Video
•Subsidized Childcare May Be In Jeopardy
Concerns Over Children's Services Raised
Cuts Proposed For Early-Education Services
POSTED: 12:00 pm EST December 14, 2009
UPDATED: 5:40 pm EST December 14, 2009
facebookdel.icio.usbuzzdiggreddit›› Email›› PrintHARTFORD, Conn. -- Concerns are being raised over children’s services in the state budget.
Early child-care and education advocates spoke out against the proposed cuts in Hartford on Monday. They urged the governor to not balance the budget at the expense of young children and their families.
Several agencies, including the Boys And Girls Club and the Head Start programs across the state joined Rep. Toni Harding from the Human Services Committee on Monday. The group is urging the governor to not cut services for children, specifically subsidized child care, saying if parents don’t have it, they can’t work.
“We are looking at a loss of 5,000 jobs in the area of child care,” said Walker.
Walker said the cuts to kids in the areas of education, family services and after-school programs total more than $47 million.
“If the cuts go through, which is about $4 million for state-funded centers, there will be a lot of families affected, and we would have to cut slots, which would impact the workforce,” said Mary Cecchinato, of Torrington Child Care Center.
"Gov. Rell is proposing cuts to state government bureaucracy and is not making cuts to direct care," said Rell spokesman Adam Liegeot. "The bigger question is what alternative equivalent spending cuts are these program advocates and legislative Democrats proposing?"
Democrats planned to caucus at 1:30 p.m. to come up with alternatives to the cuts. E-mail news tips to Eyewitness News, or dial: 866-289-0333.
http://www.wfsb.com/politics/21961249/detail.html
Isabella Brooke Knightly and Austin Gamez-Knightly
In Memory of my Loving Husband, William F. Knightly Jr. Murdered by ILLEGAL Palliative Care at a Nashua, NH Hospital
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Barbaric’ family courts behind ‘state sponsored kidnap’ – Bob Geldof
‘Barbaric’ family courts behind ‘state sponsored kidnap’ – Bob Geldof
Bob Geldof has launched an outspoken attack on the family courts system accusing it of routinely allowing “state sponsored kidnap” of vulnerable children.
By John Bingham
Published: 4:56PM GMT 07 Dec 2009
Bob Geldof Photo: Stephen Lock The singer and anti-poverty campaigner described the current child custody laws as “barbaric and abusive” and dismissed the system as a “disgraceful mess”.
He claimed that children’s futures are being decided on the basis of “mumbo jumbo” and “social engineering” with devastating long-term consequences for society.
Related Articles
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Mother taken to court for refusing to allow daughter to have swine flu vaccination
Family courts prepare to open doors Mr Geldof, who fought for custody of his three daughters from his former wife Paula Yates, also alleged that British courts “consistently” show bias against men by handing custody to mothers.
His comments come in the foreword to a new report which draws together a clutch of recent research on the psychological effects of break-up on children.
The paper, published by The Custody Minefield, an internet legal advice service, and supported by Families Need fathers, the campaign group, calls for a change in the law on relocation cases in which separated parents apply for permission to move elsewhere.
It calls for the current guidelines to be changed to include an explicit ban on decisions favouring mothers on grounds of gender.
The report lists a raft of academic research which it says shows that children with no paternal influence are more likely to have behavioural problems, lower exam results, mental health problems, and even lower IQs.
It follows a recent study which found that up to a third of children whose parents separate lost touch with their father permanently.
“In the near future the family law under which we endure will be seen as barbaric, criminally damaging, abusive, neglectful, harmful to society, the family, the parents and the children in whose name it purports to act,” wrote Mr Geldof.
“It is beyond scrutiny or criticism and like a secret society its members – the judges, lawyers, social and child ‘care’ agencies behave like any closed vested interest and protect each others’ backs.”
He described the system as: "A farrago of cod professionalism and faux concern largely predicated on nonsensical social guff, mumbo-jumbo and psychobabble.
“Dangling at the other end of this are the lives of thousands of British children and their families.”
In a reference to the famed wisdom of the Biblical King Solomon, he added: “Rather than Solomon-like resolving our tragically human disputes with understanding, compassion and logical pragmatism, the courts have consistently acted against society’s interest through the application of prejudice, gender bias and awful impartial cruelty.”
Presented with two women who both claimed to be the mother of a baby, Solomon is said to have suggested cutting the child in half. One of them immediately begged him to give the baby to her rival, demonstrating that she was the true mother.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: "We are creating a family court system that is transparent, accountable, and inspires public confidence in its good work, whilst still protecting the privacy of children and families involved.
"That is why we have allowed greater media access to family courts which will lead to greater trust. We have also increased access to out of court family mediation by putting information about divorce, relationship breakdown and the family courts, and a link to the Family Mediation Helpline website, on the DirectGov website.
"It is for the court to consider the evidence put before them in each individual case. However, the child's welfare will always be the court's paramount consideration."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/6753273/Barbaric-family-courts-behind-state-sponsored-kidnap---Bob-Geldof.html
Bob Geldof has launched an outspoken attack on the family courts system accusing it of routinely allowing “state sponsored kidnap” of vulnerable children.
By John Bingham
Published: 4:56PM GMT 07 Dec 2009
Bob Geldof Photo: Stephen Lock The singer and anti-poverty campaigner described the current child custody laws as “barbaric and abusive” and dismissed the system as a “disgraceful mess”.
He claimed that children’s futures are being decided on the basis of “mumbo jumbo” and “social engineering” with devastating long-term consequences for society.
Related Articles
Judge condemns councils for funding row that left foster parents with 'poison fruit'
Mother taken to court for refusing to allow daughter to have swine flu vaccination
Family courts prepare to open doors Mr Geldof, who fought for custody of his three daughters from his former wife Paula Yates, also alleged that British courts “consistently” show bias against men by handing custody to mothers.
His comments come in the foreword to a new report which draws together a clutch of recent research on the psychological effects of break-up on children.
The paper, published by The Custody Minefield, an internet legal advice service, and supported by Families Need fathers, the campaign group, calls for a change in the law on relocation cases in which separated parents apply for permission to move elsewhere.
It calls for the current guidelines to be changed to include an explicit ban on decisions favouring mothers on grounds of gender.
The report lists a raft of academic research which it says shows that children with no paternal influence are more likely to have behavioural problems, lower exam results, mental health problems, and even lower IQs.
It follows a recent study which found that up to a third of children whose parents separate lost touch with their father permanently.
“In the near future the family law under which we endure will be seen as barbaric, criminally damaging, abusive, neglectful, harmful to society, the family, the parents and the children in whose name it purports to act,” wrote Mr Geldof.
“It is beyond scrutiny or criticism and like a secret society its members – the judges, lawyers, social and child ‘care’ agencies behave like any closed vested interest and protect each others’ backs.”
He described the system as: "A farrago of cod professionalism and faux concern largely predicated on nonsensical social guff, mumbo-jumbo and psychobabble.
“Dangling at the other end of this are the lives of thousands of British children and their families.”
In a reference to the famed wisdom of the Biblical King Solomon, he added: “Rather than Solomon-like resolving our tragically human disputes with understanding, compassion and logical pragmatism, the courts have consistently acted against society’s interest through the application of prejudice, gender bias and awful impartial cruelty.”
Presented with two women who both claimed to be the mother of a baby, Solomon is said to have suggested cutting the child in half. One of them immediately begged him to give the baby to her rival, demonstrating that she was the true mother.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: "We are creating a family court system that is transparent, accountable, and inspires public confidence in its good work, whilst still protecting the privacy of children and families involved.
"That is why we have allowed greater media access to family courts which will lead to greater trust. We have also increased access to out of court family mediation by putting information about divorce, relationship breakdown and the family courts, and a link to the Family Mediation Helpline website, on the DirectGov website.
"It is for the court to consider the evidence put before them in each individual case. However, the child's welfare will always be the court's paramount consideration."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/6753273/Barbaric-family-courts-behind-state-sponsored-kidnap---Bob-Geldof.html
Sunday, December 13, 2009
A Child Welfare Timeline
A Child Welfare Timeline
1961: Congress allows AFDC payments to follow a child into foster care. Previously, such payments were made only to children in their own homes. This makes foster care much cheaper for states and localities. The foster care population starts to increase sharply. [1]
LATE 1970s: The foster care population reaches 503,000. [2] As a proportion of the total child population, that’s about as high as it is now. Congress becomes concerned about large numbers of children languishing in foster care, and removal of children whose poverty is confused with child “neglect.”
1980: Congress passes one of the last initiatives of the Carter Administration, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980.
THE MYTH: The claim is now made that this law promoted “family preservation at all costs” that it made family preservation “the overriding goal” that it forced states to return children to dangerous homes and led to children languishing in foster care because agencies were forced to give parents “too many chances.”
THE REALITY: The words “family preservation” do not even appear in this law. In fact, this law is the first law to encourage permanence in both directions – returning children home and getting them adopted. It is the first federal law to attempt to set any time limits on how long children could stay in foster care (18 months), and the first to offer federal aid for subsidized adoption. It also required “reasonable efforts” – and nothing more – to keep families together.
Both legislative history and guidance from the federal Department of Health and Human Services make clear that “reasonable efforts” are never to be made if it would mean a child has to stay in or return to a dangerous home. [3]
But the law does have one crucial flaw: It does nothing to change the way child welfare services are financed. Foster care reimbursement remains an open-ended federal entitlement for states and localities. Far less is available to prevent foster care, and those funds are “capped.” (See NCCPR Issue Paper #12).
EARLY 1980s: The law works. This first federal effort to deal with foster care by encouraging permanence – including, but not restricted to keeping families together -- cuts the foster care population by more than half – to 243,000.[4]
But by now the Reagan Administration is in office. They hate the law because it’s seen as unnecessary federal interference in state and local decisions. They pull back proposed regulations to enforce it.[5] That sends a signal to the states: You can go back to business as usual. Since the financial incentives were never changed, business as usual – placing more and more children in foster care – is the easier course of action.
Once again, children are taken from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kind of services. Once taken, the children are filed away and forgotten as overwhelmed workers rush on to the next case. The “reasonable efforts” requirement is ignored. Children again languish in foster care – not because of “reasonable efforts” but because of the lack of reasonable efforts. So the foster care population begins to rise again. The increase doesn’t stop until 1999.
1992: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that individuals cannot sue to have the “reasonable efforts” requirement enforced. [6]
1992: Congress begins talking about putting serious money into family preservation. It passes the Family Preservation and Support Act. President Bush vetoes it. It passes again in 1993 and President Clinton signs it.
THE MYTH: In subsequent years this law would be described as “spending $1 billion on family preservation.”
