A Critical Look At The Foster Care System:
How Safe the Service?
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HOW SAFE THE SERVICE?
A recent TIME Magazine article references a troubling report commissioned by the Reagan Administration during the late 1980s, which concluded:
Foster care is intended to protect children from neglect and abuse at the hands of parents and other family members, yet all too often it becomes an equally cruel form of neglect and abuse by the state.[1]
In the State of California, two San Diego County Grand juries would echo these concerns, finding that: "Professionals working in the field of child abuse voiced strong concerns that the children removed from abusive homes were being abused again by a system designed to protect them."[2]
A Santa Clara County Grand Jury reached similar conclusions, having determined that children often face greater risks in its existing foster care program than they do in their own homes:
Sometimes, foster care placements are made that are just as abusive, if not more so, than the home from which the child was removed. The Grand Jury learned of placements where sexual and physical abuse took place. There was even a case where the infant died.[3]
In Washington State, a blue-ribbon Governor's task force concluded:
The effect of our present foster care system is disastrous. Children are moved from one foster home to another, their school attendance is disrupted and health care needs often go unmet. They are sometimes exposed to abuse by other children in care. . .[4]
Elsewhere, a report by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services determined that the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services "has no assurance that the quality of care being given to foster children placed by child-placing agencies was adequate." Federal reviewers found "many cases" of children "in potentially harmful situations." At least one fire or health deficiency was found at 40 of the 48 homes reviewed. In 28 of the 48 homes, no record could be found to prove that required criminal background checks had been made. The report described some foster homes as filled with trash.[5]
Terry's story is in many respects typical of the plight of America's 500,000 foster children. He entered foster care at the age of one after he was found with his five siblings suffering from frostbite in an unheated home, his mother in a drug-induced sleep. When he was five, he and two of his siblings were adopted by a foster family.
To hear the adoption proponents of today tell it, this should have provided the happy ending to Terry and his sibling's travails. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning of a long journey through the labyrinth of the child welfare system.
Terry and his siblings had to be removed from their new home due to extreme abuse and neglect after the subsequent death of abuse of his five-year-old adoptive brother.
Thereafter followed a sequence of sixteen placements, during which Terry began to exhibit increasingly serious behavioral problems.
By the time he turned 11, Terry was placed in a residential facility where he began making suicidal comments, saying that he wanted to go to heaven to be with his deceased adoptive brother. He left the facility during severe thunderstorms without any shoes on. When he was found, he had to be hospitalized for over a month. He has since been diagnosed as suffering from the psychological effects of the extreme abuse and neglect he had suffered while in various placements, complicated by a lack of permanence over his ten years in government custody.
The child welfare system responsible for Terry has since been held in contempt for failing to comply with a court-ordered consent decree, and has created an internal receivership to help move toward compliance, thanks to the efforts of the private advocacy group Children's Rights, Inc. For Terry, there came a happy ending. He has recently been adopted by a warm and stable family. But it took years of difficult and costly litigation to bring about this result.[6]
Similar narratives are everywhere to be found. In Lynchburg, Virginia, a 23-year-old blind and mentally retarded woman was denied food, restrained with socks, and was regularly beaten by her foster mother. She received the maximum punishment under the 1992 law; one year in jail. What is even more amazing is that the foster mother did not even realize that she had done anything wrong.[7]
According to an Associated Press report, a 1994 Department of Health and Human Services audit of six states found foster homes that were crowded and unsafe.[8]
The report continues, illustrating that cases of foster parents inflicting harm on their wards are all too common:
A Sacramento, Calif., man was charged last December with raping and murdering one of his three foster children, a 16-year-old girl. He was arrested after holding the other two children at gunpoint during a standoff with police.
The Cook County public guardian's office recently sued a Chicago private social agency for placing an 11-year-old girl in the home of a convicted rapist who allegedly raped the child.
In a separate case, Chicago police say 2-year-old Corese Goldman was killed in February by a foster mother who held him under a faucet to toilet-train him. The woman, a distant relative, was not required to go through training, background checks and a home inspection before taking the child.
In Massachusetts, the Department of Social Services has knowingly approved scores of convicted criminals to be foster parents, including child abusers, drug dealers, habitual drunk drivers, kidnappers, armed robbers, and other violent offenders, according a recent Boston Globe series.
The Department of Social Services allowed these criminals to become foster parents by granting "waivers" that would ordinarily have caused the foster parents to be rejected.[9]
This may explain--at least in part--why after a five-month investigation based on hundreds of interviews with Department workers, court personnel and families, a Massachusetts legislative committee found that children in state care were often worse off than they were in the original homes from which they were removed.[10]
Similar reports are everywhere to be found. From New Jersey, comes a 270 page report issued by a panel of 26 experts appointed by the Governor--one which makes hundreds of recommendations for revamping the state's failed child protection system.
Among the panel's findings was that children alleged to have been abused or neglected are abused once again--by the very system intended to help them.
