*
Oslo, Norway
23 November 2020
Updated 25 November 2020
Updated with
addition 6 July 2021
Hillary and Bill
Clinton – zealous promoters of forced adoptions in the USA
By
Marianne Haslev Skånland
• • • •
This
article was updated in July 2021 with some addition in the
section 'Some
ideological background' and the quotation from Mark
Pendergrast's book.
The first
edition of the article was also published
on Wings of the Wind
on 29 November
2020 and on Arizona Telegraph
on 3 December
2020, and has been updated on Wings of the Wind.
• • • •
0.
In
their political work, Bill and Hillary Clinton
advocated early
forced adoption of children having been taken
into care by the social services and placed in foster
homes. The 'Adoption and Safe Families Act' was passed in
1997, under Bill Clinton as president, promoting forced
adopting away from their biological parents of foster
children after only 15 months separated from their parents,
if social workers (the CPS – child protective services) did
not consider the parents to have 'improved' by then.
1.
The attitude of social 'experts': Parents are unimportant
Pushing through forced adoptions in this activistic way did
not come out of the blue. Propaganda idealising the power
of social workers seems to have been strengthened under
Bill Clinton's presidency. His wife Hillary Clinton was
very active with her view that 'it takes a whole village to
raise a child', presented also in a book:
"In
it, Clinton presents her vision for the children of
America. She focuses on the impact individuals and groups
outside the family have, for better or worse, on a child's
well-being, and advocates a society which meets all of a
child's needs. The book was written with uncredited
ghostwriter Barbara Feinman."
It Takes a Village
Wikipedia,
last edited 14 May 2020.
Although she is said to have warned against too much interference by
social service agencies into family
life,
I also remember that Hillary Clinton has in some context
straight out agitated in favour of every American family
being obliged to accept a visit (inspection) by a social
worker twice a year.
An American article from 2019 gives an account of the
ideology that the 'professionals' know best and take best
care of children, the aim being to raise them to be the
kind of citizens many believe is ideal:
"The
ideology of the Clinton bureaucrats who worked on the law
might explain its focus.
“What happens to children depends not
only on what happens in the homes, but what happens in the
outside world,” Mary Jo Bane, who served as the Clinton
administration Department of Health and Human Services’
assistant secretary of children and families, said in a
1977 interview.
“We really don’t know how to raise
children. If we want to talk about equality of opportunity
for children, then the fact that children are raised in
families means there’s no equality. It’s a dilemma. In
order to raise children with equality, we must take them
away from families and communally raise
them.”"
Clinton-Era Law Has Distorted Child
Protective Services, Parents Say. Law Passed by Trump
seeks to reform a system in crisis
The
Epoch Times, 25 September 2019
2.
What to do about the unsuccessful foster home industry
The CPS business of foster homes in America is large, but
like elsewhere it is no success. The CPS in the USA is
frequently said to be 'a system in crisis' or 'a broken
system' and to have been so for a long time. This is
apparent from the outcome of CPS actions, with results far
from the ideal imagined by well-meaning psycho-social
theorists.
However, the idea under Clinton was that early cutting off
of every bond between child and parents through adoption of
the child by others would bring to an end the unfortunate
sides of foster home existence. Social services in the USA
were keen to support the legislative initiative and the
number of children forcibly adopted away shot up:
Clinton Hails Illinois For Adoption
Record
Chicago
Tribune, 24 September 1999
U.S. Rewards State Adoption
Efforts
Chicago
Tribune, 24 September 1999
Then the adoption train was made to halt for a moment, as
the Supreme Court of the State of Illinois found the law to
be unconstitutional:
Foster custody law is
voided
Chicago
Tribune, 21 September 2001
Nevertheless, the adoption-enthusiasts found a way around
this:
"DCFS and the courts made sure to have on hand people
who could make on-the-spot assessments of parents' problems
and work with "recovery coaches"."