THE REALITY: The $1 billion is over five years, and it’s for a huge range of child welfare services – including foster care, adoption, and even things like after school recreation programs. None of the money has to be spent on family preservation, and very little actually has been. (The legislation was reauthorized – and renamed – in 1997 and 2002. It’s now the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Act).
But even the prospect of putting federal money into family preservation scares a child welfare establishment that is invested – literally and figuratively -- in foster care. They begin attacking family preservation at every opportunity. Any death of any child “known to the system” is blamed on “family preservation” even if the child was nowhere near a real family preservation program – and even when it was a family preservation worker who warned that the child was in danger in the first place. Ignored, amid all the hype, is the fact that real family preservation programs actually have a better track record for safety than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper #1).
1997: The twin myths – that family preservation supposedly is unsafe and leads to children languishing in foster care – lead Congress to pass the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. This law blows huge holes in what little was left of “reasonable efforts.” Backers claim it makes exceptions only for extreme cases but, in fact, the law is filled with broad, vague “catch-all” clauses that effectively make reasonable efforts optional in every case. The law also demands that, with limited exceptions, states seek termination of parental rights whenever a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months – even if the child should not have been taken away in the first place. Even more important than any specific provision is the general message to the states: You’ve been doing too much to keep families together, you need to take away more children.
2008: Small increases in adoptions occur until 2000, but then the increases stop.[7] The average annual increase in adoptions attributable to ASFA equals less than 2.5 percent of the number of children in foster care on any given day.[8] The small increase in adoptions is outweighed by the children coming into care because ASFA encourages so many more children to be taken in the first place. As a result, during a time when crime went down and child abuse itself went down, and despite the fact that many foster children "aged out" of the system without ever finding a permanent home, the total number of children in foster care on any given day actually increased until 1999.[9] It wasn't until 2003 that this number finally fell below where it was when ASFA became law - six years earlier.[10]
Worse, until 2006, the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year increased every year but two since ASFA passed, with a record 307,000 children torn from their homes in 2005.[11] Because ASFA was built on a foundation of false premises, it has backfired.
Updated October 23, 2008
[1] Marguerite Rosenthal and James A. Louis, “The Law’s Evolving Role in Child Abuse and Neglect,” in Leroy Pelton, ed., The Social Context of Child Abuse and Neglect (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985, pp. 62-64.
[2] Leroy Pelton, For Reasons of Poverty: A Critical Analysis of the Public Child Welfare System in the United States (New York: Praeger, 1989), Chart, p.6
[3] Testimony of MaryLee Allen, Director, Child Welfare and Mental Health division Children's Defense Fund, before the House Ways and Means Committee Human resources subcommittee, April 8, 1997.
[4] Pelton, note 2, Supra.
[5] Allen, note 3, Supra.
[6] Suter v. Artist M., 112 S. Ct. 1360 (1992)
[7] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Trends in Foster Care and Adoption, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/trends.htm For data before 2000 see U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Foster Care FY1999-FY2004 Entries, Exits, and Numbers of Children In Care on the Last Day of Each Federal Fiscal Year, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/statistics/entryexit2004.htm
[8] Penelope L. Maza, Adoption Data Update, presentation to Child Welfare and Mental Health Coalition, Washington, DC, May 13, 2003.
[9] HHS, note 7, supra.
[10] Ibid.
[11] ibid.
1961: Congress allows AFDC payments to follow a child into foster care. Previously, such payments were made only to children in their own homes. This makes foster care much cheaper for states and localities. The foster care population starts to increase sharply. [1]
LATE 1970s: The foster care population reaches 503,000. [2] As a proportion of the total child population, that’s about as high as it is now. Congress becomes concerned about large numbers of children languishing in foster care, and removal of children whose poverty is confused with child “neglect.”
1980: Congress passes one of the last initiatives of the Carter Administration, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980.
THE MYTH: The claim is now made that this law promoted “family preservation at all costs” that it made family preservation “the overriding goal” that it forced states to return children to dangerous homes and led to children languishing in foster care because agencies were forced to give parents “too many chances.”
THE REALITY: The words “family preservation” do not even appear in this law. In fact, this law is the first law to encourage permanence in both directions – returning children home and getting them adopted. It is the first federal law to attempt to set any time limits on how long children could stay in foster care (18 months), and the first to offer federal aid for subsidized adoption. It also required “reasonable efforts” – and nothing more – to keep families together.
Both legislative history and guidance from the federal Department of Health and Human Services make clear that “reasonable efforts” are never to be made if it would mean a child has to stay in or return to a dangerous home. [3]
But the law does have one crucial flaw: It does nothing to change the way child welfare services are financed. Foster care reimbursement remains an open-ended federal entitlement for states and localities. Far less is available to prevent foster care, and those funds are “capped.” (See NCCPR Issue Paper #12).
EARLY 1980s: The law works. This first federal effort to deal with foster care by encouraging permanence – including, but not restricted to keeping families together -- cuts the foster care population by more than half – to 243,000.[4]
But by now the Reagan Administration is in office. They hate the law because it’s seen as unnecessary federal interference in state and local decisions. They pull back proposed regulations to enforce it.[5] That sends a signal to the states: You can go back to business as usual. Since the financial incentives were never changed, business as usual – placing more and more children in foster care – is the easier course of action.
Once again, children are taken from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kind of services. Once taken, the children are filed away and forgotten as overwhelmed workers rush on to the next case. The “reasonable efforts” requirement is ignored. Children again languish in foster care – not because of “reasonable efforts” but because of the lack of reasonable efforts. So the foster care population begins to rise again. The increase doesn’t stop until 1999.
1992: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that individuals cannot sue to have the “reasonable efforts” requirement enforced. [6]
1992: Congress begins talking about putting serious money into family preservation. It passes the Family Preservation and Support Act. President Bush vetoes it. It passes again in 1993 and President Clinton signs it.
THE MYTH: In subsequent years this law would be described as “spending $1 billion on family preservation.”
THE REALITY: The $1 billion is over five years, and it’s for a huge range of child welfare services – including foster care, adoption, and even things like after school recreation programs. None of the money has to be spent on family preservation, and very little actually has been. (The legislation was reauthorized – and renamed – in 1997 and 2002. It’s now the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Act).
But even the prospect of putting federal money into family preservation scares a child welfare establishment that is invested – literally and figuratively -- in foster care. They begin attacking family preservation at every opportunity. Any death of any child “known to the system” is blamed on “family preservation” even if the child was nowhere near a real family preservation program – and even when it was a family preservation worker who warned that the child was in danger in the first place. Ignored, amid all the hype, is the fact that real family preservation programs actually have a better track record for safety than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper #1).
1997: The twin myths – that family preservation supposedly is unsafe and leads to children languishing in foster care – lead Congress to pass the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. This law blows huge holes in what little was left of “reasonable efforts.” Backers claim it makes exceptions only for extreme cases but, in fact, the law is filled with broad, vague “catch-all” clauses that effectively make reasonable efforts optional in every case. The law also demands that, with limited exceptions, states seek termination of parental rights whenever a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months – even if the child should not have been taken away in the first place. Even more important than any specific provision is the general message to the states: You’ve been doing too much to keep families together, you need to take away more children.
2008: Small increases in adoptions occur until 2000, but then the increases stop.[7] The average annual increase in adoptions attributable to ASFA equals less than 2.5 percent of the number of children in foster care on any given day.[8] The small increase in adoptions is outweighed by the children coming into care because ASFA encourages so many more children to be taken in the first place. As a result, during a time when crime went down and child abuse itself went down, and despite the fact that many foster children "aged out" of the system without ever finding a permanent home, the total number of children in foster care on any given day actually increased until 1999.[9] It wasn't until 2003 that this number finally fell below where it was when ASFA became law - six years earlier.[10]
Worse, until 2006, the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year increased every year but two since ASFA passed, with a record 307,000 children torn from their homes in 2005.[11] Because ASFA was built on a foundation of false premises, it has backfired.
Updated October 23, 2008
[1] Marguerite Rosenthal and James A. Louis, “The Law’s Evolving Role in Child Abuse and Neglect,” in Leroy Pelton, ed., The Social Context of Child Abuse and Neglect (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985, pp. 62-64.
[2] Leroy Pelton, For Reasons of Poverty: A Critical Analysis of the Public Child Welfare System in the United States (New York: Praeger, 1989), Chart, p.6
[3] Testimony of MaryLee Allen, Director, Child Welfare and Mental Health division Children's Defense Fund, before the House Ways and Means Committee Human resources subcommittee, April 8, 1997.
[4] Pelton, note 2, Supra.
[5] Allen, note 3, Supra.
[6] Suter v. Artist M., 112 S. Ct. 1360 (1992)
[7] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Trends in Foster Care and Adoption, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/trends.htm For data before 2000 see U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Foster Care FY1999-FY2004 Entries, Exits, and Numbers of Children In Care on the Last Day of Each Federal Fiscal Year, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/statistics/entryexit2004.htm
[8] Penelope L. Maza, Adoption Data Update, presentation to Child Welfare and Mental Health Coalition, Washington, DC, May 13, 2003.
[9] HHS, note 7, supra.
[10] Ibid.
[11] ibid.
Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right-Successful Alternatives to Taking Children from their Parents
Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right
Successful Alternatives to
Taking Children from their Parents
At the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, we often are asked what can be done to prevent the trauma of foster care by safely keeping children with their own families. There are many options, and we’ve listed some below. None of the alternatives described below will work in every case or should be tried in every case. Contrary to the way advocates of placement prevention often are stereotyped, we do not believe in “family preservation at all costs” or that “every family can be saved.” But these alternatives can keep many children now needlessly taken from their parents safely in their own homes. Similarly, even communities that have turned their child welfare systems into national models still have serious problems, and often much progress still needs to be made. All of the things that go wrong in the worst child welfare systems also go wrong in the best – but they go wrong less often. These recommendations deal primarily with curbing wrongful removal by improving services. But at least as important is bolstering due process for families. For those recommendations, see NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda.
1. Doing nothing. There are, in fact, cases in which the investigated family is entirely innocent and perfectly capable of taking good care of their children without any “help” from a child welfare agency. In such cases, the best thing the child protective services worker can do is apologize, shut the door, and go away.
2. Basic, concrete help. Sometimes it may take something as simple as emergency cash for a security deposit, a rent subsidy, or a place in a day care center (to avoid a “lack of supervision” charge) to keep a family together. Indeed, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has a special program, called the Family Unification Program, in which Section 8 vouchers are reserved for families where housing is the issue keeping a family apart or threatening its breakup. Localities must apply for these subsidies. By doing so, they effectively acknowledge what they typically deny: that they do, in fact, tear apart families due to lack of housing. CONTACT: Ruth White, Executive Director National Center for Housing and Child Welfare (866) 790-6766, info@nchcw.org, www.nchcw.org. Ms. White also is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors.
