It doesn’t have those "standard validity and reliability things"

March 20, 2024 1:18 PM

An Expert Who Has Testified in Foster Care Cases Across Colorado Admits Her Evaluations Are Unscientific Diane Baird labeled her method for assessing families the "Kempe Protocol" after the renowned University of Colorado institute where she worked for decades. The school has yet to publicly disavow it. [ProPublica]
posted by readinghippo (29 comments total)

"in a case out of rural Huerfano County"

Eponysterical!
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:29 PM on March 20 [6 favorites]

How in the goddamn hell is the "expert witness" allowed to be paid by one of the arguing parties? What the actual fuck.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:32 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

How in the goddamn hell is the "expert witness" allowed to be paid by one of the arguing parties? What the actual fuck.

I mean, this is standard practice in a bunch of different kinds of cases. That doesn't make it any less fucked up, but it's common.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:32 PM on March 20 [16 favorites]

Well, I've been appropriately OutrageFiltered.

The whole "myth of benevolence" bullshit feels like a close cousin to eugenics to me. "Let's take all the babies and put them with the people who can raise them the best!"
posted by hippybear at 1:36 PM on March 20 [8 favorites]

I'm now working with a nonprofit that works with kids in NYC's child welfare and foster system. My boss is just starting up with the advocacy department.

Just forwarded her this article - I'm very interested in her response.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:53 PM on March 20 [3 favorites]

I remember the initial reporting from October, it is at least good to hear that the main family from the last article has been reunited (see the picture about midway through the article.

Is her motivation just pure racism?
posted by kittensofthenight at 1:57 PM on March 20 [4 favorites]

Having been adjacent to the dependency/foster care system for a few years now, it's not eugenics. By the time children fall into the system, it is obvious that something has gone very wrong. The stories I can't tell...

So once they are in the system, "put them with the people who can raise them best" is the goal. Seems to be usually other family members, grandparents and such, rather than anything I can think about Eugenics.

Good Foster parents are a blessing.
(Bad ones just in it for the cash, not so much, too many bad stories there)
posted by Windopaene at 1:57 PM on March 20 [6 favorites]

Is her motivation just pure racism?

My impression is her motivation is "anyone who has been raising a child before the age for 3 should continue to raise that child forever". As in, once you've lost a child into foster care, it's gone for good, and if you're a foster parent, you've gotten a free child. I didn't see racism in what she is doing, I saw classism.
posted by hippybear at 2:00 PM on March 20 [10 favorites]

I was wonder why her name sounded familiar, and looked up this previous post. Ah, yes, her. I don't like her.
posted by mrphancy at 2:15 PM on March 20 [6 favorites]

Expert witnesses are complete frauds most of the time, they don't need any double blinding, they don't have to prove repeatability of results, they just need enough clout to convince a judge who has no idea about their supposed area of expertise that they are an expert.
posted by Ferreous at 2:25 PM on March 20 [5 favorites]

This reminds me of the Motherisk scandal here in Canada. To wit a lab at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children held itself out as an expert in testing hair samples for drug or alcohol consumption. The tests were used to determine that parents were unfit and then lose custody of their children. After a decade and thousands of samples being used this way one parent was able to successfully challenge Motherisk's findings and methodology at the Ontario Court of Appeal. This lead to other findings being reviewed and overturned and Motherisk eventually closing down.

I think the justice system has difficulties with scientific evidence in general, placing unwarranted deference on the testimony of paid-for experts, but at least there's the option of the other side paying for their own expert. I'd imagine in a lot of these custody proceedings the parents don't have the resources to pay for an expert that would receive the same deference.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:26 PM on March 20 [7 favorites]

Good luck coming up with any scientific method to determine whether a child should be taken from their parent(s). This is the kind of ridiculously complex, value-laden, no-two-situations-the-same kind of thing that science does worst. If anybody claims to have a scientific method for this, I will be 100% sure that they are putting a veneer of p-values on top of their prejudices.

The unscientific methods for taking children from parents will often be a veneer of respectability on top of prejudices, too, but at least they only claim the wavering uncertainty of human judgement. They're not claiming the "proven fact" level of scientific legitimacy.

(Well, except for the religious ones. They claim the absolute authority of God as cover for their prejudices, which is even worse.)
posted by clawsoon at 2:28 PM on March 20 [9 favorites]

Yeah, I'm not claiming there's any actual scientific method that works here, more that across the board expert witnesses and how they operate in the courts is complete and utter dogshit.
posted by Ferreous at 2:32 PM on March 20 [4 favorites]

Is her motivation just pure racism?

What I'm getting from the article is that her motivation seems to be winning cases for the foster parents who are paying her (and who are recommending her to new clients).
posted by clawsoon at 2:37 PM on March 20 [7 favorites]

...and also probably the warm feeling of self-regard produced by having her expertise validated by judge after judge.
posted by clawsoon at 3:00 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

her "expertise"
posted by hippybear at 3:06 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

Like, I don't know how to have an impartial rubric developed for things like this, but having an elderly conservative woman being the arbiter is also not the solution.
posted by hippybear at 3:07 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

I know a man who was essentially framed for child abuse because he was an older, poor, and poorly educated man, and a social worker wanted to give his daughter to a friend of hers. The child's mother wanted to the couple to pay her to give the child up. But the father wouldn't terminate his parental rights. So the couple;'s lawyer and the social worker generated a bunch of transparent lies to take his custody of her away and threatened him with prosecution if he objected. He continued to fight it, but a judge stripped of his rights anyway.

