Foster care in Cleveland: The latest danger to children of battered mothers - Plain Dealer editorials

Perhaps the most common child welfare story in American newspapers is the story of the death of a child "known to the system." But all such cases are not alike.

In some cases, the failure of the child welfare agency to act is stark and obvious. These are the cases in which the file reveals more "red flags" than a Soviet May Day parade. Other cases are more ambiguous. Perhaps still another visit to the home would have revealed the danger, maybe some extra phone calls. But caseworkers are so overloaded with false allegations and trivial cases that they usually don't have time for that. I would argue that the tragic deaths of the children of Banita Jacks in Washington D.C. fit this category.

And then there are the cases in which the child welfare agency would have to be psychic to predict the tragedy. Based on the information made public so far, it appears that the case of Arshon Baker of Cleveland is one of those.

But such distinctions are of no interest to the editorial writers at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. They're on a righteous-indignation high right now, too busy reveling in their own fury to notice that, in their quest to scapegoat family preservation, they distorted the facts of the case - as reported by the Plain Dealer's own news staff. In the process they've heightened the risk to some of Cuyahoga County's most vulnerable children – those whose mothers have themselves been victims of domestic violence.

PLAIN DEALER VS. PLAIN DEALER

Compare how the editorial writers describe the case to what the Plain Dealer's own reporter found – keeping in mind that the editorial writers say they relied on the news story. Here's the editorial page version:

[Angel] Glass, Arshon's mother, was last in contact with the county child welfare department in October 2008. She subsequently lost her two part-time jobs, went off her medication and became so depressed she couldn't get out of bed in the morning.

But since her case was closed after she agreed to take a parenting class -- she had called the agency after her boyfriend slapped Arshon's sibling -- she was no longer on the department's radar screen as her life spiraled out of control.

Now compare that to the facts of the case, as reported by the same newspaper. (I've put some key points in bold):

Children and Family Services began helping her in June 2007, a year after her release [from prison on an assault charge].
It wasn't because she'd done anything to harm Arshon or his sister, who's 18 months older. Child welfare workers showed up after Glass called police to report that her boyfriend, Larry Wanzo, had slapped her 4-year-old daughter in the face. The little girl was trying to stop the drunken, 6-foot, 5-inch, 210-pound man from hurting her mother, according to the police report.
Glass was doing the right thing, [Cuyahoga County DCFS Director Deborah] Forkas said.

"She was trying to protect the child."

An investigation found no need for action against her. Because she was in a violent relationship, a case worker suggested that Glass enroll in weekly parenting classes and counseling sessions and agree to monthly visits from Children and Family Services.

Glass welcomed the help.

"She was very, very cooperative," Forkas said. "She could've said, 'no.' It was not a forced case plan."
Glass continued the classes and counseling until October 2008. Because she successfully completed the program, Children and Family Services closed her case.

"The professionals that were treating her really felt she had made a tremendous amount of progress," Forkas said. "She was completely stable."

Her office offered Glass ongoing counseling, paid for by Medicaid. Glass, she said, continued the sessions. But because Children and Family Services was no longer supervising her case, workers don't know for how long. [Emphasis added].

Glass also had an outstanding warrant for an assault charge – that occurred a year before she ever contacted DCFS. But the warrant never was served and DCFS never knew about it.

WRONG ON A KEY FACT

So for starters the Plain Dealer editorial writers are simply flat wrong when they claim the case was closed after Glass agreed to take parenting classes. The case stayed open far longer.

More generally, what do the facts actually show: A mother with a criminal record – before she ever reached out to DCFS - but no record of child abuse. A mother who did nothing to harm her child, and never was accused of doing so. A mother who reached out to protect both children, and accepted help when she was under no obligation to do so.

What, besides psychic powers, would have allowed DCFS to know that long after the case was closed she would lose her jobs, go off her medication and allegedly kill her child? How would DCFS know this case was different from all the other cases of poor people who lose their jobs in a recession, become depressed – and don't harm their children?

Unless, of course, the Plain Dealer is taking the position that DCFS should confiscate the children of any battered mother who reaches out for help – or any mother who reaches out for help when her boyfriend hits a child.

