November 20, 2009 yvonnemason
In Kentucky, an “explosion” in the number of children removed from their homes by court order has resulted in more children in need of care-yet the number of people willing to step forward as foster parents has failed to keep pace. “And its going to get worse,” says Rudi Megowan, Northern Kentucky family services supervisor for the state Department for Social Services. “They just passed legislation that will make it easier to terminate parental rights, which means more and more kids will be coming into care” (Vance, 1998).
This legislation, sweeping the states as of this writing, is the Adoption and Safe Families Act. It was the disparity between the number of children in foster care who need homes and the number who were adopted that spurred President Clinton in 1996 to ask for new legislation aimed at doubling the number of public adoptions by 2002 and giving foster children “what should be their fundamental right-a chance at a decent, safe home.” In response, Congress passed the Act in November of 1997 (Spake, 1998).
Before children may be adopted, their ties to their natural parents must first be permanently severed. Permanent termination of parental rights has been described as “the family law equivalent of the death penalty in a criminal case” (In re Smith). The power to terminate parental rights is an “awesome power” (Champagne v. Welfare). “It is tantamount to a civil death penalty” (Drury v. Lang).
In Michigan, terminations of parental rights increased by 55% in 1996 when referenced against the previous year (Kresnak, 1996). This was before the Adoption and Safe Families Act was even on the drawing board. From Wisconsin: “Petitions to terminate parental rights are on the rise in Waukesha County, fueled by changes in state law that cut the time parents have to shape up.” Over the past four years, the number of petitions filed by the county had increased sevenfold (Sink, 1998).
It apparently has become a cruel fashion of our times to systematically target primarily poor families for permanent severance of their family ties. To this end, the state of Arizona established a “Severance Project,” while Kentucky has established a “Termination of Parental Rights Project.” To implement the Kentucky initiative successfully, program officials believed that it was necessary to have the long-term and active involvement of “key officials at all levels, including the governor, legislators, and agency officials as well as caseworkers, service providers, attorneys, and judges.” This participation was deemed “essential to define the problem and reach consensus,” and accomplishing this end “required considerable coordination [of] efforts and an extended commitment of resources” (General Accounting Office, 1997).
Such a relentless onslaught against the family was bound to engender resistance. In Nevada, there is mounting anger and demand for change reportedly coming from parents whose rights have been terminated. They, too, say losing a child to protective custody is akin to a civil “death penalty” (Kanigher, 1997). Indeed, Chief Justice Charles Springer of the Nevada Supreme Court has observed that there is a “recent epidemic of terminations of parental rights of poor and handicapped parents” (Kanigher, 1997b). “As I have indicated in my dissents to other termination cases, the state seems to be running amok, spouting pop psychology and terminating parental rights in cases where it is clearly not necessary to do, particularly in cases of poor and otherwise handicapped parents,” Springer wrote in another dissent, while in another still, he explained:
The state’s modus operandi appears to be to go into the homes of handicapped, powerless and usually very poor parents, remove their children (almost always without the parents having counsel) and put the children into the home of substitute parents who are more affluent than the natural parents and more pleasing to social service agents than the natural parents.
After the children are taken out of the home of their natural parents, the state imposes upon the natural parents a “reunification plan” that is frequently beyond the capacity of the parents to deal with.
Springer has written of what he describes as the “state’s child-devouring juggernaut” to take children away from their parents only because they are poor. When child-rearing problems arise, Springer notes the problem of poverty is “rarely addressed,” rather the state seeks to assign blame to the parents thus “permanently depriving the children of their natural parents” (Ryan, 1998).
In a California case of recent vintage, a mother had her parental rights terminated on the basis of the testimony of a therapist who opined that she had a “narcissistic” personality. Her troubles began when social workers visited her home, removing the children because they found the home to be in generally “an unsanitary condition.” Orange County Counsel Laurence H. Watson and Deputy County Counsel Mark R. Howe argued the case on behalf of the Department of Social Services (Orange County Social Services Agency v Doris F.). In yet another California case, parental rights were terminated on the basis of a psychologist’s opinion that the parent had failed to “internalize” general parenting skills. Once again, Watson and Howe argued the case in the appellate court on behalf of the Department (Blanca P. v Superior Court). Dana Mack points to a case in which San Diego prosecutor E. Jane Via, whom she describes as a radical feminist, had sought to arrange for the adoption of an infant girl on grounds no more substantial than her Mormon father’s “patriarchal” religious beliefs might someday inspire him toward abusive behavior.
Perhaps more typical of national trends is a North Carolina case in which the Court of Appeals upheld termination of parental rights based on Moore County District Court Judge Michael E. Beale having found “clear, cogent and convincing evidence” that neglect had occurred based on a friend of the defendant testifying to having “observed a roach on the child’s face on one occasion,” and having seen “roaches on the car seat, diaper bag, and dirty clothes.” Dirty dishes were said to be accumulating, and dirty clothes were said to have been piled up around the apartment. This “evidence” of unfitness was not uncontroverted. A family therapist employed by the court to conduct a home study stated in his report that the house was neat and clean, and that the mother had “shown a good aesthetic sense in arranging flowers and art work to create a warm ambiance.” He also testified about the mother’s apparent willingness to become a better parent. The primary witness against the mother, Alvina Street, had legal custody of the child at the time she testified against the mother (In re Eric Young).