And the adoptions continued:
Heeding the call to
adopt
Chicago
Tribune, 20 October 2003
The programmatic believers in the 1997 law recognised that
foster home arrangements are usually not very good for
children, and certainly not in the long run. Whether wiping
out the biological family is a cure, is nevertheless quite
a question, in the light of the comprehensive evidence
available about serious problems for all parties in a
considerable number of cases, not only for the biological
parents deprived of their children but also for the adopted
children and actually for adoptive parents as well – not
only in forced adoptions. (The little bibliography here can
perhaps be a start for those not familiar with the facts
already; it lists a few items out of a rich
literature: Is biological kinship irrelevant for the
life of human beings?.)
So the question is: Why do the 'expert' authorities, the
CPS themselves, politicians who support the CPS, shut their
eyes to these realities? They seem so firmly one-sided that
the answer is probably that the system draws on other
sources in addition to a wayward ideology of 'the child's
best interest'. And indeed there are such additional
sources and factors, such as the satisfaction drawn from
power over others, that of belonging to a large set of
benefactors to society, the security of being approved by
leading authorities, and the large number of people
involved in the sector financially.
3.
Some ideological background
The favoured way of thinking behind the development in the
Clinton era is found in other countries too. Trends in
social work are rather international (The attitude of social professions
involved in the child protection
sector). In the area of forced
adoption, cf the rather similar conditions in Britain to
what has been taking place in the USA:
How social services are paid bonuses to
snatch babies for adoption
Mail
Online (Daily Mail), 31 January 2008
The child protection systems in Western countries operate
on the basis of ideological, would-be scientific,
psychological notions claiming that children are really
better off when raised by or chiefly influenced by 'ideal'
caretakers appointed by 'experts' and not by their faulty
parents. A concomitant is that ousting the parents has
supposedly little negative effect for the child.
The belief is essentially that all that matters in life
from childhood to adult age, including feelings and ideas
as well as behaviour, is formed more or less
deterministically by the environment, primarily the social
and material environment, and can therefore be modified at
will by those in power dictating how a child's environment
is to be formed and restricted. A companion argument holds
that assuming biology to be a cause of behaviour and of
mental life is unscientific. A lot of evidence exists
showing that this idea of biology and of science is
untenable. It has, however, been widely held, in several
waves of social thinking at least in the last 300 years.
But presumably, the idea that the state is better suited to
bring up children than parents are,
must have had some
currency in Europe ever since the time of Plato's
The Republic (authored around 375 BC, i.e
about 2400 years ago).
Such a philosophy, simplifying the view (if not the actual
understanding) of life and individuals, has of course been
prominent in communist and socialist thinking, albeit with
fluctuating strength in different periods, as the more
extreme consequences turned out to be impracticable. But
practically the same ideas are also found in politically
quite conservative circles.
The line of reasoning about society has been observed in
England and France at least from the Age of Enlightenment,
the time before and around the French revolution, cf H.N.
Brailsford (1913): Shelley,
Godwin and their circle (Oxford University Press)
(cf here, here and here). An important new surge in
favour of environment at the expense of and even counter
to biology can be found around 1900, starting in America
particularly in psychology and social anthropology,
cf How Norwegian experts came to reject
biological kinship as relevant in child welfare
policy. It has through the 1900s
been, and still is, evident in much of linguistics and
language teaching, even from leading linguists who claim
to be 'mentalists' and 'innate-ists'.
As clear an exposition as any of the materialistic,
environmental-deterministic ideology regarding 'the best
interest of the child' can be found in a recommendation to
the Norwegian parliament in 2012 to demote 'the biological
principle' in legislation and practice concerning children,
especially that relating to the CPS taking children into
care and declaring the child-parent relationship
permanently nullified:
The Raundalen Committee's evaluation of
the biological principle, Recommendation NOU 2012-5, and
the presentation of the
Recommendation
This legislative proposal was no bombshell when it came;
rather it represented the formalisation of trends in social
and psychological ideology consciously spread and
strengthened through propaganda over a long time. The lack
of realisation is evident – realisation that there is
something more, something other than learning and
environmental influence at the basis of children's impulses
to be with their own parents. An American friend when
reading the explanations of the Raundalen Committee was
struck by the deliberate rejection of any belief of
biological bonds having a natural cause. He wrote to me: "I
read the names and titles of these committee members and I
thought, ‘Just who do these people think they are?’" The
answer is: They are mostly leading members of the official
Norwegian establishment of state authorised 'child
experts', and with this authorisation they believe they are
the ones who know best and can diagnose and evaluate
everything.