The report followed on the heels of another scathing report issued by the Association for Children, in which 75 percent of the 772 respondents--among them police officers, foster parents, caseworkers and other individuals involved with the system--rated the agency's performance as inadequate, ultimately forcing the agency's director, Patricia Balasco-Barr, to resign.[11]
SPEAKING OUT
In Alaska, foster parents testify that the worst of the abuses endured by foster children is not the abuse and neglect allegedly suffered before the state takes them from their natural parents. Rather, the real abuse comes from the actions of the state itself.[12]
To make matters worse, just as state officials are forming ambitious efforts to deal with the severe failures in the state's child protection system, a 2-year-old in the care of Anchorage foster parents dies.[13]
Foster parents were speaking out in Utah, as well. When James Sebaske and his wife, Corinn, got their foster care license, they were prepared for troubled teens--but not for the bureaucrats in the child protective services system.
After five frustrating years of dealing with the department, the couple planned to allow their license to lapse. "The system is so corrupt, I fear for my children or any reasonable person's children," said Sebaske.[14]
But speaking out against the system can have its price, state representative Marie Parente (D-Milford), chairwoman of the Massachusetts House Foster Care Committee told Boston Globe reporters in February of 1992. Foster parents are afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals--the ultimate threat being that DSS will take away their foster children.
Her fears were ultimately proven to be well-founded. After Lynn Sanborn--a long-term foster mother with a flawless record--rendered testimony critical of the department's removal of a foster child from her home before the House Foster Care Committee, she suddenly found herself the subject of two child abuse reports.
"After 14 years of being a foster parent and three months ago I was an exemplary home, I get two complaints in a week," Sanborn said. "Doesn't that sound odd to you?"
So, too, did another foster mother who testified during the hearings, find herself the subject of an anonymous report, sparking charges from both women that the agency was retaliating against them for speaking out against the department.
The anonymous charges were filed against them within days of their testimony. "I feel hurt and I feel sad," said Sanborn. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody."[15]
The price to be paid for speaking out against the system can be equally high for biological parents. Elizabeth Sayers--by her own admission in need of support services--said in an on-air radio interview that she was not being offered the help she required from the Massachusetts department to keep her children.
Just 90 minutes after she complained on the air to a radio talk show host about the lack of services, her children were taken away and placed in foster homes in an "emergency removal."[16]
Similar narratives are everywhere to be found, as parents, foster parents and many others who advocate on behalf of children often report the fear of retaliation from child welfare agencies seeking to silence them.
In Alaska, foster parents sat with trembling hands as they told legislators of the treatment they and their young wards endured at the hands of child protective services. Fear of retaliation was reportedly a common theme throughout the meeting.[17]
Prior to a 1994 hearing held in Illinois, several parents were told by Department of Children and Family Services caseworkers "if you ever want to see your children again, don't go to the hearing," according to Champaign County Board member Robert Naiman.[18]
Thus, the most dedicated of foster parents--those who would dare advocate on behalf of the children in their care--are pushed out of the system. As a result, the abuse of children in state care continues to mount even as the number of children in state care continues to increase.
In Milwaukee, complaints of children being abused or neglected by their foster families increased dramatically over a 10-month period in 1997, compared with the same period a year earlier.[19]
In Peoria, Illinois, the state's child welfare agency "rescues" Donte May from a neglectful and possibly abusive mother, only to place him in a foster home where he dies suspiciously from bleeding in the brain.[20]
NEEDLESS SUFFERING
One of the most tragic aspects of many of these cases is that the children suffer needlessly, for in their zeal to protect them against the perceived shortcomings of their natural parents, child protective workers placed them into dangerous homes that inflicted upon them precisely the injury they had hoped to prevent.
In the District of Columbia, social workers removed four of Debra Hampton's children from her home placing them in foster care. According to the testimony of a social worker, the children were removed because Mrs. Hampton had left them alone and was not properly supervising them, and her home was "generally uninhabitable."
Three months later, the foster mother left two-year-old Mykeeda Hampton at home for over ten hours. While she was out running errands, Mykeeda was beaten to death by the foster mothers' twelve-year-old son. An autopsy later established that the two-year-old died of "blunt force injuries to the head, abdomen, and back, with internal hemorrhaging." As of September 1995, several years after the incident, the case was still under litigation.[21]
In August of 1995, San Francisco officials took custody of Selena Hill a few days after her birth because of concerns that her parents, Stacey and Claudia Hill, had physically abused each other and didn't seem capable of caring for their newborn.