3. Intensive Family Preservation Services programs. The first such program, Homebuilders, in Washington State, was established in the mid-1970s. The largest replication is in Michigan, where the program is called Families First. The very term “family preservation” was invented specifically to apply to this type of program, which has a better track record for safety than foster care. The basics concerning how these programs work – and what must be included for a program to be a real “family preservation” program -- are in NCCPR Issue Papers 10 and 11. Issue Paper 11 lists studies proving the programs’ effectiveness. CONTACTS: Charlotte Booth, executive director, Homebuilders (253) 874-3630, info@institutefamily.org, Susan Kelly, former director, Families First (734) 547-9164, skelly@casey.org
4. The Alabama “System of Care.” This is one of the most successful child welfare reforms in the country. The reforms are the result of a consent decree growing out of a lawsuit brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. The consent decree requires the state to rebuild its entire system from the bottom up, with an emphasis on keeping families together. The rate at which children are taken from their homes is among the lowest in the country, and re-abuse of children left in their own homes has been cut sharply. An independent monitor appointed by the court has found that children are safer now than before the changes. CONTACTS: Ira Burnim, Legal Director, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law (202) 467-5730, ext. 129. Mr. Burnim also is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors. The Bazelon Center also has published a book about the Alabama reforms. Paul Vincent, Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, Montgomery, Ala. (334) 264-8300. Mr. Vincent ran the child protection system in Alabama when the lawsuit was filed. He worked closely with the plaintiffs to develop and implement the reform plan. Ivor Groves, independent, court-appointed monitor, (850) 422-8900.
5. Family to Family. This is a multi-faceted program developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (which also helps to fund NCCPR). One element of the program, Team Decisionmaking often is confused with the entire program, which has many more elements. The program is described at the Casey website http://www.aecf.org/Home/MajorInitiatives/Family%20to%20Family.aspx A comprehensive outside evaluation of the program, found that it led to fewer placements, shorter placements, and less bouncing of children from foster home to foster home – with no compromise of safety. CONTACT: Gretchen Test, Annie E. Casey Foundation (410) 547-6600.
6. Community/Neighborhood Partnerships for Child Protection. These partnerships, overseen by the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, are similar to the Family to Family projects. They mobilize formal and informal networks of helpers to prevent maltreatment and avoid needless foster care placement. Partnerships in Florida’s Duval County, St. Louis, Mo. and Georgia have reduced placements and improved safety. CONTACT: Marno Batterson, Center for the Study of Social Policy, (641) 792-5918, marno.batterson@cssp.org.
7. The turnaround in Pittsburgh. In the mid-1990s, the child welfare system in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County, Pa. was typically mediocre, or worse. Foster care placements were soaring and those in charge insisted every one of those placements was necessary. New leadership changed all that. Since 1997, the foster care population has been cut dramatically. When children must be placed, nearly half of all placements are with relatives and siblings are kept together 82 percent of the time.
They’ve done it by tripling the budget for primary prevention, more than doubling the budget for family preservation, embracing innovations like Family to Family and adding elements of their own, such as housing counselors in every child welfare office so families aren’t destroyed because of housing problems. And children are safer. Reabuse of children left in their own homes has declined and there has been a significant and sustained decline in child abuse fatalities. CONTACT: Karen Blumen, Allegheny County Department of Human Services, Office of Community Relations (412) 350-5707.
8. Reform in El Paso County, Colorado. By recognizing the crucial role of poverty in child maltreatment, El Paso County reversed steady increases in its foster care population. The number of children in foster care declined significantly – and the rate of reabuse of children left in their own homes fell below the state and national averages, according to an independent evaluation by the Center for Law and Social Policy. CONTACT: Barbara Drake, El Paso County Department of Human Services, (719) 444-5532.
9. The Bridge Builders, Bronx, New York. Combine the giving and guidance of ten foundations with the knowledge and enthusiasm of eight community-based agencies, add extensive involvement of neighborhood residents in outreach, service delivery and governance, then partner with the child protective services agency and what do you get? A significant reduction in the number of children taken from their homes, with no compromise of safety, in a neighborhood that is among those losing more children to foster care than any other in New York City. That’s the record of the Bridge Builders Initiative in the Highbridge section of The Bronx. (NCCPR received a grant to assist the Bridge Builders with media work). CONTACTS: Joe Jenkins, executive director, (718) 681-2222; Jenkinsj@highbridgelife.org, John Rios, Jewish Child Care Association of New York, co-chair Bridge Builders Executive Committee, riosj@jccany.org
10. The transformation in Maine. After a little girl named Logan Marr was taken needlessly from her mother only to be killed by a foster mother who formerly worked for the child welfare agency, the people of Maine refused to settle for pat answers about background checks and licensing standards. They zeroed in on the fact that Maine had one of the highest proportions of children in the country trapped in foster care. The combination of grassroots demands for change from below and new leadership at the top led to a dramatic reduction in the number of children taken away over the course of a year. And while the state still has a long way to go in using kinship care, the proportion of children placed with relatives has more than doubled. It’s all been done without compromising safety, earning the support of the state’s independent child welfare ombudsman. CONTACTS: Dean Crocker, Vice President for Programs, Maine Children's Alliance, (207) 623-1868 ext. 212, dcrocker@mekids.org; Mary Callahan, founder Maine Alliance for DHS Accountability and Reform, (207) 353-4223, maryec_98@yahoo.com
11.Changing financial incentives. While not a program per se, making this change spurs private child welfare agencies to come up with all sorts of innovations. This is clear from the experience in Illinois. Until the late 1990s, Illinois reimbursed private child welfare agencies the way other states typically do: They were paid for each day they kept a child in foster care. Thus, agencies were rewarded for letting children languish in foster care and punished for achieving permanence.
Now those incentives have been reversed, in part because of pressure from the Illinois Branch of the ACLU, which won a lawsuit against the child welfare system. Today, private agencies in Illinois are rewarded both for adoptions (which often are conversions of kinship placements to subsidized guardianships) and for returning children safely to their own homes. They are penalized for prolonged stays in foster care. As soon as the incentives changed, the “intractable” became tractable, the “dysfunctional” became functional, and the foster care population plummeted. And children are safer. Today, Illinois takes away children at one of the lowest rates in the country. Independent, court-appointed monitors have found that child safety has improved. CONTACT: Ben Wolf, Illinois Branch, ACLU, (312) 201-9740, ext. 420, bwolf@aclu-il.org
12. Due process of law. Even the best programs are no substitute for due process. That means court hearings in child welfare cases should be open. But that also means it’s urgent for accused parents to have meaningful legal representation from well-trained attorneys with low caseloads and solid support staff. It’s not a matter of getting “bad” parents off, it’s a matter of challenging case records that often are rife with error, countering cookie-cutter “service plans” that provide no services and ensuring that families get the help they need. A pilot project to provide such representation in some counties in Washington State has had such success in safely keeping families together that even the Attorney General’s office, which represents the child welfare agency in these cases, favors expanding it. FURTHER INFORMATION AND CONTACTS are available from the Washington State Office of Public Defense at this website: http://www.opd.wa.gov/Parents%20Representation%20Program.htm And for additional due process recommendations, see NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda.
Updated, December 3, 2008 http://www.nccpr.org/index_files/Page410.html
Successful Alternatives to
Taking Children from their Parents
At the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, we often are asked what can be done to prevent the trauma of foster care by safely keeping children with their own families. There are many options, and we’ve listed some below. None of the alternatives described below will work in every case or should be tried in every case. Contrary to the way advocates of placement prevention often are stereotyped, we do not believe in “family preservation at all costs” or that “every family can be saved.” But these alternatives can keep many children now needlessly taken from their parents safely in their own homes. Similarly, even communities that have turned their child welfare systems into national models still have serious problems, and often much progress still needs to be made. All of the things that go wrong in the worst child welfare systems also go wrong in the best – but they go wrong less often. These recommendations deal primarily with curbing wrongful removal by improving services. But at least as important is bolstering due process for families. For those recommendations, see NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda.
1. Doing nothing. There are, in fact, cases in which the investigated family is entirely innocent and perfectly capable of taking good care of their children without any “help” from a child welfare agency. In such cases, the best thing the child protective services worker can do is apologize, shut the door, and go away.
2. Basic, concrete help. Sometimes it may take something as simple as emergency cash for a security deposit, a rent subsidy, or a place in a day care center (to avoid a “lack of supervision” charge) to keep a family together. Indeed, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has a special program, called the Family Unification Program, in which Section 8 vouchers are reserved for families where housing is the issue keeping a family apart or threatening its breakup. Localities must apply for these subsidies. By doing so, they effectively acknowledge what they typically deny: that they do, in fact, tear apart families due to lack of housing. CONTACT: Ruth White, Executive Director National Center for Housing and Child Welfare (866) 790-6766, info@nchcw.org, www.nchcw.org. Ms. White also is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors.
3. Intensive Family Preservation Services programs. The first such program, Homebuilders, in Washington State, was established in the mid-1970s. The largest replication is in Michigan, where the program is called Families First. The very term “family preservation” was invented specifically to apply to this type of program, which has a better track record for safety than foster care. The basics concerning how these programs work – and what must be included for a program to be a real “family preservation” program -- are in NCCPR Issue Papers 10 and 11. Issue Paper 11 lists studies proving the programs’ effectiveness. CONTACTS: Charlotte Booth, executive director, Homebuilders (253) 874-3630, info@institutefamily.org, Susan Kelly, former director, Families First (734) 547-9164, skelly@casey.org
4. The Alabama “System of Care.” This is one of the most successful child welfare reforms in the country. The reforms are the result of a consent decree growing out of a lawsuit brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. The consent decree requires the state to rebuild its entire system from the bottom up, with an emphasis on keeping families together. The rate at which children are taken from their homes is among the lowest in the country, and re-abuse of children left in their own homes has been cut sharply. An independent monitor appointed by the court has found that children are safer now than before the changes. CONTACTS: Ira Burnim, Legal Director, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law (202) 467-5730, ext. 129. Mr. Burnim also is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors. The Bazelon Center also has published a book about the Alabama reforms. Paul Vincent, Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, Montgomery, Ala. (334) 264-8300. Mr. Vincent ran the child protection system in Alabama when the lawsuit was filed. He worked closely with the plaintiffs to develop and implement the reform plan. Ivor Groves, independent, court-appointed monitor, (850) 422-8900.
5. Family to Family. This is a multi-faceted program developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (which also helps to fund NCCPR). One element of the program, Team Decisionmaking often is confused with the entire program, which has many more elements. The program is described at the Casey website http://www.aecf.org/Home/MajorInitiatives/Family%20to%20Family.aspx A comprehensive outside evaluation of the program, found that it led to fewer placements, shorter placements, and less bouncing of children from foster home to foster home – with no compromise of safety. CONTACT: Gretchen Test, Annie E. Casey Foundation (410) 547-6600.
