral. Parents have no rights. Parents have no rights. So I wanted to ask you, do parents have no rights in this country? Parents have extraordinarily strong rights in this country, and children are the ones that have very, very limited rights. So in terms of the federal constitution and most state constitutions, parents have very strongly protected constitutional rights, which means that legislation has to be written that honors parents' rights, it means that courts decide any discretionary issues recognizing parents' strong constitutional rights, whereas children have no constitutional rights, no constitutional rights to be protected against abuse and neglect,

whereas parents have very strong rights to hold onto their children, even if they're accused of abuse and neglect. So talk to us about this idea of parents' rights absolutionism because I think most people, most reasonable people would agree that parents should have rights that it's appropriate for parents to have rights with regards to their children. But talk to us about this sort of extreme of this spectrum. Yeah, I've used the term parent rights absolutism in talking about homeschooling, but I think it applies across the board in the child welfare area because I think that our system in the United States, unlike the system in many other countries, does treat parent rights as near absolute,

not as absolutely absolute. There's lots of legislation that purports to protect children, but it's very important that the federal constitution only protects parent rights, not children's rights. So it means that all the legislation that may get written, which may look as if it's designed to protect children, it's still being read in light of the Constitution, which says parents have very strong constitutional rights to hold onto their children. Children have no rights under the Constitution to anything and certainly not to being protected against abuse. Every other country in the world has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, International Treaty. Every other country in the world has ratified that. That convention recognizes children as having rights

equivalent to those of adults. It's significant that the United States has refused to ratify that. What is the argument against ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Childs in our country? Well, I don't think there's really a strong argument. The parent rights groups have opposed ratification. And there's no question but that if we did ratify, it would signal a change in the U.S. approach. a recognition that children should have rights equivalent to adults. So I think politically it's been impossible or seemed impossible for us to ratify because the parent rights movement is as strong as it is. I mean, the parent rights movement also wants to make our Constitution even more protective of parent rights than it already is. They've been pushing to amend the

Constitution so that really anything other than threats to kill a child would be a to the parent. Yeah, and I think that that is the quiet part that's not being said out loud in a lot of this media about parents being falsely accused of abuse. And it's really striking that, and I know you don't know, you know, the Kowalski case in particular, but this is a case where there was evidence, there was very strong evidence that that child's life was being put at risk. And so holding that up, and then many of these other cases that I've looked at have been cases. of abusive head trauma where children were hospitalized and required brain surgery because of their injuries. And because there was not criminal conviction with a jury trial, et cetera, in these cases,

they're being held up as false allegations of abuse. And I'm really concerned about the sort of permission structure that that creates. I think that you're right to be concerned. So abusive head trauma or a ht i think is a this whole area is a prime example of what's been going on so when i was teaching at harvard law school i brought in one of the leading expert scientific experts on a ht who was also an expert on the research about a ht and the expert opinion among child pediatricians and there's extraordinary near unanimity among the reputable pediatrician experts, that A.HT exists as a diagnosis. There's near unanimity on how to, how to diagnose it, and that it's real and that you can tell if this child has been subjected to AHT. And what you have is

a very, a tiny, really, group of so-called experts who are hiring themselves out, making a lot of money as courtroom experts. They hire themselves out to the defense bar. they get paid, they testify, a handful of them testify in case after case. And, yeah, unfortunately, what happens in courts very often is the judges aren't experts. We've got an adversarial system where each side gets to call its experts. So you have judges and juries who are faced with a lawyer on each side who's brought in an expert. And hard for the judges and juries to know which are the legitimate, knowledgeable experts and which are the hired guns who are willing to say what the defense bar wants

them to say. And unfortunately, I think in a lot of these cases, parents are being let off when they should not be. And then there's this word being put out by basically, I'll just term it, the parents' rights movement in the press that many of the media folk eat up about how, you know, this is unjust and terrible. And this poor parent has been long. unmonfully convicted. Yeah, it's really alarming. And I think it's hard not to sort of start to connect the dots with the moment that we're in just in terms of being an anti-science, anti-medicine moment. Yes. There is a piece of the parents' rights movement that is, you know, organized into a group that we're reporting on called fractured families, which is a group of parents

who claim to have been falsely accused of abuse and have been successful in getting legislation passed in Texas that specifically calls out the need for a second opinion in abuse diagnoses and, you know, list five of the conditions that these parents are all claiming their children have. And there are, you know, a whole sort of cadre of expert witnesses that they like and share about. We have a source that's in one of their private groups. And they share about these experts. They say how much they cost.

There's really a lot of coordination. And this has made its way all the way into legislation in Texas. and Florida. And I think they have been successful in rebranding their efforts as a social justice effort rather than a parents' rights effort, which I think is why it's getting buy-in from people and from journalists that it wouldn't necessarily get buy-in. If it was being framed as adjacent to the anti-vax movement or the sort of extreme homeschooling movement, although I think those are, there are a lot of the same people. It's really easy to see where these movements share DNA, but I think they've, I'm very fascinated by how they've sort of presented themselves as,

oh, we're about system reform and we're about social justice for parents. They're sort of, again, to not saying the quiet part out loud. Right. I think this is going on throughout the child welfare world. So I think what you have is two things, both a false science phenomenon, phony research, advocacy research dressed up as if it's real research, real scientific research. And then I think you also have parents' right movements that often get dressed up as something else that might be social justice or might be, you know, even they'll purport to be representing children's rights to, you know, education. And so it's very powerful advocates that know how to present their theories. And I think part of the problem, two kinds of problems. So in terms of the advocacy, I think you've got

parents or adults, kids are kids. It really is hard for children to fight for themselves. Okay. So in the end, they're always depending on adults to fight for the children. There are some adults out there that are genuinely fighting for children, but everybody out there is going to claim that they're on the side of the child. Nobody wants to admit they're anti-child. So I think it's confusing for media. Everybody's claiming they care about the children, and you can't really expect the children who are most in need of care and protection, toddlers, infants, young kids to be out there on the streets or, you know, demanding representation and getting representation. So that's a major part of the problem.

