A Critical Look At The Foster Care System:
How Great the Need?
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HOW GREAT THE NEED?
Today, over half a million children are in foster care in the United States. The vast majority of these children have been removed from their homes without legal excuse or justification. Psychologist and author Dr. Seth Farber explains:
Only a small minority of these children have been separated from parents who are dangerous to them. The overwhelming majority have been separated from loving and responsible parents. One does not need to be a child psychologist to realize the devastating effect of removing a child from parents with whom he or she is deeply bonded.[1]
The number of children removed from their homes is staggering, and by many accounts continues to increase. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, for example, confirmed during the 1990s that it removed over 1,000 children per month from their homes.[2]
Do these children really all come from families who are so abusive and neglectful of their children that they need to be removed from their homes?
"The majority of parents who come before our court love their children," explained Denise Kane, Inspector General of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, to a Congressional subcommittee. "Their children look to them with love and seek the attention and nurturing of their parents."[3]
A 1990 study conducted in Illinois by the Chapin Hall Center for Children would bear this out. At least 40% of the children in foster care found the reasons for placement confusing, while one-third of them did not even know why they had a caseworker.[4]
In Los Angeles County, California, 26,947 children entered the foster care system for the first time in 1995.[5]
Did these children truly all arrive from abusive or neglectful households? Just as in Illinois, many could safely have been left in their own homes, according to the testimony of Department head Peter Digre.
Under questioning by a Congressional subcommittee, Digre admitted to legislators that about half of the removals of children from their homes in his system are due to poverty, and not abuse or neglect.
"It gets down to those very specific issues about a place to live, food on the table, medical care, and thing like that," he explained, adding, "about half of the families are not physical abusers, not sexual abusers, not people with propensities to violence but simply people who are struggling to keep ends pulled together and are eminently salvagable."
This was too much for a frustrated Congressman Herger, who replied: "Evidently, it is your department's practice to remove children from families in about 50 percent of the cases because they don't have enough money."[6]
In Sacramento, California, child protective services caseworkers removed an estimated 400 children per month during the late 1990s--up from previous levels of 200 per month. Authorities reviewed cases that in some instances stemmed from five-year-old reports, conducting random sweeps of homes late at night without search warrants.
The majority of the children removed in these midnight raids have not necessarily been abused or neglected, rather they are determined to be "at risk" of abuse or neglect at some point in the future.[7]
How did it come to pass that so many children could be unnecessarily removed from salvagable and loving homes without inspiring public outrage? Professor of social work Leroy Pelton explains:
In the 1960s and 1970s, a child abuse crusade, based upon the discovery of the "battered child syndrome," and the social construction of child abuse as a social problem of "epidemic" proportions, served to drive the explosion in foster care placements, fueled by new child abuse and neglect reporting laws, public awareness campaigns, and increased funding for social services, much of which was used for foster care.[8]
"Increased reporting has led to a dramatic rise in the number of children who are taken away from their parents and placed into foster care," writes Douglas Besharov, the founding director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.
In 1963, no state had a law mandating the reporting of suspected child abuse or neglect. By the 1980s, all 50 states had such laws in place, and as a result of these new reporting laws, scores of children have been inappropriately removed from their homes. Besharov explains:
In 1963, about 75,000 children were put in foster care because of abuse or neglect. In 1980, the figure had ballooned to more than 300,000. Of these children about half had been in care for at least two years, and roughly one-third for over six years. Yet, according to data collected for the federal government, it appears that up to half of these children were in no immediate danger and could have been safely left in the care of their parents.
Vague laws "set no limits on intervention and provide no guidelines for decision making," Besharov explains, adding that they are "a prime reason for the system's inability to protect obviously endangered children even as it intervenes in family life on a massive scale." Without exception, efforts to develop more precise laws have been met with resistance and hence have been unsuccessful.[9]
"County child protection agencies differ somewhat in their definitions of what constitutes maltreatment," explains the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor. "The result is a system of widely varying practices and standards, sometimes operating without the full confidence of the public or the professionals who make many reports of maltreatment." The lack of clear definitions also leads to widely differing substantiation and child removal rates among county agencies, as the Auditor explains:
some county agencies require evidence of an injury "such as a bruise" before determining that maltreatment has occurred, while other agencies do not. Some county agencies think it is acceptable for children ages seven or older to be left unsupervised, while others do not. Some counties rarely if ever determine that caregivers have caused "mental injuries," while other counties frequently--and sometimes without psychiatric or psychological diagnoses--justify maltreatment determinations on the basis of mental injury.[10]
Federal financial incentives contribute to the crisis. While federal funds for the maintenance of children in foster care have historically been unlimited, monies that could have been used to provide in-home services have been appropriated at levels far below that authorized by Congress. And, many of those funds appropriated by the states for in-home services have historically been diverted instead to foster care.[11]
Current child welfare policies extract a high fiscal cost, in addition to the toll they extract on innocent families and children. As veteran journalist and author Richard Wexler explains:
Half the children now in foster care could safely be in their own homes if proper services were provided. Now, the federal government spends eight times more on children in foster care than on services to keep children out of foster care.[12]
Indeed, a Los Angeles Grand Jury investigation revealed that it costs up to $10,000 to maintain a child in the County's emergency shelter for just one month of time.[13]
The tragic reality is that while a small fraction of this amount would serve well to eliminate the "issues about a place to live, food on the table, medical care" and other factors leading to placement which Los Angeles' director Peter Digre described, his Department continues to remove children from their homes at an astounding rate.
"There are no family oriented, preventive services to keep children from coming into State care and no reunification services for children who come into State care," explained District of Columbia Bar Association Attorney Diane Weinroth to a Congressional committee.
Not only is this appalling in terms of the emotional costs to the children and families, she said, but "it is ridiculous because the cost of keeping children in State care is enormous."
"The cost of providing services to children in family settings, or with their natural families, is a fraction of the cost, generally speaking, than it takes to keep a child in the care of the State."[14]
AVERTING UNNECESSARY PLACEMENTS
Perhaps the best indication of how many children could be averted from inappropriate placement is suggested by a diversion program established in Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee.
In a study sponsored by the Urban Institute during the early 1970s, it was found that children were often inappropriately entering state care. Child welfare services consisted of a hodgepodge of different agencies lacking in coordination.
Professor of social work Duncan Lindsey describes what happened once these children entered the system:
Once in, the bureaucratic door closed behind them, and they found it hard to get out. Bureaucratic inertia suddenly asserted itself. Procedures had to be followed. Forms filled out. Hearings held. Interviews. More forms. No one wanted to take responsibility for releasing children back to a possibly dangerous home environment. The burden of proof shifted from the agency, which, in its view, had acted correctly in removing the children, to the parents who must now prove definitively why their children should be allowed to return home. The system designed to serve children and families had lost sight of its mission.[15]
As a result of this study, and through a joint initiative between federal, state and local government, the Comprehensive Emergency Services program was established, the first objective of which was to "reduce the number of dependency petitions filed and the number of children entering into they system by screening out those cases where a petition was not justified."
Through a combination of screening, coordination and provision of services, remarkable results were obtained.
As a result of the CES program, the number of dependency petitions dropped sharply--from 602 before the program started to 226 two years later. "This was achieved largely by screening the number of petitions sworn out and averting or preventing the inappropriate placement of children in care," notes Lindsey.
What is even more remarkable is that the number of cases coming to the attention of the system increased from 770 to 2,156 during the course of the program--an increase of 180 percent. Thus, while the number of potential entrants increased threefold during the course of the program, the number of actual admissions into care dropped by two-thirds.
The number of children removed from their homes and placed into care declined from 353 to 174, a decline of about 50 percent. The number of children placed in residential facilities was reduced from 262 to 35, a decrease of more than 85 percent. Perhaps most significantly, the number of children under six who were admitted dropped from 180 to zero.
But diverting placement would prove to be futile if the child showed up again due to continuing abuse or neglect. This did not appear to happen. The number of children for whom petitions were initially filed and who turned up again by the end of the following year due to abuse or neglect declined from 196 to 23.
The remarkable success of this program notwithstanding, it has yet to be replicated on any meaningful scale.
THE CONFUSION OF POVERTY WITH NEGLECT
The inability on the part of many child protective services caseworkers to differentiate between poverty and neglect is a major contributing factor to the continued inappropriate removals of children from their homes, argue many system critics.[16]
Close to 85 per cent of the cases agencies label as neglect are actually poverty cases, says Trevor Grant, former Director of Social Services of the New York City Child Welfare Administration, and removing children from their homes is often the safest course of action for a caseworker to take:
For the most trivial reasons families are destroyed. If the furniture is broken down or the house is messy, CWA workers will remove the child. When in doubt, the safest practice for the workers is to remove the children and then to file neglect charges that never have to be proved in court.[17]
Two Massachusetts studies serve to demonstrate the inextricable link between poverty and child removal.
Contrary to the results one might expect, in a study of abused and neglected children entering a hospital emergency room it was found that the severity of a physical injury served to decrease the likelihood of a child being placed outside of the home.
Specifically, the researchers found that the highest predictor of removal was not the extent of a given physical injury, but rather whether or not the family was Medicaid-eligible.[18]
In a follow-up study of 805 children, researchers found that the degree of physical injury to a child only became statistically significant in the reporting of child abuse when the family's income was excluded from the analysis.[19]
The consequences of vague statutes, increased reporting, and poor decision making among child protective services caseworkers are everywhere to be found.
In Los Angeles, lawyers at the office of Public Counsel reviewed every abuse and neglect petition filed in the county during one week in 1987. They found 30% of the petitions to be so groundless that they should never have been filed at all.[20]
Two years later in Seattle, Washington, the Governor's Commission on Children came to the same conclusion, finding that 30% of the petitions filed were for children who did not need to be in foster care.[21]
In Illinois, researchers for the Child Welfare Institute in Atlanta examined cases in three Illinois cities in 1994, conducting interviews with parents, foster parents, and caseworkers. Again, the researchers reached exactly the same conclusion. Reports the Chicago Tribune:
The Child Welfare Institute determined that in one-third of the cases, there was absolutely no reason for the children not to be home with their parents. The children were in foster care for the protection of their caseworker, not for their own safety.[22]
Defensive social work of the variety identified by the Child Welfare Institute would appear to permeate the field. In 1997, for example, removals of children from their homes in the Tampa Bay area of Florida reportedly doubled after a child known to the CPS system died.[23]
Similarly, according to Faye Moore, a senior official with the New York Social Services Employees Union Local 371, many of the removals of children from their homes that followed the tragic death of Elisa Izquierdo were unnecessary:
People are working not to make mistakes, and that may not necessarily be in the best interests of the children. How so? Unnecessary removals.[24]
If the vague statutes, increases in reporting, defensive social work and poor decision making in the field aren't enough to ensure that a large number of children will be unnecessarily removed from their homes, one other factor is certain to do it.
The Children's Defense Fund undertook a comprehensive review of the child welfare system. Project coordinator Jane Knitzer explained the studies findings to a Congressional committee, identifying as a major finding that "there is an antifamily bias that pervades the policies and practices of the child welfare system. The system works against families, not for them."
The children in care are subject to continuing neglect at the hands of public officials, she explained, adding that the federal role exacerbates both the antifamily bias and the public neglect of children.
This antifamily bias is "reflected at all points in the placement process," she explained, adding that as a result: "Children are inappropriately removed from their families."[25]
Worse, as child protective services caseworkers lack an empirically validated knowledge base to guide them in their decision making, they often fall back on hunches, or gut instinct. A user manual for child protective services supervisors issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services encourages the case manager to "analyze intuition without stifling creativity and spontaneity," explaining:
As caseworkers gain confidence, they begin to act on hunches, common sense, and intuition. Supervisors should assist caseworkers to validate these instincts by helping them analyze what led to the intuition.[26]
POVERTY CODIFIED
Responding to mounting criticism on one side about the high number of wrongful removals, and criticism on the other about the large number of children who manage each year to die under the watchful eye of child protective servises, the industry devised another gimmick to aid the social worker in making appropriate decisions.[27]
Enter the risk-assessment matrix--a checklist of "risk factors" typically used to aid the caseworker in predicting the likelihood of abuse or neglect at some point in the future.
"Risk assessment can be defined as the systematic collection of information to determine the degree to which a child is likely to be abused or neglected at some future point in time," researchers explain.[28]
Dozens of variants have been identified as being in use throughout the states. Some have as few as a handful of risk factors, while some others have several dozens of factors grouped together in various ways. These assessment tools are typically experimental and unvalidated in design, with some researchers having identified only half of the factors typically employed in their design as having been subjected to any empirical testing whatsoever.[29]
Like others among the many "solutions" devised to improve the severe deficiencies that plague the child welfare system, the risk assessment device would only appear to have made things worse.
"Many agencies have acted prematurely, implementing risk assessment instruments that have not been adequately designed or researched," writes Stanford University Law Professor Michael Wald with Maria Woolverton in the industry journal Child Welfare.
"It is not possible to to make highly accurate predictions of risk with existing instruments." Nevertheless, they have gained an almost uncritical acceptance in the field of child welfare, as Wald and Woolverton explain:
Unfortunately, some child protective services (CPS) agencies appear to be using risk-assessment instruments in an unjustifiable manner, given the limited knowledge base regarding the validity of these instruments. Moreover, we are concerned that many agencies are adopting risk-assessment instruments in lieu of addressing fundamental problems in existing child protection systems, such as the excessive number of inexperienced or incompetent workers and the lack of adequate resources. In fact, use of inadequately designed or researched risk-assessment instruments may result in poorer decisions, because workers will rely on mechanical rules and procedures instead of trying to develop greater clinical experience.[30]
But if there is one thing these assessment tools would appear to have in common, it is that they virtually define poverty conditions as indicating "neglect" on the part of parents. Among the countless factors typically included are such things as "dirty or unkempt home," "children's clothing torn or dirty," "lack of pride in neighborhood," "poor and unsafe living conditions," "family can only afford inadequate housing," "leaky faucets," and "exposed wiring."[31]
Hence, it should come as no surprise that whenever a close review of the foster care population is undertaken, it is revealed that a significant portion of children in care should never have entered the system to begin with, and that the majority of children in the foster care system come from poor families.
Sociologist John Hagedorn, a reform-minded administrator who spent two and a half years trying to reform the Milwaukee social services bureaucracy explains the results of one recent analysis:
After foster care cases were categorized by social workers and reviewed by a panel of experts, we found that most children did not need to be in foster care at all. The social workers and our expert panel agreed that a third of all children in foster care could immediately reunited with their families, if family preservation services were available . . .
The panel found another third of all children in foster care were in placement with relatives and in need of few services, and that only one-sixth of these cases could legitimately be categorized as having no chance of reunification.[32]
Consistent with these findings is a 1992 report issued by the Little Hoover Commission in California, which determined that only 19.9% of removals of children were due to allegations of physical or sexual abuse. The report concluded:
The Commission finds that the State's foster care system runs contrary to the preservation of families by unnecessarily removing an increasing number of children from their homes each year. Moreover, the children in the foster care system are staying in the system longer. As a result, the State's costs continue to skyrocket and children continue to be harmed by the removal from their families.[33]
The Philadelphia Daily News reports that a recent study sponsored by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation concluded that for every 1,000 children placed in the state's care, only 30 were victims of actual abuse.[34]
The 3 percent figure mirrors reporting trends, as only 3 percent of the the millions of reports frequently represented as "reports of child abuse and neglect" actually involve allegations of severe physical abuse.[35]
How can so many hundreds of thousands of children be needlessly torn from their homes? Aren't reasonable efforts to prevent removal required? Don't child protective workers first have to visit the home and conduct an investigation?
Not according to Dennis Lepak, a Deputy Probation Officer from California, who told a Congressional subcommittee:
Most tragically, children are placed with little or no services to prevent their removal from families. Children are often removed from homes that no representative of the removing agency has even visited.
"Decisions to remove children are based on information from old reports, office interviews, and phone calls. Caseload sizes dictate this approach," adds Lepak. "We cannot deliver the child the required services, or the family, so we deliver the child alone to the group homes."[36]
Marcia Robinson Lowry, speaking at the time as an attorney with the Children's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, identified failure to provide reasonable efforts to prevent placement as a nationwide problem, having told a Congressional subcommittee: "reasonable efforts are not made in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cases across the country."[37]
The modest requirement to provide some reasonable effort to prevent placement in foster care was the result of hearings held over a period of several years, over the course of which it was found that children were often being unnecessarily removed from their homes.[38]
"In fact, there were many instances then, as now, of children being removed unnecessarily from families. It is important to recognize that children almost always are traumatized by removal from their own family," explained the Child Welfare League of America during more recent hearings.[39]
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
"A 1986 federal study evaluating child welfare caseworkers found that up to two-thirds of substantiated cases of child maltreatment involved no actual wrongdoing on the part of parents," writes author Dana Mack.
Many removals of children into foster care are "capricious actions of 'preventive intervention' -- undertaken on a caseworker's presumption that though a child's home situation poses no immediate dangers or deprivations, it might sometime in the future," argues Mack.
In examining studies conducted by the American Humane Association during the mid-1980s, Mack found that half of the families child welfare agencies compelled to undergo therapeutic services for child maltreatment had never mistreated their children at all.[40]
And these therapeutic services are foisted on families on a massive scale. Douglas Besharov notes that even after the extensive screening of reports that takes place, as of the mid-1980s, roughly 400,000 families across the country were being "supervised" by child protective agencies, compelled to accept such "treatment services" under threat of court action.[41]
Beyond these numbers are very real children. How do these figures translate into human terms?
One foster mother from Utah has had 40 children in her care. She recounts: "Sometimes it's real rewarding to see them get back to where they should be. I only had one child that was really physically abused."
If only one of the foster children she cared for had been abused, what of the other thirty-nine that had passed through her home? ". . . I have a problem when parents repeatedly fail treatment plans and kids bounce back and forth. Luckily, we've had only two or three of those."[42]
In other words, most or all of the other thirty-nine children who were not abused had been removed from their homes in order to coerce their parents into complying with the "treatment plans" imposed by the Department of Social Services.
