November 20, 2009 yvonnemason
In Alaska, foster parents testified that the worst of the abuses endured by foster children is not the abuse and neglect allegedly suffered before the state takes them from their natural parents. Rather, the real abuse comes from the actions of the state itself. The foster parents sat with trembling hands as they told legislators of the treatment they and their young wards endured at the hands of child protective services. Fear of retaliation was reportedly a common theme throughout the meeting (Demer, 1997). To make matters worse, just as state officials were beginning ambitious efforts to deal with the severe failures in the state’s child protection system, a two-year-old in the care of Anchorage foster parents died (Campbell, 1997).
Speaking out against the system can have its price, state representative Marie Parente, chairwoman of the Massachusetts House Foster Care Committee told Boston Globe reporters. Foster parents are afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals-the ultimate threat being that DSS will take away their foster children. After Lynn Sanborn-a long-term foster mother with a flawless record-rendered testimony critical of the department’s removal of a foster child from her home before the House Foster Care Committee, she suddenly found herself the subject of two child abuse reports. “After 14 years of being a foster parent and three months ago I was an exemplary home, I get two complaints in a week,” Sanborn said. “Doesn’t that sound odd to you?” So, too, did another foster mother who testified during the hearings find herself the subject of an allegedly anonymous report, sparking charges from both women that the agency was retaliating against them for speaking out against the department. The anonymous charges were filed against them within days of their testimony. “I feel hurt and I feel sad,” said Sanborn. “If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody” (Delgado, 1992).
Similar narratives are everywhere to be found, as parents, foster parents and others who would advocate on behalf of the children in their care report the fear of retaliation from child welfare agencies seeking to silence them. The price to be paid for speaking out against the system can be particularly high for parents. Elizabeth Sayers-by her own admission in need of support services-said in an on-air radio interview that she was not being offered the help she required from the Massachusetts department to keep her children. Ninety minutes after she complained on the air to a radio talk show host about the lack of services, her children were taken away and placed in foster homes in an “emergency removal” (Matchan, 1992). Prior to a 1994 hearing held in Illinois, several parents were told by Department of Children and Family Services caseworkers “if you ever want to see your children again, don’t go to the hearing,” according to Champaign County Board member Robert Naiman (1995).
Turning once again to the matter of the treatment of foster parents by child protection agencies, ACLU attorney Benjamin Wolf asserts:
Foster parents are mistreated. They are told they’ll be reimbursed for expenses. They aren’t. They ask for respite, a break, a vacation. They don’t get help. Those not trained to deal with troubled children need support, skills training. It doesn’t happen. Emergency foster care families are treated as a bed for the night. They are given virtually no information about the child’s health needs, etc. They are lost without info, back-up services (Golden, 1997).
As a result of all this, many of the most dedicated of foster parents-those who would dare to vigorously advocate on behalf of the children in their care-are pushed out of the system, hence the abuse of children in state care continues to mount as the overall quality of the foster care pool diminishes – even as the number of children in state care continues ever to increase.
The number of conventional foster homes in the public sector has dropped from 125,000 in 1988 to 100,000 as of 1991 – and the “exodus continues,” says Gordon Evans, information director for the National Foster Parent Association in Houston. Evans explains that the average number of children per home is 3.7 – up from about 1.4 in 1983-and he estimates that “tens of thousands” care for six, seven, and eight youngsters at a time (Cohen, 1991).
The results are tragic, as even a cursory review of recent press accounts reveals. In Peoria, Illinois, the state’s child welfare agency “rescues” Donte May from a neglectful and possibly abusive mother, only to place him in a foster home where he dies suspiciously from bleeding in the brain (Associated Press, 1997c); a Pennsylvania foster mother is charged with fatally beating a six-year-old girl in her care (O’Dowd & Frisby, 1998); New Jersey officials announce they are awaiting autopsy results on an infant who suffered rib fractures and a broken leg in foster care (Van Doren & May, 1998); Oklahoma prosecutors file murder charges against a foster father who allegedly beat to death his five-year-old ward (Smith, 1998); a Wisconsin man is charged with injuring a foster child in his care so severely that doctors have to use bone grafts to repair his damaged skull (Ostrander, 1998); a two-year-old Brooklyn boy is beaten to death by his foster mother, who viciously battered the child with her fists – then took him to an all-night card game. He had been beaten with such force that his heart split, one of his lungs was punctured, his liver ripped and his ribs cracked (Cauvin, McQuillan & Hutchinson, 1998).
Categories: Abuse By Foster Parents, Abuse by CPS, adoption and safe families act Tags: Abuse by CPS, abuse by foster parent, adoption and safe families act, murder by foster parent, yvonne mason Needless Suffering
Isabella Brooke Knightly and Austin Gamez-Knightly
In Memory of my Loving Husband, William F. Knightly Jr. Murdered by ILLEGAL Palliative Care at a Nashua, NH Hospital
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Your Tax Dollars are Paying for the Buying and Selling of Our Children By CPS
November 21, 2009 yvonnemason
The Adoption and Safe Families Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in the 1990’s states that when a child is placed for adoption the State Child Protective Services is given between 4,000 and 6,000.00 per child. This money is increased using a scale of certain criteria. Once the child is placed in a adopted home the families are paid by the government amounts beginning at 500.00 per child. CPS is told not to work on reunification but to immediatly start working on forcing the parents to sign over their children for adoption especially now with most states broke.
This amount increases when there are special needs and multiple siblings. This money is paid on a monthly basis to the family until the child is 18 years old. The adoptive family can make thousands of dollars a month on procurement of adopted children.
Now, the thing is. This money for the buying and selling of children from parents whose only crime is they are poor and uneducated comes out of the pocket of taxpayers. We are culpable in crime of buying and selling children under the umbrella of CPS.
We as taxpayers are just as guilty in the trama and life altering personalities of children literally ripped from their parents without due process. The parents are not given the discovery also know as evidence, they are not allowed witnesses in court, on in front of the kangaroo panel. This panel determines the so fitness of the parent.
The charges are not considered criminal so they appear in family court and not in a court of law. Child Protective Services hide behind the guise of “confidentality” to keep the so called evidence hidden. They harass, threaten and intimadate the parent so they will be afraid not sign over their children for adoption.
We as taxpayers are part of this abuse on the poor and uneducated. We pay the money to the States and the adoptive parents. We encourage this behavior simply by not standing up to them and saying we are tired of them abusing our children and grandchildren. None of us are safe. At any time CPS can walk in your home take your child and put it up for adoption with out a warrant, a trial by your peers or handing evidence over to you. None of us are safe from this abuse.
Any one can call CPS give a report and your life and the life of your family as you know ceases to exist.
You pay for this abuse when you pay taxes. Your hard earned money pays for you and your family and those you love to be abused by the CPS. IT is time to put a stop to this abuse. It is time to say enough. It is time to give the kids back to their parents.
