Update: Escape from Nebraska!

    In that case discussed in the previous post to this Blog: After a month trapped in the Nebraska foster care system, the children from Palo Alto, California are free.

As their father's lawyer put it: "The kids were flown back here on Friday, interviewed by child protective services and returned to their parents in a matter of minutes." And on Tuesday, the juvenile court case officially was dismissed. The family will have to go through counseling. A criminal case against the parents still is pending in Nebraska.

    The daughter will be allowed to travel – with her family - to South Korea to receive her prize in an international art competition.

    By the way, her painting is scheduled to remain on display at the Omaha Children's Museum until October. But if you're thinking of dropping in from out-of-state to see it, you might want to leave the kids at home.

Nebraska: The speed trap of child welfare

    There are communities across the country that are notorious for speed traps. The speed limit is set absurdly low and the local police lie in wait for cars with out-of-state plates. The unwary don't get to leave town without paying a very stiff fine.

    Nebraska is a little like a giant speed trap. Only instead of levying a fine, they take away your children.

    Consider the case of Suwen Wang, a physicist, and his wife, Charlotte Fu, a paralegal, from Palo Alto, California. On June 6, they were traveling through Nebraska with their 12-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son when some sibling rivalry apparently got out of hand. The result: The children wound up trapped in foster care for more than a month - and Nebraska authorities were all set to force the daughter to miss a once-in-lifetime opportunity to travel to Korea where her award-winning art will be exhibited as part of an international competition. Things only began to look up when the case got some news coverage.

The daughter was the North American winner of a children's painting contest sponsored by the United Nations. The painting was on display at the Omaha Children's Museum, and the proud parents flew the family out to see it. But on the way back to the airport, the 12-year-old girl and her 13-year-old brother apparently started acting like, well, 12 and 13-year-olds, with the boy "needling his sister," according to the father's lawyer.

    So Dad pulled over to the side of the road, and Mom got out to deal with the situation – not knowing that someone was watching from her front lawn. The witness told a local television station Mom hit the 13-year-old several times on the back. (Police reportedly said she hit him in the face, but the witness herself says otherwise.) Ms. Fu does not look like someone who could inflict much damage on a 13-year-old boy. The boy cursed at his mother, pushed her, and may have hit her - since, while the boy was entirely uninjured, mom was bleeding from a cut above her nose. At that point, Dad turned around from the front seat and allegedly hit the boy. Lawyers for the couple deny that either parent hit the children.

    After 20 minutes, everyone apparently had calmed down enough for the family to resume the drive. But by then the witness had called the cops, and a Plattsmouth, Neb. Police officer pulled the family over.

Mom and dad were arrested and jailed for a weekend. The children's sentence has lasted a lot longer. As of July 9, they still were in foster care, though, thanks to the news coverage and the parents' middle-class status (which meant they could afford private attorneys), Nebraska made a deal to let Santa Clara County, California, authorities take over the case. (In California, individual counties run their own child welfare systems.) So the children probably will be released soon, if they're not back in California already. Were this family poor, odds are the children would be trapped in foster care for years.

    Of course, things like this can, and do, happen anywhere. But they're more likely to happen in Nebraska, which, year after year, takes away children at one of the highest rates in the United States, by far. The Neanderthal state of child welfare in Nebraska was exposed to the nation during the state's Safe Haven debacle last year, when the then-head of the child welfare agency, Todd Landry, made jokes at the expense of desperate parents and otherwise belittled their problems.

Landry since has left, but his replacement, Todd Reckling, appears to be cut from the same cloth, blithely declaring that these things take time, even as the children were trapped thousands of miles from home.

In fact, as the Omaha World-Herald pointed out, when Nebraska was desperate to send out-of-state "safe haven" children home, they made it happen within days. Meanwhile, the parents even reported themselves to Santa Clara County child welfare authorities in the hope it would speed up the process.

    Nebraska authorities also appear to be justifying their actions based on the fact that there has been one other incident involving the parents back in California. Mom and Dad got into a loud argument. Mom said she was leaving to stay in a hotel. Dad may, or may not, have grabbed her arm to restrain her. And he may, or may not, have gotten into a scuffle with police when they were called.

But this also is a family so well-known for their love of their children that more than a dozen friends flew thousands of miles to be with them at a court hearing in Nebraska and to protest outside the courthouse.

