National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
EMOTIONAL ABUSE
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In previous issue papers, we discussed the danger of physical and sexual abuse inherent in amending "reasonable efforts" and severely restricting or abolishing family preservation. But there is another danger that is even more widespread: the emotional abuse that often is an inevitable part of the investigation and placement process.
Even when foster parents do not physically or sexually abuse the children in their care, and the children do not abuse each other, the child has been taken not only from his or her parents, but often from friends, neighbors, teachers -- and even brothers and sisters.
And because the parents rarely are the monsters that critics of family preservation say they are, this can have devastating consequences for children.
Worse, the first move often is not the last. Children are bounced from foster home to foster home, emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone. As one such child put it: "I felt I was in a zoo and I was being transferred to another cage."[1]
Unfortunately, the emotional devastation of foster care sometimes is written off as mere collateral damage. The assumption is “well, at least they’re not being brutally beaten and tortured by their parents.” But, of course, few parents who lose children to foster care brutally beat and torture their children. And it is often the emotional harm of foster care that leaves the deepest scars; the ones that never heal.
A study released in 2005, based on a random sample of 659 case records and interviews with 479 foster-care survivors, documented the rotten outcomes. When compared to adults of the same age and ethnic background who did not endure foster care:
· Only 20 percent of the alumni could be said to be “doing well.” Thus, foster care failed for 80 percent.
· They have double the rate of mental illness.
· Their rate of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder was double the rate for Iraq War veterans.
· The former foster children were three times more likely to be living in poverty – and fifteen times less likely to have finished college.[2]
A 2006 study compared children placed in foster care to children left in their own homes. The children left in their own homes suffered just as much maltreatment. The overall psychological health of the two groups was the same - -before foster care.
But even though the children left in their own homes were identified by the researchers, not child protective services, so in most cases the children got no help at all, they still did better than the children placed in foster care.[3]
And then came the largest, most comprehensive comparison done to date. In a study of 15,000 cases, MIT researcher Joseph Doyle found the same thing the Minnesota researchers found: Children left in their own homes typically fared better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care – even when the birth families got only the ordinary “help” provided by child welfare agencies.[4]
Boyd A. lived in five different foster homes over five years between the ages of seven and twelve. His mother had been forced to place him in foster care. But it was not because she had beaten him, or neglected him or sexually abused him.
It happened when she was hospitalized after being beaten by Boyd's father. But when she was well, the agencies that had control over the children wouldn't give Boyd, his two brothers, or his sister back -- because they weren't satisfied with the housing his mother was able to find.
Critics of family preservation say agencies bend over backwards to keep families together. They say agencies do this because the law requires "reasonable efforts" to keep families whole. But there were no "reasonable efforts" in Boyd's case. There were no efforts at all.
Critics also say family preservation causes children to languish in foster care. In fact, as Boyd's case and many others make clear, it is the lack of family preservation that causes children to languish in foster care.
It took five years -- and a class action lawsuit -- before the family was reunited.
"The worst fear was never seeing my mother again," Boyd told a Congressional hearing. "I have nightmares. I had a nightmare that a cop came and took me back to foster care and I never got to see her again.
"It's hard for me to tell you how bad foster care is. My mother used to come visit me a lot when I was in care, and when she left, it felt like the whole world was leaving me."[5]
Here are some other voices from the system:
Anne. Nine homes in nine years: "When you spend your life going from place to place and knowing you're not going to be in any place for very long, you learn not to reach out, not to care, not to feel ... My bitterness is not that I went through what I did ... my bitterness is that I don't think it should have had to happen. There was no reason why my family's life should have been destroyed ... The people that I've seen, the kids that have emerged, [from foster care] are ... dead. Their hearts are functioning. The ol' heart's pumping the blood around. But they're basically dead inside. It's been killed. Either they had to kill it to survive physically, or somebody else killed it in them. Whatever it is that makes people human."[6]
Michael. 16 placements in six years: “In my opinion, foster care destroyed our whole sense of family in the end. We can’t sit down together and feel like siblings. … If the state had invested the same money they spent putting us in all those placements into weekly visits with our mother and had given her skill lessons, it might not have escalated to us needing to go into permanent foster care.”
Rob, Age 18: “To take a child away from his family is one of the most heartbreaking things you can do to him. Then to put him back with his family is one of the greatest things you can give him.”
Linda, Age 25: “I felt like my heart had been ripped out of me when they took us all away.”[7]
Kathy. Age 18. Grew up in foster care: "When you're in foster care, you can't find no love."[8]
Many people know about the emotional trauma of foster care, at least intellectually. But even when people know, they tend to think "Yes, but..." As in, "Yes, but, didn't we have to do this to these children because their parents are so dangerous and brutal?"
In the overwhelming majority of cases, the answer is no. Because most of the parents don't fit the stereotypes. (See Issue Paper 5).
And even when the parents have problems, helping those parents often is the best way to help the child.
In a University of Florida study of so-called “crack babies,” one group was placed in foster care, the other group with birth mothers able to care for them. After one year, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better. For the foster children, being taken from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.[9] Those infants are trying to tell us something. We owe it to them to listen.
We seem to understand the emotional trauma of being taken away from parents only when the parents are white, middle class -- and foster.
In the case of "baby Jessica" for example, a birth mother surrendered her child for adoption after having "consent" forms thrown at her right after birth, in violation of state law. She changed her mind five days later, but the foster parents stalled and stalled and stalled, dragging the case through courts in two states. They lost every time. When they finally ran out of ways to stall, two-and-a-half years had passed. But the foster parents won enormous sympathy when they condemned the birth parents for trying to take the child from "the only parents she has ever known."[10]
In contrast, because we have so stereotyped birth parents, we react with indifference or even relief when thousands of poor, often black, children are needlessly taken from the only parents they have ever known.
These problems can’t be solved by “fixing” foster care. The authors of the study cited earlier estimate that even if every problem that besets foster care were miraculously fixed tomorrow, it would reduce rotten outcomes by only 22.2 percent.[11]
And they can’t be solved by warehousing children in orphanages. As is discussed in detail in Issue Paper 15, more than a century of research shows the outcomes for orphanages are even worse than for family foster care.
The only way to fix foster care is to have less of it.
Intensive Family Preservation Services and other safe, proven programs to keep families together, are among the most promising innovations in child welfare in decades. Abandon these approaches and thousands more children will have "the whole world" taken from them.
Updated January 1, 2008
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1. Michelle Gillen, "Florida: State of Neglect," WPLG-TV, Miami, 1987. Back to Text.
2. Peter Pecora, et. al., Improving Family Foster Care: Findings from the Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study (Seattle: Casey Family Programs, 2005).
3. Catherine R. Lawrence, Elizabeth A. Carlson, Byron Egeland, “The impact of foster care on development,” Development and Psychopathology, Vol. 18, 2006, pp. 57–76.
4. Joseph J. Doyle, Jr. , “Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effect of Foster Care” American Economic Review: In Press, 2007.
5. Testimony of Boyd A., Foster Care, Adoption, and Child Welfare Reforms, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Public Assistance and Unemployment Compensation of the Committee on Ways and Means and the Select committee on Children, Youth, and Families, U.S. House of Representatives, April 13 and 28, May 12, 1988. Back to Text.
6. Personal communication. Back to Text.
7. Michael, Rob and Linda: North American Council on Adoptable Children, Promote Permanent Families: Reform Foster Care Now, Press Packet, March 12, 2007.
8. Ray Nunn (producer), "Crimes Against Children: The Failure of Foster Care," ABC News Close-Up, Aug. 30, 1988. Back to Text.
9. Kathleen Wobie, Marylou Behnke et. al., To Have and To Hold: A Descriptive Study of Custody Status Following Prenatal Exposure to Cocaine, paper presented at joint annual meeting of the American Pediatric Society and the Society for Pediatric Research, May 3, 1998.
10. Alice Bussiere, “’Baby Jessica Case Highlights Old Conflict,” Youth Law News, 14, No. 4, (July-August 1993, p.15) and Olya Thompson, “Motherhood Myopia: Blowing the DeBoer Story,” New York Newsday, Aug. 11, 1993, p.85.
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
Sunday, December 13, 2009
CHILD ABUSE AND POVERTY
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
CHILD ABUSE AND POVERTY
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It is an article of faith among "child savers" that "child abuse crosses class lines." They tell us that we are as likely to find maltreatment in rich families as in poor, but the rich can hide from authorities. But like most child saver "truisms," this one is false. Prof. Leroy Pelton of the University of Nevada – Las Vegas School of Social Work, calls it "The Myth of Classlessness."
Like the tailors in the fable of The Emperor's New Clothes, the child savers have invented a whole group of invisible, middle-class child abusers only they are wise enough to see. Of course there are some middle class child abusers. But the evidence is overwhelming that poverty is by far the most important cause of child maltreatment -- and the most important reason families end up in "the system" whether they have maltreated their children or not.
The federal government's Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3) compared families with an annual income of under $15,000 to families with an annual income over $30,000. Their findings:
Abuse is 14 times more common in poor families.
Neglect is 44 times more common in poor families.
The study emphasized that the findings "cannot be plausibly explained on the basis of the higher visibility of lower income families to community professionals."[1]
Studies in which all the subjects are equally open to public scrutiny (groups made up entirely of welfare recipients, for example) show that those who abuse tend to be the "poorest of the poor."[2]
The Myth of Classlessness doesn't just run counter to research. It runs counter to common sense. It is well-known that child abuse is linked to stress. It is equally well-known that poor families tend to be under more stress than rich families.
The gap between rich and poor is widest in the area of "neglect" -- which makes up by far the largest single category of maltreatment reports. That's because the poor are included in our neglect laws almost by definition.
What is neglect? In Ohio, it's when a child's "condition or environment is such as to warrant the state, in the interests of the child, in assuming his guardianship." In Illinois, it's failure to provide "the proper or necessary support ... for a child's well-being." In Mississippi, it's when a child is "without proper care, custody, supervision, or support." In South Dakota, it's when a child's "environment is injurious to his welfare."[3]
Such definitions make a mockery of the oft-repeated child-saver claim that "we never remove children because of poverty alone."
Imagine that you are an impoverished single mother with an eight-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son. The four-year-old is ill with a fever and you need to get him medicine. But you have no car, it's very cold, pouring rain, and it will take at least an hour to get to and from the pharmacy. You don't know most of your neighbors and those you know you have good reason not to trust. What do you?