Yvonne Masonm, Author
Categories: Abuse By Foster Parents, Abuse by CPS, Jackson County Georgia DFCS, adoption and safe families act, illegal entry by Police, illegal panels Tags: Abuse by CPS, abused children, adoption and safe families
The Adoption and Safe Families Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in the 1990’s states that when a child is placed for adoption the State Child Protective Services is given between 4,000 and 6,000.00 per child. This money is increased using a scale of certain criteria. Once the child is placed in a adopted home the families are paid by the government amounts beginning at 500.00 per child. CPS is told not to work on reunification but to immediatly start working on forcing the parents to sign over their children for adoption especially now with most states broke.
This amount increases when there are special needs and multiple siblings. This money is paid on a monthly basis to the family until the child is 18 years old. The adoptive family can make thousands of dollars a month on procurement of adopted children.
Now, the thing is. This money for the buying and selling of children from parents whose only crime is they are poor and uneducated comes out of the pocket of taxpayers. We are culpable in crime of buying and selling children under the umbrella of CPS.
We as taxpayers are just as guilty in the trama and life altering personalities of children literally ripped from their parents without due process. The parents are not given the discovery also know as evidence, they are not allowed witnesses in court, on in front of the kangaroo panel. This panel determines the so fitness of the parent.
The charges are not considered criminal so they appear in family court and not in a court of law. Child Protective Services hide behind the guise of “confidentality” to keep the so called evidence hidden. They harass, threaten and intimadate the parent so they will be afraid not sign over their children for adoption.
We as taxpayers are part of this abuse on the poor and uneducated. We pay the money to the States and the adoptive parents. We encourage this behavior simply by not standing up to them and saying we are tired of them abusing our children and grandchildren. None of us are safe. At any time CPS can walk in your home take your child and put it up for adoption with out a warrant, a trial by your peers or handing evidence over to you. None of us are safe from this abuse.
Any one can call CPS give a report and your life and the life of your family as you know ceases to exist.
You pay for this abuse when you pay taxes. Your hard earned money pays for you and your family and those you love to be abused by the CPS. IT is time to put a stop to this abuse. It is time to say enough. It is time to give the kids back to their parents.
Yvonne Masonm, Author
Categories: Abuse By Foster Parents, Abuse by CPS, Jackson County Georgia DFCS, adoption and safe families act, illegal entry by Police, illegal panels Tags: Abuse by CPS, abused children, adoption and safe families
Study finds CASA Encourages Needless Removal of Children From Their Homes
Study of Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASAS) Finds Them Ineffective, Possibly Harmful, Advocacy Group Says
ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 8 (AScribe Newswire) -- The highly-touted Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) program, in which volunteers investigate cases and advise family court judges on matters of life or death for children and families, does nothing to actually improve the lives of children and may well make them worse, according to a national child advocacy organization.
The evidence, says the National Coalition for Child Reform, is in a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself.
"The study offered concrete evidence of what we have long maintained," said NCCPR Executive Director Richard Wexler. "CASA is just another thumb on the scales of justice, tilting them against families. The entire program needs to be radically reformed - or abolished."
"There is no constituency in child welfare that has been the recipient of less critical scrutiny than CASA," Wexler said. "The grim findings of CASA's own study make clear it's time for that to change."
In a letter faxed this morning to National CASA CEO Michael Piraino, Wexler called on the National CASA Association to release the entire study and post it prominently on its website. Only a summary of the report was released at CASAs annual conference this week, and even that is not available online.
CASA is a program in which volunteers are appointed by judges to "investigate" cases brought before juvenile and family courts by child protection agencies. "Tens of thousands of dedicated, caring individuals are trying their best to help children," Wexler said. "Their motives are not in question. And there are a few CASA programs around the country which do a fine job, and might be models for reform of CASA as a whole. But the study shows that, by and large, CASAs have been unable to overcome racial and class biases that are virtually built into the CASA structure itself."
According to the summary of the study findings:
- The one major difference between children who had CASAs and children who didn't is that the children with CASAs are far more likely to be torn from their birth parents and thrown into foster care, and less likely to be reunified with birth parents once in foster care. According to the summary: "These differences were dramatic in size."
- The study found "no significant difference" between children with CASAs and children who did not get CASAs on a wide range of key outcomes involving child well-being. Most important, there was no difference in "exposure to violence and maltreatment."
"The study shows that children without CASAs, who are far more likely to remain in their own homes, are just as safe as children with CASAs who are far more likely to be taken away," Wexler said. "That means the only thing CASA accomplishes, in most cases, is needless destruction of families."
"Defenders of CASA will claim this is because they get the most difficult cases. But the study specifically controlled for that variable, making strenuous efforts to compare cases of similar severity," Wexler said. "The researchers were so shocked by their own findings that they speculate they may not have done a good enough job. But in fact, there is nothing shocking about the findings - they reflect common sense, given the class and racial bias built into the structure of CASA itself."
"Since it's a volunteer program, CASA volunteers tend to be people with time on their hands. That means that in a system which overwhelmingly targets poor people, CASA volunteers are likely to be middle-class or wealthy. And in a system in which only 37 percent of the children are white, 90 percent of CASA volunteers are white," Wexler said.
Wexler noted that the study found that when the children represented by CASAs were African-American, CASA volunteers gave them an average of one hour a month less of their time.
"If that's how they subconsciously react to poor black children, imagine how CASAs react to poor black parents - particularly when the CASA's recommendation turns into 'comparison shopping' between foster parents who look just like them and live in neighborhoods just like theirs and birth parents who don't."
"The finding that black children get less of a CASA's time is even more alarming since CASAs spend an average of fewer than four hours per month on a case. The oft-repeated claim that CASAs are the only ones devoting enormous amounts of time to a case - and therefore supposedly know it better than anyone else -- is a dangerous myth. It is dangerous because CASAs have virtually usurped the role of judges - the study found that their recommendations are almost always rubber-stamped."
In light of the findings, Wexler said that the federal government's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention should reconsider the awarding of taxpayer money to CASA and the Pew Commission on Foster Care should reconsider its recommendation to spend even more such funds.
Wexler also said that if CASA can't be reformed, serious consideration should be given to scrapping CASA and pouring the funds now used to administer the program into giving children actual lawyers. "Their mandate would be the same as any other lawyer - to advocate for whatever a child wants, if the child is old enough to express a reasonable preference," Wexler said. "CASAs don't do that. They advocate for whatever they think is best for the child. As a result, if the child disagrees, the most important person in the courtroom - the child - is the only one with no one fighting for him or her."
"Children shouldn't necessarily get what they want in these situations. But the best way to find out what is truly in a child's best interest is if everyone has an articulate advocate making his or her case. Deciding what is best is what we pay judges for. It's time they stopped ceding that role to amateurs."
For more information, contact Richard Wexler, 703-212-2006, rwexler@nccpr.org.
National Coalition for Child Reform: www.nccpr.org
ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 8 (AScribe Newswire) -- The highly-touted Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) program, in which volunteers investigate cases and advise family court judges on matters of life or death for children and families, does nothing to actually improve the lives of children and may well make them worse, according to a national child advocacy organization.
