Doctor Gets Court Order to Confine Pregnant Woman Against Her Will
by Roxann MtJoy
Published January 15, 2010 @ 12:19PM PT
With issues like the Stupak Amendment and Nevada's Personhood Initiative in the national spotlight, I am aware that a woman's right to choose whether or not to carry a fetus to full-term is under attack.
What I didn't realize, perhaps naively, is that her right to choose how to carry a fetus is also under fire. Last March, Florida resident Samantha Burton was in week 25 of her pregnancy when she paid a visit to her doctor. Burton was showing signs of potential miscarriage, so her physician ordered bed rest. Burton explained that, as a working mother of two toddlers, bed rest simply wasn't a viable option and then proceeded to ask for a second medical opinion. Seems reasonable, right?
Her doctor, however, was having none of that. Rather than refer Burton for the desired second opinion, he instead felt it necessary to contact state authorities, who then proceeded to force Burton to be admitted to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital against her will and undergo any procedure the doctor felt like prescribing. When Burton had the audacity to request a change in the hospital in which she was being treated, the court denied her request. Three days into her forced hospitalization, Burton miscarried.
Never mind that there is actually no scientific research to support the claim that bed rest helps prevent preterm birth and that even the American College of of Obstetricians and Gynecologists does not believe it should be routinely recommended. Never mind Burton's very real concern for the care of her two small children. Never mind the psychological, physical, and financial toll this takes on her family. The only thing that mattered to the doctor and the government was that they got their (ultimately ineffectual) way.
Oh, and did I mention this case gets worse? Burton (with help from her pro bono lawyer and the ACLU) sued the State of Florida claiming it -- duh -- violated her constitutional rights. The court ruled against her, claiming that that State was merely maintaining "status quo" in the situation. Hmmm. I never knew forcing a woman to bed rest in a hospital was status quo. Perhaps I've been ill-informed.
It is scary to think that the government feels it can negate the bodily autonomy of pregnant women for any reason, let alone for something like this. Where does this stop? If a doctor lacking scientific support can force a woman into a hospital of his choosing for the tests of his choosing, what's next? Certainly it seems as if the bar has been set pretty low in terms of the criteria needed to override a woman's freedom to make informed decisions for herself.
Burton' lawyers filed for appeal and the case is now being heard in Florida's First District Court of Appeals. Hopefully, this time the court will acknowledge the bodily autonomy of pregnant women and reverse the lower court's frightening and potentially dangerous ruling. I shudder to think of the consequences of the earlier decision being upheld.
http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/doctor_gets_court_order_to_confine_pregnant_woman_against_her_will
Isabella Brooke Knightly and Austin Gamez-Knightly
In Memory of my Loving Husband, William F. Knightly Jr. Murdered by ILLEGAL Palliative Care at a Nashua, NH Hospital
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Pregnant Iowa Woman Arrested for Falling Down
Pregnant Iowa Woman Arrested for Falling Down
by Roxann MtJoy
Published February 12, 2010 @ 06:00AM PT
Life can't get much worse for Christine Taylor. Last month, after an upsetting phone conversation with her estranged husband, Ms. Taylor became light-headed and fell down a flight of stairs in her home. Paramedics rushed to the scene and ultimately declared her healthy. However, since she was pregnant with her third child at the time, Taylor thought it would be best to be seen at the local ER to make sure her fetus was unharmed.
That's when things got really bad and really crazy. Alone, distraught, and frightened, Taylor confided in the nurse treating her that she hadn't always been sure she'd wanted this baby, now that she was single and unemployed. She'd considered both adoption and abortion before ultimately deciding to keep the child. The nurse then summoned a doctor, who questioned her further about her thoughts on ending the pregnancy. Next thing Taylor knew, she was being arrested for attempted feticide. Apparently the nurse and doctor thought that Taylor threw herself down the stairs on purpose.
According to Iowa state law, attempted feticide is an trying "to intentionally terminate a human pregnancy, with the knowledge and voluntary consent of the pregnant person, after the end of the second trimester of the pregnancy." At least 37 states have similar laws. Taylor spent two days in jail before being released. That's right, a pregnant woman was jailed for admitting to thinking about an abortion at some point early in her pregnancy and then having the audacity to fall down some stairs a couple of months later. Please tell me you find this as horrifying as I do.
The District Attorney -- after three weeks of investigation -- eventually declined to prosecute Taylor. Before you get too happy, keep in mind that this decision was made, not because the arrest was travesty to begin with, but because it came to light that Taylor was late in her second trimester when she fell, not early in her third as the hospital staff had thought. I guess you are allowed to trip and fall in the first two-thirds of your pregnancy in Iowa, but do so in your last third and the long arm of the law will grab you by your swollen ankles.
Of all the horrible, shocking elements to this case, perhaps one of the worst is the breach of confidentiality on the part of the hospital staff. Christine Taylor came to them emotionally vulnerable in order to seek help for her unborn child. She thought she was in a safe place talking to professionals in whom she could confide. Oops, her bad. As Robert Rigg, professor at the Drake University Law School, said, "How in the heck did the police get a statement made by a patient to a medical person during the course of treatment?
Sadly, this is already the second time this year I've written about an innocent pregnant woman held against her will. What is wrong with people that they think that this is okay? Christine Taylor sure doesn't know. This ordeal has turned her life upside and made finding a job that much harder. I guess we've all learned a valuable lesson: when pregnant, you should always act ridiculously happy about it, regardless of circumstances. And, for heaven's sake, don't dare fall down.
http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/pregnant_iowa_woman_arrested_for_falling_down
by Roxann MtJoy
Published February 12, 2010 @ 06:00AM PT
Life can't get much worse for Christine Taylor. Last month, after an upsetting phone conversation with her estranged husband, Ms. Taylor became light-headed and fell down a flight of stairs in her home. Paramedics rushed to the scene and ultimately declared her healthy. However, since she was pregnant with her third child at the time, Taylor thought it would be best to be seen at the local ER to make sure her fetus was unharmed.
That's when things got really bad and really crazy. Alone, distraught, and frightened, Taylor confided in the nurse treating her that she hadn't always been sure she'd wanted this baby, now that she was single and unemployed. She'd considered both adoption and abortion before ultimately deciding to keep the child. The nurse then summoned a doctor, who questioned her further about her thoughts on ending the pregnancy. Next thing Taylor knew, she was being arrested for attempted feticide. Apparently the nurse and doctor thought that Taylor threw herself down the stairs on purpose.
According to Iowa state law, attempted feticide is an trying "to intentionally terminate a human pregnancy, with the knowledge and voluntary consent of the pregnant person, after the end of the second trimester of the pregnancy." At least 37 states have similar laws. Taylor spent two days in jail before being released. That's right, a pregnant woman was jailed for admitting to thinking about an abortion at some point early in her pregnancy and then having the audacity to fall down some stairs a couple of months later. Please tell me you find this as horrifying as I do.
The District Attorney -- after three weeks of investigation -- eventually declined to prosecute Taylor. Before you get too happy, keep in mind that this decision was made, not because the arrest was travesty to begin with, but because it came to light that Taylor was late in her second trimester when she fell, not early in her third as the hospital staff had thought. I guess you are allowed to trip and fall in the first two-thirds of your pregnancy in Iowa, but do so in your last third and the long arm of the law will grab you by your swollen ankles.
Of all the horrible, shocking elements to this case, perhaps one of the worst is the breach of confidentiality on the part of the hospital staff. Christine Taylor came to them emotionally vulnerable in order to seek help for her unborn child. She thought she was in a safe place talking to professionals in whom she could confide. Oops, her bad. As Robert Rigg, professor at the Drake University Law School, said, "How in the heck did the police get a statement made by a patient to a medical person during the course of treatment?
Sadly, this is already the second time this year I've written about an innocent pregnant woman held against her will. What is wrong with people that they think that this is okay? Christine Taylor sure doesn't know. This ordeal has turned her life upside and made finding a job that much harder. I guess we've all learned a valuable lesson: when pregnant, you should always act ridiculously happy about it, regardless of circumstances. And, for heaven's sake, don't dare fall down.
http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/pregnant_iowa_woman_arrested_for_falling_down
Will Foster Care Cuts Drive More Runaways to the Streets?
Will Foster Care Cuts Drive More Runaways to the Streets?
By Adam Hyla • on February 23, 2010
Gregoire’s proposed budget hits at two programs aimed at getting troubled kids to gain independence
Seventeen-year-old Mikhail Stewart has never ridden a horse. Or pushed a lawnmower. Driving a car? Forget it. But she recently got on a quad– a four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle. And of course she had a good time: the kind of time she hopes to have more of when she turns 18.
Then, free at last, “I can get my own place, sit back, have a cup of coffee,” she says.
Stewart’s got more reason than most teens to be excited. She’s a foster child. There’s neither a father nor a mother in charge, but only the state Children’s Administration. And it can be a little overbearing.
Children are always surveying the landscape of authority to see what they might claim for themselves. For children in foster care, whose foster parents are assigned by the state, rebellion against parental authority can also become a direct rebellion against perceived failures of the state as a care provider.
In Stewart and many other children’s experiences, the state doesn’t manage its foster care responsibilities very well. “Look, I don’t want to bag on the state,” she says, “but they’re just hiring people off the street.”
Among the 19 places she’s lived since she was 5, “I’ve been in extensively abusive homes.” She lived in places where caregivers met the state requirement that there be food — but where the fridge door was padlocked. Where the adults were drunk. Where she had bruises all over her legs. Where she suffered much worse.
