My response to a column in my local USAToday network paper this weekend. The original column, linked here.
Dear Editor,
I believe that the column your paper chose to run in the
March 25 Living section, by Ana Veciana-Suarez, under the headline “Crocodile
Tears for Teen After Suicide,” was a deeply flawed piece that should never have
been given national attention.
While I agree with Ana Veciana-Suarez’s thesis that the
mother of her piece is clearly trying to make a cash grab in the wake of her
personal tragedy, I find it appalling the lengths to which the article goes on
about demonizing the woman. The texts
quoted in the piece are justly horrifying.
But the article’s insistence on naming only the woman involved, and none
of the other people who had wronged young Naika Venant seems to me to be doing
just what the mother claims, recasting her as the sole villain in this
piece.
If this article had been bought, and paid for, by the State
of Florida’s DCF it couldn’t have been a better attempt to shift blame away
from “the black hole of the system.” The
acceptance that foster care is going to involve rape, and neglect, and that “[Naika’s]
journey through foster care made her even more
disrespectful and rebellious, too. Her behavior, however, was an expected
result of the great trauma she endured,” is frankly horrifying. This shouldn’t be seen as an opportunity to pile
upon a woman who is herself deeply flawed, but a chance to shine a light upon
the often desperate straits that the whole nation’s foster care system is
facing – often enough because of inadequate funding and impossible caseloads, as has been highlighted by
the investigations locally in the wake of the Brook Stagles case.
It seems to me to be not merely unfair to send this article
out nationally where it is falling into the public’s purview without any
context, nor any direct follow-up to be expected, but a dangerous over-simplification
– presenting the parent of a child who died while in care of the state’s as the
sole named villain of the piece – when anyone who took the time to think about
it would realize that the parents of all the children who find themselves in
the foster care system are going to be deeply flawed individuals – and excusing
failures of the system by blaming them for blatantly predictable failures is
going to leave us with a system that isn’t bothering to ask what can it do
better, and what resources does it need to meet the real-world demands placed
upon it.
Sincerely,
Michael D. Taub
cc. aveciana@MiamiHerald.com
