Richard Wexler

Richard Wexler argues that a stronger presence of family and legal advocates has steeled Minnesota against foster care panics

Richard Wexler argues that many child welfare's prevention programs could be done outside the realm of surveillance and investigations

Legislators have proposed expanding mandatory reporting into one of the few fields that has typically been viewed as sacrosanct: the clergy.

"Neglect" is not a gateway allegation — unless you take data out of context by presenting numbers without ratios or ratios without numbers.

In child welfare, genuine safety science demands a method that can spot the errors in all directions, including wrongful removal, writes Richard Wexler.

Richard Wexler writes that white, middle-class families who face CPS investigations experience less intrusion than more marginalized families.

There is a graphic making the rounds in child welfare that’s gotten a fair amount of attention lately — but its numbers are misleading.

Although it took longer than in many other aspects of American life, the racial justice reckoning finally may be having an effect on child welfare. As America is forced to take a new look at other draconian, racially biased laws of the 1990s – the “crime bill” and a law to “end welfare as we know it” – there now are calls to repeal the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.

Remember the parable about blind men describing an elephant? Each touched a different part of the elephant, so they came to different conclusions about what it looked like. But what if there were more people involved – and they had to compare notes?

Imagine for a moment that leaders of a group called the Association of Really Good Police Departments wrote a column proclaiming their sympathy for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and even used their rhetoric, beginning the column with “Say his name. George

“When elephants fight,” the proverb goes, “the grass gets hurt.” As Los Angeles deals with the aftermath of another child abuse tragedy, the death of Yonatan Aguilar, the debate over how to fix the system is devolving into a fight between two of the field’s “elephants.”

In a field filled with subjectivity and bias, it’s sometimes assumed that one determination is easy: figuring out if a death was caused by child maltreatment. In fact, that’s often as subjective as everything else.

Casey Jo Caswell of Lansing, Mich. made a terrible mistake. Homeless and jobless, she turned to Michigan’s child welfare agency for help raising her son, Ricky. But the agency offered no help with housing, no help with a job and no help with education.