Finally, the state said there were no more homes in which to put her. So what she’s getting now is a little bit of freedom.
Stewart lives with an in-home manager who is not a foster parent, but “more of a person who I turn to if I’m in trouble,” she says. “I’m staying with her while CYS (the Olympia-area nonprofit Community Youth Services) teaches me everything I need to know.”
The program “is my family. Not necessarily the home or the person, but the structure around it. I know I’m going to be OK so long as I do the right thing and I’m responsible.”
The 1999 Homeless, Youth Prevention/Protection and Engagement (HOPE) Act set up a shelter system runaway kids could voluntarily enter without the intervention of a social worker: a 30-day respite from the streets while a social worker comes up with some alternatives. The state law also created the Responsible Living Skills Program (RLSP), Stewart’s program, designed for adolescents who haven’t successfully bonded in a state-arranged home. It offers kids help in navigating their independence: tasks that wards of the state may never have been taught to do, like applying for work or school, buying groceries and cooking meals, or reading a bus schedule.
Though Stewart has never run away, many of the participants in her program’s 32-bed network have. At age 15 and up, their chances of being adopted are fading. And their 18th birthdays, when the Children’s Administration no longer holds a claim on them, are drawing near.
Children’s advocate Jim Theofelis says he wrote the HOPE Act in response to the processes he saw kids endure when he was a social worker. They would seek a bed late at night, and “I would say dumb things like ‘Meet me here tomorrow at 9 a.m.,’” he says. “Of course the next morning the kid’s not there.”
As director of the statewide child advocacy group The Mockingbird Society, Theofelis is wondering how the governor’s proposed cut to HOPE Act programs will work out — and how the state could still fulfill its legal obligation to discourage runaways.
The governor’s December budget proposal eliminated the shelter program from the General Fund, reducing its $972,000 budget by 33 percent, and reduced the $1.1 million Responsible Living Skills Program by $765,000, or 44 percent. The five non-profits contracted by the state to run the RLSP are at 80-100 percent of capacity. On average, 64 percent of the shelter beds are being utilized, according to the Children’s Administration.
Both the voluntary shelter and the life-readiness training program let troubled kids know that they can “reinvest in the hope for their own lives, believe in the system and the adult folks around them,” says Theofelis.
And if you enter the RLSP, you can stay until age 18: no more shuffling off to another foster home.
“If you come back to the table and participate in pro-social activities, you don’t have to look at moving elsewhere before you age out,” he continues.
“I fear we’re on the cusp of breaking that promise to those people.”
Stewart’s social worker, Bernadette Irish, says the life-skills program allows some “very sheltered kids” the chance to dispel the mythic nature of life after foster care. It’s a daunting world of great freedom and practical responsibilities. And if, after they’ve gotten a taste, the outside world feels a little overwhelming, they can sign up for optional state-funded services that last until age 21.
The bottom-line message that her program sends adolescents: “You don’t have to run.”
Of the four youths on Irish’s caseload, three are going to college this fall, and one is postponing it a year.
Stewart is spending two years at a local community college before she heads to the University of Washington. She will study anesthesiology and then, because anesthesiologists make good money, she wants to be a philanthropist. Right now, she feels a spiritual calling to speak for other foster children: those who did run, those who may have decided to drop out, get high, drunk or pregnant, and who could use some more help.
“They can get the same thing I expect, which is life,” she says. “All this is doing is ensuring that we have the same advantages that every other kid has.”
http://www.olympianews.org/2010/02/23/will-foster-care-cuts-drive-more-runaways-to-the-streets/
By Adam Hyla • on February 23, 2010
Gregoire’s proposed budget hits at two programs aimed at getting troubled kids to gain independence
Seventeen-year-old Mikhail Stewart has never ridden a horse. Or pushed a lawnmower. Driving a car? Forget it. But she recently got on a quad– a four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle. And of course she had a good time: the kind of time she hopes to have more of when she turns 18.
Then, free at last, “I can get my own place, sit back, have a cup of coffee,” she says.
Stewart’s got more reason than most teens to be excited. She’s a foster child. There’s neither a father nor a mother in charge, but only the state Children’s Administration. And it can be a little overbearing.
Children are always surveying the landscape of authority to see what they might claim for themselves. For children in foster care, whose foster parents are assigned by the state, rebellion against parental authority can also become a direct rebellion against perceived failures of the state as a care provider.
In Stewart and many other children’s experiences, the state doesn’t manage its foster care responsibilities very well. “Look, I don’t want to bag on the state,” she says, “but they’re just hiring people off the street.”
Among the 19 places she’s lived since she was 5, “I’ve been in extensively abusive homes.” She lived in places where caregivers met the state requirement that there be food — but where the fridge door was padlocked. Where the adults were drunk. Where she had bruises all over her legs. Where she suffered much worse.
Finally, the state said there were no more homes in which to put her. So what she’s getting now is a little bit of freedom.
Stewart lives with an in-home manager who is not a foster parent, but “more of a person who I turn to if I’m in trouble,” she says. “I’m staying with her while CYS (the Olympia-area nonprofit Community Youth Services) teaches me everything I need to know.”
The program “is my family. Not necessarily the home or the person, but the structure around it. I know I’m going to be OK so long as I do the right thing and I’m responsible.”
The 1999 Homeless, Youth Prevention/Protection and Engagement (HOPE) Act set up a shelter system runaway kids could voluntarily enter without the intervention of a social worker: a 30-day respite from the streets while a social worker comes up with some alternatives. The state law also created the Responsible Living Skills Program (RLSP), Stewart’s program, designed for adolescents who haven’t successfully bonded in a state-arranged home. It offers kids help in navigating their independence: tasks that wards of the state may never have been taught to do, like applying for work or school, buying groceries and cooking meals, or reading a bus schedule.
Though Stewart has never run away, many of the participants in her program’s 32-bed network have. At age 15 and up, their chances of being adopted are fading. And their 18th birthdays, when the Children’s Administration no longer holds a claim on them, are drawing near.
Children’s advocate Jim Theofelis says he wrote the HOPE Act in response to the processes he saw kids endure when he was a social worker. They would seek a bed late at night, and “I would say dumb things like ‘Meet me here tomorrow at 9 a.m.,’” he says. “Of course the next morning the kid’s not there.”
As director of the statewide child advocacy group The Mockingbird Society, Theofelis is wondering how the governor’s proposed cut to HOPE Act programs will work out — and how the state could still fulfill its legal obligation to discourage runaways.
The governor’s December budget proposal eliminated the shelter program from the General Fund, reducing its $972,000 budget by 33 percent, and reduced the $1.1 million Responsible Living Skills Program by $765,000, or 44 percent. The five non-profits contracted by the state to run the RLSP are at 80-100 percent of capacity. On average, 64 percent of the shelter beds are being utilized, according to the Children’s Administration.
Both the voluntary shelter and the life-readiness training program let troubled kids know that they can “reinvest in the hope for their own lives, believe in the system and the adult folks around them,” says Theofelis.
And if you enter the RLSP, you can stay until age 18: no more shuffling off to another foster home.
“If you come back to the table and participate in pro-social activities, you don’t have to look at moving elsewhere before you age out,” he continues.
“I fear we’re on the cusp of breaking that promise to those people.”
Stewart’s social worker, Bernadette Irish, says the life-skills program allows some “very sheltered kids” the chance to dispel the mythic nature of life after foster care. It’s a daunting world of great freedom and practical responsibilities. And if, after they’ve gotten a taste, the outside world feels a little overwhelming, they can sign up for optional state-funded services that last until age 21.
The bottom-line message that her program sends adolescents: “You don’t have to run.”
Of the four youths on Irish’s caseload, three are going to college this fall, and one is postponing it a year.
Stewart is spending two years at a local community college before she heads to the University of Washington. She will study anesthesiology and then, because anesthesiologists make good money, she wants to be a philanthropist. Right now, she feels a spiritual calling to speak for other foster children: those who did run, those who may have decided to drop out, get high, drunk or pregnant, and who could use some more help.
“They can get the same thing I expect, which is life,” she says. “All this is doing is ensuring that we have the same advantages that every other kid has.”
http://www.olympianews.org/2010/02/23/will-foster-care-cuts-drive-more-runaways-to-the-streets/
Foster Father Accused Of Sex Assault
Foster Father Accused Of Sex Assault
62-Year-Old Free On Bail
POSTED: 11:47 am PST February 23, 2010
Nev. -- A 62-year-old Pahrump man was charged with sexual assault and lewdness after he was accused of molesting a child in his care.
John Bivens is a licensed foster care parent. Police did not provide any details of his alleged crimes or victim. All of the children in his care have been taken from his home and placed elsewhere.
Bivens posted bail and is awaiting his next court appearance.
http://www.fox5vegas.com/news/22647188/detail.html
62-Year-Old Free On Bail
POSTED: 11:47 am PST February 23, 2010
Nev. -- A 62-year-old Pahrump man was charged with sexual assault and lewdness after he was accused of molesting a child in his care.
John Bivens is a licensed foster care parent. Police did not provide any details of his alleged crimes or victim. All of the children in his care have been taken from his home and placed elsewhere.
Bivens posted bail and is awaiting his next court appearance.
http://www.fox5vegas.com/news/22647188/detail.html
Psych meds and children—what parents need to know
Psych meds and children—what parents need to know
Thrive Childrens Hospital Boston's Health and Science Blog
by Claire McCarthy, MD on February 23, 2010
We’ve all heard the stories in the news about Rebecca Riley, the 4-year-old who died in 2006 of an overdose of psychiatric medication. She made her first trip to a psychiatrist when she was two, because she was active and had trouble sleeping. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was only three–her ten-year-old brother and four-year-old sister had already been diagnosed with the same—and put on three different medications. By the time she died, she was taking more than ten pills a day. She got sick, and her mother, who was recently convicted in her death, gave her extra pills to make her sleep. Rebecca never woke up.
