Painful Stories in Public Defense with Sy Hoekstra
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In This Episode
In this powerful episode, former public defender Sy Hoekstra shares his experiences working in family court, shedding light on the often-overlooked challenges within the child welfare system.
A system where both families and public defenders have no choice but to tell incredibly traumatic stories.
Content Warning: Sy describes the traumatic impact of investigations on families, particularly on families of color. So, we'll be talking about systematic racism at play. Be mindful of your emotional capacity as you listen in.
Expect to gain eye-opening insights into the complexities of family court, the power dynamics at play, and the lasting impact on all involved. This episode covers the intersection of law, social services, and systemic inequalities, challenging listeners to reconsider their assumptions about family welfare and public defense.
It also sheds light on the beautiful power of storytelling and advocacy during the most traumatic seasons of people’s lives.
Hoekstra's personal journey from public defense to burnout, as well as his current work, demonstrates how these experiences continue to shape his advocacy for marginalized voices and social justice.
About Sy Hoekstra
Sy is a founding partner of the faith-based media and publishing company KTF Press. He is also an attorney who has worked in the federal court system and as a public defender in New York City's child welfare system. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.
Connect Sy Hoekstra
Connect with Maria
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Transcripts
Maria:
I am so honored to bring on former public defender Sy Hoekstra for today's episode. When we met, he shared his experience working in family court, shedding light on the often overlooked challenges within the child welfare system. I realized this is a system where both families and public defenders have no choice but to tell incredibly traumatic stories, so I had to bring him on the show to explore this further.
Content warning: in this episode, Sy describes the traumatic impact of investigations on families, particularly on families of color. We will be talking about systemic racism. Please be mindful of your emotional capacity as you listen.
Welcome to When Bearing Witness. I'm so thrilled to have you here.
Sy:
Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to be here.
Maria:
I find your career path fascinating. Let’s start there. I have questions about the two parts of your career, being in family court and then what you are doing now, but can you bring us into your work as a public defender in family court? What brought you there, and what was that path like?
Sy:
It was a little bit windy. I went to law school after undergrad thinking it was something I would probably have a good skill set for, without a very particular vision of what I wanted to do. I ended up in family court partially because of a professor who was a former family court judge and really into teaching not just what most law schools teach, which is how to make a lot of money being a divorce attorney, but how to better serve all of the people involved in the child welfare system. That was something I knew nothing about going into law school.
After working for the federal courts for a couple of years, working for judges, I knew I wanted to go into public interest. I wanted to be some kind of defense attorney or work in civil rights. I ended up getting a job with an agency that does public defense in family court, representing parents who had been accused of neglect or abuse in the child welfare system.
Maria:
We will get into that in more detail, because I am assuming a decent number of listeners just heard you say that and thought, why would you do that? We will talk more about the stories we tell ourselves about systems like family court.
One thing that really stuck out to me the first time we met was this idea that in that world, families—parents and caregivers—do not have a choice in telling their incredibly painful and traumatic stories. Even if it is not through a huge megaphone, they are sharing their story with you, in court, and with others. What impact does that have, to not have a say in sharing some of the most painful and intimate moments of family life?
Sy:
Another way to frame that is, what happens when you take the good rules of thumb and best practices you talk about on this podcast and throw them out the window. That is family court. If I give a little background on what happens to parents during an investigation and a case, the answer comes through that story, not a single individual’s story, but a prototypical path.
A typical story: a parent is at home, a caseworker knocks and says a report has been filed that someone suspects neglect or abuse. In most cases it is neglect. The overwhelming majority are not serious physical abuse or sexual abuse, but neglect, which is legally defined in ways most people would not recognize. It often maps onto poverty, things like a dirty home, insufficient food, being unable to get your kid to school because of circumstances, having a mental health diagnosis and not following the exact prescription while caring for a child, smoking weed, things like that.
The CPS worker says they are there to help and provide services or referrals. Then they ask questions about any possible form of harm or neglect in the home, every traumatic thing you could think of: domestic violence, drug use, mental health; they search your home to see if you have enough food; they ask about cleaning habits, discipline, school attendance. They want to interview your child separately about the same topics. And they will want to strip search your child to check for bruises, regardless of the original report.
Parents technically have the right to refuse any of that, but they are never told that. The entry into the conversation is usually, I am here to help. Parents quickly realize what is actually happening: you are looking for any way I am a bad parent. It does not matter what the report is about. If it is about school absences, they still want to strip search your child. Parents feel deceived. They feel their parenting is being insulted, often for things they cannot help, like poverty.
The worker will knock on neighbors’ doors, ask teachers questions, dig up information. If they file a case, the petition they file in court, essentially the indictment, will be full of quotes from the parent. Parents are not told that anything they say can be used against them. There is no Miranda warning. It is not an arrest, it is a civil system, but their words are used against them.