When in modern times it became fashionable for the courts of appeal to uphold the termination of parental rights for reasons of poverty is difficult to determine with precision. In Texas, however, the date was February of 1987, and the venue was the Court Of Appeals, Fifth District Of Texas. In his dissent in In the interest of S.H.A., a child, Justice Devany observed:
[W]hen we are faced with an economic depression and parents cannot provide adequate food for their children, under the majority holding, termination will be justified. The majority has enacted law that in a time of poverty parental rights will be terminated. The majority will have the state become a “big brother” form of government of such supremacy that it can destroy the very base of freedom and democracy in this country by destroying the family.
A more comprehensive review of appellate cases involving termination of parental rights is beyond the scope of this text. Suffice it to say that to the extent a very few children find themselves fortunate enough to wind their way out of the labyrinth of foster care toward the promise of permanence offered by adoption, a majority of these children appear to have had their rights to their parents terminated for largely the same reasons they entered foster care to begin with. In a majority of cases the reason is related to their poverty status. Among the majority of the remainder of these cases factors such as cultural bias or insensitivity, decision making and other skill deficits at all levels of administration, an all-pervasive anti-family bias, and corruption motivated either by financial gain or personal aggrandizement frequently manifest themselves. Allegations involving instances of life-threatening child abuse or neglect appear to be raised among the minority of TPR cases based on my personal review of something approaching some several hundred such cases.
And now, along comes the Adoption and Safe Families Act. Already the Department of Health and Human Services has issued a Program Announcement detailing how the legislation is to work once implemented on the state level. States are affirmatively required to proceed with the termination of parental rights when a child has been in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months. There are only three exceptions to the rule: 1) the child is placed with a relative (at the option of the State); 2) the State documents a compelling reason not to file a petition for TPR; 3) the State has not provided the services, identified in the case plan, necessary to make the home safe for the child’s return within the time frame specified in the case plan. The Act is “to be treated as a Title IV-E State plan requirement” and failure to obtain the necessary State legislation required to implement these new procedures during the first legislative session following the enactment of the Act “will result in a State plan compliance issue” (Administration for Children, Youth and Families, 1998).
Former New Hampshire State Senator and Chairman of the Human Services Committee David Wheeler argues that the Adoption and Safe Families Act will allow juvenile court judges to proceed with terminations of parental rights based solely on a child’s length of stay in foster care absent so much as an adjudication of abuse or neglect. The law comes with new funding streams, including incentives to maintain a child in state care until such time as termination of parental rights triggers financial incentives to child protection agencies. To my knowledge, his was the only state to reject the bill when it was first introduced in the House. A subsequent effort to attach it to another bill was discovered and derailed. The former Senator explains that as of this writing, efforts are still under way “to slip it under the door” (personal communication). While on its face, the legislation offers the promise of quicker exit from a system historically known for maintaining children in care for countless years of time, the Congress failed to ask one crucial question when it passed the legislation: Why are so many children in the foster care system to begin with?
Categories: Abuse by CPS, adoption and safe families act Tags: abuse, abuse of CPS, adoption and safe families act, children, termination of parental rights by DFCS, Title IV, yvonne mason SystemWide Abuses
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
CPS/DCYF Makes Matters Worse
November 20, 2009 yvonnemason
Making Matters Worse
The reporting crusade wrought other unintended consequences as well, among them an increase in the abuse and neglect of children by the very system designed to protect them. Stein and Rzepnicki (1983) explain that the possibility state action could have negative consequences for youngsters and their families was not seriously entertained, nor had the effects of state action been systematically monitored during earlier years. While courts and child-caring agencies have historically been considered as benevolent, and acting to protect children and further their best interests: “Evidence gathered in recent years has shown that intervention by child welfare agencies may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, family difficulties” (p. 284). This growing body of evidence, they argue, “forces a reconsideration of the previously unquestioned assumption that actions taken by state agencies are ipso facto beneficial.”
As Lindsey (1994) explains, with the shifting emphasis placed on child abuse investigation, “the [caseworker] was unmistakably cast in the role of inquisitor prying into and judging the affairs of the family, with predictably adverse effects on the family” (p. 98). Dysfunctional families “may experience considerable stress with the occurrence of seemingly minor events,” notes the Reference Manual for the Pennsylvania Model of Risk Assessment (Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, undated). “The mere presence of the social worker can trigger a family crisis.”