"This is an Orwellian nightmare," one friend, Larry Markosian, told the San Jose Mercury News. "Every family occasionally has difficulty raising kids, especially teenage boys. I don't know what happened. But we know they are a loving and kind family and we see no reason whatsoever to keep these kids in a foster home so far from the community they grew up in."
    So yeah, it seems the folks in this family have tempers – like real, fallible human beings. A couple of times it may have gotten out-of-hand. Apparently, no one told them about the CPS-endorsed Oprah-fication of American family life. They hadn't heard that to be sure you stay out of trouble with CPS you should never, ever lose control and all differences are to be settled by saying "I'm not o.k. with that" and otherwise mumbling therapy-speak at each other.

Who knows? Maybe this family could use some of that "counseling" that CPS agencies always try to impose – though in this case it should be strictly voluntary. After all, it is possible to live together as a family with neither the phony harmony of therapy-speak nor ever raising a hand (as opposed to a voice) toward another in anger. The issue here, as almost always, is balance of harms. And one thing is clear: Whatever problems may have existed before, the Nebraska child welfare agency has made them worse by punishing the children with needless foster care.

"These kids are very much involved in the Palo Alto community, with Boy Scouts, art and Chinese lessons," Markosian, the family friend, told the Mercury News. "And they are being ripped away from not only their family but from their whole community."

He went on to read aloud from an e-mail sent by the 12-year-old girl to her parents: "Dear Mom and Dad," the e-mail said. "We love you a lot. Remember that. We know you're doing everything you can to bring us back home and we are very thankful. Love you a lot." The e-mail is signed with 10 exclamation points.
    Part of the explanation for the behavior of Nebraska authorities is just bureaucratic inertia. Another part is the fanaticism about child removal that permeates the state. But there also is an undercurrent of racism running through the case.

Although the family are American citizens and the parents have lived in the United States for 17 years, the 12-year-old's "law guardian," who, in theory, is supposed to watch out for her "best interests," wanted to seize the family's passports – which would have made it impossible for the girl to go to South Korea for the award ceremony. (After all, what could be more suspicious, and pose more risk to a child, than an Asian-American family going to – Asia?) The law guardian reportedly explained that the art contest was irrelevant to the foster care case.

In addition, during visits, the family was forced to speak English, though they prefer Chinese – so the supervisors monitoring the visits could understand every word. I've seen no explanation concerning why the visits had to be monitored in the first place.

    Such bias is certainly nothing new in Omaha. In 2002, authorities tore 10 Hmong children from their families after they confused marks left by a traditional Southeast Asian healing practice known as "coining" with child abuse. Even after the error was explained, authorities kept the children – until publicity and protest marches, which included one Asian youth singing "We Shall Overcome," won their freedom. I have two letters from the Omaha police chief proudly justifying the raids.

    Would the caller in this most recent case, who has refused to back up her claims by disclosing her name, have made the same call, had the family been white?

    Meanwhile, authorities in Santa Clara County haven't acquitted themselves all that well either. They have not promised to return the children even after they obtain legal custody and they've come up with an absurd list of hoops the parents are going to have to jump through – something almost guaranteed to increase the stress in the family (though it's possible they did that to appease Nebraska.)

In general, though Santa Clara does a far better job than Nebraska, that's a mighty low bar. The county has one of the highest rates of removal in California, as is documented in NCCPR's California Rate-of-Removal Index. And, as former Mercury News columnist Peter Delevett documented, child welfare authorities in Santa Clara may not treat Mexicans any better than their counterparts in Omaha treat Asians.

    Back in Nebraska, the child welfare agency justified what it did to these children by saying their staff followed procedures. But that, of course, is a big part of the problem: the procedures stink.

    Then, at the hearing where the agreement with Santa Clara County was reached, an attorney for the Nebraska child welfare agency, Susan Buettner, declared: "The most important thing has been lost: This is a case that involved alleged child abuse,"

    No, Ms. Buettner, that fact hasn't been lost at all. But it was your agency that did the abusing.

A post in response to The Post

    There is a whole subgenre of child welfare writing that might be called "the-adoption-failed-but-it-wasn't-my-fault lit." In it, white upper-middle-class adoptive parents write about their noble efforts to rescue a Black a child from foster care, about how terribly hard they tried to make it work and how, because everybody else failed, ultimately, they had to throw the child back. Such accounts usually engender enormous sympathy from readers. Since most of the readers also tend to be upper-middle-class, they have no problem sympathizing – no, make that empathizing – with one of their own.