6. Community/Neighborhood Partnerships for Child Protection. These partnerships, overseen by the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, are similar to the Family to Family projects. They mobilize formal and informal networks of helpers to prevent maltreatment and avoid needless foster care placement. Partnerships in Florida’s Duval County, St. Louis, Mo. and Georgia have reduced placements and improved safety. CONTACT: Marno Batterson, Center for the Study of Social Policy, (641) 792-5918, marno.batterson@cssp.org.
7. The turnaround in Pittsburgh. In the mid-1990s, the child welfare system in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County, Pa. was typically mediocre, or worse. Foster care placements were soaring and those in charge insisted every one of those placements was necessary. New leadership changed all that. Since 1997, the foster care population has been cut dramatically. When children must be placed, nearly half of all placements are with relatives and siblings are kept together 82 percent of the time.
They’ve done it by tripling the budget for primary prevention, more than doubling the budget for family preservation, embracing innovations like Family to Family and adding elements of their own, such as housing counselors in every child welfare office so families aren’t destroyed because of housing problems. And children are safer. Reabuse of children left in their own homes has declined and there has been a significant and sustained decline in child abuse fatalities. CONTACT: Karen Blumen, Allegheny County Department of Human Services, Office of Community Relations (412) 350-5707.
8. Reform in El Paso County, Colorado. By recognizing the crucial role of poverty in child maltreatment, El Paso County reversed steady increases in its foster care population. The number of children in foster care declined significantly – and the rate of reabuse of children left in their own homes fell below the state and national averages, according to an independent evaluation by the Center for Law and Social Policy. CONTACT: Barbara Drake, El Paso County Department of Human Services, (719) 444-5532.
9. The Bridge Builders, Bronx, New York. Combine the giving and guidance of ten foundations with the knowledge and enthusiasm of eight community-based agencies, add extensive involvement of neighborhood residents in outreach, service delivery and governance, then partner with the child protective services agency and what do you get? A significant reduction in the number of children taken from their homes, with no compromise of safety, in a neighborhood that is among those losing more children to foster care than any other in New York City. That’s the record of the Bridge Builders Initiative in the Highbridge section of The Bronx. (NCCPR received a grant to assist the Bridge Builders with media work). CONTACTS: Joe Jenkins, executive director, (718) 681-2222; Jenkinsj@highbridgelife.org, John Rios, Jewish Child Care Association of New York, co-chair Bridge Builders Executive Committee, riosj@jccany.org
10. The transformation in Maine. After a little girl named Logan Marr was taken needlessly from her mother only to be killed by a foster mother who formerly worked for the child welfare agency, the people of Maine refused to settle for pat answers about background checks and licensing standards. They zeroed in on the fact that Maine had one of the highest proportions of children in the country trapped in foster care. The combination of grassroots demands for change from below and new leadership at the top led to a dramatic reduction in the number of children taken away over the course of a year. And while the state still has a long way to go in using kinship care, the proportion of children placed with relatives has more than doubled. It’s all been done without compromising safety, earning the support of the state’s independent child welfare ombudsman. CONTACTS: Dean Crocker, Vice President for Programs, Maine Children's Alliance, (207) 623-1868 ext. 212, dcrocker@mekids.org; Mary Callahan, founder Maine Alliance for DHS Accountability and Reform, (207) 353-4223, maryec_98@yahoo.com
11.Changing financial incentives. While not a program per se, making this change spurs private child welfare agencies to come up with all sorts of innovations. This is clear from the experience in Illinois. Until the late 1990s, Illinois reimbursed private child welfare agencies the way other states typically do: They were paid for each day they kept a child in foster care. Thus, agencies were rewarded for letting children languish in foster care and punished for achieving permanence.
Now those incentives have been reversed, in part because of pressure from the Illinois Branch of the ACLU, which won a lawsuit against the child welfare system. Today, private agencies in Illinois are rewarded both for adoptions (which often are conversions of kinship placements to subsidized guardianships) and for returning children safely to their own homes. They are penalized for prolonged stays in foster care. As soon as the incentives changed, the “intractable” became tractable, the “dysfunctional” became functional, and the foster care population plummeted. And children are safer. Today, Illinois takes away children at one of the lowest rates in the country. Independent, court-appointed monitors have found that child safety has improved. CONTACT: Ben Wolf, Illinois Branch, ACLU, (312) 201-9740, ext. 420, bwolf@aclu-il.org
12. Due process of law. Even the best programs are no substitute for due process. That means court hearings in child welfare cases should be open. But that also means it’s urgent for accused parents to have meaningful legal representation from well-trained attorneys with low caseloads and solid support staff. It’s not a matter of getting “bad” parents off, it’s a matter of challenging case records that often are rife with error, countering cookie-cutter “service plans” that provide no services and ensuring that families get the help they need. A pilot project to provide such representation in some counties in Washington State has had such success in safely keeping families together that even the Attorney General’s office, which represents the child welfare agency in these cases, favors expanding it. FURTHER INFORMATION AND CONTACTS are available from the Washington State Office of Public Defense at this website: http://www.opd.wa.gov/Parents%20Representation%20Program.htm And for additional due process recommendations, see NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda.
Updated, December 3, 2008 http://www.nccpr.org/index_files/Page410.html
JUST SAY NO TO THE ORPHANAGE
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
JUST SAY NO TO THE ORPHANAGE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Although the idea of going "back to the orphanage" gained a great deal of attention when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich brought it up, the notion has quietly been pushed by child savers for a long time.
Gingrich, at least, was honest about his agenda: He wanted to take children away from their parents just because they are poor. The child savers claim no such intent, but their proposals amount to the same thing.
Supporters of orphanages base their arguments on three false premises:
First, they say, we must have more orphanages because there are not enough foster parents for all the children who need them. But as we have shown in previous issue papers, we do not have too few foster parents, we have too many children needlessly taken from their own homes.
Thousands of children who could be safely in their own homes now languish in foster care. Get these children out of the system and there will be plenty of room in foster homes for the children who really do need substitute care and there will be no need to build any more orphanages.
Second, orphanage backers claim that institutionalizing children gives them "stability." But orphanage staff often work in shifts, and even in places that employ so-called "house parents," they typically quit every year or two. For a child, that makes living in an orphanage every bit as unstable as a succession of foster homes.[1]
The third false premise is the Boys Town myth. Child savers say today's orphanages will be better than yesterday's and we should no longer precede the word "orphanage" with the word Dickensian. This myth has been fed by media that flocked to what they thought were the nation's few well-run institutions (some of which turned out not to be models after all). Of course there are model orphanages. There also are model jails. But they are called models precisely because they are unusual.
To find out what is in store for most children if we go back to the orphanage, we need go back no further than 1987. That was the year New York City set up 17 mini-orphanages for infants and toddlers. The city called them "congregate care facilities" but they soon acquired another name: baby warehouses. In the two years between the time they were set up and the time the state ordered them closed:
· Two children died of infectious diarrhea because of unsanitary diapering practices. A third child died because -- like 91 percent of the children -- he was not properly immunized. There may have been more deaths, but the record keeping was as shoddy as the sanitation.
· Inspectors found that "all but five of the shelters have had consistent problems with roaches, flies, mice, or rats. Food practices are often unsafe."
· Disease was not the only hazard. Inspectors also found "unshielded wall outlets, broken cribs, playpens, and highchairs, play areas with broken glass, toxic chemicals leaking from containers within easy reach of toddlers."
· Children were cared for in eight-hour shifts by untrained workers who often did not even know their names. At one of the baby warehouses, the children were spoken to only when they did something wrong [2].
Sixteen years later, a new study of group homes and institutions in New York, this time for teenagers, found similar hideous conditions. According to The New York Times, “the report paints a daily life full of barbarisms…[emphasis added].
“Teenagers recount being raped, having their rooms set on fire, being pressed to join gangs and routinely having their few nice possessions stolen. Insiders and outsiders … agree that staff members not only fail to protect children but also engage in violence and intimidation themselves.” [3]
These institutions are not aberrations. An Indiana study found that children in "group homes" are 10 times more likely to be physically abused and 28 times more likely to be sexually abused than children in their own homes [4].
There have been other tales of terror from America's modern orphanages. Among them:
· SOS Children's Village in Florida repeatedly has been cited by orphanage proponents as proof that orphanages can work. But between 1999 and 2001 33 reports were filed with Florida's child abuse hotline alleging abuse of children at the 50-bed facility; 21 were "substantiated" or "indicated." During the same time period 13 "house parents" and 14 "parent assistants" quit or were fired. (So much for orphanages providing "stability.") [5]
· Another facility touted as a national model, Maryville, near Chicago, has been revealed as a place of terror for many of the children confined there, according to documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times. The newspaper reports that "the place is often up for grabs, with staff struggling to handle suicide attempts, sex abuse, drug use, fights and vandalism [6]
In 2001, police were called to Maryville 909 times.[7] After a 15-year-old left her Maryville "cottage", was gang raped by other Maryville residents and escaped from her attackers, she says the kindly staff at her "cottage" wouldn't let her in until they had filled out a report about her "running away." [8]
In 2004, Illinois pulled all 270 state wards out of Maryville [9] – something it could do because it had done such a good job of reducing needless foster care. As a result, in Illinois, substitute care is no longer a “sellers market.”
There are many other examples:
· A 1997 Los Angeles County Grand Jury report which found, according to the Los Angeles Times, that "Many of the nearly 5,000 foster children housed in Los Angeles County group homes are physically abused and drugged excessively while being forced to live without proper food, clothing, education, and counseling." [10] [Emphasis added]
A year later, the Times found that "children under state protection in California group and foster homes are being drugged with potent, dangerous psychiatric medications, at times just to keep them obedient and docile for overburdened caretakers…Under the influence of such drugs, children have suffered from drug-induced psychoses, hallucinations, abnormal heart activity, uncontrollable tremors, liver problems, and loss of bowel control..."