The evidence, says the National Coalition for Child Reform, is in a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself.
"The study offered concrete evidence of what we have long maintained," said NCCPR Executive Director Richard Wexler. "CASA is just another thumb on the scales of justice, tilting them against families. The entire program needs to be radically reformed - or abolished."
"There is no constituency in child welfare that has been the recipient of less critical scrutiny than CASA," Wexler said. "The grim findings of CASA's own study make clear it's time for that to change."
In a letter faxed this morning to National CASA CEO Michael Piraino, Wexler called on the National CASA Association to release the entire study and post it prominently on its website. Only a summary of the report was released at CASAs annual conference this week, and even that is not available online.
CASA is a program in which volunteers are appointed by judges to "investigate" cases brought before juvenile and family courts by child protection agencies. "Tens of thousands of dedicated, caring individuals are trying their best to help children," Wexler said. "Their motives are not in question. And there are a few CASA programs around the country which do a fine job, and might be models for reform of CASA as a whole. But the study shows that, by and large, CASAs have been unable to overcome racial and class biases that are virtually built into the CASA structure itself."
According to the summary of the study findings:
- The one major difference between children who had CASAs and children who didn't is that the children with CASAs are far more likely to be torn from their birth parents and thrown into foster care, and less likely to be reunified with birth parents once in foster care. According to the summary: "These differences were dramatic in size."
- The study found "no significant difference" between children with CASAs and children who did not get CASAs on a wide range of key outcomes involving child well-being. Most important, there was no difference in "exposure to violence and maltreatment."
"The study shows that children without CASAs, who are far more likely to remain in their own homes, are just as safe as children with CASAs who are far more likely to be taken away," Wexler said. "That means the only thing CASA accomplishes, in most cases, is needless destruction of families."
"Defenders of CASA will claim this is because they get the most difficult cases. But the study specifically controlled for that variable, making strenuous efforts to compare cases of similar severity," Wexler said. "The researchers were so shocked by their own findings that they speculate they may not have done a good enough job. But in fact, there is nothing shocking about the findings - they reflect common sense, given the class and racial bias built into the structure of CASA itself."
"Since it's a volunteer program, CASA volunteers tend to be people with time on their hands. That means that in a system which overwhelmingly targets poor people, CASA volunteers are likely to be middle-class or wealthy. And in a system in which only 37 percent of the children are white, 90 percent of CASA volunteers are white," Wexler said.
Wexler noted that the study found that when the children represented by CASAs were African-American, CASA volunteers gave them an average of one hour a month less of their time.
"If that's how they subconsciously react to poor black children, imagine how CASAs react to poor black parents - particularly when the CASA's recommendation turns into 'comparison shopping' between foster parents who look just like them and live in neighborhoods just like theirs and birth parents who don't."
"The finding that black children get less of a CASA's time is even more alarming since CASAs spend an average of fewer than four hours per month on a case. The oft-repeated claim that CASAs are the only ones devoting enormous amounts of time to a case - and therefore supposedly know it better than anyone else -- is a dangerous myth. It is dangerous because CASAs have virtually usurped the role of judges - the study found that their recommendations are almost always rubber-stamped."
In light of the findings, Wexler said that the federal government's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention should reconsider the awarding of taxpayer money to CASA and the Pew Commission on Foster Care should reconsider its recommendation to spend even more such funds.
Wexler also said that if CASA can't be reformed, serious consideration should be given to scrapping CASA and pouring the funds now used to administer the program into giving children actual lawyers. "Their mandate would be the same as any other lawyer - to advocate for whatever a child wants, if the child is old enough to express a reasonable preference," Wexler said. "CASAs don't do that. They advocate for whatever they think is best for the child. As a result, if the child disagrees, the most important person in the courtroom - the child - is the only one with no one fighting for him or her."
"Children shouldn't necessarily get what they want in these situations. But the best way to find out what is truly in a child's best interest is if everyone has an articulate advocate making his or her case. Deciding what is best is what we pay judges for. It's time they stopped ceding that role to amateurs."
For more information, contact Richard Wexler, 703-212-2006, rwexler@nccpr.org.
National Coalition for Child Reform: www.nccpr.org
A Foster Parent Speaks Out
Mary Callahan is an author of two books, an emergency room nurse, and a foster parent in Maine, a state forced to confront the failures of what was then its Department of Human Services (DHS) when five-year-old Logan Marr was taken from her mother, Christie, only to die in foster care, bound to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape. The foster mother was convicted of manslaughter.
As new leadership faced up to the problems in Maine, Mary Callahan became a respected voice for reform. Callahan was invited to give a presentation to an Advisory Commission working on restructuring human services in Maine. That restructuring now is complete, and there have been dramatic improvements since Callahan gave this presentation, on August 7, 2003. It is reprinted with permission.
_______________________________________________
My name is Mary Callahan. I am a mother, a foster mother, and a nurse. Some of you are already familiar with me from the opinion pieces and letters to the editor I’ve had in the papers. Some of you have even read the book I wrote on my experiences as a foster parent in Maine. And some of you are saying to yourself, “Here it comes again, Mary Callahan and more of her crazy stories.”
I know exactly how you feel. I felt the same way for the first two years I was doing foster care when I had to deal with the birth parents of Marie. Every time there was a case review, they would wait for me in the parking lot afterwards to plead their case.
It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. They tried to tell me that DHS lied about them, that DHS tricked them, even that DHS forced them to say things to their kids that they didn’t want to say. I wanted to tell them it was time to start taking responsibility for their own actions.
Then I found out they were telling the truth. The case worker, who was leaving his job, admitted to me that everything the parents said was true, and most of what I had been told about them was fiction, made up by the worker before him who hated the dad and was determined to see him lose his kids.
This would be bad enough if it stood alone. But I knew what had happened to Marie since she came into foster care. That’s when the real abuse began. For six years she lived in a foster home that I would describe as sadistic. She came to me malnourished and reading four years below grade level, thanks to the constant stress she was under. People outside the system are horrified by her story. The people I went to within the system looked blankly at me and waited for me to tell them something they didn’t already know.
You may think their vision is to keep children safe. In reality the vision is to keep children safe from those horrible parents that we hate. Sometimes it is those horrible foster parents that we hate.
That was my first clue that the Child Welfare System in Maine isn’t really about the welfare of children.
By the time I wrote my first letter to the editor, I was convinced of that. I wrote that the system should be torn down and rebuilt “from the vision on up,” and I still believe it. You may think their vision is to keep children safe. In reality the vision is to keep children safe from those horrible parents that we hate. Sometimes it is those horrible foster parents that we hate.
The emphasis on hating parents instead of caring about children was never clearer than at the foster parent workshop I attended where a speaker was introduced as The Terminator because of the record she had set in terminating parental rights. They didn’t say, “She freed this many children for adoption.” That might have been an even bigger, more impressive number. It was how many parents she had stuck it to. And the shocking part to me was that the audience applauded.