It’s easy to dismiss Rebecca’s case as an extreme, an outlier. But a paper published in the September 2007 edition of the Archives of General Psychiatry noted that there has been a 40-fold increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in youth over the past decade, with widespread prescribing of medications for bipolar disorder that are not FDA-approved for children. The National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) is studying children and adolescents diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and has found that in many cases, the diagnosis is overused or misused (in response, the American Psychiatric Association has developed a new diagnosis, temper dysregulation disorder, that it hopes will be used instead). This is very troubling.
Data from the National Center for Health Statistics shows that in 2005-2006 (the most recent data available), 5 percent of American children ages 4-17 were prescribed psychiatric medication. That’s an awful lot of kids. The vast majority—89 percent–were treated for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD; over the past decade, the prescribing of ADHD medication to children under 18 has more than doubled. Here’s another startling statistic: in that same decade, the prescribing of antidepressants to children under 18 has quadrupled.
As scary as all this sounds, it’s important to remember that for many children, psychiatric medications can make a tremendous difference. I have seen it in my practice. For children with ADHD, medication can be the difference between doing well in school and failing, the difference between making friends and having no friends at all. For children with depression or anxiety, medication can change how they see the world. And for children who truly do have bipolar disorder and other serious psychiatric illnesses, medication can be a lifeline for them and their families.
The key is to be sure that psychiatric medications are used sparingly, carefully and responsibly in children. Here are some suggestions to make sure that happens:
• All children should have a thorough, careful evaluation before prescribing medications. Not all active or aggressive children have ADHD, let alone bipolar disorder, for example, and one quick visit with a doctor or the results of a questionnaire filled out by a teacher isn’t enough to sort things out. I get asked frequently by elementary school teachers to medicate children with behavioral problems; people seem to look to medication as a quick fix. But to really help kids, we need to really understand them. The choice of who should do the evaluation (pediatrician, psychiatrist, other mental health provider, neurologist) depends on the diagnosis that is being considered—but whoever does it should be licensed, reputable and have experience working with children. If you are considering medication for your child, talk to your doctor about the best way to proceed.
• Parents need to be aware of all the possible side effects. As with any medication, psychiatric medications can have side effects—and some can be serious. For example, in some children, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI’s, may make them feel like killing themselves. While this is rare, and these medications are generally safe and effective, it’s important for parents to be monitoring their children closely. Parents should be fully educated on all the possible risks of medications, and told exactly what to do if they occur.
• Medication combined with therapy gives the best chance at success. Studies show that for most children, cognitive and/or behavioral therapy along with medication works better than either one alone. Therapy also allows for closer, more detailed monitoring—and can give support to family members coping with the fallout of mental illness.
• Children on medication should see their prescriber regularly. How often will depend on the medication and how long the child has been taking it. These visits are crucial, to monitor for side effects and for effectiveness. Parents should be wary of a practitioner who routinely gives refills without seeing their child.
• If a child isn’t getting better, or multiple medications are being prescribed, a second opinion may be a good idea. Sometimes it helps to have someone take a fresh look.
Psychiatric medications can be safe, and can improve a child’s life—but only when used wisely. For more information on medications used to treat mental health problems, visit the website of the National Institute of Mental Health.
http://childrenshospitalblog.org/psych-meds-and-children%E2%80%94what-parents-need-to-know/
Thrive Childrens Hospital Boston's Health and Science Blog
by Claire McCarthy, MD on February 23, 2010
We’ve all heard the stories in the news about Rebecca Riley, the 4-year-old who died in 2006 of an overdose of psychiatric medication. She made her first trip to a psychiatrist when she was two, because she was active and had trouble sleeping. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was only three–her ten-year-old brother and four-year-old sister had already been diagnosed with the same—and put on three different medications. By the time she died, she was taking more than ten pills a day. She got sick, and her mother, who was recently convicted in her death, gave her extra pills to make her sleep. Rebecca never woke up.
It’s easy to dismiss Rebecca’s case as an extreme, an outlier. But a paper published in the September 2007 edition of the Archives of General Psychiatry noted that there has been a 40-fold increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in youth over the past decade, with widespread prescribing of medications for bipolar disorder that are not FDA-approved for children. The National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) is studying children and adolescents diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and has found that in many cases, the diagnosis is overused or misused (in response, the American Psychiatric Association has developed a new diagnosis, temper dysregulation disorder, that it hopes will be used instead). This is very troubling.
Data from the National Center for Health Statistics shows that in 2005-2006 (the most recent data available), 5 percent of American children ages 4-17 were prescribed psychiatric medication. That’s an awful lot of kids. The vast majority—89 percent–were treated for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD; over the past decade, the prescribing of ADHD medication to children under 18 has more than doubled. Here’s another startling statistic: in that same decade, the prescribing of antidepressants to children under 18 has quadrupled.
As scary as all this sounds, it’s important to remember that for many children, psychiatric medications can make a tremendous difference. I have seen it in my practice. For children with ADHD, medication can be the difference between doing well in school and failing, the difference between making friends and having no friends at all. For children with depression or anxiety, medication can change how they see the world. And for children who truly do have bipolar disorder and other serious psychiatric illnesses, medication can be a lifeline for them and their families.
The key is to be sure that psychiatric medications are used sparingly, carefully and responsibly in children. Here are some suggestions to make sure that happens:
• All children should have a thorough, careful evaluation before prescribing medications. Not all active or aggressive children have ADHD, let alone bipolar disorder, for example, and one quick visit with a doctor or the results of a questionnaire filled out by a teacher isn’t enough to sort things out. I get asked frequently by elementary school teachers to medicate children with behavioral problems; people seem to look to medication as a quick fix. But to really help kids, we need to really understand them. The choice of who should do the evaluation (pediatrician, psychiatrist, other mental health provider, neurologist) depends on the diagnosis that is being considered—but whoever does it should be licensed, reputable and have experience working with children. If you are considering medication for your child, talk to your doctor about the best way to proceed.
• Parents need to be aware of all the possible side effects. As with any medication, psychiatric medications can have side effects—and some can be serious. For example, in some children, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI’s, may make them feel like killing themselves. While this is rare, and these medications are generally safe and effective, it’s important for parents to be monitoring their children closely. Parents should be fully educated on all the possible risks of medications, and told exactly what to do if they occur.
• Medication combined with therapy gives the best chance at success. Studies show that for most children, cognitive and/or behavioral therapy along with medication works better than either one alone. Therapy also allows for closer, more detailed monitoring—and can give support to family members coping with the fallout of mental illness.
• Children on medication should see their prescriber regularly. How often will depend on the medication and how long the child has been taking it. These visits are crucial, to monitor for side effects and for effectiveness. Parents should be wary of a practitioner who routinely gives refills without seeing their child.
• If a child isn’t getting better, or multiple medications are being prescribed, a second opinion may be a good idea. Sometimes it helps to have someone take a fresh look.
Psychiatric medications can be safe, and can improve a child’s life—but only when used wisely. For more information on medications used to treat mental health problems, visit the website of the National Institute of Mental Health.
http://childrenshospitalblog.org/psych-meds-and-children%E2%80%94what-parents-need-to-know/
Ban Preponderance of Evidence as a Judicial Standard
Please go to the web-site at the bottom of this article and sign.
The Obama Administration has welcomed ideas for change to be voted for on-line, in the Criminal Justice section there is the sugestion to eliminate preponderance of evidence as a judicial standard, that people may have equal protection under the law. To reform the American Judical system toward eliminating quasi-judicial administrative hearings that are held as services yielding the sword of government power, without the constitutional protections normally afforded in criminal prosecution, this link:
[http://www.change.org/ideas/view/ban_preponderance_of_evidence_as_a_judicial_standar
d] is aimed at stopping the child-snatching industry that is bankrupting our Social Security system at a rate of $300Billion a year with 98% false claims of child protection services by the states. To stand up for families and demand that our courts require evidence supporting allegations before adjudication, please forward this post to as many people as possible. We need more than 2000 votes before this Thursday to be considered among the top three most popular ideas.
[http://www.change.org/ideas/view/ban_preponderance_of_evidence_as_a_judicial_standar
The Obama Administration has welcomed ideas for change to be voted for on-line, in the Criminal Justice section there is the sugestion to eliminate preponderance of evidence as a judicial standard, that people may have equal protection under the law. To reform the American Judical system toward eliminating quasi-judicial administrative hearings that are held as services yielding the sword of government power, without the constitutional protections normally afforded in criminal prosecution, this link:
[http://www.change.org/ideas/view/ban_preponderance_of_evidence_as_a_judicial_standar
d] is aimed at stopping the child-snatching industry that is bankrupting our Social Security system at a rate of $300Billion a year with 98% false claims of child protection services by the states. To stand up for families and demand that our courts require evidence supporting allegations before adjudication, please forward this post to as many people as possible. We need more than 2000 votes before this Thursday to be considered among the top three most popular ideas.
