Nothing better sums up the state of Iowa child welfare than
one sentence buried amid the 2,500 words of a Des Moines Register story
Sunday: A child is trapped in foster
care for four years because her mother “only had an efficiency apartment.”
In a classic example of the vicious, lets-bash-those-“bad-parents”-no-matter-how-much-we-hurt-kids-in-the-process
mentality that permeates the Iowa system, the state Department of Human
Services punished a child for four years because Mom couldn’t afford a
one-bedroom apartment.
And it’s hard to imagine anything that better explains the
fact that Iowa actually spends
a lot on child welfare, but gets horrific results than the fact that
helping Mom pay for that one bedroom apartment would have cost vastly less than
four years of foster care.
Sadly, this is not unusual.
Nationwide, 30 percent of America’s foster children could
be home right now if their parents had adequate housing. In Iowa, which
takes away children at one of
the highest rates in the nation, the proportion almost certainly is even
higher.
Reading between the lines
There are other messages between the lines in the Register story, almost all of them
dismal.
● Iowa is almost certainly in the midst of a foster-care
panic, a sharp, sudden surge in children torn needlessly from everyone they
know and love. That often happens when
child abuse deaths are in the news, as they are now in Iowa. The fact that, in
this case, the children who died were children who had been adopted by their
foster parents doesn’t matter.
According to the tortured logic of Iowa DHS, when two
children placed in foster care die in their adoptive homes (and a third suffers
horrific abuse before escaping) the solution is to place more children in
foster care.
● The Register
story implies that the panic is inevitable – after all, more people are
reporting alleged abuse and “more children are being found to be abused” so it
stands to reason there are more children who need to be taken, right?
Wrong.
For starters, this leaves out the fact that, even before any
current panic, Iowa has been tearing apart families at a vastly higher rate
than most of the nation (more on that below). But also, when high-profile cases
are in the news, and anyone and everyone is being urged to report anything and everything,
what you get is a massive increase in false reports, usually by well-meaning
people who suddenly decide that, say, a neighbor’s behavior just might be
suspicious.
Child welfare agencies with strong leadership don’t give in
to this.
That’s the lesson from Pennsylvania, where individual
counties run child welfare.
When that state experienced a similar surge in reports after
the sex abuse scandal involving Jerry Sandusky (who, by the way, was
a foster parent), the system in Philadelphia (the Iowa of big cities – it’s
long taken children at a rate far above the rate in most major metropolitan
areas) did indeed see an increase in removals.
But Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County did not – because the
reformer who has run that system for decades understood that most of the new
reports were false – and he refused to tolerate a foster-care panic.
Iowa is an extreme outlier
● Foster-care panics cause enormous harm to children in any
state. They are worse, of course, in a state that starts out tearing apart
families at one of the highest rates in the nation. The Register
mentioned in passing that Iowa removes children from their homes “at a higher
rate than most other states…” but that’s an understatement. Iowa
is an extreme outlier.
● The Register
story claims that some groups want to keep more children “found in risky
situations” with their parents or relatives. That’s true. But we don’t just want to do that and go
away. We support safe, proven
alternatives that remove the risk instead of the child.
Foster care, on the other hand, with its high rate of abuse
and enormous inherent emotional trauma is most definitely a “risky situation.” In fact, for the overwhelming majority of
children the overwhelming majority of the time family preservation is the safer choice. (And, for the record, an
efficiency apartment is not a “risky situation” to begin with.)
● The story also implies that the fact that there is far more abuse in foster care than suggested by
Iowa’s official statistics is merely the claim of one former foster child. On the contrary, it’s what we know from one
major study after another.
Iowa makes way too much use of “shelters”
● Still another shocking fact about Iowa child welfare
emerges from the story – with no apparent recognition of just how shocking it
is: the extent to which Iowa relies on what is, by far, the worst option for
children, institutionalizing them in “shelters.”
The San Francisco
Chronicle is only the latest
in a long line of newspapers to expose the
horrors of such places. But more
important, even when there is no actual physical abuse, the very existence of
this sort of placement is barbaric – shelters are that harmful to children.
