Judge calls latest horror “a cockfight … between foster kids”
A story in the Miami Herald this week begins this way:
A Miami group home for foster children is under fire after a video circulated on social media showing two 11-year-old boys in a violent brawl — egged on by the facility’s adult supervisor as other kids cheered.
“I saw a cockfight … between foster kids,” Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman said in court last week, describing the video as showing the employee “provoking and encouraging violence” while “these two boys battled it out and beat each other up."
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| A wrecking crew does to the former headquarters of the Miami Herald what the Herald did to journalistic standards in its child welfare coverage. Photo by Phillip Pessar http://bit.ly/1J0P3bl |
From time to time on this blog I have highlighted the
failings of news organizations whose work has falsely scapegoated family
preservation for child deaths. That has
led to foster-care panics, sharp sudden spikes in the number of children
removed from their homes.
That does terrible harm to the children needlessly taken, of
course, but it also overloads the child welfare system. That means caseworkers have less time to
investigate any case properly. As a
result, even as more children are forced to endure needless foster care other
children, in real danger, are overlooked.
That’s why foster-care panics make all children less safe.
There have been many such journalistic failures over the
years. But one is in a class by itself –
at least so far in this century. Yes, it's the Miami Herald.
The Herald has been crusading against efforts to keep
families together for at least five years.
The apotheosis of the campaign was a series published in March 2014
called Innocents Lost. The stories
blamed family preservation for child deaths.
The Herald’s journalistic
failures have been so egregious that NCCPR created an entire website to
respond, including a comprehensive rebuttal to Innocents Lost.
The results were great for the Herald – it won a bunch of awards, and spawned at least one imitator in another state. The newspaper got to claim credit for the usual changes in law to “crack down on child abuse” that follow this kind of reporting.
Now, nearly two years after Innocents Lost was published, the results are in for the children. Those results are not so great,
Florida has a long tumultuous history in child welfare – just as one would expect from Florida. But for several years before the Herald started on its crusade, the state
actually was making impressive progress.
The number of children taken from their parents was reduced and a
series of independent evaluations found that child safety improved.
The Herald
destroyed all that.
- Thousands of children who otherwise would have remained in their homes have been consigned to foster care.
- This was supposed to reduce child deaths. In fact, such deaths, including deaths of children “known to the system” have increased.
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| Innocents Lost did about as much good for the children of Florida as the war in Iraq did for the Iraqis. That's why every time the series won an award, I thought of this image. |
In short, as we noted on our Florida blog, Innocents Lost did about as much good for the
children of Florida as the war in Iraq did for the Iraqis. That's why
every time the series won an award, I thought of George W. Bush in front of his
“Mission Accomplished” banner.
And then, this week, we got that example of the human toll
behind the figures:
One of the things that happens when you have a foster-care
panic is that the agency taking the children runs out of places to put them.
The “shortage” of placements forces the state to rely more
on the worst form of “care” group homes and institutions, and to turn a blind
eye when those institutions become abusive.
With that in mind, let's look again at what the
Herald reported this week:
A Miami group home for foster children is under fire after a video circulated on social media showing two 11-year-old boys in a violent brawl — egged on by the facility’s adult supervisor as other kids cheered.
“I saw a cockfight … between foster kids,” Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman said in court last week, describing the video as showing the employee “provoking and encouraging violence” while “these two boys battled it out and beat each other up. …
“She encouraged the kids to fight. She said, go ahead and fight, just don’t use weapons. Let’s have a fight. She circled everybody around. Got the kids all riled up.”
The home was one of many run by the Children’s Home Society
of Florida, (CHS) a venerable, and powerful player in the Florida system. Children’s Home was contracted to run the
group home by Our Kids, the private “lead agency” responsible for foster care
in Miami.
According to the Herald
story (written by David Ovalle, not Carol Marbin Miller, the lead writer for
Innocents Lost) the fight wasn’t the end of the trauma for one of the children,
identified in court records as J.W.
After the staffer [who organized the fight] summoned police, officers committed J.W. against his will to a hospital for days for psychiatric evaluation under the state’s Baker Act. Hanzman said the staffer clearly “lied to” officers about what happened.
“This kid is going to be labeled as having a mental illness his whole life. Probably won’t be able to get a job,” he said. “All because you have a stupid, inept case worker at your facility that encourages 11-year-olds to engage in brutal violence and stands around watching and cheering.”
But others told the court the problem goes well beyond one
staffer. Again from the story:
There is reason “to believe that the incident in the case is not isolated, and that all of the children in the care of CHS are potentially in danger of similar abuse,” Eugene Zenobi, head of the publicly funded Regional Counsel office, wrote in a motion filed to the court Friday.
Group homes and institutions are particularly damaging for
younger children. In fact, the federal government rates state child welfare
systems in part on their ability to reduce the number of children under
age 12 in institutions. Which raises the
question: What were those 11-year-olds doing in a group home in the first
place?
One likely answer: With so many more children entering care
and trapped in care for a longer time because of the foster-care panic caused
by the Herald, the state Department
of Children and Families and the “lead agencies” are begging for beds. Beggars can’t be choosers.
Our Kids has a disturbing record when it comes to
institutionalizing children. The proportion of children under Our Kids
jurisdiction in group homes and institutions is 35 percent above the state
average, and it’s increased by nearly 30 percent since April of 2010.
Another part of the problem is that so many in Florida,
including the judge in this case, have bought into the false narrative created
by the Herald in Innocents Lost. So the judge declares:
“What is really sad is these kids are abused, abandoned and neglected. And then they get taken from their parents. They come in expecting refuge,” the judge said. “And what they are subjected to is more abuse and neglect at the hands of ineptitude, and agencies who throw them in these group homes with incompetent people who stand around watching them have cockfights.”
He got the second part right. But while some of the children taken from
their parents are “abused abandoned and neglected,” others are not. And the proportion who are not is likely to
rise during a foster-care panic, when caseworkers rush to take away more
children to avoid being on the front page, or the home page, of the Herald.
By now some readers, especially in Florida, may be
wondering: Are you really going to blame every new horror in Florida foster
care on the Herald?
Actually, yes – in part.
Since at least March 2014, when Innocents Lost was
published, the Herald has, in effect,
dictated child welfare policy in Florida.
That’s partly the fault of the Florida Legislature, the governor and
DCF, which have allowed the Herald to
tell them how to run child welfare. It’s
also true that there were horrors before Innocents Lost, even during the years
when Florida was reducing foster care and, those
independent evaluations found, improving safety overall. And there are horrors in every child welfare
system in America.
But the take-the-child-and-run approach advocated by the Herald has made everything worse. So the
Herald shares responsibility for the
results.
