Reporting “A Family Matter:” A Q&A with Journalist Jessica Weisberg
“Spending time with another family is like traveling to a foreign country.”
Jessica Weisberg’s recent feature in The Atavist Magazine, “A Family Matter,” follows Danyelle and Randy Branning, along with their three children, through some of the hardest days of their lives. It begins on August 29th, 2013, when a policeman and two social workers from Riverside County’s Department of Public Social Services appeared at their doorstep in Eastvale, California. Within ten minutes of arriving at the Branning home, a social worker told Danyelle that she had deemed their home environment too unsafe for the kids, and that she’d be putting all three of the Branning children — Amber, Cory, and Kelly — into foster care.
Danyelle could not believe the allegations the social worker was making — that Randy had thrown their oldest daughter, Amber, against a wall the previous night, that Danyelle had a drinking problem. It was true that Danyelle and Randy had argued with Amber the previous night — the authorities had come because the 16-year-old had told her school’s guidance counselor about the fight. But Amber later denied the truth of many of the allegations CPS leveled against Randy and Danyelle.
Weisberg’s story documents the Brannings’ fight to bring their family back together after their children were taken without a warrant. From October 2015 to January 2016, she spent a great deal of time with the Branning family and others involved in their case. Her reporting was assisted by the presence of some essential tapes — recordings of the August 29 encounter and an additional interview that the policeman conducted with Danyelle and Randy at their home.
The scope of Weisberg’s piece, however, extends beyond the Branning family. Weisberg attempts to make sense of the secretive family court system, whose child-abuse case hearings are closed to the public in all but 15 states. She also follows the work of Shawn McMillan, the Brannings’ lawyer, who is filing class-action lawsuits against both Riverside and Orange Counties in California for seizing more than 80,000 children without warrants. To the uninformed observer, the Branning case might seem incredulous and isolated. But Weisberg’s investigation shows that perhaps the entire child welfare system needs more scrutiny.
Importantly, every character in Weisberg’s story is redeemable. Weisberg’s work reminds us that a system can still be broken even if the vast majority of actors within it have the best of intentions.
I caught up with her over the phone to get some of her thoughts on the child welfare system and the process of reporting and writing the piece. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JG: When and how did you find out about the Branning family and what made you want to pursue this piece?
JW: My editor at the Atavist, Katia Bachko, heard about the class action suit and she suggested I look into it. I did, and I was truly astounded. What interested me about the issue in general is that, for the most part, everyone involved in the child welfare system are incredibly well-intentioned — and there’s just this very strange dissonance between good intentions and traumatizing results.
Shawn McMillan introduced me to a few different people involved in the suit, and the Brannings really stuck out for a few reasons. One was because of the tapes; I felt like the tapes gave their stories a certain credence that cases like these often don’t have because court records are so hard to obtain.
The other reason was that I thought Amber’s encounters with CPS in Iowa just showed how different CPS can be in different places — which I thought was really important. [Editor’s note: Amber, who is Randy’s daughter from a previous relationship, had previously lived with her mother in Iowa, where CPS had been repeatedly reluctant to separate them.]
I also thought they were really thoughtful parents, and I liked talking to them about parenting. I thought they were very open and thoughtful about how they wanted to parent their kids…I just really appreciated their candor.
JG: Actually, I had planned to ask about Amber’s experience in Iowa because I felt like that was a really interesting counterexample to the more invasive CPS that’s on display with the Brannings in California. How can we have a productive conversation about child welfare while still being sensitive to regional variations and acknowledging how case by case it is?
JW: Well, I think you’ve hit exactly on the big issue with the constellation of agencies involved in child welfare. It has been allowed to be a very disparate organization, in large part because the federal government wants to give communities the opportunities to police these issues according to their own values, but that also has some consequences.
JG: One part of your piece that really struck me was when you wrote that “Spending time with another family is like traveling to a foreign country.” how much time you spent with the Brannings and what was it like to try and report accurately and fairly on their family dynamic?
JW: I spent a lot of time with the Brannings. I went to their home a lot of times. I went to football practice, I had dinner at their house many times— yeah, I spent a long time with them.
The trap social workers fall into is rushing to conclusions about other people’s families, and so I didn’t want to do the same thing as a journalist. But you just do your best. You do your best to get to know the members of the family and describe who they are as people — but I was definitely conscious of the fact that I was sort of putting myself in the same position as a social worker in a strange way.
JG: What surprised you the most as you did your reporting?
JW: It surprised me how deregulated the system was. And also the family court system — I was surprised by the challenges of reporting on the family court system.
JG: You mean just how secretive it is?
JW: Yeah, the fact that it was a closed court system and that it’s a closed court system in most parts of America.
JG: You also highlighted the fact that there doesn’t seem to be an easy fix here, because if the state were to outline stricter guidelines about requiring warrants, then we’d face the risk of letting more emergencies go unaddressed. Are there any discussions about policy change you hope your piece will inspire?
JW: I hope that the conversation draws awareness to the flaws in the system. I hope that it starts a conversation about family court. I hope that there comes a conversation about how to do this better, because no one’s really happy with how it’s going. There are very well intended social workers who are not happy with the way things are.
JG: It seems like the perspectives of social workers were harder for you to access — case workers involved in the Branning’s case were obviously less willing to talk to you than the Brannings or their lawyers. I’m wondering how you went about trying to gain their perspective and if you had any insights around that process?
JW: Actually it’s interesting — one of the professors of social work I spoke to in the piece who is teaching social work at USC told me that USC actually encourages them to talk to the media — they feel that unless they speak to the media, the media will never get a social worker’s perspective, so I really appreciated that.
…I spoke to a number of social workers. None of them wanted to talk to me on the record, and all of them were drawn to the profession for very noble reasons.
JG: It seems like it’s a pretty underreported topic — I was wondering if you had any idea about why that might be?
JW: I think it’s underreported largely because access is really hard. Obviously reporting on children, and reporting on people who have gone through experiences like that is just challenging. I’m very grateful to the Brannings for sharing their experience with me, it just would not have been possible with that, and they wouldn’t have wanted to do that if they didn’t feel very strongly that things need to be different.
The story would not have been possible if they had not trusted me with their story. So I think that a big reason why these kinds of stories are underreported because these are traumatizing incidents involving people’s children and people want to protect their children — and you do the best to protect the identities of the people you report on, but people still get nervous. And also I think the fact that the family court system is closed makes it even harder to get access. So it largely has to do with access, and that access can be difficult to achieve.
I think that because the system is deregulated, every county in America is a different story. I feel like there are a lot more stories to tell. There are stories to tell about counties who are doing it right, just as there are stories to tell about counties like Riverside and Orange, which have a long history of taking children without warrants.
And also one thing I’ll also say — one thing you hear a lot when you report on child welfare — Jill Lepore wrote a piece for the New Yorker not that long ago — is that child welfare often works as a pendulum, that there are moments, often dictated by major news events, when social workers become more alarmist in their reaction to accusations of child abuse and then the opposite.
The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. That might be another reason why there’s so little reporting — that pendulum has been swinging back and forth for such a long time that no one knows what else to say about it.
JG: One thing I was really struck by in the piece was just how lasting the damage has been for the Brannings. I was wondering what was it like for you to be in that with them for a moment. How did that feel?
JW: It was clear that the ramifications of that experience were still really present for them, and something that they were still really contending with and grappling with. I think they all felt like it was something they would always grapple with, like the pain of that situation would never go away.
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