If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then politicians and child welfare officials in Los Angeles need what parents so often are put through when child welfare agencies get into their lives: a psychiatric evaluation.
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| The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is doing what it does best after a child-abuse tragedy: grandstanding at children's expense |
Do we really have to go through this again?
Do we really have to go through another round of preening,
posturing, finger-pointing and general sound and fury signifying nothing in the
aftermath of a horrible child abuse death?
Do we really need another round of “[name of politician here] demands
answers”-type press releases? Don’t
political leaders in Los Angeles finally owe the county’s most vulnerable
children more?
Those are the questions we should be asking after the latest
high-profile death of a child “known to the system” – the death of Anthony Avalos. But so far, all we’ve gotten is more of the
same. Take out the name Anthony Avalos and substitute Gabriel Fernandez, or Yonatan
Aguilar or Dae’von Bailey or Lars Sanchez, among other Los Angeles child
welfare tragedies, and you could barely tell the difference.
That’s because the real root of the problem is that Los
Angeles takes away too many children, not too few. That overloads the system,
leaving less time for workers to find children in real danger. Each time
there’s a high-profile death it sets off a foster-care
panic – encouraged by those grandstanding politicians. Even more children
are taken needlessly. So workers have even less time. So the cycle repeats over
and over.
It happens almost everywhere, of course. But part of the reason it’s often worse in
Los Angeles is that Los Angeles child welfare has long suffered from being
overseen by one of the worst governing bodies in America on these issues, the
Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors – or as I’ve called them before, the
B.S.
Nearly a decade ago, I wrote about the m.o. of the B.S.:
In 1954, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont denounced his notorious colleague Joe McCarthy in words that need be changed only slightly to explain the modus operandi of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in child welfare cases. To paraphrase Flanders:
They don their war paint; they go into their war dance; they emit their war whoops; they go forth to battle -- and proudly return with the scalp of a social worker.
Though there’s been a lot of turnover on the B.S. in
recent years, when it comes to child welfare, most of them share their
predecessors’ fondness for clueless grandstanding.
Consider this statement from supervisor Kathryn Barger, who
said that after Gabriel’s death: “I
didn’t think something like that could happen again…”
In fact, it’s never stopped happening. Every year, among the tens of thousands of
cases investigated by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family
Services, there are some in which warning signs, sometimes subtle, sometimes
achingly obvious, are overlooked. And
every year some of those children die.
It’s just that every few years, for reasons ranging from particularly
horrible details to random chance, media and politicians fixate on a single
case.
That distorts our entire perception of what’s wrong with
DCFS and how to fix it. Child welfare
systems are more secret than the CIA.
They can hide almost all their blunders behind “confidentiality.” Almost the only time we see their failures is
when a child “known-to-the- system” dies. So we assume that all the errors go
in only one direction – leaving children in dangerous homes.
But child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and
cruel – they err in all directions. They
tear many children from their homes needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect. In other cases, there are real problems but
they could be solved without resorting to traumatizing the children by taking them
from their homes.
Lessons from the border
One need only look about 129 miles south of Los Angeles, to
the Mexican border, to see just how horrible such separation can be. A professor of pediatrics called the trauma
of separation “catastrophic.”
Remember those sounds
of crying children smuggled out of a detention center and published by
ProPublica? It doesn’t matter if the
person separating parent from child is a border patrol officer carrying out a
policy of pure evil or a DCFS caseworker with the best of intentions – the
children shed the same sorts of tears for the same sorts of reasons; the damage
done to them is the same. So it’s no
wonder massive studies have found that, in
typical cases, children left in their own home fare better even than comparably
maltreated children placed in foster care.
That harm is done even when the foster home is a good one.
The majority are. But study after study has
found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. As for group homes and
institutions: The record in California speaks for itself.
The typical response to high-profile tragedies – the general
chest thumping and calls for heads to roll - makes everything worse. Workers
become terrified of having the next tragedy on their caseload and facing everything
from media censure to criminal charges. So there’s a foster-care panic: Workers rush to inflict
more catastrophes on children by taking more of them needlessly.
That only makes the other kind of catastrophe – the death of
a child “known to the system” – more likely, because overloaded workers have
even less time to find children in real danger.
Just as tearing apart more families at the border doesn’t
improve border security, tearing apart more families in Los Angeles County
won’t improve child safety.
Enter the Fox News of Child Welfare
Already the so-called Chronicle
of Social Change, the Fox News of child welfare, is laying the groundwork for the next foster-care
panic in Los Angeles. The Chronicle
ran a story
that seeks to justify the panic in advance, arguing, in effect: What do you
expect? More people call in reports alleging child abuse so of course more
children will be removed.
But often, during foster-care panics the increase in
removals far
exceeds the increase in reports. And
because, during a foster-care panic, anyone and everyone is hectored repeatedly
to report anything and everything, no matter how absurd, a greater proportion
of reports is likely to be false. There should
be no automatic assumption that more people calling in their slightest
suspicion should mean more children torn from their homes.
And, of course, the story
quoted DCFS director Bobby Cagle
falsely equating child removal with child safety – just the way Donald Trump
falsely equates child removal with border security. But then that’s the same Big Lie of American Child Welfare that Chronicle
publisher and self-proclaimed "child welfare expert" Daniel Heimpel pushes at every opportunity.
(A quick reminder of
Heimpel’s track record: He has analogized the
increase use of family preservation to cancer, dismissed concerns about racial
bias in child welfare as a “panic” and published and promoted a column using a
vile racial stereotype to attack one of the mothers profiled in the New
York Times story about foster care as the new Jane Crow.)
Computerized “poverty profiling” won’t help
Nor will we fix the system by taking all the human biases
that exist now and automating them. That’s what the current fad sweeping
through child welfare, “predictive
analytics” really is all about.
Predictive analytics involves using masses of data about people –
mostly, it turns out, poor people – and coughing up a score that supposedly
tells workers for agencies like DCFS who is most likely to abuse a child.
Contrary to a column
in the Los Angeles Times by Naomi
Schaefer Riley (the same Naomi Schaefer Riley who was barred from blogging for
an education trade journal after writing a column widely
viewed as racist) the first Los Angeles experiment with this approach was
not dropped because the county used a private company. It was dropped because
the software produced a false positive rate of 95 percent. As Judge Michael Nash, director of the
county’s Office of Child Protection explained,
95 percent of the time, the software labeled as “high risk” children “who were
not at risk for a negative outcome.”
The same column goes on to praise the predictive analytics
experiment in Pittsburgh. But, as
I discuss here, that experiment doesn’t correct the biases of humans, it
magnifies them. In her book, Automating Inequality, Prof.
Virginia Eubanks aptly called it “poverty profiling.”
Los Angeles already takes away children at more than double the rate of New York City and more
than triple the rate of Chicago, even when rates of child poverty are factored
in. There is no evidence L.A. children are two and three times as safe from
abuse.
If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing
over and over and expecting a different result, then politicians and child
welfare officials in Los Angeles need what parents so often are put through
when DCFS gets into their lives: a psychiatric evaluation.
No large child welfare system in America ever has been able
to stop every child abuse death – just as no police department can stop every
murder. But the few that do better at
curbing child abuse have one thing in common: They do far more than Los Angeles
to keep families together and avoid needless foster care.
Why not try that for a change?