In fact, the trauma to a child of separation from a loving mother actually is heightened if that mother is, herself, a victim of domestic violence. One expert calls it "tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound." (Is the Plain Dealer now advocating a policy that amounts to "please pass the salt?") That's why a class-action lawsuit led to banning this pernicious practice in New York City (NCCPR's Vice President was co-counsel for the plaintiffs). Such removals are of sufficient concern in Ohio for the Ohio Domestic Violence Network to have filed a "friend of the court" brief in the case.

Even if this is not literally what the Plain Dealer wants, consider the message the editorial writers are sending to other women like Glass – if the newspaper gets its way, and pressures DCFS into taking a take-the-child-and-run approach in these kinds of cases.

If there's one thing we know about men who abuse their partners and their children it's that they can be highly manipulative. So what happens to the next mother in Glass' position who wants to seek help because a boyfriend has beaten her child, or her? Why shouldn't we expect the boyfriend to say: "Go ahead. Call the cops. They'll just call DCFS and they'll take away your kids. I read it in the Plain Dealer."

When anecdotes collide: Foster care policy and the tyranny of personal experience

ACTUALLY, IT WAS ALL EXPLAINED ON THE DAILY SHOW

There is one thing I will never say to a current or former foster child. I'll never say it to a parent whose children were taken from her, or to a foster parent who had to fight the system to get help for a foster child. I'll never say it to a frontline caseworker, or even to someone running a child welfare system. What I will never say is: "I know how you feel." Because I don't; and I never will.

Only someone who actually has been a birth parent who lost a child to the system, or the child who was taken, or the child who was rescued from an abusive home, or a foster parent, or a caseworker can know how it feels to endure such tragedy or, sometimes, triumph. I've never been any of those things.

Those who have had such profound personal experiences bring important insights to the child welfare debate; their views should be sought out and respected. But sometimes those who have had such profound personal experiences take the argument a step further, declaring that because only they know how it feels, or what it's really like, only they know the right solutions and only they should make policy or even know what the right policies should be. But relying only on those who have had personal experiences can skew policy just as badly as ignoring them.

People who have had a searing personal experience that drowns out everything else may seek policies that are good for people who had exactly the same personal experience they had, while making other people's experiences worse. That's because of the one huge problem with personal experience:
It's personal.

I have quoted many foster children who say they never should have been taken from their parents. But I am well aware of other foster children who say being removed from their parents was the best thing that ever happened to them. Who's right? Quite possibly all of them – in their own particular cases. I've read articles by caseworkers expressing frustration at being pressured to take children needlessly – and other articles in which caseworkers complain about not having a free enough hand to take more children.

When anecdotes collide, it's time to look at the data.

I don't believe family preservation is the better option for most children most of the time because so many former foster children have recounted terrible experiences in the system. I believe family preservation is the better option most of the time because of things like the study of more than 15,000 cases which found that children left in their own homes in typical cases typically did better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. I don't believe foster care can be dangerous because of the stories I've read about children being beaten, raped and killed in foster homes. I believe foster care can be dangerous because so many studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes.

We're all influenced by our personal experiences, and we should be. I doubt that I would notice the ugly anti-union streak among some child welfare leaders and, I'm sorry to say, some in the family preservation movement, had public employee unions not done so much to help my own family make it into the middle class when I was growing up.

But it's one thing to be influenced by personal experience and another to be tyrannized by it. The birth parent who says the whole system is corrupt because a caseworker lied in her particular case has been tyrannized by her personal experience. So has the foster parent who says all children in the system really needed to be taken from their parents because that was true of her foster children. Sometimes making sound policy decisions means rising above our own personal experiences to acknowledge that other people's personal experiences are closer to the norm.

Making child welfare policy based solely or even predominantly on one's personal experience would be like, oh, I don't know, like the approach to global warming satirized in this segment of The Daily Show – which, starting about 4:50 in, turns out to be the best analysis of the tyranny of personal experience I've seen anywhere.

UPDATE, APRIL 9: until Johana Scot of the Parent Guidance Center in Texas reminded me today, I'd completely forgotten that the same edition of The Daily Show also includes the best take anywhere on the invasion of the child savers that followed the earthquake in Haiti.