Another authority in Norway is the leader of the state's
professional committee for adoptions. Private adoptions are
not allowed in Norway, so this committee holds great
powers, and its leader is listened to with respect by
makers of legislation. In the 1990s the leader was
psychologist Karen
Hassel. In a tv interview in 2001
she emphasised that adoptive relationships were very
problematic indeed, often with years of rejection of the
adoptive parents by the adopted child. About 4 months
later she testified in court in a forced adoption case,
and managed to say the opposite: that this adoption was
no trouble at all and strongly to be recommended,
without explaining the relationship between that
particular adoption and those she had warned about on
tv.
The situation here in Norway, then, is perhaps much the
same as I find dominating in the policies of the Clintons
in the USA, just more one-sidedly accepted in Norway? No
one reading the Raundalen committee's recommendations needs
to be surprised at the impossibility of debating with the
members of the Committee or their supporters. Nor is it
surprising that the development since 2012 has been
characterised by a continued belief within the CPS that
their breaking up of families is in children's best
interest, likewise that the county welfare boards (making
the initial approvals of taking children into care) and the
courts support them, to the despair of the very large
majority of parents and children in the hands of the CPS.
4.
The result of the Clinton administration's 'Adoption and
Safe Families Act'
So a factor is money. As the Chicago Tribune articles as
well as the one in The Epoch Times show, Clinton's law
created special 'financial incentives' to agencies for each
child adopted out of foster care. There was apparently no
reason then to stop when the children in care had been
adopted away. On the contrary, there was reason for the CPS
to go ahead and take new children into foster care, to be
the next to be adopted away, with a generous government
check as a reward.
In other words, the number of children taken into care did
not go down as a result of the Clinton initiative, quite
the contrary, the 1997 law
"sparking a lucrative government-run business of child
removal" (Clinton-Era Law Has Distorted
...).
Keeping a
child away from its parents for 15 months, with the kind of
laws and rules the CPS possess, is child's play. There is
evidence in the USA as in other countries that social work
establishments' own actions and what they consider
necessary changes in the lives of parents tend to take up a
very long time, if demanded changes are even so concrete
and sensible that parents can comply with them in the real
world. The demands of the CPS can also make a family's
practical life impossible. CPS 'diagnoses' on the spot and
'recovery coaches' are unlikely to compensate for a child's
loss of its family, especially when surrounded by
professionals who have no notion of the loss of family
being a fundamental problem.
Let alone that far from every removal of a child from its
parents is responsible and necessary from the start. The
less real reason there has been for taking a child into
care, the more the CPS will make demands that do not really
help the child, and will resist letting go, since that
would take away their power and tend to expose their
actions from the beginning to have been unjustified. So
once a child is taken into public care, it tends to stay in
the system and be a factor supporting the CPS's demands for
more resources.
A
clear forerunner to the adoption push of the Clintons is
found in action taken by e.g Walter Mondale, who championed
the
Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment
Act in 1974. The following
account of aspects of the wave in child protection ideas
of the last 50 years can be found in Mark
Pendergrast's Victims of Memory. Incest Accusations and
Shattered Lives (the quotation is from the
first edition, of 1995, pp 359-60):
"As
a result of increased awareness of the true horrors of
child abuse, Walter Mondale championed the passage of the
Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act in 1974. This
landmark legislation offered matching federal funds to
states which passed their own laws mandating that doctors,
psychologists, police officers, teachers, nurses, and other
professionals report any suspected child abuse to the
appropriate child protection agency. The act offered
anonymity and immunity from prosecution to anyone reporting
child abuse. Those who failed to report suspected abuse
faced fines or prison sentences.(2)
(see
footnote)
The
legislation has produced a self-sustaining bureaucracy of
social workers, mental health experts, and police officers
who specialize in rooting out sex abuse. The more cases
they find, the more funds they receive, and the more vital
their jobs appear. The result? Beyond question, many cases
of actual abuse have been brought to light. But tragically,
the legislation has also encouraged false accusations that
have ruined the lives of innocent people. A network of
self-righteous True Believers has blanketed America, eager
to find offenses, even in cases where little or no evidence
exists. A rumour or malicious allegation is enough to start
the wheels rolling. Often, children are taken away from
parents without notice, and the accused are arrested
without ever being questioned.(3) (see footnote)
So the procedure was tried out in the 1970s, with a result
that cannot be called anything but dismal for large numbers
of children. This was known and understood in 1995, when
Pendergrast wrote his book, and he surely cannot have been
the only clear-eyed individual. Nevertheless, the Clinton
administration went ahead with the same set-up of rewarding
the social sector for dramatic early breaking of family
bonds.
