Child welfare in Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Where stigma and bias “flourish”

The case file had a single word written across the top.  There was no context for this one word, no explanation.

But in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and surrounding Linn County, when that word is on a child welfare file, no explanation is necessary.  Everybody knows the word means the agency doesn’t like the family, the family deserves an extra measure of suspicion and the case worker really thinks the children would be better off with people with whom that worker is more comfortable.

That one word amounts to seven scarlet letters for a family caught up in the net of the Iowa Department of Human Services in Linn County.

The word is “CHICAGO.”

Why does the file say “Chicago”?  Because over the past several years, cities like Cedar Rapids and nearby Iowa City have seen an influx of “urban immigrants” – they actually use that term – from Chicago.  Many are poor people who moved to the region when giant public housing projects were torn down.

As Cedar Rapids Gazette columnist Jennifer Hemmingson has written:

Iowa City’s shifting demographics have brought real changes to our neighborhoods and schools. But “those people from Chicago” have also been convenient scapegoats.

So why does the file say “Chicago”?  Because it’s a great codeword.  The caseworker would have gotten in trouble if he or she’d simply written across the top of the file: “BLACK.”

The file marked “Chicago” was found by researchers for the Center for the Study of Social Policy as they prepared an Institutional Analysis Report on the child welfare system in Linn County.  To its credit, Iowa DHS invited CSSP to do the study as part of an effort to reduce racial bias in the system.

That bias is profound.  Data compiled by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges show that African American children are trapped in Iowa foster care at a rate nearly quadruple their rate in the general population.  The rate of “disproportionality,” as it’s called, is even worse for Native American children – no surprise in a state where the chief juvenile prosecutor in a county in which one in ten Indian children is in foster care, says: “I don’t think there’s anything in any of these cases that points to something positive about Indian culture, except the culture of drugs and the culture of poverty and the culture of abuse.”

So it also should come as no surprise that the CSSP researchers found that the child welfare system in Linn County, Iowa is a place where “stigma and bias are permitted to flourish…”

The racial bias is on top of the fact that, year after year, Iowa tears apart families of all races at one if the highest rates in the nation.  In 2010, Iowa tore apart families at the fourth highest rate in the nation, a rate more than two-and-a-half times the national average.  (That’s part of a national pattern.  The states that have the worst record on racial bias, like Iowa and Nebraska often also are the states with the highest rates of child removal for all races.)

Though not as detailed as CSSP’s similar report on Michigan, the Linn County report uses the same combination of hard data, rigorous case record review and interviews with participants in the system to produce a compelling narrative that interweaves data and case examples.  (Throughout this post, when it comes to conclusions, unless that conclusion is quoted directly from the report or attributed to it, it’s my interpretation, not necessarily CSSP’s).

The incident about the case file marked “Chicago” is in an entire section devoted to the ways African American families are stigmatized by the Cedar Rapids DHS office.  (The section is headed “Stigma.”) Other examples cited by the study include:

● One therapist described a "loud,” “emotional” father as being perceived as “risky” and “hostile.”
　
· An African American youth described how he hoped to change his last name when he became an adult because his family had a “reputation” in the community.
　
· An African American father was told that the only way he could prove he was not seeking reunification to benefit financially from his son’s public assistance was by using his own money to purchase a car seat for his son.
　
The report concludes that:

In a system with weak accountability, issues of stigma and bias are permitted to flourish and become part of the agency’s culture, resulting in a troubling lack of consensus about policy and practice in Linn County.

The stigmatizing and stereotyping apparently runs so deep that some caseworkers may view African American parents as almost literally sub-human, so it may not even occur to them to consider the emotional trauma inflicted on the child by removing that child from the home.  Consider this example:

…a three month old infant was removed when the child’s mother called the hospital because the infant had fallen from a bed. DHS filed a report and removed the infant after the mother failed to bring the infant to the hospital, even though the child’s mother had called her own mother – a nurse – the night of the fall for medical advice. The infant sustained no injury, a visiting nurse was in the home at the request of the mother, and the mother brought the infant to the doctor the next day. Although the infant was currently safe and the mother had significant community based supports in place, the hospital, the DHS worker, and the court all supported a decision to remove the infant from the care of this young mother. Six months later, the infant had experienced two foster home placements and was not gaining weight in foster care. [Emphasis added.]