If the mere presence of a social worker can trigger a family crisis, imagine what a full-blown child abuse investigation may do. Besharov (1985) explains that even the determination that a report is unfounded can only be made after an unavoidably traumatic investigation that is, inherently, a breach of parental and family privacy. Dana Mack (1997) notes that caseworkers will typically enter a home for the first time at an odd hour, with no previous announcement, giving no information about the nature of the charge held against the family, nor who has made it. The homes of accused families are always checked, with refrigerators opened and the bathrooms inspected. Neighbors and school personnel are questioned about the family, particularly about the reputation, behavior and habits of the parents. Nor is it unusual in some jurisdictions for child welfare workers to enter homes in the middle of the night, stripping children naked and probing their genitals for evidence of abuse. Investigations may involve repeated and relentless interrogations of children, and a battery of psychological testing for both the parents and their children. These tests are often conducted by a parade of court-appointed psychologists and therapists.
Thomas Sowell (1995) observes that, by the time an investigation has run its course, children have been strip-searched, interrogated by a stream of social workers, police officers, and prosecutors, psychologically tested, and sometimes placed in foster care. Such actions usually occur without search warrants, parental consent, court hearings, or official charges-and often solely on the basis of the anonymous telephone call. Even in the event that a report is ultimately unfounded, a family has been subjected to enormous stress factors. As Elizabeth Hutchinson (1990) explains:
Investigation of a report of child maltreatment is not an innocuous intrusion into family life. By the time an investigation is complete, the family has had to cope with anxieties in both their formal and informal support systems alerted to state suspicion of their parenting. Even if the report is expunged from the central registry due to lack of substantiation, it is seldom expunged from the mind of the family-or from the memories of persons in the support system.
Child development experts Goldstein, Solnit, Goldstein, and Freud (1996) note that, “by its intervention, the state may make a bad situation worse: indeed it may even turn a tolerable situation or even a good situation into a bad one” (Besharov, 1987; see also Goldstein et al., 1996, p. 92).
The clientele primarily “serviced” by child protection agencies may be particularly vulnerable to having a bad situation worsen. Empirical research corroborates the association between social class and the physical abuse and neglect of children (Hagedorn, 1995; Lindsey, 1994; Pelton, 1978). Child abuse has always been concentrated in areas of greatest poverty, where stress is more common. Family income is among the best predictors for both investigation and child removal (Fein & Maluccio, 1992; Lindsey, 1994). The families which become known to public child welfare agencies through the reporting of child abuse and neglect are largely the poorest of the poor, and the children in foster care come predominantly from such families (Horowitz & Wolock, 1981; Pelton, 1992; Testa & Goerge, 1988). The reasons for this are clear, as Van Hooris and Gilbert (1998) explain: “The frustration and stresses that accompany unemployment, poverty, inadequate housing, and continual insecurities of lower-socio-economic status contribute to a volatile environment in which children are at risk of abuse and neglect.”
Add to this already volatile mix a child abuse or neglect investigation with the possibility of child removal looming as imminent and the results are predictable. The mere presence of a social worker or other authority may exacerbate an already dysfunctional or stressful family situation, tipping the marginalized parent toward an act of physical violence which may not have otherwise occurred absent the anger, fear or frustration imposed by the investigation itself. Yale Professor Edward Zigler, testifying before Congress during the 1970s, addressed this issue, saying that he was “beginning to see some people who we are driving to the brink of psychosis because of these [reporting] laws.” Zigler found these early trends to be both troubling and potentially counterproductive, for even during this early period we were already reaching a phenomenon of the sort in which: “Somebody reports a parent; then the parent abuses the child again for getting her in trouble.” Zigler explained that this was “clinically occurring everywhere” at the time (Committee on Education and Labor, 1977).
Research into this area is problematic. After all, who would believe the word of an accused child abuser claiming to have been pushed toward such action by the stresses imposed by an investigation? The situation poses something of a classic chicken or the egg dilemma for the researcher, as an act of violence, or worse, a child fatality following an investigation seemingly provides the “proof” that the family was being properly investigated to begin with, and that the caseworker “missed something.”
Consider the case of an Iraqi family who became refugees in 1991 after their home was bombed during the Persian Gulf War. They reportedly lived in tents in Saudi Arabia for more than three years before the United Nations brought them to Nebraska in 1994. A year later, the family moved to Detroit, drawn by the area’s large Arab-American and Muslim communities. A teacher from Nebraska had kept in touch with one of the daughters, a former student, and called Detroit authorities to report suspicions that the parents might be abusing some of their children. Detroit police went to the home to interview the children and the parents. Finding nothing wrong, the police left. The Detroit Free Press (Krodel, 1998) describes what happened next:
After they were gone, the father — angry, frightened and insulted by the visit — said he wanted to know who said what to the teacher in Nebraska. An argument erupted. Two of the teenage daughters started pointing fingers at each other, and eventually the 16-year-old tried to leave the house, the family’s attorney said. Her parents and an older brother tried to stop her.
Neighbors heard screams and saw the girl in the street with her clothes torn and called police.