In a case which the 1991-92 Santa Clara Grand Jury reviewed, the principal of a school reported suspected "emotional abuse" to the local Department of Family and Children's Services, based on a comment a student had made. The parent was given one hour's notice of the detention hearing, and as a result failed to attend. His daughter was taken from his care. This occurred in 1991 and the Jury found, as of May 1993, that the student still remained out of her home.
In its review of this case the Grand Jury did not find any reasonable evidence of abuse on the part of the parent. What was found was a parent who appeared to care greatly for his daughter and her welfare but would not admit to something he did not do. His refusal to admit to abuse was viewed as a lack of cooperation on his part; therefore, his child was not returned.[43]
The children know they belong with their families, and not in the hands of strangers.
According a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, lengthy interviews conducted with children and parents from 200 randomly sampled cases revealed no surprises. Parents who were separated from their children felt they had been unfairly separated. As for their children, the article continues:
At least 80% of the children, asked to name three wishes, mentioned that they wanted to be with their mother or father. Many tended to believe that the separation was their fault.
Not only are child protective workers quick to tear children away from their families, but they are slow to return them as well.
The same article cites a 1992 University of Southern Maine study of the state of Kansas, which found that in 86.8 per cent of cases where a child was put in foster care, the state failed to make the required reasonable effort to reunite him with his parents.[44]
A similar situation is to be found in the District of Columbia. In a landmark suit initiated by the Children's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Court determined that the agency had:
consistently failed to provide services or otherwise use "reasonable efforts" to prevent placement. The result has been an increased risk of arbitrary or inappropriate placements as well as an increased cost to the District.
Just as the agency often failed to provide any services to prevent the removal of children from their homes, the Court found the agency "consistently failed to provide services once children are removed from their homes and placed in foster care."
Based on case records of the children in foster care as of December 1989 whose goal was return home and who had entered into care through voluntary placement, the Court found the agency "had failed to provide services in 77 percent of their cases."[45]
In Illinois, Cook County Juvenile Court Judge Robert A. Smierciak chided child welfare officials for failing to rectify a lingering problem of child-care workers--failing to show up for scheduled court appearances without explanation.
According to statistics compiled by the Cook County public guardian's office, during three weeks in May of 1994, 106 child welfare workers failed to appear for cases assigned to courtrooms that handle abuse and neglect cases. As a result, several children remained separated from their families, remaining instead in dangerous foster care placements.[46]
Douglas Besharov was invited to testify before the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families in 1987, in his capacity of director of the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect.
During his testimony, Besharov called for better screening procedures and improved intake methods. He also cited the need for training and educational programs that would set clear definitions of abuse and neglect. He continued, defining the standards that ought be applied in cases of state intervention:
[S]tates should be required to demonstrate that they are making efforts to prevent children from being removed from their homes without an appropriate investigation--unless they appear to be in imminent danger.[47]
This is not to suggest that there is no need for foster care. Sadly, some children do require a safe haven from chronic abuse or neglect. The greatest tragedy is that those children in true need of placement often are not identified--even in the event that they come to the attention of the system--while those for whom placement is inappropriate are removed from their homes by the hundreds of thousands. As professor of social work Leroy Pelton explains:
It is my belief that not only are there many children in foster care who should not have been placed there, but that there are other children who are being wrongfully left in their natural homes. In short, children are being removed from their homes in the wrong cases and being left at home in the wrong cases. Furthermore, it is my belief that if only those children were placed in foster care who actually need it, we would have very few children in foster care.[48]
CONCLUSION
The press plays its role in the molding of public perception. That perception is one largely based on sensationalized accounts of relatively infrequent occurrences of brutality at the hands of parents. Benjamin Wolf, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who filed a landmark suit against the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, responds to such sensationalized coverage as provided by the Chicago Tribune, writing:
Incredibly, there is another side which often is at least as bad and is rarely reported by the media. Those are the tragic situations in which children are needlessly removed from their homes or not reunited with their families when more appropriate, less expensive services would keep the family together.
"The cases that grab headlines and the attention of columnists are of course the ones in which the unrehabilitated parent regains custody only to inflict injury again," writes Wolf.
"But by not telling about the often silent suffering of perhaps thousands of children who could be reunited with their families with just a little bit of help, we all reinforce an atmosphere in which case workers will be forced needlessly to shatter families contrary to the best interests of the children."[49]
Foster care was never intended as a holding ground for children while caseworkers conduct an investigation, or as a coercive tool to enforce compliance with social worker demands. It was intended to offer an alternative home-like environment for those relatively few unfortunate children who are truly subject to an abusive home environment.
The sad reality is that it is all-too-often misused by child protective services caseworkers who are less than capable of conducting an adequate assessment, or who fear liability for their failure to remove a child who is subsequently injured. As professor of social work Duncan Lindsey points out: "Caseworkers in doubt about a child's situation make the safe decision to remove a child."[50]
As a result, the number of children removed from their homes has reached staggering proportions. It is precisely because the system is so flooded with children who don't belong there that tragedies in state care continue to mount.
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/foster02.htm
Isabella Brooke Knightly and Austin Gamez-Knightly
In Memory of my Loving Husband, William F. Knightly Jr. Murdered by ILLEGAL Palliative Care at a Nashua, NH Hospital
Sunday, February 21, 2010
CASEWORKER TRAINING
A Critical Look at the Child Welfare System
Caseworker Training
From Lifting the Veil
CASEWORKER TRAINING
An investigation of child abuse or neglect may have far reaching implications for children and their families. Decisions must be made as to whether or not a case is founded, whether children should be removed from their home, and as to what services should be provided to the family. What kind of training should a Child Protective Services caseworker have to aid in making such crucial decisions?
"You need a skilled professional to do what is a very complicated job," says Mark Hardin, director of foster care and family preservation for the American Bar Association. "There should be competitive testing and training, like you'd see at a police academy."[1]
Former Child Protective Services caseworker Paulla Garcia agrees. "In a police academy, they give you real training before they put you out in the field," says Garcia, adding that nothing like that was provided to her when she first joined the Arizona Department of Economic Security.
Instead, her training consisted of half a week spent reading policy manuals, after which she was assigned to follow some of the more "seasoned" caseworkers in the field.
Thankfully, Garcia had previous training as a social worker, and mental health interviewing experience to help guide her. She also had a background in child abuse triage, having worked in a pediatric clinic.
"I knew very early on I would not learn much from my 'seasoned' co-workers," says Garcia. "They had poor skills."[2]
The situation is not unique to Arizona. In New York City, caseworkers receive only twenty days of training, most of which focuses not on child development but on filling out forms and other paperwork tasks, a recent legal action charges.
"As a result, caseworkers are wholly unprepared to make critical assessments, to provide and access necessary services, or to work with children and families," charges the advocacy group Children's Rights, Inc.[3]
Elsewhere, a panel of experts in the field of child welfare assembled to study the operations of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services in the wake of a lawsuit against the agency. The panel found that: "DCFS caseworkers are uninformed or misinformed about internal resources and procedures of DCFS, as well as about DCFS philosophy and job performance expectations."
The panel also found caseworkers lacking in the essential skills of family assessment; service planning; family intervention techniques; child development; distinguishing the differences between poverty and neglect; and in their understanding of the legal rights and entitlements of the families and wards they served.[4]
"Contrary to public opinion, the majority of CPS workers are not trained social workers," write Professors of social work Lela Costin, Howard Karger and David Stoesz. They note that reductions in the minimum educational standards for public service jobs, including child protective services positions, have become a national trend.
Costin and colleagues point to a national study in which staff development directors in 27 states were asked about minimum educational requirements for child welfare caseworkers. Respondents reported that none of those states required a social work degree for an entry-level position in child welfare.
Nor would supervisory staff necessarily be better prepared. In a study of front-line supervisors, it was found that while some had many years of experience, barely one-third held graduate degrees in social work.[5]
The American Public Welfare Association indicates that one quarter of states surveyed do not require a college degree as a prerequisite for becoming a Child Protective Services caseworker, and less than half train workers before they take on cases.
Failures can be glaringly tragic, an Associated Press investigation of the child welfare system concludes. And while training is essential, the reality is that "undertrained and hard-pressed workers make tough decisions, pressured by time and limited resources. The easiest decision may be to temporarily remove a child from his or her home."[6]
In Vermont, Child Protective Services came under close scrutiny during the 1995 National Governor's Conference meeting, in Burlington. A forum held during the Conference drew attention to the need for reform of Child Protective Services throughout the country.
The event grew out of the work of Dr. Deborah G. Alicen, a clinical psychologist who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Child Protective Services. Her research indicated that many caseworkers have no college training, and that only 28 percent of all CPS workers in the country have either a Bachelor of Science or a Master of Science in Social Work degree. Thus, 72 percent of them, she concludes, have no suitable professional training.[7]
A study of 5,000 child welfare workers would bear this out. Researchers found that only 15 percent held a Bachelor of Science degree in Social Work, while only 13 percent held a Master of Science degree in the field.[8]
James McElhannon, a former Arkansas social worker describes his first days as a child protective caseworker:
My first day on the job, I was given a policy manual to look at, which basically taught me how to get travel reimbursement. And so, the second day on the job, I was handed cases to go out and investigate, so obviously, I went to investigate these cases without any experience or training whatsoever. The people who are making these decisions about children are still people that are undertrained, underpaid and underexperienced.[9]
"Foolish record-keeping policies, inadequate oversight, poor training and shortsighted budget cuts have left imperiled children with a crippled champion," a Suffolk County, New York, grand jury investigation concludes.[10]
In Utah, a 1993 Audit by the General Accounting Office found that 24 of 100 randomly selected referrals were inadequately investigated by Child Protective Services. The report concluded that system-wide changes are needed to protect the interests of both children and their families:
Better training, more focused supervisory review, and changes in staffing will help ensure that children are protected, families are preserved where possible, and a permanent home is established.[11]
Elsewhere, the Virginia House and Senate recently passed Joint House Resolution 502, which established a 1995-96 Joint House Subcommittee to investigate the adequacy of the training Child Protective Services workers receive.[12]
The sad reality is that the requirements for becoming a child protective services caseworker are very low.
In Georgia, a 1995 Child Protective Services Program Evaluation indicates that the minimum educational requirement for becoming a child protective caseworker is that of a High School diploma. The requirements in Indiana are only somewhat better, with "some college" as the prerequisite.[13]
Just how low are the requirements for becoming a child protective caseworker?
These frightening words were reported by the New York Times as spoken by a former protective services supervisor, one who had spent a decade working in the New York City Child Welfare Administration field office:
The worst of the caseworkers was extraordinarily bad -- unable to spell, to write sentences.
And there were some seriously troubled, dysfunctional people. They were the people knocking on the doors of others and asking how they were treating their children. You had to ask yourself: What is this madness?[14]
According to sociologist John M. Hagedorn, a reform minded administrator who tried for two and a half years to reform the troubled Milwaukee social services bureaucracy:
Milwaukee County civil service procedures allow a worker to go one day from handling baggage at the airport or feeding animals at the zoo to the next day investigating sexual abuse complaints.[15]
The situation is not unique to Milwaukee, as Michael Petit, Deputy Director of the Child Welfare League of America, explained to a 1995 Congressional subcommittee:
one-half of the States have no preservice training right now for the child welfare workers. You can be a 23-year-old social worker on Friday doing food stamps, and on Monday you are talking about somebody who has had sex with their children.[16]
Says author and family-violence expert Richard Gelles of the University of Rhode Island: "It is only mildly facetious to talk about child-protective workers being 26-year-old art-history majors with 20 hours of training who do risk-assessment based on how the toys are lined up."[17]
Evidently, child protective caseworkers get an earlier start in Massachusetts. "We need the best people in the field," says Marie Parente, Chairwoman of the Massachusetts Legislative Committee on Foster Care. "We can't have these 22-year-old art students making decisions about children's lives."[18]
The lack of training often has a tremendous impact on how investigations are conducted, as well as their outcomes. Law enforcement personnel in the state of Florida note that there were many caseworkers who were accusatory in tone from the outset of the initial interview, attributing this to their lack of training, among some other factors.
A recent study indicates that some of the state's child protective services caseworkers were "notorious for their cold, almost confrontational, style thus putting families on the defensive."
"In the absence of proper training, some were unnecessarily and unwisely heavy handed and reacted to resistance with an exertion of power," note reviewers. As a result, the agency had a widely held reputation of being "an invasive bureaucracy which removes children from their families without good cause."[19]
By many accounts, hiring standards continue ever to diminish. Faced with low pay, increasing caseloads, the high stress of helping allegedly abused children, and confronted by criticism from the public when a child dies, qualified candidates are often avoiding the job.
In one North Carolina county, for example, officials are turning to those with little or no social work experience to fill new positions. Many have degrees in the humanities or other subjects that are unrelated to children or Social Services.[20]
The lack of training and experience is not limited to the child protective services intake workers, extending throughout the entire child welfare bureaucracy. According to David Liederman, Executive Director of the Child Welfare League of America:
There is inadequate training for foster parents, for caseworkers, for core personnel, and for administrators. I would suggest to you that it is not in the best interest of children or families in this country to hire someone with a B.A. in history, give them three weeks of training, and turn them loose...[21]
North Carolina now requires some training for social workers who investigate child abuse and neglect, but not for its foster care workers.
"We have social workers coming into agencies who've never dealt with public agencies, who may or may not have degrees in social work," says Joann Caye, a former state Department of Social Services supervisor who teaches at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's School of Social Work.
"In many, many instances, we're dealing with social workers so overworked and undertrained that they can't get the cases right."[22]
Is this what was intended by the original legislation? Not according to Pat Schroeder, former Congresswoman and sponsor of the Mondale Act, who writes:
In the Child Abuse and Protection Act, we tried to set up a system in which trained people could identify children and parents who were in trouble and offer them help. . . People's lives can hinge on the judgement of the social worker assigned to their case. Yet some states don't even require social workers to have specialized training in their field.[23]
Douglas Besharov, founding director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, addressed the issue of social worker training in the context of the high unfounded rate of allegations before the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families:
There are, of course, many reasons for the high unfounded rate--evidence of child maltreatment is hard to obtain, overworked and inadequately trained workers may not uncover the evidence that does exist, and many cases are labeled unfounded as a means of caseload control or when there are no services available to help the family.[24]
Writing in Justice for Children, author Andrew H. Vachss explains the need for adequately trained child abuse investigators:
Child abuse investigation is not a hobby. It is not a game for amateurs. We must establish irreducible minimums of competence in all investigative and fact-finding procedures, and we must be assured that professionals adhere to such standards.[25]
But, instead of irreducible minimums of competence, what we find instead is an extraordinary degree of incompetence among the ranks of child protective services caseworkers.
Genuine cases of life-threatening child abuse all-too-frequently go uninvestigated as poorly trained child protective caseworkers lacking in any training or life experience make decisions that will greatly impact families and lives. The result is that children continue to die, even as functional and loving families are needlessly destroyed.
"Whether to blame the workers or not is often simply a matter of perspective," according to John Hagedorn. "Interviews with DSS management as part of the Youth Initiative evaluation found widespread agreement that line workers were the greatest obstacle to reform." Notes the former Youth Initiative director: "I could fill an entire book with 'bad worker' stories from personal experience and from the lips of managers and line staff themselves."[26]
Says David Liederman of the Child Welfare League of America:
Our very first priority has been and will always be to assure the safety of abused and neglected children and to make sure that their best interest is served. To do that, you have got to have experienced people. Unfortunately, many times the people making judgements in this business are rookies. This is no place for rookies...[27]
As the experts continue to testify, and the studies are conducted, children continue to be needlessly separated from their families and placed by the thousands into a foster care system that presents tremendous potential risks of harm. Meanwhile, those children in genuine need of protection continue to "slip through the cracks."
Says former New York City caseworker Marc Parent: "You hear about children who fall through the cracks, but the truth is that there are no cracks. There are only people, and children are falling through their fingers."[28]
But if there is one aspect of social worker training that is often worse than no training at all, it is the training that some social workers do receive.
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/training.htm
Caseworker Training
From Lifting the Veil
CASEWORKER TRAINING
An investigation of child abuse or neglect may have far reaching implications for children and their families. Decisions must be made as to whether or not a case is founded, whether children should be removed from their home, and as to what services should be provided to the family. What kind of training should a Child Protective Services caseworker have to aid in making such crucial decisions?
"You need a skilled professional to do what is a very complicated job," says Mark Hardin, director of foster care and family preservation for the American Bar Association. "There should be competitive testing and training, like you'd see at a police academy."[1]
Former Child Protective Services caseworker Paulla Garcia agrees. "In a police academy, they give you real training before they put you out in the field," says Garcia, adding that nothing like that was provided to her when she first joined the Arizona Department of Economic Security.
Instead, her training consisted of half a week spent reading policy manuals, after which she was assigned to follow some of the more "seasoned" caseworkers in the field.
Thankfully, Garcia had previous training as a social worker, and mental health interviewing experience to help guide her. She also had a background in child abuse triage, having worked in a pediatric clinic.
"I knew very early on I would not learn much from my 'seasoned' co-workers," says Garcia. "They had poor skills."[2]
The situation is not unique to Arizona. In New York City, caseworkers receive only twenty days of training, most of which focuses not on child development but on filling out forms and other paperwork tasks, a recent legal action charges.
"As a result, caseworkers are wholly unprepared to make critical assessments, to provide and access necessary services, or to work with children and families," charges the advocacy group Children's Rights, Inc.[3]
Elsewhere, a panel of experts in the field of child welfare assembled to study the operations of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services in the wake of a lawsuit against the agency. The panel found that: "DCFS caseworkers are uninformed or misinformed about internal resources and procedures of DCFS, as well as about DCFS philosophy and job performance expectations."