The Times found that it happens to children as young as 3 "and even a 22-month- old knew the word 'meds.'" [11]
· The JDM Residential Treatment Center near St. Louis, where, according to a former director, "there were days when there wasn't any food. The whole thing was just a way to make money off the state."[12]
· Mooseheart, near Chicago, where, over five years, four "houseparents" were convicted of molesting the children in their care. In the most recent case, a houseparent was convicted of molesting six pre-teen boys in less than a year. [13]
· Mission of the Immaculate Virgin on Staten Island, which became so well known for brutality that youths would run away and sleep on the subway rather than spend even one night there. According to New York Newsday, "Adolescents returning from temporary placements ... described a pattern of incidents in which longer-term residents raped, robbed, or assaulted newcomers while night-shift staff slept on the job." [14]
· Linden Hill and Hawthorne Cedar Knolls, two institutions in Westchester County, New York which were, according to New York Newsday, "plagued by violence, unchecked sex, and poor supervision. ... " Said one counselor: "They have lost sight that the program is no longer safe to kids. It's outrageous." [15]
A study of teenagers who had been through a representative cross-section of orphanages reported that the teenagers found institutions to be a significantly worse option than their own families, care by relatives, adoption, or even foster care.[16] The North American Council on Adoptable Children aptly summed up the study findings: "The teens felt "less loved, less looked after, less trusted, less wanted Teens described a powerful code of behavior dictated by institutional peer-group subculture, encompassing drugs, sex, and intimidation."[17]
And that study is typical. A comprehensive review of the scientific literature on orphanages reveals that even the model facilities do serious emotional harm to children.[18] When it comes to orphanages, we’re not talking about rotten apples. We’re talking about rotten barrels.
To know which is more likely to emerge from the "back to the orphanage" movement -- luxury orphan resorts or baby warehouses --we need only look at how America has handled the mass institutionalization of other populations who are feared and despised.
The "back-to-the-orphanage" movement is based on the premise that the same governments and private agencies that have given us the prison system and the juvenile justice system, and have dotted the landscape with hideous warehouses for the mentally ill and the mentally retarded, somehow will come up with loving, humane institutions for children who are disproportionately black and overwhelmingly poor. But orphanages are institutions for the poor, and institutions for the poor are almost always poor institutions.
Updated January 1, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. North American Council on Adoptable Children, There is a Better Way: Family-Based Alternatives to Institutional Care (St. Paul, Minn: 1995) pp. 5-9.
2. All information about the "baby warehouses" is from Karen Benker and James Rempel, "Inexcusable Harm: The Effect of institutionalization on Young Foster Children in New York City," City Health Report (New York: Public Interest Health Consortium for New York City), May, 1989. Back to Text.
3. Leslie Kaufman, “Survey Backs Reputation of Danger in Group Homes,” The New York Times, November 6, 2003.
4. J. William Spencer and Dean D. Knudsen, "Out of Home Maltreatment: An Analysis of Risk in Various Settings for Children," Children and Youth Services Review Vol. 14, pp. 485-492. Back to Text.
5. Megan O'Matz, "Model children's home falls short of expectations," South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 21, 2002, p.A1. Back to Text.
6. Tim Novak and Chris Fusco, "Reports find Maryville's environment 'dangerous'" Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 6, 2002. Back to Text.
7. Ofelia Casillas and David Heinzmann, "A troubled Maryville attempts to heal self," Chicago Tribune, Sept. 7, 2002. Back to Text.
8. David Heinzmann and Ofelia Casillas, "Maryville feeling stress of its kids," Chicago Tribune, Sept. 8, 2002. Back to Text.
9. Ofelia Casillas, “Maryville opens doors again,” Chicago Tribune, June 28, 2007. In 2007, 25 state wards were transferred to the campus from another Maryville program.
10. James Rainey, "Grand Jury Cites Abuses in Group Foster Homes," Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1997, p.A1. Back to Text.
11.Tracy Weber, "Caretakers Routinely Drug Foster Children"(p.A1) and "Prescription for Tragedy" (p.A31) Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1998. Back to Text.
12. Martha Shirk, "As Troubles Come to Light, Home Surrenders License," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 3, 1993, p.1. Back to Text.
13."Ex-Mooseheart Staffer Guilty of Molesting Boys," Chicago Tribune, Nov. 5, 1993, Sec. 2, p. 7; Linda Young, "Mooseheart Aches After Sex Abuses," Chicago Tribune, Feb. 8, 1994, p.1., Alicia Fabbre, “Mooseheart worker pleads guilty to abuse,” Arlington Heights, Illinois, Daily Herald
February 07, 2003 Back to Text.
14. Nina Bernstein, "Probe of Foster Care Nightmares," New York Newsday, May 2, 1990, 16. Back to Text.
15. Michael Powell, "Violence Rife at Two Homes for Troubled Teens," New York Newsday, Nov. 14, 1990, p.6. Back to Text.
16. M. Bush, "Institutions for Dependent and Neglected Children: Therapeutic option of choice or last resort? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (50)(2), 239-255.Back to Text.
17. North American Council on Adoptable Children, Note 1, supra. Back to Text.
18. The summary, with full citations, is available on request from NCCPR. Back to Text.
JUST SAY NO TO THE ORPHANAGE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Although the idea of going "back to the orphanage" gained a great deal of attention when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich brought it up, the notion has quietly been pushed by child savers for a long time.
Gingrich, at least, was honest about his agenda: He wanted to take children away from their parents just because they are poor. The child savers claim no such intent, but their proposals amount to the same thing.
Supporters of orphanages base their arguments on three false premises:
First, they say, we must have more orphanages because there are not enough foster parents for all the children who need them. But as we have shown in previous issue papers, we do not have too few foster parents, we have too many children needlessly taken from their own homes.
Thousands of children who could be safely in their own homes now languish in foster care. Get these children out of the system and there will be plenty of room in foster homes for the children who really do need substitute care and there will be no need to build any more orphanages.
Second, orphanage backers claim that institutionalizing children gives them "stability." But orphanage staff often work in shifts, and even in places that employ so-called "house parents," they typically quit every year or two. For a child, that makes living in an orphanage every bit as unstable as a succession of foster homes.[1]
The third false premise is the Boys Town myth. Child savers say today's orphanages will be better than yesterday's and we should no longer precede the word "orphanage" with the word Dickensian. This myth has been fed by media that flocked to what they thought were the nation's few well-run institutions (some of which turned out not to be models after all). Of course there are model orphanages. There also are model jails. But they are called models precisely because they are unusual.
To find out what is in store for most children if we go back to the orphanage, we need go back no further than 1987. That was the year New York City set up 17 mini-orphanages for infants and toddlers. The city called them "congregate care facilities" but they soon acquired another name: baby warehouses. In the two years between the time they were set up and the time the state ordered them closed:
· Two children died of infectious diarrhea because of unsanitary diapering practices. A third child died because -- like 91 percent of the children -- he was not properly immunized. There may have been more deaths, but the record keeping was as shoddy as the sanitation.
· Inspectors found that "all but five of the shelters have had consistent problems with roaches, flies, mice, or rats. Food practices are often unsafe."
· Disease was not the only hazard. Inspectors also found "unshielded wall outlets, broken cribs, playpens, and highchairs, play areas with broken glass, toxic chemicals leaking from containers within easy reach of toddlers."
· Children were cared for in eight-hour shifts by untrained workers who often did not even know their names. At one of the baby warehouses, the children were spoken to only when they did something wrong [2].
Sixteen years later, a new study of group homes and institutions in New York, this time for teenagers, found similar hideous conditions. According to The New York Times, “the report paints a daily life full of barbarisms…[emphasis added].
“Teenagers recount being raped, having their rooms set on fire, being pressed to join gangs and routinely having their few nice possessions stolen. Insiders and outsiders … agree that staff members not only fail to protect children but also engage in violence and intimidation themselves.” [3]
These institutions are not aberrations. An Indiana study found that children in "group homes" are 10 times more likely to be physically abused and 28 times more likely to be sexually abused than children in their own homes [4].
There have been other tales of terror from America's modern orphanages. Among them:
· SOS Children's Village in Florida repeatedly has been cited by orphanage proponents as proof that orphanages can work. But between 1999 and 2001 33 reports were filed with Florida's child abuse hotline alleging abuse of children at the 50-bed facility; 21 were "substantiated" or "indicated." During the same time period 13 "house parents" and 14 "parent assistants" quit or were fired. (So much for orphanages providing "stability.") [5]
· Another facility touted as a national model, Maryville, near Chicago, has been revealed as a place of terror for many of the children confined there, according to documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times. The newspaper reports that "the place is often up for grabs, with staff struggling to handle suicide attempts, sex abuse, drug use, fights and vandalism [6]
In 2001, police were called to Maryville 909 times.[7] After a 15-year-old left her Maryville "cottage", was gang raped by other Maryville residents and escaped from her attackers, she says the kindly staff at her "cottage" wouldn't let her in until they had filled out a report about her "running away." [8]
In 2004, Illinois pulled all 270 state wards out of Maryville [9] – something it could do because it had done such a good job of reducing needless foster care. As a result, in Illinois, substitute care is no longer a “sellers market.”
There are many other examples:
· A 1997 Los Angeles County Grand Jury report which found, according to the Los Angeles Times, that "Many of the nearly 5,000 foster children housed in Los Angeles County group homes are physically abused and drugged excessively while being forced to live without proper food, clothing, education, and counseling." [10] [Emphasis added]
A year later, the Times found that "children under state protection in California group and foster homes are being drugged with potent, dangerous psychiatric medications, at times just to keep them obedient and docile for overburdened caretakers…Under the influence of such drugs, children have suffered from drug-induced psychoses, hallucinations, abnormal heart activity, uncontrollable tremors, liver problems, and loss of bowel control..."
The Times found that it happens to children as young as 3 "and even a 22-month- old knew the word 'meds.'" [11]
· The JDM Residential Treatment Center near St. Louis, where, according to a former director, "there were days when there wasn't any food. The whole thing was just a way to make money off the state."[12]
· Mooseheart, near Chicago, where, over five years, four "houseparents" were convicted of molesting the children in their care. In the most recent case, a houseparent was convicted of molesting six pre-teen boys in less than a year. [13]
· Mission of the Immaculate Virgin on Staten Island, which became so well known for brutality that youths would run away and sleep on the subway rather than spend even one night there. According to New York Newsday, "Adolescents returning from temporary placements ... described a pattern of incidents in which longer-term residents raped, robbed, or assaulted newcomers while night-shift staff slept on the job." [14]
· Linden Hill and Hawthorne Cedar Knolls, two institutions in Westchester County, New York which were, according to New York Newsday, "plagued by violence, unchecked sex, and poor supervision. ... " Said one counselor: "They have lost sight that the program is no longer safe to kids. It's outrageous." [15]
A study of teenagers who had been through a representative cross-section of orphanages reported that the teenagers found institutions to be a significantly worse option than their own families, care by relatives, adoption, or even foster care.[16] The North American Council on Adoptable Children aptly summed up the study findings: "The teens felt "less loved, less looked after, less trusted, less wanted Teens described a powerful code of behavior dictated by institutional peer-group subculture, encompassing drugs, sex, and intimidation."[17]
And that study is typical. A comprehensive review of the scientific literature on orphanages reveals that even the model facilities do serious emotional harm to children.[18] When it comes to orphanages, we’re not talking about rotten apples. We’re talking about rotten barrels.