    A classic example turned up in the Washington Post "Parenting" blog yesterday. This is one of the Blogs that also criticized Gary Staton, the father who came under attack in a Nebraska Safe Haven case. (This is the Blog I mentioned in my previous post about the case where at least the criticism was civil.)

Yesterday, the Blog owner, Stacey Garfinkle, turned over the blog to Wendy Bilen Thorbjornsen, an adoptive mother who told the story of adopting a child from the D.C. foster care system, and then throwing the child out less than a year later. She was deluged with empathy. Her "guest blog" was preceded by a glowing endorsement from Ms. Garfinkle.

In fact, it would not be fair to pass judgment one way or another based only on the information in Thorbjornsen's blog. The real problem with the blog was the way the Thorbjornsen passed judgment on everyone else – especially any and all birth parents caught up in the D.C. child welfare system.

So I posted a response – which Ms. Garfinkle went out of her way to include in the blog's comments section despite its length. I'm also offering it here:

    Suppose somebody were to read [Thorbjornsen's] column and, just hypothetically, conclude the following:

    These are spoiled upper middle class white people who treated a flesh-and-blood human being like a BMW that was out of warranty, throwing her back when she turned out to have too many defects.

    The more mom professes "love" for her adopted child, the more it's as she approaches the moment she throws the child away. She gave the daughter she loves less than a year to overcome everything in her past and, when the system finally offered intensive help, she wouldn't even try to use it.

    Thousands of parents, birth, foster and adoptive, do a lot more for children who are harder to deal with. They try longer and they go to greater lengths.

    Never mind sympathizing with the parents, how about some sympathy for the child, who now has endured the ultimate rejection and may never trust again.

    Unfair? Actually, yes. I've just stereotyped people I've never met – let alone walked in their shoes. They tried to do something I wouldn't even attempt. At a minimum, we who haven't "been there" should suspend judgment of those who have.

    So why be unfair on purpose?

    I did it in the hope that the readers of a column that clearly is of the upper-middle-class, by the upper-middle-class and for the upper-middle-class finally might feel how much it hurts to be stereotyped, even by just one poster to a blog, even when everyone else is rallying around you.

Now try, just try, to imagine how much worse it is to be stereotyped over and over again just because you're poor, Black and caught up in DC Family Court. Imagine what it's like for those stereotypes to be so ingrained that they have cost thousands of children the chance to be raised in loving homes – the loving homes they were born in. Because that's exactly what you did, Ms. Thorbjornsen, when you wrote that the children whose fates are decided by that court:

"have largely been removed from unfit homes rife with abuse, neglect, abandonment, and myriad other social and emotional ills. These kids have encountered more of life's seamy side than many of us will over a lifetime."

    In some cases that's exactly what happened; in many more it's not. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with "neglect" others fall between the extremes. Yet you saw fit to paint them all with the broadest of brushes based, apparently, on one case file (which only tells the agency's version of events) and some horror stories from the headlines.

    Ms. Garfinkle also seems prone to some stereotyping, what with this column coming so quickly on the heels of the one about Gary Staton, the father in the Nebraska Safe Haven case.

    So I challenge you, Ms. Garfinkle: Now that you've published Ms. Thorbjornsen's version of how the system works, publish the first-hand account of someone who actually saw what goes on in D.C. Family Court day after day, because he's one of the few allowed past the curtain of secrecy the system uses to cover up its blunders.

    The University of the District of Columbia runs one of only two programs in the entire nation in which law students represent exclusively birth parents in cases alleging child maltreatment. Some great students, who themselves don't get the respect they deserve – they're from UDC after all – stand up for families who have been disrespected their entire lives.

    One of those students spoke of his experiences during a news conference organized by my organization to mark the first anniversary of the discovery of the deaths of the Jacks children [a particularly horrific D.C. case]. If you're willing to have your preconceived notions challenged instead of reinforced, go here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/dc1709.pdf and scroll down to page 11.

    Then, how about letting your readers in on what you find?

    In an e-mail Ms. Garfinkle said she will, indeed, take a look at what the student wrote.