Financing foster care and family preservation: The waiver that saved Florida – again!

One of the canards used by the foster care-industrial complex to scare people away from real reform of how the federal government pays for child welfare is the claim that an "entitlement" is harder for Congress to cut than a flat grant. Therefore, groups like the Child Welfare League of America say, we have to keep the current, idiotic entitlement that pays states for every eligible child they throw into foster care.

Of course, this creates an absurd incentive to use foster care instead of better alternatives – but if you're a trade association that represents a lot of great big private agencies that need a steady supply of foster children to stay in business, you're not going to have a problem with that.

In fact, neither entitlements nor flat grants are written into the Constitution. Neither is easier or harder to change than the other. Indeed, CWLA itself is willing to see the entitlement for foster care cut in exchange for making every foster care case eligible for federal aid – so apparently cutting an entitlement isn't really so hard after all. (For details on all this see our briefing paper on child welfare finance.)

But now it turns out that not only are flat grants no easier to reduce; done right, they actually can save a child welfare system from devastating budget cuts. It's happening in Florida – for the second year in a row.

As I've noted often on this Blog, Florida is the only state that accepted a statewide waiver from federal funding rules – they traded in their "entitlement" to unlimited foster care money for every eligible child they threw into the system for a flat grant – and the flexibility to use the money for better alternatives, instead of just foster care.

The benefits for children have been huge: significantly fewer torn from everyone they know and love, and, most important, improvements in child safety, as documented by independent outside evaluations.

But there's also been a big financial gain. For starters, unlike the entitlement, which can be cut at any time, the waiver guaranteed Florida a specific level of federal aid for five years. But there's a string attached: Florida can't cut its state spending on child welfare below where it was when the waiver first was approved, in 2006. Cut below that level and the state loses all its federal money.

The result: a floor on state spending below which Florida simply won't go. As this Palm Beach Post editorial makes clear, for the second year in a row, the waiver will save Florida from devastating budget cuts in child welfare. The waiver won't prevent all budget cuts in children's services; but it significantly reduces the harm. No other state child welfare system in America has that kind of leverage.

It's too bad, that say, Michigan doesn't have a waiver like that, so the state can't impose slash-and-burn budget cuts on prevention and family preservation. Oh, wait – Michigan did have such a waiver. The state Department of Human Services even put out a press release touting it. Then, at the last minute, Michigan chickened out.

And this time, it wasn't the fault of Ismael Ahmed and his pals. The decision was made during the administration of his predecessor, Marianne Udow. Exactly who made the decision remains a mystery, in part because no reporter in Michigan has pressed DHS to name this individual so he or she can be held accountable. But, at a minimum, Udow allowed it to happen.

But the biggest lesson isn't the one that needs to be learned by Michigan, it's the one that needs to be learned by Congress: Congress needs to stand up to CWLA and the rest of the network of vested interests in child welfare - the foster care-industrial complex - and resist the kind of wimpy, non-reform reforms that the foster care-industrial complex wants. Instead, at a minimum, Congress should require the Department of Health and Human Services to make Florida-style waivers available to any state that wants it. Better yet, the Florida approach should be mandatory for every state.

Foster care in Cleveland: Will child welfare “go haywire” again?

The 1990s were a time of chaos for the child welfare system in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (metropolitan Cleveland). Stories about child abuse deaths led to scapegoating and panic, making a bad system far worse. Thousands of children were swept needlessly into foster care, destroying their families and often, the children's futures.

I say things like that a lot on this Blog, of course. But this time, it's not just my conclusion. Those are the findings of one of the most extraordinary pieces of reporting on child welfare I've seen anywhere in the country, a 4000-word dissection of how the wrong response to tragedy collapsed a child welfare system, published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on August 8, 2004. The headline said it all: "Child welfare gone haywire."

But let the Plain Dealer reporters explain it:

What has been described as a culture of hysteria had engulfed the Jane Edna Hunter Social Services Building. … Rather than risk censure for making a costly mistake, … social workers concluded that it was safer for them to just take the kids. The result was a six-year foster-care tidal wave … [The Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services] started taking kids away from their families at a furious pace, overwhelming its foster-home network and burdening taxpayers with huge increases in costs.