So, the misuse of the story is that the system looks only for what is negative about you, not trauma informed, not the rest of your life, just the worst interpretation of your parenting. The first effect is further traumatizing the parent, and often the child. Parents feel betrayed and then basically do not trust anyone involved in the system, including the people they should trust, like me, their defense attorney, who actually has attorney client privilege. They also do not trust service providers they are referred to, like therapists or supportive programs. If the CPS worker refers you, you probably do not trust that person either.
All of that sits on top of the toxic stress from poverty and racism. The overwhelming majority of people in the system are poor Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. In New York City, 90 percent of the cases public defenders handle involve people of color. New York City is not 10 percent white. Even among the white families involved, many are low income Eastern European immigrants.
The betrayal and lack of trust creates an adversarial way of providing services, which makes no sense. The people trying to help you are also in court telling a negative story about you and trying to force services. On top of that, I often had to tell clients, even if the allegations are minor or did not happen, the fastest way out of court is to do the services, then convince everyone you are okay, and get a dismissal on consent. So people end up doing services not primarily to get help, but to get out of court.
Effectively, mishandling stories creates an adversarial relationship, prevents people from approaching services for the right reasons, and traumatizes them.
Maria:
It is devastating.
Sy:
I had a client who had just moved to New York City from another country. She was living with a large immigrant family and community. A couple of months into her case, she said, you should hear the way my family and community talk about CPS. They are worse than the cops. That is the level of distrust with ACS, as they are called in New York City. These systems are interconnected with police and other institutions that people already experience as oppressive.
Maria:
You come in with a role in telling stories and advocating for families. Is there a positive role that storytelling can play as you defend them?
Sy:
For sure, that was the whole job: convincing people, often not even the judge but the other attorneys, that my client is not who the petition says they are. Storytelling happens through documents, carefully worded emails, and in court. The clearest benefits are obvious: you can win a case, you can win a trial, you can get children home from foster care. In those moments you either prove the story in the petition is wrong, or you show there is no imminent threat to the child.
Even when I did not win, clients often felt validated by having someone correct the record or try to correct it. Just standing up in court to say “objection,” or cross examining witnesses who were accusing them, meant a lot. In family court, parents pretty much have to testify, which gives them the chance to tell their side. They may not get to tell their whole story, because the legal questions are narrower, but they get to tell some of it. I had clients who did not trust me until I stood up in a hearing and really fought for them. Then it clicked that I was on their side.
There are broader impacts too. I worked for the first organization in the country that was a true public defense office in family court, founded in the mid‑2000s. Instead of random assigned counsel, it was a nonprofit entity sharing resources and knowledge, social justice oriented, fighting for clients. By consistently showing up for this population with diligence, you shift the narrative in family court. Judges, attorneys for children, and ACS attorneys start to see the holes in the system because someone is constantly pointing them out. For example, the state average stay in foster care in New York was about 11 months. At my firm, the average was six months. That alone shows how much unnecessary foster care there is when clients do not have strong representation.
Then there is the narrative about the system itself. Many people listening have never heard family court discussed this way. Hearing someone from inside the system tell a different story matters. And at the largest level, I had the enormous privilege of learning from Bryan Stevenson in law school. He would say, the North won the Civil War militarily and legally abolished slavery, but the South won the narrative. After the war, you had Jim Crow, sharecropping, redlining, disenfranchisement, segregation, all built on the same stories that justified slavery. His organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, represents individuals, but also does public memory work, like the museum in Montgomery and lynching memorials. They shape narrative by telling true stories.
The same is true here. As my professor Peggy Cooper Davis at NYU argues, you can draw a line from slavery to today’s child welfare system. The assumptions made about Black mothers in particular are strikingly consistent from the antebellum South to modern family court. Changing that narrative is crucial.
Maria:
We have unpacked layers of toxic stress and trauma. I want to talk about you. You bore witness to a lot of trauma. How did your time in family court affect you professionally and personally?
Sy:
I burned out, which is what happens to most lawyers in the system. People doing this work last two to three years on average. About a year in, I came home from work and could not stop crying for what felt like an alarmingly long time. I took the next day off, had an emergency therapy session, my parents came over. There were several times I woke up and immediately started driving because I was so anxious about a hearing that day. I had bouts of insomnia for a couple of years, which disappeared a couple of months after I left the job.
I had to think hard about why I was staying in a job that made me so miserable. I believed in the cause and wanted to be someone who could fight for it, not one of the many who could not. In the end, letting go of that was a positive lesson, but not a pleasant way to learn it.
Vicarious trauma is real. I had 60 cases open at any given time. The volume wears on you. It is not the same as the direct trauma my clients faced, but it has real implications. I wanted to do so much, and often could do so little. Even when I did something really positive, I immediately looked at my spreadsheet of other cases where I could not do much. And even big wins in family court are often only mitigating damage. You are not removing what happened.
