Open Child Neglect Hearings To Public

Open Child Neglect Hearings To Public


By RICHARD WEXLER
September 14, 2010

There is only one thing worse than a child welfare agency stonewalling after it botches a case: a legislator grandstanding about problems he and his colleagues could have fixed long ago.

So state Sen. Ed Meyer, D-Guilford, stalked out of a recent hearing called in response to a child neglect case in Torrington shocked — shocked! — that the Department of Children and Families won't discuss the case at hand.

But who, exactly, made the absurd confidentiality laws that prevent DCF from talking? The General Assembly. That's why they're called lawmakers.

Several states have laws allowing their child welfare agencies to comment on cases if they've already become public. DCF claims it has unsuccessfully tried to get Connecticut to pass a similar law.

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We'd all know far more about what goes on not just in the egregious cases, but the everyday cases, if all court hearings in child welfare cases were open. But the legislature has refused to join at least 15 other states with fully open courts, approving only a pilot project in one court.

But worst of all, such grandstanding encourages the kind of response to high-profile cases that always makes everything worse — a foster care panic.

Compare the number of children torn from their parents to the number of impoverished children in each state, and Connecticut already takes away children at a rate well above the national average, and more than double the rate of states widely regarded as, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe.

This high rate of removal has plagued Connecticut for decades. But that didn't prevent the death of Baby Emily in 1995 or Al-Lex Daniels in 2003, and many others.

With workers terrified of having the next such incident on their caseloads, the number of children torn from everyone they know and love is likely to soar, exactly as it did after the deaths of Emily and Al-Lex. And that is a disaster for vulnerable children.

The trauma of removal is, itself, so devastating that two landmark studies of more than 15,000 typical cases found that children left in their own homes typically fared better even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.

Worst of all, foster care panics overload caseworkers, so they have even less time to investigate any case thoroughly — so more children in real danger are missed.

Connecticut's high rate of removal and, in particular, its overuse of what is both the worst and the most expensive form of care — institutionalization — also explain why the state spends so much on child welfare, and gets so little protection for children in return.

DCF's handling of the Torrington case was idiotic. DCF concluded in May that the danger to the children required taking them from the home, yet also felt the removal could wait for two months.

What DCF should have done in May was try Intensive Family Preservation Services. Under this program, a worker with a caseload of no more than three families is in the home several days a week, sometimes for several hours at a time — for no more than six weeks. This kind of intervention costs less than foster care and has a better track record for safety.

After six weeks, either the family is linked up to less intensive help — or the worker concludes the family really is hopeless and recommends removal. Either way, odds are there would have been no crisis in July requiring police to intervene.

The reason to try it is because, as in the overwhelming majority of cases, family preservation is, in the words of the late Yale University child welfare scholars Albert Solnit and Joseph Goldstein, the least detrimental alternative.

Yes, the response of DCF in the Torrington case was idiotic. But the solution to the problems of idiocy is not more idiocy.

Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a nonprofit child advocacy organization based in Alexandria, Va.

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-wexler-dcf-0914-20100914,0,5748613.story