Go without the medicine? That's "medical neglect." The child savers can take away your children for medical neglect. Bundle up the feverish four-year-old in the only, threadbare coat he's got and take him out in the cold and rain? That's "physical neglect." The child savers can take away your children for physical neglect. Leave the eight-year-old to care for the four-year-old and try desperately to get back home as soon as you can? That's "lack of supervision." The child savers can take away your children for lack of supervision.
And in every one of those cases, the child savers would say, with a straight face, that they didn't take your children "because of poverty alone."
Or consider some actual cases from around the country.
· In Orange County, California, an impoverished single mother can't find someone to watch her children while she works at night, tending a ride at a theme park. So she leaves her eight-, six-, and four-year-old children alone in the motel room that is the only housing they can afford. Someone calls child protective services. Instead of helping her with babysitting or daycare, they take away the children on the spot.[4]
· In Akron, Ohio, a grandmother raises her 11-year-old granddaughter despite being confined to a wheelchair with a lung disease. Federal budget cuts cause her to lose housekeeping help. The house becomes filthy. Instead of helping with the housekeeping, child protective services takes the granddaughter away and throws her in foster care for a month. The child still talks about how lonely and terrified she was - and about the time her foster parent took her picture and put it in a photo album under the heading: "filthy conditions."[5]
· In Los Angeles, the pipes in a grandmother's rented house burst, flooding the basement and making the home a health hazard. Instead of helping the family find another place to live, child protective workers take away the granddaughter and place her in foster care. She dies there, allegedly killed by her foster mother. The child welfare agency that would spend nothing to move the family offers $5,000 for the funeral.[6]
· In Paterson New Jersey, parents lose their three children to foster care solely because they lack adequate housing. When the children are returned, one of them shows obvious signs of abuse – bruises and new and old burn marks -- in foster care. The parents are suing. And so is their first caseworker. He never wanted the children taken away. He’d even found the family a better apartment. But that’s not what his superiors wanted. Indeed, the caseworker says that because he insisted on trying to help the family, and refused to alter his reports to make the parents look bad, he was fired. Why were his bosses so anxious to take away the children? There was a rich, suburban couple ready and waiting to adopt them. And according to the lawsuit filed by the caseworker, a supervisor told him that “children should be taken away from poor parents if they can be better off elsewhere.”[7]
It is NCCPR’s position that no child should ever be removed from the child's family for neglect alone, unless the child is suffering, or is at imminent risk of suffering, identifiable, serious harm that cannot be remediated by services.
Even when child savers don't remove the children, the "help" they offer impoverished families can be a hindrance. For such families, demanding that they drop everything to go to a counselor's office or attend a parent education class is simply adding one more burden for people who already are overwhelmed.
Step one to ensuring they can provide a safe environment for their children is offering help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty. Family preservation programs do just that, (see Issue Paper 10). And that is one reason they succeed where other efforts fail.
Updated January 1, 2008
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1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, The Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3), September, 1996, Chapter 5, pp. 2-17; Summary: Chapter 8, pp.10-11. Back to Text.
2. e.g. Bernard Horowitz and Isabel Wolock, "Material Deprivation, Child Maltreatment and Agency Interventions Among Poor Families," in Leroy Pelton, ed., The Social Context of Child Abuse and Neglect (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1981), p.138. Back to Text.
3. Ohio Statutes, Sec. 2151.04; Illinois Statutes, Chapter 23, Sec. 2053; Mississippi Statutes, Sec. 43-21-105; South Dakota Statutes, Sections 26-8-6 and 26-8-2. Back to Text.
4. Laura Saari, "Checking Up on the Children," Orange County Register, Jan. 17, 1999, p.E1. Back to Text.
5. Donna J. Robb, "Child Abuse Charge Unfair, Group Says" The Plain Dealer, March 11, 1998, p.1B. Back to Text.
6. Nicholas Riccardi, "Grandmother Blames County in Latest Death of Foster Child" Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1999, p.B1. Back to Text.
7. Jennifer V. Hughes, “Lawsuit Says DYFS Ordered False Reports,” The Record, May 4, 2001, p.L3. Back to Text.
CHILD ABUSE AND POVERTY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is an article of faith among "child savers" that "child abuse crosses class lines." They tell us that we are as likely to find maltreatment in rich families as in poor, but the rich can hide from authorities. But like most child saver "truisms," this one is false. Prof. Leroy Pelton of the University of Nevada – Las Vegas School of Social Work, calls it "The Myth of Classlessness."
Like the tailors in the fable of The Emperor's New Clothes, the child savers have invented a whole group of invisible, middle-class child abusers only they are wise enough to see. Of course there are some middle class child abusers. But the evidence is overwhelming that poverty is by far the most important cause of child maltreatment -- and the most important reason families end up in "the system" whether they have maltreated their children or not.
The federal government's Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3) compared families with an annual income of under $15,000 to families with an annual income over $30,000. Their findings:
Abuse is 14 times more common in poor families.
Neglect is 44 times more common in poor families.
The study emphasized that the findings "cannot be plausibly explained on the basis of the higher visibility of lower income families to community professionals."[1]
Studies in which all the subjects are equally open to public scrutiny (groups made up entirely of welfare recipients, for example) show that those who abuse tend to be the "poorest of the poor."[2]
The Myth of Classlessness doesn't just run counter to research. It runs counter to common sense. It is well-known that child abuse is linked to stress. It is equally well-known that poor families tend to be under more stress than rich families.
The gap between rich and poor is widest in the area of "neglect" -- which makes up by far the largest single category of maltreatment reports. That's because the poor are included in our neglect laws almost by definition.
What is neglect? In Ohio, it's when a child's "condition or environment is such as to warrant the state, in the interests of the child, in assuming his guardianship." In Illinois, it's failure to provide "the proper or necessary support ... for a child's well-being." In Mississippi, it's when a child is "without proper care, custody, supervision, or support." In South Dakota, it's when a child's "environment is injurious to his welfare."[3]
Such definitions make a mockery of the oft-repeated child-saver claim that "we never remove children because of poverty alone."
Imagine that you are an impoverished single mother with an eight-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son. The four-year-old is ill with a fever and you need to get him medicine. But you have no car, it's very cold, pouring rain, and it will take at least an hour to get to and from the pharmacy. You don't know most of your neighbors and those you know you have good reason not to trust. What do you?
Go without the medicine? That's "medical neglect." The child savers can take away your children for medical neglect. Bundle up the feverish four-year-old in the only, threadbare coat he's got and take him out in the cold and rain? That's "physical neglect." The child savers can take away your children for physical neglect. Leave the eight-year-old to care for the four-year-old and try desperately to get back home as soon as you can? That's "lack of supervision." The child savers can take away your children for lack of supervision.
And in every one of those cases, the child savers would say, with a straight face, that they didn't take your children "because of poverty alone."
Or consider some actual cases from around the country.
· In Orange County, California, an impoverished single mother can't find someone to watch her children while she works at night, tending a ride at a theme park. So she leaves her eight-, six-, and four-year-old children alone in the motel room that is the only housing they can afford. Someone calls child protective services. Instead of helping her with babysitting or daycare, they take away the children on the spot.[4]
· In Akron, Ohio, a grandmother raises her 11-year-old granddaughter despite being confined to a wheelchair with a lung disease. Federal budget cuts cause her to lose housekeeping help. The house becomes filthy. Instead of helping with the housekeeping, child protective services takes the granddaughter away and throws her in foster care for a month. The child still talks about how lonely and terrified she was - and about the time her foster parent took her picture and put it in a photo album under the heading: "filthy conditions."[5]
· In Los Angeles, the pipes in a grandmother's rented house burst, flooding the basement and making the home a health hazard. Instead of helping the family find another place to live, child protective workers take away the granddaughter and place her in foster care. She dies there, allegedly killed by her foster mother. The child welfare agency that would spend nothing to move the family offers $5,000 for the funeral.[6]
· In Paterson New Jersey, parents lose their three children to foster care solely because they lack adequate housing. When the children are returned, one of them shows obvious signs of abuse – bruises and new and old burn marks -- in foster care. The parents are suing. And so is their first caseworker. He never wanted the children taken away. He’d even found the family a better apartment. But that’s not what his superiors wanted. Indeed, the caseworker says that because he insisted on trying to help the family, and refused to alter his reports to make the parents look bad, he was fired. Why were his bosses so anxious to take away the children? There was a rich, suburban couple ready and waiting to adopt them. And according to the lawsuit filed by the caseworker, a supervisor told him that “children should be taken away from poor parents if they can be better off elsewhere.”[7]
It is NCCPR’s position that no child should ever be removed from the child's family for neglect alone, unless the child is suffering, or is at imminent risk of suffering, identifiable, serious harm that cannot be remediated by services.
Even when child savers don't remove the children, the "help" they offer impoverished families can be a hindrance. For such families, demanding that they drop everything to go to a counselor's office or attend a parent education class is simply adding one more burden for people who already are overwhelmed.
Step one to ensuring they can provide a safe environment for their children is offering help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty. Family preservation programs do just that, (see Issue Paper 10). And that is one reason they succeed where other efforts fail.
Updated January 1, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, The Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3), September, 1996, Chapter 5, pp. 2-17; Summary: Chapter 8, pp.10-11. Back to Text.
2. e.g. Bernard Horowitz and Isabel Wolock, "Material Deprivation, Child Maltreatment and Agency Interventions Among Poor Families," in Leroy Pelton, ed., The Social Context of Child Abuse and Neglect (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1981), p.138. Back to Text.
3. Ohio Statutes, Sec. 2151.04; Illinois Statutes, Chapter 23, Sec. 2053; Mississippi Statutes, Sec. 43-21-105; South Dakota Statutes, Sections 26-8-6 and 26-8-2. Back to Text.
4. Laura Saari, "Checking Up on the Children," Orange County Register, Jan. 17, 1999, p.E1. Back to Text.
5. Donna J. Robb, "Child Abuse Charge Unfair, Group Says" The Plain Dealer, March 11, 1998, p.1B. Back to Text.
6. Nicholas Riccardi, "Grandmother Blames County in Latest Death of Foster Child" Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1999, p.B1. Back to Text.
7. Jennifer V. Hughes, “Lawsuit Says DYFS Ordered False Reports,” The Record, May 4, 2001, p.L3. Back to Text.
THEY "ERRED ON THE SIDE OF THE CHILD"
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
THEY "ERRED ON THE SIDE OF THE CHILD"
SOME CASE HISTORIES
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Opponents of family preservation have a lot of great applause lines. They are for "child protection," they say. They are for "children's rights," they say. They are for "putting children first instead of families first," they say. And over and over again, they tell us they are just “erring on the side of the child.”
