Families Belong Together
Reading "We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death and Child Removal in America."
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I first spoke with the journalist Roxanna Asgarian a year ago, about the ways that Family Protective Services agencies in Texas were targeting transgender kids and their families.
The agency is like a policing system, she said. Under the guise of protecting kids, it becomes a weapon against families.
“Poor families are targeted, LGBT families, undocumented families.” Asgarian told me. “Families who are already marginalized in some way basically make up the entirety of the child welfare system.”
Now, Asgarian has written a beautiful, heartbreaking, infuriating book. It tells the story of six Black and biracial children — Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah and Ciera — who were placed into the foster care system. They were eventually adopted by two white women, Sarah and Jennifer Hart, who killed them in a murder-suicide when they drove off a cliff in California, in March 2018.
As painful as it was to read this book – I had to put it down many, many times – I started it again the minute I finished it. (You can buy it here.)
Unlike the coverage of the murders at the time, which focused on the stories of the adoptive mothers, Asgarian tells the story of the children’s birth families.
How did these children end up in foster care in the first place? What were the conditions they left, only to find themselves in far, far worse circumstances?
What Asgarian found is that – every step of the way – the adults in the children's birth families had to navigate cruel bureaucracies in order to prove their competence. Despite their obvious love and commitment to the children, they were met with suspicion, technical roadblocks and racist contempt. The birth families are repeatedly hit with accusations of neglect, and their children were moved farther away from them.
But, as Asgarian points out neglect and poverty can look a lot alike.
“Seventy-five percent of child welfare cases are around neglect, not abuse. Neglect is living in conditions of poverty. Mom had to go to work. The kids have to stay home alone.” she said in an interview in the L.A. Times.
“These are not parenting issues. These are issues with our society.”
“We have no safety net. This is our safety net. We take kids aways from their families,” Asgarian said.
Then, there’s the hypocrisy and the racism: The adoptive moms, Sarah and Jennifer Hart, were investigated for abuse in three stares, and in Minnesota, Sarah was convicted for assaulting one of her daughters. But the investigations were dropped. Neighbors didn’t follow up with calls to child services.
After the murders, the event was framed by a police narrative that described “two well-meaning women who succumbed to great outside pressures, driving them to end their families lives,” Asgarian writes.
By the time I finished We Were Once a Family, I was wrecked. We don’t know how to take care of families, and we give children away to people who harm them even more.
And, for those who might think this is story is an exception, or this practice is a recent one, Asgarian reminds us that child removal has been a strategy of the state since the day enslaved people were brought here, and since the not-so-distant time ago when Native American children were removed from their families and sent to white, Christian boarding schools. In the 19th century, we put poor children in New York on trains and sent them to live with – and work for – families in the middle of the country.
“Breaking up families is actually one of the U.N. definitions of genocide,” Asgarian said in an interview in the L.A. Times.
“It’s so deeply wounding. “
There have been some improvements in the way we serve children in foster care, Asgarian writes in her epilogue. The Washington State supreme court ruled in 2022 that efforts must be made to place children with their relatives, writing that to do otherwise, “creates chaos for the child.”
Another idea: The expansion of Child Tax Credit, which gave families a monthly stipend, and which cut the child poverty rate by a third. Congress let the CTC expire at the end of 2021.
Yet another idea: In 2021, California passed a law that gave young people aging out of foster care up to $1,000 a month for a year. Asgarian describes the ways in which young people leaving the foster care system struggle without family and financial support, and are “saddled with the trauma of their long stays in foster care.”
The support of the state goes a long way to provide some stability in that transition, advocates say.
Asgarian’s book is about systems that fail families, that are designed to maintain the status quo and that prop up racist ideas about who deserves to be trusted, and who deserves to be investigated, interrogated and broken apart.
But her book is also a book about familial love.
There is one child, removed from his family, that doesn’t die in the crash in California. Dontay, the oldest brother, is separated from his mother and his siblings, but instead of being placed for adoption, he is moved into institutions, residential treatment centers, where he, too, suffers abuse and severe neglect.
But what Asgarian found when she combed through thousands of pages of documents was that Dontay never stopped wanting to reunite with his siblings. He never stopped thinking of himself as a big brother.
He, like the birth mothers whose children were removed from their care, never stopped loving his family. Why would they? They were a family.
In her book, Asgarian tell us that she had an unstable childhood, and was a victim of child sexual abuse outside her home.
“But would it have helped for me to have been separated from my friends, my school, the sources of stability in my life?” she asks.
“Although my friends and I were often left unsupervised as our parents struggled with abusive partners or substance abuse or mental illness, the involvement of CPS in our lives was so far from a possibility it didn’t even factor into our or our parents decision-making.”
“Why, as a middle-class white person did I never have to worry about that happening, when everyday Black families are making parenting decisions with the threat of government intervention looming over them?”
Resilience comes from stable communities, as well as stable families, Asgarian writes.
“Each child deserves a safe place to call home.”
Here are two newsletters we are loving right now:
MAD WOMAN by Amanda Montei is a feast for feminist thinking, covering everything from reproductive freedom to assaults on trans youth (“The only thing kids are being groomed for is the gender binary”) to evolving understanding of sexuality. Plus, we can’t wait to get our hands into her forthcoming book, Touched Out: Motherhood, Monogamy, Consent and Control. You can subscribe to MAD WOMAN here.
We are so down to rethink motherhood, shake it from the grip of patriarchy and find new ways of being moms in the world, and Cindy DiTiberio’s THE MOTHERLODE is an essential guide on the path. It’s packed with personal reflections, book reviews and interviews. You can subscribe here.
MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and is based in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is the Associate Dean at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, the economy and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.
"How did these children end up in foster care in the first place? What were the conditions they left, only to find themselves in far, far worse circumstances?"
THIS! Thank you so much for this Allison and Roxana. This just gets at the heart of so many things.
This is such an important topic that no one is talking about, and it resonates for me as someone who survived a white alcoholic abusive family. Not once in my childhood did the possibility of CPS showing up at our house seem like a remote possibility, and there was rampant drug use, physical abuse, domestic violence, you name it.
The following quote from Roxanna Asgarian expresses what I've felt my whole life.
"Although my friends and I were often left unsupervised as our parents struggled with abusive partners or substance abuse or mental illness, the involvement of CPS in our lives was so far from a possibility it didn’t even factor into our or our parents decision-making.”
“Why, as a middle-class white person did I never have to worry about that happening, when everyday Black families are making parenting decisions with the threat of government intervention looming over them?”