I would have thought, in a business as delicate as this one, where the stakes are so high, that great care would be taken to prevent the hating from becoming more important than the caring, that supervisors would be constantly on the lookout for workers who let their personal biases cloud their judgment or used the families to grind their own axes. Instead the contempt for families can be spoken out loud and even applauded.
The attitude is so pervasive that it trickles down to people on the periphery of the system, like mandatory reporters. I saw an example of that in the Emergency Room recently. A family brought in their 6-year-old son because they couldn’t control him any more. He
had a mental health diagnosis and was on medications, but that day he was tearing the curtains down and threatening family members with kitchen knives. I took the family back to the crisis area where, I thought, they would talk with a social worker and come up with a plan.
A few hours later that worker came up to the triage booth with a big grin on his face. “I think we’ve got ‘em,” he told me.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Those parents. I’ve been sitting with them for an hour and I counted 14 times that the child bit himself, hard.” He demonstrated. “The parents didn’t do anything. They just looked at him. It’s a total parent/child disconnect. I think I have enough to call DHS.”
The delight in that social worker’s eyes was the same delight I saw at that workshop in The Terminator’s eyes. He was so proud of himself, but what will be the end result of his actions? If those parents manage to keep their child, they will never come to the ER for help again. They will handle their problems themselves at home. And who knows what that might mean? We are creating real child abuse when we react with blame when asked for help.
Since I started speaking out, people have come to me with their own stories. I get e-mails, phone calls and letters, and they fall into two categories. They are either professionals who have seen what I have seen and don’t know what to do about it, or they are victims.
By professionals, I mean lawyers and psychologists, even social workers who have seen terrible suffering inflicted in the name of protecting children. An example is a police officer who e-mailed me to say that he accompanied a caseworker once when children were being removed only to hear the worker tell a complete fabrication in court about what they had found when they were at the home and how the parents reacted.
I got this email from a foster parent, “Would anyone out there believe how bad the foster care system is in Maine if they were not involved in it? I set out with the desire to try to help a few children while I still had the energy to do it. I never knew I would be asked to lie, look the other way when some major mistakes were made, be part of a cover-up to hide the mistakes of those who were supposed to be protecting children. I watched my children’s medical needs not be met. My voice meant nothing at team meetings. I have had 8 families in my area leave foster care in the past two years. They are good, honest people and that was the problem. They are not willing to be a part of a team that doesn’t care about the children.”
Would any of these people go public with me? No. They don’t want to become DHS’s next victims.
When I talk to people who see themselves as DHS victims, I know I am only hearing one side of the story. But I also recognize that the same factors come up over and over again, and they are things I have seen for myself. Here are those factors:
[A] foster child asked to move back with me after his kinship placement failed and was told that I said no. Now I ask you to think how that must feel to a child to be rejected by his former foster parent. … Only he wasn’t. I would have taken him back in a second, but his DHS worker didn’t like me, so she lied to him.
1) Lying. Everyone claims the department lied about them. I don’t doubt it any more because they have lied about me. Just one example, a foster child asked to move back with me after his kinship placement failed and was told that I said no. Now I ask you to think how that must feel to a child to be rejected by his former foster parent. He is already in the system because we have rejected his parents, now he is being personally rejected. Only he wasn’t. I would have taken him back in a second, but his DHS worker didn’t like me, so she lied to him. His next placement was told not to let him contact me because I supposedly provided drugs and alcohol for him when he lived with me.
2) Divide and conquer. Just as Christie Marr was told to cut ties with her mother, many of the people who call me say they were forced to cut ties with someone important to them. One mother claims she had to cut her father out of her life when he was terminally ill. She never knew him to hurt anybody, but the department said he had, and made her choose between him and her children.
3) The set-up. “She said to call her if I had any problems, that she would be happy to help, and when I did call, she came out with the cops and took my kids.” I’ve heard that more than once. Another set up is the parenting evaluation. Parents are told if they take it and pass, that it will help them in court. What they are not told is that 95% of the people who take that test fail. They are really taking the test just so the department will have more justification for removing children. I call it the Kiss-of-Death Parenting Eval.
4) Disrespect. Yelling seems to be acceptable behavior. When a parent or grandparent tells me that the worker yelled at them in the DHS waiting room, I believe it because I have seen it happen. I’ve been yelled at on the phone. As a nurse, I don’t even yell back when a drunk berates me in the Emergency Room. I handle it professionally because that’s what’s expected of me. They don’t seem to have the same expectation at DHS.
5) Child removal on a whim. When foster parents contact me it is usually about some child who has been removed with no warning, and apparently no grasp at all on the part of the department of how painful this is for the child. Children are like pawns in a big game, moved more easily than we would move a pet from one household to another. One foster father said he had someone come up to him and ask why he hadn’t been to the transition meetings for his foster child. He didn’t know the child was moving. What he finally found out was that the caseworker’s best friend had become a foster parent and was interested in that particular child, so she was giving her the child like some kind of a gift.
At the center of any of these situations is a power struggle. Parents think they have a certain amount of control over the circumstances surrounding their own children. DHS workers are determined to show them they are wrong. I think we saw that on The Caseworker Files on Frontline when the statement “They’re not taking me seriously yet,” kept being repeated, until the child was finally taken.
What I experience is a system that is about power, control and hate. But you know what never comes up? Love never comes up. The only time we talk about it, we use a euphemism.
When we call kids attachment disordered, we are really saying they don’t love the new parents we have given them. And we send them to therapy to fix that. We even say it is caused by a lack of bonding in the first six months of life, another strike against the birth parents. Doesn’t it seem illogical to expect kids to love someone just
When I went into this business I never thought I would end up saying this, but these mothers who have lost their children to foster care are no different than me. They have just had harder lives. Much harder. Many of them grew up in foster care. And now they have broken hearts on top of it because they couldn’t save their children from the same fate.
because we have plopped them down in their home? And even if we have given them a half a dozen sets of really lovable foster parents, doesn’t it make sense that the kids would be afraid to take the chance of loving again and losing again?
And speaking of logic, how logical is it to take a child because the parent moves too much, as we are told the department did to Logan Marr? No one moves more than a foster child and those moves are made alone. Again, we’re leaving out the love factor. Think of your own children. What do you think would be harder on them, moving from place to place with you, the parent they love, or losing you and everyone else in your family, then spending the rest of their childhood waiting for you to come and get them, wondering what they did to lose your love, wanting to go back and find you and ask you why. Love doesn’t seem to count for anything in this system.
I spend a lot of time with the families of my foster kids now. I see how easily they fall into each others arms, the way they finish each other’s sentences, the way they accept each other for who they are and forgive each other. I’ve gotten to know the parents myself and I like them. When I went into this business I never thought I would end up saying this, but these mothers who have lost their children to foster care are no different than me. They have just had harder lives. Much harder. Many of them grew up in foster care. And now they have broken hearts on top of it because they couldn’t save their children from the same fate.