These parent rights groups are very organized. It's certainly in the areas I've looked at, for example, recently in the homeschooling area. I don't think it's a particularly large group, just like the gun rights folk, aren't as large as the noise they make. But it's a single issue group that's highly organized. And so, for example, in the homeschooling area, you get a legislator will see a kid who died. at home who was supposedly being homeschooled, but in fact, we've withdrawn from school because the child was reserved by a teacher to be bruised and beaten. So the parent withdraws the child. Child ends up dead. Some legislator says, oh, there's no regulation of homeschooling. I think we should,

for example, like check before you're allowed to homeschool if you've already killed a child in your custody. That sounds minimally reasonable. poses a bill, the next day there'll be 200 or 500 people in that legislator's office, there'll be thousands of emails, all from this homeschooling movement, because they put out the word to their members. Every state has a homeschooling legal defense fund. There's this immediate major pushback, whereas there's nothing on the side of, well, there might be, there's a little nonprofit, not very powerful. There are a bunch of academics like me that write articles. There isn't anything like the equivalent lobbying group. So you get the pressure in the legislature is all in

one direction. At the same time, this movement, parents' right movement broadly defined is strong enough that they're, and smart enough, savvy enough. They're funding research as well as advocacy. So in various areas I've studied, whether it's race issues in child welfare, homeschooling, A.HT, a whole range of issues that have to do with children's rights. You get foundations and nonprofits that believe in a parent rights. And I'm sure some of them believe that parents can do no wrong, or at least the state will be worse if it intervenes, and that'll be worth for children. but in any event, it's strongly pushing the idea that it's always going to be better to keep the state out of it. Whereas in the other areas, like women's rights, we've come to recognize that when you have a less powerful player,

you need the state to represent the interests of the woman or the person with disabilities of the person who's mentally incompetent. But in the area of children, you've got people pushing this line that everybody's going to be better off including children if we don't get the state in. So now, these savvy groups are not only savvy about lobbying, but they're savvy about the uses of research. So you get advocacy groups that are either doing the so-called research themselves or they team up with other advocacy groups that present themselves as foundations, nonprofits, research people. And they're doing research, but it's not real research, it's advocacy research. It's designed to accomplish a policy purpose rather than to seek

the truth and decide where the truth leads in terms of policy outcomes. So in one area after another, I mean, most of my writing and research has been devoted to kind of looking at the social science in a variety of child welfare fields, unpacking it, and realizing that actually most of the advocacy that pushes for these parent-friendly, child-unfriendly policies is advocacy research. And it can look very slick and fancy and have statistical charts. But when you probe it, you see, even if you're a non-social scientist as I am, that it only superficially is what you might call research. That's a piece that I'm really interested to unpack because there are two organ, there's more than two, but there's two that are really on my radar in terms of nonprofits that, you know, yeah, look very

legit and they have doctors that have, like, fine credentials, right? It's not necessarily obvious quackery to the naked eye. But then you look at who founded them, who's coalesced around them, who's funding them. And one is mitoaction, which is really sort of forwarding this idea that every parent that is falsely accused of Munchausen by proxy abuse is actually, you know, just a child with a mitochondrial disorder. And then fractured families funds a lot of research with the Ellers-Danlo's Society. And there's one doctor in particular, Dr. Hollick, who they really, they've fundraised for to keep his clinic open.

They're just like they're very actively supporting him in his research. And then another one, you know, Dr. Patch. So there's sort of these like individual diagnoses that they fixated on that can sort of serve as a catch-all in court, right, for anything. be like, oh, well, that wasn't abuse. That was this other thing. Right. And here's our doctor that testifies about it. And here's like, look at this foundation we have and look at all these other families that this has happened to. And what I can see from having again a source that's on the inside of one of these groups for the past couple of years, it's very obvious that they're

not doing any due diligence with who they're sort of letting into the group. I am a busy working mom with a four-year-old and a seven-year-old. Neither of whom want to go to bed on time because it is summer. sun is still up. So in short, am I well rested? No, but you might never know it because my eye makeup from Thrive Cosmetics is doing the Lord's Work. Thrive has two of my all-time favorite products for judging up my sleepy eye situation. I start with their brilliant eye-brightener sticks for my eye shadow. These waterproof eye-shadow sticks come in 32 colors and they are foolproof so I can manage them even on my roughest mornings. And I always top it off with the superstar of Thrives products

