By: Stephanie Turcios

The creators of the animated series, The Simpsons, depicted the unintended consequences of our child welfare system in its 1995 episode titled, Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily. In this episode, the Simpson children are sent to live with their neighbors, the Flanders, who serve as foster parents, while Homer and Marge complete a parenting class to get their children back. Sadly, the problems depicted in this episode still exist today. 

The Simpsons’ involvement in the child welfare system.

The Simpsons became involved in the child welfare system through a series of unfortunate misunderstandings. First, Bart went to school with head lice after playing with his best friend’s  pet monkey. Second, Lisa reported to the principal’s office without shoes after an altercation with bullies on the playground and her baby tooth fell out. Consequently, Bart and Lisa’s principal reported the children’s condition to Child Protective Services (“CPS”) out of concern for the children’s wellbeing. When the CPS agents arrived at the Simpson’s home, Marge and Homer were away for an afternoon getaway at the spa, but CPS found their home to be a “squalid hellhole.” Newspapers from 20 years ago were sitting on the kitchen table for Lisa’s school project, the dishes were not done, and the trash had not been taken out. The final straw for the CPS agents was the fact that Grandpa had fallen asleep while watching Maggie. Given the totality of the circumstances, the CPS agents believed Homer and Marge were negligent parents and immediately removed Bart, Lisa, and Maggie from their parents’ care. 

The episode continues by depicting how much the children miss their parents, and the hurdles Homer and Marge must overcome to regain custody of their children. Although this episode is comical and has a happy ending, this is not the case for many families impacted by the child welfare system. The Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily episode provides an impetus for a deeper conversation about the problematic nature of mandatory reporting and the trauma children experience as a result of short stays in foster care.  

The problematic nature of mandatory reporting.

Principal Skinner was required to report the conditions of Bart and Lisa to CPS under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). See 42 U.S.C. § 5106a(b)(2)(B)(i).  Like in The Simpsons episode, the unfortunate road to the child welfare system almost always begins with a report to CPS for suspected neglect via a mandatory reporter. According to the Children’s Bureau, in 2019, more than two-thirds (68.6 %) of all reports of alleged child neglect were made by mandatory reporters. 

Mandatory reporters are likely to overreport because of the financial and legal consequences built into our federal statute. First, to receive federal funding, states must require certain professionals to be mandatory reporters. Most states impose the mandatory reporting requirement on a lengthy list of professionals, including teachers, principals, and school administrators. Second, a mandatory reporter must report any suspected child neglect or abuse or risk possible incarceration and losing their license. Hence, mandatory reporting is a double edged sword because these are professionals that are able to help meet a child’s needs but are simultaneously instrumental in removing children from their parents’ care.

Unfortunately, research shows that mandatory reporting fails to protect children. According to an international qualitative study of mandatory reporters, most of whom were in the U.S., 73% of mandatory reporters reported negative experiences with the process. Mandatory reporters described experiences where children were revictimized by the process, their abuse intensified after the report, and children were placed in foster care environments that were worse than the family of origin.

The trauma of short stays.

Most Americans are unaware that the experience of the Simpson children depicted in the episode is common in real life. Children are removed temporarily (either for a few days or a few weeks) without a court order while their parents sort out the allegations against them. On average, approximately 17,000 children are removed from their families’ custody per year and placed in foster care only to be reunited within days. Child welfare experts refer to these removals as “short stays.” 

Remarkably, Washington’s King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties are amongst the counties with the highest percentage of short stays in the U.S. This is because in Washington, a child can be removed by law enforcement and placed in protective custody without a court order for up to 72 hours if law enforcement believes a child is being abused or neglected and will be hurt if not removed immediately. (emphasis added). Like in the episode when Bart had lice and Lisa lost her shoes and baby tooth, indicators of neglect in Washington may include the child being dirty, lacking needed medical or dental care, or lacking sufficient clothing for the weather.  These indicators are enough to remove children from their parents’ care for up to 72 hours. 

Studies on child development show that when children are separated from their parents, it is the source of a lifelong trauma, regardless of how long the separation lasts. Some children who were removed from their home described the experience as “being kidnapped,” even if it only lasted for a few days. Further, children who experience even brief separation from their families release a higher level of cortisol-stress hormones that damage unrenewable brain cells. Dr. Charles Nelson, professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, said “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”  

Should we reconsider mandatory reporting?

Many people wondered how the U.S. government could unnecessarily traumatize children by separating them from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the reality is the U.S. government has been doing this to its own citizens for decades via short stays in the foster care system, and consequently, causing irreversible harm to children. Animated cartoons like The Simpsons create a safe space for people to reflect on the issues depicted in the episode and critically evaluate the impact our current system is having on people’s lives. A system that perpetuates harm requires a reimagined approach. Instead of requiring mandatory reporting, professionals should have the discretion to report without fear of losing their license or facing criminal penalties. Perhaps reimagining mandatory reporting will free community spaces from harmful practices and give social service professionals the liberty to work with families to get children’s needs met rather than subjecting them to unnecessary trauma.