The panel also found caseworkers lacking in the essential skills of family assessment; service planning; family intervention techniques; child development; distinguishing the differences between poverty and neglect; and in their understanding of the legal rights and entitlements of the families and wards they served.[4]
"Contrary to public opinion, the majority of CPS workers are not trained social workers," write Professors of social work Lela Costin, Howard Karger and David Stoesz. They note that reductions in the minimum educational standards for public service jobs, including child protective services positions, have become a national trend.
Costin and colleagues point to a national study in which staff development directors in 27 states were asked about minimum educational requirements for child welfare caseworkers. Respondents reported that none of those states required a social work degree for an entry-level position in child welfare.
Nor would supervisory staff necessarily be better prepared. In a study of front-line supervisors, it was found that while some had many years of experience, barely one-third held graduate degrees in social work.[5]
The American Public Welfare Association indicates that one quarter of states surveyed do not require a college degree as a prerequisite for becoming a Child Protective Services caseworker, and less than half train workers before they take on cases.
Failures can be glaringly tragic, an Associated Press investigation of the child welfare system concludes. And while training is essential, the reality is that "undertrained and hard-pressed workers make tough decisions, pressured by time and limited resources. The easiest decision may be to temporarily remove a child from his or her home."[6]
In Vermont, Child Protective Services came under close scrutiny during the 1995 National Governor's Conference meeting, in Burlington. A forum held during the Conference drew attention to the need for reform of Child Protective Services throughout the country.
The event grew out of the work of Dr. Deborah G. Alicen, a clinical psychologist who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Child Protective Services. Her research indicated that many caseworkers have no college training, and that only 28 percent of all CPS workers in the country have either a Bachelor of Science or a Master of Science in Social Work degree. Thus, 72 percent of them, she concludes, have no suitable professional training.[7]
A study of 5,000 child welfare workers would bear this out. Researchers found that only 15 percent held a Bachelor of Science degree in Social Work, while only 13 percent held a Master of Science degree in the field.[8]
James McElhannon, a former Arkansas social worker describes his first days as a child protective caseworker:
My first day on the job, I was given a policy manual to look at, which basically taught me how to get travel reimbursement. And so, the second day on the job, I was handed cases to go out and investigate, so obviously, I went to investigate these cases without any experience or training whatsoever. The people who are making these decisions about children are still people that are undertrained, underpaid and underexperienced.[9]
"Foolish record-keeping policies, inadequate oversight, poor training and shortsighted budget cuts have left imperiled children with a crippled champion," a Suffolk County, New York, grand jury investigation concludes.[10]
In Utah, a 1993 Audit by the General Accounting Office found that 24 of 100 randomly selected referrals were inadequately investigated by Child Protective Services. The report concluded that system-wide changes are needed to protect the interests of both children and their families:
Better training, more focused supervisory review, and changes in staffing will help ensure that children are protected, families are preserved where possible, and a permanent home is established.[11]
Elsewhere, the Virginia House and Senate recently passed Joint House Resolution 502, which established a 1995-96 Joint House Subcommittee to investigate the adequacy of the training Child Protective Services workers receive.[12]
The sad reality is that the requirements for becoming a child protective services caseworker are very low.
In Georgia, a 1995 Child Protective Services Program Evaluation indicates that the minimum educational requirement for becoming a child protective caseworker is that of a High School diploma. The requirements in Indiana are only somewhat better, with "some college" as the prerequisite.[13]
Just how low are the requirements for becoming a child protective caseworker?
These frightening words were reported by the New York Times as spoken by a former protective services supervisor, one who had spent a decade working in the New York City Child Welfare Administration field office:
The worst of the caseworkers was extraordinarily bad -- unable to spell, to write sentences.
And there were some seriously troubled, dysfunctional people. They were the people knocking on the doors of others and asking how they were treating their children. You had to ask yourself: What is this madness?[14]
According to sociologist John M. Hagedorn, a reform minded administrator who tried for two and a half years to reform the troubled Milwaukee social services bureaucracy:
Milwaukee County civil service procedures allow a worker to go one day from handling baggage at the airport or feeding animals at the zoo to the next day investigating sexual abuse complaints.[15]
The situation is not unique to Milwaukee, as Michael Petit, Deputy Director of the Child Welfare League of America, explained to a 1995 Congressional subcommittee:
one-half of the States have no preservice training right now for the child welfare workers. You can be a 23-year-old social worker on Friday doing food stamps, and on Monday you are talking about somebody who has had sex with their children.[16]
Says author and family-violence expert Richard Gelles of the University of Rhode Island: "It is only mildly facetious to talk about child-protective workers being 26-year-old art-history majors with 20 hours of training who do risk-assessment based on how the toys are lined up."[17]
Evidently, child protective caseworkers get an earlier start in Massachusetts. "We need the best people in the field," says Marie Parente, Chairwoman of the Massachusetts Legislative Committee on Foster Care. "We can't have these 22-year-old art students making decisions about children's lives."[18]
The lack of training often has a tremendous impact on how investigations are conducted, as well as their outcomes. Law enforcement personnel in the state of Florida note that there were many caseworkers who were accusatory in tone from the outset of the initial interview, attributing this to their lack of training, among some other factors.
A recent study indicates that some of the state's child protective services caseworkers were "notorious for their cold, almost confrontational, style thus putting families on the defensive."
"In the absence of proper training, some were unnecessarily and unwisely heavy handed and reacted to resistance with an exertion of power," note reviewers. As a result, the agency had a widely held reputation of being "an invasive bureaucracy which removes children from their families without good cause."[19]
By many accounts, hiring standards continue ever to diminish. Faced with low pay, increasing caseloads, the high stress of helping allegedly abused children, and confronted by criticism from the public when a child dies, qualified candidates are often avoiding the job.
In one North Carolina county, for example, officials are turning to those with little or no social work experience to fill new positions. Many have degrees in the humanities or other subjects that are unrelated to children or Social Services.[20]
The lack of training and experience is not limited to the child protective services intake workers, extending throughout the entire child welfare bureaucracy. According to David Liederman, Executive Director of the Child Welfare League of America:
There is inadequate training for foster parents, for caseworkers, for core personnel, and for administrators. I would suggest to you that it is not in the best interest of children or families in this country to hire someone with a B.A. in history, give them three weeks of training, and turn them loose...[21]
North Carolina now requires some training for social workers who investigate child abuse and neglect, but not for its foster care workers.
"We have social workers coming into agencies who've never dealt with public agencies, who may or may not have degrees in social work," says Joann Caye, a former state Department of Social Services supervisor who teaches at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's School of Social Work.
"In many, many instances, we're dealing with social workers so overworked and undertrained that they can't get the cases right."[22]
Is this what was intended by the original legislation? Not according to Pat Schroeder, former Congresswoman and sponsor of the Mondale Act, who writes:
In the Child Abuse and Protection Act, we tried to set up a system in which trained people could identify children and parents who were in trouble and offer them help. . . People's lives can hinge on the judgement of the social worker assigned to their case. Yet some states don't even require social workers to have specialized training in their field.[23]
Douglas Besharov, founding director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, addressed the issue of social worker training in the context of the high unfounded rate of allegations before the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families:
There are, of course, many reasons for the high unfounded rate--evidence of child maltreatment is hard to obtain, overworked and inadequately trained workers may not uncover the evidence that does exist, and many cases are labeled unfounded as a means of caseload control or when there are no services available to help the family.[24]
Writing in Justice for Children, author Andrew H. Vachss explains the need for adequately trained child abuse investigators:
Child abuse investigation is not a hobby. It is not a game for amateurs. We must establish irreducible minimums of competence in all investigative and fact-finding procedures, and we must be assured that professionals adhere to such standards.[25]
But, instead of irreducible minimums of competence, what we find instead is an extraordinary degree of incompetence among the ranks of child protective services caseworkers.
Genuine cases of life-threatening child abuse all-too-frequently go uninvestigated as poorly trained child protective caseworkers lacking in any training or life experience make decisions that will greatly impact families and lives. The result is that children continue to die, even as functional and loving families are needlessly destroyed.
"Whether to blame the workers or not is often simply a matter of perspective," according to John Hagedorn. "Interviews with DSS management as part of the Youth Initiative evaluation found widespread agreement that line workers were the greatest obstacle to reform." Notes the former Youth Initiative director: "I could fill an entire book with 'bad worker' stories from personal experience and from the lips of managers and line staff themselves."[26]
Says David Liederman of the Child Welfare League of America:
Our very first priority has been and will always be to assure the safety of abused and neglected children and to make sure that their best interest is served. To do that, you have got to have experienced people. Unfortunately, many times the people making judgements in this business are rookies. This is no place for rookies...[27]
As the experts continue to testify, and the studies are conducted, children continue to be needlessly separated from their families and placed by the thousands into a foster care system that presents tremendous potential risks of harm. Meanwhile, those children in genuine need of protection continue to "slip through the cracks."
Says former New York City caseworker Marc Parent: "You hear about children who fall through the cracks, but the truth is that there are no cracks. There are only people, and children are falling through their fingers."[28]
But if there is one aspect of social worker training that is often worse than no training at all, it is the training that some social workers do receive.
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/training.htm
A Critical Look at the Child Welfare System Caseworker Turnover
A Critical Look at the Child Welfare System
Caseworker Turnover
From Lifting the Veil
In the last 2 years there has been a 50 percent turnover among State directors of child welfare programs. That is outrageous.
David Liederman --
Child Welfare League of America
TURNOVER IN CHILD WELFARE
Certain child abuse "professionals" have labeled child abuse "as American as apple pie." If child abuse is the apple pie, then Child Protective Services may well be the apple turnover of the child abuse bakery.
In Massachusetts, for example, the turnover among Department of Social Services social workers is currently 300 per year.[1]
Dare Family Services Northeast Region, a private nonprofit agency that provides adoption and foster placement under contract with the Massachusetts Department of Social Services reported an 80 percent turnover since the policy of dealing with whole families rather than single children went into effect in July of 1990. Its Taunton office reported a 100 percent turnover.[2]
In Prince William County, Virginia, the ranks of Child Protective Services have been battered by low morale and a staggering 60 percent annual turnover rate, said Department head Ricardo Perez to the Prince William County Board of Supervisors.
"A 60 percent turnover rate -- that's greater than staff help at the 7-Eleven," said County Supervisor Loring B. Thompson (R-Brentsville) who questioned whether low staffing was really to blame for all the problems in the agency. "You begin to wonder somewhat about the management of the organization."[3]
In Florida, the Miami Herald reports that staff turnover among child protective caseworkers actually decreased in 1993, from a previous high of 40% down to 23%.[4]
What are the tangible impacts of the high caseloads, the false reports that caseworkers are called upon to investigate, and the resultant high turnover among child protective workers? According to the Miami Herald:
In Broward County, child-protection workers falsify and botch scores of abuse and neglect investigations. The results: A child is beaten into a coma. An 11-year-old girl is raped by her uncle. A frightened boy of 12 is left to live in a closet.
A child is supposed to spend no more than 18 months in foster care before being adopted or returned home. In South Florida, children typically spend three years or more. . .
Sometimes counselors don't visit the homes for months. When they do visit, the workers are often too harried to spend more than a few minutes. . .
Turnover is so high that . . . two foster kids have had 14 caseworkers in the past four years.
Today, some South Florida counselors have 71 cases.
In 1997, Broward County reached a point of near-crisis, with turnover among its foster care workers at 85 percent. By 1998, attorneys from the Youth Law Center were calling its foster care system one of the most dangerous and over-crowded in the nation, threatening that a lawsuit loomed imminent.[5]
According to one recent report issued by the General Accounting office: "Next to funding, states report that staffing is the most serious issue facing their child welfare systems. In response to an APWA survey, 90 percent of states reported difficulty recruiting and retaining caseworkers."
Attributing difficulties in recruiting and retaining caseworkers to several factors, including hiring freezes, low pay, and poor working conditions, the report concludes:
These factors, in turn, led to staff shortages, high caseloads, and high burnout and turnover rates among caseworkers. In some jurisdictions, caseloads have reached 100 cases per caseworker, well above the 25 per caseworker recommended by the National Association of Social Workers. In New York City, annual turnover rates for caseworkers have been as high as 75 percent, so that each year most foster children, who have suffered from unstable families, get a new caseworker.[6]
Douglas Besharov, founding director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, described one New York City case that had been passed from worker-to-worker in a recent article in Social Science and Modern Society:
In a 1992 New York City case, for example, five-month-old Jeffrey Harden died from burns caused by scalding water and three broken ribs while under the supervision of New York City's Child Welfare Administration. Jeffrey Harden's family had been known to the administration for more than a year and a half. Over this period, the case had been handled by four separate caseworkers, each conducting only partial investigations before resigning or being reassigned to new cases. It is unclear whether Jeffrey's death was caused by his mother or her boyfriend, but because of insufficient time and overburdened caseloads, all four workers failed to pay attention to a whole host of obvious warning signals.[7]
Cases are reassigned, passed from worker-to-worker as workers are transfered or resign. Children in need of services, or lingering in foster care, are lucky to see the same caseworker twice--if they are lucky enough to see one at all.
"The rate of burnout and turnover among CPS workers is alarmingly high, resulting in a workforce that is chronically inexperienced and under-trained," notes the National Conference of State Legislatures.[8]
Nor is the problem isolated to larger metropolitan areas. Evidence of under-trained and inexperienced child protective services caseworkers is virtually everywhere to be found.
Notes a California Grand Jury: "Due to the high employee turnover rate in Child Protective Services, Social Workers doing Immediate Response and Initial Services often lack experience." [9]
"The vacancies created by caseworker turnover have resulted in increased workload for the remaining caseworkers, less experienced caseworkers assuming increased responsibilities, and higher costs to train new caseworkers," writes the Texas State Auditor in a 1995 report.[10]
"High staff turnover rates, low pay, inadequate training, inadequate supervision, etc., lead to poor casework practice in many cases, despite good intentions," the Child Welfare League of America told a Senate committee.[11]
Civil service procedures may well be a major contributing factor to the continuing crises faced by child welfare agencies.
In Massachusetts, a 1993 report issued by the Governor's Special Commission on Foster Care recommended abolishing the civil service system used by the Department of Social Services in the hiring and promotion of workers, finding the agency to be on the verge of organizational collapse, with management and leadership failures having left the department virtually paralyzed.
As a result, the commission said, the Department is unable to effectively serve the needs of children and families and that many children, while in the care of the department, suffer continued and repeated abuse and neglect.
In its 280-page report, the commission recommended a complete restructuring of the agency, saying that without an overhaul, any other recommended changes will be nearly impossible to undertake.
"This commission is asking for nothing less than a serious reformulation of the objectives of the state's child protection and child welfare systems," said Dr. Eli Newberger, a commission member and director of family development programs at Children's Hospital.[12]
Higher stress, client contact positions are filled primarily by newer staff, often transfers from other agencies using the child protective position as a stepping-stone to other civil service positions, argues John M. Hagedorn, former director of the Milwaukee Youth Initiative.
"Many of the new transfer employees wait their mandatory six months and then bid to a 'better' job within social services," notes Hagedorn. "Thus the crucial jobs of client contact are held by a mix of highly committed, but frustrated staff, and staff who are 'stuck' in those positions until they can bid out."
Hagedorn notes that the fragmentation of social services has created "eagerly sought after islands of relief" from the stresses of day-to-day contact with troubled families. Older, typically white social workers advance in seniority as they bid for better and better jobs within the bureaucracy, transferring to the "nooks and crannies" of the bureaucracy, to specialty positions like "purchase liaison," which entail little client contact.[13]
Mismanagement and sexual harassment also account for a part of the turnover problem in some agencies.
In Florida, management at the child protective services office in Bradenton was found to have "potentially serious problems," according to a state investigative report.
Two managers, Stephen Kibbey, program administrator for child protective investigations, and Ruth Hansel, an abuse investigative supervisor, were demoted to non-supervisory positions in the wake of the report.
The report was sparked when two anonymous letters sent to state legislators and Gov. Lawton Chiles alleging a litany of problems, including allegations that supervisors forced employees to lie in court about child abuse cases, falsified information to fire certain employees, intimidated children during child abuse interviews and bribed clients to lie about cases.
The letters led to an Inspector General's investigation, which said that Kibbey verbally abused his staff and Hansel engaged in and allowed sexually inappropriate behavior in her office.
Employee dissatisfaction at the local HRS office led to the two anonymous letters complaining of conditions there. The letters said things were so bad that children in Manatee County would suffer or die because of the poor management of child abuse and neglect cases.
A former HRS child protection counselor who retired in 1995 after 17 years with HRS said the allegations sounded to her as true. "From what I know, what I read sounded very much like what's happening," she told reporters. "The people who do the good work just don't get the promotions."[14]
Similar problems were identified in California, as the 1990-91 Santa Barbara Grand Jury explained:
In reviewing the operations of the Santa Barbara CPS Division, the Grand Jury was appalled by the degree of mutual distrust which exists between management and staff. Despite an "open door" policy, some of the line staff, most of whom have long tenure, view their managers as closed minded, dictatorial and intimidating. Managers view some staff as resistant to change, obstructive and vindictive.
The Grand Jury determined that these problems were of such severity that unless immediate corrective actions were undertaken, that essential mandated services to children would have been jeopardized.[15]
Fiscal concerns and political maneuvering contribute to the crisis.
In June of 1989, District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry was told that 41.3 percent of the caseworker positions in the Children and Family Services Division were vacant, and that the "tremendous amount of stress that leads to worker burnout" contributes to the "rapid turnover" of social workers.
The former mayor was informed again in November of 1989, and once again in January of 1990 that the Division was experiencing serious staff shortages. Nevertheless, on June 28, 1990, the District of Columbia instituted a hiring freeze that barred filling the vacancies.
As of February of 1991, 107 of a total of 239 social worker positions in the Division remained vacant.[16]
But the problems associated with high employee turnover are not limited to child protective workers, extending to other related fields as well.