in my opinion, my all-time favorite, their lashes for days, liquid lash extension mascara. This is my favorite mascara ever. It makes your lashes look super long and full, and it comes off easily with soap and water. It's magic. It's witchcraft. I don't know how they do it, but I love it. This product has over 40,000 five-star reviews for a good reason. And not only are their products amazing, you can feel good about Thrive because shopping with them means giving back, with over 150, million dollars in product and cash donations to 600 plus giving partners, your purchase directly fuels real impact. Beauty with a purpose, we love it. So amplify your summer look with Thrive Cosmetics. Go to ThriveCosmetics.com backslash nobody for an exclusive offer of 20% off your

first order. That's Thrive Cosmetics, C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S dot com slash nobody. You can find all of that information in our show notes, and remember the shopping our sponsors is a great way to support the show. I just got back from doing some reporting in the field with my producer Mariah, and I noticed that she was sporting a very cute bag. And what do you know, it was the Italian leather, hand-woven convertible crossbody from Quince. This bag easily looks like it could cost $500, but it is, in fact, $96 from Quince. I have actually been eyeing this bag for a while online, and after six, seeing it in real life, I had to go get one for myself. Mara also told me she was sporting a pair of Quince's black 100% European linen pants. These are perfect for summer, especially in the south,

where we were traveling. The Nobody Should Believe Me team loves Quince, and we genuinely talk about this brand a lot, even when no one's paying us to. And truly, what's not to love? Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands, and they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middleman so you're paying for exceptional quality, not brand markup. So whether you're looking for some new luxurious accessories or to refresh your summer basics, Quince has everything you need. Make your summer wardrobe feel easier. Go to quince.com slash believe for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com slash believe for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash believe.

You can find that information in our show notes. And remember, the shopping our sponsors is a great way to support the show. There's this organization called the Homeschooling Defense Fund that it organizes the lobbying efforts. But it also tells all its members that if any of them, part of the benefits that go with being a member is that if you are accused of child abuse, you call HSLDA and they will give you a lawyer. And I believe they fund the lawyer. So any accusation, we don't screen. We don't take what kind of. child abuse, is there any proof of it? We just protect you against invasion by the state,

because they're similarly against any of the, basically, of the child abuse protections. And second thing that comes to mind is somewhat different. But when I was teaching, the course I taught in which I dealt with A.H.T. issues is called the Art of Social Change. It should still be on my website with under Art of Social Change or under Child program, and it's got my earlier courses. And there was an expert on the research on AHT from, I think he was from medical school in Minnesota or possibly Michigan. And I had him twice lecture, and he had sort of amazing materials, which are also probably available on the website. But he's the one who did a survey of like all the nation's pediatricians on

whether they thought AHT was a genuine diagnosis or not and, you know, all of this stuff. And it's on his work that I base this claim I made that there's sort of near unanimous agreement among respectable experts that AHT is a legitimate diagnosis, et cetera. To your point about the medical consensus, you have consensus from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the, I mean, all of the sort of internationally even there's consensus on this. And yet it somehow has made it into both the courtroom and the media as, oh, there's all of this controversial, you know, science. And you're like, well, no, the science is not controversial. It's like people are creating a controversy around it, but it's not a scientific one. And you were talking about sort of this legal defense fund. And I think we can definitely talk a little bit about the connection between homeschooling and abuse because that's come up. Hom schooling question has come up in a lot of our cases that we've covered. This debate has co-opted the Innocence Project. Yes. Because the Innocence Project now lists Shaken Baby Syndrome, which is the older name for it, as junk science, which is so appalling to me. And I think this is where I'm talking about, like, they're reframing it as a social justice movement. The week after this expert that I had present on H.A.HT. in my class, the week after that, I had a class in which I had somebody from the Innocence program. And he was on a totally different topic. But he was so angry that I had had this expert the week before that he took advantage of being in this other class of mine to denounce all the AHD sciences, you know, completely fake and blah, blah, blah. I mean, based on what do you know?

Well, I think it's based on the innocence project obviously became committed to people who had been falsely found guilty and or given death sentences in that connection. So I think they get over to that defense side of things. But I don't think based on any science, it just that I don't know. Because again, that wasn't supposed to be the topic of that class or I chose not to engage with the guy. Yeah, I knew they'd been co-opted. I think the other point I wanted to make is how differently other countries think about these things. So it's not only the case that they've all signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which basically equates child rights with adult rights.

But in the area of homeschooling, I wrote an article, which actually, it's a chapter of a book. And it appears on my publications, it's slightly more recent than the article. in Arizona on homeschooling. And it basically talks about homeschooling in the United States in terms of the larger international picture and basically says, we're aberrational. I mean, every other country either forbids homeschooling altogether outlaws it or allows it strictly regulates it. There are few countries that don't regulate it very strictly, but they're all stricter

than we are. So we're the country that, and I think it largely relates to our country. Constitution, which is famously a negative rights constitution. So it sort of protects against state interference. It doesn't grant people the right to have the state interfere to protect you. So that's part of why we protect adult rights against state intervention, but what children need is active intervention. So we don't have that. But other nations have positive rights, not just negative rights. And among the most popular rights in other countries' constitutions, particularly in recent decades, are children's rights, rights to education, rights to protection against abuse and neglect.