[http://www.change.org/ideas/view/ban_preponderance_of_evidence_as_a_judicial_standar
Monday, February 22, 2010
CPS/DCYF From the Inside
How sad is this story from someone who is on the inside
City Limits MAGAZINE
Date: December 2000
TAKING LIBERTIES
She thought she was hired to protect children. But instead, a city child abuse investigator discovered that betraying her clients was part of her job description. Tales from a year inside the Administration for Children's Services. > By Akka Gordon
Emergency Children's Services is an inconspicuous, dingy building at the southern edge of Soho. About 30 to 40 kids come here each night, after they are taken away from their parents and while they're waiting for a foster home to take them in. When they get here, they cry, fight or sit silently on a stained couch, eyes glazed over. As an investigator for the New York City Administration for Children's Services, I spent many nights here.
When children first arrive at ECS they are taken through a metal detector by security. Some carry garbage bags containing their clothes; others tightly clutch just the one item they brought from home. Each is accompanied by an ACS child protective caseworker, who is given a number and waits to be called to check the kids in. On a busy night, of which there are many, this can take hours.
In the waiting room, some tattered old books and the odd toy lie about. A green banner hangs year round saying, "Seasons Greetings From Pre-Placement" and does little to conceal the cracking paint. The children hungrily eye a vending machine in the corner and beg their caseworkers for candy. And the caseworkers say, No way.
Some of these kids, who range from newborn babies to 17-year-olds, have been rescued from seriously abusive or neglectful parents. Others are here for reasons that are ambiguous, unjustified, even arbitrary. But they all come to the same dim room on Laight Street. And because the city's Administration for Children's Services has identified them as children in danger, this is the first of many unfamiliar places they'll be seeing as they journey through the city's foster care system.
Like me, the other caseworkers here are exhausted. Most of them are on the phone or stare up at the television hung from the wall. It is not part of the job to comfort the children just plucked from their homes. They are irritated and want to get home.
When I first started coming to ECS, I tried to reach out to all the children who were crying or sitting alone, shocked and terrified. It was easier with the little ones, because I could hug them and they would immediately respond. But the older ones were different. I asked them, "Do you know why you are here?" Chances were that they had only a vague idea; ACS investigators often do not tell the children they are removing exactly what is going on. Most of the time the kids shrugged and said, "I don't know." Or they knew pieces, like, "Because mommy didn't clean the house." Often it was, "Because mommy got arrested."
The more I ended up at ECS, the harder it became to comfort these children. When you had no idea where a child was going to end up that night, it was impossible to assure them of anything. When a child asks, "Am I going to get split up from my little brother?" you can't say no. Although all efforts are supposed to be made to place siblings together, there are countless exceptions. Instead you have to say, "Let's hope not, okay?"
One night I was at ECS with a 3-year-old named Christopher, whom I had picked up from a precinct in East Harlem. His mother was arrested that day on drug charges. He had been living in a crack house, according to the police who took him, and his arms and legs were caked with dirt. All he had with him was a pacifier and a scarf. I pulled the pacifier out of his mouth and asked him, "Are you going to talk to me?" He looked at me and said, "Fuck off." Other than this, he didn't speak.
In the waiting room he pulled a chair out from under a girl his age as she went to sit down. After she fell, crying, he jumped up and down, pointing and laughing at her. I tried to engage him, to keep Christopher from terrorizing the other children. Then another caseworker came in. He lifted him by one arm and shouted in his face, "Listen, you brat. You better sit down and SHUT UP." He tossed Christopher onto the couch and he bounced, landing on his head. The caseworker warned, "Don't even think about moving. I'm watching you." Christopher did not move or even cry. He looked at me for help.
The caseworker explained to me defensively, "That's the only way these kids listen. That's how they are treated at home, so that's the only way to get through to them." And I wondered, silently: If we aren't treating these children any better than they were treated in their homes, then what are we doing?
To the manager at ACS who makes the fateful decision to remove a child, and to the judge who approves it, a child exists on a piece of paper, alongside a list of disturbing circumstances. They don't see a child having a panic attack at 3 a.m. because he is suddenly alone in the world. Or slamming his head against a wall out of protest and desperation. The good intentions that go into the decision to remove a child often have little to do with the sometimes brutal outcomes of that choice. And the problem is not simply caseworkers who do not know how to talk to children. The whole system does not treat children with dignity and respect.
Usually, the kids fell asleep in my lap during the car rides to their new foster homes. But Christopher stayed awake all the way to his new home in Staten Island, until 3 a.m. He stared out the car window and watched Manhattan recede in the distance. He seemed to know exactly what was happening, like an adult trapped in a little body that couldn't speak. But when I finally had to leave him, he did what any 3-year-old would do in the face of abandonment. He clung for his life to my leg.
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When I graduated from college two years ago, I decided to become a caseworker for ACS. I wanted to learn how child welfare policy affects children and their families--not from reports and data, but on the front lines.
It may seem hard to imagine now, but in many ways I loved my job and had no plans to do anything else. As a caseworker, I was in a unique position to advocate for children and parents when they most needed help. Many of the parents and children I encountered made deep impressions on me, and I established close connections with some of them. I also enjoyed the investigative aspect of the job, the thrill of constantly going into unknown situations. At first, I saw it as a daily adventure.
But it did not take long for me to see that there was no adventure here. Many of these families were harassed, their rights systematically violated by ACS. Their children were being swallowed up by an agency that too often operated on virtually unchecked authority, wielded arbitrarily. And I represented that agency.
More and more, I felt that I could not do the job I believed I needed to do with an ACS badge around my neck. I resigned from the agency in October 1999, after working there for just over a year. After all that I had experienced, I felt, like many of my clients, crippled by feelings of powerlessness. At the time, the only thing I could do was write it all down.
In the year I worked there, the Administration for Children's Services investigated more than 50,000 reports of child abuse and neglect. I handled about 50 of them in my job as a child protective caseworker in the Manhattan field office. I went all over the city investigating cases--to housing projects, family shelters and, once, to an apartment where a father had made a robot for his kids out of old Metrocards. But except for the time I visited a family on the Upper West Side--who hired their own doctors to disprove ACS's allegations of child abuse--my work took me to low-income neighborhoods. The reality is that families who are likely to be reported to ACS are poor.
When I first started the job, my supervisor explained to me that bad caseworkers sympathize with the parents. "Being sentimental," he said, "is the worst way to be." If you relate to the parent, the wisdom goes, you cannot conduct an objective investigation.
The entire investigation process relies on the assumption that parents do not know their rights, starting with the moment they allow caseworkers to come into their homes. A lot of these families are so conditioned to caseworkers knocking on their doors that the presence of a city worker in their homes is just another part of life. Nearly half a million New York City children have been the subjects of ACS investigations. If you are poor and if you have had problems with the law, if you have ever been involved in a domestic violence dispute, if you took your child to the emergency room after an accident, if you have ever used drugs, if your children have problems in school, if you have ever been homeless, ACS has been a part of your life.
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Child protective specialists get about two to three new cases each week, sent to them by their supervisors. Those supervisors have their own supervisors, called managers. It's managers who sign off on the big decisions: whether a case is worth pursuing and, most critically, when to put children into foster care.
For a caseworker, each case represents a heavy set of tasks and responsibilities. First, unless the call was anonymous, she must contact the source of the report. Many calls come from professionals required by law to report suspected abuse or neglect, such as teachers, guidance counselors and hospital social workers. Other people call in reports, too, especially neighbors and family members. But many of these reports turn out to be false, and some of them are made purely for revenge.
Within 24 hours of a report, the caseworker has to visit the family at home. Caseworkers must interview each child and examine them all for marks and bruises. They must also interview every other member of the household, check every room for safety, check refrigerators and cabinets for food. Immunization records, birth certificates and proof of income must be verified. Next, caseworkers contact the children's schools and doctors. And in cases that involve drug allegations, the caseworker must accompany the parent to a drug test.
At any point during the investigation, a manager can order children to be removed from their homes if it is determined that their lives are at risk. But under state law and ACS policy, removals are supposed to be a last resort. As an alternative, the agency offers a menu of services to help families deal with problems; counseling, parenting classes, drug treatment and housekeeping services are the most typical.
These investigations and interventions save children's lives and protect their well-being all the time. Caseworkers are trained to look beneath the surface, to not trust a parent's statement without evidence and to compile as much information about a family as possible. Caseworkers and their supervisors are accountable for each case; the days when cases piled up on desks without anyone contacting a family are long over.
But accountability, at ACS, is a one-way street. A manager or supervisor has no one to answer to if a child who shouldn't be in foster care is removed from home anyway. There is no penalty for the wrongful taking of a child. And the pressures to remove are intense. I was trained to do removals in cases that did not necessarily qualify as abuse or neglect because, as one of my supervisors reminded me, "prevention is better than a cure." When I was resistant to doing a removal on a case, that same supervisor's advice was, "It's better to be safe than sorry." And at moments of uncertainty, the mantra was "Cover your ass"--a phrase heard often around the office. It was backed up by a pervasive fear--among caseworkers, supervisors, managers and attorneys--of seeing our photograph in the Daily News as the person who made an error that was literally fatal.
Caseworkers, usually the only people who have had direct contact with a family, don't have much to say in the decision-making process. Managers generally think of them as being incapable of giving meaningful recommendations. One week after the investigation begins, caseworkers have to file an electronic report. The computer offers two options: "safe" and "unsafe." But my manager accepted only one. Any time I determined a child to be "safe," my manager rejected it and returned it to me. The first step to protect yourself, I quickly discovered, is to determine that a child is "unsafe" from the outset of an investigation.