In South Carolina, entry-level foster care licensing workers, who make $19,375 a year, are the agency's lowest-paid caseworkers and have one of the highest turnover rates in the agency. And seven or eight out of every 10 prospective foster parents drop out during 10 hours of training before they are licensed.
"I think the perception of a lot of [Department of Social Services employees] . . . is that if you do that for a while, you can get a real job," says Lynne Noble, a University of South Carolina employee under contract to write training programs for South Carolina foster care workers and foster parents through the Center for Child and Family Studies.[17]
The high turnover in child protective agencies is symptomatic of more complex problems which have long been documented, according to some professionals. Writing in Child Welfare, a periodical put out by the Child Welfare League of America, Susan J. Wells, Ph.D., Director of Research for the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, Washington, D.C. defines the problem in a broader context:
Report after report describes the high turnover rate of staff, the lag time between knowledge development and use in the field, the archaic information systems in many agencies, and the feeling of powerlessness many administrators voice. To contribute to the improvement of CPS, research must take a more rigorous approach to evaluation of management and administration. Both process and outcome are critical. The personnel crisis (e.g., insufficient number of staff members, high turnover, insufficient training) appears to have a devastating effect on the quality of services currently provided. . .[18]
There may more fundamental issues driving the high turnover in the field, among them the erosion of some deeply-cherished myths, suggests George Frank in an early examination of the treatment needs of children in foster care. Frank identified the child welfare system as one in which "the massive employment of social workers without Master's degrees in social work, often with no type of social work education, large caseloads, infrequent interviews, and inadequate diagnosis" were among the characteristic elements.
Infrequent and poorly focused work with families, and "a peculiar blindness to the child's distress until he or she did something bizarre or antisocial," coupled with a tendency toward the blaming or rejection of a child were identified. But most distressingly, Frank explained:
There seems to be a myth that the placement experience is somehow good for the child; even when it blatantly is obvious that this is not so, social workers frequently report that the setting is meeting the child's needs. Another problem is rapid turnover among workers, so that often there is no continuity of treatment; perhaps this is a function of the myth not holding up over time.[19]
Far from limited to the front lines, the constant turnover extends itself to the top of the bureaucratic pyramid. As David Liederman, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America recently explained during Congressional hearings: "There is a lack of stable leadership in child welfare. In the last 2 years there has been a 50 percent turnover among State directors of child welfare programs. That is outrageous."[20]
System proponents with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo point to high caseloads, increasingly difficult family circumstances, drug usage and other outside factors to account for the problems that ail the child welfare and foster care systems.
But the problems of high turnover and inexperienced staff have long been documented. During the 1970s, turnover in the field of child welfare was reported in industry publications to be in the range of 50 to 100 percent.[21]
A 1976 study identified caseworkers as "prone to changing their jobs after relatively short periods of involvement with their clients."[22]
What of the effect all of this has on the children? For Jesus, a nine-year-old Los Angeles County boy who was "beaten, sodomized, burned on his genitals and nearly drowned by his foster parents" after caseworkers failed to visit him in his foster home for four months, it means a life spent as a spastic paraplegic.[23]
For hundreds of thousands of other children it means long-term, and in many cases permanent separation from loving families as they languish in inappropriate placements with scarce hope of returning to their families.
For Jeffrey Harden, Elisa Izquierdo, and the countless hundreds of other children in genuine need of protection, it meant a fate far more permanent.
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/turnover.htm
Caseworker Turnover
From Lifting the Veil
In the last 2 years there has been a 50 percent turnover among State directors of child welfare programs. That is outrageous.
David Liederman --
Child Welfare League of America
TURNOVER IN CHILD WELFARE
Certain child abuse "professionals" have labeled child abuse "as American as apple pie." If child abuse is the apple pie, then Child Protective Services may well be the apple turnover of the child abuse bakery.
In Massachusetts, for example, the turnover among Department of Social Services social workers is currently 300 per year.[1]
Dare Family Services Northeast Region, a private nonprofit agency that provides adoption and foster placement under contract with the Massachusetts Department of Social Services reported an 80 percent turnover since the policy of dealing with whole families rather than single children went into effect in July of 1990. Its Taunton office reported a 100 percent turnover.[2]
In Prince William County, Virginia, the ranks of Child Protective Services have been battered by low morale and a staggering 60 percent annual turnover rate, said Department head Ricardo Perez to the Prince William County Board of Supervisors.
"A 60 percent turnover rate -- that's greater than staff help at the 7-Eleven," said County Supervisor Loring B. Thompson (R-Brentsville) who questioned whether low staffing was really to blame for all the problems in the agency. "You begin to wonder somewhat about the management of the organization."[3]
In Florida, the Miami Herald reports that staff turnover among child protective caseworkers actually decreased in 1993, from a previous high of 40% down to 23%.[4]
What are the tangible impacts of the high caseloads, the false reports that caseworkers are called upon to investigate, and the resultant high turnover among child protective workers? According to the Miami Herald:
In Broward County, child-protection workers falsify and botch scores of abuse and neglect investigations. The results: A child is beaten into a coma. An 11-year-old girl is raped by her uncle. A frightened boy of 12 is left to live in a closet.
A child is supposed to spend no more than 18 months in foster care before being adopted or returned home. In South Florida, children typically spend three years or more. . .
Sometimes counselors don't visit the homes for months. When they do visit, the workers are often too harried to spend more than a few minutes. . .
Turnover is so high that . . . two foster kids have had 14 caseworkers in the past four years.
Today, some South Florida counselors have 71 cases.
In 1997, Broward County reached a point of near-crisis, with turnover among its foster care workers at 85 percent. By 1998, attorneys from the Youth Law Center were calling its foster care system one of the most dangerous and over-crowded in the nation, threatening that a lawsuit loomed imminent.[5]
According to one recent report issued by the General Accounting office: "Next to funding, states report that staffing is the most serious issue facing their child welfare systems. In response to an APWA survey, 90 percent of states reported difficulty recruiting and retaining caseworkers."
Attributing difficulties in recruiting and retaining caseworkers to several factors, including hiring freezes, low pay, and poor working conditions, the report concludes:
These factors, in turn, led to staff shortages, high caseloads, and high burnout and turnover rates among caseworkers. In some jurisdictions, caseloads have reached 100 cases per caseworker, well above the 25 per caseworker recommended by the National Association of Social Workers. In New York City, annual turnover rates for caseworkers have been as high as 75 percent, so that each year most foster children, who have suffered from unstable families, get a new caseworker.[6]
Douglas Besharov, founding director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, described one New York City case that had been passed from worker-to-worker in a recent article in Social Science and Modern Society:
In a 1992 New York City case, for example, five-month-old Jeffrey Harden died from burns caused by scalding water and three broken ribs while under the supervision of New York City's Child Welfare Administration. Jeffrey Harden's family had been known to the administration for more than a year and a half. Over this period, the case had been handled by four separate caseworkers, each conducting only partial investigations before resigning or being reassigned to new cases. It is unclear whether Jeffrey's death was caused by his mother or her boyfriend, but because of insufficient time and overburdened caseloads, all four workers failed to pay attention to a whole host of obvious warning signals.[7]
Cases are reassigned, passed from worker-to-worker as workers are transfered or resign. Children in need of services, or lingering in foster care, are lucky to see the same caseworker twice--if they are lucky enough to see one at all.
"The rate of burnout and turnover among CPS workers is alarmingly high, resulting in a workforce that is chronically inexperienced and under-trained," notes the National Conference of State Legislatures.[8]
Nor is the problem isolated to larger metropolitan areas. Evidence of under-trained and inexperienced child protective services caseworkers is virtually everywhere to be found.
Notes a California Grand Jury: "Due to the high employee turnover rate in Child Protective Services, Social Workers doing Immediate Response and Initial Services often lack experience." [9]
"The vacancies created by caseworker turnover have resulted in increased workload for the remaining caseworkers, less experienced caseworkers assuming increased responsibilities, and higher costs to train new caseworkers," writes the Texas State Auditor in a 1995 report.[10]
"High staff turnover rates, low pay, inadequate training, inadequate supervision, etc., lead to poor casework practice in many cases, despite good intentions," the Child Welfare League of America told a Senate committee.[11]
Civil service procedures may well be a major contributing factor to the continuing crises faced by child welfare agencies.
In Massachusetts, a 1993 report issued by the Governor's Special Commission on Foster Care recommended abolishing the civil service system used by the Department of Social Services in the hiring and promotion of workers, finding the agency to be on the verge of organizational collapse, with management and leadership failures having left the department virtually paralyzed.
As a result, the commission said, the Department is unable to effectively serve the needs of children and families and that many children, while in the care of the department, suffer continued and repeated abuse and neglect.
In its 280-page report, the commission recommended a complete restructuring of the agency, saying that without an overhaul, any other recommended changes will be nearly impossible to undertake.
"This commission is asking for nothing less than a serious reformulation of the objectives of the state's child protection and child welfare systems," said Dr. Eli Newberger, a commission member and director of family development programs at Children's Hospital.[12]
Higher stress, client contact positions are filled primarily by newer staff, often transfers from other agencies using the child protective position as a stepping-stone to other civil service positions, argues John M. Hagedorn, former director of the Milwaukee Youth Initiative.
"Many of the new transfer employees wait their mandatory six months and then bid to a 'better' job within social services," notes Hagedorn. "Thus the crucial jobs of client contact are held by a mix of highly committed, but frustrated staff, and staff who are 'stuck' in those positions until they can bid out."
Hagedorn notes that the fragmentation of social services has created "eagerly sought after islands of relief" from the stresses of day-to-day contact with troubled families. Older, typically white social workers advance in seniority as they bid for better and better jobs within the bureaucracy, transferring to the "nooks and crannies" of the bureaucracy, to specialty positions like "purchase liaison," which entail little client contact.[13]
Mismanagement and sexual harassment also account for a part of the turnover problem in some agencies.
In Florida, management at the child protective services office in Bradenton was found to have "potentially serious problems," according to a state investigative report.
Two managers, Stephen Kibbey, program administrator for child protective investigations, and Ruth Hansel, an abuse investigative supervisor, were demoted to non-supervisory positions in the wake of the report.
The report was sparked when two anonymous letters sent to state legislators and Gov. Lawton Chiles alleging a litany of problems, including allegations that supervisors forced employees to lie in court about child abuse cases, falsified information to fire certain employees, intimidated children during child abuse interviews and bribed clients to lie about cases.
The letters led to an Inspector General's investigation, which said that Kibbey verbally abused his staff and Hansel engaged in and allowed sexually inappropriate behavior in her office.
Employee dissatisfaction at the local HRS office led to the two anonymous letters complaining of conditions there. The letters said things were so bad that children in Manatee County would suffer or die because of the poor management of child abuse and neglect cases.
A former HRS child protection counselor who retired in 1995 after 17 years with HRS said the allegations sounded to her as true. "From what I know, what I read sounded very much like what's happening," she told reporters. "The people who do the good work just don't get the promotions."[14]
Similar problems were identified in California, as the 1990-91 Santa Barbara Grand Jury explained:
In reviewing the operations of the Santa Barbara CPS Division, the Grand Jury was appalled by the degree of mutual distrust which exists between management and staff. Despite an "open door" policy, some of the line staff, most of whom have long tenure, view their managers as closed minded, dictatorial and intimidating. Managers view some staff as resistant to change, obstructive and vindictive.
The Grand Jury determined that these problems were of such severity that unless immediate corrective actions were undertaken, that essential mandated services to children would have been jeopardized.[15]
Fiscal concerns and political maneuvering contribute to the crisis.
In June of 1989, District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry was told that 41.3 percent of the caseworker positions in the Children and Family Services Division were vacant, and that the "tremendous amount of stress that leads to worker burnout" contributes to the "rapid turnover" of social workers.
The former mayor was informed again in November of 1989, and once again in January of 1990 that the Division was experiencing serious staff shortages. Nevertheless, on June 28, 1990, the District of Columbia instituted a hiring freeze that barred filling the vacancies.
As of February of 1991, 107 of a total of 239 social worker positions in the Division remained vacant.[16]
But the problems associated with high employee turnover are not limited to child protective workers, extending to other related fields as well.
In South Carolina, entry-level foster care licensing workers, who make $19,375 a year, are the agency's lowest-paid caseworkers and have one of the highest turnover rates in the agency. And seven or eight out of every 10 prospective foster parents drop out during 10 hours of training before they are licensed.
"I think the perception of a lot of [Department of Social Services employees] . . . is that if you do that for a while, you can get a real job," says Lynne Noble, a University of South Carolina employee under contract to write training programs for South Carolina foster care workers and foster parents through the Center for Child and Family Studies.[17]
The high turnover in child protective agencies is symptomatic of more complex problems which have long been documented, according to some professionals. Writing in Child Welfare, a periodical put out by the Child Welfare League of America, Susan J. Wells, Ph.D., Director of Research for the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, Washington, D.C. defines the problem in a broader context:
Report after report describes the high turnover rate of staff, the lag time between knowledge development and use in the field, the archaic information systems in many agencies, and the feeling of powerlessness many administrators voice. To contribute to the improvement of CPS, research must take a more rigorous approach to evaluation of management and administration. Both process and outcome are critical. The personnel crisis (e.g., insufficient number of staff members, high turnover, insufficient training) appears to have a devastating effect on the quality of services currently provided. . .[18]
There may more fundamental issues driving the high turnover in the field, among them the erosion of some deeply-cherished myths, suggests George Frank in an early examination of the treatment needs of children in foster care. Frank identified the child welfare system as one in which "the massive employment of social workers without Master's degrees in social work, often with no type of social work education, large caseloads, infrequent interviews, and inadequate diagnosis" were among the characteristic elements.
Infrequent and poorly focused work with families, and "a peculiar blindness to the child's distress until he or she did something bizarre or antisocial," coupled with a tendency toward the blaming or rejection of a child were identified. But most distressingly, Frank explained:
There seems to be a myth that the placement experience is somehow good for the child; even when it blatantly is obvious that this is not so, social workers frequently report that the setting is meeting the child's needs. Another problem is rapid turnover among workers, so that often there is no continuity of treatment; perhaps this is a function of the myth not holding up over time.[19]
Far from limited to the front lines, the constant turnover extends itself to the top of the bureaucratic pyramid. As David Liederman, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America recently explained during Congressional hearings: "There is a lack of stable leadership in child welfare. In the last 2 years there has been a 50 percent turnover among State directors of child welfare programs. That is outrageous."[20]
System proponents with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo point to high caseloads, increasingly difficult family circumstances, drug usage and other outside factors to account for the problems that ail the child welfare and foster care systems.
But the problems of high turnover and inexperienced staff have long been documented. During the 1970s, turnover in the field of child welfare was reported in industry publications to be in the range of 50 to 100 percent.[21]
A 1976 study identified caseworkers as "prone to changing their jobs after relatively short periods of involvement with their clients."[22]
What of the effect all of this has on the children? For Jesus, a nine-year-old Los Angeles County boy who was "beaten, sodomized, burned on his genitals and nearly drowned by his foster parents" after caseworkers failed to visit him in his foster home for four months, it means a life spent as a spastic paraplegic.[23]
For hundreds of thousands of other children it means long-term, and in many cases permanent separation from loving families as they languish in inappropriate placements with scarce hope of returning to their families.
For Jeffrey Harden, Elisa Izquierdo, and the countless hundreds of other children in genuine need of protection, it meant a fate far more permanent.
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/turnover.htm
A Critical Look At the Child Welfare System Falsification of Records
A Critical Look At the Child Welfare System
Falsification of Records
From Lifting the Veil
Caseworkers often are caught in a Catch-22 situation, where
they would have to doctor paperwork or have to acknowledge
that they are not doing their job.
Benjamin Wolf -- American Civil Liberties Union
September, 1996
FALSIFICATION OF RECORDS
In southwest Florida, a supervisor of child-abuse investigators instructed several caseworkers to falsify reports to improve his unit's performance numbers, according to a 1991 Health and Rehabilitative Services Inspector General report.
In Broward County, state records show some child-abuse investigators were also lying about their cases. The investigators, many in an evening unit that tended to get the most dire cases, sometimes failed to visit reported child victims for up to a year. They never interviewed key witnesses, and decided without enough information whether or not children suffered abuse.
Worse, some supervisors were aware of these problems and failed to take corrective action.[1]
Investigators in Dade and Broward Counties, along with southwest Florida "have been caught faking and mishandling investigative reports."[2]
Notes the Miami Herald in part of an ongoing series: "This indicates an endemic problem. And, in fact, similar reports have implicated HRS offices elsewhere."[3]
What are the effects of all of this on the children the caseworkers are supposed to be protecting? According to the May 24 edition of the Miami Herald, the results are devastating:
Even though HRS is supposed to be monitoring his welfare, 14-month-old Courtney Sims is beaten for three months in a relative's home in Lauderhill. Two people warn that the child is in trouble, but the counselor supervising his care reports he is "doing fine." In October, he dies after being slammed into a metal door.
Twice in 1991, HRS is told a Miami man is beating his children. Twice, police say, HRS investigators take too long to show up, then dismiss the complaints. In December, the man's infant son, Akeem Oats, dies of a beating.
A child-abuse investigator in Broward gets a report in June that a man is sexually assaulting his 11-year-old niece. The investigator does nothing. By the time HRS finally sends another investigator out in November, the girl has been raped.
In 1994, a teen who spent most of her life in foster care or shelter homes filed suit against the Florida agency, charging that years of neglect left her mentally and physically scarred.
The girl's story of beating, torture and starvation at a foster home, rejection, intimidation, and allegations of sexual abuse at others, was chronicled in a 1993 Tampa Tribune series called "Nobody's Child," in which she is identified only as Jane.
In 1979, Jane was beaten, burned, tied to a bed and nearly starved to death at one foster home. A Health and Rehabilitative Services investigator would conclude that her caseworker either condoned the abuse or falsified visitation records.