But in the name of "child protection" children have been beaten. In the name of "children's rights" children have been raped. And in the name of "erring on the side of the child," children have been murdered. These are the stories of some of those children:
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When Sara Eyerman of northern California was nineteen-months-old, child protective services was concerned that she wasn't growing fast enough. So they "erred on the side of the child" and placed Sara in a "specialized" foster home.
About six weeks later, Sara began running a 105 degree fever. But the "specialists" in the specialized foster home decided it was o.k. to wait two days before taking her to a doctor. On the way to the doctor's office, Sara Eyerman died of viral pneumonia.
"She should have been in the hospital two days earlier when she had a 104.8 [degree] temperature," said Sara's mother, Angie. "When she was home, she went to the emergency room if her temperature got over 101. I didn't care if they laughed at me when I got there or not. One time I took her when she was cutting a tooth ... I kept her alive for a year and seven months. They had her for six weeks and three days and she died."[1]
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Authorities in New York City thought Caprice Reid wasn't being properly supervised by her mother. So they decided to "put the child first" and put the child in foster care. They made a "child focused" decision. They "erred on the side of the child." Eleven months after placement in her third foster home, Caprice Reid, then age four, was dead.
Death did not come quickly. She was starved. She was dehydrated. And her body was covered with bruises. Police say she was tied to a chair and beaten with a stick for four days until she could no longer walk.
The foster home was licensed by one of the scores of private agencies that handle foster care for the city in the midst of a sudden shortage of foster home beds caused by the city's decision to effectively abandon family preservation. The home was licensed even though another agency had found the home unfit just a few months earlier.
About a week before she died, Caprice Reid's mother saw her daughter for the last time. The little girl clung to her mother's neck and said "Don't go, Mommy. I love you."[2]
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China Marie Davis was placed in foster care in Arizona when she was a little over a year old. Someone decided to "put the child first" and take her from her parents. They made a "child focused" decision. They "erred on the side of the child."
Ten months later, China Marie Davis' autopsy revealed two broken collarbones, a broken left arm, a broken right rib, two fractures of the left upper arm, a fracture of the right upper arm, broken left wrist, a broken left hand, a broken left forearm, a broken right wrist, a broken right forearm, fractures of both thigh bones and a compression fracture of the spine.
No one suspected anything because her foster mother always dressed her in such pretty outfits.[3]
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Somebody "erred on the side of the child" and placed Corey Greer of Treasure Island, Florida, in a foster home that would later be described by police as "filthy and overcrowded." The home was licensed for four children. By the time Corey Greer died in his crib of dehydration, 12 were living there. The foster mother was convicted of manslaughter and third degree murder.
Corey Greer might have survived the overcrowding, if only he had been white. According to a witness at the foster mother's trial, the foster mother said that touching black children "just gives me the willies." According to the witness, the foster mother referred to Corey Greer as "a big black blob."[4]
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Tina Ponce thought she was doing the right thing. She was suffering from bipolar disorder and couldn’t take care of her children. She also was too poor to get the help that a middle class family can count on. So she did the only thing she could think of: She asked the State of California to keep her children in foster care until she got better. Rather than provide Ponce with mental health services, the state “put the children first.” They made a “child-focused decision.” They “erred on the side of the child,” and gladly threw the children into foster care. “I had five kids, I was alone, I didn’t have any money, Ponce said. “I thought it would be a temporary thing. I didn’t think they would be in the system that long or it would be that hard to get them back.”
But when Ponce was better, she found it was much harder to get her children back than to get the state to take them. One day, while Ponce still was jumping through hoop after hoop in order to get her children back, she saw a television news story about a little girl who died after being left in her foster mother’s car in 100 degree heat.
It was her three-year-old daughter, Maryah.
“Even in my confusion, I never jeopardized my children’s safety or health,” Ponce said. “If I had them, this wouldn’t have happened. I thought I was doing the right thing by putting them in foster care.” [5]
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When child protective services took four-year-old Jamie Mayne from his father, they never bothered to tell his mother, Marie Panos, who was not living with the man. The mother was never accused of abusing or neglecting the boy. But after she found out about the removal two days later and offered to care for him, authorities in California refused. They decided to make a “child focused” decision, to “put the child first,” to “err on the side of the child” by placing Jamie with a stranger.
"I went up to them to get my children, and they said they’re in the system now and I had to do a case plan in order to get my kids back,” Panos said.
But a jury in Visalia, California found that while Panos was working on her “case plan,” Jamie was being tortured and murdered by his foster mother. He died of a collapsed heart, a ruptured small bowel and an abdominal hemorrhage. There were more than 40 bruises on his body. “It’s hard because I can’t pick him up and kiss him,” Panos said at the foster mother’s trial. “All I have is a headstone to look at instead of his beautiful face.”[6]
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Authorities in Massachusetts decided to "put the child first" and take seven-year-old Michelle Walton away from her parents. They made a "child focused" decision. They "erred on the side of the child."
Three years later, the body of Michelle Walton was found in the dirty hallway of her foster home, under 380 pounds of Sheetrock. Her foster mother says it was an accident. But a judge found that it was murder. And he found that Michelle was chronically sexually abused during her time in "care."
No one has been charged. According to the Boston Globe, Michelle's mother "heads to work every day with a worn Peanuts knapsack on her back crammed with her daughter's autopsy report and assorted other documents that chronicle her death and proffers them to most anyone interested. Not many are.
"'I carry 'em because it makes it easier for my sanity ... It helps me from going insane. Or maybe it just keeps her alive a little bit longer.''[7]
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Of course most foster parents don't harm the children in their care -- but most birth parents don't either. The case against family preservation has been fueled by "horror stories." It's important to remember that there are horror stories in foster care -- and family preservation has the better track record.
More examples of the harm of “erring on the side of the child” can be found in Issue Paper 6.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Kent Pollock, "The Child Protectors: Innocent Suffer in War to Protect," Sacramento Bee, August 3, 1986, p.1 Back to Text.
2. Rachel Swarns, "Agency Was Warned About Foster Mother Charged in Girl's Death," The New York Times, July 2, 1997, p.B3; Michelle McPhee et. al., "Two Charged in Foster Death" New York Daily News, July 2, 1997, p.17 Back to Text.
3. Clint Williams and Norm Parish, "Few Grown-Ups Wanted to Bother With China Marie Davis," The Arizona Republic, April 9, 1994, p.A1 Back to Text.
4. Diana Smith, "Foster Baby's Death Spurs Corrective Action by State," Associated Press Dec. 8, 1985, "Race Issue Raised in Baby's Death," United Press International, Oct. 22, 1986," Woman Faces Seven Years in Foster Child's Death," Associated Press, June 13, 1988. Back to Text.
5. Rachel Tuinstra, “Tot’s Family Still Dazed,” The (Riverside, CA) Press Enterprise, July 6, 2001, p.B1 Back to Text.
6. Jennifer M. Fitzenberger, “Visalia woman gets life for death of 4-year-old foster son,” Fresno Bee, Sept. 12, 2001, p.B1; Jennifer M. Fitzenberger,” Convicted foster mom’s ‘a good mother,’” Fresno Bee, May 24, 2001, p.A1 Back to Text.
7. Sally Jacobs, "Who Killed Michelle Walton?" The Boston Globe, December 10, 1995, p.1. Back to Text.
THEY "ERRED ON THE SIDE OF THE CHILD"
SOME CASE HISTORIES
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Opponents of family preservation have a lot of great applause lines. They are for "child protection," they say. They are for "children's rights," they say. They are for "putting children first instead of families first," they say. And over and over again, they tell us they are just “erring on the side of the child.”
But in the name of "child protection" children have been beaten. In the name of "children's rights" children have been raped. And in the name of "erring on the side of the child," children have been murdered. These are the stories of some of those children:
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When Sara Eyerman of northern California was nineteen-months-old, child protective services was concerned that she wasn't growing fast enough. So they "erred on the side of the child" and placed Sara in a "specialized" foster home.
About six weeks later, Sara began running a 105 degree fever. But the "specialists" in the specialized foster home decided it was o.k. to wait two days before taking her to a doctor. On the way to the doctor's office, Sara Eyerman died of viral pneumonia.
"She should have been in the hospital two days earlier when she had a 104.8 [degree] temperature," said Sara's mother, Angie. "When she was home, she went to the emergency room if her temperature got over 101. I didn't care if they laughed at me when I got there or not. One time I took her when she was cutting a tooth ... I kept her alive for a year and seven months. They had her for six weeks and three days and she died."[1]
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Authorities in New York City thought Caprice Reid wasn't being properly supervised by her mother. So they decided to "put the child first" and put the child in foster care. They made a "child focused" decision. They "erred on the side of the child." Eleven months after placement in her third foster home, Caprice Reid, then age four, was dead.
Death did not come quickly. She was starved. She was dehydrated. And her body was covered with bruises. Police say she was tied to a chair and beaten with a stick for four days until she could no longer walk.
The foster home was licensed by one of the scores of private agencies that handle foster care for the city in the midst of a sudden shortage of foster home beds caused by the city's decision to effectively abandon family preservation. The home was licensed even though another agency had found the home unfit just a few months earlier.
About a week before she died, Caprice Reid's mother saw her daughter for the last time. The little girl clung to her mother's neck and said "Don't go, Mommy. I love you."[2]
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China Marie Davis was placed in foster care in Arizona when she was a little over a year old. Someone decided to "put the child first" and take her from her parents. They made a "child focused" decision. They "erred on the side of the child."
Ten months later, China Marie Davis' autopsy revealed two broken collarbones, a broken left arm, a broken right rib, two fractures of the left upper arm, a fracture of the right upper arm, broken left wrist, a broken left hand, a broken left forearm, a broken right wrist, a broken right forearm, fractures of both thigh bones and a compression fracture of the spine.
No one suspected anything because her foster mother always dressed her in such pretty outfits.[3]
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Somebody "erred on the side of the child" and placed Corey Greer of Treasure Island, Florida, in a foster home that would later be described by police as "filthy and overcrowded." The home was licensed for four children. By the time Corey Greer died in his crib of dehydration, 12 were living there. The foster mother was convicted of manslaughter and third degree murder.
Corey Greer might have survived the overcrowding, if only he had been white. According to a witness at the foster mother's trial, the foster mother said that touching black children "just gives me the willies." According to the witness, the foster mother referred to Corey Greer as "a big black blob."[4]
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Tina Ponce thought she was doing the right thing. She was suffering from bipolar disorder and couldn’t take care of her children. She also was too poor to get the help that a middle class family can count on. So she did the only thing she could think of: She asked the State of California to keep her children in foster care until she got better. Rather than provide Ponce with mental health services, the state “put the children first.” They made a “child-focused decision.” They “erred on the side of the child,” and gladly threw the children into foster care. “I had five kids, I was alone, I didn’t have any money, Ponce said. “I thought it would be a temporary thing. I didn’t think they would be in the system that long or it would be that hard to get them back.”