The action taken by the Trump administration, as described
by The Epoch Times, seems to have hit the CPS effectively
by clamping down on the money paid out to the CPS for
breaking up families – viz on the very point the CPS is
probably most keen to protect:
"President Donald Trump’s Family First Prevention
Services Act—which he passed by attaching it to a February
2018 spending bill". With Joe Biden most likely
heading for the White House, a real concern for American
families targeted by the CPS will probably be whether his
administration will revert to the Clintons' idea of
children and their needs. Policies regarding the taking of
children into care and what happens to them are not usually
a major political concern to the general population in a
country, but for those who are hit by destructive CPS
actions it is different – being forcibly separated from
their family is a fundamental tragedy in the core of their
hearts and their lives.
5.
A different understanding of the needs of children
Scientific studies show that not foster care, not adoption,
but a third option is far superior to them, even when the
biological family is far from ideal.
The evidence is in
Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together: The Definitive
Studies
National
Coalition for Child Protection
Reform,
September 2015
Rethinking foster care: Molly McGrath
Tierney at TEDxBaltimore 2014
TEDx
Talks, on youtube, 27 February 2014
Literature about it has appeared in most countries. Also
well-known: Although adoption as well as foster care are
realised to be problematic, there is no will in social
service circles to go to the core of what is wrong; instead
they want to keep on doing variants of the same, and
calling for 'more research'. Much the same goes for the
people researching these topics; they are themselves
perhaps close to the ones who would be out of a job or
would have to re-train completely if social services for
children were re-cast. At the same time the amount of
lying, in case work and in the courts, on the part of the
social services in countries practicing these ideas of
children's needs, is striking, and is in itself a symptom
of a system and an ideology failing deeply.
There have over the years been plenty of studies in the USA
as well as in Europe showing most of what we need to know.
There have also been many individuals and NGOs in the USA
whose information has reached us here in Europe, as they
have carried out excellent documentation and have published
on the internet and elsewhere about abuses by the social
services against families. An example is
Fight CPS: Child Protective
Services-CPS-False Accusations, which has been running for
several decades, under Linda Martin's well-informed
leadership. It cannot be emphasised often enough how
important information and the freedom of expression are
in the work to combat a CPS system with unwarranted
power.
Local, political initiatives to turn things the right way
are certainly also found. Nancy Schafer, a senator in
Georgia, did not shy away:
Nancy Schafer exposes the EVIL
CPS
Constitution
Man, on youtube, 14 April 2009
Chris Reimers in Arkansas wrote this about an initiative to
reunite children with their parents which had been partly
successful (cf comments to Natalya Shutakova, Another Mother
Tormented by the Norwegian “Child Welfare Services”
(Barnevernet)):
"a
local politician has recently been able to get legislation
passed in our state assembly that would help situations
like Natalya’s to be avoided."
Here is how:
".....
In the case of the local politician I’ve mentioned, it took
three things:
1) People who were not afraid to tell their stories to the
man who represented them in Little Rock, and
2) A man (in this case State Senator Alan Clark) who was
willing to listen to them, take them seriously, and craft
legislation that would uphold parental rights in certain
cases. There were two new laws crafted, and only one of the
two passed into law. Still, progress was made.