"It's a horror story, not unlike many I've heard," said HRS Secretary Jim Towey.[4]
Do these narratives represent isolated cases? Sadly, falsification of visitation records, case histories, and even evidence would appear to be more the rule than the exception among many child protective services caseworkers. And the problem is not limited to Florida.
In South Carolina, the supervisor of the Aiken County Child Protective Services unit, along with the supervisor of the County Treatment Unit were arrested and charged with falsifying the records surrounding the removal of Krystal Scurry and her brother from their home.
A total of six Social Services workers, including the County Director of Foster Care, would eventually be charged in connection with the case. The multiple charges would include ethics violations, falsification of records, neglect of duty and embezzlement.
None of this would have come to light had two-year-old Krystal Scurry not been raped and murdered at the hands of the foster mother's son--after having endured a year of physical abuse at the hands of her foster mother.
Krystal Scurry was one of five foster children killed in South Carolina foster homes between February 1991 and January 1992. [5]
CULTURE OF LIES
In Louisiana, a 1992 case involved child protective caseworker Paula Bennett and her supervisor Sheryl George. They were charged with misrepresenting facts concerning interviews with the plaintiff's children and the existence of crucial evidence, and of lying to a judge and the District Attorney.
The caseworkers claimed immunity from prosecution, but the Court of Appeals held that: "Any reasonable state actor employed in a capacity which embraces law enforcement would surely realize that misrepresenting or concealing facts to judges or prosecutors is a violation of the accuseds' guaranteed rights under the United States Constitution."[6]
Sometimes, child protective workers don't even bother to falsify their records. They simply don't maintain any.
In February of 1994, the state of Massachusetts terminated its contract La Alianza Hispana, a private agency that was supposed to be monitoring a Roxbury mother who allegedly scalded her 4-year-old son by plunging his hands into boiling liquid.
In at least nine of 17 cases reviewed by officials, families that should have been visited at least once a month by Alianza social workers had not been visited for a year, according to Massachusetts Department of Social Services Commissioner Linda Carlisle.
According to a source familiar with the investigation, Alianza was unable to produce any records for four families it was supposed to be monitoring. Carlisle also said Alianza case workers falsified reports, claiming to have visited some families when they had not.
A team of Department of Social Services officials reviewing the private agencies work reportedly wrote "outrageous" and "This is scary!" on some of their reports.[7]
In 1996, DSS commissioner Carlisle overhauled a Boston Department of Social Services office that lost track of two young boys under its watch who ended up dead, taking the unusual steps of firing a social worker and her supervisor and demoting two managers.
An internal review found that the social worker assigned to the case had filed no reports or records about the family, and had failed to enter any notations for any other family under her supervision for several months. Her supervisor did not review her casework, and had completed only six of the 360 quarterly reviews for which he was responsible.
At one point, about 40 employees came to the commissioner's office urging leniency. After Carlisle proceeded with the firings, union officials protested.[8]
So, too, did union officials protest the terminations of child protective caseworkers in a similar case in Illinois, where two caseworkers with the Department of Children and Family Services were charged with falsifying records in child-abuse cases and failing to make home visits that might have saved the lives of two children who later were murdered.
Hattie Roland was indicted by a Cook County grand jury on 63 counts of official misconduct and charged with failing to file reports, falsifying reports, failing to provide protective services and failing to make monthly family visits.
Diane Henton was indicted on eight counts of official misconduct on charges of closing a case improperly, failing to report abuse and failing to provide protective services.
Before being fired, both of the caseworkers had been promoted to supervisory positions.
A leader of the union that represents the Illinois department workers said that if the employees are being indicted for failing to adequately protect abused children, then "every single DCFS worker is guilty."
Said outspoken Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy: "They lie, and they do it all the time. They can do this because there is nobody to scrutinize them. They are above the law."[9]
In a remarkably similar case, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the firing of a caseworker who had falsified case records claiming that three girls she was supposed to monitoring were: "doing fine and have adjusted well to placement with the maternal grandmother."
In reality, the siblings had died months earlier in a fire that gutted their apartment, leaving their grandmother severely burned.[10]
A spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which had successfully defended caseworker Vera DuBose in earlier proceedings, called the ruling a bad precedent for other cases involving agencies that drag their feet in disciplining workers.
Children's rights experts said that the case reflected larger problems at DCFS that were especially prevalent in the early 1990s, and agency critics said the case shed light on a "culture of lying" at DCFS.
Said Benjamin Wolf, the ACLU attorney who had successfully sued the agency to implement reforms in 1988: "Caseworkers often are caught in a Catch-22 situation, where they would have to doctor paperwork or have to acknowledge that they are not doing their job."
Like her companion workers in Cook County, DuBose had been promoted to a $34,000 investigators position shortly after filing the false progress report on the girls.[11]
Her promotion proved to be her undoing when the caseworker assigned to replace her visited the girl's residence, only to discover a burned-out shell. Neighbors told him the girls had died in the fire.
A year later, she was still on the job. It took DCFS that long to make its decision to fire her.[12]
Around this time, another DCFS caseworker was convicted of lying to a judge in a case in which an infant had died.
Ahmad Muhammad told a Cook County Juvenile Court judge that a cocaine-addicted mother had completed her court-ordered drug treatment and parenting classes. On the basis of his testimony, the judge halted state monitoring of the woman. Six months later, she was charged with fatally beating her infant son while under the influence of cocaine.
Testimony at Muhammad's contempt trial revealed that he had never called the woman's drug-abuse counselor to check on her progress.
Just like his co-worker, a year later Muhammad was still on the job as a DCFS caseworker, notwithstanding that by this time it had come to light that he had a criminal conviction involving armed robbery, larceny and forgery in another state.
Ed McManus, a DCFS spokesman, said the agency had no prohibition against hiring someone with a criminal record, unless the crime involved child abuse, and that lying on a job application is reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
"We take it seriously, but we need good people, and we're not going to throw away a good person without a careful review," he said.[13]
FROM WHITE-OUT TO WHITEWASH
In Utah, after months of speculation about an alleged "whitewash" of wrongdoing in the Moab office of the Division of Child and Family Services, officials released drafts of an internal investigation that was "less heavily edited" than one which had been previously released to the public.
The investigation by the Bureau of Service Review began in September 1995, when Assistant Attorney General Kenton Goodwill provided Human Services officials with 58 items that he considered as problems in the Moab office.
Goodwill suggested in his list of complaints that staffers were deliberately not closing cases once the court discharged them in order to inflate caseloads. While the audit did verify that some cases were not closed, it did not conclusively determine why.
The investigative report verified that some treatment plans were falsified by having been backdated, interviews with children were not timely or were inadequate, and children in state custody were sometimes not visited for several months.
The report concluded: "This problem also is not isolated to the Moab office. Previously, the bureau has identified this issue as a statewide problem."[14]
The extent to which some individuals with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo is perhaps best illustrated by the outcome of this case.
In 1997, Sherianne Cotterell, a member of a three-member monitoring panel overseeing the State's compliance with a recent lawsuit, resigned citing job stress as a key factor.
Cotterell's role in writing reports critical of agency compliance and in pursuing information about the audit being kept secret in Moab led to death threats against her.[15]
By 1998, a member of the monitoring panel said the number of children who have been compromised while the settlement languished was "mind-boggling."
Pam Rasmussen said the division has reshuffled people but not terminated incompetent employees, and that some workers continue to fabricate paperwork.
Apparently, they weren't very clever at how they it either. "I mean, if you're documenting something from 1997, don't use a '98 form. That goes to show they're not even thinking that through. They're fudging the documents," said Rasmussen.[16]
In Texas, a Grand Jury was convened in Tom Green County in November of 1987. The Jury was charged with the task of investigating the regional Child Protective Services division of its Department of Human Services. Among the Jury's findings:
That false entries into records at DHS have been made in violation of the law
That the system that exists appears to encourage inaccurate or false recordkeeping with no system of verification
The Grand Jury also found that management in one regional office has failed to correct inadequacies "although they have been aware that problems have existed for two to three years." Among the recommendations put forth by the Grand Jury:
That the Commissioner of DHS determine whether inaccurate or false recordkeeping, though in violation of law and policy, is nevertheless being practiced statewide, at worker and management levels . . .[17]
In 1992, an attorney with the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services alleged that she was instructed by her supervisor to proceed on a parental rights termination case, even though she felt there were no grounds to pursue the case.
She first wrote letters to general counsel of the Department, claiming that there were ethical problems and possible due process violations in the case.
Some time later, she was told by a Department employee that the caseworker assigned to the case had been instructed to alter the case record.
Her efforts to expose the possible misrepresentations and due process violations included discussions with her supervisor, the State Bar of Texas, the trial court and opposing counsel in the case, as well as the Office of the Inspector General.
Thereafter, she filed a Whistleblower lawsuit alleging that she had been retaliated against by her supervisor for her efforts in exposing the possible misrepresentations, also filing a claim that a former supervisor in the Texas Department of Human Services had falsified time records.[18]
The suit would never go to trial, as it was dismissed on procedural grounds, but the problems suggested by this case would appear to be widespread.
In May of 1990, the Regional Director of Protective Services in the Arlington region of Texas distributed an internal memorandum to CPS Program Directors and Supervisors. The subject of the memorandum: "Alternations, Backdating and Reconstruction of Case Records."
The memorandum detailed some of the methods employed by child protective caseworkers to falsify case records and service plans: "There should be absolutely no changes made to the service plans by use of white-out, correction tape, adding information or backdating.
"If part of a case record has been lost or a particular service plan was not done, do not reconstruct the plans and back date the plans with the date that the plan was actually due."
The memorandum concludes: "It is important to remember that whether or not there was a deliberate attempt to falsify, backdate or alter a case, it does indicate alteration of a case record which is considered to be a public record and may result in legal or personnel consequence, up to one including dismissal."[19]
The problem of backdating forms to render the appearance of being in compliance is not limited to Texas. In New York City, a 1989 audit conducted by the Office of the Comptroller determined that in more than one in five cases studied, caseworkers had falsified records "by altering dates and backdating forms" in order to appear to be in compliance with deadlines that had actually been missed--sometimes by years.[20]
In California, seven Los Angeles County social service employees were fired or disciplined in 1995 when children under their jurisdiction were fatally abused by parents or caretakers, according to a confidential report requested by county supervisors.
The report examines the homicides of a dozen children whose families had at some point been under investigation for child abuse or neglect. Eight of the children were under the supervision of the county Department of Children and Family Services when they died.
In one case, the department investigation found that when the child's social worker went on leave, a supervisor failed to reassign the case and falsified records. As a result, the child was "not seen or assessed for six months prior to his death."[21]
Some years earlier in California, the 1988-89 San Diego County Grand Jury examined several cases, one of which involved a six-year-old girl had been removed from her home on allegations of excessive punishment on the part of her parents.
During her first ten months in placement, the girl had experienced eight changes in placement. The child was then sent out of the State with incomplete paperwork. When that placement failed, she was returned to San Diego without a definite plan for foster care. After three weeks in San Diego, her parents had still not been notified of her return. By this time, the girl had been in foster care for two and a half years.
The Grand Jury observed "inaccurate statements in the social worker's report that were not corrected," noting that the social worker further delayed resolution of the case by failing to communicate with personnel regarding court orders.
In another case the Grand Jury examined, discrepancies were found between police and medical reports, and the caseworker's continuing written account, in which she indicated suspicions against a grandmother that were contrary to all available evidence.
Yet another case involved "conflicting statements between the school personnel and the social worker's report regarding the dates the abuse occurred and was reported."[22]
Three years later, another Grand Jury conducted a comprehensive investigation of the San Diego County child welfare system, interviewing hundreds of system professionals, examining thousands of pages of documents, observing nearly one hundred juvenile dependency cases and listening to one month of sworn testimony.
According to a letter addressed to the Chairman of the Public Safety Committee, the San Diego Grand Jury had:
seen repeated episodes of social worker perjury in court reports, and indeed, even in court testimony;
heard testimony of social workers lying to adoptive parents about the past history of children available for adoption;
read numerous Social Study reports written by social workers and filled with innuendo, half truths and lies;
seen documented evidence of social workers conspiring to place children for adoption with their own family members even while reunification with natural family members was in process.
The Grand Jury offered 92 recommendations, including that the Board of Supervisors seek legislative changes in the immunity provisions which insulated social workers against accountability.[23]
FRAUD, COERCION, PERJURY, COVER-UPS AND LIES
In 1996, Florida State Senator John Ostalkiewicz called for a full-scale investigation of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services after hearing testimony from parents and experts, all of whom told horror stories of child abuse investigations mismanaged by the state agency.
"We need a full-scale investigation of this department, with subpoena power," he told a cheering audience at the Orange County Administration Center.
"What we're hearing about here is fraud, coercion, perjury, cover-ups and lies," he said. "It's time for this stuff to come to an end."
The most compelling testimony came from Glades County Chief Deputy Circuit Court Clerk Richard Blackwell, chairman of the HRS District 8 Human Rights Advocacy Committee, a volunteer advocacy group that investigates client complaints against HRS.
Blackwell told of his firsthand knowledge of the agency's misdeeds. His examples dated from 1991 to August 1995 and included the killing of a baby girl. Although neighbors told the media the baby's family had been reported for abuse several times, HRS workers denied it, Blackwell said.
When an HRS employee found records of those previous reports, agency workers secretly destroyed them, he said.
"Documents were being altered, shredded," testified Charlotte Kay, a former HRS employee who watched the destruction of the documents. "It went on and on and on . . . It was nothing but a cover-up."[24]
The Massachusetts Department of Social Services finally admitted something many of its critics have long suspected -- that the department validates cases without even a cursory examination.
State social workers are filing abuse complaints against parents without interviewing them or their children, and then claiming in letters to the parents that family interviews were part of the investigation supporting the abuse charge.
The admission followed a decision to reverse an abuse claim against a doctor who was accused of neglect when she left her two young children unattended for less than two minutes in a locked car.
She was sent a letter 10 days after the incident informing her the charge of neglect against her was supported "after visiting with you and your children and talking to other people who know your family." The social worker had not talked to any of the people she cited and the doctor had been vacationing with her family in Colorado at the time.[25]
Falsifications such as these represent only the more overt practice of the art of deception, and cases such as these indicate fundamental problems in the child welfare system.
When caseworkers inflate their caseloads to increase or maintain government funding, or to justify inadequate response to crisis situations; when investigators falsify visitation records; when caseworkers falsify records to justify wrongful removals; and when supervisors ignore or encourage their deception, it is real children who suffer.
These children endure continued, and sometimes fatal abuse at the hand of heartless parents, foster parents and caretakers. Hundreds of thousands of children endure separation from loving families as they continue to "languish in inappropriate placements, with scarce hope of returning to their families or being adopted," all hope of a brighter future having been stripped away from them.[26]
Copyright © 1997 - 2002, Rick Thoma
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/falsification.htm
Falsification of Records
From Lifting the Veil
Caseworkers often are caught in a Catch-22 situation, where
they would have to doctor paperwork or have to acknowledge
that they are not doing their job.
Benjamin Wolf -- American Civil Liberties Union
September, 1996
FALSIFICATION OF RECORDS
In southwest Florida, a supervisor of child-abuse investigators instructed several caseworkers to falsify reports to improve his unit's performance numbers, according to a 1991 Health and Rehabilitative Services Inspector General report.
In Broward County, state records show some child-abuse investigators were also lying about their cases. The investigators, many in an evening unit that tended to get the most dire cases, sometimes failed to visit reported child victims for up to a year. They never interviewed key witnesses, and decided without enough information whether or not children suffered abuse.
Worse, some supervisors were aware of these problems and failed to take corrective action.[1]
Investigators in Dade and Broward Counties, along with southwest Florida "have been caught faking and mishandling investigative reports."[2]
Notes the Miami Herald in part of an ongoing series: "This indicates an endemic problem. And, in fact, similar reports have implicated HRS offices elsewhere."[3]
What are the effects of all of this on the children the caseworkers are supposed to be protecting? According to the May 24 edition of the Miami Herald, the results are devastating:
Even though HRS is supposed to be monitoring his welfare, 14-month-old Courtney Sims is beaten for three months in a relative's home in Lauderhill. Two people warn that the child is in trouble, but the counselor supervising his care reports he is "doing fine." In October, he dies after being slammed into a metal door.
Twice in 1991, HRS is told a Miami man is beating his children. Twice, police say, HRS investigators take too long to show up, then dismiss the complaints. In December, the man's infant son, Akeem Oats, dies of a beating.
A child-abuse investigator in Broward gets a report in June that a man is sexually assaulting his 11-year-old niece. The investigator does nothing. By the time HRS finally sends another investigator out in November, the girl has been raped.
In 1994, a teen who spent most of her life in foster care or shelter homes filed suit against the Florida agency, charging that years of neglect left her mentally and physically scarred.
The girl's story of beating, torture and starvation at a foster home, rejection, intimidation, and allegations of sexual abuse at others, was chronicled in a 1993 Tampa Tribune series called "Nobody's Child," in which she is identified only as Jane.
In 1979, Jane was beaten, burned, tied to a bed and nearly starved to death at one foster home. A Health and Rehabilitative Services investigator would conclude that her caseworker either condoned the abuse or falsified visitation records.
"It's a horror story, not unlike many I've heard," said HRS Secretary Jim Towey.[4]
Do these narratives represent isolated cases? Sadly, falsification of visitation records, case histories, and even evidence would appear to be more the rule than the exception among many child protective services caseworkers. And the problem is not limited to Florida.
In South Carolina, the supervisor of the Aiken County Child Protective Services unit, along with the supervisor of the County Treatment Unit were arrested and charged with falsifying the records surrounding the removal of Krystal Scurry and her brother from their home.
A total of six Social Services workers, including the County Director of Foster Care, would eventually be charged in connection with the case. The multiple charges would include ethics violations, falsification of records, neglect of duty and embezzlement.
