The horrors happen everywhere, but they’re more likely in Oregon, a state which, year-after-year, tears apart families at a rate well above the national average.
From a
story in the Oregonian:
The state of Oregon has paid $750,000 to three English-speaking foster kids who were placed in the Gresham home of Spanish-speaking foster parents and forced to wear filthy clothes smelling of urine and sleep in a windowless basement.
Two of the three brothers also were sexually abused by another, older male foster child -- and they were unable to tell that to their foster parents because their foster parents didn't speak English, said Portland attorney David Paul, who represented the brothers.
Paul said the brothers' isolation was made even worse because child-protection workers with the Oregon Department of Human Services failed to regularly check on the boys.
The story is only the latest in a “spate,” as newspapers
love to call such things, of high-profile
cases involving abuse of children in Oregon foster homes, group homes and
institutions.
But perhaps the most interesting, and in some ways, the most
tragic, part of this story can be found toward the end:
The biological mother lost custody of her sons under allegations that she failed to protect them against another adult who posed a threat, Paul said.
The Oregon Department of Human Services then proved itself
guilty of exactly the same thing. But
there’s more:
When the state finally pulled them from the Gresham foster home, the boys returned to her care and they are now living with her with no oversight from DHS, Paul said.
Which raises an obvious question: Did the children ever
really need to be taken in the first place?
If there really was another adult from whom the children needed to be
protected, could that other adult have been removed from the home instead of
the children?
But they don’t think that way in Oregon, a state where a
take-the-child-and-run mentality goes back decades, a state where year after
year, children are taken away at a rate well above the national average.
And, again from the story, this is the result:
"They come back a shadow of their former selves," Paul said.
The story also leaves one key question unanswered. These
children spoke only English and were placed in home where the foster parents
spoke only Spanish.
My guess is the reverse is more common. How many Spanish-speaking
foster children can’t make themselves understood to their foster parents
because those foster parents speak only English? What, if anything, is DHS doing about
it? And who, if anyone, among Oregon
journalists, will try to find out?