Those are the most popular rights. And what does that look like in practice if a child has actual defined rights? Because I think a lot of people actually would assume that children do have those rights in America. And that's just not quite true is what you're saying. So what would it look like if we were to sort of be a little similar to some of these other peer nations? Well, it varies. So I can't, you know, just because other nations have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, lots of them are countries in which kids are worse off than here. Yeah, they're child soldiers. There's, so it's not going to be a perfect correlation. I'd say if you look at peer countries, certainly in homeschooling, there's more. regulation, more protection of the child. If you look at child welfare, I don't know that many other countries that well, but I know in England, the court cases, if they're thinking about something

like child abuse or visitation, they're analyzing it in term of child rights as well as parent rights. I have one article in which I talk about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and I talk a bit about how different would things look in the United States if we ratified and if we took it seriously. So it's the only one of my articles in which the title includes convention on the rights of the child. So it's easily to spot. Yeah. And, you know, because I think that that's where the ultimate tension here is, right? Like, what rights do you believe that children are entitled to? And obviously, I think we're not saying that, like, five-year-olds should have the right to vote. And, like, we're recognizing that children are minors, that they're dependent.

that there are things that like their rights are not going to be equal to adults. But I think like, I mean, we need to change our constitution. So we recognize child rights. I think we should ratify the convention on the rights of the child. But those things aren't going to be enough. How do you get a child rights movement that's at all close to the parent rights movement? Part of the problem is that children are young and they don't vote and they can't demonstrate it, particularly the ones that are the most vulnerable.

So how do you get protection for those children? So, you know, there's some devices like having ombudsman for children. Every state has one, but they tend to be really powerless organizations with limited funding and limited staff. So you're going to have to have a lot of changes to really build up greater protection for children. Yeah. And it's interesting that you said that you're talking about these power dynamics because I think that that's where the conversation about child abuse pediatricians is really off the rails because the argument that these various lawsuits and certainly the argument these parents are making in the media is these individual child abuse pediatricians are just too powerful. I don't see that. I don't see where they're powerful. They don't have lobbyists. They're not organized in this way. They have a

professional society, but it's not like, you know, it's not especially well funded. I mean, it's just because of their professional role, which is doctor for children, they've developed a commitment to children's health and well-being, and that's what's motivating them. So it's just their expertise and their voice that people are complaining about. Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about some of, to kind of broaden our scope a little bit here, and as we talk about how we could better protect children, because I've really noticed that they're see sort of, I'm sure there's more than three, but sort of three pretty distinct arguments as I see it with with maybe some some overlap. And so you have this idea of like

stronger protections for the children and that focus on that and, you know, possibly more state intervention, more funding for that apparatus. And then you have the parents rights movement, which I think the underlying sort of principle is. And I think this is why there's so much crossover with like the evangelical movement heritage foundation, et cetera, is that children are essentially not humans with human rights in the same way that in particular the adult men are, but that their property of their parents and that what their parents choose to how they choose to educate them, medicate them, treat them, discipline them is no one else's business and that a family should be a closed system.

Right. So you have those two arguments. And then you have the abolitionist argument that I think is fundamentally different than the parents' rights movement. And so I think the abolitionist? The child welfare abolitionist movement where people are saying we really need to move towards not a punitive system, but really look at how we can get rid of the need for all of this intervention and focus on that. Why do you say you think those are distinctive? Because I think they're actually quite related.

That's really interesting. I think mostly it's been from my conversations with people in the abolitionist. movement. Their arguments seem a lot more supported by data and real lived experience, and a lot of them are, you don't think so. No, I think Dio Roberts is the one who's led that, and I think that all of them, no, I mean, I've been dealing with those people in connection with a huge amount of my work of transracial adoption, of child welfare, abuse and neglect, etc. and I think they're a totally parent rights movement. They don't want the state intervening because in abuse and neglect cases,

it may remove children from their parents, and it disproportionately removes black and brown and poor children because that's where drug abuse and alcoholism and unemployment and other things that statistically relate to abuse and neglect occur. And they're against that removal, and I think they're totally into parent rights and not child rights. And I think they're making up the same phony arguments that this is consistent with child interests. And they're claiming that children are always better off when they stay with their families.

I think it's very, very similar. That's really interesting because I will tell you that in my sort of lengthy conversations with a couple of these folks, my impression has been that they are at very minimum making, a good faith argument in a way that the people who I see advocating for the medical kidnapping piece that I'm covering are just not. And I disagree again. I think Dorothy Roberts, it totally ignores the good social science, doesn't footnote it, doesn't deal with it. Marty Guggenheim, who's now probably less active, but again, totally ignores the good social science. And, And I think just tons of my work on racial, transracial adoption, racial disproportionality has all

been dealing with those people. And I think they're totally into the false science. They know it's false. They've locked up lots of the social scientists because they get funding from the same foundations, Casey Foundation. So I think it's exactly the same dynamic as this going on with homeschooling. That's really interesting. And yeah, I mean, so I want to talk about it.

a few of these things that you've pointed out. Because maybe I'm, maybe I'm observing them as different, and maybe they're fundamentally not. And maybe that that's a bit on me. I have noticed that sort of like some of this stuff gets cloaked. I'm quite a like, especially socially, like I'm quite a liberal person. So it may be that those are, there are things that are resonating with me about their movement that just like the other sort of sector of the parents rights movement that's mostly sort of evangelical Christian just does not resonate with me at all. So I do think it's really helpful to talk about the data. And one data point that we've heard ad nauseum is about the high rates of abuse in the foster system. And so can you talk to us about, and I noticed that was something that you flagged in some of your research. So can you talk to us about