None of this would have come to light had two-year-old Krystal Scurry not been raped and murdered at the hands of the foster mother's son--after having endured a year of physical abuse at the hands of her foster mother.
Krystal Scurry was one of five foster children killed in South Carolina foster homes between February 1991 and January 1992. [5]
CULTURE OF LIES
In Louisiana, a 1992 case involved child protective caseworker Paula Bennett and her supervisor Sheryl George. They were charged with misrepresenting facts concerning interviews with the plaintiff's children and the existence of crucial evidence, and of lying to a judge and the District Attorney.
The caseworkers claimed immunity from prosecution, but the Court of Appeals held that: "Any reasonable state actor employed in a capacity which embraces law enforcement would surely realize that misrepresenting or concealing facts to judges or prosecutors is a violation of the accuseds' guaranteed rights under the United States Constitution."[6]
Sometimes, child protective workers don't even bother to falsify their records. They simply don't maintain any.
In February of 1994, the state of Massachusetts terminated its contract La Alianza Hispana, a private agency that was supposed to be monitoring a Roxbury mother who allegedly scalded her 4-year-old son by plunging his hands into boiling liquid.
In at least nine of 17 cases reviewed by officials, families that should have been visited at least once a month by Alianza social workers had not been visited for a year, according to Massachusetts Department of Social Services Commissioner Linda Carlisle.
According to a source familiar with the investigation, Alianza was unable to produce any records for four families it was supposed to be monitoring. Carlisle also said Alianza case workers falsified reports, claiming to have visited some families when they had not.
A team of Department of Social Services officials reviewing the private agencies work reportedly wrote "outrageous" and "This is scary!" on some of their reports.[7]
In 1996, DSS commissioner Carlisle overhauled a Boston Department of Social Services office that lost track of two young boys under its watch who ended up dead, taking the unusual steps of firing a social worker and her supervisor and demoting two managers.
An internal review found that the social worker assigned to the case had filed no reports or records about the family, and had failed to enter any notations for any other family under her supervision for several months. Her supervisor did not review her casework, and had completed only six of the 360 quarterly reviews for which he was responsible.
At one point, about 40 employees came to the commissioner's office urging leniency. After Carlisle proceeded with the firings, union officials protested.[8]
So, too, did union officials protest the terminations of child protective caseworkers in a similar case in Illinois, where two caseworkers with the Department of Children and Family Services were charged with falsifying records in child-abuse cases and failing to make home visits that might have saved the lives of two children who later were murdered.
Hattie Roland was indicted by a Cook County grand jury on 63 counts of official misconduct and charged with failing to file reports, falsifying reports, failing to provide protective services and failing to make monthly family visits.
Diane Henton was indicted on eight counts of official misconduct on charges of closing a case improperly, failing to report abuse and failing to provide protective services.
Before being fired, both of the caseworkers had been promoted to supervisory positions.
A leader of the union that represents the Illinois department workers said that if the employees are being indicted for failing to adequately protect abused children, then "every single DCFS worker is guilty."
Said outspoken Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy: "They lie, and they do it all the time. They can do this because there is nobody to scrutinize them. They are above the law."[9]
In a remarkably similar case, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the firing of a caseworker who had falsified case records claiming that three girls she was supposed to monitoring were: "doing fine and have adjusted well to placement with the maternal grandmother."
In reality, the siblings had died months earlier in a fire that gutted their apartment, leaving their grandmother severely burned.[10]
A spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which had successfully defended caseworker Vera DuBose in earlier proceedings, called the ruling a bad precedent for other cases involving agencies that drag their feet in disciplining workers.
Children's rights experts said that the case reflected larger problems at DCFS that were especially prevalent in the early 1990s, and agency critics said the case shed light on a "culture of lying" at DCFS.
Said Benjamin Wolf, the ACLU attorney who had successfully sued the agency to implement reforms in 1988: "Caseworkers often are caught in a Catch-22 situation, where they would have to doctor paperwork or have to acknowledge that they are not doing their job."
Like her companion workers in Cook County, DuBose had been promoted to a $34,000 investigators position shortly after filing the false progress report on the girls.[11]
Her promotion proved to be her undoing when the caseworker assigned to replace her visited the girl's residence, only to discover a burned-out shell. Neighbors told him the girls had died in the fire.
A year later, she was still on the job. It took DCFS that long to make its decision to fire her.[12]
Around this time, another DCFS caseworker was convicted of lying to a judge in a case in which an infant had died.
Ahmad Muhammad told a Cook County Juvenile Court judge that a cocaine-addicted mother had completed her court-ordered drug treatment and parenting classes. On the basis of his testimony, the judge halted state monitoring of the woman. Six months later, she was charged with fatally beating her infant son while under the influence of cocaine.
Testimony at Muhammad's contempt trial revealed that he had never called the woman's drug-abuse counselor to check on her progress.
Just like his co-worker, a year later Muhammad was still on the job as a DCFS caseworker, notwithstanding that by this time it had come to light that he had a criminal conviction involving armed robbery, larceny and forgery in another state.
Ed McManus, a DCFS spokesman, said the agency had no prohibition against hiring someone with a criminal record, unless the crime involved child abuse, and that lying on a job application is reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
"We take it seriously, but we need good people, and we're not going to throw away a good person without a careful review," he said.[13]
FROM WHITE-OUT TO WHITEWASH
In Utah, after months of speculation about an alleged "whitewash" of wrongdoing in the Moab office of the Division of Child and Family Services, officials released drafts of an internal investigation that was "less heavily edited" than one which had been previously released to the public.
The investigation by the Bureau of Service Review began in September 1995, when Assistant Attorney General Kenton Goodwill provided Human Services officials with 58 items that he considered as problems in the Moab office.
Goodwill suggested in his list of complaints that staffers were deliberately not closing cases once the court discharged them in order to inflate caseloads. While the audit did verify that some cases were not closed, it did not conclusively determine why.
The investigative report verified that some treatment plans were falsified by having been backdated, interviews with children were not timely or were inadequate, and children in state custody were sometimes not visited for several months.
The report concluded: "This problem also is not isolated to the Moab office. Previously, the bureau has identified this issue as a statewide problem."[14]
The extent to which some individuals with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo is perhaps best illustrated by the outcome of this case.
In 1997, Sherianne Cotterell, a member of a three-member monitoring panel overseeing the State's compliance with a recent lawsuit, resigned citing job stress as a key factor.
Cotterell's role in writing reports critical of agency compliance and in pursuing information about the audit being kept secret in Moab led to death threats against her.[15]
By 1998, a member of the monitoring panel said the number of children who have been compromised while the settlement languished was "mind-boggling."
Pam Rasmussen said the division has reshuffled people but not terminated incompetent employees, and that some workers continue to fabricate paperwork.
Apparently, they weren't very clever at how they it either. "I mean, if you're documenting something from 1997, don't use a '98 form. That goes to show they're not even thinking that through. They're fudging the documents," said Rasmussen.[16]
In Texas, a Grand Jury was convened in Tom Green County in November of 1987. The Jury was charged with the task of investigating the regional Child Protective Services division of its Department of Human Services. Among the Jury's findings:
That false entries into records at DHS have been made in violation of the law
That the system that exists appears to encourage inaccurate or false recordkeeping with no system of verification
The Grand Jury also found that management in one regional office has failed to correct inadequacies "although they have been aware that problems have existed for two to three years." Among the recommendations put forth by the Grand Jury:
That the Commissioner of DHS determine whether inaccurate or false recordkeeping, though in violation of law and policy, is nevertheless being practiced statewide, at worker and management levels . . .[17]
In 1992, an attorney with the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services alleged that she was instructed by her supervisor to proceed on a parental rights termination case, even though she felt there were no grounds to pursue the case.
She first wrote letters to general counsel of the Department, claiming that there were ethical problems and possible due process violations in the case.
Some time later, she was told by a Department employee that the caseworker assigned to the case had been instructed to alter the case record.
Her efforts to expose the possible misrepresentations and due process violations included discussions with her supervisor, the State Bar of Texas, the trial court and opposing counsel in the case, as well as the Office of the Inspector General.
Thereafter, she filed a Whistleblower lawsuit alleging that she had been retaliated against by her supervisor for her efforts in exposing the possible misrepresentations, also filing a claim that a former supervisor in the Texas Department of Human Services had falsified time records.[18]
The suit would never go to trial, as it was dismissed on procedural grounds, but the problems suggested by this case would appear to be widespread.
In May of 1990, the Regional Director of Protective Services in the Arlington region of Texas distributed an internal memorandum to CPS Program Directors and Supervisors. The subject of the memorandum: "Alternations, Backdating and Reconstruction of Case Records."
The memorandum detailed some of the methods employed by child protective caseworkers to falsify case records and service plans: "There should be absolutely no changes made to the service plans by use of white-out, correction tape, adding information or backdating.
"If part of a case record has been lost or a particular service plan was not done, do not reconstruct the plans and back date the plans with the date that the plan was actually due."
The memorandum concludes: "It is important to remember that whether or not there was a deliberate attempt to falsify, backdate or alter a case, it does indicate alteration of a case record which is considered to be a public record and may result in legal or personnel consequence, up to one including dismissal."[19]
The problem of backdating forms to render the appearance of being in compliance is not limited to Texas. In New York City, a 1989 audit conducted by the Office of the Comptroller determined that in more than one in five cases studied, caseworkers had falsified records "by altering dates and backdating forms" in order to appear to be in compliance with deadlines that had actually been missed--sometimes by years.[20]
In California, seven Los Angeles County social service employees were fired or disciplined in 1995 when children under their jurisdiction were fatally abused by parents or caretakers, according to a confidential report requested by county supervisors.
The report examines the homicides of a dozen children whose families had at some point been under investigation for child abuse or neglect. Eight of the children were under the supervision of the county Department of Children and Family Services when they died.
In one case, the department investigation found that when the child's social worker went on leave, a supervisor failed to reassign the case and falsified records. As a result, the child was "not seen or assessed for six months prior to his death."[21]
Some years earlier in California, the 1988-89 San Diego County Grand Jury examined several cases, one of which involved a six-year-old girl had been removed from her home on allegations of excessive punishment on the part of her parents.
During her first ten months in placement, the girl had experienced eight changes in placement. The child was then sent out of the State with incomplete paperwork. When that placement failed, she was returned to San Diego without a definite plan for foster care. After three weeks in San Diego, her parents had still not been notified of her return. By this time, the girl had been in foster care for two and a half years.
The Grand Jury observed "inaccurate statements in the social worker's report that were not corrected," noting that the social worker further delayed resolution of the case by failing to communicate with personnel regarding court orders.
In another case the Grand Jury examined, discrepancies were found between police and medical reports, and the caseworker's continuing written account, in which she indicated suspicions against a grandmother that were contrary to all available evidence.
Yet another case involved "conflicting statements between the school personnel and the social worker's report regarding the dates the abuse occurred and was reported."[22]
Three years later, another Grand Jury conducted a comprehensive investigation of the San Diego County child welfare system, interviewing hundreds of system professionals, examining thousands of pages of documents, observing nearly one hundred juvenile dependency cases and listening to one month of sworn testimony.
According to a letter addressed to the Chairman of the Public Safety Committee, the San Diego Grand Jury had:
seen repeated episodes of social worker perjury in court reports, and indeed, even in court testimony;
heard testimony of social workers lying to adoptive parents about the past history of children available for adoption;
read numerous Social Study reports written by social workers and filled with innuendo, half truths and lies;
seen documented evidence of social workers conspiring to place children for adoption with their own family members even while reunification with natural family members was in process.
The Grand Jury offered 92 recommendations, including that the Board of Supervisors seek legislative changes in the immunity provisions which insulated social workers against accountability.[23]
FRAUD, COERCION, PERJURY, COVER-UPS AND LIES
In 1996, Florida State Senator John Ostalkiewicz called for a full-scale investigation of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services after hearing testimony from parents and experts, all of whom told horror stories of child abuse investigations mismanaged by the state agency.
"We need a full-scale investigation of this department, with subpoena power," he told a cheering audience at the Orange County Administration Center.
"What we're hearing about here is fraud, coercion, perjury, cover-ups and lies," he said. "It's time for this stuff to come to an end."
The most compelling testimony came from Glades County Chief Deputy Circuit Court Clerk Richard Blackwell, chairman of the HRS District 8 Human Rights Advocacy Committee, a volunteer advocacy group that investigates client complaints against HRS.
Blackwell told of his firsthand knowledge of the agency's misdeeds. His examples dated from 1991 to August 1995 and included the killing of a baby girl. Although neighbors told the media the baby's family had been reported for abuse several times, HRS workers denied it, Blackwell said.
When an HRS employee found records of those previous reports, agency workers secretly destroyed them, he said.
"Documents were being altered, shredded," testified Charlotte Kay, a former HRS employee who watched the destruction of the documents. "It went on and on and on . . . It was nothing but a cover-up."[24]
The Massachusetts Department of Social Services finally admitted something many of its critics have long suspected -- that the department validates cases without even a cursory examination.
State social workers are filing abuse complaints against parents without interviewing them or their children, and then claiming in letters to the parents that family interviews were part of the investigation supporting the abuse charge.
The admission followed a decision to reverse an abuse claim against a doctor who was accused of neglect when she left her two young children unattended for less than two minutes in a locked car.
She was sent a letter 10 days after the incident informing her the charge of neglect against her was supported "after visiting with you and your children and talking to other people who know your family." The social worker had not talked to any of the people she cited and the doctor had been vacationing with her family in Colorado at the time.[25]
Falsifications such as these represent only the more overt practice of the art of deception, and cases such as these indicate fundamental problems in the child welfare system.
When caseworkers inflate their caseloads to increase or maintain government funding, or to justify inadequate response to crisis situations; when investigators falsify visitation records; when caseworkers falsify records to justify wrongful removals; and when supervisors ignore or encourage their deception, it is real children who suffer.
These children endure continued, and sometimes fatal abuse at the hand of heartless parents, foster parents and caretakers. Hundreds of thousands of children endure separation from loving families as they continue to "languish in inappropriate placements, with scarce hope of returning to their families or being adopted," all hope of a brighter future having been stripped away from them.[26]
Copyright © 1997 - 2002, Rick Thoma
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/falsification.htm
REUNIFICATION PLANS: RECIPES FOR FAILURE
A Critical Look at the Child Welfare System
Reunification Plans
REUNIFICATION PLANS: RECIPES FOR FAILURE
Kevin Norell is one of the newer foster care caseworkers in the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, hired to satisfy child-welfare reform laws and the terms of a recent lawsuit settlement in Utah.
According to Norell, the state asks a lot of parents who want their children returned home. They have to find a job, find housing, all of which can be "tough to do for anyone in Salt Lake County." Parents are ordered into therapy, parenting classes, perhaps drug rehabilitation, and they have to find time to visit with their children.
"Even an organized parent might have trouble with all that. And many of these parents are anything but organized," says Morell.[1]
The intent behind court ordered reunification plans may be admirable, but the reality appears to be that many plans are designed for failure, according to the 1991-1992 San Diego Grand Jury:
Testimony was received regarding the hours of time which must be spent in order to comply with these plans. Defense attorneys have testified that they have told clients that it is impossible for them to work and comply with reunification. Judges and referees were observed, seemingly without thought, ordering parents into programs which require more than 40 hours per week. Frequently, these parents have only public transportation. Obviously, there is no time to earn a living or otherwise live a life. A parent often becomes a slave to the reunification plan.[2]
On April 20, 1993, a Florida father entered into such a "performance agreement" with the Florida Department of Health and Human Resources. The performance agreement, which is now referred to as a "case plan" pursuant to revisions in the Florida statutes, required the father to perform nine tasks to be reunified with his child:
(1) completion of an abuse counseling program and its recommendations;
(2) completion of a psychological evaluation and its recommendations;
(3) completion of a parenting program and demonstration of proficiency in parenting skills;
(4) evaluation for anger management and follow recommendations;
(5) evaluation for individual counseling and follow recommendations;
(6) monthly contact with HRS;
(7) follow reasonable requests and recommendations of the supervising counselor;
(8) provide HRS a list of relatives, their addresses, and phone numbers; and
(9) maintain adequate housing and demonstrate financial ability to provide for the child.
The father, through sheer determination, managed to comply with the provisions of the performance agreement. But was HRS satisfied with the result?
On November 22, 1994, HRS filed a motion for change of goal, requesting that the father's rights regarding the child be terminated because he had 'failed to benefit from services in a reasonable length of time.'
The lower court, on this basis, terminated the father's parental rights. The determined father appealed to the District Court of Appeal. On March 22, 1996, the Court of Appeal reversed the decision of the lower court, holding that HRS had not met its burden of proof. The case was remanded for further proceedings. By this time, the child had been in foster care for three years.[3]
In another recent case, HRS filed a petition to declare a child dependent, and to terminate the parental rights of the mother. The lower court dismissed the petition, as it failed to allege any abuse or neglect.
The Court of Appeal ruled that abuse or neglect need not be alleged, and that the lower Court was in error holding that it could not terminate parental rights on the ground that HRS had alleged only that the mother failed to comply substantially with her performance agreements:
Florida Rule of Juvenile Procedure 8.500(b) provides that the only substantive allegation required in a termination petition, aside from the parents' and child's identities, etc., is that 'the parents were offered a performance agreement or permanent placement plan and did not substantially comply with it,' when required by law. The petitions conformed with this requirement.[4]
In most states, allegations of abuse or neglect are not necessary to remove a child, or to permanently sever parental rights. In virtually every state, the laws have been constructed in such a way as to allow the removal of children on the basis that they may be abused or neglected at some point in the future.
In the State of Montana, for example, temporary removal orders require the department only "to submit to the court facts establishing a probable cause that a youth is abused or neglected or is in danger of being abused or neglected."
According to a recent judicial assessment of the Montana juvenile justice system, such treatment plans are often implemented early during the proceedings, even though a child may not have been adjudicated "a youth in need of care."