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In my division, if the allegations were bad enough--and especially if they came from a teacher, doctor, or other professional required by law to report suspected abuse or neglect--our manager considered them to be absolute truth. Virtually every time, if a caseworker could not find evidence to prove that the allegations were unfounded, the manager would refuse to sign off on a case, clearing it from our ever-growing caseloads, until we marked it "indicated" in the computer system. Indicated means that ACS has found credible evidence that abuse or neglect has taken place.
Our manager indicated a case in which an 18-year-old mother was mistakenly picked up in a drug sweep and immediately released. The same woman had been indicated in an earlier investigation, after hot tea spilled on her child at a family shelter, even though the social worker whose tea it was witnessed that it was an accident. Still, the manager decided that this previous incident--along with a robbery conviction and marijuana use before the child was born--was reason enough to indicate the new case.
Throughout ACS, the proportion of cases that end up labeled indicated has jumped from 26 percent in 1994 to nearly 40 percent in 1998. From a manager's point of view, indicating cases gives them the legal leverage they need to order a removal at any given time. For a parent, it also means something else: Having an indicated case on her record means that she cannot adopt a child, become a foster parent or work with children in any capacity.
From there, the decision to remove is entirely up to the manager. By law, children are supposed to be removed only if their physical or emotional health has been harmed or they are in immediate danger or being hurt as a result of a parent's failure to "exercise a minimum degree of care." In practice, that can mean anything from a parent failing to show up for parenting classes to sending her child to the hospital with a broken limb. But sometimes children are removed for reasons the caseworkers themselves cannot fathom.
On the night I met a client I'll call Louise at the homeless shelter where she lived, she told me her 11-day-old son, Kevin, was born without drugs in his body. That she prayed to God and he gave her another chance. And that she got clean on her own, without any program. I asked her about her other children and she told me what I already knew: She had given birth to five children who were all taken away from her while she was still in the hospital because each time she tested positive for crack.
Back at the office, my manager ordered me to remove Kevin. My manager, like most of her colleagues, did not go for the "life transformation" stuff. It did not matter that all of Louise's drug tests had been clean for the past two years. The manager called it a straight case of neglect, since the woman's other children had all been taken from her. Besides, my manager reminded me, Louise is taking heavy psychotropic medication.
Before going to court, we received a letter written by Louise's psychiatrist, whom she had seen regularly for the past year. He wrote:
I remember thinking in her case no medication and certainly no therapy had been able to have the effect on her that her new child has had on her....The effect of the role of motherhood on her has defined her and given her grounding. It is our social and moral responsibility to support [Louise] in functioning as a mother. It is clear that [Louise] is ill. However, it is my assessment, in accord with all other senior clinicians [here], that [Louise] poses no immediate threat to her child.
My manager didn't see things the same way, and she made me file the case in court. "If we can't get a neglect finding on this mother, I might as well go work for the Parks Department," she told me. When ACS's attorneys initially wouldn't accept the case, she emailed the head of the legal division. And while I was away at a three-day training, she finally managed to get Kevin into foster care. Louise had stayed overnight with Kevin's father that week after she missed curfew at her shelter, and my manager had found an old order of protection against him--evidence of domestic violence. Louise was nailed with "failure to protect" Kevin from this potentially dangerous man.
(Only later did Louise tell me that she did not really have a history of domestic violence; she made it up a few years ago since she knew it was the only way she could qualify for emergency housing. I explained to her that it was the only reason ACS was able to take Kevin. "Well, what would you have done?" she asked me.)
In Family Court, Louise spoke up for herself, because her attorney did not. She argued her case herself and, with the help of testimony from her psychiatric nurse, won the judge over. Louise got Kevin back on the condition that she secure housing, submit to drug tests, continue to see her psychiatrist and comply with ACS supervision.
The ability to return a child to his or her parent is one of the few rewards of a caseworker's job. After picking up Kevin from his foster care agency in Queens, I sat with him in the Emergency Assistance Unit, the city's dispatch center for homeless families, waiting for his mother to arrive. The waiting room was filled with mothers and crying kids. A little girl came in the waiting area and asked the lady behind the counter for a piece of paper. "No paper," was the curt reply. I told the girl to come over to where I was sitting. My hands were full because I was feeding Kevin, but I told her that she could rip some pages out of my notebook. She stood there and tore out about 30 pages, one at a time. Every few moments she looked up at me waiting for me to say no. I just smiled at her. "That your baby?" she asked me.
"No," I told her.
"You homeless?"
I shook my head.
"You took that baby, didn't you?" she asked.
"I'm giving him back."
"Yeah, you better," she warned.
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In my year at ACS, I was lucky to see only a few children who were severely abused and neglected. I did see bruises, belt marks and burns on kids. I saw dirty and hungry children. I saw a baby with cockroaches crawling in her crib. There were kids who had never been to school.
I had to ask a kindergartner if her father put his penis in her mouth. I sat in the back of an ambulance with a 9-year-old boy lying on a stretcher who had been beaten up by his mother with a baseball bat. He clutched his HIP card, his only possession now, in his swollen hand. I had a 3-year-old child whose mother forced him to stay awake for four days and three nights because she thought he was possessed by a ghost and would die if he fell asleep.
And I met some parents who were dangerous not just to their children, but to me. I had to get an order of protection for myself against one, and was warned by another that I was going to be killed by the Bloods outside Family Court.
But all this is what I expected from the job. In a strange way, these really horrible cases turned out to be the easy ones. It was the cases that weren't so clear-cut that kept me up at night. I saw removals occur when parents were accused of failing to follow up with a preventive service program or counseling. Breaking rules at shelters. Using or selling marijuana, or not sending their children to school. Failure-to-protect cases were common. One time, I removed a child from a mother accused of neglecting her infant son when she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt. It turned out the child was not yet even born when the suicide attempt occurred.
I worried about what I would do if my manager ordered me to remove. I worried about making mistakes myself.
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Two nights before Christmas 1998, I removed two children who I still believe should not have been taken from their home. I had been a caseworker at ACS for two months.
At the last minute, my supervisor instructed me to accompany an even greener coworker on a case I knew nothing about. On the way up the FDR, in the back of the city car, my colleague, Theresa, described the case to me. The children were to be removed because their 82-year-old great-grandmother, Ms. Ruth Jackson, was too old to care for them. Owen, 5, and Carla, 14, were in Ms. Jackson's legal custody, because their mother and grandmother were both absent, allegedly because of drug use.
According to the allegations from an after-school program she attended, Carla had recently slashed a girl in the face with a pocketknife at school and was beyond the great-grandmother's control. Theresa told me Ms. Jackson had medical problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes and glaucoma. Due to her "failing health," our supervisor believed that she was not an appropriate caretaker for the children.
The supervisor instructed Theresa to ask the great-grandmother to sign a form that would voluntarily place the children in ACS's custody. Theresa told me that she was instructed to call the police and remove the children only if the woman refused to sign the form. Our supervisor had informed Theresa that a refusal to sign would constitute neglect, because Ms. Jackson would not be complying with the best interests of the children.
"I don't believe that this is the right thing," Theresa complained to me. "The great-grandmother hasn't done anything wrong, and her health seems fine." I was furious at her for not telling me any of this before we left. I knew the options a family could be offered in a time of stress. A removal was to be done only in an emergency.
When we arrived, Ms. Jackson looked at us suspiciously and seemed reluctant to let us in. Decorated for Christmas, the apartment smelled like greasy chicken. It was 9 at night.
She instructed the children to go to their rooms. She sat on the sagging couch and asked, "What can I do for you ladies tonight?" She looked a little frail but seemed strong-willed.
I sat in the corner by the Christmas tree while Theresa tried to explain about the voluntary form. "You are old and you have so many health problems," she told Ms. Jackson unconvincingly. "Who will take care of the children if something should happen to you?"
Ms. Jackson said, "Ain't nothing happening to me. What if something happens to you?"
Theresa tried again. "It's not safe for the children to be living with you because you are too old to care for them properly and look after them." She looked at the floor as she said this, her voice shaking.
"What're you saying, miss? These children are not going anywhere. Nobody in this house is too old. I raised them kids since they were babies. The court gave me these children and nobody's going to take them away from me."
"My supervisor said that..."
"What?"
"My supervisor"
"Your what?"
"My supervisor. He wants you to sign this voluntary form so that the children will be safe." She placed the blank form on the coffee table.
"I don't know much about your supervisor, but nobody's signing these kids to them foster people. It's Christmas. Did you know that, dear?"
After about 15 minutes of this, Theresa signaled me to call the police. Out in the hallway I called 911, then went back into the apartment to wait for the cops.
Ms. Jackson had no idea they were coming. "Who would want to take these children?" she asked us. "It's Christmas. These children are happy. I take these children to school every day. I make sure they have everything they need to get along fine."
The cops banged on the door. "Who's that?" asked Ms. Jackson. "That your supervisor?"
I answered the door. Two cops stood around and did not say much. Theresa started crying, and everything fell into my hands. I explained to Ms. Jackson that the children were coming with us tonight and that she would have to come to court tomorrow to get them back. I had packed kids up quickly once before, so I braced myself to do it again.
The kids were watching The Brady Bunch, lying with their feet up on their great-grandmother's bed. I introduced myself and told Carla to pack up some clothes for herself and her brother. She looked at me as if the prospect of leaving might be exciting for a second. Owen wanted to know if "grandma" was coming. I told him no, and said some things about how everything was going to be okay. Ms. Jackson came in and put clean underwear on Owen, put his pajamas back on, and packed some clothes in a backpack for him.
As we continued to pack, Ms. Jackson stood in the bedroom doorway with her mouth half-open, no sound coming out. Carla ran down the stairs and waited for us in front of the police car.