DCFS Director James McCafferty acknowledges that many of the thousands of additional foster-care placements may have been unnecessary.

The story was extraordinary in another respect. The Plain Dealer acknowledged the role of lousy, out-of-context media coverage in fueling the panic and contributing to the disastrous results.

Ultimately, the system righted itself, and child safety improved.

But now, child abuse fatalities and near fatalities are back on the front page. And guess who hasn't learned a damn thing from all those mistakes in the 1990s: The
Plain Dealer.

Not everyone at the Plain Dealer. The news coverage has been largely careful and straightforward, and one reporter, Diane Suchetka, has tried to add some context. But the editorial board has systematically ignored all the lessons from "Child welfare gone haywire." In the process they've increased the chances of more child abuse deaths, increased the odds that battered women will be driven underground and away from seeking help, and figuratively spat in the face of Joel Rutchick and Kera Ritter, the two excellent former Plain Dealer reporters who wrote "Child welfare gone haywire."

●The Plain Dealer editorial board resurrected the canard that, because children known-to-the system sometimes die, and because two such cases, and one that came close, happened in rapid succession, the county must be putting family preservation ahead of child safety – even though, using measures that are far more reliable than horror stories, Cuyahoga County has a better record for keeping children safe than many Ohio counties that take away proportionately more children. (Details are in NCCPR's report on Ohio child welfare).

●A columnist assumed that all parents who lose their children to foster care must have done terrible things to those children, and it's too easy to get them back. In fact, children often are taken when poverty is confused with neglect. Then the children are bounced from foster home to foster home, emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone, while their parents are forced to jump through meaningless hoops.

●Another columnist says bring back the orphanage – even though there is overwhelming evidence that warehousing children even in "good" orphanages is, by far, the worst option.

Countering these very myths is a large part of what "Child welfare gone haywire" was all about.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK…

As has been noted often on this Blog, we know what really works, and what does not, to curb child abuse tragedies.

A major national study found that taking away more children doesn't work. That's not as surprising as it may sound. In Cuyahoga County, a county with nearly 300,000 children, there were six children previously known-to-the-system killed by their caretakers in 2009. Though each is the worst form of tragedy, they also are needles in a haystack. You'll never find all the needles by trying to vacuum up the entire haystack.

We also know that little is more dangerous for children than falsely equating child removal with child safety. Two massive studies of more than 15,000 typical cases found that children placed in foster care typically fared far worse in later life than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes – even when those families got little or no help. Several other studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes, and the record of orphanages is worse.

The worst option of all is another 1990s-style foster-care panic, with terrified caseworkers rushing to tear apart families not to protect children but to protect themselves from winding up on the front page of The Plain Dealer.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University estimate that before they reach the age of ten, nearly one-third of all children in Cuyahoga County are put through the trauma of a child abuse investigation. And that's the countywide figure. Since it's unlikely that many of those investigations are occurring in, say, Pepper Pike, it is likely that such trauma has simply become one more hardship to endure for the majority of children in the City of Cleveland.

Now that figure, and entries into foster care, are likely to soar. Not only would that do enormous harm to the children needlessly investigated and taken, it also will overload caseworkers, making it less likely that they will find the children in real danger. That's why, in state after state, foster-care panics have been followed by increases in child abuse deaths.

None of this means no child ever should be taken away. But foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that must be used sparingly and in small doses. Nothing would hurt children more than returning to the days when Cuyahoga County prescribed mega-doses of foster care, and child welfare went haywire.

…AND WHAT DOES

What does work? Ameliorating the worst effects of poverty works. Curbing teen pregnancy works. Some child abuse prevention programs cited in some of Suchetka's stories work – but, as the stories point out, Cuyahoga County often is not using them.

They don't work perfectly. No state or county will be able to prevent every tragedy, not even every tragedy in which a child was "known to the system." But Cuyahoga's record, both when child welfare went haywire and then when it improved, shows that the way to reduce such tragedies is to do more, not less, to keep families together.