"Adjudication provides the basis for state intervention in a family," reviewers note. "Therefore, enforcement of treatment which is not required for the immediate protection of the child... is an inappropriate exercise of the state's power."
Citing state law, assessment reviewers explain the dire consequences of failure to complete the "treatment plan" constructed by the department of social services:
the failure of a parent or guardian to participate in, comply with, in whole or in part, or to meet the goals of the treatment plan is prima facie evidence that return of the child to the parent or guardian would be detrimental.[5]
Incredibly, rulings like this can be found throughout the states.
In California, an often-applied ruling used to terminate the parental rights of parents who simply refuse to comply with social worker demands that they attend "treatment" or "therapy" reads:
the failure of the parent or guardian to participate in any court-ordered treatment programs shall constitute prima facie evidence that return [of the child] would be detrimental.[6]
Hence, the refusal to participate in these programs will result in the permanent separation of a child from his parents--whether or not any maltreatment had actually occurred.
In examining studies conducted by the American Humane Association during the mid-1980s, Dana Mack of the Institute for American Values found that half of the families that child welfare agencies compelled to undergo therapeutic services for child maltreatment never mistreated their children at all, and that many removals of children are capricious actions of "preventive intervention," based on a caseworker's presumption that although abuse may not have occurred, it may at some time in the future.[7]
Even for those parents who comply with the reunification terms, the state has another way of using these plans to terminate parental rights.
The laws throughout the states are written in such a way that "failure to substantially comply with the terms of the performance agreement," or "failure to derive benefit from the services provided by the Department" are reason enough to have children permanently separated from their parents, once they have become dependents of the court.
In a recent Minnesota case, for example, the "disposition plan" for reunification included the following elements:
(1) that appellants work with a housekeeper provided by the county to maintain the housekeeping standard from week to week;
(2) that appellants cooperate with an assessment and goals as determined by an in-home skills counselor, to provide a safe, clean, and organized living environment for the family;
(3) that prior to reunification, the home environment will have an adequate level of housekeeping, as determined by the social worker and public health nurse;
(4) that appellants keep all scheduled appointments with service providers or cancel and reschedule appointments in a timely manner;
(5) that appellants complete individual psychological and psychiatric evaluations and follow all recommendations;
(6) that appellants attend individual therapy to determine and address issues of depression, grief, and loss, and other issues as may be recommended by the treating therapist;
(7) that appellants cooperate and work with the assigned financial worker from the county and comply with the budget or recommendations of the financial worker;
(8) that appellants follow all recommendations of [the child's] treating physicians and keep all appointments with the home health aide for the purpose of childcare, nutrition, and bathing; and
(9) that appellants maintain a working telephone in the residence at all times.[8]
The sad reality is that abuse or neglect need not be demonstrated. Simple failure to maintain a purely subjective housekeeping standard, the missing of an appointment, failure to "adequately assimilate" budgeting skills, or the disconnection of a telephone can result in the permanent separation of a child from his or her parents.
In most states, social workers have been granted the authority to construct these reunification plans at their sole discretion. And, there is precious little oversight from the courts in the construction of these plans.
Montana reviewers found that most judges rarely issue orders or make recommendations addressing reunification or treatment plans, finding also that: "Some judges assert that it is appropriate for the courts to defer to the department's expertise in these matters because of the social workers' experience and education."
One judge reported that while he often orders parents to take parenting classes, he does not actually know what those classes entail!
Hence, the construction of these plans is left to social workers who typically have precious little training, oversight or experience.
Worse, over half of counsel representing parents said that they seldom receive information from service providers or the department regarding the availability of services. Reviewers determined that: "Parents' counsel are, therefore, unable to to effectively challenge the appropriateness of a treatment plan."[9]
Personal bias or prejudice often play a role in how these plans are constructed.
Veteran Juvenile Court Judge Judy Sheindlin recounts the story of one young couple named Robin and Tim. Robin had two children before she met Tim. She also had a drug problem. City caseworkers stepped in and removed her three children when the third was born with cocaine in her system.
Tim, who was separated from Robin, lived at home with his parents and his brother, all of whom were employed. Judge Sheindlin describes the obstacles Tim had to face when he sought custody of his child:
First, he had to establish paternity, proving that he was the biological father of his child. Tim did this. Next, the caseworkers told him that before he could even be considered for custody, he had to take parenting classes. He had to provide the name of the person who would be caring for his child while he worked during the day. He had to establish a permanent, independent residence. There was not a scintilla of evidence that he was an unfit parent, but these were the rules that Tim had to follow. He met all of the conditions.
Meanwhile, Robin the drug addict had it easy. All she had to do was enroll herself in a drug treatment program and get on welfare. That, my friends, was it.
When Judge Sheindlin asked the caseworker about this obvious gender disparity, her answer was simply: "Well, she's the mother."[10]
The San Diego Grand Jury confirmed that these plans are sometimes intentionally made impossible to prevent reunification:
Failure to comply with any element of a reunification plan is sufficient for termination of parental rights. We have taken testimony from attorneys, court appointed therapists, and social workers, that some of these plans are intentionally made impossible, particularly when infants or toddlers are involved.
Chief Administrative Officer Norman Hickey conducted an independent investigation of the San Diego Department of Social Services. His report confirmed the San Diego Grand Jury findings, following on the heels of another stinging critique of the system by the county's Juvenile Justice Commission.
The system is too demanding of the parents, distracting them from more important issues, he wrote. "Too many tasks or unproductive requirements overwhelm parents and reduce the potential for priority behavioral change."
His report also indicated that foster parents may try to thwart reunification efforts. "A desire to take care of the child on a permanent basis must not be permitted to work against the parent's goal" of reunification.[11]
The Juvenile Justice Commission examined several troubling cases in which social workers sought to prevent reunification of children with their parents. They found such cases in their representative sampling to be "numerous and diverse."
In one such case, a social worker threatened that a child would be removed from the mother's home if she allowed the child to attend a scheduled birthday party with her father in a public place. She further advised the mother to move to another part of the County, and keep her whereabouts unknown to the father.
In another case, a social worker sought to prevent the development of ties between a child and her maternal aunt, even though the aunt was known to the worker as a licensed foster mother. The worker sought instead to maintain the child in a foster home in which the foster parents had expressed a desire to adopt the child.
"The unwillingness of the Children's Services Bureau staff, from line to administrative, to listen to opposing views to the point of being hostile and threatening has resulted in a backlash from the community, as well as tragic consequences for families," the Commission found.
"Court time and real time are world's apart, so that while a case drags on from week to week and month to month, the agony of separation continues," the Commission concluded. "While Court cases often require lengthy investigation and preparation to ensure due process of law to all involved, it must never be forgotten that these cases are ultimately about living, breathing human beings."[12]
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/reunification.htm
Reunification Plans
REUNIFICATION PLANS: RECIPES FOR FAILURE
Kevin Norell is one of the newer foster care caseworkers in the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, hired to satisfy child-welfare reform laws and the terms of a recent lawsuit settlement in Utah.
According to Norell, the state asks a lot of parents who want their children returned home. They have to find a job, find housing, all of which can be "tough to do for anyone in Salt Lake County." Parents are ordered into therapy, parenting classes, perhaps drug rehabilitation, and they have to find time to visit with their children.
"Even an organized parent might have trouble with all that. And many of these parents are anything but organized," says Morell.[1]
The intent behind court ordered reunification plans may be admirable, but the reality appears to be that many plans are designed for failure, according to the 1991-1992 San Diego Grand Jury:
Testimony was received regarding the hours of time which must be spent in order to comply with these plans. Defense attorneys have testified that they have told clients that it is impossible for them to work and comply with reunification. Judges and referees were observed, seemingly without thought, ordering parents into programs which require more than 40 hours per week. Frequently, these parents have only public transportation. Obviously, there is no time to earn a living or otherwise live a life. A parent often becomes a slave to the reunification plan.[2]
On April 20, 1993, a Florida father entered into such a "performance agreement" with the Florida Department of Health and Human Resources. The performance agreement, which is now referred to as a "case plan" pursuant to revisions in the Florida statutes, required the father to perform nine tasks to be reunified with his child:
(1) completion of an abuse counseling program and its recommendations;
(2) completion of a psychological evaluation and its recommendations;
(3) completion of a parenting program and demonstration of proficiency in parenting skills;
(4) evaluation for anger management and follow recommendations;
(5) evaluation for individual counseling and follow recommendations;
(6) monthly contact with HRS;
(7) follow reasonable requests and recommendations of the supervising counselor;
(8) provide HRS a list of relatives, their addresses, and phone numbers; and
(9) maintain adequate housing and demonstrate financial ability to provide for the child.
The father, through sheer determination, managed to comply with the provisions of the performance agreement. But was HRS satisfied with the result?
On November 22, 1994, HRS filed a motion for change of goal, requesting that the father's rights regarding the child be terminated because he had 'failed to benefit from services in a reasonable length of time.'
The lower court, on this basis, terminated the father's parental rights. The determined father appealed to the District Court of Appeal. On March 22, 1996, the Court of Appeal reversed the decision of the lower court, holding that HRS had not met its burden of proof. The case was remanded for further proceedings. By this time, the child had been in foster care for three years.[3]
In another recent case, HRS filed a petition to declare a child dependent, and to terminate the parental rights of the mother. The lower court dismissed the petition, as it failed to allege any abuse or neglect.
The Court of Appeal ruled that abuse or neglect need not be alleged, and that the lower Court was in error holding that it could not terminate parental rights on the ground that HRS had alleged only that the mother failed to comply substantially with her performance agreements:
Florida Rule of Juvenile Procedure 8.500(b) provides that the only substantive allegation required in a termination petition, aside from the parents' and child's identities, etc., is that 'the parents were offered a performance agreement or permanent placement plan and did not substantially comply with it,' when required by law. The petitions conformed with this requirement.[4]
In most states, allegations of abuse or neglect are not necessary to remove a child, or to permanently sever parental rights. In virtually every state, the laws have been constructed in such a way as to allow the removal of children on the basis that they may be abused or neglected at some point in the future.
In the State of Montana, for example, temporary removal orders require the department only "to submit to the court facts establishing a probable cause that a youth is abused or neglected or is in danger of being abused or neglected."
According to a recent judicial assessment of the Montana juvenile justice system, such treatment plans are often implemented early during the proceedings, even though a child may not have been adjudicated "a youth in need of care."
"Adjudication provides the basis for state intervention in a family," reviewers note. "Therefore, enforcement of treatment which is not required for the immediate protection of the child... is an inappropriate exercise of the state's power."
Citing state law, assessment reviewers explain the dire consequences of failure to complete the "treatment plan" constructed by the department of social services:
the failure of a parent or guardian to participate in, comply with, in whole or in part, or to meet the goals of the treatment plan is prima facie evidence that return of the child to the parent or guardian would be detrimental.[5]
Incredibly, rulings like this can be found throughout the states.
In California, an often-applied ruling used to terminate the parental rights of parents who simply refuse to comply with social worker demands that they attend "treatment" or "therapy" reads:
the failure of the parent or guardian to participate in any court-ordered treatment programs shall constitute prima facie evidence that return [of the child] would be detrimental.[6]
Hence, the refusal to participate in these programs will result in the permanent separation of a child from his parents--whether or not any maltreatment had actually occurred.
In examining studies conducted by the American Humane Association during the mid-1980s, Dana Mack of the Institute for American Values found that half of the families that child welfare agencies compelled to undergo therapeutic services for child maltreatment never mistreated their children at all, and that many removals of children are capricious actions of "preventive intervention," based on a caseworker's presumption that although abuse may not have occurred, it may at some time in the future.[7]
Even for those parents who comply with the reunification terms, the state has another way of using these plans to terminate parental rights.
The laws throughout the states are written in such a way that "failure to substantially comply with the terms of the performance agreement," or "failure to derive benefit from the services provided by the Department" are reason enough to have children permanently separated from their parents, once they have become dependents of the court.
In a recent Minnesota case, for example, the "disposition plan" for reunification included the following elements:
(1) that appellants work with a housekeeper provided by the county to maintain the housekeeping standard from week to week;
(2) that appellants cooperate with an assessment and goals as determined by an in-home skills counselor, to provide a safe, clean, and organized living environment for the family;
(3) that prior to reunification, the home environment will have an adequate level of housekeeping, as determined by the social worker and public health nurse;
(4) that appellants keep all scheduled appointments with service providers or cancel and reschedule appointments in a timely manner;
(5) that appellants complete individual psychological and psychiatric evaluations and follow all recommendations;
(6) that appellants attend individual therapy to determine and address issues of depression, grief, and loss, and other issues as may be recommended by the treating therapist;
(7) that appellants cooperate and work with the assigned financial worker from the county and comply with the budget or recommendations of the financial worker;
(8) that appellants follow all recommendations of [the child's] treating physicians and keep all appointments with the home health aide for the purpose of childcare, nutrition, and bathing; and
(9) that appellants maintain a working telephone in the residence at all times.[8]
The sad reality is that abuse or neglect need not be demonstrated. Simple failure to maintain a purely subjective housekeeping standard, the missing of an appointment, failure to "adequately assimilate" budgeting skills, or the disconnection of a telephone can result in the permanent separation of a child from his or her parents.
In most states, social workers have been granted the authority to construct these reunification plans at their sole discretion. And, there is precious little oversight from the courts in the construction of these plans.
Montana reviewers found that most judges rarely issue orders or make recommendations addressing reunification or treatment plans, finding also that: "Some judges assert that it is appropriate for the courts to defer to the department's expertise in these matters because of the social workers' experience and education."
One judge reported that while he often orders parents to take parenting classes, he does not actually know what those classes entail!
Hence, the construction of these plans is left to social workers who typically have precious little training, oversight or experience.
Worse, over half of counsel representing parents said that they seldom receive information from service providers or the department regarding the availability of services. Reviewers determined that: "Parents' counsel are, therefore, unable to to effectively challenge the appropriateness of a treatment plan."[9]
Personal bias or prejudice often play a role in how these plans are constructed.
Veteran Juvenile Court Judge Judy Sheindlin recounts the story of one young couple named Robin and Tim. Robin had two children before she met Tim. She also had a drug problem. City caseworkers stepped in and removed her three children when the third was born with cocaine in her system.
Tim, who was separated from Robin, lived at home with his parents and his brother, all of whom were employed. Judge Sheindlin describes the obstacles Tim had to face when he sought custody of his child:
First, he had to establish paternity, proving that he was the biological father of his child. Tim did this. Next, the caseworkers told him that before he could even be considered for custody, he had to take parenting classes. He had to provide the name of the person who would be caring for his child while he worked during the day. He had to establish a permanent, independent residence. There was not a scintilla of evidence that he was an unfit parent, but these were the rules that Tim had to follow. He met all of the conditions.
Meanwhile, Robin the drug addict had it easy. All she had to do was enroll herself in a drug treatment program and get on welfare. That, my friends, was it.
When Judge Sheindlin asked the caseworker about this obvious gender disparity, her answer was simply: "Well, she's the mother."[10]
The San Diego Grand Jury confirmed that these plans are sometimes intentionally made impossible to prevent reunification:
Failure to comply with any element of a reunification plan is sufficient for termination of parental rights. We have taken testimony from attorneys, court appointed therapists, and social workers, that some of these plans are intentionally made impossible, particularly when infants or toddlers are involved.
Chief Administrative Officer Norman Hickey conducted an independent investigation of the San Diego Department of Social Services. His report confirmed the San Diego Grand Jury findings, following on the heels of another stinging critique of the system by the county's Juvenile Justice Commission.
The system is too demanding of the parents, distracting them from more important issues, he wrote. "Too many tasks or unproductive requirements overwhelm parents and reduce the potential for priority behavioral change."
His report also indicated that foster parents may try to thwart reunification efforts. "A desire to take care of the child on a permanent basis must not be permitted to work against the parent's goal" of reunification.[11]
The Juvenile Justice Commission examined several troubling cases in which social workers sought to prevent reunification of children with their parents. They found such cases in their representative sampling to be "numerous and diverse."
In one such case, a social worker threatened that a child would be removed from the mother's home if she allowed the child to attend a scheduled birthday party with her father in a public place. She further advised the mother to move to another part of the County, and keep her whereabouts unknown to the father.
In another case, a social worker sought to prevent the development of ties between a child and her maternal aunt, even though the aunt was known to the worker as a licensed foster mother. The worker sought instead to maintain the child in a foster home in which the foster parents had expressed a desire to adopt the child.
"The unwillingness of the Children's Services Bureau staff, from line to administrative, to listen to opposing views to the point of being hostile and threatening has resulted in a backlash from the community, as well as tragic consequences for families," the Commission found.
"Court time and real time are world's apart, so that while a case drags on from week to week and month to month, the agony of separation continues," the Commission concluded. "While Court cases often require lengthy investigation and preparation to ensure due process of law to all involved, it must never be forgotten that these cases are ultimately about living, breathing human beings."[12]
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/reunification.htm
DEFENSIVE SOCIAL WORK
DEFENSIVE SOCIAL WORK
From Lifting the Veil
"I would like the caseworkers to err on the side of protecting the children," said Nicholas Scoppetta, the former prosecutor named by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to revamp the troubled New York City agency after the tragic and avoidable death of Elisa Izquierdo.
Shortly after her death made headlines, defensive social work took hold in New York City, and removals of children from their homes skyrocketed.
What is defensive social work?
A Brooklyn judge, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained to a New York Times reporter:
It's classic cover-your-rear-end behavior by people who are either genuinely frightened or cynical. I don't know if they are servicing people better, but all of a sudden, I have tons of cases, cases that they would not have normally filed.
Said Jane Spinak, head of the Legal Aid Society's Juvenile Rights Project: "They are bringing many, many more cases into court. The question is whether they are cleaning up their act or whether, to protect themselves, they are shifting the burden of responsibility to the judges."