what is the actual sort of underlying data and research? Yeah. So less than one percent of the kids per year in foster care suffer abuse and neglect, less than one percent. Whereas if you look at the kids who are kept with their families after abuse and neglect is identified, but we do family preservation. We keep them there. Or if you look at the kids who are in foster care and we return them to their biological families, somewhere between 50 percent and two-thirds are subject to repeat abuse and neglect. So less than 1 percent as compared to 50 percent or two-thirds. And yet, they will talk all the time about the high rates of the rates. abuse in foster care. So it's just not true. Where does that data or research that they're using,

where does that come from? Usually it's anecdotal. And, you know, there'll be a case of a kid who suffers in foster care. And then they'll say foster care is all, you know, the state's always a worst parent than the biological parent. Sometimes they'll look at the statistics on how kids who've been in foster care due later in life. Kids who graduate out of foster care do badly later in in life. Well, those kids have been abused, neglected, kept with their biological families, returned from foster care to their biological families, and maybe eventually freed up and put in foster care. So do they do badly later in life? Yes. Is it because of foster care? Almost certainly no most of the time. So you're sort of looking at acees that are difficult to

distinguish from what happened to them to get them in foster care in the first place. Exactly. And you know that what got them into foster care is almost always, or at least I feel I know, abuse and neglect, a lot of suffering, a lot of bouncing back and forth. Now, these people would say that, oh, the kids were removed when it wasn't really such a big problem. And so I go into a fair amount of that research. I have a book, Nobody's Children, where I go into a fair amount of that research in Chapter 3, and then in some of my books, I mean, oh, differential response. Oh, kids are going to do so much better if we have these two tracks.

One is voluntary, one is coercive, and, you know, again, phony research and the decent evidence, which is hard to get because it doesn't get funded, but the decent research indicates that, no, it's more dangerous for kids to be put on this voluntary track than on the potentially coercive track. Yeah. So that was definitely something I wanted to ask you about because this is, you know, we've been talking a lot about CAPTA, and this was a major update, right, in 2010 to CAPTA to sort of incorporate this idea of differential response.

And before that, the intensive family, the IFPS, I think, was a, It's sort of a similar, a similar program. So can you talk about those programs and what their sort of stated intentions were and in sort of what the outcomes of those programs? Well, they're all the same. So one of the things I think I talk about in, I think the first article that I suggested you might look at, which was liberal dilemma. I think I talked about several of these movements. And basically, you get one movement after another that is a parent rights, family preservation, movement and very often you get the movement you get research you get some decent research which shows it's dangerous for children and then finally sometimes that movement gets beaten back and then

a new other movement starts which is the same idea but with a different name so you know for while there was racial matching we just make sure we don't remove any kids that can't go to racially matched families and we finally passed a law multi-ethnic placement Act that said you can't place, you can't use race as the basis for placement. And then, you know, you get other things. So intensive family preservation, that they had some phony research supporting it. Then they got some decent research that showed really wasn't working very well. Then you get something else like differential response. So things with different names, all of which are designed to keep kids at home after abuse and neglect is identified on the theory that kids,

are always going to be better off with a biological parent. Yeah. And can we sort of distinguish for me in terms of like when we're looking at research on these programs, on their efficacy, you know, on rates of abuse and foster care, all of this stuff, help me distinguish between research that people should understand as independent and trustworthy and where that would come from. And research that is maybe less trustworthy because it's advocacy. research that's being funded by an organization that wants to support a certain outcome from that

research? Well, it's hard to distinguish. I mean, there are certain people who I think are good, legitimate research people, but it is hard to distinguish, and that's the problem. I mean, so that the people promoting these movements can easily come up with stuff that looks like research that has slick charts and how are legislators going to distinguish? How are judges? Well, so how do you distinguish them when you're saying, oh, these people are sort of using phony research and there's good research that indicates that? Yeah, I suppose, I mean, some of it, for example, in differential response or the intensive family preservation program, some of the research claiming success, the criterion for success turns out to be, do we succeed in keeping the child

at home? So, you've got a program that has decided it's a good idea to keep kids at home. then you do stuff and then you measure have you succeeded in keeping them at home, and you say yes, and then you have a fancy chart that shows there's a correlation, and then you've made the claim that keeping them at home is better for kids, but you don't actually prove that. You just prove you're keeping them at home, but you've got this nice-looking statistical chart. So it doesn't take a lot of sophistication, and I don't have it.

I'm not a social scientist, but I feel as if, yes, that I was able to with a lot of work, read these things and see through. I mean, some of it is blatantly obvious. So on differential response, when I first started reading some of the fancy, supportive research, it has surveys of parents. So are parents happier when they're put on a voluntary track and told that there's not going to be any coercive, intervention and that they can go to drug treatment if they feel like it, but they don't have to,

and they might get a rent stipend. Or are they happier when they're put on a potentially coercive track and told they ought to go to drug treatment and that if they don't shape up, their child might be taken away? Well, surprise, surprise. Many parents are happier when they're put on the voluntary track and they get a rent stipend and they don't have coercive intervention and they don't have to go to drug treatment. And so they check off happier. And then you could produce a really slick chart that shows happiness.

