NCCPR Child Welfare Blog: Foster care lawsuit in Nevada: How the .

I`ve written often here around the loser of my fellow liberals on child welfare issues. But if you need to see a dear old fashioned failure of right-wing extremism, just hold out the decision by Federal District Judge Robert C. Jones throwing out a suit against the child welfare system in Clark County (metropolitan Las Vegas) Nevada. (Check it out when the determination in Henry A. v.

Willden becomes generally available online, that is; right now I`ve just been capable to get it done a federal courts database that requires registration; but this tale in the Las Vegas Review Journal sums it up well.)

In the form of throwing out a case brought by the Home Centre for Youth Law (which should not be confounded with the more progressive Youth Law Center), Judge Jones essentially ruled that, under the U.S. Constitution, the rights of children thrown into foster care are maybe one step above the rights of prisoners of war below the Geneva Convention. NCYL plans to appeal, and we`d better hope that prayer is successful.

It`s not that this was a really good cause to start with. As I`ve discussed previously on this blog, NCYL has the same access to litigation as the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children`s Rights: Whatever you do, don`t evoke the subject of children not needing to be taken out in the 1st place. So NCYL`s suits tend to make the same mediocre results as CR`s, which is why I`ve taken to referring to the California-based NCYL as "CR West."

For example, NCYL is waging the same war against grandparents as CR. Indeed, the one good thing about Judge Jones` decision is that it threw out NCYL`s bizarre claim that nurture children have a constitutional right not to be located with their grandparents or other relatives if those relatives can`t comply with every hypertechnical licensing requirement.

This, of course, illustrates the trouble with claiming to "be" children through adult "next friends" who may barely know them or who, in this case, may only be current or former foster parents who may put a shared ideology ahead of what the children really want. It`s difficult to suppose that thousands of children really are begging their caseworkers by saying something like "Please, please don`t direct me with grandma unless her home has exactly the square footage required in division 4 subsection A(2) of regulation 456!"

But the balance of the case might have made things a little better. And by setting such an appallingly low standard concerning what foster children are entitled to, the decision, if upheld on appeal, could do things much worse.

The great irony in this - and the biggest lesson for NCYL, CR and all the others who willfully ignore the trouble of wrongful removal of children is that ignoring that problem helped plant the seeds of NCYL`s defeat.

That is plain from this part of the decision, on page 12:

Plaintiffs have failed to say that Defendants "did anything more than place foster childreninto an already broken system." _ Moreover, the Complaint does not say that Defendantscreated or increased the risk to children. Based on these pleading failures, this claim forrelief is dismissed.

In addition, Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity on this claim. In this regard,Plaintiffs have not provided any factual assertions that the Defendants increased the danger to Plaintiffs. [Emphasis added.]

In contrast,

● Had NCYL taken notice of Nevada`s extremely high range of child removal - more than 50 percent above the national average.

● Had NCYL pointed out that many of those removals are unnecessary (something well attested in a casereading by Prof. Leroy Pelton of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas School of Social Work)

● And had NCYL included cases of wrongful removal among their "named plaintiffs"

then they could, indeed, have made the call that Clark County and the Province of Nevada had really made things worse for the children, and the label would have had a lot more difficulty dismissing the subject on that ground.

Of course, given the judge`s clear hostility to the whole lawsuit, even had NCYL acknowledged the creation of the elephant in the room, judge Jones might easily have ruled against them anyway. But there`s yet a moral for those times when cases are brought before more reasonable judges: NCYL`s embrace of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare got in the way of making the strongest possible suit for the children it sued to protect.