This state is littered with broken hearts. I see it in my own foster kids and their families. I hear it in the voices at the other end of the phone. I also see it in the Emergency Room when patients come to the crisis unit sobbing because they miss their children so much, children that DHS has taken. One man was actually psychotic in his grief over losing his children, hallucinating that they were still there, looking through the house as if they were just misplaced. And his children had been gone for years. I see it at my other job too, where I teach people to live with heart and lung disease. Three, so far this year, have shared with me their secret pain, that there is a grandchild out there that they may never see again because DHS took them.
And it doesn’t have to be that way. Other states have undertaken real reform, working to keep kids with their families in all but the worst of cases and to support those families while they are going through tough times. I’ve heard some encouraging things lately, things that give me hope that Maine might be going the same way.
One man was actually psychotic in his grief over losing his children, hallucinating that they were still there, looking through the house as if they were just misplaced. And his children had been gone for years.
The news coverage on the workshop that was held last week said the department was going to work on preventing child abuse instead of reacting to it, focus on a family’s strengths instead of their weaknesses. But they also said something that frightened me. Someone said they were going to be focusing on “children who
don’t get enough attention.” I would have thought it was embarrassing enough when, on
Frontline’s Caseworker Files, a Maine social worker said that she thought “not paying enough attention” to a child might be the worst abuse of all. This was an absurd statement, on a program about a foster child who had been duct taped to a chair and suffocated.
As a mandatory reporter for as long as there have been mandatory reporters, I can tell you that ten years ago spankings and long timeouts were not reportable offenses. They are now. We shouldn’t be surprised when the number of child abuse reports goes up at the same time that the definition has been expanded. Reports will go up again if the public can be convinced that they should report children who don’t get enough attention. How do they expect to prevent child abuse deaths if they are busy sifting through those kinds of reports and possibly taking those
children into foster care? I suggest that if you see a child who doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention, give him some attention!
Letting the people who make their livings off child abuse define it sounds like a conflict of interest to me. Imagine if the health care industry worked that way. Hospitals could mandate hospitalizations for cold symptoms and then reap in the bucks. Insurance companies would just keep paying and no one would listen to the occasional voice of reason saying that there were worse infections to be caught inside the hospital and this was doing more harm than good.
We are losing the distinction between child abuse and parenting we don’t agree with, just as we have long since lost the distinction between poverty and neglect. Pity the parents who have taken on two jobs to provide for their children, to avoid being accused of neglect, only to be accused of not paying enough attention to them. They might as well just give their children to the state at birth. They can no longer win, no matter what they do.
My greatest hope for the future in Maine is Paul Vincent and the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group. They have come here to introduce Family Team Meetings to Maine, a program that brings all the players to the table before a child removal to explore and possibly choose an alternative. Hopefully this is only the beginning. He has done wonderful things in other states. If he does here what he did in Alabama, I will have gotten my wish, the foster care system will be torn down and rebuilt from the vision on up.
Pity the parents who have taken on two jobs to provide for their children, to avoid being accused of neglect, only to be accused of not paying enough attention to them. They might as well just give their children to the state at birth. They can no longer win, no matter what they do.
But even then, I will have one remaining concern. What of those hearts already broken? I said in my book that “DHS means never having to say you’re sorry.” Will that remain true? Will the powers-that-be say, “It’s too late” as Marie’s worker said to me when I asked why she wasn’t returned to her parents after he took the job and realized what had happened to her? Will the grandparents have to go to their graves with their pain and the parents keep coming to the ER when they feel like dying? Will the children keep going to bed every night asking why somebody had to be paid to love them.
Mary Callahan is the author of “Memoirs of a Baby Stealer: Lessons I’ve Learned as a Foster Mother” (Pinewoods Press: 2003),
Reprinted with permission by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202), Alexandria VA, 22314, (703) 212-2006, www.nccpr.org, info@nccpr.org Introduction revised, November 6, 2006
As new leadership faced up to the problems in Maine, Mary Callahan became a respected voice for reform. Callahan was invited to give a presentation to an Advisory Commission working on restructuring human services in Maine. That restructuring now is complete, and there have been dramatic improvements since Callahan gave this presentation, on August 7, 2003. It is reprinted with permission.
_______________________________________________
My name is Mary Callahan. I am a mother, a foster mother, and a nurse. Some of you are already familiar with me from the opinion pieces and letters to the editor I’ve had in the papers. Some of you have even read the book I wrote on my experiences as a foster parent in Maine. And some of you are saying to yourself, “Here it comes again, Mary Callahan and more of her crazy stories.”
I know exactly how you feel. I felt the same way for the first two years I was doing foster care when I had to deal with the birth parents of Marie. Every time there was a case review, they would wait for me in the parking lot afterwards to plead their case.
It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. They tried to tell me that DHS lied about them, that DHS tricked them, even that DHS forced them to say things to their kids that they didn’t want to say. I wanted to tell them it was time to start taking responsibility for their own actions.
Then I found out they were telling the truth. The case worker, who was leaving his job, admitted to me that everything the parents said was true, and most of what I had been told about them was fiction, made up by the worker before him who hated the dad and was determined to see him lose his kids.
This would be bad enough if it stood alone. But I knew what had happened to Marie since she came into foster care. That’s when the real abuse began. For six years she lived in a foster home that I would describe as sadistic. She came to me malnourished and reading four years below grade level, thanks to the constant stress she was under. People outside the system are horrified by her story. The people I went to within the system looked blankly at me and waited for me to tell them something they didn’t already know.
You may think their vision is to keep children safe. In reality the vision is to keep children safe from those horrible parents that we hate. Sometimes it is those horrible foster parents that we hate.
That was my first clue that the Child Welfare System in Maine isn’t really about the welfare of children.
By the time I wrote my first letter to the editor, I was convinced of that. I wrote that the system should be torn down and rebuilt “from the vision on up,” and I still believe it. You may think their vision is to keep children safe. In reality the vision is to keep children safe from those horrible parents that we hate. Sometimes it is those horrible foster parents that we hate.
The emphasis on hating parents instead of caring about children was never clearer than at the foster parent workshop I attended where a speaker was introduced as The Terminator because of the record she had set in terminating parental rights. They didn’t say, “She freed this many children for adoption.” That might have been an even bigger, more impressive number. It was how many parents she had stuck it to. And the shocking part to me was that the audience applauded.
I would have thought, in a business as delicate as this one, where the stakes are so high, that great care would be taken to prevent the hating from becoming more important than the caring, that supervisors would be constantly on the lookout for workers who let their personal biases cloud their judgment or used the families to grind their own axes. Instead the contempt for families can be spoken out loud and even applauded.
The attitude is so pervasive that it trickles down to people on the periphery of the system, like mandatory reporters. I saw an example of that in the Emergency Room recently. A family brought in their 6-year-old son because they couldn’t control him any more. He
had a mental health diagnosis and was on medications, but that day he was tearing the curtains down and threatening family members with kitchen knives. I took the family back to the crisis area where, I thought, they would talk with a social worker and come up with a plan.