In the back of the car on our way to ECS, Owen saw his big sister crying. He sat on my lap and started crying into my shirt.
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Almost all removals take place at night. Caseworkers are too busy during the day, and a family is also more likely to be home after dark. But some workers deliberately wait till after hours, for the time-and-a-half overtime. Doing a removal, staying out all night at ECS, and then taking the child to a foster home can mean more than doubling a day's pay. With caseworkers' salaries starting at under $32,000, overtime makes a big difference.
The caseworkers who want nothing to do with removals can rely on other caseworkers who volunteer for the money. When supervisors are desperate to find someone to do a removal, they often encourage caseworkers by reminding them, "You could use the extra cash." The consequence is caseworkers arriving at ECS with no idea why they just removed the kids who are with them. When the ECS intake worker or an ACS lawyer asks them why the children were removed, "I don't know, it's not my case" is a standard response. Or simply, "Because my supervisor told me to."
Any caseworker can tell you that they have done removals that they did not personally agree with. But they rarely complain to management, since they will never get in trouble for removing a child under supervisors' orders. Caseworkers are also quiet about unnecessary removals because doing a removal and then transferring a case to foster care takes them a lot less time than keeping it and trying to work with a family. Keeping a case obligates a worker to do regular home visits and follow-ups to make sure a family is getting preventive services. It also means dealing with anything that may go wrong and continuing to be responsible for the children's safety.
To become a child protective caseworker, you do not need to have any experience working with children, or demonstrate that you actually want to work with children. No one even asks if you like children. You must simply have a bachelor's degree in a social science field and pass a two-part exam. For the oral part we were asked to think of five questions we would ask a parent, based on a short case scenario. A "powerful rotting odor" is supposed to prompt test-takers to ask, "What is that smell?" For the written test, we listened to a series of voice mail recordings and wrote down phone numbers and other details. This was not a test of common sense, or even listening skills. It seemed to be a test to see if we were alive.
Once hired, caseworkers have six weeks of training, where they are taught how to conduct interviews, identify abuse and neglect, and carry out a removal. Legal issues, child development, domestic violence, sensitivity to cultural issues and handling angry clients were also part of the curriculum. Through it all, caseworkers are taught, it is essential to treat clients respectfully and professionally.
But the social work lingo of the training, where we spent two days discussing the need to "leave your baggage at the door," is far removed from the harsh reality of a field office. For new caseworkers, the obsessive concern with liability at the field offices quickly overshadows the reasonable criteria they have been taught for identifying abuse and neglect. Most quickly learn to abandon their training and to do what it takes to survive.
ACS has been making strides cutting down heavy caseloads, but it's still a stressful and at times tedious job--each case, no matter how trivial, calls for the same 15-page report. A contradiction at the heart of it all makes the work even more difficult. Caseworkers are trained to be service providers and advocates for families. To work together with families to uncover and solve problems in the home, caseworkers must establish an intimate rapport with their clients. Yet at the very same time they are engaged in an act of betrayal: as they write down parents' statements and survey their homes and behavior, caseworkers are building a potential court case against them. At no point are they able to tell their clients that everything they say can be used against them in court. The relationship of caseworker and client becomes one of manipulation, characterized by a deep lack of trust on both sides.
Although many of the best caseworkers get fed up and leave the agency, there are good workers who have been at ACS for years. They have survived because they have learned how to manipulate the system to make it work for themselves and their clients. They purposely omit or obscure facts about families in their case records and in their discussions with their supervisors to save clients from unnecessary court action. The most fortunate have supervisors who share their commitment to respecting families' rights. I was one of them: One of my supervisors was a mentor to me, and I considered her directives highly valuable.
Several months before I left the agency, an Emergency Children's Services supervisor who was resigning after more than 10 years blanketed the agency with a stunning email. He began by saying that he is not leaving the agency any better than when he started. He blamed this lack of improvement on ACS Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, whom he accused of being more preoccupied with making the agency look good in the media than with making substantial changes that help clients. "ACS cares more about statistics than they do about children, forgetting that those statistics represent real children," he wrote. The supervisor had equally harsh words for protective caseworkers: "ACS workers cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for doing wrong removals by blaming them on their supervisors or managers or on agency policy." He compared the level of obedience and complacency at the agency to Nazi soldiers who killed 11 million civilians during World War II because "they too were just carrying out orders." Nobody around me talked about the email, not even to disagree.
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Carla and Owen were placed in foster care that night. The next day, Theresa went to court. The judge, who happened to be in his seventies himself, ordered that Owen be returned home immediately. The judge stated the obvious: Old age is not grounds for neglect. Carla, however, was to remain in foster care because of her behavior problems. When the judge asked Theresa if she felt the children were in imminent danger, she answered that in her opinion they were not.
City Limits MAGAZINE
Date: December 2000
TAKING LIBERTIES
She thought she was hired to protect children. But instead, a city child abuse investigator discovered that betraying her clients was part of her job description. Tales from a year inside the Administration for Children's Services. > By Akka Gordon
Emergency Children's Services is an inconspicuous, dingy building at the southern edge of Soho. About 30 to 40 kids come here each night, after they are taken away from their parents and while they're waiting for a foster home to take them in. When they get here, they cry, fight or sit silently on a stained couch, eyes glazed over. As an investigator for the New York City Administration for Children's Services, I spent many nights here.
When children first arrive at ECS they are taken through a metal detector by security. Some carry garbage bags containing their clothes; others tightly clutch just the one item they brought from home. Each is accompanied by an ACS child protective caseworker, who is given a number and waits to be called to check the kids in. On a busy night, of which there are many, this can take hours.
In the waiting room, some tattered old books and the odd toy lie about. A green banner hangs year round saying, "Seasons Greetings From Pre-Placement" and does little to conceal the cracking paint. The children hungrily eye a vending machine in the corner and beg their caseworkers for candy. And the caseworkers say, No way.
Some of these kids, who range from newborn babies to 17-year-olds, have been rescued from seriously abusive or neglectful parents. Others are here for reasons that are ambiguous, unjustified, even arbitrary. But they all come to the same dim room on Laight Street. And because the city's Administration for Children's Services has identified them as children in danger, this is the first of many unfamiliar places they'll be seeing as they journey through the city's foster care system.
Like me, the other caseworkers here are exhausted. Most of them are on the phone or stare up at the television hung from the wall. It is not part of the job to comfort the children just plucked from their homes. They are irritated and want to get home.
When I first started coming to ECS, I tried to reach out to all the children who were crying or sitting alone, shocked and terrified. It was easier with the little ones, because I could hug them and they would immediately respond. But the older ones were different. I asked them, "Do you know why you are here?" Chances were that they had only a vague idea; ACS investigators often do not tell the children they are removing exactly what is going on. Most of the time the kids shrugged and said, "I don't know." Or they knew pieces, like, "Because mommy didn't clean the house." Often it was, "Because mommy got arrested."
The more I ended up at ECS, the harder it became to comfort these children. When you had no idea where a child was going to end up that night, it was impossible to assure them of anything. When a child asks, "Am I going to get split up from my little brother?" you can't say no. Although all efforts are supposed to be made to place siblings together, there are countless exceptions. Instead you have to say, "Let's hope not, okay?"
One night I was at ECS with a 3-year-old named Christopher, whom I had picked up from a precinct in East Harlem. His mother was arrested that day on drug charges. He had been living in a crack house, according to the police who took him, and his arms and legs were caked with dirt. All he had with him was a pacifier and a scarf. I pulled the pacifier out of his mouth and asked him, "Are you going to talk to me?" He looked at me and said, "Fuck off." Other than this, he didn't speak.
In the waiting room he pulled a chair out from under a girl his age as she went to sit down. After she fell, crying, he jumped up and down, pointing and laughing at her. I tried to engage him, to keep Christopher from terrorizing the other children. Then another caseworker came in. He lifted him by one arm and shouted in his face, "Listen, you brat. You better sit down and SHUT UP." He tossed Christopher onto the couch and he bounced, landing on his head. The caseworker warned, "Don't even think about moving. I'm watching you." Christopher did not move or even cry. He looked at me for help.
The caseworker explained to me defensively, "That's the only way these kids listen. That's how they are treated at home, so that's the only way to get through to them." And I wondered, silently: If we aren't treating these children any better than they were treated in their homes, then what are we doing?
To the manager at ACS who makes the fateful decision to remove a child, and to the judge who approves it, a child exists on a piece of paper, alongside a list of disturbing circumstances. They don't see a child having a panic attack at 3 a.m. because he is suddenly alone in the world. Or slamming his head against a wall out of protest and desperation. The good intentions that go into the decision to remove a child often have little to do with the sometimes brutal outcomes of that choice. And the problem is not simply caseworkers who do not know how to talk to children. The whole system does not treat children with dignity and respect.
Usually, the kids fell asleep in my lap during the car rides to their new foster homes. But Christopher stayed awake all the way to his new home in Staten Island, until 3 a.m. He stared out the car window and watched Manhattan recede in the distance. He seemed to know exactly what was happening, like an adult trapped in a little body that couldn't speak. But when I finally had to leave him, he did what any 3-year-old would do in the face of abandonment. He clung for his life to my leg.
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When I graduated from college two years ago, I decided to become a caseworker for ACS. I wanted to learn how child welfare policy affects children and their families--not from reports and data, but on the front lines.
