People occasionally ask whether or not I changed after having kids. The biggest way that I’ve changed is that I can’t stomach horror tales of child abuse. It actually makes me ill.
The big news around here is a mentally unstable woman on Long Island stabbed and drowned her three kids. One of the kids’ fathers called child protective services three days earlier to say that he thought that the woman was going to hurt the kids. Child protective services made some half hearted phone calls and then dropped the ball.
We hear this story over and over. Overworked caseworkers let things slide and a kid ends up dead. An effective child protective agency would seem to be something that everybody, regardless of political ideology, wants. Even the most doctrinaire of libertarians is in favor of government oversight of children’s welfare. Why do these screw ups keep happening?
Apt. 11d 
Because Republicans won’t support necessary taxes for essential social services.
LikeLike
Even the most doctrinaire of libertarians is in favor of government oversight of children’s welfare.
Um, no they are not. They resent government involvement in the family, even if it is to police things like whipping and worse.
And liberals aren’t exactly big supporters of CPS either; they are so prone to stories about abuse of power.
I see the problem more in terms of Type I and Type II errors. And most adults seem far more worried about CPS removing a child who should not be removed than they are about leaving a child in an unsafe home. I gave an APSA paper a while back called “The Strange Politics of Child Abuse.” More on that in the future.
LikeLike
Is the paper online, RC?
LikeLike
The children’s fathers seemed very well informed about the kids and on the ball. The father of the two younger kids appealed for help, saying she was going to harm the children, and it sounded like both were trying to get custody. The articles don’t talk about the fathers bona fides, but I wonder if part of the problem was an unwarranted (in this case) benefit of the doubt for mothers. I’d also note that according to the first (?) article, Brewer was doing pretty well while living with her kids at her grandmother’s house, until her grandmother asked her to leave. That move to independent living is described as “the beginning of a downward spiral.”
Children’s protective services do have to walk the line between underinterfering and overinterfering. It is dangerous to take children out of their families of origin–there have been many, many cases of children abused or killed while in protective custody.
LikeLike
I agree with Laura that part of the problem is with understaffed, overburdened social service agencies. I remember reading about the Rilya Wilson case – Rilya was a little girl in Florida who just disappeared and Florida’s CPS didn’t have any record of her. With overburdened agencies, kids fall through cracks.
There is also a reluctance to remove children from their families. While some hard-core reactionaries probably still believe that children are the property of their parents, to be treated as the parents see fit, more reasonable people will point to past instances where children were removed from families because the family was the “wrong” race, class, or sexual orientation. And, of course, foster care often isn’t much better for the kids than their homes were.
IMO the real solution (and challenge!) is to work with parents to prevent them from abusing their kids in the first place. Mentally ill parents may be impossible to reach, but a more common type of abuser – young, poor, and overburdened, prioritizing her relationship with some man over the welfare of her children – can be worked with and her or his parenting skills improved.
LikeLike
Is the paper online? Sorry, it’s not. But the ideas will be part of my book-in-progress and/or some of the many things that will come after it. 🙂
LikeLike
I was literally 2 miles away.
I don’t think she was an abuser (though I guess I don’t know). I think she sounds like someone who was mentally ill. Was Susan Smith an abuser? Was Andrea Yates an abuser? Obviously they are all murderers, but did they abuse the children beforehand?
I wonder what her psychiatric history was and if she had gotten real psychiatric help. Her mother was obviously mentally ill, and there is a strong genetic component to mental illness.
Sometimes I think the problem is that we still don’t really know enough about mental illness and how to deal with it.
LikeLike
Well, “the problem” in cases like Andrea Yates is some form of mental illness.
But there are also all kinds of cases with known abusers and a state that’s afraid to take the children away. Read the infamous DeShaney v. Winnebego County, which went to the US Supreme Court. A social worker in that case predicted that the boy would end up dead. He did. And nobody is even liable.
It’s often much easier for the state to leave a kid in harm’s way than it is to try to take him or her out.
LikeLike
Correction: he ended up severely brain damaged. As the famous dissent begins: Poor Joshua!
LikeLike
In a recent Texas case, a foster father severely shook a crying 2-year-old, causing her to lose both her sight and the ability to walk. She and her infant sister had been previously been removed from a “neglectful” home.
So, if children are to be removed from neglectful homes, there has to be some safe place to send them.
LikeLike
The key statistic to remember about child welfare is that 40 percent of those kids whose case is investigated and abuse or neglect is *substantiated* never get any further service. Not foster care, not a social worker following up with the family. Nothing.
And the way the federal funding is set up, there’s lots of money for foster care (if the family of origin is sufficiently poor) but relatively little for prevention services.
See http://www.clasp.org/publications/changes_cw_law.pdf
for a summary of the changes that are needed.
And being a CPS investigator is probably up there among the worst jobs in the world. I was a CASA, and I was overwhelmed by the needs of the one family I was dealing with. CPS workers have 40 or more cases at a time.
LikeLike
Actually, the key thing to keep in mind is that all states are different. Very different. Often different in how they count and even more often different in what they provide. The idea that federal statutes induce foster care is a myth. Why is the percentage of children in foster care dropping, then? And look at how varied the percentage of children in foster care is by state, and how generally low it is in most states:
Click to access Data011807a.pdf
LikeLike
Isn’t it possible in some cases for family members to receive payments for foster care?
LikeLike
Family members can get paid to provide foster care, but they need to become licensed foster care homes to do so, and not all are willing/able to do so. Some states provide special payments to kin caregivers that are less than the regular foster care payment, but don’t require as high a level of supervision. Relatives can also get child-only TANF payments for the kids, but that’s a much lower monthly payment.
I think the biggest reason that foster care caseloads are down so much is that about 5 years ago there was a policy decision made that it was unacceptable to allow kids to linger in foster care for years. So now, after a year, if a parent hasn’t gotten their act together enough to get the kids back, states pretty much always move to terminate parental rights and free the kids up for adoption.
But, RC is right that there’s a huge level of variation among states, and Amy’s right that there’s a shortage of good foster care homes.
Here in the DC area, one of the problems is that most of the available spots are in the distant suburbs, which makes it hard for kids to stay in touch with their communities. Plus, even if there’s a willing relative, they often live in a different jurisdiction, which means you need to go through the interstate compact on placement of children, which can take a year or more to approve even a clearly good placement.
LikeLike
re: the politics of funding CPS. Is there is a difference between regular libertarians and elite libertarians about government intervention for child abuse? Milton Friedman and other intellectual libertarians always make an exception for government supervision of children’s welfare. If the funding of CPS was more visible, obvious, and separate from other funds, would people be more willing to put their tax dollars into it? Have any states experimented with finding private dollars to support this program?
Elizabeth, that jurisdiction red tape would drive me insane if I was a social worker in DC. I’m not sure how I could hold myself back from abducting all those poor kids and taking them home with me.
LikeLike
There’s also this thing called a guardian ad litem that one of the more well-informed folks might want to talk about. (One of my aunties served as one after a longish career as a parole officer for juvenile delinquents.)
LikeLike
CASA (court appointed special advocate) and guardian ad litem are essentially the same things, under different names. In some places, only an attorney can be a GAL. In either case, they’re volunteers who are assigned to a single case and make recommendations to the court about what’s in the best interest of the child. It adds a layer of oversight, and can provide more continuity and personal attention than the case workers can spare.
LikeLike