A few hours later that worker came up to the triage booth with a big grin on his face. “I think we’ve got ‘em,” he told me.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Those parents. I’ve been sitting with them for an hour and I counted 14 times that the child bit himself, hard.” He demonstrated. “The parents didn’t do anything. They just looked at him. It’s a total parent/child disconnect. I think I have enough to call DHS.”
The delight in that social worker’s eyes was the same delight I saw at that workshop in The Terminator’s eyes. He was so proud of himself, but what will be the end result of his actions? If those parents manage to keep their child, they will never come to the ER for help again. They will handle their problems themselves at home. And who knows what that might mean? We are creating real child abuse when we react with blame when asked for help.
Since I started speaking out, people have come to me with their own stories. I get e-mails, phone calls and letters, and they fall into two categories. They are either professionals who have seen what I have seen and don’t know what to do about it, or they are victims.
By professionals, I mean lawyers and psychologists, even social workers who have seen terrible suffering inflicted in the name of protecting children. An example is a police officer who e-mailed me to say that he accompanied a caseworker once when children were being removed only to hear the worker tell a complete fabrication in court about what they had found when they were at the home and how the parents reacted.
I got this email from a foster parent, “Would anyone out there believe how bad the foster care system is in Maine if they were not involved in it? I set out with the desire to try to help a few children while I still had the energy to do it. I never knew I would be asked to lie, look the other way when some major mistakes were made, be part of a cover-up to hide the mistakes of those who were supposed to be protecting children. I watched my children’s medical needs not be met. My voice meant nothing at team meetings. I have had 8 families in my area leave foster care in the past two years. They are good, honest people and that was the problem. They are not willing to be a part of a team that doesn’t care about the children.”
Would any of these people go public with me? No. They don’t want to become DHS’s next victims.
When I talk to people who see themselves as DHS victims, I know I am only hearing one side of the story. But I also recognize that the same factors come up over and over again, and they are things I have seen for myself. Here are those factors:
[A] foster child asked to move back with me after his kinship placement failed and was told that I said no. Now I ask you to think how that must feel to a child to be rejected by his former foster parent. … Only he wasn’t. I would have taken him back in a second, but his DHS worker didn’t like me, so she lied to him.
1) Lying. Everyone claims the department lied about them. I don’t doubt it any more because they have lied about me. Just one example, a foster child asked to move back with me after his kinship placement failed and was told that I said no. Now I ask you to think how that must feel to a child to be rejected by his former foster parent. He is already in the system because we have rejected his parents, now he is being personally rejected. Only he wasn’t. I would have taken him back in a second, but his DHS worker didn’t like me, so she lied to him. His next placement was told not to let him contact me because I supposedly provided drugs and alcohol for him when he lived with me.
2) Divide and conquer. Just as Christie Marr was told to cut ties with her mother, many of the people who call me say they were forced to cut ties with someone important to them. One mother claims she had to cut her father out of her life when he was terminally ill. She never knew him to hurt anybody, but the department said he had, and made her choose between him and her children.
3) The set-up. “She said to call her if I had any problems, that she would be happy to help, and when I did call, she came out with the cops and took my kids.” I’ve heard that more than once. Another set up is the parenting evaluation. Parents are told if they take it and pass, that it will help them in court. What they are not told is that 95% of the people who take that test fail. They are really taking the test just so the department will have more justification for removing children. I call it the Kiss-of-Death Parenting Eval.
4) Disrespect. Yelling seems to be acceptable behavior. When a parent or grandparent tells me that the worker yelled at them in the DHS waiting room, I believe it because I have seen it happen. I’ve been yelled at on the phone. As a nurse, I don’t even yell back when a drunk berates me in the Emergency Room. I handle it professionally because that’s what’s expected of me. They don’t seem to have the same expectation at DHS.
5) Child removal on a whim. When foster parents contact me it is usually about some child who has been removed with no warning, and apparently no grasp at all on the part of the department of how painful this is for the child. Children are like pawns in a big game, moved more easily than we would move a pet from one household to another. One foster father said he had someone come up to him and ask why he hadn’t been to the transition meetings for his foster child. He didn’t know the child was moving. What he finally found out was that the caseworker’s best friend had become a foster parent and was interested in that particular child, so she was giving her the child like some kind of a gift.
At the center of any of these situations is a power struggle. Parents think they have a certain amount of control over the circumstances surrounding their own children. DHS workers are determined to show them they are wrong. I think we saw that on The Caseworker Files on Frontline when the statement “They’re not taking me seriously yet,” kept being repeated, until the child was finally taken.
What I experience is a system that is about power, control and hate. But you know what never comes up? Love never comes up. The only time we talk about it, we use a euphemism.
When we call kids attachment disordered, we are really saying they don’t love the new parents we have given them. And we send them to therapy to fix that. We even say it is caused by a lack of bonding in the first six months of life, another strike against the birth parents. Doesn’t it seem illogical to expect kids to love someone just
When I went into this business I never thought I would end up saying this, but these mothers who have lost their children to foster care are no different than me. They have just had harder lives. Much harder. Many of them grew up in foster care. And now they have broken hearts on top of it because they couldn’t save their children from the same fate.
because we have plopped them down in their home? And even if we have given them a half a dozen sets of really lovable foster parents, doesn’t it make sense that the kids would be afraid to take the chance of loving again and losing again?
And speaking of logic, how logical is it to take a child because the parent moves too much, as we are told the department did to Logan Marr? No one moves more than a foster child and those moves are made alone. Again, we’re leaving out the love factor. Think of your own children. What do you think would be harder on them, moving from place to place with you, the parent they love, or losing you and everyone else in your family, then spending the rest of their childhood waiting for you to come and get them, wondering what they did to lose your love, wanting to go back and find you and ask you why. Love doesn’t seem to count for anything in this system.
I spend a lot of time with the families of my foster kids now. I see how easily they fall into each others arms, the way they finish each other’s sentences, the way they accept each other for who they are and forgive each other. I’ve gotten to know the parents myself and I like them. When I went into this business I never thought I would end up saying this, but these mothers who have lost their children to foster care are no different than me. They have just had harder lives. Much harder. Many of them grew up in foster care. And now they have broken hearts on top of it because they couldn’t save their children from the same fate.
This state is littered with broken hearts. I see it in my own foster kids and their families. I hear it in the voices at the other end of the phone. I also see it in the Emergency Room when patients come to the crisis unit sobbing because they miss their children so much, children that DHS has taken. One man was actually psychotic in his grief over losing his children, hallucinating that they were still there, looking through the house as if they were just misplaced. And his children had been gone for years. I see it at my other job too, where I teach people to live with heart and lung disease. Three, so far this year, have shared with me their secret pain, that there is a grandchild out there that they may never see again because DHS took them.
And it doesn’t have to be that way. Other states have undertaken real reform, working to keep kids with their families in all but the worst of cases and to support those families while they are going through tough times. I’ve heard some encouraging things lately, things that give me hope that Maine might be going the same way.