Congratulations, World-Herald, you got your lynch mob

At the end of my post last week about Gary Staton, the Nebraska father who was the victim of a journalistic mugging by the Omaha World-Herald which read like something straight from Fox News, I wrote:

And, in the age of the internet, there is an extra reason to be extra careful about any story involving poor people having children. This is a particularly hot button for the virtual lynch mob – the despicable haters who fill the comment sections of newspaper websites under any story about poor people with vulgar demands for compulsory sterilization. The World-Herald does not post comments with its stories yet, but it's already started elsewhere, with one website calling Staton a "slimeball" and a "dirtbag." But then, that's essentially what the Omaha World-Herald did, with just a bit more subtlety.

Well, the mob has formed.

Fox News picked up the story with links to the World Herald coverage (although, as it turns out, other than repeating the grossly misleading aggregation of government benefits given over 17 years to this married two-parent family, the Fox story was a lot more "fair and balanced" than the one in the World-Herald.) And from there is spread quickly to the blogs.

At one site the comments were fairly civil, but at another, a very big, very mainstream site, there were more than 500 comments by last Friday, and if those I skimmed are any indication, each was more vile than the next. (You won't get the name of the site or a link here, since I have no intention of spreading the poison further.) The extent to which this issue brings the racists crawling out from under their rocks can be seen by the fact that at least one poster used the n-word - notwithstanding the fact that Staton is white.

In the internet age, in which almost anyone's location can be tracked down in minutes, even as the mob gets ever more frenzied, I'm sure anyone who wants to harass Mr. Staton directly will have no trouble finding him. And, no doubt stumbling across these comments will do wonders to help the children heal from the various traumas in their lives as they grow up.

As I said in the original post, the latest developments in the Staton case needed to be reported, but not in the way the World-Herald chose to do it.

As old media learns to cope with new media, here's a good rule of thumb: If you see the equivalent of a group of men wearing white hoods and sheets walking through the woods carrying a big wooden cross and cans of gasoline – don't strike a match.

UPDATED JULY 2: Michigan and Illinois: The difference is leadership

An excellent story in The Detroit News Tuesday about cuts to youth services in Michigan includes this excuse from a spokesman for Michigan State Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop:

"I don't know where we're going to get the money," said Matt Marsden, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop. "It's not for not wanting to. It's just a matter of trying to reduce the budget enough to pay for it."
But that's, um, nonsense (there's a better word, but I try to maintain the same standards as a "family newspaper" on this blog). It's nonsense when it comes from Bishop, just as it is nonsense when it comes from the Governor's office.

In another excellent story, from Interlochen Public Radio, about the end of Michigan's Family Group Decision Making program, the head of the DHS office in Grand Traverse County (long one of the state's most regressive) says much the same thing.

But while some things are being cut to close a big budget deficit, that's not the reason for the cuts in prevention and family preservation. As is documented in detail in NCCPR's reports on Michigan child welfare, those cuts are being made to finance big rate increases for the powerful private agencies that institutionalize children - almost always needlessly – in Michigan. And the cuts are going to finance a child abuse investigator/foster care worker hiring binge most of which is not, in fact, required by Michigan's class action lawsuit settlement.

The settlement between Michigan and the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights," says caseloads need to be lower – but that's far more likely to happen if you spend more on prevention and family preservation programs that keep children out of the foster care system. As it stands now, odds are the new workers are going to be investigating all the new cases that result from the budget cuts, and shoving a lot more children into foster care, leaving Michigan with the same lousy system only bigger.

Illinois also operates under a class-action settlement, and Illinois also faced draconian cuts in child welfare services. But the ACLU of Illinois, which brought that lawsuit, went back to court and won an order from a federal judge barring implementation of what have been called "doomsday" budget cuts. The head of the Illinois child welfare agency himself testified about the harm the cuts would do.

Compare that to Michigan where DHS director Ismael Ahmed is swinging the ax himself, and, as far as I can tell, CR has neither gone to court nor used its high powered PR machine to even speak out against the cuts. UPDATE, JULY 2: CR Just announced it is fighting similar cuts in Connecticut. So why the silence about Michigan?

What a difference leadership makes.

And speaking of leadership: The Michigan cuts certainly don't say much for the effectiveness of the state's giant Child Welfare Improvement Task Force and its get-along-go-along-let's-all-sing-kumbaya-with-Ismael-Ahmed approach to advocacy.

Perhaps if they'd been a little more, oh, I don't know – "inflammatory"?