But when Ponce was better, she found it was much harder to get her children back than to get the state to take them. One day, while Ponce still was jumping through hoop after hoop in order to get her children back, she saw a television news story about a little girl who died after being left in her foster mother’s car in 100 degree heat.
It was her three-year-old daughter, Maryah.
“Even in my confusion, I never jeopardized my children’s safety or health,” Ponce said. “If I had them, this wouldn’t have happened. I thought I was doing the right thing by putting them in foster care.” [5]
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When child protective services took four-year-old Jamie Mayne from his father, they never bothered to tell his mother, Marie Panos, who was not living with the man. The mother was never accused of abusing or neglecting the boy. But after she found out about the removal two days later and offered to care for him, authorities in California refused. They decided to make a “child focused” decision, to “put the child first,” to “err on the side of the child” by placing Jamie with a stranger.
"I went up to them to get my children, and they said they’re in the system now and I had to do a case plan in order to get my kids back,” Panos said.
But a jury in Visalia, California found that while Panos was working on her “case plan,” Jamie was being tortured and murdered by his foster mother. He died of a collapsed heart, a ruptured small bowel and an abdominal hemorrhage. There were more than 40 bruises on his body. “It’s hard because I can’t pick him up and kiss him,” Panos said at the foster mother’s trial. “All I have is a headstone to look at instead of his beautiful face.”[6]
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Authorities in Massachusetts decided to "put the child first" and take seven-year-old Michelle Walton away from her parents. They made a "child focused" decision. They "erred on the side of the child."
Three years later, the body of Michelle Walton was found in the dirty hallway of her foster home, under 380 pounds of Sheetrock. Her foster mother says it was an accident. But a judge found that it was murder. And he found that Michelle was chronically sexually abused during her time in "care."
No one has been charged. According to the Boston Globe, Michelle's mother "heads to work every day with a worn Peanuts knapsack on her back crammed with her daughter's autopsy report and assorted other documents that chronicle her death and proffers them to most anyone interested. Not many are.
"'I carry 'em because it makes it easier for my sanity ... It helps me from going insane. Or maybe it just keeps her alive a little bit longer.''[7]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course most foster parents don't harm the children in their care -- but most birth parents don't either. The case against family preservation has been fueled by "horror stories." It's important to remember that there are horror stories in foster care -- and family preservation has the better track record.
More examples of the harm of “erring on the side of the child” can be found in Issue Paper 6.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Kent Pollock, "The Child Protectors: Innocent Suffer in War to Protect," Sacramento Bee, August 3, 1986, p.1 Back to Text.
2. Rachel Swarns, "Agency Was Warned About Foster Mother Charged in Girl's Death," The New York Times, July 2, 1997, p.B3; Michelle McPhee et. al., "Two Charged in Foster Death" New York Daily News, July 2, 1997, p.17 Back to Text.
3. Clint Williams and Norm Parish, "Few Grown-Ups Wanted to Bother With China Marie Davis," The Arizona Republic, April 9, 1994, p.A1 Back to Text.
4. Diana Smith, "Foster Baby's Death Spurs Corrective Action by State," Associated Press Dec. 8, 1985, "Race Issue Raised in Baby's Death," United Press International, Oct. 22, 1986," Woman Faces Seven Years in Foster Child's Death," Associated Press, June 13, 1988. Back to Text.
5. Rachel Tuinstra, “Tot’s Family Still Dazed,” The (Riverside, CA) Press Enterprise, July 6, 2001, p.B1 Back to Text.
6. Jennifer M. Fitzenberger, “Visalia woman gets life for death of 4-year-old foster son,” Fresno Bee, Sept. 12, 2001, p.B1; Jennifer M. Fitzenberger,” Convicted foster mom’s ‘a good mother,’” Fresno Bee, May 24, 2001, p.A1 Back to Text.
7. Sally Jacobs, "Who Killed Michelle Walton?" The Boston Globe, December 10, 1995, p.1. Back to Text.
FOSTER CARE PANICS
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
FOSTER CARE PANICS
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We don't have to guess what will happen if opponents of family preservation get what they want. We don't have to guess what will happen if family preservation is effectively abandoned.
We don't have to guess, because it happened -- in Illinois in 1993, in New York City in 1996 and in Florida in 1999.
In April, 1993, three-year-old Joseph Wallace was killed by his mother. Joseph was "known to the system." "Family preservation" quickly became the scapegoat. It was attacked relentlessly by politicians and much of the media -- even though most of the programs in Illinois bore little resemblance to the effective, Homebuilders-based models used in other states (see Issue Paper 10).
As a result, workers and judges became terrified to leave or return any child home for fear of becoming the next target of politicians and the Chicago media. Almost all efforts to keep families together were effectively abandoned amid claims that such efforts contradict "child protection." Indeed, Illinois legislators added the words "best interests of the child" to their child welfare law in at least 30 different places to make sure everybody got the point.
By 1996, a child was more likely to be placed in foster care in Illinois than in any other state. But instead of saving lives, child abuse deaths went up. They soared from 78 before family preservation was abandoned to 82 the first year after, to 91 in fiscal 1997[1]. That's not surprising. The abandonment of family preservation led to a foster care panic that overwhelmed the system to the point that it created a backlog of more than 5,000 uncompleted investigations[2]. In the first two years of the panic, foster care placements the Illinois foster care population soared by 44. Child abuse deaths in foster care in Illinois went from zero in the year before the foster care panic to five in the first year afterwards -- an all-time record. [3]
The pattern showed itself in a new way in fiscal 1998, when the Illinois foster care panic finally began to abate. That year, the number of child abuse deaths finally fell below the number before the panic began. And that year also was the first year since the panic in which the total number of Illinois children in foster care actually declined.[4] The decline has continued; indeed, Illinois reversed course, embraced family preservation and cut its foster care population dramatically. And at the same time, safety outcomes have improved.[5]
But during the years family preservation was abandoned, it led to other tragedies in Illinois:
· Having supposedly "put children first," Illinois officials soon found they had no place to put children at all. So they were jammed into a hideous shelter, then overflowed into offices. Streetwise teens were thrown together with vulnerable younger children; infants were jammed into urine-soaked cribs. An 11-year-old got hold of a gun and fired it.[6]
· Children were jammed into any foster home with a bed, with little screening of foster parents or foster children. As a result, according to Benjamin Wolf of the Illinois Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Illinois foster care system became "like a laboratory experiment to produce the sexual abuse of children."
· A study by the Child Welfare Institute found that, as a result of the foster care panic, at least one third of the children now in foster care in Illinois could safely have been returned to their own homes.[7]
Abandoning family preservation took a bad system and made it, in Wolf's words, "unquestionably worse." [8]
CASE HISTORY: IN THE CHICAGO SHELTER
What was it like for children suddenly swept up in the Chicago Foster Care Panic, taken from their parents and left in the city's makeshift shelter? This account is from the Chicago Tribune
"A surly teenager with a bad attitude struts and shouts swear words a few yards away from the abused and neglected little ones, so young they can barely tell you their names ... 16-year-old Harry is boasting: 'I stole 50 cars this week!' A few yards away is 5-year-old Michael, so very scared and trying with all his might not to cry. 'I'm the big brother,' Michael explains, gently stroking the hair of Christopher, 4, who gulps heavy, sleepy breaths and sucks his thumb on a cot in a corner. ... When a visitor tried to shake the little boy's hand, he threw his arms around her, starving for a hug ...
"'I want my mom,' Michael said ..."[9]
And what about the case that started it all? What was the role of family preservation in the case of Joseph Wallace? A family preservation worker recommended that the Wallace family not be preserved -- he recommended to a judge that the child be removed. The judge agreed. The child was removed, but the records were lost when the family moved to another county. Only then was the child sent home to his death. [10]
Not only was family preservation not the cause of the Wallace death -- family preservation almost saved Joseph Wallace's life.
Other Foster Care Panics
Nearly three years later it was New York City's turn. Again, this time in late 1995, a child "known to the system" died. Again officials blamed "family preservation" - even though deaths of children previously known to the child welfare system had declined by more than 40 percent since 1991.[11] Once again, they set off a foster care panic, overwhelming the system. The result: Thousands of children were forced to sleep, often on chairs and floors, in a violence-plagued, emergency makeshift shelter created from city offices,[12] a four-year-old foster child was beaten and starved to death in a foster home opened by one private agency, apparently desperate for beds, after another had closed it down,[13] and the decline in child abuse deaths ended. Between 1996 and 1998, deaths of children previously "known to the system" increased by 50 percent.[14] Just as in Illinois, the death toll among children known to the system fell below the pre-panic level only after the panic had abated in 1999 and the City was taking away fewer children.[15] Like Illinois, New York City learned from its mistakes, reversed course, and embraced family preservation – though another high-profile case has led to backsliding, and another increase in deaths.
And then came Florida. The death of a child “known to the system” and the appointment of a state child welfare agency chief staunchly opposed to keeping families together combined to set off a foster care panic in 1999. Again the foster care population soared. And again, deaths of children “known to the system” increased, from an average of 25 per year in the four years before the Florida Foster Care Panic to an average of 32 per year in the five years since.[16]
These data don't prove that child abuse deaths always will go up when family preservation is abandoned. But the critics of family preservation premise their entire argument on the assumption that if family preservation is eliminated, or at least drastically curtailed, such deaths will decrease.
At a minimum, the results from Illinois, New York, and Florida -- particularly when compared to states like Alabama, and to what happened when Illinois and New York reversed course -- suggest that it's the people who want to abandon family preservation who have a lot of explaining to do. It's time for the burden of proof to shift from those who want to keep more children with their parents to those who want to take them away.
Updated January 1, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. State of Illinois, Department of Children and Family Services, Office of Quality Assurance, Executive Statistical Summary, January, 1998. Back to Text.
2. Sharman Stein, "DCFS Coordinator Puts Family Values to Work," Chicago Tribune, March 8, 1995. Back to Text.
3. Peter Kendall and Terry Wilson, "Boy's Death Casts Shadow on Foster Care," Chicago Tribune, Feb.28, 1995. Back to Text.
FOSTER CARE PANICS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We don't have to guess what will happen if opponents of family preservation get what they want. We don't have to guess what will happen if family preservation is effectively abandoned.
We don't have to guess, because it happened -- in Illinois in 1993, in New York City in 1996 and in Florida in 1999.