On the other hand, the error in this next case is so common in lousy child welfare systems that I suspect it could as easily have happened to a child of any race:

Another young child in a residential treatment program misbehaved after returning from an overnight visit with her parent, resulting in DHS denying overnight visits rather than considering that the behavior might be related to a child missing her family and working with the family to get to the root cause of the behavior.

The very fact that young children are warehoused in residential treatment centers at all is appalling – since the evidence is overwhelming that residential treatment does no good, and is particularly harmful for younger children.  Yet that issue arises again in another case:

a six year old African American boy with behavioral issues was placed in a residential program. Professionals working with the mother on this case determined that a residential setting was the only available service to meet this young child’s needs. After nine months, when this boy was being prepared to exit placement, it was unclear what, if any, at home and in school supports would be available. Further, it was unclear if residential placement could have been avoided altogether if meaningful, intensive in home and community based services had been available.

Residential treatment also is among the most expensive services – so lack of money is no excuse for the lack of alternatives that not only are better, but also cost less.  Rather, it is a function of a system that dehumanizes impoverished children and families, especially impoverished Black children and families.

The dehumanization extends to victims of domestic violence.  According to the report:

data indicated that African American women who defend themselves in battering situations are often assessed as the aggressor and their case plans then require them to attend anger management classes, rather than providing them assistance as victims of domestic violence.

It all adds up to a system that, the report says, “intervened with some African American families in extensive ways with no clear reason or rationale.”

According to the report, the Cedar Rapids DHS office would force families into substance abuse screening and treatment when there were no substance abuse issues and harass a family with unannounced visits “three or four times a week” – a full year after a child had been returned home with no problems.  As the mother’s attorney told the CSSP researchers it is nearly impossible for clients to “prove they are not doing something.”  Private agencies that were supposed to provide help would re-report families to DHS for “minor new concerns.”

But it will be easy to prove whether or not, at long last, Iowa decides to do something about its penchant for tearing apart families in general and minority families in particular.  One need simply watch the figures for entries into care.


And there are signs that Linn County, at least, is taking some first steps in the right direction.  According to the Gazette, the number of cases in which a caseworker declared an allegation of child maltreatment against an African American family to be “substantiated” was cut in half in the seven months ending July 1, compared to a similar period in 2010.


On the other hand, the same story reports that neighboring Johnson County, they’re not even trying to reduce needless removal of children – they’re just trying to find more Black foster parents.


How very Iowa of them.

UPDATED, 5:25PM: Foster care in New Jersey: Child safety continues to improve

Monitor’s statement is rebuke to those seeking a return to the days of “take the child and run”


Judge overseeing class-action suit also praises agency

            The latest state to see the take-the-child-and-run crowd try to roll back a successful reform is New Jersey. As usual, they’re trying to exploit a tragic death.

But this time a reform effort that has significantly reduced entries into care and improved child safety has two strong defenders – the independent monitor overseeing a class-action lawsuit settlement, and the judge who has the final word on that settlement.

            In unusually-strong language for this kind of document, monitor Juith Meltzer of the Center for the Study of Social Policy issued a special statement along with the regular monitoring report released today.  In that statement she strongly defended both the reforms in general and the handling of the recent tragedy.

            That tragedy is the death of Christiana Glenn, who was allegedly starved and denied medical care by her mother.  According to news accounts, this allegedly occurred after the mother came under the sway of a boyfriend involved in what he persuaded her were religious rituals.

As is always the case with statements from child welfare court monitors, the language is measured, even genteel.  That’s because a monitor’s role also is to serve as a de facto mediator between the state and whoever is suing the state.  So by the standards of such documents, this statement amounts to a stinging rebuke to those who have tried to exploit the Glenn case to roll back reform and return to the take-the-child-and-run approach that dominated the system before reform.