Police then took four daughters — ages 3, 12, 14 and 16 — into protective custody. Ten days later, three more children-sons ages 5, 8 and 10-were taken into custody. The four children over age 18 remained in the home. The situation has been especially difficult because neither parent speaks English.
In this instance, the vague concerns of a former teacher many miles distant first brought the family to the attention of Detroit authorities. While it may be argued that the case raises some valid concerns about the family’s functioning, it may also be argued that it was the mere presence of the authorities in the home which exacerbated the family’s functioning to the extent that further intervention became a consideration. Moreover, once removal of the children became a consideration, the authorities may have been negligent by virtue of having failed to adequately weigh the consequences of removal against the alternative of leaving the family intact in terms of which option provided the least detrimental alternative for the children.
Consider the results of this intervention: The children were spread out over four foster homes. While in foster care, a 3-year-old girl was burned with an iron, her depressed 16-year-old sister mutilated her own arm, and their 12-year-old sister was seen with a 16-year-old boy who had his pants down, prompting concerns that the girl had been raped. To make matters worse, a non-Muslim foster parent gave the older girls crosses, which was interpreted by the Muslim and Arab communities — which had over time become involved in the case — as a sign that the children were being deprived of their Muslim faith.
Compounding the difficulties of research into this area of inquiry is the industry’s continued reliance on what Hagedorn (1995, p. 63) euphemistically refers to as “medical model gimmicks” drawn as a consequence of its continued reliance on Freudian models of psychopathology (Billingsley & Giovannoni, 1972; Johnson, 1991). The relation between social work and popular psychotherapy “is the most significant issue facing the profession today.” Social services, both public and private, are organized to make individualized psychotherapeutic forms of helping the most significant service they have to offer, hence: “Whether we are dealing with child abuse and neglect, addictions, loneliness, anxiety, economic dependency, or other physical and mental disabilities, it is psychotherapeutically oriented work with individuals that is considered to be the key” (Specht, 1990).
The philosophical underpinning of psychotherapeutic intervention in the field of social work, however, may itself be a significant part of the equation. Epstien (1997), in commenting on recent tinkering with family preservation services, notes:
Family preservation services, intrusive and possibly irritating, may actually exacerbate bad situations, producing harmful effects. Although the deterioration of subjects as a result of care may appear to be theoretically remote, it remains a live possibility of psychotherapy, and therefore cannot be summarily dismissed in any service involving counseling.
The psychotherapeutic orientation of social work aside, Epstien observes that the “intrusiveness” of one family preservation effort under review “may have exacerbated family tensions in a number of cases.” Matters can only be worse in the event that a child is actually removed from the home. As Besharov (1987) explains:
Long-term foster care can leave lasting psychological scars. For the parents, removing a child is psychologically devastating, and can do irreparable damage to their bond of affection and commitment. In addition, many forms of maltreatment stem from how the parent and child relate to each other. Separation obviously cannot aid in the resolution of such problems. The period of separation may so completely tear the already weak family fabric that the parents have no chance of coping with the children when they are returned.
The true extent of the problem is potentially far more significant than one might care to imagine. Roughly 45% of child abuse related fatalities have already come to the attention of child protective services agencies (Wiese & Daro, 1994) with some estimates ranging as high as 55% (Besharov, 1987). While the precise number of such cases actually accepted into the system and passed on for investigation is unknown, conventional wisdom would dictate that had the screening operator or investigating caseworker conducted a more competent or thorough inquiry, or had a reliable risk assessment device — one more capable of better “predicting” the course of events — been made available, nearly half of all child fatalities could have been prevented and these children could have been “rescued” from their tragic fates.
For example, Barth (1994) claims that unwarranted intrusions are not as deleterious to families as is often assumed while others, such as Finkelhor (1990, 1993) and Gelles (1996), argue in support of casting a more expansive net, positing that the problem of unsubstantiated reports is not serious enough to warrant any changes to or restrictions on current reporting trends. Gelles maintains not only that child abuse and neglect are underreported, but that the solution to the problems attributed to overreporting “is a better and more accurate means of risk assessment for reported cases” (p. 47). Reduced to its essence, they, along with many other advocates, argue for what Pelton (1997) describes as “more of the same” so that more children may be “rescued” from their homes.
But will casting a wider net, i.e., significant increases in financial resources expended on child welfare agencies, coupled with a marked increase in the number of available caseworkers truly have an impact on child fatalities? Apparently not, if recent developments in Sacramento, California, are to be taken as an indication. After several high-profile deaths of young children who had reportedly “fallen through the cracks of the county’s notoriously porous Child Protective Services,” Sacramento beefed up its child protective services programs and budgets. The county hired 116 additional social workers, and began removing children from “dangerous homes” more quickly, particularly those homes where drug abuse was present (Sacramento Bee, 1998). As previously noted, the removals of children from their homes increased from a rate of approximately 200 per month to 400 per month, with police assisting child protection workers in conducting unannounced late-night home visits. The results are in, as the Sacramento Bee explains:
Sadly, increased vigilance did not have an appreciable impact. The number of children who died of abuse and neglect last year in the county was among the highest ever, 14 such child deaths in 1998, compared to nine in 1996. At the same time, the number of children in foster homes has soared, up 1,400 from last year, a 45% increase.