In April, 1993, three-year-old Joseph Wallace was killed by his mother. Joseph was "known to the system." "Family preservation" quickly became the scapegoat. It was attacked relentlessly by politicians and much of the media -- even though most of the programs in Illinois bore little resemblance to the effective, Homebuilders-based models used in other states (see Issue Paper 10).
As a result, workers and judges became terrified to leave or return any child home for fear of becoming the next target of politicians and the Chicago media. Almost all efforts to keep families together were effectively abandoned amid claims that such efforts contradict "child protection." Indeed, Illinois legislators added the words "best interests of the child" to their child welfare law in at least 30 different places to make sure everybody got the point.
By 1996, a child was more likely to be placed in foster care in Illinois than in any other state. But instead of saving lives, child abuse deaths went up. They soared from 78 before family preservation was abandoned to 82 the first year after, to 91 in fiscal 1997[1]. That's not surprising. The abandonment of family preservation led to a foster care panic that overwhelmed the system to the point that it created a backlog of more than 5,000 uncompleted investigations[2]. In the first two years of the panic, foster care placements the Illinois foster care population soared by 44. Child abuse deaths in foster care in Illinois went from zero in the year before the foster care panic to five in the first year afterwards -- an all-time record. [3]
The pattern showed itself in a new way in fiscal 1998, when the Illinois foster care panic finally began to abate. That year, the number of child abuse deaths finally fell below the number before the panic began. And that year also was the first year since the panic in which the total number of Illinois children in foster care actually declined.[4] The decline has continued; indeed, Illinois reversed course, embraced family preservation and cut its foster care population dramatically. And at the same time, safety outcomes have improved.[5]
But during the years family preservation was abandoned, it led to other tragedies in Illinois:
· Having supposedly "put children first," Illinois officials soon found they had no place to put children at all. So they were jammed into a hideous shelter, then overflowed into offices. Streetwise teens were thrown together with vulnerable younger children; infants were jammed into urine-soaked cribs. An 11-year-old got hold of a gun and fired it.[6]
· Children were jammed into any foster home with a bed, with little screening of foster parents or foster children. As a result, according to Benjamin Wolf of the Illinois Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Illinois foster care system became "like a laboratory experiment to produce the sexual abuse of children."
· A study by the Child Welfare Institute found that, as a result of the foster care panic, at least one third of the children now in foster care in Illinois could safely have been returned to their own homes.[7]
Abandoning family preservation took a bad system and made it, in Wolf's words, "unquestionably worse." [8]
CASE HISTORY: IN THE CHICAGO SHELTER
What was it like for children suddenly swept up in the Chicago Foster Care Panic, taken from their parents and left in the city's makeshift shelter? This account is from the Chicago Tribune
"A surly teenager with a bad attitude struts and shouts swear words a few yards away from the abused and neglected little ones, so young they can barely tell you their names ... 16-year-old Harry is boasting: 'I stole 50 cars this week!' A few yards away is 5-year-old Michael, so very scared and trying with all his might not to cry. 'I'm the big brother,' Michael explains, gently stroking the hair of Christopher, 4, who gulps heavy, sleepy breaths and sucks his thumb on a cot in a corner. ... When a visitor tried to shake the little boy's hand, he threw his arms around her, starving for a hug ...
"'I want my mom,' Michael said ..."[9]
And what about the case that started it all? What was the role of family preservation in the case of Joseph Wallace? A family preservation worker recommended that the Wallace family not be preserved -- he recommended to a judge that the child be removed. The judge agreed. The child was removed, but the records were lost when the family moved to another county. Only then was the child sent home to his death. [10]
Not only was family preservation not the cause of the Wallace death -- family preservation almost saved Joseph Wallace's life.
Other Foster Care Panics
Nearly three years later it was New York City's turn. Again, this time in late 1995, a child "known to the system" died. Again officials blamed "family preservation" - even though deaths of children previously known to the child welfare system had declined by more than 40 percent since 1991.[11] Once again, they set off a foster care panic, overwhelming the system. The result: Thousands of children were forced to sleep, often on chairs and floors, in a violence-plagued, emergency makeshift shelter created from city offices,[12] a four-year-old foster child was beaten and starved to death in a foster home opened by one private agency, apparently desperate for beds, after another had closed it down,[13] and the decline in child abuse deaths ended. Between 1996 and 1998, deaths of children previously "known to the system" increased by 50 percent.[14] Just as in Illinois, the death toll among children known to the system fell below the pre-panic level only after the panic had abated in 1999 and the City was taking away fewer children.[15] Like Illinois, New York City learned from its mistakes, reversed course, and embraced family preservation – though another high-profile case has led to backsliding, and another increase in deaths.
And then came Florida. The death of a child “known to the system” and the appointment of a state child welfare agency chief staunchly opposed to keeping families together combined to set off a foster care panic in 1999. Again the foster care population soared. And again, deaths of children “known to the system” increased, from an average of 25 per year in the four years before the Florida Foster Care Panic to an average of 32 per year in the five years since.[16]
These data don't prove that child abuse deaths always will go up when family preservation is abandoned. But the critics of family preservation premise their entire argument on the assumption that if family preservation is eliminated, or at least drastically curtailed, such deaths will decrease.
At a minimum, the results from Illinois, New York, and Florida -- particularly when compared to states like Alabama, and to what happened when Illinois and New York reversed course -- suggest that it's the people who want to abandon family preservation who have a lot of explaining to do. It's time for the burden of proof to shift from those who want to keep more children with their parents to those who want to take them away.
Updated January 1, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. State of Illinois, Department of Children and Family Services, Office of Quality Assurance, Executive Statistical Summary, January, 1998. Back to Text.
2. Sharman Stein, "DCFS Coordinator Puts Family Values to Work," Chicago Tribune, March 8, 1995. Back to Text.
3. Peter Kendall and Terry Wilson, "Boy's Death Casts Shadow on Foster Care," Chicago Tribune, Feb.28, 1995. Back to Text.
NCCPR FOSTER CARE VS. FAMILY PRESERVATION: THE TRACK RECORD ON SAFETY AND WELL-BEING
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
At the heart of the criticism of family preservation is one overriding assumption: If you remove a child from the home, the child will be safe. If you leave a child at home the child is at risk. In fact, there is risk in either direction, but real family preservation programs have a better record for safety than foster care.
And even when families don’t get special help, two major new studies have found that children left in their own homes typically do better than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.
To understand why, one must first understand one fundamental fact about foster care: It's not safe. Here's how we know:
National data on child abuse fatalities show that a child is nearly twice as likely to die of abuse in foster care as in the general population. [1]
A study of reported abuse in Baltimore, found the rate of "substantiated" cases of sexual abuse in foster care more than four times higher than the rate in the general population.[2] Using the same methodology, an Indiana study found three times more physical abuse and twice the rate of sexual abuse in foster homes than in the general population. In group homes there was more than ten times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse as in the general population[2], in part because so many children in the homes abused each other.[3]
Those studies deal only with reported maltreatment. The actual amount of abuse in foster care is likely to be far higher, since agencies have a special incentive not to investigate such reports, since they are, in effect, investigating themselves.
· A study of foster children in Oregon and Washington State found that nearly one third reported being abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home.[4]
· In a study of investigations of alleged abuse in New Jersey foster homes, the researchers found a lack of “anything approaching reasonable professional judgment” and concluded that “no assurances can be given” that any New Jersey foster child is safe.[5]
· A lawyer who represents children in Broward County, Florida, says in a sworn affidavit that over a period of just 18 months he was made personally aware of 50 instances of child-on-child sexual abuse involving more than 100 Broward County foster children. The official number during this same period: Seven - because until what the lawyer called "an epidemic of child-on-child sexual abuse" was exposed, the child abuse hotline didn't accept reports of such abuse.[6]
· Another Baltimore study, this one examining case records, found abuse in 28 percent of the foster homes studied -- more than one in four.[7]
· A study of cases in Fulton and DeKalb Counties in Georgia found that among children whose case goal was adoption, 34 percent had experienced abuse, neglect, or other harmful conditions. For those children who had recently entered the system, 15 percent had experienced abuse, neglect or other harmful conditions in just one year.[8]
· Even what is said to be a model foster care program, where caseloads are kept low and workers and foster parents get special training, is not immune. When alumni of the Casey Family Program were interviewed, 24 percent of the girls said they were victims of actual or attempted sexual abuse in their foster homes. Furthermore, this study asked only about abuse in the one foster home the children had been in the longest. A child who had been moved from a foster home precisely because she had been abused there after only a short stay would not even be counted.[9] Officials at the program say they have since lowered the rate of all forms of abuse to "only" 12 percent, but this is based on an in-house survey of the program's own caseworkers, not outside interviews with the children themselves.[10]
This does not mean that all, or even many, foster parents are abusive. The overwhelming majority do the best they can for the children in their care -- like the overwhelming majority of parents, period. But the abusive minority is large enough to cause serious concern. And abuse in foster care does not always mean abuse by foster parents. As happened so often during the Illinois Foster Care Panic for example (see Issue Paper 2), and as the Indiana study shows, it can be caused by foster children abusing each other.
Compare the record of foster care to the record of family preservation.
The original Homebuilders program (See Issue Paper 10) has served 12,000 families since 1982. No child has ever died during a Homebuilders intervention, and only one child has ever died afterwards, more than two decades ago.[11]
Michigan has the nation's largest family preservation program. The program rigorously follows the Homebuilders model (see Issue Paper 10).
Since 1988, the Michigan family preservation program has served more than 100,000 children. During the first two years, two children died during the intervention. In nearly two decades since, there has not been a single fatality.[12] In contrast, when Illinois effectively abandoned family preservation, there were five child abuse deaths in foster care in just one year. That’s one reason the state subsequently reversed course.
Several states and localities that have bucked the national trend and embraced safe, proven programs to keep families together also have improved child safety.
One state that is leading the nation in reforming child welfare is the last state many people might expect: Alabama.
But Alabama is implementing a consent decree (R.C. v. Hornsby) resulting from a federal lawsuit requiring it to reframe its whole approach to child welfare by following family preservation principles.
Even with an increase in removals in recent years due to methamphetamine, Alabama still removes children at one of the lowest rates in the nation. And in 2006, removals even began to decline again.[13] But re-abuse of children left in their own homes has been cut by 60 percent – to less than half the national average.[14]
An independent, court-appointed monitor concluded that children in Alabama are safer now than before the system switched to a family preservation model. The monitor wrote that "the data strongly support the conclusion that children and families are safer in counties that have implemented the R.C. reforms."[15]
Illinois also has improved child safety, even as it dramatically reduced its foster care population. (See Issue Paper 2).