The Omaha World-Herald takes its revenge

JULY 6: There is now an update to this post available here: http://nccpr.blogspot.com/2009/07/congratulations-world-herald-you-got.html

Two stories. Same subject. Same reporter. One is a finely-nuanced portrait. The other is an act of vengeance. It's more evidence that, to paraphrase one the best media critics I know, Hell hath no fury like a newspaper that thinks it's been suckered.

It's all fallout from the safe-haven law in Nebraska. A recap: Every state has a law allowing parents to surrender their newborns to authorities, no questions asked. The limits on how old the infant can be vary from state to state. But in Nebraska, the original law allowed parents to surrender children up to age 18. And that's exactly what more than two dozen desperate parents and guardians did, until the Nebraska legislature closed the loophole late last year.

One of the most compelling stories to emerge from the safe haven debacle was that of the Staton family; Gary, his wife RebelJane and their ten children.

Much about this case is undisputed. The oldest child, now 19, was from RebelJane's first marriage. Gary adopted her and raised her as his own.

Gary worked, apparently whenever he could get a job, given his limited skills. When the tragedy that led him to use the safe haven law struck, he was earning $10.75 an hour as a machinist.

RebelJane wanted a lot of children, but apparently, she raised them well. They're polite and well-mannered. While some are a little behind in school, most excel.

Story #1

According to a 2,200-word in-depth profile of the family that originally ran in the Omaha World-Herald on March 29 (not June 28, as the World-Herald website says):

RebelJane Staton ruled her home as strongly as her name implies.
While Gary Staton brought home a paycheck, Rebel paid the bills, arranged for food stamps and sometimes found temporary jobs.
She grounded the kids when they brought home bad grades and assigned book work to help them improve. For three years, she home-schooled a few.

Nevertheless, in 2004, they fell behind on the bills, the gas was shut off, the home became filthy – and, of course, the children were taken away. This is, after all, Nebraska, which, year after year, takes away children at one of the highest rates in the nation. Ultimately, the state did chip in a little for rent and utilities, and nine months later the children were returned to their intact, married, two-parent family, in which all of the children were born in wedlock.

Then, suddenly, after 17 years of marriage, and shortly after giving birth to the tenth child, RebelJane died. Gary was left desperate, distraught and overwhelmed. He was too proud to turn to his own family for help, and either too proud or too afraid to turn to the government – especially given what the government had done to the family a few years before.

Not that there had been no government assistance over the years. According to the March 29 World-Herald story:

With an income tax refund sitting in the bank, Gary received permission from his employer in June to leave work to get his life together.

Come September, money was dwindling. Bills were due. The family received $900 a month in food stamps and $250 a month in Social Security benefits for seven of the nine children, but it wasn't enough and the family was close to getting evicted.

Gary filled out job applications at his old workplace, but he never heard back. He was too proud to ask Rebel's large extended family for help.
Though state officials calculated that the family had received almost $800,000 in different forms of government aid, including more than $600,000 in food stamps, Gary didn't check into subsidized housing or other aid once he was out of work.

"I could have gone and asked the state for help, but I didn't," he said. "There was no place for me and the kids to go and we were just too many. It would have been crazy just trying to fit all of us in."

About that time, he heard news reports that people were dropping off kids at area hospitals, invoking the safe haven law and facing no criminal penalty.

This comes about half-way into a story that paints a picture of the family in all its complexity. The story talks about how the oldest child became a surrogate mother to the family, how Gary found a new girlfriend a year after RebelJane died, how this pleased the oldest child but upset some of the others but how, nevertheless, all the members of the family still loved and cared about each other. The story describes how, after Gary invoked the safe haven law, seven of the children were placed with RebelJane's aunt and the oldest two with foster parents, and how Gary ultimately gave up parental rights but still kept in touch with the children. The story talked about how he did not regret his decision because he was sure "It's the best thing I could do for them." Toward the very end, the story noted that Staton decided having more children was out of the question.

For the World-Herald it was a return to the kind of excellent journalism that characterized its coverage of the safe haven problem – (the coverage collapsed when the time came to look at solutions.)

The story was no puff piece. If you want to draw much harsher conclusions about Gary Station than I did, the material is there – and, indeed, the headline on a follow up story characterizes the response as ranging from "approval" to "contempt." The story gives readers the context they need to render a judgment without making the judgment for them.

Story #2

But three months later, things had changed.

If the first story suggested that, perhaps, Gary should have sought more help from the government, a story that ran yesterday took a very different tack.