So it doesn't take a lot of sophistication, I think, to say, oh, well, that's the wrong measure. You should be measuring whether children are abused and neglected more. Children are at risk. Terlund are dying at higher rates. But unfortunately, I think what they're doing is good enough to persuade legislators, particularly when you have one group lobbying and nobody else. You've got the major foundations that are pouring money into child welfare stuff, Casey's recently, Egnon McConnell Clark before,

and they're all committed to family preservation. So they're pouring money into promoting these programs as well as promoting research. And they're going into states, I mean on differential response, I document some of this. They go into the states and they say, You know, we'll fund a study of your state for you. And we'll pay for it all and we'll staff it and we'll produce a report to tell you whether you should be doing differential response and how well it works. And the state says yes. And then they get a report and, oh, this is what we should do. And look,

it's doing better. Yeah. I mean, I was really interested in reading some of your work about the Casey Family Foundation because we had a case that we covered last season that involved billionaire, And so that's been on my radar and all of the sort of like how influential that can be behind the scenes in a way that I think it sort of operates just completely out of view for most of us. I've had good social scientist people that I've gotten to know over the years say that one of them, for example, did some work that it was considered threatening to the family preservation agenda. and she was called in by the funder from one of these big powerful foundations and told, if you don't change the nature of the focus of your work, we will stop funding you. I mean, it's not subtle. I've had people, good social scientists, say, great article, glad I could contribute to it.

Please don't thank me in your law review. I can't afford to have you name me. Please don't even cite my work. And then I said, well, it's published. Can I say the published work? but don't cite the draft that you, you know, the other's draft you sent me. So they feel threatened. They can't do their work without funding.

And the funders are, for the most part, these huge foundations. I did a joint op-ed on differential response with somebody who ran a kind of media program that was concerned with child welfare. and his program was partially funded by the Casey Foundation. And after he did a joint op-ed with me, critical of differential response, he was called in and told, you know, what are you doing?

We reward you against working with that Bartholet woman. This spring, Denham 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. like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Rees knows a thing or two about great combinations.

Chocolate and peanut butter, obviously, but there's more than one way to Reese's. From indulgent Reese's big cups with caramel to crunchy Reese's pieces and Reese's miniature, There's a delicious Rees for every mood. It's the same combo you love, just with more ways to enjoy it. So whether you're snacking, sharing, or just treating yourself, nothing else is Rees's. In talking to this sort of abolitionist idea, I guess the big difference I see is whether the interest is about more community and community support or less. And with the parents' rights movement that I've sort of identified with the medical kidnapping, it's this idea of with, with home, homeschooling and the sort of evangelical Christian thing, right, is like taking your child out of the

community and having fewer community members sort of involved in your child's life and being able to really restrict your child's sort of access to other ideas that may not be your ideas and sort of this idea that like that children are not a community, like children are not members of community. And I think when I've talked to the abolitionists about what they see as sort of solutions, they are talking about with a recognition that these things are likely very far off because we know there's this connection with abuse and neglect and poverty, which obviously you've also identified, that if we had a stronger social safety net, and even when you were talking about sort of what rights do children have, like rights, like sort of this idea

that children have the right to be safe in their homes, like when I think about what rights I would like children to have and to be preserved, right, that I would like children to have the fundamental rights to be in a safe and nurturing home, free from abuse and neglect, that they should have enough to eat, that they should have access to adequate medical care and access to education. And like those are things that I really believe. And I think that abolitionists, at least some of them, seem to really hold those things dear as well. And that if we lived in a world where children had that kind of support, regardless of whatever struggles their parents were going through and that if we provided that support to every child, that there would be far less

family separations necessary. And to my mind, that's sort of what it's what it's working towards. I just kind of wonder where you think about this, because I think what I've observed is like, especially with medical kidnapping and why I feel so egregious, is that like it's not the time to talk about resources for a family prevention, et cetera, when your child's in the hospital because of abuse, right? It's like there's a place for those prevention conversations that I think is really important. And the time is not when a child has been hospitalized because they have a brain injury from abuse. Like then we're not talking about prevention. We're talking about a child who's already been subjected to greatest harm. Well, I recognize the way the abolitionists talk, but I think it's phony.

So one of their big pitches is there's this distinction between neglect and abuse. And, you know, Yeah, we would agree that in those rare cases where kids are beaten near to death or to death, gee, that's bad. And we should have a system that intervenes to protect kids against that. But that's very, very rare. And overwhelmingly, the cases where kids are removed are, quote, neglect cases. And that really equates, this is, I'm speaking for them, that equates with poverty and dirty home and social. workers using white gloves and finding dust on the shells. And that's, you know, this huge neglect

category. So I think that is completely phony and they know it is. So true that the great majority of cases in which kids are removed are categorized as neglect cases. And typically they would be like the case in Massachusetts where a kid just died in home, never had been removed after three years of social workers visiting and seeing the feces on the floor, the animal feces on the floor, the parents who are abusing drugs and alcohol, multiple visits, it's categorized as neglect, and the kid dies in the end, okay? So neglect cases are overwhelmingly probably in the 90% range, more or less, all the neglect cases are serious drug abuse cases, drug and or alcohol. They are not minor poverty, dusty house cases. They are serious neglect cases. I mean, of course,

there are going to be mistakes, but I think it's hard to document this, but one of the pieces of evidence for this is if you look at kids who end up dead, kids in the neglect category end up dead at the same rate as kids in the abuse category. This is not dusty house. This is, this is not minor neglect. It's overwhelmingly serious drug abuse. And these are the cases that the abolitionists are saying, basically they were saying in all the movements I've dealt with, the racial disproportionality, the anti-transracial adoption, the differential treatment, they're all saying these kids shouldn't be removed. We should keep them at home. We should do support. We should build up community support. So I don't think there's any reason to