Five years later, he sets aside birthday and Christmas gifts and letters for her with the intention of getting them to her when she turns 18.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 3:28 PM on March 20 [4 favorites]

"How in the goddamn hell is the "expert witness" allowed to be paid by one of the arguing parties? What the actual fuck.

I mean, this is standard practice in a bunch of different kinds of cases. That doesn't make it any less fucked up, but it's common."

Who else is going to pay for them?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:03 PM on March 20

She featured prominently in this previous post. As you can guess, she did not come out looking good.
posted by TedW at 4:11 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

I completely understand the need for CPS/DCFS systems and that there are some people that are simply unsafe to be around children.

I also am completely appalled by all the bias and just wierd bullshit that goes on, what gets prioritized, and pretty terrible the outcomes of kids who age out of care.

I'm also alarmed at the disconnect between criminal and dcfs systems. One can absolutely be found not guilty of physically abusing and child AND have parental rights terminated about the same alleged event, or criminal charges never pressed or all other variations. Not that criminal systems are unbiased or even a way to measure if someone can parent but I would hope that there would be some consistency between the two and there is just absolutely not.

This is such a tiny example to a system happening in every state, in every county through the US, that minimizes the impact and the voices of those most involved: primary caregivers before separation and foster/kinship placed children.

There is just so many variables in training and education of dcfs staff, what they will accept as evidence, and turnover, turnover, and more turnover. At any point a single biased worker can shift an entire case and plan sometimes litteral years in the making. It's infuriating. It's also really really complex.

I have so much I could say about these things and not really enough time to put it together more than the above right now.
posted by AlexiaSky at 4:20 PM on March 20 [5 favorites]

> I didn't see racism in what she is doing, I saw classism.

Classism, yes, but there's also the parts like this:

Had she considered or was she even aware of the cultural background of the birth family and child whom she was recommending permanently separating? (The case involved a baby girl of multiracial heritage.) Baird answered that babies have “never possessed” a cultural identity, and therefore are “not losing anything,” at their age, by being adopted.

She also doesn't seem to consider that if you turn the foster system into one where any child under 3 is permanently taken away as soon as they go into foster care, that dramatically changes how families and reporters will relate to the system.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:59 PM on March 20 [16 favorites]

My oldest brother was taken away from my mother and adopted out. We've reconnected over the past few years, and what I've learned from his story is that if you're the only black kid in a white community, you'll be given a cultural identity by the community whether you want it or not.
posted by clawsoon at 6:10 PM on March 20 [19 favorites]

(I'll note that both my older brothers were Black. After the devastation of losing her first son to adoption, my mother did everything she could to keep her second son, and succeeded. All of our lives could've turned out very differently, but my oldest brother's life most of all.)
posted by clawsoon at 6:18 PM on March 20 [7 favorites]

What an awful, awful person.

It struck me as odd that the Kempe Center would not disavow her. If I started calling snake oil “The Mayo Clinic Protocol” I think I would be hearing from some lawyers.
posted by Ishbadiddle at 6:53 PM on March 20 [3 favorites]

After reading this, the "Kempe Protocol" seems to be ... whatever the hell she says it is? Like, is there even a rubric? A standard set of questions? Is she just going on "vibes"? Her use of neuroscience terminology without actually being a neuroscientist is just shit icing on this woman's turd cake.
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:59 PM on March 20 [6 favorites]

I'm reminded of this NPR story (link to transcript and audio player), which I heard on the radio this week about Sixto Cancel's work advocating for kinship care.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1185025494
posted by Chrysopoeia at 7:19 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

In Baird’s reports and testimony summarizing her observations from such sessions, she has said, for instance, that a little boy and his birth father seeming to be happy around each other (they were playing catch and saying “I love you!” “I love you more!”; the boy “expressed no negative emotion during their time together”) just showed that the dad was too rigidly setting the emotional tone of the relationship.

And this is believable to people in court? Do none of the judges or lawyers have children? She must be presenting all of this completely out of context.
posted by Emmy Rae at 7:58 AM on March 21 [1 favorite]

It's awful, but I can see exactly how the judges in these proceedings get taken in by this woman.

We live in a culture that teaches us from the moment we can take in media that you can do anything you set your mind to. So many people carry the implied inverse along with that belief - that if you are poor it must be because something is wrong in you. You either must be stupid and suited only for low wage jobs, or you are lazy, or you are morally compromised.

Add to that the fact that poor family members would not be able to afford a consultant of their own to be a counterweight to this awful woman's testimony. And that by itself would damn them in the eyes of many - because when many middle class and higher income folks say they can't afford something, it's different from what poor folks mean when they say it. A middle income "I can't afford it" often means "paying this money would mean having to not take that week long vacation at the beach". And so many do not understand that a poor "I can't afford it" usually means "neither I nor any of my network can access the money to do this, and I don't have credit cards, and I can't get a loan."

So underneath the things that are actually being said in the court about attachment theory and whatever, there is the underlying set of assumptions about the poor. And many judges will think that it would be better for a child to be raised by people with means that are showing a deep desire to parent anyway, and are given the fig leaf by testimony like this.

I do believe that race probably plays a role too - I really wonder how many of the people trying to steal children this way are white. Anybody want to bet me it's 90% or more?
posted by Vigilant at 11:45 AM on March 21 [7 favorites]