Now, Gary Staton, overwhelmed, hapless father who had, perhaps made some bad judgments, becomes Gary Staton, welfare king. This time, the dollar figures were the principal focus of the front-page "World-Herald exclusive" that led the Sunday paper. They were the subject of the headline, they were at the top of the story, they took up more than one-fourth of the story – and they were taken out of context:

Since the Staton children were young, the family has received $995,468 in different forms of government aid, including more than $600,000 in food stamps and $109,774 in Medicaid, according to Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services records.

Only much, much farther down in the story do we learn the ages of the children. Then a reader who was so inclined could pull out a calculator, do the math himself and find out that this huge total dollar figure probably comes down to about $169 per child per week. And little or none of it was for "welfare as we knew it." It went to give the children health care and put more food on the table than Staton could afford on his machinist's pay. A lot of the rest probably was Social Security survivor benefits a fact mentioned in the first story, but not the second.

Or, to put it another way, all of the public money spent to help this married man and his wife raise their in-wedlock children over 18 years is less than one bonus paid to one of the financial industry parasites who helped plunge our entire economy into chaos. (And we really can't say "yes, but that's not government money" anymore, now can we?)

But the reporter isn't done yet. Now there's a new issue of government money that the same reporter saw no need to mention before:

The children were placed in foster care after their father left them. Under the latest figures available, the state paid an average $725 a month per child to foster parents in similar situations.
Staton has given up custody of his seven youngest children. They remain in foster care with their mother's aunt, who hopes to adopt them. The two oldest boys were in foster care until last month, when a 75-year-old Omaha woman was approved to be their guardian.

Both women are eligible for adoption and guardianship subsidies. Parents who adopt state wards may apply to receive Medicaid health insurance and a monthly maximum subsidy of $1,490 per child until the child turns 18.

Why, suddenly, the righteous wrath about foster care and adoption subsidies for the great aunt? Strangers would get the same amounts. (In fact if RebelJane's aunt is not a licensed foster parent, she may not even be getting what the World-Herald thinks she's getting.) And why, all of a sudden, are subsidized adoptions a problem? Would the World-Herald be happier if Madonna had adopted the children and gotten the same subsidy (they are paid without regard to income, and odds are, RebelJane's aunt needs the money more.)

An extra dose of humiliation

To what can we attribute this outpouring of journalistic indignation? Apparently it all goes back to that line at the end of the first story where Staton says he's not going to have any more children.

He changed his mind.

As noted above, the story was the lead on page one of the Sunday paper, under the heading "World- Herald Exclusive." The headline itself said: "Man who dropped off 9 kids now dad-to-be; While Gary Staton's girlfriend is pregnant, the safe haven wards are with caregivers eligible for state aid." They also threw in an unflattering photo.

How dare he????? The nerve! The gall! Conceiving another child while still poor. And after he said he wouldn't. Everybody knows only middle-class people should be allowed to procreate, right?

Indeed, that may explain this line which turns up in the story right after the detailed enumeration of taxpayer costs:

After Staton's newest child is born, the state cannot remove it from his custody unless there is evidence that the child is in danger, said Brenda Beadle, Douglas County chief deputy county attorney.

And the problem with that is?

It also explains a final bit of humiliation for Gary Staton at the very end of the story. The story returns to his earlier promise to have no more children, but this time the reporter uses a quote from her original interview with Staton in March that she did not feel was needed in her first story. Story #2 ends this way:

"If I had a thousand dollars," [Staton] said "I'd get fixed."
Staton declined to be interviewed for this newer story – wisely, from the look of it. But he did make this point in an e-mail to the newspaper: "Do you think I'm going to raise this one alone?"

The fact is, there probably are thousands of other families across America with similar arrangements. Dad becomes depressed after the first wife dies; he can't cope. Then, a year later, another woman enters his life. That causes stress in the household. So a caring relative moves in to help – or the children go live with the relative while dad stays in touch. But it's all done informally, out of the public eye. Even if the relative ultimately becomes a kinship foster parent, it's still likely to stay private.

So yes, Gary Staton blundered by invoking the safe haven law. But that's no excuse for what the World-Herald just did to him – and to his children.

Was there cause for a story? Yes. The first story prompted some sympathy for Staton, along with some contempt. You can draw all sorts of conclusions about Gary Staton's decision to have another child, including conclusions far harsher than mine. Having opened the door with the story in March, there is an obligation to tell people the rest and let them draw their own conclusions.