To know which is more likely to emerge from the "back to the orphanage" movement -- luxury orphan resorts or baby warehouses --we need only look at how America has handled the mass institutionalization of other populations who are feared and despised.
The "back-to-the-orphanage" movement is based on the premise that the same governments and private agencies that have given us the prison system and the juvenile justice system, and have dotted the landscape with hideous warehouses for the mentally ill and the mentally retarded, somehow will come up with loving, humane institutions for children who are disproportionately black and overwhelmingly poor. But orphanages are institutions for the poor, and institutions for the poor are almost always poor institutions.
Updated January 1, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. North American Council on Adoptable Children, There is a Better Way: Family-Based Alternatives to Institutional Care (St. Paul, Minn: 1995) pp. 5-9.
2. All information about the "baby warehouses" is from Karen Benker and James Rempel, "Inexcusable Harm: The Effect of institutionalization on Young Foster Children in New York City," City Health Report (New York: Public Interest Health Consortium for New York City), May, 1989. Back to Text.
3. Leslie Kaufman, “Survey Backs Reputation of Danger in Group Homes,” The New York Times, November 6, 2003.
4. J. William Spencer and Dean D. Knudsen, "Out of Home Maltreatment: An Analysis of Risk in Various Settings for Children," Children and Youth Services Review Vol. 14, pp. 485-492. Back to Text.
5. Megan O'Matz, "Model children's home falls short of expectations," South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 21, 2002, p.A1. Back to Text.
6. Tim Novak and Chris Fusco, "Reports find Maryville's environment 'dangerous'" Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 6, 2002. Back to Text.
7. Ofelia Casillas and David Heinzmann, "A troubled Maryville attempts to heal self," Chicago Tribune, Sept. 7, 2002. Back to Text.
8. David Heinzmann and Ofelia Casillas, "Maryville feeling stress of its kids," Chicago Tribune, Sept. 8, 2002. Back to Text.
9. Ofelia Casillas, “Maryville opens doors again,” Chicago Tribune, June 28, 2007. In 2007, 25 state wards were transferred to the campus from another Maryville program.
10. James Rainey, "Grand Jury Cites Abuses in Group Foster Homes," Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1997, p.A1. Back to Text.
11.Tracy Weber, "Caretakers Routinely Drug Foster Children"(p.A1) and "Prescription for Tragedy" (p.A31) Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1998. Back to Text.
12. Martha Shirk, "As Troubles Come to Light, Home Surrenders License," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 3, 1993, p.1. Back to Text.
13."Ex-Mooseheart Staffer Guilty of Molesting Boys," Chicago Tribune, Nov. 5, 1993, Sec. 2, p. 7; Linda Young, "Mooseheart Aches After Sex Abuses," Chicago Tribune, Feb. 8, 1994, p.1., Alicia Fabbre, “Mooseheart worker pleads guilty to abuse,” Arlington Heights, Illinois, Daily Herald
February 07, 2003 Back to Text.
14. Nina Bernstein, "Probe of Foster Care Nightmares," New York Newsday, May 2, 1990, 16. Back to Text.
15. Michael Powell, "Violence Rife at Two Homes for Troubled Teens," New York Newsday, Nov. 14, 1990, p.6. Back to Text.
16. M. Bush, "Institutions for Dependent and Neglected Children: Therapeutic option of choice or last resort? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (50)(2), 239-255.Back to Text.
17. North American Council on Adoptable Children, Note 1, supra. Back to Text.
18. The summary, with full citations, is available on request from NCCPR. Back to Text.
FAMILY PRESERVATION AND ADOPTION
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
FAMILY PRESERVATION AND ADOPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Critics of family preservation claim that it makes it harder to free children for adoption. Once again, they are wrong.
Not only does family preservation not impede adoption, family preservation can speed the process of terminating parental rights when necessary.
The federal law that effectively abolished the reasonable efforts requirement, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), also requires states to seek termination of parental rights for many children in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months. Yet in many jurisdictions it can take at least 12 months for a judge to decide if the initial placement was justified in the first place.
Thus, while some children in foster care do indeed need to be adopted, ASFA encourages the indiscriminate adoption of children without regard to whether they could have remained safely in their own, loving homes.
And this influx of new termination cases comes despite increasing evidence that the system can't cope with the thousands of children legally free for adoption right now.
After three years of modest increases in the raw number of annual adoptions, the number has remained stagnant at about 50,000 per year.[1]
This is all states can manage, even though the federal government offers them a huge financial incentive – bounties of $4,000 to $12,000 or more for every adoption over a baseline number -- and political and media pressure for adoption is enormous. In contrast, since 1983 the foster care population has more than doubled. The real message from the so-called surge in adoptions is that the problems of foster care can never be solved through adoption alone.
Furthermore, the figures include only finalized adoptions, not the number of cases in which parental rights were terminated, but no adoptive home was found.
In the early 1990s, NCCPR’s President, Prof. Martin Guggenheim of New York University Law School, examined two states which expedited termination proceedings. He found that as the number of children freed for adoption soared, the number of actual adoptions increased far more slowly. The result: A generation of legal orphans, who have no ties whatsoever to their birth parents, but aren't being placed for adoption either. Guggenheim found that, contrary to the unsupported rhetoric of critics of family preservation, the one reform taken most seriously since the 1970s has been termination of parental rights.[2] The study was prescient. Nationwide, every year since ASFA was passed, terminations have far outrun adoptions.[3] As a result, the number of children aging out of foster care with no permanent home has soared by 41 percent.[4]
Furthermore, although abuse in adoptive homes is rare – like abuse in birth parent homes – ASFA’s encouragement of quick-and-dirty, slipshod placements increases the risk of abuse. Even Children’s Rights, Inc., a group which favors ASFA and has been hostile to family preservation, says “… Congress should realize that far too many states … when they do, for example, raise their adoption numbers, are doing so by including many clearly inadequate families … along with the genuinely committed, loving families who want to make a home for these children, just to ‘succeed’ by boosting their numbers.” .[5]
Even if all the children now awaiting adoption could be placed, that doesn't mean the placements will last. Current efforts to plunge headlong into adoption are being undertaken in the absence of any reliable data about how often placements "disrupt" when parents who adopt a child - especially a "special needs" child - change their minds. But the evidence we do have is alarming. Even before the effects of the new law were felt, it was estimated that 10 to 25 percent of so-called “forever families” don’t turn out to be forever after all – the adoptive parents change their minds. [5] That number is only likely to increase as workers feel pressure to cash in on the bounties for adoptive placements handed out under ASFA - bounties which are paid whether the adoption actually lasts or not.
As adoptions level off, the pressure to increase them again – and cash in on the bounties – is likely to have another pernicious effect. It is likely to prompt agencies to target the children most in demand by prospective adoptive parents: healthy infants from poor families. Agencies will rationalize that the parents really are “unfit” even as they continue to turn their child welfare systems into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up, and take a poor person’s child for your very own.
For an example of such targeting, see The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette series, “When The Bough Breaks,” available online at http://www.post-gazette.com/newslinks/1999boughbreaks.asp and the burgeoning scandal in Kentucky where even an organization which once zealously supported a take-the-child-and-run approach has reversed itself and condemned what it calls “quick trigger adoptions.” [6]
Says the former head of Los Angeles County’s child welfare system: “What you have now is an incentive to initially remove the child, and an incentive to adopt them out. I think when you put those two together, there is a problem.” [7]
Family preservation not only does not impede adoption, it can expedite the process of termination of parental rights by allowing workers to find out more quickly when a family can’t be preserved – and giving judges the confidence to make a termination decision knowing that the agency really did try to keep the family together.
The argument that there are children trapped in foster care who should be adopted and the argument that there are children trapped in foster care who should be in their own homes are not mutually exclusive. There are children in foster care who should be exiting in both directions.
But the claim that family preservation impedes adoption is nonsense. So is the claim that it was extremely difficult to terminate parental rights before the law was changed. All that is needed is minimal competence on the part of child protective workers.
This was demonstrated by an American Bar Association project in Upstate New York. The ABA's National Center for Children and the Law taught lawyers and workers how to present a decent case in court. Without offering one iota of additional help to families before moving to terminate, the termination rate soared. [8]
We have always believed there is a place for efforts to increase the number of adoptions as part of child welfare reform. But long as the rush to cash in on adoption bounties causes a further neglect of efforts to keep families in their own homes, it will only make things worse.
Contrary to critics' claims, most people in child protection work are almost obsessed with a substitute care fantasy, in which children are rescued from their "evil" birth parents and placed in substitute settings, which, in the imagination of the workers, are always ideal. For most workers and most agencies, termination of parental rights is the dessert in the child welfare meal, family preservation is the broccoli. ASFA gives workers and agencies all the dessert they want without ensuring that they eat their broccoli first.
Updated November 23, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Between 1997 and 2000 adoptions of foster children increased from 31,030 to 51,000. They’ve stayed at about 50,000 per year ever since. (1997 to 2003: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Adoptions of Children with Public Child Welfare Agency Involvement By State FY 1995-FY 2003, available online at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/ adoptchild03b.htm, 2004 to 2007: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Trends in Foster Care and Adoption, chart available online at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/trends.htm)
2. Martin Guggenheim, "The Effects of Recent Trends to Accelerate the Termination of parental Rights of Children in Foster Care - An Empirical Analysis in Two States," Family Law Quarterly, p.139. Back to Text.
3. Trends, note 1, supra.
4. Jim Casey Youth Opportunities, Time for Reform: Aging Out and On Their Own, May, 2007, available online at http://www.kidsarewaiting.org/tools/reports/files/0006.pdf
5. Statement of Marcia Robinson Lowry, Executive Director, Children's Rights, Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House Committee on Ways and Means, November 06, 2003. Back to Text.
6. National Adoption Information Clearinghouse Disruption and Dissolution, http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/s_disrup.cfm Back to Text.
7. Valarie Honeycutt Spears, “Report: State unjustly terminates parental rights for federal money,” Lexington Herald-Leader, April 16, 2006, and numerous other stories.
8. Troy Anderson, “Government Bonuses Accelerate Adoptions,” Daily News of Los Angeles, December 8, 2003.
9. Debra Ratterman of the ABA's National Legal Resource Center for Child Advocacy and Protection described the project at the 1991 Annual Conference of the New York State Citizens Coalition for Children. Back to Text.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FAMILY PRESERVATION AND ADOPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Critics of family preservation claim that it makes it harder to free children for adoption. Once again, they are wrong.
Not only does family preservation not impede adoption, family preservation can speed the process of terminating parental rights when necessary.