            In general, “New Jersey’s child welfare system is …doing a better job protecting and supporting New Jersey’s children and families,” than before the reforms, Meltzer said.

            She went on to address specifically, the case of Christiana Glenn. 

            New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families and its Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS), investigated four previous reports about the family and determined that all of them were unfounded.  That prompted those who have opposed reform from the start to “raise questions” about whether too many cases are labeled unfounded and more children should be torn from their homes.

EARLIER REPORTS REALLY WERE UNFOUNDED

            But Meltzer concluded that the reason these four reports were declared unfounded is because they were, in fact, unfounded.  The reports were received between 2006 and 2008, well before the boyfriend entered the picture.  At the time, Meltzer wrote, “none of the activities and behaviors that were associated with the children’s abuse and Christiana’s death were observable by the DYFS worker” nor were they reported to that worker by the family’s only neighbor, a day care worker or the children’s pediatrician.

            Workers for agencies like DYFS are expected to be many things.  But they are not expected to be psychic.  Sometimes children “known to the system” die and it’s not the child welfare agency’s fault.

            That means even looking only at this case, there is nothing to indicate the reforms have compromised safety or that New Jersey needs to return to taking away more children.

            Using a more reliable measure than the latest horror story, the overall rate of reabuse of children left in their own homes after a substantiated report of maltreatment, the monitor found that the reabuse rate remains well below the level required to meet the terms of the consent decree, and, of course, well below where it was when New Jersey was taking away far more children.

            Indeed, to the extent that there was any failing it was that DYFS was not able to persuade the mother to accept enough voluntary help. 

            This echoes a theme in previous monitoring reports on New Jersey: that the biggest failings involve prevention and family preservation, not investigations or failure to be aggressive about removing children.

            The monitor’s comments do not address the issue of a newly-discovered fifth report received days before Christiana’s death, a call which a hotline operator did not refer for investigation.  Based on news accounts, it appears that the person calling was anonymous, he had an address but no name for the family and his concerns were vague.

If that is the case, had this been the only report on this family, it would have been the right decision.  The apparent failure on the part of the hotline operator was a failure to link the address given by the anonymous reporter to the address of Christiana.  So the operator apparently was unaware of the family’s history.

            Unfortunately, in any system that responds to tens of thousands of calls every year, operators sometimes will screw up, and sometimes that will have tragic results. That may well be what happened here.  It does not follow, however, that the hotline regularly is failing.


The state's handling of the investigation into the Glenn case won praise from the judge in charge of the consent decree.


According to the Newark Star-Ledger:


"This is not an agency that went into a bunker mentality," Judge [Stanley R.] Chesler said, in praising DCF for working closely with Meltzer, the federal monitor, as she has sought in recent weeks to review DYFS's investigation of the Glenn family in 2006 and 2008. In expressing further approval of the agency's handling of its investigation into Christiana Glenn's brutal death, he said DCF had "presented this situation indeed transparently."

            The monitor’s report also is notable in other respects.  While New Jersey still has a very long way to go, few systems under consent decrees have come so far so fast.  To cite just one example: New Jersey went an entire year without placing even one child under age 13 in a parking place “shelter” -  one of the worst forms of placement.  That is a record almost any state would envy, whether under a consent decree or not. 

And that helps explain why Judge Chesler said that, compared to when he first started overseeing the New Jersey child welfare system, that system has improved "drastically."

            What makes this all so important is the urgent need to avoid a repeat of the foster-care panic - the huge spike in needless removals of children - in the immediate aftermath of a horrendous case that made headlines in January, 2003, the death of Faheem Williams. 

            That case led to a foster care panic in a state that already had been wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach for several years.  It also forced the state to settle the lawsuit.  And even though the suit was brought by the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights, the settlement came during a time when CR was willing to listen to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a former funder of NCCPR, and so was more progressive than most.

            The result: A reversal of the take the child and run approach, a significant reduction in entries into foster care and safer children.

            That’s what’s under attack right now – and fortunately, that’s what the independent monitor has come forward to defend.

