The California online news site Capital and Main has
an excellent story about how California in general and, apparently, Los
Angeles in particular, makes the plight of the children of battered mothers
infinitely worse by blaming the mothers for being beaten and consigning the
children to foster care. The charge is “failure
to protect” – as in failure to protect the children from seeing their moms
being beaten.
The story cites the case of Ingrid Archie. She was charged even after she fled from her
abuser, got a restraining order and moved to a domestic violence shelter.
Nevertheless her children were taken – and she was jailed. Then in a twist that’s Kafkaesque even by
child welfare standards, she was charged with “failure to protect” again –
because, while she was in jail, her oldest daughter was sexually abused in
foster care.
The ways in which this all makes children less safe are
legion – not least the fact that it discourages battered women from seeking
help. They’re actually more likely to stay in abusive relationship for fear
that if they seek that help, they’ll lose their children. Indeed, as reporter Angelika
Albaladejo explains in her story, that fear is even exploited by abusers who sometimes
threaten to turn their victims in to child protective services if they try to
leave.
But there’s another harm as well. As traumatizing as it is for children to be
thrown into foster care, that trauma is actually worse when the child has
witnessed domestic violence. One expert
called removing children under such circumstances “tantamount to pouring salt
into an open wound.”
We know this because these experts testified in a landmark class-action
lawsuit that got this horrible practice banned in New York City. NCCPR’s Vice
President, Carolyn Kubitschek, was co-counsel for the battered women in the
case, known as Nicholson v. Scoppetta.
(Due to some odd legal twists and turns, the ban theoretically applies
statewide, but I doubt it’s being enforced Upstate.) You can read the expert testimony as
summarized by the judge, the stories of the plaintiffs and the judge’s full,
scathing 183-page decision on
NCCPR’s website here.
Remarkably, though New York City’s child welfare system has
plenty of faults, and indeed, may be backsliding
on this issue, the Nicholson consent
decree has significantly reduced the needless removal of children of battered
mothers.
The reasons for LA’s failure
So why is L.A. so far behind?
First, of course, in this case, because in New York they won
that lawsuit. I know of none other like it anywhere else in the country. But there also are other reasons Los Angeles
lags behind. They’re the reasons Los Angeles always lags behind:
● New York City has a relatively strong family defender
community, with aggressive institutional providers that fight hard for their
clients. They can fight, case by case,
to make sure the city’s child protective services agency follows the consent
decree. There is nothing like it in Los
Angeles.
● New York City has a mediocre child welfare agency chief and
a mayor who, on child welfare, shows no courage. But at least the City Council understands
these issues and, particularly in recent years, has worked to hold the city
child protective services agency accountable.
In contrast, Los Angeles has had a long succession of poor child welfare
leaders, and the current one, Bobby Cagle, has
a particularly poor track record.
And the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which
effectively functions as both the legislative and executive branch, may well be
the worst governing body in America, with politicians seemingly in a
never-ending race-to-the-bottom when it comes to demagoguery about child
welfare.
All of this also explains why Los Angeles takes away
children at a rate more than double that of New York City.
The issue is not all that complex
Although the Capital
and Main article is outstanding, there are a couple of points with which I would
take issue.
One is the idea that the rush to remove children in these
cases amounts to “prioritization of the immediate safety of the child” – at the
expense of all sorts of other harm to that child. In fact, even that assessment is too generous. What’s really being prioritized is the
immediate “safety” of everyone from the caseworker to the agency chief; all of
them terrified of leaving a child home and being blamed if something goes
wrong.
Indeed, as Albaladejo notes:
In Los
Angeles County in recent years, concerns over protecting children have come to
a head after several high-profile murders of children at the hands of abusive
parents generated public scrutiny of [the county’s child protective services
agency’s] practices, and encouraged a more reactive response.
That is a polite way of saying: There’s probably a foster-care panic underway right now.
As for the child, she or he may well wind up less safe
physically – as is illustrated by what happened to Ingrid Archie’s oldest
child; an illustration backed up by the data on the widespread extent of abuse in foster care. And that’s before we even get to the
additional emotional trauma.
I also question the idea that all of these cases are
unusually “complex” and workers need lots and lots of that all-purpose child
welfare bromide: “training.”
Some cases undoubtedly are complex. But these also are cases in which there’s a
vastly better way to “prioritize the immediate safety of the child” that’s also
pretty simple: Instead of making it the victim’s responsibility to flee and,
even then, sometimes taking away the child, why not remove the abuser from the
home?
As I’ve noted before on this blog, there’s a readily
available method to accomplish this: It’s called arrest. And there is a readily
available placement for the abuser: It’s called jail.
As for training: Allow me to provide the entire training
curriculum needed for this approach:
- . Taking children from battered mothers in itself inflicts severe emotional abuse on those children
- . Therefore, don’t do it.
- .. Remove the abusers instead.