While the increase in fatalities may well be attributable in part to some yet-to-be-described outside factors, one may well have imagined that even such a “notoriously porous” safety net would have fared better in protecting children from harm with the addition of 116 caseworkers to its ranks. The best argument that could be raised is that increases in budgets and staffing for child protection agencies are largely ineffective at reducing child abuse- and neglect-related fatalities. An alternative explanation is that such increases in staffing and budgets are somehow responsible for an increase in child fatalities.
Further compounding the difficulties of research in this arena is the fact that there has been little research on the possibility that child welfare services reduce child mortality (Barth & Blackwell, 1998). Pelton (1990) and Lindsey (1991, 1994) argue that there is no empirical evidence to support frequent claims by professionals that child protection services have impacted positively in terms of reducing child fatalities. Indeed, Lindsey (1994, pp. 100-118) devotes considerable attention to an argument which asserts that the tremendous increases in reporting and investigations of the recent decades have failed to produce anticipated reductions in child abuse- and neglect-related fatalities.
While it is not suggested that broad conclusions should necessarily be drawn from the anecdotal accounts recounted herein, further inquiry is essential if we are to devise a meaningful solution to the problem of child abuse while minimizing the possibility of exacerbating it in the very process of investigating whether or not it has occurred. Research in this area of inquiry is scant, at best, and I would find myself gratified if credible research efforts were to be undertaken as a result of my having outlined my hypothesis in these pages.
Categories: Abuse by CPS, adoption and safe families act, illegal panels Tags: Abuse by CPS, abuse by DFCS, adoption and safe families act, Title IV Funding, yvonne mason Termination of Parental Rights
Making Matters Worse
The reporting crusade wrought other unintended consequences as well, among them an increase in the abuse and neglect of children by the very system designed to protect them. Stein and Rzepnicki (1983) explain that the possibility state action could have negative consequences for youngsters and their families was not seriously entertained, nor had the effects of state action been systematically monitored during earlier years. While courts and child-caring agencies have historically been considered as benevolent, and acting to protect children and further their best interests: “Evidence gathered in recent years has shown that intervention by child welfare agencies may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, family difficulties” (p. 284). This growing body of evidence, they argue, “forces a reconsideration of the previously unquestioned assumption that actions taken by state agencies are ipso facto beneficial.”
As Lindsey (1994) explains, with the shifting emphasis placed on child abuse investigation, “the [caseworker] was unmistakably cast in the role of inquisitor prying into and judging the affairs of the family, with predictably adverse effects on the family” (p. 98). Dysfunctional families “may experience considerable stress with the occurrence of seemingly minor events,” notes the Reference Manual for the Pennsylvania Model of Risk Assessment (Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, undated). “The mere presence of the social worker can trigger a family crisis.”
If the mere presence of a social worker can trigger a family crisis, imagine what a full-blown child abuse investigation may do. Besharov (1985) explains that even the determination that a report is unfounded can only be made after an unavoidably traumatic investigation that is, inherently, a breach of parental and family privacy. Dana Mack (1997) notes that caseworkers will typically enter a home for the first time at an odd hour, with no previous announcement, giving no information about the nature of the charge held against the family, nor who has made it. The homes of accused families are always checked, with refrigerators opened and the bathrooms inspected. Neighbors and school personnel are questioned about the family, particularly about the reputation, behavior and habits of the parents. Nor is it unusual in some jurisdictions for child welfare workers to enter homes in the middle of the night, stripping children naked and probing their genitals for evidence of abuse. Investigations may involve repeated and relentless interrogations of children, and a battery of psychological testing for both the parents and their children. These tests are often conducted by a parade of court-appointed psychologists and therapists.
Thomas Sowell (1995) observes that, by the time an investigation has run its course, children have been strip-searched, interrogated by a stream of social workers, police officers, and prosecutors, psychologically tested, and sometimes placed in foster care. Such actions usually occur without search warrants, parental consent, court hearings, or official charges-and often solely on the basis of the anonymous telephone call. Even in the event that a report is ultimately unfounded, a family has been subjected to enormous stress factors. As Elizabeth Hutchinson (1990) explains:
Investigation of a report of child maltreatment is not an innocuous intrusion into family life. By the time an investigation is complete, the family has had to cope with anxieties in both their formal and informal support systems alerted to state suspicion of their parenting. Even if the report is expunged from the central registry due to lack of substantiation, it is seldom expunged from the mind of the family-or from the memories of persons in the support system.
Child development experts Goldstein, Solnit, Goldstein, and Freud (1996) note that, “by its intervention, the state may make a bad situation worse: indeed it may even turn a tolerable situation or even a good situation into a bad one” (Besharov, 1987; see also Goldstein et al., 1996, p. 92).