One man was actually psychotic in his grief over losing his children, hallucinating that they were still there, looking through the house as if they were just misplaced. And his children had been gone for years.
The news coverage on the workshop that was held last week said the department was going to work on preventing child abuse instead of reacting to it, focus on a family’s strengths instead of their weaknesses. But they also said something that frightened me. Someone said they were going to be focusing on “children who
don’t get enough attention.” I would have thought it was embarrassing enough when, on
Frontline’s Caseworker Files, a Maine social worker said that she thought “not paying enough attention” to a child might be the worst abuse of all. This was an absurd statement, on a program about a foster child who had been duct taped to a chair and suffocated.
As a mandatory reporter for as long as there have been mandatory reporters, I can tell you that ten years ago spankings and long timeouts were not reportable offenses. They are now. We shouldn’t be surprised when the number of child abuse reports goes up at the same time that the definition has been expanded. Reports will go up again if the public can be convinced that they should report children who don’t get enough attention. How do they expect to prevent child abuse deaths if they are busy sifting through those kinds of reports and possibly taking those
children into foster care? I suggest that if you see a child who doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention, give him some attention!
Letting the people who make their livings off child abuse define it sounds like a conflict of interest to me. Imagine if the health care industry worked that way. Hospitals could mandate hospitalizations for cold symptoms and then reap in the bucks. Insurance companies would just keep paying and no one would listen to the occasional voice of reason saying that there were worse infections to be caught inside the hospital and this was doing more harm than good.
We are losing the distinction between child abuse and parenting we don’t agree with, just as we have long since lost the distinction between poverty and neglect. Pity the parents who have taken on two jobs to provide for their children, to avoid being accused of neglect, only to be accused of not paying enough attention to them. They might as well just give their children to the state at birth. They can no longer win, no matter what they do.
My greatest hope for the future in Maine is Paul Vincent and the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group. They have come here to introduce Family Team Meetings to Maine, a program that brings all the players to the table before a child removal to explore and possibly choose an alternative. Hopefully this is only the beginning. He has done wonderful things in other states. If he does here what he did in Alabama, I will have gotten my wish, the foster care system will be torn down and rebuilt from the vision on up.
Pity the parents who have taken on two jobs to provide for their children, to avoid being accused of neglect, only to be accused of not paying enough attention to them. They might as well just give their children to the state at birth. They can no longer win, no matter what they do.
But even then, I will have one remaining concern. What of those hearts already broken? I said in my book that “DHS means never having to say you’re sorry.” Will that remain true? Will the powers-that-be say, “It’s too late” as Marie’s worker said to me when I asked why she wasn’t returned to her parents after he took the job and realized what had happened to her? Will the grandparents have to go to their graves with their pain and the parents keep coming to the ER when they feel like dying? Will the children keep going to bed every night asking why somebody had to be paid to love them.
Mary Callahan is the author of “Memoirs of a Baby Stealer: Lessons I’ve Learned as a Foster Mother” (Pinewoods Press: 2003),
Reprinted with permission by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202), Alexandria VA, 22314, (703) 212-2006, www.nccpr.org, info@nccpr.org Introduction revised, November 6, 2006
Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together:
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va. 22314
(703) 212-2006 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
THE EVIDENCE IS IN
Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together:
The Definitive Studies
NCCPR long has argued that many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they had remained with their own families and those families had been given the right kinds of help.
Turns out that’s not quite right.
In fact, many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they remained with their own families even if those families got only the typical help (which tends to be little help, wrong help, or no help) commonly offered by child welfare agencies.
That’s the message from the largest studies ever undertaken to compare the impact on children of foster care versus keeping comparably maltreated children with their own families. The study was the subject of a front-page story in USA Today. The full study is available here.
The first study, published in 2007, looked at outcomes for more than 15,000 children. It compared foster children not to the general population but to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. The result: On measure after measure the children left in their own homes do better.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care.
One year later, the same researcher published another study, this time of 23,000 cases. Again he compared foster children to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. This time he looked at which children were more likely to be arrested as adults. Once again, the children left in their own homes fared better than the foster children.
Implications
● The studies use the term “foster care” generically; they include children placed in any form of substitute care. That’s important because whenever information like this comes out, people who want to warehouse children in orphanages try to use it to justify their schemes. But these studies were not limited to family foster homes. And it takes three single-spaced pages just to list all the other studies documenting the harm of orphanages. (Those pages are available from NCCPR.)
● This does not mean that no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means many fewer children should be placed in foster care.
The studies excluded the most severe cases of maltreatment, a very small proportion of any child protective worker’s caseload, precisely because, horror stories that make the front page notwithstanding, these are cases where everyone with time to investigate would agree that removal from the home was the only alternative.
Rather, the studies focused on, by far, the largest group of cases any worker sees, those that can best be called the “in-between cases” where the parent is neither all victim nor all villain; cases where there are real problems in the home, but wide disagreement over what should be done. As the first study itself notes: “These are the cases most likely to be affected by policy changes that alter the threshold for placement.” They also, are, of course, the cases most likely to be affected by a foster-care panic – which also alters the threshold for placement.
Even among these cases, the figures are averages. Certainly there are some individual cases among the thousands studied in which foster care was the less harmful alternative. But what the data make clear is that foster care is vastly overused, damaging large numbers of children who would do better in life had they remained in their own homes, even with the minimal help most child welfare agencies offer to families.
This says less about how well child protection agencies do in helping families than it does about how enormously toxic a foster care intervention is. Anything that toxic must be used very sparingly and in very small doses.
● Child welfare agencies have a disingenuous response to all this: “Why yes, of course,” they like to say. “This research just shows what we’ve always said ourselves: foster care only should be used as a last resort; of course we keep families together whenever possible.” But this research shows that agency actions belie their words. These studies found thousands of children already in foster care who would have done better had child protection agencies not taken them away in the first place.
● The USA Today story quotes one deservedly well-respected expert as saying that the 2007 study was the first to produce such results. But that is an error. Actually it was at least the second since 2006. A University of Minnesota study used a different methodology and measured different outcomes, but came to very similar conclusions.
● Though the USA Today story says other “studies” go the other way, the one cited, with less than 1/100th the sample size of the new studies, a shorter duration and at least one other serious flaw (omitting foster children in care for less than six months) is the only one we know of. And that study focused on reunification, not on children never removed in the first place.
And, of course, that study also compared foster care only to typical “help” for families in their own homes, which generally is little or nothing. Providing the kinds of real help NCCPR recommends (See Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right) would likely change the result and, in the case of the three more recent and more rigorous studies, create an even wider gap in outcomes favoring keeping families together.
● Perhaps most intriguing, these studies suggest it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care panic, a huge, sudden upsurge in needless removals after the death of a child “known to the system” gets extensive news coverage.
Thanks to these studies, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic.
It also should be possible to estimate roughly how many children have been saved from these rotten outcomes in states and localities that have reformed their systems to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together.