According to Faye Moore, a senior official with the Social Services Employees Union Local 371: "People are working not to make mistakes, and that may not necessarily be in the best interests of the children. How so? Unnecessary removals."[1]
But needless and traumatic removals would appear to have long been the rule, rather than the exception in New York City.
According to one former child protective worker, the "classic cover-your-rear-end behavior" spoken of by the Brooklyn juvenile court judge was specifically taught at the New York City Training Academy.
Former New York City child protective caseworker Lisa Clampitt explained: "They would literally say it all through training: You have to cover your ass. Everyone's going to try and dump work on you and get you in trouble."[2]
Says former New York City caseworker Marc Parent: "Our thing was go out, see if the kid's safe. If the kid's safe, leave him. If the kid's not safe, take him. If you're not sure, take him."[3]
If you're not sure, take him?
BEST DEFENSE--A REAL OFFENSE
Douglas Besharov refers to needless removals of children as "defensive social work." It would appear that the unconscionable practice of removing a child to protect a career, or to prevent liability is quite common. Besharov explains:
The dynamic is simple enough to understand: negative media publicity and a lawsuit are always possible if the child is subsequently killed or injured; but there will be no critical publicity if it turns out that intervention was unneeded, and much less chance of a lawsuit. Joanne Selinske, formerly director of the American Public Welfare Association's child abuse project, characterized this approach as the "'better safe than sorry' attitude that permeates the child protection system."[4]
The former NCCAN director adds that while no one knows exactly how much defensive social work goes on, there is no denying "that it affects all aspects of child protective decision making."
Besharov continues, citing a program director who described what happened after the was indicted for "allowing" a child to be killed:
Upon learning of the indictments, caseworkers and their supervisors became aware of their own vulnerability. As a result, paperwork increased to account for everyone's actions and for a while more children were removed from their homes. Supervisors told me that these removals seemed unnecessary but that caseworkers were afraid.[5]
TIP OF THE ICEBERG?
Just how prevalent the practice is may be indicated by an Illinois study conducted in 1994 by the Child Welfare Institute. The study found that one third of a sample group of foster children were in placement not for reasons of abuse or neglect, but for reasons of caseworker protection.
A Chicago Tribune reporter estimated that as many as 14,000 children in Illinois may be in placement as a direct result of this unspoken policy.[6]
These figures may well represent the tip of the iceberg.
Diane Redleaf, formerly of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago estimated that between 25 and 50 percent of children in foster care in Illinois could safely be returned to their homes if proper services were provided.
Benjamin Wolf, who filed a landmark suit against the Illinois child welfare agency, estimates that between 55 to 90 percent could safely be returned home, an estimate he said was based on comments made to him off-the-record by system insiders.[7]
The needless removal of children from their homes has long been documented, and is so prevalent that it is often accepted as a reasonable consequence of child protective activities.
"Child protective staff fear errors, especially the failure to take endangered children into care, and the subsequent public response to deaths or severe abuse and neglect," observed Sheila Kamerman and Alfred Kahn of the Columbia University School of Social Work.[8]
"Social workers may more quickly--but prematurely--remove children from troubled families rather than risk being sued on behalf of an abused child," notes Yale Law School Professor Peter Schuck.[9]
Leroy Schultz, social work professor at the University of West Virginia conducted a survey of child protective caseworkers, finding at least one worker who "tries to get state custody of all suspected abused children just to protect herself from liability."[10]
Evidently, there are many other child protective caseworkers just like her.
In Florida, one social worker was so quick to tear children away from their homes that he was given the nickname "Cap'n Hook." It is a title he wore with pride, and he was reportedly admired by his fellow caseworkers.[11]
CHECKS AND BALANCES?
What of legislative efforts to protect children against the harm inflicted by the countless caseworkers like Cap'n Hook and the one Schultz identified?
Invariably, efforts at imposing civil liability against caseworkers for wrongful removals of children from their homes have been met with tremendous resistance.
One such amendment, proposed in Missouri, would have imposed penalties for removing a child without a strong case to support abuse. The amendment was defeated by a House vote of 78-48.[12]
Nor have the courts adopted a position favorable to the innocent families and children impacted by these needless interventions. A 1996 Michigan Court of Appeals decision held that families cannot sue caseworkers for wrongful removals of children, holding that it would impede the investigation of abuse by social workers.
The suit was filed by a family whose children had been kept in foster care for four years before being returned to them.[13]
Not even the Congress is able to stem the tide of wrongful removals. Nearly a decade after the passage of the Adoption Assistance Act, which was intended, in part, to address the problem of needless placements, the Congress held hearings aptly entitled Programs and Services Designed to Prevent Unnecessary Foster Care Placement. The Ways and Means Committee determined that needless removals remain a major concern.[14]
ERRING ON THE SIDE OF THE CHILD -- OR THE CASEWORKER?
Like many other fields of work, child welfare seems to have its own peculiar vocabulary to describe wrongful removals of children from their homes. Industry professionals invariably call this "erring on the side of the child."
So prevalent is the use of this term to deflect criticism over wrongful removals that one may wonder if courses in child protective apologetics might be taught in some training centers.
Just as needless removals of children skyrocketed in New York after the reports of Elisa Izquierdo made headlines, removals skyrocketed in Utah after the National Center for Youth Law sued the state over its treatment of children in foster care.
"We saw a dramatic increase" in removals, said Suzanne Timmerman of the Division of Child and Family Services. "Workers are afraid of making a mistake and would rather err on the side of caution."
"We do believe the lawsuit has heightened awareness that if it's a really difficult judgment call, we need to err on the side of protection of the child, which means removal," said Robin Arnold-Williams, director of the Department of Human Services.[15]
The effects in Utah have been similar to those of reform efforts elsewhere. Increased spending and the hiring of more intake workers have resulted in more needless removals, and foster care placements have increased. Hence, conditions for these children are worse than they were prior to the reform effort.
In a 1996 case, Los Angeles officials took five of seven children into custody, based in part on a dream one of the children recounted during questioning.
The case stemmed from an entry into the families home by an intruder. Even after the father had captured the intruder, and evidence had been found by police linking him to the crime, the children were kept in foster care for three weeks.
County social workers then coerced the family into signing an agreement to have the entire family attend counseling sessions in exchange for the return of their children.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich called for an investigation, saying the case "raises questions with regard to the powers exercised by the Department of Children and Family Services."
Betsy Azariah, a children's services administrator, disagreed, saying that she had reviewed the case and found no irregularities. Asked if caseworkers might have overreacted, Azariah said, "We always err on the side of caution."[16]
Sound familiar?
Does it ever occur to caseworkers who employ defensive social work that they are hurting the very children they are supposed to protect? Do they recognize the trauma they inflict when they remove a child from a loving family, tossing him into the home of strangers?
Journalist Richard Wexler examined these and similar questions, determining that for the most part, they don't. Wexler explained:
The answer is, I think, that child savers live in a foster-care fantasyland. They see in front of them children living in poverty, perhaps with a struggling single parent, and they fantasize that they can take the children away and place them in a nice middle-class suburban home with two cars, two dogs, and two parents.[17]
Bruce Boyer, supervising attorney for the Children and Family Justice Center of Northwest Law School has represented many Illinois children, parents and families in abuse and neglect cases.
"The DCFS caseworker who doesn't try hard enough to get into the home, to do an investigation that subsequently gets front page in the news, gets hung out to dry," says Boyer.
"On the other hand, there are a set of harms that follow a kid in foster care even if they are treated as well as the foster care system is capable of treating them. For those kinds of harms there is no mechanism for holding decision makers accountable; the only person who suffers is the child."[18]
"The urge is to remove kids and ask questions later," says Gail Smith, executive director of Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers.
"This floods the system," says Smith, creating cases such as that of Amanda Wallace, in which a child was inappropriately returned to an abusive mother. "One overwhelmed caseworker can misidentify a serious case."[19]
Benjamin Wolf, of the Illinois Civil Liberties Union, describes the impact of defensive social work on the Illinois foster care population: "Permanancy planning declined while the DCFS population exploded... the number of cases closed dropped off the table. In 1987, DCFS had 14,000 cases; in 1994, they had 45,000. It's disastrous."[20]
Just as in New York and Utah, there was a precipitating series of events that triggered the massive increase in removals of children from their homes in Illinois.
These events were the Wallace case, which demonstrated the widespread breakdown in the Department of Children and Family Services, and the Keystone case, which involved related mothers whose children were removed, and whose parental rights were terminated for reasons of poverty.
In Illinois, unnecessary or not, foster care placements are often permanent. Says Benjamin Wolf: "After Joey Wallace and Keystone, no kid went home."
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/defensive.htm
From Lifting the Veil
"I would like the caseworkers to err on the side of protecting the children," said Nicholas Scoppetta, the former prosecutor named by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to revamp the troubled New York City agency after the tragic and avoidable death of Elisa Izquierdo.
Shortly after her death made headlines, defensive social work took hold in New York City, and removals of children from their homes skyrocketed.
What is defensive social work?
A Brooklyn judge, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained to a New York Times reporter:
It's classic cover-your-rear-end behavior by people who are either genuinely frightened or cynical. I don't know if they are servicing people better, but all of a sudden, I have tons of cases, cases that they would not have normally filed.
Said Jane Spinak, head of the Legal Aid Society's Juvenile Rights Project: "They are bringing many, many more cases into court. The question is whether they are cleaning up their act or whether, to protect themselves, they are shifting the burden of responsibility to the judges."
According to Faye Moore, a senior official with the Social Services Employees Union Local 371: "People are working not to make mistakes, and that may not necessarily be in the best interests of the children. How so? Unnecessary removals."[1]
But needless and traumatic removals would appear to have long been the rule, rather than the exception in New York City.
According to one former child protective worker, the "classic cover-your-rear-end behavior" spoken of by the Brooklyn juvenile court judge was specifically taught at the New York City Training Academy.
Former New York City child protective caseworker Lisa Clampitt explained: "They would literally say it all through training: You have to cover your ass. Everyone's going to try and dump work on you and get you in trouble."[2]
Says former New York City caseworker Marc Parent: "Our thing was go out, see if the kid's safe. If the kid's safe, leave him. If the kid's not safe, take him. If you're not sure, take him."[3]
If you're not sure, take him?
BEST DEFENSE--A REAL OFFENSE
Douglas Besharov refers to needless removals of children as "defensive social work." It would appear that the unconscionable practice of removing a child to protect a career, or to prevent liability is quite common. Besharov explains:
The dynamic is simple enough to understand: negative media publicity and a lawsuit are always possible if the child is subsequently killed or injured; but there will be no critical publicity if it turns out that intervention was unneeded, and much less chance of a lawsuit. Joanne Selinske, formerly director of the American Public Welfare Association's child abuse project, characterized this approach as the "'better safe than sorry' attitude that permeates the child protection system."[4]
The former NCCAN director adds that while no one knows exactly how much defensive social work goes on, there is no denying "that it affects all aspects of child protective decision making."
Besharov continues, citing a program director who described what happened after the was indicted for "allowing" a child to be killed:
Upon learning of the indictments, caseworkers and their supervisors became aware of their own vulnerability. As a result, paperwork increased to account for everyone's actions and for a while more children were removed from their homes. Supervisors told me that these removals seemed unnecessary but that caseworkers were afraid.[5]
TIP OF THE ICEBERG?
Just how prevalent the practice is may be indicated by an Illinois study conducted in 1994 by the Child Welfare Institute. The study found that one third of a sample group of foster children were in placement not for reasons of abuse or neglect, but for reasons of caseworker protection.
A Chicago Tribune reporter estimated that as many as 14,000 children in Illinois may be in placement as a direct result of this unspoken policy.[6]
These figures may well represent the tip of the iceberg.
Diane Redleaf, formerly of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago estimated that between 25 and 50 percent of children in foster care in Illinois could safely be returned to their homes if proper services were provided.
Benjamin Wolf, who filed a landmark suit against the Illinois child welfare agency, estimates that between 55 to 90 percent could safely be returned home, an estimate he said was based on comments made to him off-the-record by system insiders.[7]
The needless removal of children from their homes has long been documented, and is so prevalent that it is often accepted as a reasonable consequence of child protective activities.
"Child protective staff fear errors, especially the failure to take endangered children into care, and the subsequent public response to deaths or severe abuse and neglect," observed Sheila Kamerman and Alfred Kahn of the Columbia University School of Social Work.[8]
"Social workers may more quickly--but prematurely--remove children from troubled families rather than risk being sued on behalf of an abused child," notes Yale Law School Professor Peter Schuck.[9]
Leroy Schultz, social work professor at the University of West Virginia conducted a survey of child protective caseworkers, finding at least one worker who "tries to get state custody of all suspected abused children just to protect herself from liability."[10]
Evidently, there are many other child protective caseworkers just like her.
In Florida, one social worker was so quick to tear children away from their homes that he was given the nickname "Cap'n Hook." It is a title he wore with pride, and he was reportedly admired by his fellow caseworkers.[11]
CHECKS AND BALANCES?
What of legislative efforts to protect children against the harm inflicted by the countless caseworkers like Cap'n Hook and the one Schultz identified?
Invariably, efforts at imposing civil liability against caseworkers for wrongful removals of children from their homes have been met with tremendous resistance.
One such amendment, proposed in Missouri, would have imposed penalties for removing a child without a strong case to support abuse. The amendment was defeated by a House vote of 78-48.[12]
Nor have the courts adopted a position favorable to the innocent families and children impacted by these needless interventions. A 1996 Michigan Court of Appeals decision held that families cannot sue caseworkers for wrongful removals of children, holding that it would impede the investigation of abuse by social workers.
The suit was filed by a family whose children had been kept in foster care for four years before being returned to them.[13]
Not even the Congress is able to stem the tide of wrongful removals. Nearly a decade after the passage of the Adoption Assistance Act, which was intended, in part, to address the problem of needless placements, the Congress held hearings aptly entitled Programs and Services Designed to Prevent Unnecessary Foster Care Placement. The Ways and Means Committee determined that needless removals remain a major concern.[14]
ERRING ON THE SIDE OF THE CHILD -- OR THE CASEWORKER?
Like many other fields of work, child welfare seems to have its own peculiar vocabulary to describe wrongful removals of children from their homes. Industry professionals invariably call this "erring on the side of the child."
So prevalent is the use of this term to deflect criticism over wrongful removals that one may wonder if courses in child protective apologetics might be taught in some training centers.
Just as needless removals of children skyrocketed in New York after the reports of Elisa Izquierdo made headlines, removals skyrocketed in Utah after the National Center for Youth Law sued the state over its treatment of children in foster care.
"We saw a dramatic increase" in removals, said Suzanne Timmerman of the Division of Child and Family Services. "Workers are afraid of making a mistake and would rather err on the side of caution."
"We do believe the lawsuit has heightened awareness that if it's a really difficult judgment call, we need to err on the side of protection of the child, which means removal," said Robin Arnold-Williams, director of the Department of Human Services.[15]
The effects in Utah have been similar to those of reform efforts elsewhere. Increased spending and the hiring of more intake workers have resulted in more needless removals, and foster care placements have increased. Hence, conditions for these children are worse than they were prior to the reform effort.
In a 1996 case, Los Angeles officials took five of seven children into custody, based in part on a dream one of the children recounted during questioning.
The case stemmed from an entry into the families home by an intruder. Even after the father had captured the intruder, and evidence had been found by police linking him to the crime, the children were kept in foster care for three weeks.
County social workers then coerced the family into signing an agreement to have the entire family attend counseling sessions in exchange for the return of their children.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich called for an investigation, saying the case "raises questions with regard to the powers exercised by the Department of Children and Family Services."
Betsy Azariah, a children's services administrator, disagreed, saying that she had reviewed the case and found no irregularities. Asked if caseworkers might have overreacted, Azariah said, "We always err on the side of caution."[16]
Sound familiar?
Does it ever occur to caseworkers who employ defensive social work that they are hurting the very children they are supposed to protect? Do they recognize the trauma they inflict when they remove a child from a loving family, tossing him into the home of strangers?
Journalist Richard Wexler examined these and similar questions, determining that for the most part, they don't. Wexler explained:
The answer is, I think, that child savers live in a foster-care fantasyland. They see in front of them children living in poverty, perhaps with a struggling single parent, and they fantasize that they can take the children away and place them in a nice middle-class suburban home with two cars, two dogs, and two parents.[17]
Bruce Boyer, supervising attorney for the Children and Family Justice Center of Northwest Law School has represented many Illinois children, parents and families in abuse and neglect cases.
"The DCFS caseworker who doesn't try hard enough to get into the home, to do an investigation that subsequently gets front page in the news, gets hung out to dry," says Boyer.
"On the other hand, there are a set of harms that follow a kid in foster care even if they are treated as well as the foster care system is capable of treating them. For those kinds of harms there is no mechanism for holding decision makers accountable; the only person who suffers is the child."[18]
"The urge is to remove kids and ask questions later," says Gail Smith, executive director of Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers.
"This floods the system," says Smith, creating cases such as that of Amanda Wallace, in which a child was inappropriately returned to an abusive mother. "One overwhelmed caseworker can misidentify a serious case."[19]
Benjamin Wolf, of the Illinois Civil Liberties Union, describes the impact of defensive social work on the Illinois foster care population: "Permanancy planning declined while the DCFS population exploded... the number of cases closed dropped off the table. In 1987, DCFS had 14,000 cases; in 1994, they had 45,000. It's disastrous."[20]
Just as in New York and Utah, there was a precipitating series of events that triggered the massive increase in removals of children from their homes in Illinois.
These events were the Wallace case, which demonstrated the widespread breakdown in the Department of Children and Family Services, and the Keystone case, which involved related mothers whose children were removed, and whose parental rights were terminated for reasons of poverty.
In Illinois, unnecessary or not, foster care placements are often permanent. Says Benjamin Wolf: "After Joey Wallace and Keystone, no kid went home."
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/defensive.htm
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