Search

Home > Let's Grab Coffee > S1E116 - We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America with Roxanna Asgarian
Podcast: Let's Grab Coffee
Episode:

S1E116 - We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America with Roxanna Asgarian
Category: Education
Duration: 00:55:58
Publish Date: 2023-11-13 18:01:00
Description:

Episode Notes

November is National Adoption Month, which adoptees have reclaimed as National Adoptee Awareness Month (NAAM). In honor of NAAM, this month on Let's Grab Coffee, I'm featuring conversations with authors of books that center adoptee voices.

Child welfare services, including adoption and foster care, are often framed around the “best interests of the child,” but who gets to decide what’s best and who’s best for the child? What happens in cases of adoptive parent and foster parent abuse, neglect, and murder? On this episode, I sit down with Roxanna Asgarian, author of We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America. Through her investigative journalism, she challenges some of the assumptions around child welfare and adoption, centers the birth families whose children were murdered by their adoptive parents in a highly-publicized 2018 murder-suicide, and exposes the harms baked into the child welfare system.

Roxanna Asgarian was the law and courts reporter for the Texas Tribune. Previously, she covered the child welfare and criminal justice systems as an independent reporter in Houston. Roxanna received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and her master’s degree from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
Total Play: 0