The federal law that effectively abolished the reasonable efforts requirement, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), also requires states to seek termination of parental rights for many children in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months. Yet in many jurisdictions it can take at least 12 months for a judge to decide if the initial placement was justified in the first place.
Thus, while some children in foster care do indeed need to be adopted, ASFA encourages the indiscriminate adoption of children without regard to whether they could have remained safely in their own, loving homes.
And this influx of new termination cases comes despite increasing evidence that the system can't cope with the thousands of children legally free for adoption right now.
After three years of modest increases in the raw number of annual adoptions, the number has remained stagnant at about 50,000 per year.[1]
This is all states can manage, even though the federal government offers them a huge financial incentive – bounties of $4,000 to $12,000 or more for every adoption over a baseline number -- and political and media pressure for adoption is enormous. In contrast, since 1983 the foster care population has more than doubled. The real message from the so-called surge in adoptions is that the problems of foster care can never be solved through adoption alone.
Furthermore, the figures include only finalized adoptions, not the number of cases in which parental rights were terminated, but no adoptive home was found.
In the early 1990s, NCCPR’s President, Prof. Martin Guggenheim of New York University Law School, examined two states which expedited termination proceedings. He found that as the number of children freed for adoption soared, the number of actual adoptions increased far more slowly. The result: A generation of legal orphans, who have no ties whatsoever to their birth parents, but aren't being placed for adoption either. Guggenheim found that, contrary to the unsupported rhetoric of critics of family preservation, the one reform taken most seriously since the 1970s has been termination of parental rights.[2] The study was prescient. Nationwide, every year since ASFA was passed, terminations have far outrun adoptions.[3] As a result, the number of children aging out of foster care with no permanent home has soared by 41 percent.[4]
Furthermore, although abuse in adoptive homes is rare – like abuse in birth parent homes – ASFA’s encouragement of quick-and-dirty, slipshod placements increases the risk of abuse. Even Children’s Rights, Inc., a group which favors ASFA and has been hostile to family preservation, says “… Congress should realize that far too many states … when they do, for example, raise their adoption numbers, are doing so by including many clearly inadequate families … along with the genuinely committed, loving families who want to make a home for these children, just to ‘succeed’ by boosting their numbers.” .[5]
Even if all the children now awaiting adoption could be placed, that doesn't mean the placements will last. Current efforts to plunge headlong into adoption are being undertaken in the absence of any reliable data about how often placements "disrupt" when parents who adopt a child - especially a "special needs" child - change their minds. But the evidence we do have is alarming. Even before the effects of the new law were felt, it was estimated that 10 to 25 percent of so-called “forever families” don’t turn out to be forever after all – the adoptive parents change their minds. [5] That number is only likely to increase as workers feel pressure to cash in on the bounties for adoptive placements handed out under ASFA - bounties which are paid whether the adoption actually lasts or not.
As adoptions level off, the pressure to increase them again – and cash in on the bounties – is likely to have another pernicious effect. It is likely to prompt agencies to target the children most in demand by prospective adoptive parents: healthy infants from poor families. Agencies will rationalize that the parents really are “unfit” even as they continue to turn their child welfare systems into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up, and take a poor person’s child for your very own.
For an example of such targeting, see The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette series, “When The Bough Breaks,” available online at http://www.post-gazette.com/newslinks/1999boughbreaks.asp and the burgeoning scandal in Kentucky where even an organization which once zealously supported a take-the-child-and-run approach has reversed itself and condemned what it calls “quick trigger adoptions.” [6]
Says the former head of Los Angeles County’s child welfare system: “What you have now is an incentive to initially remove the child, and an incentive to adopt them out. I think when you put those two together, there is a problem.” [7]
Family preservation not only does not impede adoption, it can expedite the process of termination of parental rights by allowing workers to find out more quickly when a family can’t be preserved – and giving judges the confidence to make a termination decision knowing that the agency really did try to keep the family together.
The argument that there are children trapped in foster care who should be adopted and the argument that there are children trapped in foster care who should be in their own homes are not mutually exclusive. There are children in foster care who should be exiting in both directions.
But the claim that family preservation impedes adoption is nonsense. So is the claim that it was extremely difficult to terminate parental rights before the law was changed. All that is needed is minimal competence on the part of child protective workers.
This was demonstrated by an American Bar Association project in Upstate New York. The ABA's National Center for Children and the Law taught lawyers and workers how to present a decent case in court. Without offering one iota of additional help to families before moving to terminate, the termination rate soared. [8]
We have always believed there is a place for efforts to increase the number of adoptions as part of child welfare reform. But long as the rush to cash in on adoption bounties causes a further neglect of efforts to keep families in their own homes, it will only make things worse.
Contrary to critics' claims, most people in child protection work are almost obsessed with a substitute care fantasy, in which children are rescued from their "evil" birth parents and placed in substitute settings, which, in the imagination of the workers, are always ideal. For most workers and most agencies, termination of parental rights is the dessert in the child welfare meal, family preservation is the broccoli. ASFA gives workers and agencies all the dessert they want without ensuring that they eat their broccoli first.
Updated November 23, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Between 1997 and 2000 adoptions of foster children increased from 31,030 to 51,000. They’ve stayed at about 50,000 per year ever since. (1997 to 2003: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Adoptions of Children with Public Child Welfare Agency Involvement By State FY 1995-FY 2003, available online at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/ adoptchild03b.htm, 2004 to 2007: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Trends in Foster Care and Adoption, chart available online at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/trends.htm)
2. Martin Guggenheim, "The Effects of Recent Trends to Accelerate the Termination of parental Rights of Children in Foster Care - An Empirical Analysis in Two States," Family Law Quarterly, p.139. Back to Text.
3. Trends, note 1, supra.
4. Jim Casey Youth Opportunities, Time for Reform: Aging Out and On Their Own, May, 2007, available online at http://www.kidsarewaiting.org/tools/reports/files/0006.pdf
5. Statement of Marcia Robinson Lowry, Executive Director, Children's Rights, Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House Committee on Ways and Means, November 06, 2003. Back to Text.
6. National Adoption Information Clearinghouse Disruption and Dissolution, http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/s_disrup.cfm Back to Text.
7. Valarie Honeycutt Spears, “Report: State unjustly terminates parental rights for federal money,” Lexington Herald-Leader, April 16, 2006, and numerous other stories.
8. Troy Anderson, “Government Bonuses Accelerate Adoptions,” Daily News of Los Angeles, December 8, 2003.
9. Debra Ratterman of the ABA's National Legal Resource Center for Child Advocacy and Protection described the project at the 1991 Annual Conference of the New York State Citizens Coalition for Children. Back to Text.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FAMILY PRESERVATION AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
FAMILY PRESERVATION AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They may be the parents most of us would most like to punish. Mothers who seem to care so little for their children that they'd rather get high than take care of them. Mothers who can't or won't kick their habit even while they're pregnant.
No one really knows how many there are. The huge numbers bandied about by child savers are guesses, and the child savers have a vested interest in guessing high. Furthermore, guesses about the extent of "substance abuse" by parents lump together everything from the parent who sells her child for crack to the parent who had her child taken for a week at birth because she smoked one marijuana cigarette to ease the pain of labor. [1]
Myths about those who abuse drugs -- and their children – die hard. Even though the apocalyptic claims about children born with cocaine in their systems – and their mothers – proved to be false, the same false claims are being made now in connection with another drug: methamphetamine.
But the problem cannot be minimized either. The problem of drug abuse, like the problem of child abuse, is serious and real. And there is an enormous temptation to punish addicted parents. But do we want to punish their children?
We favor providing Intensive Family Preservation Services and other help to some families with substance abuse problems. But not because it's another chance for the parent. We favor such programs because they may be the only chance for the child.
Consider the case of Alice Porter (not her real name) of Newark, New Jersey.
She was a drug-addicted single mother with a 12-year-old boy. The boy was angry, unruly, defiant, and hitting his mother. She was too overwhelmed by addiction to give him the order and stability he needed. One option would be to take the boy away because his mother doesn't "deserve" another chance.
But what would happen to an angry "acting out" 12-year-old in foster care? Probably foster home after foster home, as foster parents found they could not cope with him. Then group home after group home. The odds that he would have been adopted are slim. The odds that he would have been abused in foster care are excellent, (See Issue Paper 1). And the odds that he would emerge unable to love or trust anyone after all those placements are overwhelming.
But none of that happened. Alice Porter's family was referred to a family preservation program in Newark. The mother became active in Narcotics Anonymous. She built her skills, getting the education she needs to find employment. Her son joined Al-Ateen and did well in school. Because he stayed at home, he saw his mother fight -- and win -- her battle with addiction. "That's one less negative role model in his life," says family preservation worker Marcello Gomez. "He's learning he can have a positive lifestyle, drug free."[2]
But what about infants? Would they do better taken from parents who have abused drugs? Often, the answer there too, is no. After examining what really happens to such babies Time Magazine concluded: "Staying at home with an addicted mother who is actively participating in a rehabilitation program can, in many cases, be the more promising and safer route for the child [Emphasis added]."[3]
In a University of Florida study of children born with cocaine in their systems – children often stigmatized with the label “crack babies” -- one group was placed in foster care, another 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, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine [4]. Why help addicted mothers? Because it is extremely difficult to take a swing at "bad mothers" without the blow landing on their children. And if we really believe all the rhetoric about putting the children’s needs first, then those needs must come before everything, including how we may feel about their parents.
That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with addicted parents. It does mean that drug treatment for the parents, including inpatient programs where parents can live with their children, are almost always a better first choice than foster care for the children.
Not all cases work out like the case of Alice Porter. In some cases, a parent's addiction and lack of interest in treatment combine to create a situation that requires immediate removal of the child. But Intensive Family Preservation programs have developed their impressive record of safety while working with drug addicted parents. Michigan's program, for example, has an exemplary safety record, (See Issue Paper 1) even though 58 percent of the families it works with in Detroit have substance abuse problems. In the Newark program, 75 percent of families stayed together one year after the intervention. The fact that 25 percent did not indicates the care with which such families are approached and the willingness of family preservation workers to recommend removal of children when necessary.
An exhaustive 1999 report on child welfare and drug abuse found that, again contrary to the stereotype, "national treatment outcome studies clearly show that treatment can be effective."[5] [Emphasis added]. A federal report concluded that one-third of addicts recover on their first attempt and another third recover "after brief periods" of relapse.[6] And family preservation can increase the chances that treatment will work. And another federal study found that the chances of success increase dramatically when parents are allowed to keep their young children with them during inpatient treatment.[7]
But what about “meth”?
When use of crack cocaine was at its worst, so was the hype about what it did to children, and their parents.
The claim that children born with cocaine in their systems were doomed to become, in the words of one hyperventilating columnist, “a biological underclass” [8] was false. The claim that crack cocaine destroyed all maternal instincts was false. And the claim that addition to crack cocaine could not be treated was false.