The clientele primarily “serviced” by child protection agencies may be particularly vulnerable to having a bad situation worsen. Empirical research corroborates the association between social class and the physical abuse and neglect of children (Hagedorn, 1995; Lindsey, 1994; Pelton, 1978). Child abuse has always been concentrated in areas of greatest poverty, where stress is more common. Family income is among the best predictors for both investigation and child removal (Fein & Maluccio, 1992; Lindsey, 1994). The families which become known to public child welfare agencies through the reporting of child abuse and neglect are largely the poorest of the poor, and the children in foster care come predominantly from such families (Horowitz & Wolock, 1981; Pelton, 1992; Testa & Goerge, 1988). The reasons for this are clear, as Van Hooris and Gilbert (1998) explain: “The frustration and stresses that accompany unemployment, poverty, inadequate housing, and continual insecurities of lower-socio-economic status contribute to a volatile environment in which children are at risk of abuse and neglect.”
Add to this already volatile mix a child abuse or neglect investigation with the possibility of child removal looming as imminent and the results are predictable. The mere presence of a social worker or other authority may exacerbate an already dysfunctional or stressful family situation, tipping the marginalized parent toward an act of physical violence which may not have otherwise occurred absent the anger, fear or frustration imposed by the investigation itself. Yale Professor Edward Zigler, testifying before Congress during the 1970s, addressed this issue, saying that he was “beginning to see some people who we are driving to the brink of psychosis because of these [reporting] laws.” Zigler found these early trends to be both troubling and potentially counterproductive, for even during this early period we were already reaching a phenomenon of the sort in which: “Somebody reports a parent; then the parent abuses the child again for getting her in trouble.” Zigler explained that this was “clinically occurring everywhere” at the time (Committee on Education and Labor, 1977).
Research into this area is problematic. After all, who would believe the word of an accused child abuser claiming to have been pushed toward such action by the stresses imposed by an investigation? The situation poses something of a classic chicken or the egg dilemma for the researcher, as an act of violence, or worse, a child fatality following an investigation seemingly provides the “proof” that the family was being properly investigated to begin with, and that the caseworker “missed something.”
Consider the case of an Iraqi family who became refugees in 1991 after their home was bombed during the Persian Gulf War. They reportedly lived in tents in Saudi Arabia for more than three years before the United Nations brought them to Nebraska in 1994. A year later, the family moved to Detroit, drawn by the area’s large Arab-American and Muslim communities. A teacher from Nebraska had kept in touch with one of the daughters, a former student, and called Detroit authorities to report suspicions that the parents might be abusing some of their children. Detroit police went to the home to interview the children and the parents. Finding nothing wrong, the police left. The Detroit Free Press (Krodel, 1998) describes what happened next:
After they were gone, the father — angry, frightened and insulted by the visit — said he wanted to know who said what to the teacher in Nebraska. An argument erupted. Two of the teenage daughters started pointing fingers at each other, and eventually the 16-year-old tried to leave the house, the family’s attorney said. Her parents and an older brother tried to stop her.
Neighbors heard screams and saw the girl in the street with her clothes torn and called police.
Police then took four daughters — ages 3, 12, 14 and 16 — into protective custody. Ten days later, three more children-sons ages 5, 8 and 10-were taken into custody. The four children over age 18 remained in the home. The situation has been especially difficult because neither parent speaks English.
In this instance, the vague concerns of a former teacher many miles distant first brought the family to the attention of Detroit authorities. While it may be argued that the case raises some valid concerns about the family’s functioning, it may also be argued that it was the mere presence of the authorities in the home which exacerbated the family’s functioning to the extent that further intervention became a consideration. Moreover, once removal of the children became a consideration, the authorities may have been negligent by virtue of having failed to adequately weigh the consequences of removal against the alternative of leaving the family intact in terms of which option provided the least detrimental alternative for the children.
Consider the results of this intervention: The children were spread out over four foster homes. While in foster care, a 3-year-old girl was burned with an iron, her depressed 16-year-old sister mutilated her own arm, and their 12-year-old sister was seen with a 16-year-old boy who had his pants down, prompting concerns that the girl had been raped. To make matters worse, a non-Muslim foster parent gave the older girls crosses, which was interpreted by the Muslim and Arab communities — which had over time become involved in the case — as a sign that the children were being deprived of their Muslim faith.
Compounding the difficulties of research into this area of inquiry is the industry’s continued reliance on what Hagedorn (1995, p. 63) euphemistically refers to as “medical model gimmicks” drawn as a consequence of its continued reliance on Freudian models of psychopathology (Billingsley & Giovannoni, 1972; Johnson, 1991). The relation between social work and popular psychotherapy “is the most significant issue facing the profession today.” Social services, both public and private, are organized to make individualized psychotherapeutic forms of helping the most significant service they have to offer, hence: “Whether we are dealing with child abuse and neglect, addictions, loneliness, anxiety, economic dependency, or other physical and mental disabilities, it is psychotherapeutically oriented work with individuals that is considered to be the key” (Specht, 1990).