It may seem hard to imagine now, but in many ways I loved my job and had no plans to do anything else. As a caseworker, I was in a unique position to advocate for children and parents when they most needed help. Many of the parents and children I encountered made deep impressions on me, and I established close connections with some of them. I also enjoyed the investigative aspect of the job, the thrill of constantly going into unknown situations. At first, I saw it as a daily adventure.
But it did not take long for me to see that there was no adventure here. Many of these families were harassed, their rights systematically violated by ACS. Their children were being swallowed up by an agency that too often operated on virtually unchecked authority, wielded arbitrarily. And I represented that agency.
More and more, I felt that I could not do the job I believed I needed to do with an ACS badge around my neck. I resigned from the agency in October 1999, after working there for just over a year. After all that I had experienced, I felt, like many of my clients, crippled by feelings of powerlessness. At the time, the only thing I could do was write it all down.
In the year I worked there, the Administration for Children's Services investigated more than 50,000 reports of child abuse and neglect. I handled about 50 of them in my job as a child protective caseworker in the Manhattan field office. I went all over the city investigating cases--to housing projects, family shelters and, once, to an apartment where a father had made a robot for his kids out of old Metrocards. But except for the time I visited a family on the Upper West Side--who hired their own doctors to disprove ACS's allegations of child abuse--my work took me to low-income neighborhoods. The reality is that families who are likely to be reported to ACS are poor.
When I first started the job, my supervisor explained to me that bad caseworkers sympathize with the parents. "Being sentimental," he said, "is the worst way to be." If you relate to the parent, the wisdom goes, you cannot conduct an objective investigation.
The entire investigation process relies on the assumption that parents do not know their rights, starting with the moment they allow caseworkers to come into their homes. A lot of these families are so conditioned to caseworkers knocking on their doors that the presence of a city worker in their homes is just another part of life. Nearly half a million New York City children have been the subjects of ACS investigations. If you are poor and if you have had problems with the law, if you have ever been involved in a domestic violence dispute, if you took your child to the emergency room after an accident, if you have ever used drugs, if your children have problems in school, if you have ever been homeless, ACS has been a part of your life.
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Child protective specialists get about two to three new cases each week, sent to them by their supervisors. Those supervisors have their own supervisors, called managers. It's managers who sign off on the big decisions: whether a case is worth pursuing and, most critically, when to put children into foster care.
For a caseworker, each case represents a heavy set of tasks and responsibilities. First, unless the call was anonymous, she must contact the source of the report. Many calls come from professionals required by law to report suspected abuse or neglect, such as teachers, guidance counselors and hospital social workers. Other people call in reports, too, especially neighbors and family members. But many of these reports turn out to be false, and some of them are made purely for revenge.
Within 24 hours of a report, the caseworker has to visit the family at home. Caseworkers must interview each child and examine them all for marks and bruises. They must also interview every other member of the household, check every room for safety, check refrigerators and cabinets for food. Immunization records, birth certificates and proof of income must be verified. Next, caseworkers contact the children's schools and doctors. And in cases that involve drug allegations, the caseworker must accompany the parent to a drug test.
At any point during the investigation, a manager can order children to be removed from their homes if it is determined that their lives are at risk. But under state law and ACS policy, removals are supposed to be a last resort. As an alternative, the agency offers a menu of services to help families deal with problems; counseling, parenting classes, drug treatment and housekeeping services are the most typical.
These investigations and interventions save children's lives and protect their well-being all the time. Caseworkers are trained to look beneath the surface, to not trust a parent's statement without evidence and to compile as much information about a family as possible. Caseworkers and their supervisors are accountable for each case; the days when cases piled up on desks without anyone contacting a family are long over.
But accountability, at ACS, is a one-way street. A manager or supervisor has no one to answer to if a child who shouldn't be in foster care is removed from home anyway. There is no penalty for the wrongful taking of a child. And the pressures to remove are intense. I was trained to do removals in cases that did not necessarily qualify as abuse or neglect because, as one of my supervisors reminded me, "prevention is better than a cure." When I was resistant to doing a removal on a case, that same supervisor's advice was, "It's better to be safe than sorry." And at moments of uncertainty, the mantra was "Cover your ass"--a phrase heard often around the office. It was backed up by a pervasive fear--among caseworkers, supervisors, managers and attorneys--of seeing our photograph in the Daily News as the person who made an error that was literally fatal.
Caseworkers, usually the only people who have had direct contact with a family, don't have much to say in the decision-making process. Managers generally think of them as being incapable of giving meaningful recommendations. One week after the investigation begins, caseworkers have to file an electronic report. The computer offers two options: "safe" and "unsafe." But my manager accepted only one. Any time I determined a child to be "safe," my manager rejected it and returned it to me. The first step to protect yourself, I quickly discovered, is to determine that a child is "unsafe" from the outset of an investigation.
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In my division, if the allegations were bad enough--and especially if they came from a teacher, doctor, or other professional required by law to report suspected abuse or neglect--our manager considered them to be absolute truth. Virtually every time, if a caseworker could not find evidence to prove that the allegations were unfounded, the manager would refuse to sign off on a case, clearing it from our ever-growing caseloads, until we marked it "indicated" in the computer system. Indicated means that ACS has found credible evidence that abuse or neglect has taken place.
Our manager indicated a case in which an 18-year-old mother was mistakenly picked up in a drug sweep and immediately released. The same woman had been indicated in an earlier investigation, after hot tea spilled on her child at a family shelter, even though the social worker whose tea it was witnessed that it was an accident. Still, the manager decided that this previous incident--along with a robbery conviction and marijuana use before the child was born--was reason enough to indicate the new case.
Throughout ACS, the proportion of cases that end up labeled indicated has jumped from 26 percent in 1994 to nearly 40 percent in 1998. From a manager's point of view, indicating cases gives them the legal leverage they need to order a removal at any given time. For a parent, it also means something else: Having an indicated case on her record means that she cannot adopt a child, become a foster parent or work with children in any capacity.
From there, the decision to remove is entirely up to the manager. By law, children are supposed to be removed only if their physical or emotional health has been harmed or they are in immediate danger or being hurt as a result of a parent's failure to "exercise a minimum degree of care." In practice, that can mean anything from a parent failing to show up for parenting classes to sending her child to the hospital with a broken limb. But sometimes children are removed for reasons the caseworkers themselves cannot fathom.
On the night I met a client I'll call Louise at the homeless shelter where she lived, she told me her 11-day-old son, Kevin, was born without drugs in his body. That she prayed to God and he gave her another chance. And that she got clean on her own, without any program. I asked her about her other children and she told me what I already knew: She had given birth to five children who were all taken away from her while she was still in the hospital because each time she tested positive for crack.
Back at the office, my manager ordered me to remove Kevin. My manager, like most of her colleagues, did not go for the "life transformation" stuff. It did not matter that all of Louise's drug tests had been clean for the past two years. The manager called it a straight case of neglect, since the woman's other children had all been taken from her. Besides, my manager reminded me, Louise is taking heavy psychotropic medication.
Before going to court, we received a letter written by Louise's psychiatrist, whom she had seen regularly for the past year. He wrote:
I remember thinking in her case no medication and certainly no therapy had been able to have the effect on her that her new child has had on her....The effect of the role of motherhood on her has defined her and given her grounding. It is our social and moral responsibility to support [Louise] in functioning as a mother. It is clear that [Louise] is ill. However, it is my assessment, in accord with all other senior clinicians [here], that [Louise] poses no immediate threat to her child.
My manager didn't see things the same way, and she made me file the case in court. "If we can't get a neglect finding on this mother, I might as well go work for the Parks Department," she told me. When ACS's attorneys initially wouldn't accept the case, she emailed the head of the legal division. And while I was away at a three-day training, she finally managed to get Kevin into foster care. Louise had stayed overnight with Kevin's father that week after she missed curfew at her shelter, and my manager had found an old order of protection against him--evidence of domestic violence. Louise was nailed with "failure to protect" Kevin from this potentially dangerous man.
(Only later did Louise tell me that she did not really have a history of domestic violence; she made it up a few years ago since she knew it was the only way she could qualify for emergency housing. I explained to her that it was the only reason ACS was able to take Kevin. "Well, what would you have done?" she asked me.)
In Family Court, Louise spoke up for herself, because her attorney did not. She argued her case herself and, with the help of testimony from her psychiatric nurse, won the judge over. Louise got Kevin back on the condition that she secure housing, submit to drug tests, continue to see her psychiatrist and comply with ACS supervision.
The ability to return a child to his or her parent is one of the few rewards of a caseworker's job. After picking up Kevin from his foster care agency in Queens, I sat with him in the Emergency Assistance Unit, the city's dispatch center for homeless families, waiting for his mother to arrive. The waiting room was filled with mothers and crying kids. A little girl came in the waiting area and asked the lady behind the counter for a piece of paper. "No paper," was the curt reply. I told the girl to come over to where I was sitting. My hands were full because I was feeding Kevin, but I told her that she could rip some pages out of my notebook. She stood there and tore out about 30 pages, one at a time. Every few moments she looked up at me waiting for me to say no. I just smiled at her. "That your baby?" she asked me.
"No," I told her.
"You homeless?"
I shook my head.
"You took that baby, didn't you?" she asked.
"I'm giving him back."
"Yeah, you better," she warned.
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In my year at ACS, I was lucky to see only a few children who were severely abused and neglected. I did see bruises, belt marks and burns on kids. I saw dirty and hungry children. I saw a baby with cockroaches crawling in her crib. There were kids who had never been to school.