X-ray of an agency’s soul

If you only read one "study" this year, make it the one on racial bias in Michigan child welfare just released by the Center for the Study of Social Policy. It was the topic of a good story in The Detroit News. But this time, even a good news story just isn't enough. It's worth reading every word, particularly the words from page 12 through page 40.

In more than 30 years of following child welfare, I have read hundreds of reports and studies. I've never read one more compelling than this one. It reads more like good investigative reporting than a dry recitation of statistics, with actual case histories interwoven throughout. And it certainly doesn't apply only to Michigan.

This report is a less a study than an X-ray of a child welfare agency's soul; in this case the Michigan Department of Human Services (DHS) – and the picture is ugly. It tells us, in vivid, compelling detail, that every impoverished African American child in Michigan is in danger of needlessly being torn from everyone loving and familiar by a child welfare system that is arbitrary, capricious and cruel. (And things aren't much better for impoverished white children.)

How many children were taken in the first place because of things like, say, a mother lacking a stove, or a mother getting upset the day after police raided her home and ordered her to lie on the ground while her child was taken? (See the report itself for details on such cases).

How many children have been taken because agencies legally required, and paid by Michigan taxpayers to provide in-home services, simply refuse to do so because they don't want to go into poor neighborhoods? And why does DHS keep letting them get away with it?

How many children have been taken when a Team Decisionmaking meeting, meant to be a way to help a family stay together, was turned into a subterfuge designed to lure a family to a DHS office so a child could be taken on the spot – again, something DHS actually tried to do in one of the cases documented in this stunning report.

Not only does all this do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, it also wastes time and resources that should be devoted to finding children in real danger.

But sometimes, it's the little things that reveal the most. The report offers up one particularly telling detail. It's about how a Black parent and a white parent can say the same thing about alleged drug abuse, but the statement is characterized differently in case records, simply by changing one key word.  Quoting directly from the report:

"In several case files of African American families, workers described a parent as 'DENIES history of substance abuse.' The case file contained no documentation of any past or current substance abuse problem. In case files of Caucasian families with similar documentation, workers described a parent as having 'NO history of substance abuse.' [Emphasis added]. 

In other words, under otherwise identical circumstances, the white parent is taken at her word, the Black parent is not.

Among other key revelations in the new study:

●Structured Decision Making, which now plagues systems around the country, (it may well be the cause of a spike in needless removals in Los Angeles County, for example) was pioneered in Michigan. But it turns out that the Structured Decision Making checklists used to determine risk and decide if a child should be torn from everyone loving and familiar are permeated with racial bias. While SDM has a veneer or objectivity, many of the determinations workers are asked to make are highly subjective.

Furthermore, the "risk factors" are self-reinforcing. In other words, a child is rated at higher risk if there have been previous reports of maltreatment. But, precisely because of poverty – and racial bias – poor Black families are more likely to be subjects of such reports.

● And if that's not bad enough, the reviewers found that caseworkers often simply got their facts wrong – and then used this erroneous information to increase the alleged "risk" to the child.

● In other families, a case deliberately is mislabeled "high risk" because it's the only way to get "services" to the family. That, however, may simply mean the family gets the wrong "help" – counseling instead of, say, a rent subsidy. And then, they may come under suspicion over and over for years, because now they're listed in Michigan's Central Registry of alleged child abusers.

●Team Decisionmaking, a technique that is supposed to be used to try to keep families together, often is misused. The meetings are dominated by "service providers" the families get little or no say and good alternatives to placement are ignored. Caseworkers fail to tell families their rights at these meetings, and fail to tell them they are allowed to bring relatives, friends and other informal supports. Parents – and older children – were talked at instead of talked to, sometimes not even accorded the dignity of being addressed by name, and when they did speak up, often they were ignored. Even when the meetings function properly they tend to be geared to determining the type of placement, instead of whether placement itself is necessary. And, as noted above and in the Detroit News story, in at least one case, DHS actually tried to use such a meeting as a subterfuge to lure a mother and infant to a DHS office to snatch away the infant. 