3) It took a group of lawmakers who would pass such a law.
It seems a minority of American representatives are willing
to spend so much time on issues like these but there are
some. It also seems like Norway would get stopped, in
almost all cases, by the second and third requirements
listed."
*
Footnote
The
footnotes in Pendergrast's book are:
(2)
Gardner, "Modern Witch Hunt," Wall
Street Journal; Coleman, "False Allegations
of Sexual Abuse," p. 15-16.
(3)
Benedek, "Problems in Validating." For general books on the
child abuse industry, see Wexler, Wounded
Innocents; Pride, Child
Abuse Industry; Tong, Don't
Blame ME.
The
references are given in the bibliography as:
Gardner,
Richard A., "Modern Witch Hunt – Child Abuse
Charges," Wall
Street Journal, Feb. 22, 1993
Coleman, Lee and Patrick E. Clancy,
"False Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse,"
Criminal
Justice, Fall 1990, p. 14-20, 43-47
Benedek, Elissa P. and Diane H. Schetky,
"Problems in Validating Allegations of Sexual
Abuse", Journal
of the Academy of Child & Adolescent
Psychiatry (1987), v. 26, p. 912-915
Wexler, Richard. Wounded
Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child
Abuse.
Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1990.
Pride, Mary. The
Child Abuse Industry. Westchester, IL: Crossway
Books, 1986.
Tong, Dean. Don't
Blame ME, Daddy: False Accusations of Child Sexual
Abuse.
Norfolk, VA: Hampton Roads Pub, 1992.
**
See
also
Siv Westerberg:
Foster-children as lucrative
business
MHS's
home page, February 2005 / 25 January
2014
– : Child prisons? In
Sweden?
MHS's
home page, 1995, 1998, 2006, 28
December 2018
– : Norway and Sweden – where inhuman rights
prevail
MHS's
home page, 7 May 2012 / 11 November 2017
Senators want to see Children and Youth
Services reform
Fox56,
27 March 2018
Connie
Reguli:
Breaking up families in the name of child
protection
Sunday
Guardian, 13 October
2018
Do criminals have more rights than
parents in Tennessee?
News
Channel 9 (Fox 17 News), 14 November 2017
Marianne Haslev Skånland:
Separating children from their parents –
is Norway better than the USA?
MHS's
home page, 16 July 2018
– : Demonstrations abroad against Norwegian
child protection (CPS) –
Barnevernet
MHS's
home page, 8 - 10 January 2016
– : Canadian documentary about child
protection
MHS's
home page, 11 September 2013
– : The Council of Europe with a critical
report on European child protection
systems
MHS's
home page, 4 July 2018
– : Some professional child experts
(4)
Karen Hassel, psychologist, adoption
expert, editor of the CPS Barnevernet's
projects
MHS's
home page, 13 January 2019
– : Some professional child experts (5)
Vigdis Bunkholdt, psychology
specialist
MHS's
home page, 28 November 2019
Øivind Østberg:
The fight over the future of child
protection in Norway is hardening
MHS's
home page, 8 March 2020
Hemming threatens to name social workers
in Parliament
Liberal
Democrat Voice (UK), 7 January 2007
Jan Simonsen:
Rock hard criticism of Norwegian child
protection from the president of the Czech
Republic
MHS's
home page, 10 February, 2015
Article series about child protection
published in Sunday Guardian in
India
Series
overview with links
MHS's
home page, 17 December 2017 –
Suranya Aiyar:
Family must come
first
MHS's
home page, 14 February 2013 / 17
October 2015
– : Understanding and Responding to Child
Confiscation by Social Service
Agencies
MHS's
home page, 9 May 2012 / 20 September
2017
Octavian D. Curpas:
With Barnevernet, Norway is going
South
MHS's
home page, 1 September 2016
Jan Pedersen:
The children of the state – The Norwegian
child protection agency, Barnevernet, has created a
society of fear
MHS's
home page, 27 November 2017
familien-er-samlet (the-family-is-together):
Flight, exile and taking
chances
MHS's
home page, 11 November 2020
*