I had a client whose trial we won, which is rare. We walked out of court, she was grateful, then asked whether she could sue for the damage done to her by the process when it turned out they could not prove anything. That was a common question. We always had to say no. The system treats the harm of the process as acceptable and does not compensate you for it.
Maria:
Is this just the way it is? You were in it for two years and had a strong response that was harmful to you. Can we better support public defenders in family court? Can anything be done differently?
Sy:
Yes. First, decrease the number of cases. There need to be more public defenders. You cannot do the job clients deserve with 55 to 65 open cases. As Bryan Stevenson says, you can be the most talented lawyer in the world, but your case volume can make you ineffective counsel.
They should be paid better and have access to mental health care. Organizations need to take good care of their people. We need trauma‑informed judges. In New York City you are starting to see more public defenders become judges, which is good, the way prosecutors traditionally become judges in criminal court.
The bigger thing for me is boldly reimagining the system. That is what I want for the clients. There are movements to reimagine or even abolish foster care, in the same way people are reimagining policing. We created this system, we can uncreate it. The child welfare system, as it exists, is not even 100 years old. We can find better ways to take care of each other, ways that may not involve defense attorneys at all.
Maria:
I love that you brought up trauma‑informed training. Every actor here could use trauma‑informed principles, from attorneys to judges to CPS workers to social workers.
Sy:
Absolutely. When you do not understand how trauma affects people, you misread their behavior. You map stereotypes and prejudices onto what you see. If you do not understand the effects of poverty, racism, homophobia, or other factors my clients faced, you call trauma responses something else. Training is necessary across the board.
Maria:
Let’s take one micro part: when ACS workers come to investigate. This is a traumatic experience for caregivers and children. When you are experiencing trauma, your body might respond with fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It seems like the only acceptable response is fawn. All the other responses get labeled noncompliance.
Sy:
They absolutely want the fawn response. All the other responses are labeled noncompliance. I had clients whose primary response was fawn, and they did better. But people do not choose how their bodies respond. If we slowed down and the system understood those responses, the empathy and understanding would make a huge difference. It would change how investigations happen and how findings are understood, even how reports from mandated reporters are interpreted. Mandated reporters are often white, from different class backgrounds than the families they report.
Maria:
I have never paused so much in an interview. My heart hurts. I am an imperfect parent with so much privilege who has lived in New York City my whole life. Two to three years sounds about right to be in that work.
Sy:
One more thing, as a parent now, which happened after I left the job. If my daughter gets hurt, my brain immediately jumps to family court. If she needed a doctor for an injury, I would be thinking, will this doctor decide this could not have been an accident, and then I get reported. Those cases are nightmarish. Kids end up in foster care for years and parents cannot do anything because nobody believes them, unless you have a really good attorney with a really good expert witness doctor.
Another layer is that I am blind, I am disabled. That gives them a smoother path to concluding the issue is my lack of capacity. Fortunately, I have a wife who is an incredible ally and a team of people around me, in part because of privilege, who know I am a competent parent. But it is scary. It took about a year of being a dad to stop having regular thoughts about that. There is no reason I should be thinking that in daily life, except for what I saw.
Maria:
Thank you for the role you played during that time. It is so important to advocate for these families. You might think that kind of storytelling is legal and jargony, but I am picturing you standing and saying “objection,” and families feeling, even briefly, safe and protected because someone believes them and is advocating for them. I am sure those moments stay with them.
Catch us up. What are you doing now? I know you are doing exciting things, a little different. How can folks connect with you?
Sy:
“Different” is an understatement. I am no longer a lawyer. I podcast, and I write and edit articles and books. I started a media company with friends called KTF Press. We are in the faith‑based media space, talking about politics, church, theology, and social and justice issues in ways that center and elevate marginalized voices, helping Christians walk away from the mess the white American church finds itself in.
We try to be as trauma informed as we can. People can find us at ktfpress.com, which is a Substack page. Our podcast is Shake the Dust, and we will likely add more shows. We are @ktfpress on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Maria:
If I met you at a barbecue and you said, I used to be a public defender in family court and now I work on dismantling white Christianity, I would say that sounds so different. After hearing your story, it is not that different. You are listening and raising voices. The church is also deeply involved in the child welfare system, running foster care agencies, so there is crossover.
I will link your podcast and publication in the show notes. I deeply appreciate you sharing your story, including painful personal experiences and painful things you have seen. I think it will really impact people doing the same work and validate them.
Sy:
Thank you. Anyone listening, feel free to get in touch. If you sign up for the Substack, you can reply to any email, and it comes straight to me.
Maria:
Beautiful. Thanks again. Take care.
Sy:
Thank you.
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