The philosophical underpinning of psychotherapeutic intervention in the field of social work, however, may itself be a significant part of the equation. Epstien (1997), in commenting on recent tinkering with family preservation services, notes:
Family preservation services, intrusive and possibly irritating, may actually exacerbate bad situations, producing harmful effects. Although the deterioration of subjects as a result of care may appear to be theoretically remote, it remains a live possibility of psychotherapy, and therefore cannot be summarily dismissed in any service involving counseling.
The psychotherapeutic orientation of social work aside, Epstien observes that the “intrusiveness” of one family preservation effort under review “may have exacerbated family tensions in a number of cases.” Matters can only be worse in the event that a child is actually removed from the home. As Besharov (1987) explains:
Long-term foster care can leave lasting psychological scars. For the parents, removing a child is psychologically devastating, and can do irreparable damage to their bond of affection and commitment. In addition, many forms of maltreatment stem from how the parent and child relate to each other. Separation obviously cannot aid in the resolution of such problems. The period of separation may so completely tear the already weak family fabric that the parents have no chance of coping with the children when they are returned.
The true extent of the problem is potentially far more significant than one might care to imagine. Roughly 45% of child abuse related fatalities have already come to the attention of child protective services agencies (Wiese & Daro, 1994) with some estimates ranging as high as 55% (Besharov, 1987). While the precise number of such cases actually accepted into the system and passed on for investigation is unknown, conventional wisdom would dictate that had the screening operator or investigating caseworker conducted a more competent or thorough inquiry, or had a reliable risk assessment device — one more capable of better “predicting” the course of events — been made available, nearly half of all child fatalities could have been prevented and these children could have been “rescued” from their tragic fates.
For example, Barth (1994) claims that unwarranted intrusions are not as deleterious to families as is often assumed while others, such as Finkelhor (1990, 1993) and Gelles (1996), argue in support of casting a more expansive net, positing that the problem of unsubstantiated reports is not serious enough to warrant any changes to or restrictions on current reporting trends. Gelles maintains not only that child abuse and neglect are underreported, but that the solution to the problems attributed to overreporting “is a better and more accurate means of risk assessment for reported cases” (p. 47). Reduced to its essence, they, along with many other advocates, argue for what Pelton (1997) describes as “more of the same” so that more children may be “rescued” from their homes.
But will casting a wider net, i.e., significant increases in financial resources expended on child welfare agencies, coupled with a marked increase in the number of available caseworkers truly have an impact on child fatalities? Apparently not, if recent developments in Sacramento, California, are to be taken as an indication. After several high-profile deaths of young children who had reportedly “fallen through the cracks of the county’s notoriously porous Child Protective Services,” Sacramento beefed up its child protective services programs and budgets. The county hired 116 additional social workers, and began removing children from “dangerous homes” more quickly, particularly those homes where drug abuse was present (Sacramento Bee, 1998). As previously noted, the removals of children from their homes increased from a rate of approximately 200 per month to 400 per month, with police assisting child protection workers in conducting unannounced late-night home visits. The results are in, as the Sacramento Bee explains:
Sadly, increased vigilance did not have an appreciable impact. The number of children who died of abuse and neglect last year in the county was among the highest ever, 14 such child deaths in 1998, compared to nine in 1996. At the same time, the number of children in foster homes has soared, up 1,400 from last year, a 45% increase.
While the increase in fatalities may well be attributable in part to some yet-to-be-described outside factors, one may well have imagined that even such a “notoriously porous” safety net would have fared better in protecting children from harm with the addition of 116 caseworkers to its ranks. The best argument that could be raised is that increases in budgets and staffing for child protection agencies are largely ineffective at reducing child abuse- and neglect-related fatalities. An alternative explanation is that such increases in staffing and budgets are somehow responsible for an increase in child fatalities.
Further compounding the difficulties of research in this arena is the fact that there has been little research on the possibility that child welfare services reduce child mortality (Barth & Blackwell, 1998). Pelton (1990) and Lindsey (1991, 1994) argue that there is no empirical evidence to support frequent claims by professionals that child protection services have impacted positively in terms of reducing child fatalities. Indeed, Lindsey (1994, pp. 100-118) devotes considerable attention to an argument which asserts that the tremendous increases in reporting and investigations of the recent decades have failed to produce anticipated reductions in child abuse- and neglect-related fatalities.
While it is not suggested that broad conclusions should necessarily be drawn from the anecdotal accounts recounted herein, further inquiry is essential if we are to devise a meaningful solution to the problem of child abuse while minimizing the possibility of exacerbating it in the very process of investigating whether or not it has occurred. Research in this area of inquiry is scant, at best, and I would find myself gratified if credible research efforts were to be undertaken as a result of my having outlined my hypothesis in these pages.