Well-being
Confronted with the fact that, for most children, family preservation is, in fact, the safer option, child savers sometimes seek to change the subject to children’s overall well-being. Maybe children are seriously safe, but they couldn’t really be doing better in life when left with birth parents, could they?
They could, and they do.
The largest study ever to try to measure well-being compared outcomes for more than 15,000 children who came to the attention of child protective services from 1990 through mid-2003. The study looked at teen pregnancy, juvenile arrests, and youth unemployment.
On every measure, children left with their own homes did better than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care. And that was true even though birth families generally got only the conventional “help” offered by child welfare agencies, not the exemplary interventions supported by NCCPR.[16]
When University of Minnesota researchers compared children left in their own homes with comparably maltreated children placed in foster care, they too found that the children left in their own homes did better, even when the birth families got little or no help at all.[17]
Why it works:
There are three primary reasons for the better safety record of communities that embrace safe, proven programs to keep families together:
· Most of the parents caught in the net of child protective services are not who most people think they are. (See Issue Paper 5).
· When child welfare systems take family preservation seriously, foster care populations stabilize or decline. Workers have more time to find the children who really do need to be placed in foster care. (See Issue Paper 8).
· Family preservation workers see families in many different settings for many hours at a time. Because of that, and because they are usually better trained than child protective workers they are far more likely than conventional child protective workers to know when a family can't be preserved -- and contrary to stereotype, they do place child safety first. (See Issue Paper 8)
As for the better well-being for children left in their own homes, that is no testament to typical services for families. Rather it is evidence of just how toxic an intervention it really is to tear a child from everyone she or he knows and loves. Anything that toxic should be used sparingly and in very small doses.
Updated November 4, 2007
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1. About 0.73 percent of American children are in foster care, but 1.22 percent of child abuse fatalities are in foster care. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth and Families. Child Maltreatment 2002 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001). See chart in Chapter Four, also available online Back to Text.
2. Mary I. Benedict and Susan Zuravin, Factors Associated With Child Maltreatment by Family Foster Care Providers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, June 30, 1992) charts, pp. 28,30. Back to Text.
3. J William Spencer and Dean D. Kundsen, "Out of Home Maltreatment: An Analysis of Risk in Various Settings for Children," Children And Youth Services Review Vol. 14, pp. 485-492, 1992. Back to Text.
4. Leslie Kaufman and Richard Lezin Jones, “Report finds flaws in inquiries on foster abuse in New Jersey.” The New York Times, May 23, 2003. Back to Text.
5. Affidavit of David S. Bazerman, Esq, Ward v. Feaver, Case# 98-7137, United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Fort Lauderdale Division, Dec. 16, 1998, p.4. Back to Text.
6. Children’s Rights, Inc., “Expert research report finds children still unsafe in Fulton and Dekalb foster care,” Press release, November 5, 2004.
7. Memorandum and Order of Judge Joseph G. Howard, L.J. v. Massinga, Civil No. JH-84-4409, United States District Court for the District of Maryland, July 27, 1987. Back to Text.
8. Peter Pecora, et. al., Improving Family Foster Care: Findings from the Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study (Seattle: Casey Family Programs, 2005).
9. David Fanshel, et. al., Foster Children in a Life Course Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 90. Back to Text.
10. How Are The Children Doing? Assessing Youth Outcomes in Family Foster Care. (Seattle: Casey Family Program, 1998). Back to Text.
11. Personal communication from Charlotte Booth, Executive Director, Homebuilders. Even in the one case in which a child died after the intervention, in 1987, Homebuilders had warned that the child was in danger and been ignored. Back to Text.
12. Personal Communication, Susan Kelly, former director of family preservation services, Michigan Department of Social Services. Back to Text.
13. In 2006, the most recent year for which data are available, Alabama removed 15.5 children for every thousand impoverished children. The national average was 23.5. Back to Text.
14. Erik Eckholm , “Once Woeful, Alabama Is Model in Child Welfare,” The New York Times, August 20, 2005.
15. Ivor D. Groves, System of Care Implementation: Performance, Outcomes, and Compliance, March, 1996, Executive Summary, p.3. Back to Text.
16. Joseph J. Doyle, Jr. , “Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effect of Foster Care” American Economic Review: In Press, 2007. This study is available online at http://www.mit.edu/~jjdoyle/doyle_fosterlt_march07_aer.pdf
17. Byron Egeland, et. al., “The impact of foster care on development” Development and Psychopathology, (Vol. 18, 2006, pp. 57–76).
http://www.nccpr.org/newissues/1.html
At the heart of the criticism of family preservation is one overriding assumption: If you remove a child from the home, the child will be safe. If you leave a child at home the child is at risk. In fact, there is risk in either direction, but real family preservation programs have a better record for safety than foster care.
And even when families don’t get special help, two major new studies have found that children left in their own homes typically do better than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.
To understand why, one must first understand one fundamental fact about foster care: It's not safe. Here's how we know:
National data on child abuse fatalities show that a child is nearly twice as likely to die of abuse in foster care as in the general population. [1]
A study of reported abuse in Baltimore, found the rate of "substantiated" cases of sexual abuse in foster care more than four times higher than the rate in the general population.[2] Using the same methodology, an Indiana study found three times more physical abuse and twice the rate of sexual abuse in foster homes than in the general population. In group homes there was more than ten times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse as in the general population[2], in part because so many children in the homes abused each other.[3]
Those studies deal only with reported maltreatment. The actual amount of abuse in foster care is likely to be far higher, since agencies have a special incentive not to investigate such reports, since they are, in effect, investigating themselves.
· A study of foster children in Oregon and Washington State found that nearly one third reported being abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home.[4]
· In a study of investigations of alleged abuse in New Jersey foster homes, the researchers found a lack of “anything approaching reasonable professional judgment” and concluded that “no assurances can be given” that any New Jersey foster child is safe.[5]
· A lawyer who represents children in Broward County, Florida, says in a sworn affidavit that over a period of just 18 months he was made personally aware of 50 instances of child-on-child sexual abuse involving more than 100 Broward County foster children. The official number during this same period: Seven - because until what the lawyer called "an epidemic of child-on-child sexual abuse" was exposed, the child abuse hotline didn't accept reports of such abuse.[6]
· Another Baltimore study, this one examining case records, found abuse in 28 percent of the foster homes studied -- more than one in four.[7]
· A study of cases in Fulton and DeKalb Counties in Georgia found that among children whose case goal was adoption, 34 percent had experienced abuse, neglect, or other harmful conditions. For those children who had recently entered the system, 15 percent had experienced abuse, neglect or other harmful conditions in just one year.[8]
· Even what is said to be a model foster care program, where caseloads are kept low and workers and foster parents get special training, is not immune. When alumni of the Casey Family Program were interviewed, 24 percent of the girls said they were victims of actual or attempted sexual abuse in their foster homes. Furthermore, this study asked only about abuse in the one foster home the children had been in the longest. A child who had been moved from a foster home precisely because she had been abused there after only a short stay would not even be counted.[9] Officials at the program say they have since lowered the rate of all forms of abuse to "only" 12 percent, but this is based on an in-house survey of the program's own caseworkers, not outside interviews with the children themselves.[10]
This does not mean that all, or even many, foster parents are abusive. The overwhelming majority do the best they can for the children in their care -- like the overwhelming majority of parents, period. But the abusive minority is large enough to cause serious concern. And abuse in foster care does not always mean abuse by foster parents. As happened so often during the Illinois Foster Care Panic for example (see Issue Paper 2), and as the Indiana study shows, it can be caused by foster children abusing each other.
Compare the record of foster care to the record of family preservation.
The original Homebuilders program (See Issue Paper 10) has served 12,000 families since 1982. No child has ever died during a Homebuilders intervention, and only one child has ever died afterwards, more than two decades ago.[11]
Michigan has the nation's largest family preservation program. The program rigorously follows the Homebuilders model (see Issue Paper 10).
Since 1988, the Michigan family preservation program has served more than 100,000 children. During the first two years, two children died during the intervention. In nearly two decades since, there has not been a single fatality.[12] In contrast, when Illinois effectively abandoned family preservation, there were five child abuse deaths in foster care in just one year. That’s one reason the state subsequently reversed course.
Several states and localities that have bucked the national trend and embraced safe, proven programs to keep families together also have improved child safety.
One state that is leading the nation in reforming child welfare is the last state many people might expect: Alabama.
But Alabama is implementing a consent decree (R.C. v. Hornsby) resulting from a federal lawsuit requiring it to reframe its whole approach to child welfare by following family preservation principles.
Even with an increase in removals in recent years due to methamphetamine, Alabama still removes children at one of the lowest rates in the nation. And in 2006, removals even began to decline again.[13] But re-abuse of children left in their own homes has been cut by 60 percent – to less than half the national average.[14]
An independent, court-appointed monitor concluded that children in Alabama are safer now than before the system switched to a family preservation model. The monitor wrote that "the data strongly support the conclusion that children and families are safer in counties that have implemented the R.C. reforms."[15]
Illinois also has improved child safety, even as it dramatically reduced its foster care population. (See Issue Paper 2).
Well-being
Confronted with the fact that, for most children, family preservation is, in fact, the safer option, child savers sometimes seek to change the subject to children’s overall well-being. Maybe children are seriously safe, but they couldn’t really be doing better in life when left with birth parents, could they?
They could, and they do.
The largest study ever to try to measure well-being compared outcomes for more than 15,000 children who came to the attention of child protective services from 1990 through mid-2003. The study looked at teen pregnancy, juvenile arrests, and youth unemployment.
On every measure, children left with their own homes did better than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care. And that was true even though birth families generally got only the conventional “help” offered by child welfare agencies, not the exemplary interventions supported by NCCPR.[16]
When University of Minnesota researchers compared children left in their own homes with comparably maltreated children placed in foster care, they too found that the children left in their own homes did better, even when the birth families got little or no help at all.[17]
Why it works:
There are three primary reasons for the better safety record of communities that embrace safe, proven programs to keep families together:
· Most of the parents caught in the net of child protective services are not who most people think they are. (See Issue Paper 5).
· When child welfare systems take family preservation seriously, foster care populations stabilize or decline. Workers have more time to find the children who really do need to be placed in foster care. (See Issue Paper 8).
· Family preservation workers see families in many different settings for many hours at a time. Because of that, and because they are usually better trained than child protective workers they are far more likely than conventional child protective workers to know when a family can't be preserved -- and contrary to stereotype, they do place child safety first. (See Issue Paper 8)
As for the better well-being for children left in their own homes, that is no testament to typical services for families. Rather it is evidence of just how toxic an intervention it really is to tear a child from everyone she or he knows and loves. Anything that toxic should be used sparingly and in very small doses.