● Poverty routinely is confused with neglect. Housing problems come up over and over. For instance: A Black mother loses her housing because her child has been removed. Then she can't get the child back because she doesn't have housing. (When the same thing happened to a white mother in the same community, she was able to get a housing voucher).

As noted above, in one case, a DHS welfare worker encouraged a mother to call the child protective services division for help in obtaining a stove. She didn't get a stove, she got a child abuse investigation. She then was told her child would be taken away if she didn't obtain the stove on her own. Similarly, families that make the mistake of calling DHS for help with heat during the winter, often end up with nothing but a cold house that now has a child abuse investigator at the front door.

● Again, as noted above, big wealthy service providers based in the suburbs sometimes simply refuse to provide services in the neighborhoods where families live. This sometimes happens even with providers specifically contracted to provide in-home services – and DHS has done nothing about it.

● Hotline workers screen in far too many cases that are not, in fact, cases of child maltreatment. (In addition to the harm this does to the families that are investigated, it's also overloading caseworkers, reducing the time they have to find children in real danger.) The hotline review process is biased – there are extra reviews when a call is screened out, but not when it's screened in.

● Caseworker reports are permeated with misinformation – and then the people doing psychological evaluations rely on that misinformation. Worse, it appears some evaluators are simply cutting and pasting boilerplate assessments from one person's "psych eval" into another. In other words, (and this is my interpretation, not a direct quote from the report) a "psych eval" that was supposedly done on Ms. Smith winds up with a paragraph that might say something like "It is clear that Ms. Jones suffers from…" 

● Echoing the false claims of Michigan's "foster care-industrial complex" workers, judges and especially lawyer guardian ad litems for children, repeatedly claimed it was better for children to be torn from everyone they know and love because then they'd get to live in wealthier neighborhoods and have better "cultural experiences." (And of course, then those service providers wouldn't have to go through the trouble of going from their suburban headquarters into the inner city.) The report called this
"Reminiscent of the 19th century child rescue ideology that led to the separation of tribal and immigrant children from their families and communities … The belief that African American children are better off away from their families and communities was seen in explicit statements by key policy makers and service providers."

But it should be no surprise that this kind of thinking permeates the frontlines of Michigan child welfare. The leader of a trade association for the state's enormously powerful private agencies said the same thing at a legislative hearing three years ago. The hearing, and why this kind of thinking is a huge problem for children, are discussed in this earlier post to the Blog.

● Parents constantly are stigmatized and stereotyped; files are filled with insults, none of them justified by facts of the case. Parents – and children - are characterized negatively for conduct that is entirely justified – such as a becoming angry when a child is taken from them, or a child picking a fight with a classmate moments after being told that his rights to his parents have been terminated forever, and he can't see them anymore.

● The requirement to make "reasonable efforts" to keep families together when it is safe to do so is routinely ignored. Parents' lawyers don't even raise the issue – and one judicial officer said that's because raising reasonable efforts is "a losing argument." Worse, in a bit of irony worthy of Kafka, judges are now deeming the mere existence of a Team Decisionmaking meeting sufficient to meet the "reasonable efforts" requirement. (This is especially disturbing in light of the fact that the whole phony rationale for Michigan's so-called Binsfeld Laws, draconinan state legislation that out-ASFAs ASFA, and the enormous harm they've done, was that DHS supposedly was fanatical about "reasonable efforts." It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now).

● Many in DHS have no clue what really is required in law and regulation. The problem is so pervasive that the report authors coined a term for it: "Policy mythology." For example, there is a widespread belief that if a parent has lost one child to termination of parental rights – even if, say, a mother voluntarily gave up a child for adoption decades before, all future children must be confiscated at birth and termination of parental rights petitions filed. It's not true – but workers routinely act on this myth. (The reality, that the law encourages this pernicious practice, is bad enough.)

● The investigators found that DHS workers at every level were deep in denial about all of this. Some simply refused to believe the data with which they were confronted. Others responded with Stephen Colbert-like platitudes about how they, personally are "color blind" and "everyone is the same to me."

Of course, when Colbert says it, it's satire.