In September, seven-week-old Selena Hill was rushed to Children's Hospital in Oakland with a fractured skull and other injuries that almost killed her. In their efforts to protect her from her actual parents, child welfare workers placed Selena into a foster home with a history of domestic violence. In the nine months before the infant was injured, Berkeley police had visited the residence three times after receiving reports about violent disturbances in the foster home.[22]
The state of Georgia placed Clayton and Kelly Miracle in foster care with Betty and Joe Wilkins in June of 1993. Two months later paramedics would arrive at the foster home in response to a 911 call, finding Clayton barely breathing, with two large knots on his head, one in the front and one in back. Clayton died as a result of blunt force trauma to his head. The doctor who performed the autopsy testified that Clayton's fatal injuries could not have been caused by an accidental fall and that injuries and bruising found all over Clayton's body were consistent with battered child syndrome. Doctors also examined Kelly and found the same pattern of bruising.[23]
Newsday reports the tragic story of one father whose desperate pleas to the family court fell on deaf ears. David Roman fights back tears as he recounts the shooting death of his son who had been placed into foster care in the Jamaica section of New York City:
My son was going to turn 15 this coming Friday. I begged the family court judges to get my children back. I looked at the neighborhood . . . and I could tell it was no good. That place was a drug-infested neighborhood.[24]
FATALITIES - A CLOSER LOOK
During a recent two year period, one foster child died on average every seven and a half weeks in the state of Arizona. Four of them were reported as having been "viciously beaten to death" by their foster parents.[25]
Among the deaths in Arizona was that of China Marie Davis, of Phoenix. An autopsy revealed that over her 11 months in the care of her foster mother, Dorothy Jean Livingston, China Marie suffered a compression fracture of the spine, breaks in both forearms and wrists, two broken collarbones, fractures of both thighs, and a broken left arm, right rib and left hand.
China Marie finally found her relief in death, after Livingston repeatedly kicked her down a staircase because she refused to clap her hands to gospel music.[26]
Among the deaths was that of Tajuana Davidson, also of Phoenix. While in foster care the three-year-old suffered a broken shoulder blade, a black eye, and bruises on her stomach, back, legs and arms. But it was the "seven crushing blows to the head" that finally killed her.[27]
Just how many abuse and neglect related incidents actually occur in foster care is difficult to determine, given the child protection agencies apparent unwillingness to investigate them. It becomes nearly impossible with confidentiality laws shielding child protection agencies from public scrutiny. What is clear is that there is no shortage of them.
"The state's foster care system has been racked by tragedy in recent years," note Boston Globe reporters. "In the past three years, several foster children have been murdered or have died from neglect, while others have been horrifically abused."[28]
In 1995, at least eight children died while in foster care in Massachusetts, and federal officials were threatening a private lawsuit against the agency if changes weren't made.[29]
But the most telling statistic of all may be that of the seven deaths directly attributable to maltreatment in Massachusetts in 1995, three of them--nearly half--were in foster care.[30]
In this respect Massachusetts is a more or less a typical state. Notes outspoken veteran juvenile court judge Judy Sheindlin:
Every year in every a state a commission meets to attempt to identify the scores of children killed and maimed while in foster care. And each year a report is published with suggestions for legislative and systemic change. Although the number of victims is increasing, there has been no nationwide overhaul of the systems that permit these in-house tragedies to occur.[31]
THE CLOAK OF SECRECY
Sheindlin attributes much of the problem to confidentiality laws. "The only people being protected here are caseworkers and other officials, who regularly hide behind a wall of secrecy," she writes.
She notes that dozens of New York City cases where children have been maimed or murdered never reach public attention, and it is not just because they are poor minority children. Rather it is "because of confidentiality rules, which protect inept bureaucrats and a faltering social services system."[32]
"In the name of protecting children, we have kept it a secret how we as a society deal with our most vulnerable children," explained American Civil Liberties Union attorney Eric S. Maxwell to the Massachusetts Senate Committee on Post-Audit and Oversight.
"There is a great gap between protecting a child's identity and keeping the process and acts of our government secret."
Maxwell urged the Committee to push for legislation to open court proceedings involving the removal of children from their parents, and child guardianship cases.
"I think any time you take a system and cloak it in secrecy there are going to be substantial abuses," said Maxwell, adding that he believes the Department of Social Services is often too quick to take custody of children away from their parents.[33]
"Foster care systems are cloaked in secrecy that often is used to conceal illegal and unconscionable practices," explained children's advocate and attorney Marcia Robinson Lowry during Congressional hearings.
"Every state in the country cloaks its foster care system in secrecy, prohibiting the disclosure of any information about children's experiences in foster care. Though these statutes often were enacted to protect children, they routinely are used by state officials to conceal illegal and unconscionable practices."[34]
These confidentiality laws have served the system well, if the figures from the state of Georgia are any indication.
Nancy Schaefer, twice a gubernatorial candidate for governor, has repeatedly called for a fundamental restructuring of the state's foster care system, including the dismantling of the Georgia Department of Family and Children Services.
Schaefer charges that an astounding 433 children have died while in state care over the last several years.[35]
"Words cannot describe the travesty of justice suffered by these children who, rather than receiving the protection of the state, gave their lives in a most horrible and painful death because of a failed and unaccountable system of administration," says Schaefer.[36]
"We have to ask ourselves whether we're doing children a service by taking them out of their homes and placing them in a system that's just as unable to meet their needs," says District Judge Bill Jones of Charlotte, North Carolina.
"Are we doing them more harm than good?"
Says District Judge Deborah Burgin of Rutherfordton, North Carolina: "If you take on the responsibility to take care of someone - and are paid to take care of someone - the least we can ask is that they come out of it alive."[37]
http://www.liftingtheveil.org/foster03.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
A Critical Look At The Foster Care System:How Great the Need?
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
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
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
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