think that the kind of intensive family preservation services is assuming we could build those supportive systems, that those are enough to help these families. They have not been enough in the past. And yeah, we could build better systems, but profound, ongoing substance abuse is not something that just gets fixed because you're saying, we'll send a social worker to you every week. I mean, to your point, when you were talking about the sort of differential response, that track of being like six weeks of help, and I was just like, well, that's not enough to fix anything. It's always hard to tell, I think, like much like I think in some of these, like, I'm very focused on one piece of this, right? And I never want to like sort of focus to be the same

as exclusion and want to recognize the bigger picture. Obviously, my own experience is that, you know, and I'm the white middle class family, my sister was investigated twice, once by the police, reported numerous times. I have no idea how many times. CPS has, been called on her, and her children remain with her. And because we, as their other family members, have no rights to see them, we are completely estranged. The evidence against her was extremely strong, and I now sort of had these opposing conversations of reunification being the mandate or not, certainly in the cases that I've seen, I only know one Munchausen by proxy survivor who was ultimately separated from their abusers. There's two cases.

where they've been separated. And it's very rare. It's rare that there's a criminal conviction. It's rare that children are personally separated and now, or permanently separated. And now that I'm getting into these other, like, abusive head trauma cases and broken bone cases, I, it seems similar, right? And to your point about neglect, something I've noticed, as we're sort of talking about how these cases get laundered in medium, right? Neglect cases, like an abusive head trauma case, for example, where you have two parents and neither of them is talking. Neither of them will say, what happened. Those often get classified as neglect because the only criminal charge can be you've failed to protect your child from this abuse because if you can't identify a timeline and a perpetrator,

and so to your point, I wonder about how many of these abuse cases actually get classified as neglect if they're being classified at all. You're absolutely right. And it's one of the things I write about a lot of the reasons that there's so many are classified as neglect is that it's harder to prove abuse. So you can go into the house and you can see there's no food in the refrigerator. They're dog and cat feces all over the floor. The kids don't have clothes. They're starving. But if they have bruises, how do you prove who did the bruise? So you can say neglect and you categorize it as neglect. Like this child is something bad is happening to this child. We've identified what's happened to the child, but not who the perpetrator is. And we really only have a system that's set up to deal with

perpetrators. I think this idea is confronting, I think especially for liberal people, such as maybe such as myself, even though... Such is me too, okay? So this is interesting that you've been identified as conservative as a conservative. And I was like, I don't, that doesn't seem to track with me. Yeah. I mean, my life has been liberal progressive civil rights lawyer and a lot of my struggles in this field has been to say to the people I've worked with all my life, hey, children are the most powerless of all groups. You should not be taking the side you're taking. One of the things also that goes on this field is that people like you and me who identify as progressive, it's hard to take these positions. You have to be willing to be called a racist, a fascist, you know, all of these

things. You have to be going to because that is the price you pay because they know, they know that by calling people that they're going to silence people. And they have successfully silenced lots of of people that way. That's so hard to grapple with because on the other hand, you have people who are complaining about being called racist and fascists who are legitimately racist and fascists. And I've sort of said this like, oh, well, it's just woke culture. And ironically, like those are the same sort of parents' rights evangelical people who say stuff like that. In the homeschooling area, we have people teaching Nazi ideology and teaching white supremacist ideology to homeschooled children. and saying we don't want them exposed to any of this integration or this woke stuff or this LGBT.

So, you know, one comment I wanted to make about the abolitionist. So the first battle I fault had to do with transracial adoption. So they took the position that the other side, which has become the abolitionist, that better the black social worker statement was, you know, better that black children stay in foster care than that they go to a white family. Okay, even if, yeah, staying in foster care until they aged out was better than letting them be placed with often the foster parent who was already fostering them who happened to be white. In the area of international adoption, the same battles going on. International adoption has almost been entirely shut down. So we used to have 23,000 kids coming into this country.

We now have something like five or six thousand per year coming in. And it's all because the good guys of the world, UNICEF, save the children, and the Dorothy Roberts folk are all saying, no, that international adoption, like transracial adoption, like all adoption, is a form of slavery and colonialism. So what's happening to those kids? They're growing up either on the street or in institutions abroad. This is death for children, or it's suicide, or it's the way kids, or it's sexual slavery, if they're, I live out institutional life in other countries. And that's what these forces that are calling people like me, racist and fascist, that's what they're doing.

They're saying anything is better than this removal to loving home that's something other than the home that you started in and the biology. So I think this whole idea that biology is always better and kids should always belong to. To me, it's a very regressive idea. The kids should be seen as property of, as belonging to the birth parents, the racial group, the nation of origin.

No, I think kids should be seen as having rights of their own, and those rights, the most fundamental rights, are basically healthy nurturing childhood because otherwise you're not going to enjoy the rights of adulthood. And that's what I think these people are denying. Now, do I agree with them that we should have a reformed world in which only people who really wanted to give birth and could take care of their kids had them? And they were all wealthy enough to do that. Yes, I think that would be great.

But we don't have that world. And in the meantime, I think this other side is sacrificing children to this idea. and it's not really helping children, nor do I think it's helping the larger group. You know, if I thought, I think it would be a tough question. If we really thought it would empower black people, poor people, or poor nations to say, you can all keep your kids. If we thought that would empower them, maybe it would be a close question, even if it was hard for the kids. But I don't see any evidence that it helps poor nations to say, okay, we're not going to take your kids.