Updated November 4, 2007
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1. About 0.73 percent of American children are in foster care, but 1.22 percent of child abuse fatalities are in foster care. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth and Families. Child Maltreatment 2002 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001). See chart in Chapter Four, also available online Back to Text.
2. Mary I. Benedict and Susan Zuravin, Factors Associated With Child Maltreatment by Family Foster Care Providers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, June 30, 1992) charts, pp. 28,30. Back to Text.
3. J William Spencer and Dean D. Kundsen, "Out of Home Maltreatment: An Analysis of Risk in Various Settings for Children," Children And Youth Services Review Vol. 14, pp. 485-492, 1992. Back to Text.
4. Leslie Kaufman and Richard Lezin Jones, “Report finds flaws in inquiries on foster abuse in New Jersey.” The New York Times, May 23, 2003. Back to Text.
5. Affidavit of David S. Bazerman, Esq, Ward v. Feaver, Case# 98-7137, United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Fort Lauderdale Division, Dec. 16, 1998, p.4. Back to Text.
6. Children’s Rights, Inc., “Expert research report finds children still unsafe in Fulton and Dekalb foster care,” Press release, November 5, 2004.
7. Memorandum and Order of Judge Joseph G. Howard, L.J. v. Massinga, Civil No. JH-84-4409, United States District Court for the District of Maryland, July 27, 1987. Back to Text.
8. Peter Pecora, et. al., Improving Family Foster Care: Findings from the Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study (Seattle: Casey Family Programs, 2005).
9. David Fanshel, et. al., Foster Children in a Life Course Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 90. Back to Text.
10. How Are The Children Doing? Assessing Youth Outcomes in Family Foster Care. (Seattle: Casey Family Program, 1998). Back to Text.
11. Personal communication from Charlotte Booth, Executive Director, Homebuilders. Even in the one case in which a child died after the intervention, in 1987, Homebuilders had warned that the child was in danger and been ignored. Back to Text.
12. Personal Communication, Susan Kelly, former director of family preservation services, Michigan Department of Social Services. Back to Text.
13. In 2006, the most recent year for which data are available, Alabama removed 15.5 children for every thousand impoverished children. The national average was 23.5. Back to Text.
14. Erik Eckholm , “Once Woeful, Alabama Is Model in Child Welfare,” The New York Times, August 20, 2005.
15. Ivor D. Groves, System of Care Implementation: Performance, Outcomes, and Compliance, March, 1996, Executive Summary, p.3. Back to Text.
16. Joseph J. Doyle, Jr. , “Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effect of Foster Care” American Economic Review: In Press, 2007. This study is available online at http://www.mit.edu/~jjdoyle/doyle_fosterlt_march07_aer.pdf
17. Byron Egeland, et. al., “The impact of foster care on development” Development and Psychopathology, (Vol. 18, 2006, pp. 57–76).
http://www.nccpr.org/newissues/1.html
NCCPR-Family Preservation IS Safer than Foster Care
THE NCCPR QUICK READ:
Child Welfare In America – An Overview
Family preservation is SAFER than foster care.
The failings of America’s child welfare system can be summed up by the very rationalization often used to justify the way it works today, an approach that can be boiled down to “take the child and run.” You’ve probably heard it many times: Sure adults may suffer when their children are needlessly taken away, but, it is claimed, we have to “err on the side of the child.” In fact, there probably is no phrase in the child welfare lexicon that has done more harm to children than “err on the side of the child.”
· When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates. For a young enough child it can be an experience akin to a kidnapping. Other children feel they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. One recent study of foster care “alumni” found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be “doing well.” (See our publication, 80 Percent Failure) How can throwing children into a system which churns out walking wounded four times out of five be “erring on the side of the child?”
A second study, of 15,000 cases, is even more devastating. That study found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help fared better, on average, than comparably- maltreated children placed in foster care. (See our publication, The Evidence is In.) So whenever anyone tells you that rushing to tear children from their parents is “erring on the side of the child” please remember the 15,000 children who would gladly tell you otherwise if they could.
· All that harm can occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population. (For details, see NCCPR’s Issue Papers.) That same alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they’d been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. (The study didn’t even ask about one of the most common forms of abuse in foster care, foster children abusing each other). Switching to orphanages won’t help -- the record of institutions is even worse.
Furthermore, the more a foster care system is overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be there, the less safe it becomes, as agencies are tempted to overcrowd foster homes and lower standards for foster parents. If a child is taken from a perfectly safe home only to be beaten, raped or killed in foster care, how is that “erring on the side of the child”?
· But even that isn’t the worst of it. Everyone knows how badly caseworkers are overwhelmed. They often make bad decisions in both directions – leaving some children in dangerous homes, even as more children are taken from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of services. The more that workers are overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger. So they make even more mistakes in both directions. That is almost always the real explanation for the horror-story cases that make headlines.
None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. Rather, it means that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that must be used sparingly and in small doses. But for decades, America’s child welfare systems have prescribed mega-doses of foster care.
The only systems that succeed emphasize family preservation
● Thanks to a class-action lawsuit, Alabama is rebuilding its entire child welfare system to emphasize keeping families together. Alabama takes away children at one of the lowest rates in the
nation. But the state has cut the rate of reabuse of children left in their own homes in half, and the
independent, court-appointed monitor who oversaw the lawsuit found that children are safer now than they were before the changes. (See our Issue Papers and this New York Times story about the Alabama reforms.)
● That’s also the lesson from Illinois. A decade ago, at any one time, more than 50,000 children were trapped in all forms of substitute care. Today the number is under 17,000. Illinois takes away children at an even lower rate than Alabama. And in Illinois, as in Alabama, independent court-appointed monitors have found that, as the number of children taken away has declined, child safety has improved.
Why it works
Contrary to the common stereotype, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more common are cases in which a family’s poverty has been confused with child “neglect.” Several studies have found that 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing. And single parents, desperate to keep their low-wage jobs when the sitter doesn’t show may have to choose between staying home and getting fired, or going to work and having their children taken on “lack of supervision” charges. (See NCCPR Issue Papers 5 and 6.)
Other cases fall between the extremes, the parents neither all victim nor all villain. What these cases have in common is the fact that there are a wide variety of proven programs that can keep these children in their own homes, and do it with a far better track record for safety than foster care. And all of the problems are compounded by pervasive racial bias. (See NCCPR Issue Paper 7.)
Some of those “in-between cases” involve drug abuse. And that raises another question: Why even bother with parents – usually mothers -- in these cases? But the reason to “bother” is not for the sake of the parents, but for their children.
University of Florida Medical Center researchers studied two groups of infants born with cocaine in their systems. One group was placed in foster care, the other with birth mothers able to care for them.
After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better. For the foster children, being taken from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. (See Issue Paper 13.)
It is extremely difficult to take a swing at “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. If we really believe all the rhetoric about putting the needs of children first, then we need to put those needs ahead of everything – including how we may feel about their parents. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with addicts – it does mean that drug treatment for the parent almost always is a better first choice than foster care for the child.
For more on what works, see NCCPR’s publication Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right.
But services are no substitute for due process
The normal protections of due process of law simply don’t apply in child welfare proceedings. Children can be stripsearched – and seized – without a warrant. Children can be taken solely on the authority of a caseworker without a hearing beforehand. At the hearing afterwards, there is no guarantee of counsel for the indigent, and usually no effective counsel at all. The standard of proof is no higher than that used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender. Once again, the problem with all this is not the harm to parents – rather the harm is to children needlessly trapped in foster care. For more on this see NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda.
Child Welfare In America – An Overview
Family preservation is SAFER than foster care.
The failings of America’s child welfare system can be summed up by the very rationalization often used to justify the way it works today, an approach that can be boiled down to “take the child and run.” You’ve probably heard it many times: Sure adults may suffer when their children are needlessly taken away, but, it is claimed, we have to “err on the side of the child.” In fact, there probably is no phrase in the child welfare lexicon that has done more harm to children than “err on the side of the child.”
· When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates. For a young enough child it can be an experience akin to a kidnapping. Other children feel they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. One recent study of foster care “alumni” found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be “doing well.” (See our publication, 80 Percent Failure) How can throwing children into a system which churns out walking wounded four times out of five be “erring on the side of the child?”
A second study, of 15,000 cases, is even more devastating. That study found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help fared better, on average, than comparably- maltreated children placed in foster care. (See our publication, The Evidence is In.) So whenever anyone tells you that rushing to tear children from their parents is “erring on the side of the child” please remember the 15,000 children who would gladly tell you otherwise if they could.
· All that harm can occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population. (For details, see NCCPR’s Issue Papers.) That same alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they’d been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. (The study didn’t even ask about one of the most common forms of abuse in foster care, foster children abusing each other). Switching to orphanages won’t help -- the record of institutions is even worse.
Furthermore, the more a foster care system is overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be there, the less safe it becomes, as agencies are tempted to overcrowd foster homes and lower standards for foster parents. If a child is taken from a perfectly safe home only to be beaten, raped or killed in foster care, how is that “erring on the side of the child”?
· But even that isn’t the worst of it. Everyone knows how badly caseworkers are overwhelmed. They often make bad decisions in both directions – leaving some children in dangerous homes, even as more children are taken from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of services. The more that workers are overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger. So they make even more mistakes in both directions. That is almost always the real explanation for the horror-story cases that make headlines.
None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. Rather, it means that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that must be used sparingly and in small doses. But for decades, America’s child welfare systems have prescribed mega-doses of foster care.
The only systems that succeed emphasize family preservation
● Thanks to a class-action lawsuit, Alabama is rebuilding its entire child welfare system to emphasize keeping families together. Alabama takes away children at one of the lowest rates in the
nation. But the state has cut the rate of reabuse of children left in their own homes in half, and the
independent, court-appointed monitor who oversaw the lawsuit found that children are safer now than they were before the changes. (See our Issue Papers and this New York Times story about the Alabama reforms.)
● That’s also the lesson from Illinois. A decade ago, at any one time, more than 50,000 children were trapped in all forms of substitute care. Today the number is under 17,000. Illinois takes away children at an even lower rate than Alabama. And in Illinois, as in Alabama, independent court-appointed monitors have found that, as the number of children taken away has declined, child safety has improved.
Why it works
Contrary to the common stereotype, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more common are cases in which a family’s poverty has been confused with child “neglect.” Several studies have found that 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing. And single parents, desperate to keep their low-wage jobs when the sitter doesn’t show may have to choose between staying home and getting fired, or going to work and having their children taken on “lack of supervision” charges. (See NCCPR Issue Papers 5 and 6.)