Categories: Abuse by CPS, adoption and safe families act, illegal panels Tags: Abuse by CPS, abuse by DFCS, adoption and safe families act, Title IV Funding, yvonne mason Termination of Parental Rights
Needless Suffering of Our Children
November 20, 2009 yvonnemason
One of the most tragic aspects of many of these cases is that the children suffer needlessly, for in their zeal to protect them against the perceived shortcomings of their natural parents, child protective services caseworkers placed them into dangerous homes that inflicted upon them precisely the injury they had hoped to prevent. In the District of Columbia, social workers removed four of Debra Hampton’s children from her home placing them in foster care. According to the testimony of a social worker, the children were removed because Mrs. Hampton had left them alone and was not properly supervising them, and her home was “generally uninhabitable.” Three months later, the foster mother left two-year-old Mykeeda Hampton at home for over ten hours. While she was out running errands, Mykeeda was beaten to death by the foster mother’s 12-year-old son. An autopsy later established that the two-year-old died of “blunt force injuries to the head, abdomen, and back, with internal hemorrhaging.” As of September 1995, several years after the incident, the case was still under litigation (District of Columbia v. Debra Ali Hampton).
In August of 1995, San Francisco officials took custody of Selena Hill a few days after her birth because of concerns that her parents, Stacey and Claudia Hill, had physically abused each other and didn’t seem capable of caring for their newborn. In September, seven-week-old Selena Hill was rushed to Children’s Hospital in Oakland with a fractured skull and other injuries that almost killed her. In their efforts to protect her from her actual parents, child welfare workers placed Selena into a foster home with a history of domestic violence. In the nine months before the infant was injured, Berkeley police had visited the residence three times after receiving reports about violent disturbances in the foster home (Ferriss, 1995).
The state of Georgia placed Clayton and Kelly Miracle in foster care with Betty and Joe Wilkins in June of 1993. Two months later paramedics would arrive at the foster home in response to a 911 call, finding Clayton barely breathing, with two large knots on his head, one in the front and one in back. Clayton died as a result of blunt force trauma to his head. The doctor who performed the autopsy testified that Clayton’s fatal injuries could not have been caused by an accidental fall and that injuries and bruising found all over Clayton’s body were consistent with battered child syndrome. Doctors also examined his sister Kelly and found the same pattern of bruising (Wilkins v State).
Categories: Abuse By Foster Parents, Abuse by CPS, adoption and safe families act Tags: Abuse by CPS, abuse by DFCS, adoption and safe families act, murder by cps, Title IV Funding, yvonne mason CPS Makes Matter Worse
One of the most tragic aspects of many of these cases is that the children suffer needlessly, for in their zeal to protect them against the perceived shortcomings of their natural parents, child protective services caseworkers placed them into dangerous homes that inflicted upon them precisely the injury they had hoped to prevent. In the District of Columbia, social workers removed four of Debra Hampton’s children from her home placing them in foster care. According to the testimony of a social worker, the children were removed because Mrs. Hampton had left them alone and was not properly supervising them, and her home was “generally uninhabitable.” Three months later, the foster mother left two-year-old Mykeeda Hampton at home for over ten hours. While she was out running errands, Mykeeda was beaten to death by the foster mother’s 12-year-old son. An autopsy later established that the two-year-old died of “blunt force injuries to the head, abdomen, and back, with internal hemorrhaging.” As of September 1995, several years after the incident, the case was still under litigation (District of Columbia v. Debra Ali Hampton).
In August of 1995, San Francisco officials took custody of Selena Hill a few days after her birth because of concerns that her parents, Stacey and Claudia Hill, had physically abused each other and didn’t seem capable of caring for their newborn. In September, seven-week-old Selena Hill was rushed to Children’s Hospital in Oakland with a fractured skull and other injuries that almost killed her. In their efforts to protect her from her actual parents, child welfare workers placed Selena into a foster home with a history of domestic violence. In the nine months before the infant was injured, Berkeley police had visited the residence three times after receiving reports about violent disturbances in the foster home (Ferriss, 1995).
The state of Georgia placed Clayton and Kelly Miracle in foster care with Betty and Joe Wilkins in June of 1993. Two months later paramedics would arrive at the foster home in response to a 911 call, finding Clayton barely breathing, with two large knots on his head, one in the front and one in back. Clayton died as a result of blunt force trauma to his head. The doctor who performed the autopsy testified that Clayton’s fatal injuries could not have been caused by an accidental fall and that injuries and bruising found all over Clayton’s body were consistent with battered child syndrome. Doctors also examined his sister Kelly and found the same pattern of bruising (Wilkins v State).
Categories: Abuse By Foster Parents, Abuse by CPS, adoption and safe families act Tags: Abuse by CPS, abuse by DFCS, adoption and safe families act, murder by cps, Title IV Funding, yvonne mason CPS Makes Matter Worse
Speaking Out-Foster Parents (STRANGERS)
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
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
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
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