By: Riley Grace Borden

What are NFT’s and Why Should the Art World Care?

NFTs are rapidly altering the digital art marketplace, as well as the arts marketplace at large. NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens,” are bits of code which are not interchangeable with each other (unlike bitcoin and Ethereum.) There can only be a single, non-divisible NFT per use, and they are traded and recorded on a blockchain, which is a digital public ledger that exists across a network. NFTs can include music, poetry, comics, digital art, and even tweets. NFTs do not actually include artwork, but only a link to artwork. However, platforms auctioning NFTs do display the artwork tied to the token, opening those sites up to copyright claims. Some NFTs contain a link to an interest address with a copy of an image, while others include a “hash” or short crypto code of an image. The NFT may contain the seller’s wallet address, and it may also contain a smart contract that manages its future transactions.

In 2016 and 2017, NFT art became increasingly mainstream, beginning with digital cartoon frogs and cats, specifically “Rare Pepes,” the first digital art to have intrinsic value, and CryptoKitties, which fans spent more than 32 million dollars trading. By 2021, NFTs grew from a sub-billion-dollar industry to a multi-decabillion industry.

In March 2021, a digital work of art by the artist Beeple entitled The First 5000 Days sold for 69.3 million dollars at Christie’s, in the first sale of its kind at the auction house. Later in the year, Sotheby’s recorded $7.3 billion in sales for 2021, a 46% jump from 2020 and the highest sales figure ever in its 277-year history. It credited NFTs stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Around 44% of all Sotheby’s bidders were new, and 80% of all NFT bidders were newcomers. Sotheby’s has since partnered with NFT artist, Pak, and NFT marketplace, Nifty Gateway, a partnership with brought in $16,825,999 in two days for Pak’s NFT collection, The Fungible. These early sales and increased acceptance of NFTs in establishments of the arts world, indicate that “even if art powerhouses might not [yet] understand the genre, they understand its financial potential.”

Acceptance of NFTs in the art industry varies. Some hold a cynical view of the growing industry, crediting its rise to decades of billions invested into cryptocurrencies and people with nothing to do with their crypto wealth other than buy digital art. This, of course, means fickle investment, as well as no obligation to exercise any judgment about the art itself. Some have summarized art NFTs as little more than commercially exploitable hype.

Those who are hopeful about NFTs in the art world foresee a flexible, more accessible, metaverse where art is more easily shared and disseminated. Former Christie’s co-chairman Loïc Gouzer stated, “The NFT sphere will be a catalyst that will give a voice to a new generation of artists and expand the palette of expressions for established artists that are not afraid to embrace paradigm shifts.”

NFTs and Copyright Law Gray Areas

The world is suddenly rife with NFT-based art cases, and courts are scrambling to keep up. Near the end of 2021, in Tarantino vs. Miramax, Miramax Studio, which produced the 1994 Pulp Fiction film, filed suit against Quentin Tarantino when he announced a planned sale of NFT’s based on original handwritten script of Pulp Fiction. Given the recent windfalls from NFT arts sales, Miramax preferred to benefit from any NFT sale, and accused Tarantino of breach of contract and copyright and trademark infringement. The case’s core question: Does Tarantino’s reserved right to screenplay publications cover the planned NFT sale? The still unresolved dispute raises more issues as to what happens if someone mints an NFT connected to the work of another filmmaker or musician without their consent, particularly because, with an NFT, a copy is not technically being made or distributed.

NFTs have been dubbed as solving digital art’s authenticity problem. However, NFTs, with their link and/or hash, identify a particular digital artwork only in the most general way, and they make distinguishing the actual original of a piece of work nearly impossible.

NFT marketplaces like HitPiece, SuperRare, and OpenMarket, among multiple others, face increased pressure to protect artists on their platforms. What exactly constitutes theft remains unclear, with some arguing that to right-click and save an NFT is “no more theft than taking a photograph of the Mona Lisa would be.” Regardless, multiple artists have come forward with complaints of their images being appropriated and monetarily exploited for the purpose of  NFTs.

Some people from the art world counter the law’s confusion over NFTs and their regulation with optimism, harkening back to a time when “information imbalance was aided by the patronizing misconception that thinking too much about the market compromised an artist’s creative output.” Changing the means of financial transactions in the art world once seemed impossible, but now lawyers like Amanda Rottermund see being on the blockchain as a way to have control and prevent market fraud. Jeff Gluck, an attorney specializing in art and intellectual property issues, launched a beta version of CXIP, a platform that encourages artists to turn their copyright registrations into NFTs. Through such a platform, artists can “effortlessly control, monetize, and manage their IP.” Leading the way for artists to ensure royalties for themselves, artist Sarah Ludy at Bitforms has already used smart contracts to distribute percentages of sales to lower-paid workers at her gallery.

The enforceability of smart contracts in court remains an open question, no cases on whether NFTs constitute fair use or violate 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act have been decided, and it is likely to take much more trial and error before the arts world can equate the rise of NFT’s with comparably fewer “starving” (and properly credited) artists.