These new studies and the Minnesota study are in addition to the comprehensive study of foster care alumni showing that only one in five could be said to be doing well as a young adult – in other words, foster care churns out walking wounded four times out of five. (See NCCPR’s publication 80 Percent Failure for more on this study) and the mass of evidence showing that simply in terms of physical safety, real family preservation programs have a far better track record than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper #1.)
The buzzword in child welfare is “evidence-based.” What that really means is: How dare proponents of any new, innovative approach to child welfare expect to get funding if they can’t dot every i and cross every t on evaluations proving the innovation’s efficacy beyond a shadow of a doubt? Old, non-innovative programs, however, are not held to this standard. If they were, child welfare would be turned upside down by the results of this new research.
Because now, more than ever, the evidence is in.
Updated June 3, 2009
(703) 212-2006 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
THE EVIDENCE IS IN
Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together:
The Definitive Studies
NCCPR long has argued that many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they had remained with their own families and those families had been given the right kinds of help.
Turns out that’s not quite right.
In fact, many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they remained with their own families even if those families got only the typical help (which tends to be little help, wrong help, or no help) commonly offered by child welfare agencies.
That’s the message from the largest studies ever undertaken to compare the impact on children of foster care versus keeping comparably maltreated children with their own families. The study was the subject of a front-page story in USA Today. The full study is available here.
The first study, published in 2007, looked at outcomes for more than 15,000 children. It compared foster children not to the general population but to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. The result: On measure after measure the children left in their own homes do better.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care.
One year later, the same researcher published another study, this time of 23,000 cases. Again he compared foster children to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. This time he looked at which children were more likely to be arrested as adults. Once again, the children left in their own homes fared better than the foster children.
Implications
● The studies use the term “foster care” generically; they include children placed in any form of substitute care. That’s important because whenever information like this comes out, people who want to warehouse children in orphanages try to use it to justify their schemes. But these studies were not limited to family foster homes. And it takes three single-spaced pages just to list all the other studies documenting the harm of orphanages. (Those pages are available from NCCPR.)
● This does not mean that no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means many fewer children should be placed in foster care.
The studies excluded the most severe cases of maltreatment, a very small proportion of any child protective worker’s caseload, precisely because, horror stories that make the front page notwithstanding, these are cases where everyone with time to investigate would agree that removal from the home was the only alternative.
Rather, the studies focused on, by far, the largest group of cases any worker sees, those that can best be called the “in-between cases” where the parent is neither all victim nor all villain; cases where there are real problems in the home, but wide disagreement over what should be done. As the first study itself notes: “These are the cases most likely to be affected by policy changes that alter the threshold for placement.” They also, are, of course, the cases most likely to be affected by a foster-care panic – which also alters the threshold for placement.
Even among these cases, the figures are averages. Certainly there are some individual cases among the thousands studied in which foster care was the less harmful alternative. But what the data make clear is that foster care is vastly overused, damaging large numbers of children who would do better in life had they remained in their own homes, even with the minimal help most child welfare agencies offer to families.
This says less about how well child protection agencies do in helping families than it does about how enormously toxic a foster care intervention is. Anything that toxic must be used very sparingly and in very small doses.
● Child welfare agencies have a disingenuous response to all this: “Why yes, of course,” they like to say. “This research just shows what we’ve always said ourselves: foster care only should be used as a last resort; of course we keep families together whenever possible.” But this research shows that agency actions belie their words. These studies found thousands of children already in foster care who would have done better had child protection agencies not taken them away in the first place.
● The USA Today story quotes one deservedly well-respected expert as saying that the 2007 study was the first to produce such results. But that is an error. Actually it was at least the second since 2006. A University of Minnesota study used a different methodology and measured different outcomes, but came to very similar conclusions.
● Though the USA Today story says other “studies” go the other way, the one cited, with less than 1/100th the sample size of the new studies, a shorter duration and at least one other serious flaw (omitting foster children in care for less than six months) is the only one we know of. And that study focused on reunification, not on children never removed in the first place.
And, of course, that study also compared foster care only to typical “help” for families in their own homes, which generally is little or nothing. Providing the kinds of real help NCCPR recommends (See Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right) would likely change the result and, in the case of the three more recent and more rigorous studies, create an even wider gap in outcomes favoring keeping families together.
● Perhaps most intriguing, these studies suggest it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care panic, a huge, sudden upsurge in needless removals after the death of a child “known to the system” gets extensive news coverage.
Thanks to these studies, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic.
It also should be possible to estimate roughly how many children have been saved from these rotten outcomes in states and localities that have reformed their systems to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together.
These new studies and the Minnesota study are in addition to the comprehensive study of foster care alumni showing that only one in five could be said to be doing well as a young adult – in other words, foster care churns out walking wounded four times out of five. (See NCCPR’s publication 80 Percent Failure for more on this study) and the mass of evidence showing that simply in terms of physical safety, real family preservation programs have a far better track record than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper #1.)
The buzzword in child welfare is “evidence-based.” What that really means is: How dare proponents of any new, innovative approach to child welfare expect to get funding if they can’t dot every i and cross every t on evaluations proving the innovation’s efficacy beyond a shadow of a doubt? Old, non-innovative programs, however, are not held to this standard. If they were, child welfare would be turned upside down by the results of this new research.
Because now, more than ever, the evidence is in.
Updated June 3, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
Missing Child-Kidnapped by DCYF
This is our grandson, Austin Knightly. He was kidnapped by Nashua, NH DCYF on February 3rd, 2006.If anyone see's him, please tell him we did NOT abandon him. That we are and always will be fighting for his safe return.
Austin, if you come across this message, please know we love you and always will. We will never give up. We know how much you want to be with us and don't ever forget how much we love you and want you with us. WE DID NOT ABANDON YOU!!!!!!!!!! WE WANT YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE!!!!!! Don't believe DCYF's lies!
You have been kept from us due to the lies and deceit of DCYF, not because we don't you. The agency you have always known to steal kids from their families. We will always be here for you. Please don't forget us. We will never forget you, or the happy little boy you once were. We still live in the same place, so you know where to find us. Love Alway's, Grampie, Grammie and your puppy Belle.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Bring Austin Home-Stolen by Nashua, NH DCYF
Please check out Austin's video and see how happy he once was until his kidnapping by DCYF in Nashua, NH. Then see what the state of NH has done to him. He's now doped up on adderal to calm his violent behavior. Behavior he never experienced until he was stolen from his family. This is what DCYF/CPS does to our innocent children! It's too late for DCYF reform. Abolishment is the only answer.
The picture of Austin on the left was taken at his grandparents house, where he was alway's happy.
The picture on the right was taken at the children's home AKA orphanage, where he was placed after he tried to hang himself. Not the happy little boy we once knew.
Check out Austin's doped up picture at the bottom of the page. He chose this picture to send us. Was he trying to tell us something? He's smarter than they think he is!
Please check out Austin's you tube video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC0yPZQGKp0
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