Other cases fall between the extremes, the parents neither all victim nor all villain. What these cases have in common is the fact that there are a wide variety of proven programs that can keep these children in their own homes, and do it with a far better track record for safety than foster care. And all of the problems are compounded by pervasive racial bias. (See NCCPR Issue Paper 7.)
Some of those “in-between cases” involve drug abuse. And that raises another question: Why even bother with parents – usually mothers -- in these cases? But the reason to “bother” is not for the sake of the parents, but for their children.
University of Florida Medical Center researchers studied two groups of infants born with cocaine in their systems. One group was placed in foster care, the other with birth mothers able to care for them.
After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better. For the foster children, being taken from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. (See Issue Paper 13.)
It is extremely difficult to take a swing at “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. If we really believe all the rhetoric about putting the needs of children first, then we need to put those needs ahead of everything – including how we may feel about their parents. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with addicts – it does mean that drug treatment for the parent almost always is a better first choice than foster care for the child.
For more on what works, see NCCPR’s publication Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right.
But services are no substitute for due process
The normal protections of due process of law simply don’t apply in child welfare proceedings. Children can be stripsearched – and seized – without a warrant. Children can be taken solely on the authority of a caseworker without a hearing beforehand. At the hearing afterwards, there is no guarantee of counsel for the indigent, and usually no effective counsel at all. The standard of proof is no higher than that used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender. Once again, the problem with all this is not the harm to parents – rather the harm is to children needlessly trapped in foster care. For more on this see NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda.
THE EVIDENCE IS IN Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va. 22314
(703) 212-2006 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
THE EVIDENCE IS IN
Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together
The Definitive Studies
NCCPR long has argued that many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they had remained with their own families and those families had been given the right kinds of help.
Turns out that’s not quite right.
In fact, many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they remained with their own families even if those families got only the typical help (which tends to be little help, wrong help, or no help) commonly offered by child welfare agencies.
That’s the message from the largest studies ever undertaken to compare the impact on children of foster care versus keeping comparably maltreated children with their own families. The study was the subject of a front-page story in USA Today. The full study is available here.
The first study, published in 2007, looked at outcomes for more than 15,000 children. It compared foster children not to the general population but to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. The result: On measure after measure the children left in their own homes do better.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care.
One year later, the same researcher published another study, this time of 23,000 cases. Again he compared foster children to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. This time he looked at which children were more likely to be arrested as adults. Once again, the children left in their own homes fared better than the foster children.
Implications
● The studies use the term “foster care” generically; they include children placed in any form of substitute care. That’s important because whenever information like this comes out, people who want to warehouse children in orphanages try to use it to justify their schemes. But these studies were not limited to family foster homes. And it takes three single-spaced pages just to list all the other studies documenting the harm of orphanages. (Those pages are available from NCCPR.)
● This does not mean that no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means many fewer children should be placed in foster care.
The studies excluded the most severe cases of maltreatment, a very small proportion of any child protective worker’s caseload, precisely because, horror stories that make the front page notwithstanding, these are cases where everyone with time to investigate would agree that removal from the home was the only alternative.
Rather, the studies focused on, by far, the largest group of cases any worker sees, those that can best be called the “in-between cases” where the parent is neither all victim nor all villain; cases where there are real problems in the home, but wide disagreement over what should be done. As the first study itself notes: “These are the cases most likely to be affected by policy changes that alter the threshold for placement.” They also, are, of course, the cases most likely to be affected by a foster-care panic – which also alters the threshold for placement.
Even among these cases, the figures are averages. Certainly there are some individual cases among the thousands studied in which foster care was the less harmful alternative. But what the data make clear is that foster care is vastly overused, damaging large numbers of children who would do better in life had they remained in their own homes, even with the minimal help most child welfare agencies offer to families.
This says less about how well child protection agencies do in helping families than it does about how enormously toxic a foster care intervention is. Anything that toxic must be used very sparingly and in very small doses.
● Child welfare agencies have a disingenuous response to all this: “Why yes, of course,” they like to say. “This research just shows what we’ve always said ourselves: foster care only should be used as a last resort; of course we keep families together whenever possible.” But this research shows that agency actions belie their words. These studies found thousands of children already in foster care who would have done better had child protection agencies not taken them away in the first place.
● The USA Today story quotes one deservedly well-respected expert as saying that the 2007 study was the first to produce such results. But that is an error. Actually it was at least the second since 2006. A University of Minnesota study used a different methodology and measured different outcomes, but came to very similar conclusions.
● Though the USA Today story says other “studies” go the other way, the one cited, with less than 1/100th the sample size of the new studies, a shorter duration and at least one other serious flaw (omitting foster children in care for less than six months) is the only one we know of. And that study focused on reunification, not on children never removed in the first place.
And, of course, that study also compared foster care only to typical “help” for families in their own homes, which generally is little or nothing. Providing the kinds of real help NCCPR recommends (See Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right) would likely change the result and, in the case of the three more recent and more rigorous studies, create an even wider gap in outcomes favoring keeping families together.
● Perhaps most intriguing, these studies suggest it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care panic, a huge, sudden upsurge in needless removals after the death of a child “known to the system” gets extensive news coverage.
Thanks to these studies, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic.
It also should be possible to estimate roughly how many children have been saved from these rotten outcomes in states and localities that have reformed their systems to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together.
These new studies and the Minnesota study are in addition to the comprehensive study of foster care alumni showing that only one in five could be said to be doing well as a young adult – in other words, foster care churns out walking wounded four times out of five. (See NCCPR’s publication 80 Percent Failure for more on this study) and the mass of evidence showing that simply in terms of physical safety, real family preservation programs have a far better track record than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper #1.)
The buzzword in child welfare is “evidence-based.” What that really means is: How dare proponents of any new, innovative approach to child welfare expect to get funding if they can’t dot every i and cross every t on evaluations proving the innovation’s efficacy beyond a shadow of a doubt? Old, non-innovative programs, however, are not held to this standard. If they were, child welfare would be turned upside down by the results of this new research.
Because now, more than ever, the evidence is in.
Updated June 3, 2009
(703) 212-2006 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
THE EVIDENCE IS IN
Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together
The Definitive Studies
NCCPR long has argued that many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they had remained with their own families and those families had been given the right kinds of help.
Turns out that’s not quite right.
In fact, many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they remained with their own families even if those families got only the typical help (which tends to be little help, wrong help, or no help) commonly offered by child welfare agencies.
That’s the message from the largest studies ever undertaken to compare the impact on children of foster care versus keeping comparably maltreated children with their own families. The study was the subject of a front-page story in USA Today. The full study is available here.
The first study, published in 2007, looked at outcomes for more than 15,000 children. It compared foster children not to the general population but to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. The result: On measure after measure the children left in their own homes do better.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care.
One year later, the same researcher published another study, this time of 23,000 cases. Again he compared foster children to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. This time he looked at which children were more likely to be arrested as adults. Once again, the children left in their own homes fared better than the foster children.
Implications
● The studies use the term “foster care” generically; they include children placed in any form of substitute care. That’s important because whenever information like this comes out, people who want to warehouse children in orphanages try to use it to justify their schemes. But these studies were not limited to family foster homes. And it takes three single-spaced pages just to list all the other studies documenting the harm of orphanages. (Those pages are available from NCCPR.)
● This does not mean that no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means many fewer children should be placed in foster care.
The studies excluded the most severe cases of maltreatment, a very small proportion of any child protective worker’s caseload, precisely because, horror stories that make the front page notwithstanding, these are cases where everyone with time to investigate would agree that removal from the home was the only alternative.
Rather, the studies focused on, by far, the largest group of cases any worker sees, those that can best be called the “in-between cases” where the parent is neither all victim nor all villain; cases where there are real problems in the home, but wide disagreement over what should be done. As the first study itself notes: “These are the cases most likely to be affected by policy changes that alter the threshold for placement.” They also, are, of course, the cases most likely to be affected by a foster-care panic – which also alters the threshold for placement.
Even among these cases, the figures are averages. Certainly there are some individual cases among the thousands studied in which foster care was the less harmful alternative. But what the data make clear is that foster care is vastly overused, damaging large numbers of children who would do better in life had they remained in their own homes, even with the minimal help most child welfare agencies offer to families.
This says less about how well child protection agencies do in helping families than it does about how enormously toxic a foster care intervention is. Anything that toxic must be used very sparingly and in very small doses.
● Child welfare agencies have a disingenuous response to all this: “Why yes, of course,” they like to say. “This research just shows what we’ve always said ourselves: foster care only should be used as a last resort; of course we keep families together whenever possible.” But this research shows that agency actions belie their words. These studies found thousands of children already in foster care who would have done better had child protection agencies not taken them away in the first place.
● The USA Today story quotes one deservedly well-respected expert as saying that the 2007 study was the first to produce such results. But that is an error. Actually it was at least the second since 2006. A University of Minnesota study used a different methodology and measured different outcomes, but came to very similar conclusions.
● Though the USA Today story says other “studies” go the other way, the one cited, with less than 1/100th the sample size of the new studies, a shorter duration and at least one other serious flaw (omitting foster children in care for less than six months) is the only one we know of. And that study focused on reunification, not on children never removed in the first place.
And, of course, that study also compared foster care only to typical “help” for families in their own homes, which generally is little or nothing. Providing the kinds of real help NCCPR recommends (See Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right) would likely change the result and, in the case of the three more recent and more rigorous studies, create an even wider gap in outcomes favoring keeping families together.
● Perhaps most intriguing, these studies suggest it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care panic, a huge, sudden upsurge in needless removals after the death of a child “known to the system” gets extensive news coverage.
Thanks to these studies, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic.
It also should be possible to estimate roughly how many children have been saved from these rotten outcomes in states and localities that have reformed their systems to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together.
These new studies and the Minnesota study are in addition to the comprehensive study of foster care alumni showing that only one in five could be said to be doing well as a young adult – in other words, foster care churns out walking wounded four times out of five. (See NCCPR’s publication 80 Percent Failure for more on this study) and the mass of evidence showing that simply in terms of physical safety, real family preservation programs have a far better track record than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper #1.)
The buzzword in child welfare is “evidence-based.” What that really means is: How dare proponents of any new, innovative approach to child welfare expect to get funding if they can’t dot every i and cross every t on evaluations proving the innovation’s efficacy beyond a shadow of a doubt? Old, non-innovative programs, however, are not held to this standard. If they were, child welfare would be turned upside down by the results of this new research.
Because now, more than ever, the evidence is in.
Updated June 3, 2009
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