But a story somewhere in the metro section that reported the fact that Staton had conceived another child, reaction from family and friends and Staton's comment in the e-mail - in short, the story the World-Herald published, but without the hysterical headline and the huge section high up about tax money which read like they added by Fox News – would have been fine. It would have been enough to inform anyone who wanted to withdraw sympathy from Gary Staton; while reducing the chances that Staton and his new girlfriend will be deluged with hate mail – and that the children will be ridiculed at school this week. (The children are not named, but it's hard to believe their neighbors and classmates don't know who they are.)

That also makes this story a setback for all of us who have crusaded for opening court hearings and records in these cases. Most of the time, the press shows admirable restraint in these situations while advancing the public good; the World Herald's own coverage of the safe haven families – until now - being a fine example. But every exception, however rare, is more fodder for those who want to use secrecy to cover up their own far more common, far more egregious failings.

The journalist's worst fear

So what in the world is this really all about? It's not really about Gary Staton or his children. Based on my 19 years of experience as a reporter, I'd say it's really about a newspaper that feels suckered – and, specifically, a reporter who feels betrayed, a reporter who thinks she was made to look naïve in front of her colleagues. Or maybe it wasn't a reporter, but some editor who demanded this kind of story. Either way, nothing – nothing – is more mortifying to journalists than believing they have been made to look naive.

Ever wonder why so much political coverage is about strategy and tactics and so little about issues? Because covering issues is considered naïve (after all, they're politicians, they won't keep their word anyway, right?) Knowing the strategy, understanding who's up, who's down and who's likely to win this or that state – that's how you score points among your peers.

Why are there reporters who won't write a story about an initiative or program that seems successful – in any field, not just child welfare? Because if it turns out the program isn't what it's cracked up to be, the reporters are afraid they'll look naïve.

Of course the build 'em up, tear 'em down cycle also is a part of political reporting. But politicians crave the limelight and know what they're getting into. Newspapers ought to think twice before bringing down the full weight of their righteous wrath on a man who is maybe desperate, maybe hapless, maybe irresponsible, but definitely an awfully small target for so much front-page fury, especially when some of that fury may harm the children.

And, in the age of the internet, there is an extra reason to be extra careful about any story involving poor people having children. This is a particularly hot button for the virtual lynch mob – the despicable haters who fill the comment sections of newspaper websites under any story about poor people with vulgar demands for compulsory sterilization. The World-Herald does not post comments with its stories yet, but it's already started elsewhere, with one website calling Staton a "slimeball" and a "dirtbag." But then, that's essentially what the Omaha World-Herald did, with just a bit more subtlety.

Some children win protection from stripsearches – now if we could just take the next logical step…

    By a vote of 8 to 1, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that an unverified tip is not sufficient justification for school officials to stripsearch a student looking for drugs. The justices zeroed in on the fact that a stripsearch is a particularly traumatic experience for a child, so you really need to have something solid to go on before you inflict it on that child.

    I'm sure my fellow liberals will be pleased, just as I am. But I'll bet some of them will be the same liberals who backed SB 1440, the Texas bill that would have run roughshod over children's Fourth Amendment rights in cases where the allegation was child abuse.

    Though it didn't get much attention in the debate over SB 1440, all over the country, stripsearches just like the one that prompted the Supreme Court decision are a common part of child abuse investigations (CPS agencies prefer euphemisms like "visual inspection.") If the allegation is sexual abuse, the examination is likely to be a whole lot worse. And sadly, despite Gov. Rick Perry's veto of SB 1440, for families too poor to fight back, in Texas and everywhere else, their children can be stripsearched based on little more than a CPS worker's whim. Indeed, the issue arose in a Texas case just last month.

    Defenders of unlimited CPS power will say child abuse investigations are different. They'll argue that in those cases, the people doing the searching are looking for bruises, not drugs, so they're doing it for the child's own good. (Of course, that's also what they say whenever they haul a child off to foster care.) But when school officials are stripsearching a student looking for drugs they're presumably doing it for the good of an entire school full of children, yet the Supreme Court still said no. And, of course, if the child has not been bruised – as is likely when there is no more than, say, an anonymous phone call alleging abuse -- then the only people who have hurt the child are the people who stripsearched her or him.

    But the Supreme Court decision also showed, once again, that my fellow liberals don't have a monopoly on inconsistency. The only dissenter in the school stripsearching case was Justice Clarence Thomas.