You keep your kids, Brazil, or. Korea or Indonesia or whatever. No, I don't think it helped Native American tribes when in 1978 we passed a law saying, okay, Native American tribes, your kids are yours, you can keep them. It was a symbolic gesture. Congress didn't want to devote the money to jobs or housing or, you know, economic opportunity for Native Americans. So we'll say, keep your kids. And that looks like, you know, alleviates guilt and looks good, but it doesn't help the larger nation, and it certainly doesn't help the kids. And I don't think any of these movements, all of which are related, they're all intimately related. I don't think any of them help either the larger group or

the kids. Yeah. It's a lot to grapple with. And I think there's for a liberal person, right, you have to kind of balance, because we're not sort of saying, oh, like, racial bias in the court system doesn't exist. I think it would be very hard for me to accept that white mothers don't get the benefit of the doubt in court in a way that, like, black mothers would not be afforded because of archetypes as recent as the sort of welfare queen and all of our history, right? I think it's impossible for me to think that it doesn't bear down. Maybe, but I'll just say a lot of my work, I've done employment discrimination work, and there's implicit bias. But I would say the child welfare system is significantly different.

So you've got social workers are way disproportionately black compared to other workforces. And also, black and white social workers are all massively socialized in social work school and in their work environment to believe that. that kids should be kept with their birth parents, they should be returned to their birth parents, birth is better, transracial adoption is bad, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it is a different world than many other worlds where we can assume this kind of bias exists. So, you know, I would encourage you, I know it's a lot to get through, but to read my differential response and racial disproportionality articles which really grapple with some of the social science and with the issues you raise. And I truly just don't think there's this distinction that you're drawing

between the homeschooling world and the abolitionist world. I think this abolitionist world is really scarily dangerous in terms of child rights. Do you think there's a tension between an ideal situation and the best possible situation in bad circumstances. Because I think, like, we actually talked in depth about transracial adoption for a previous season, because we had a white evangelical adopted mom. And so we talked to someone who is that this has lived experience and he's an expert. And he talked about not that this was bad. He loved his parents. He had a good childhood and everything, but talked about sort of like, here are some extra considerations you have to make if you're in that situation, right? It is different than raising a child that's the same race. And so

I wonder if some of this tension is like, yeah, I think we can all accept that like an ideal circumstance for a child would be to be born into a safe loving home where their biological parents could raise them and that if a child is not in that situation, then it's probably because of something, almost necessarily because of something bad that has happened. And that when we're in that situation, when a child is in that situation and you're talking about a very difficult either or, yeah, there's my. be a lot of tough things about foster being in a foster home. However, most of the time that's going to be better than being in an abusive home. Right. You're sort of talking about, you're not talking about perfect choices. I mean, do you think that's kind of where some of this? Well, I guess I have a complicated answer to that. So I'm the parent. Two of my three children are adopted. They're transracial international adoptees. I'm very conscious of the parent of the challenge of raising children who have birth parents. We made an effort to meet the birth parents. I'm conscious of the challenges of raising black and brown children. When I haven't been through that experience myself,

I'm conscious of, yeah, a lot of the challenges in terms of them, in terms of their experience, in terms of my ability to be as good a parent as I'd like to be for them. If I back off look at the larger society. If I look at immigration, if I look at the increase in transracial marriages and interracial families overall, I think it's a great thing for society that there are more interracial marriages. When I looked at the research on transracial adoption, so before I did my article on transracial adoption, I actually believed some of this stuff that there must be problems because people wrote about the research as if it indicated there were problems in transracial families. So when I read the research, it's completely different from the way it was described.

And it was actually amazingly positive to read the closeness between siblings of different races in these adoptive families, the closeness in the families. It seemed like, gee, in a society worldwide, which is torn apart by racial and national conflicts, Why wouldn't people think it's a good thing to see transracial and international adoptive families that are overwhelmingly the research shows loving good families? I mean, it may also show challenges, but these families actually work for kids. They manage to help kids who've suffered a lot in their pre-adoptive lives there. But create these loving families across these boundaries that are tearing the larger society apart. So overall, I actually think transracial international adoption, just like interracial marriages, immigration, all of this, I think our overall world would be way better off if we had more of this.

So I'm not ready overall to think it's this way second best kind of sacrifice alternative. But yeah, do I want a world in which almost everybody could get pregnant or not as a matter of choice could be. able to raise a child if they chose to, children could be raised by the parent who gave birth to them. Yeah, that would be a better world. And I'd like to see that. I just don't think that helping kids today get the best homes they can get in any way gets in the way of that larger goal. You know, if anything, I think raising kids who were abused, neglected, kept at home when they shouldn't be kept in foster care, kept in institutions, means kids who are going to raise the next generation to have a lot of problems.

Yeah, because we know how cyclical it is. And I really so appreciate you having this conversation with us. I think my, like, sort of final question is, from your perspective, you know, both your extensive research and also your lived experience, do you think that we should be less attached to the idea of the biological nuclear family being family? and that part of what might help us here is we had a more holistic idea about who should be responsible for raising children. Absolutely. I think that we should be less attached to the idea that parents own and should govern their children to the exclusion of the state being able to protect children.

And I think that what I've often called biological bias, this idea that biology should be seen as all-powerful and determining family. we should get away from those ideas. 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.