Unfortunately, there are signs that the county child welfare agency already has begun to cave. Cuyahoga DCFS is taking the classic steps seen elsewhere when agencies are in full cave-in mode:

• They've named an OBRC (Obligatory Blue-Ribbon Commission)
  
• They're "reviewing" all open cases and all child reunifications from January 2009 through the present. The problem with that is lack of any comparable review of all cases in which children are in foster care to see if all of them need to be in foster care. The message to the frontlines is obvious.
  

In "Child welfare gone haywire," even the politician most responsible for the panic in the 1990s, former County Commissioner Timothy McCormack, expressed some regrets. He said he had to do something but "I didn't know there was a better way."

This time, nobody has that excuse.

And, remarkably, one current County Commissioner apparently has learned from McCormack's mistakes and is standing up for Cuyahoga County's reforms. According to one recent Plain-Dealer story:

Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones criticized the media scrutiny of the agency over the recent cases and said the workers are dedicated to protecting children.

If you'd like to know more, too bad. Jones was relegated to the last 50 words of a 700 word story.

IN A FUTURE POST: HOW THE PLAIN DEALER EDITORIAL BOARD ENDANGERS BATTERED MOTHERS – AND ESPECIALLY THEIR CHILDREN.

Covering foster care in Los Angeles: Better boilerplate at the LA Times

Los Angeles Times reporter Kim Christensen proved Saturday that it is possible to cover the story of child abuse fatalities in Los Angeles County without the loaded language. Instead of the usual boilerplate paragraph falsely suggesting that child abuse deaths among children previously known to the county Department of Children and Family Services were increasing, Christensen offered this far more accurate summary:

"The county's child-welfare system -- and those in charge of it -- have come under intense scrutiny in the last two years as deaths among children have come to light."

Exactly.

Next week on the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

    On Monday: How editorials in the Cleveland Plain Dealer are putting Cuyahoga County's vulnerable children at risk, followed on Thursday by the special risk those editorials pose to the children of battered mothers.

    On Tuesday, more (relatively) good news from Florida, thanks to that state's child welfare waiver.

If it’s April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

See update at the end of this post.
Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse.
There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fools Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real scope of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op ed column follows a standard formula:

1. Take the most horrifying case to occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.
2. Jump immediately from that story to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports" alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror story, and often involve the confusion of poverty with neglect. Or…
3. Use only the total number of cases that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed" giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on a form, far more credibility than they deserves. A major federal study found that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.
4. Throw in huge lists of "symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be "signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number of other things.
5. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" maltreatment, the same standard often used in law to guide "mandated reporters."
6. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity.

It all comes from the same ends-justify-the-means mentality behind the egregiously-misleading report published by Every Child Matters last year – the mentality that says: what's a little distortion and exaggeration in the name of a good cause?
In fact, such distortion and exaggeration can do enormous harm to children. Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.
REALITY CHECK
NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions:

• Issue papers on Understanding Child Abuse Numbers and False Allegations: What the Data Really Show
• Our analysis of the latest comprehensive study of child abuse, which puts the scope of the problem into context
• Our Solutions pages, Doing Child Welfare Right and our Due Process Agenda.

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness" campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems even worse.
If only there were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.

UPDATE: Sure enough, the serial statistics abusers at the Child Welfare League of America are at it again. They’re launching a so-called “fact-a-day” campaign in April. Distortion-a-day is more like it. For instance, the “fact” scheduled for April 4 is: “More than 25 percent (25.2%) of the investigations determined that at least one child was a victim of abuse or neglect.”

For starters, that means more than 74 percent of reports are false. In addition, “determined” as a victim means only that one usually inexperienced, overwhelmed worker guessed that to be the case. And in at least half the states, workers are instructed to make the “determination” that abuse or neglect occurred even when there is more evidence of innocence.

Another page on the CWLA website - the one with the "symptoms list" equates poverty with neglect. CWLA instructs us to "Know what child abuse is, and what the signs are. Physical and sexual abuse clearly constitute maltreatment, but so does neglect, or the failure of parents or other caregivers to provide a child with needed food, clothing, and care."