But now the same false claims are being made about methamphetamine. In fact, methamphetamine addiction can be treated with just as much success and in the same time frame as addiction to crack cocaine and other substances.[9]
In part, there is a political motivation for the false claime about meth. There have been proposals to allow states to use billions of dollars now reserved for foster care for various prevention programs, including drug treatment. But the child savers want to hoard the money for foster care.
The child savers want us to believe that methamphetamine is virtually untreatable because they want us to believe the only option for their children is foster care. They want us to believe the only option is foster care in order to justify their demand that those billions of dollars be reserved for foster care, and nothing else.
Family preservation is not drug treatment. But Intensive Family Preservation Programs work with parents to determine which of the many forms of drug treatment is most likely to work, advocate to get them into treatment, and support them as they enter that treatment. They also prepare the family for the possibility of relapse, so even if that happens, the children remain safe. And perhaps most important, family preservation programs provide concrete services, so parents with substance abuse problems can marshal their energies and focus on freeing themselves from their addiction.
By providing such concrete help, Family Preservation programs provide something even more important: Hope. "A lot of our families are hopeless," Gomez says. "When you've been using for a long time, you think you'll never be able to get yourself together again." Often it is hopelessness that caused the addiction in the first place. "People get high for a lot of reasons," Gomez says. Sometimes, it may be a personal trauma. Often, it is the despair brought on by a life surrounded by seemingly intractable poverty.
Family preservation can't do it alone -- and the people who run such programs have never claimed that they can. There is an urgent need for a wide variety of substance abuse programs, particularly programs geared to the needs of mothers and children.
"They are doing [drugs] to anesthetize themselves," Gomez says. "They have a pain to deal with. We're always offering other options."
Updated January 1, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Brief for Defendant Appellant and Brief for Petitioner-Respondent, Nassau County (N.Y.) Department of Social Services v. Theresa Back to Text.
2. Personal Communication with Marcello Gomez, Clinical Supervisor for Family Preservation Programs at The Bridge, Inc., Irvington, N.J. Back to Text.
3. James Willwerth, "Should We Take Away Their Kids? Often The Best Way to Save the Child is to Save the Mother as Well," Time, May 13, 1991, p.62. Back to Text.
4. 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. Back to Text.
5. National Center On Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, No Safe Haven: Children of Substance-Abusing Parents (New York: January, 1999). Back to Text.
6. Department of Health and Human Services, Blending Perspectives and Building Common Ground: A Report to Congress on Substance Abuse and Child Protection (Washington, DC: April, 1999) p.14. Back to Text.
7. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, Benefits of Residential Substance Abuse Treatment for Pregnant and Parenting Women (Washington DC: September, 2001). Back to Text.
8. Mariah Blake: “The Damage Done: Crack Babies Talk Back,” Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2004.
9. Richard A. Rawson, Ph.D, Challenges in Responding to the Spread of Methamphetamine Use in the US: Recommendations Concerning the Treatment of Individuals with Methamphetamine-Related Disorders (Los Angeles: UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs, David Geffen School of Medicine). See also, Maia Szalavitz, The Media’s Meth Mania, (Aug. 4, 2005) and The Media Go Into ‘Crack Baby’ Mode Over Meth (August 10, 2005) both at www.stats.org.
FAMILY PRESERVATION AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They may be the parents most of us would most like to punish. Mothers who seem to care so little for their children that they'd rather get high than take care of them. Mothers who can't or won't kick their habit even while they're pregnant.
No one really knows how many there are. The huge numbers bandied about by child savers are guesses, and the child savers have a vested interest in guessing high. Furthermore, guesses about the extent of "substance abuse" by parents lump together everything from the parent who sells her child for crack to the parent who had her child taken for a week at birth because she smoked one marijuana cigarette to ease the pain of labor. [1]
Myths about those who abuse drugs -- and their children – die hard. Even though the apocalyptic claims about children born with cocaine in their systems – and their mothers – proved to be false, the same false claims are being made now in connection with another drug: methamphetamine.
But the problem cannot be minimized either. The problem of drug abuse, like the problem of child abuse, is serious and real. And there is an enormous temptation to punish addicted parents. But do we want to punish their children?
We favor providing Intensive Family Preservation Services and other help to some families with substance abuse problems. But not because it's another chance for the parent. We favor such programs because they may be the only chance for the child.
Consider the case of Alice Porter (not her real name) of Newark, New Jersey.
She was a drug-addicted single mother with a 12-year-old boy. The boy was angry, unruly, defiant, and hitting his mother. She was too overwhelmed by addiction to give him the order and stability he needed. One option would be to take the boy away because his mother doesn't "deserve" another chance.
But what would happen to an angry "acting out" 12-year-old in foster care? Probably foster home after foster home, as foster parents found they could not cope with him. Then group home after group home. The odds that he would have been adopted are slim. The odds that he would have been abused in foster care are excellent, (See Issue Paper 1). And the odds that he would emerge unable to love or trust anyone after all those placements are overwhelming.
But none of that happened. Alice Porter's family was referred to a family preservation program in Newark. The mother became active in Narcotics Anonymous. She built her skills, getting the education she needs to find employment. Her son joined Al-Ateen and did well in school. Because he stayed at home, he saw his mother fight -- and win -- her battle with addiction. "That's one less negative role model in his life," says family preservation worker Marcello Gomez. "He's learning he can have a positive lifestyle, drug free."[2]
But what about infants? Would they do better taken from parents who have abused drugs? Often, the answer there too, is no. After examining what really happens to such babies Time Magazine concluded: "Staying at home with an addicted mother who is actively participating in a rehabilitation program can, in many cases, be the more promising and safer route for the child [Emphasis added]."[3]
In a University of Florida study of children born with cocaine in their systems – children often stigmatized with the label “crack babies” -- one group was placed in foster care, another 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, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine [4]. Why help addicted mothers? Because it is extremely difficult to take a swing at "bad mothers" without the blow landing on their children. And if we really believe all the rhetoric about putting the children’s needs first, then those needs must come before everything, including how we may feel about their parents.
That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with addicted parents. It does mean that drug treatment for the parents, including inpatient programs where parents can live with their children, are almost always a better first choice than foster care for the children.
Not all cases work out like the case of Alice Porter. In some cases, a parent's addiction and lack of interest in treatment combine to create a situation that requires immediate removal of the child. But Intensive Family Preservation programs have developed their impressive record of safety while working with drug addicted parents. Michigan's program, for example, has an exemplary safety record, (See Issue Paper 1) even though 58 percent of the families it works with in Detroit have substance abuse problems. In the Newark program, 75 percent of families stayed together one year after the intervention. The fact that 25 percent did not indicates the care with which such families are approached and the willingness of family preservation workers to recommend removal of children when necessary.
An exhaustive 1999 report on child welfare and drug abuse found that, again contrary to the stereotype, "national treatment outcome studies clearly show that treatment can be effective."[5] [Emphasis added]. A federal report concluded that one-third of addicts recover on their first attempt and another third recover "after brief periods" of relapse.[6] And family preservation can increase the chances that treatment will work. And another federal study found that the chances of success increase dramatically when parents are allowed to keep their young children with them during inpatient treatment.[7]
But what about “meth”?
When use of crack cocaine was at its worst, so was the hype about what it did to children, and their parents.
The claim that children born with cocaine in their systems were doomed to become, in the words of one hyperventilating columnist, “a biological underclass” [8] was false. The claim that crack cocaine destroyed all maternal instincts was false. And the claim that addition to crack cocaine could not be treated was false.
But now the same false claims are being made about methamphetamine. In fact, methamphetamine addiction can be treated with just as much success and in the same time frame as addiction to crack cocaine and other substances.[9]
In part, there is a political motivation for the false claime about meth. There have been proposals to allow states to use billions of dollars now reserved for foster care for various prevention programs, including drug treatment. But the child savers want to hoard the money for foster care.
The child savers want us to believe that methamphetamine is virtually untreatable because they want us to believe the only option for their children is foster care. They want us to believe the only option is foster care in order to justify their demand that those billions of dollars be reserved for foster care, and nothing else.
Family preservation is not drug treatment. But Intensive Family Preservation Programs work with parents to determine which of the many forms of drug treatment is most likely to work, advocate to get them into treatment, and support them as they enter that treatment. They also prepare the family for the possibility of relapse, so even if that happens, the children remain safe. And perhaps most important, family preservation programs provide concrete services, so parents with substance abuse problems can marshal their energies and focus on freeing themselves from their addiction.
By providing such concrete help, Family Preservation programs provide something even more important: Hope. "A lot of our families are hopeless," Gomez says. "When you've been using for a long time, you think you'll never be able to get yourself together again." Often it is hopelessness that caused the addiction in the first place. "People get high for a lot of reasons," Gomez says. Sometimes, it may be a personal trauma. Often, it is the despair brought on by a life surrounded by seemingly intractable poverty.
Family preservation can't do it alone -- and the people who run such programs have never claimed that they can. There is an urgent need for a wide variety of substance abuse programs, particularly programs geared to the needs of mothers and children.
"They are doing [drugs] to anesthetize themselves," Gomez says. "They have a pain to deal with. We're always offering other options."
Updated January 1, 2008
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1. Brief for Defendant Appellant and Brief for Petitioner-Respondent, Nassau County (N.Y.) Department of Social Services v. Theresa Back to Text.
2. Personal Communication with Marcello Gomez, Clinical Supervisor for Family Preservation Programs at The Bridge, Inc., Irvington, N.J. Back to Text.
3. James Willwerth, "Should We Take Away Their Kids? Often The Best Way to Save the Child is to Save the Mother as Well," Time, May 13, 1991, p.62. Back to Text.
4. 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. Back to Text.
5. National Center On Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, No Safe Haven: Children of Substance-Abusing Parents (New York: January, 1999). Back to Text.
6. Department of Health and Human Services, Blending Perspectives and Building Common Ground: A Report to Congress on Substance Abuse and Child Protection (Washington, DC: April, 1999) p.14. Back to Text.
7. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, Benefits of Residential Substance Abuse Treatment for Pregnant and Parenting Women (Washington DC: September, 2001). Back to Text.
8. Mariah Blake: “The Damage Done: Crack Babies Talk Back,” Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2004.
9. Richard A. Rawson, Ph.D, Challenges in Responding to the Spread of Methamphetamine Use in the US: Recommendations Concerning the Treatment of Individuals with Methamphetamine-Related Disorders (Los Angeles: UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs, David Geffen School of Medicine). See also, Maia Szalavitz, The Media’s Meth Mania, (Aug. 4, 2005) and The Media Go Into ‘Crack Baby’ Mode Over Meth (August 10, 2005) both at www.stats.org.
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