I had to ask a kindergartner if her father put his penis in her mouth. I sat in the back of an ambulance with a 9-year-old boy lying on a stretcher who had been beaten up by his mother with a baseball bat. He clutched his HIP card, his only possession now, in his swollen hand. I had a 3-year-old child whose mother forced him to stay awake for four days and three nights because she thought he was possessed by a ghost and would die if he fell asleep.
And I met some parents who were dangerous not just to their children, but to me. I had to get an order of protection for myself against one, and was warned by another that I was going to be killed by the Bloods outside Family Court.
But all this is what I expected from the job. In a strange way, these really horrible cases turned out to be the easy ones. It was the cases that weren't so clear-cut that kept me up at night. I saw removals occur when parents were accused of failing to follow up with a preventive service program or counseling. Breaking rules at shelters. Using or selling marijuana, or not sending their children to school. Failure-to-protect cases were common. One time, I removed a child from a mother accused of neglecting her infant son when she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt. It turned out the child was not yet even born when the suicide attempt occurred.
I worried about what I would do if my manager ordered me to remove. I worried about making mistakes myself.
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Two nights before Christmas 1998, I removed two children who I still believe should not have been taken from their home. I had been a caseworker at ACS for two months.
At the last minute, my supervisor instructed me to accompany an even greener coworker on a case I knew nothing about. On the way up the FDR, in the back of the city car, my colleague, Theresa, described the case to me. The children were to be removed because their 82-year-old great-grandmother, Ms. Ruth Jackson, was too old to care for them. Owen, 5, and Carla, 14, were in Ms. Jackson's legal custody, because their mother and grandmother were both absent, allegedly because of drug use.
According to the allegations from an after-school program she attended, Carla had recently slashed a girl in the face with a pocketknife at school and was beyond the great-grandmother's control. Theresa told me Ms. Jackson had medical problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes and glaucoma. Due to her "failing health," our supervisor believed that she was not an appropriate caretaker for the children.
The supervisor instructed Theresa to ask the great-grandmother to sign a form that would voluntarily place the children in ACS's custody. Theresa told me that she was instructed to call the police and remove the children only if the woman refused to sign the form. Our supervisor had informed Theresa that a refusal to sign would constitute neglect, because Ms. Jackson would not be complying with the best interests of the children.
"I don't believe that this is the right thing," Theresa complained to me. "The great-grandmother hasn't done anything wrong, and her health seems fine." I was furious at her for not telling me any of this before we left. I knew the options a family could be offered in a time of stress. A removal was to be done only in an emergency.
When we arrived, Ms. Jackson looked at us suspiciously and seemed reluctant to let us in. Decorated for Christmas, the apartment smelled like greasy chicken. It was 9 at night.
She instructed the children to go to their rooms. She sat on the sagging couch and asked, "What can I do for you ladies tonight?" She looked a little frail but seemed strong-willed.
I sat in the corner by the Christmas tree while Theresa tried to explain about the voluntary form. "You are old and you have so many health problems," she told Ms. Jackson unconvincingly. "Who will take care of the children if something should happen to you?"
Ms. Jackson said, "Ain't nothing happening to me. What if something happens to you?"
Theresa tried again. "It's not safe for the children to be living with you because you are too old to care for them properly and look after them." She looked at the floor as she said this, her voice shaking.
"What're you saying, miss? These children are not going anywhere. Nobody in this house is too old. I raised them kids since they were babies. The court gave me these children and nobody's going to take them away from me."
"My supervisor said that..."
"What?"
"My supervisor"
"Your what?"
"My supervisor. He wants you to sign this voluntary form so that the children will be safe." She placed the blank form on the coffee table.
"I don't know much about your supervisor, but nobody's signing these kids to them foster people. It's Christmas. Did you know that, dear?"
After about 15 minutes of this, Theresa signaled me to call the police. Out in the hallway I called 911, then went back into the apartment to wait for the cops.
Ms. Jackson had no idea they were coming. "Who would want to take these children?" she asked us. "It's Christmas. These children are happy. I take these children to school every day. I make sure they have everything they need to get along fine."
The cops banged on the door. "Who's that?" asked Ms. Jackson. "That your supervisor?"
I answered the door. Two cops stood around and did not say much. Theresa started crying, and everything fell into my hands. I explained to Ms. Jackson that the children were coming with us tonight and that she would have to come to court tomorrow to get them back. I had packed kids up quickly once before, so I braced myself to do it again.
The kids were watching The Brady Bunch, lying with their feet up on their great-grandmother's bed. I introduced myself and told Carla to pack up some clothes for herself and her brother. She looked at me as if the prospect of leaving might be exciting for a second. Owen wanted to know if "grandma" was coming. I told him no, and said some things about how everything was going to be okay. Ms. Jackson came in and put clean underwear on Owen, put his pajamas back on, and packed some clothes in a backpack for him.
As we continued to pack, Ms. Jackson stood in the bedroom doorway with her mouth half-open, no sound coming out. Carla ran down the stairs and waited for us in front of the police car.
In the back of the car on our way to ECS, Owen saw his big sister crying. He sat on my lap and started crying into my shirt.
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Almost all removals take place at night. Caseworkers are too busy during the day, and a family is also more likely to be home after dark. But some workers deliberately wait till after hours, for the time-and-a-half overtime. Doing a removal, staying out all night at ECS, and then taking the child to a foster home can mean more than doubling a day's pay. With caseworkers' salaries starting at under $32,000, overtime makes a big difference.
The caseworkers who want nothing to do with removals can rely on other caseworkers who volunteer for the money. When supervisors are desperate to find someone to do a removal, they often encourage caseworkers by reminding them, "You could use the extra cash." The consequence is caseworkers arriving at ECS with no idea why they just removed the kids who are with them. When the ECS intake worker or an ACS lawyer asks them why the children were removed, "I don't know, it's not my case" is a standard response. Or simply, "Because my supervisor told me to."
Any caseworker can tell you that they have done removals that they did not personally agree with. But they rarely complain to management, since they will never get in trouble for removing a child under supervisors' orders. Caseworkers are also quiet about unnecessary removals because doing a removal and then transferring a case to foster care takes them a lot less time than keeping it and trying to work with a family. Keeping a case obligates a worker to do regular home visits and follow-ups to make sure a family is getting preventive services. It also means dealing with anything that may go wrong and continuing to be responsible for the children's safety.
To become a child protective caseworker, you do not need to have any experience working with children, or demonstrate that you actually want to work with children. No one even asks if you like children. You must simply have a bachelor's degree in a social science field and pass a two-part exam. For the oral part we were asked to think of five questions we would ask a parent, based on a short case scenario. A "powerful rotting odor" is supposed to prompt test-takers to ask, "What is that smell?" For the written test, we listened to a series of voice mail recordings and wrote down phone numbers and other details. This was not a test of common sense, or even listening skills. It seemed to be a test to see if we were alive.
Once hired, caseworkers have six weeks of training, where they are taught how to conduct interviews, identify abuse and neglect, and carry out a removal. Legal issues, child development, domestic violence, sensitivity to cultural issues and handling angry clients were also part of the curriculum. Through it all, caseworkers are taught, it is essential to treat clients respectfully and professionally.
But the social work lingo of the training, where we spent two days discussing the need to "leave your baggage at the door," is far removed from the harsh reality of a field office. For new caseworkers, the obsessive concern with liability at the field offices quickly overshadows the reasonable criteria they have been taught for identifying abuse and neglect. Most quickly learn to abandon their training and to do what it takes to survive.
ACS has been making strides cutting down heavy caseloads, but it's still a stressful and at times tedious job--each case, no matter how trivial, calls for the same 15-page report. A contradiction at the heart of it all makes the work even more difficult. Caseworkers are trained to be service providers and advocates for families. To work together with families to uncover and solve problems in the home, caseworkers must establish an intimate rapport with their clients. Yet at the very same time they are engaged in an act of betrayal: as they write down parents' statements and survey their homes and behavior, caseworkers are building a potential court case against them. At no point are they able to tell their clients that everything they say can be used against them in court. The relationship of caseworker and client becomes one of manipulation, characterized by a deep lack of trust on both sides.
Although many of the best caseworkers get fed up and leave the agency, there are good workers who have been at ACS for years. They have survived because they have learned how to manipulate the system to make it work for themselves and their clients. They purposely omit or obscure facts about families in their case records and in their discussions with their supervisors to save clients from unnecessary court action. The most fortunate have supervisors who share their commitment to respecting families' rights. I was one of them: One of my supervisors was a mentor to me, and I considered her directives highly valuable.
Several months before I left the agency, an Emergency Children's Services supervisor who was resigning after more than 10 years blanketed the agency with a stunning email. He began by saying that he is not leaving the agency any better than when he started. He blamed this lack of improvement on ACS Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, whom he accused of being more preoccupied with making the agency look good in the media than with making substantial changes that help clients. "ACS cares more about statistics than they do about children, forgetting that those statistics represent real children," he wrote. The supervisor had equally harsh words for protective caseworkers: "ACS workers cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for doing wrong removals by blaming them on their supervisors or managers or on agency policy." He compared the level of obedience and complacency at the agency to Nazi soldiers who killed 11 million civilians during World War II because "they too were just carrying out orders." Nobody around me talked about the email, not even to disagree.
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Carla and Owen were placed in foster care that night. The next day, Theresa went to court. The judge, who happened to be in his seventies himself, ordered that Owen be returned home immediately. The judge stated the obvious: Old age is not grounds for neglect. Carla, however, was to remain in foster care because of her behavior problems. When the judge asked Theresa if she felt the children were in imminent danger, she answered that in her opinion they were not.
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