That’s why states such as Alabama and New Jersey have sharply – and
successfully - restricted their use.
(One small bit of good news: The Alabama child welfare leader who
implemented the curbs on shelters and other
successful reforms, is Paul Vincent, who’s been hired to assess the
situation in Iowa.)
Much the same is true of “residential treatment” – another
option that has been found harmful in study after study – and again, there are
far better alternatives. Details
here. (See especially the All Purpose Foster Care-Industrial Complex Excuse
Checklist on Page 3, which has responses to all the nonsense one typically
hears from shelter directors.)
● Almost everyone in child welfare pays lip service to
“prevention.” You never hear anyone say “boy, if there’s one thing I hate it’s
prevention!” But usually, it’s the wrong kind of “prevention.” There’s a very
good chance that the mother who lived in that efficiency apartment was forced
into “counseling” and “parent education.” That probably made it that much
harder for her to search for what she really needed – better housing and the
job necessary to afford better housing.
There is a difference between prevention that involves
making the helpers feel good and actually providing what families need. There’s
more discussion of this here.
● Even worse, the new director of the Iowa Department of
Human Services, Jerry Foxhoven, says he won’t even bother trying to get the
federal government to change financial
incentives that encourage foster care and discourage better
alternatives. In fact, Foxhoven can
barely manage even the usual lip service. From the story:
Foxhoven says he does believe in the concept
that "it's a lot easier for everybody to buy smoke alarms than fire
trucks." But, he added, "you still need fire trucks."
Unfortunately, in child welfare, the “fire trucks” too often
are like the kind in the science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451.
Turning adoptive parents into second-class parents
● Democrats in the legislature aren’t helping. They, too,
are ignoring the elephant in the room – Iowa’s obscene rate-of-removal,
focusing instead on scapegoating foster parents who happen to be homeschoolers
and demanding “medical check-ups” for every child in foster care and every
child receiving an adoption subsidy.
Of course there already are requirements that foster
children get medical check-ups.
When it comes to adoptive families, what the Democrats
really want is another chance for government to spy on families.
The time to make sure an adoptive placement is safe is before it happens. Something that could be done fairly easily
were Iowa not rushing to tear apart families, creasing pressure for
quick-and-dirty slipshod adoptive placements.
The whole point of adoption is that the adoptive parent is
the child’s parent, period. When you make adoptive parents second-class parents,
subject to any form of restriction or oversight that does not apply to every
other parent you undermine the emotional security of the children – and
providing that kind of security is the whole point of adoption. Otherwise, it’s
just another word for foster care.
And why, by the way, should this extra government scrutiny
be limited to adoptive parents who get subsidies, as Democrats propose? Are they presumed to be worse parents than
wealthy adoptive parents who don’t need such assistance? Or is it just that
receiving a government benefit somehow is supposed to give the government extra
leverage to invade family privacy.
If that’s the case, then please feel free to do this – just
as soon as you also pass a law requiring government audits of how we older
Americans are spending our Social Security checks.
The bigger danger is in foster care
● And finally, the Register
takes pains to point out that most children “known to the system” who are
harmed are not foster children who were adopted by their foster parents. That leaves the false implication that abuse
in foster care is extremely rare and it’s birth parents who are the real
danger.
But the reason a majority of children “known to the system”
who are hurt are hurt in their own homes has nothing to do with comparative
danger and everything to do with the immutable laws of mathematics: The
majority of Iowa children who are abused are abused in their own homes because,
despite the best efforts of the Iowa Department of Human Services, the majority
of Iowa children still live in their
own homes. Proportionately, there is every indication that foster care is more
dangerous – for all sorts of reasons, including foster children abusing each
other.
And even were it not so dangerous in terms of abuse and
neglect, the trauma of placement itself is so great that two
massive studies of more than 15,000 typical cases found that children left
in their own homes typically fared better than comparably-maltreated children
placed in foster care.
None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or
his parents. But it means you’d better
be damn sure that the child really is in so much danger at home that foster
care is a less harmful alternative.
For starters, Iowa DHS could stop taking away children when
they deem a parent’s apartment too small.
