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When the bough breaks: Child welfare hearings usually secret
Monday, December 13, 1999 By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In virtually every state, including Pennsylvania, juvenile court hearings, terminations of parental rights and adoptions are shrouded in secrecy. That closed-door policy -- combined with the lack of federal or state scrutiny of child welfare agencies' termination and adoption practices -- means agencies could be violating parents' and children's rights throughout the nation, and no one would be able to find out.
This gives local child welfare agencies enormous power.
In Beaver County, the process is so secretive that one lawyer who routinely represents birth parents, Cathy Campbell, refused to name other lawyers who do the same work -- as if their very identities should be confidential -- although the secrecy is intended to protect the privacy of families and children, not lawyers.
But the secrecy is not universal.
Several states -- including New York, Florida and Michigan -- have ended such practices, opening their courtroom doors for hearings on child dependency, which is when children can be put into foster care, and parental rights terminations, which is when parents' legal ties to their children can be permanently severed.
These states have opened the hearings without experiencing major problems. That is because virtually no one goes to the hearings anyway, and in the rare instances when reporters cover them, they have routinely withheld the names of the children, officials in those states say.
Michigan has allowed press and public access for the longest period -- a decade. Lawyers representing children there say reporters hardly ever show up, except for high-profile cases in which children have been killed or horribly beaten, which are cases the press would have covered even if the hearings were closed.
Detroit Judge Freddie Burton, who served for years as chief judge of juvenile court, said Michigan's openness has helped the courts and the people they serve.
"The open hearings have given the judicial system a face. It has allowed people to feel more comfortable about what is going on in these cases. When you operate under a shroud of secrecy, there is a tendency for people to think you are hiding something."
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