In
a field filled with subjectivity and bias, it’s sometimes assumed that
one determination is easy: figuring out if a death was caused by child
maltreatment.
In fact, that’s often as subjective as everything else. I
usually illustrate this with the following hypothetical.
Early one Sunday morning, a young child finds a way to unlatch
the back door while his parents are asleep. He wanders off, falls into a body
of water and drowns. Accident or neglect? If the body of water is a pool behind
a McMansion, it probably will be labeled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a
trailer park, it probably will be labeled neglect.
But no hypothetical can demonstrate how much cruelty such
subjectivity can inflict on children. For that, only real life will do.
Consider the story of the Wartena family – mother, father, and
five children – who were passing through Amarillo, Texas, on their way
home to California last month.
Seven-year-old Alexis Wartena, who was autistic and fascinated
by water, opened a broken latch on their hotel room door and left the room. She
wandered to a nearby lake and drowned.
The
Amarillo police, who apparently watch too many episodes of Law
& Order, seem to have jumped immediately to the conclusion that the
parents must have killed the little girl. So they allegedly browbeat the
parents for 12 hours, possibly delaying the search for the child in the
process.
Emotional “torture”
The
family’s pro-bono attorney, Jesse Quackenbush, calls what
was done to the girl’s mother emotional “torture.”
But it was
mild compared to the emotional torture endured by Alexis’ siblings, aged 6, 5,
4 and 2. At the worst moment of their lives, the moment when they most needed
the comfort of their parents, they were torn away from them by strangers –
child protective services workers – and consigned to foster care, with no
idea when or if they’d ever go back. The parents talk about the family’s ordeal here.
For children of this age it can feel like a kidnapping; you
can’t explain good intentions to a two-year-old. And young children often
believe anything that happens to them somehow was caused by them. So these
children may well have felt the death of their sister somehow was their fault
and now they were being punished. They may carry these scars forever.
For one
child, the harm was not just emotional. Child Protective Services admits that
one of the children was physically abused in foster care, which one could
almost have expected giventhe high rates of abuse in foster care. And the Wartena children
were subjected to the special hellscape that is Texas foster care.
Once the
child was abused in foster care, CPS gave all the children back. How did parents who supposedly
were a terrible threat to their children instantly become no threat right after
one of the children was abused in foster care?
Unless, of course, they never really needed to be taken away at
all.
CPS was only protecting itself
The harm inflicted on this family by CPS had nothing to do with
protecting children and everything to do with protecting CPS. The workers
probably were terrified of having the next high-profile tragedy on their
caseload.
What are the odds this would have happened had the tragic
accident occurred in that hypothetical backyard pool, instead of a pond behind
a hotel where the rooms rent for an average of $67.50 per night?
We don’t need to rely on hypotheticals here, either.
Several
weeks ago, I wrote about a Michigan case in which a little boy died and the
parents really did kill him. But in the
case of Ricky Holland, the murderers were affluent adoptive parents.
During the
time after Ricky Holland disappeared but his body had not yet been found,
Michigan child protective services not only left Ricky’s siblings in the home,
they actually gave the Hollands final approval to adopt
another foster child in their care. “This worker has no concerns regarding the
safety of the other children,” a CPS caseworker wrote in a report.
One more burden?
Even after
all they’ve endured, the Wartena family may have to bear still another burden –
if, that is, they live in a community where the latest fad in child
welfare, predictive
analytics, is taking off. After all, what would an algorithm say about a
family in which one child died and the other children already been taken away
and thrown into foster care?
Wherever predictive analytics rules, families like the Wartenas
will be under suspicion forever.
This
column was co-authored by Johana Scot, executive director of the Parent Guidance Centerin
Austin.
