Reports issued by consultants tend to be diplomatic
documents. One has to use genteel language when criticizing the people who
hired you in the first place.
Nevertheless, there’s no mistaking the message from a
recent report by the highly respected Child Welfare Policy and Practice
Group concerning child welfare in Iowa.
The report found that recent policy changes made by the state Department
of Human Services in the wake of high-profile tragedies have made things worse.
And things weren’t good to begin with.
Iowa has long been an extreme outlier, tearing apart
families at one of the highest rates in America. Then, over a little more than a year, four
high-profile cases of vicious, sometimes fatal abuse of children “known to the
system” made headlines.
Given that, in every one of these cases, the alleged
perpetrators were foster parents who had adopted the children they allegedly abused,
one might think this might finally lead to reforms aimed at curbing needless
removal.
But that underestimates the capacity of child welfare
systems – and often, sadly, the press and the public -- for double
standards. Had there been four separate
cases of horrific abuse by birth parents making the front page of newspapers in
a relatively small state day after day we all know that everyone would be
scapegoating efforts to keep families together and demanding that we take away
more children.
Yet even in the wake of what newspapers would normally call
a “spate” of child abuse tragedies involving foster and adoptive parents, there
is no media outcry demanding that Iowa curb its obscene rate of tearing apart
families. (In fact, I don’t think policy
in either direction should be based
on horror stories – Iowa should curb its obscene rate of removal not
because of horror stories, but because of the data on how harmful such removal
is to children.)
DHS moves full-speed backwards
But DHS has done nothing to curb needless removal. On the
contrary, even though the abuse occurred in foster care, DHS has made changes
that actually increase the likelihood that even more children will be funneled
into the very system where these children were tortured.
Sadly that is not unusual. As
I first noted long ago, foster-care panics – huge spikes in removals of
children from their homes in the wake of horror stories – almost never work in
reverse.
So, the consultants tell us, Iowa curbed screening of
reports alleging child abuse and neglect.
The proportion accepted for investigation soared from 50 percent to 65
percent. And of the reports accepted,
the proportion diverted to a more family friendly approach known as “differential
response” was reduced. That happened
even though 25 separate studies have found that differential
response is safe – and the Child Welfare Group found that Iowa’s
differential response program “was working as intended and that outcomes
overall were positive.”
Again the response is unsurprising. When the first of the
horror story cases made headlines, supporters of Iowa’s take-the-child-and-run
approach rushed to scapegoat differential response -even though there was no evidence that the
case in question ever
involved the use of differential response.
The result of all this is a 43 percent increase in the
number of families subjected to a child abuse investigation in Iowa.
Here’s what the consultants have to say about it:
These policy measures, the broadening of intake and the lowering of screen‐out rates, are familiar; they follow a pattern often taken by states in the wake of child fatalities or other high profile cases in well intentioned attempts to ensure children’s safety. They have, however, in the reviewers’ experience, seldom if ever had the intended effect. Such actions can, in fact, serve to place more children at risk by adding to workload requirements that are frequently already overwhelming and broadening the scope of intervention far beyond the expertise or experience of child welfare personnel.
One fact that is frequently lost in child welfare reform efforts is that child protection intervention can, if too broadly targeted or poorly executed, cause great harm, inflicting trauma on children and families that has far worse effects than the maltreatment it is intended to prevent in all except the minority of particularly egregious incidents.
Other key findings
That was only the beginning. As I read the report, a theme
emerging over and over is that almost everything that exists to help families
and children on paper in Iowa doesn’t function that way in real life.
● On paper, Iowa embraces the concept of family team
meetings, in which everyone important in a child’s life gets together to work
out a plan to keep the child safe. In practice, extended family, friends and
others often are left out, and the agency presents a “cookie cutter” service
plan instead of something geared to what the family really needs. In other
words, DHS does exactly what DHS would have done had there been no family team
meeting.
● Although people interviewed by the consultants claimed
that a wide array of services are available to families, as I read the
consultants’ report, the services appear to be skewed heavily toward providing
the kinds of help that make
the helpers feel good – endless “counseling” and “parent education” instead
of the help families need, which often involves concrete help with things like
housing, child care and other supports to ameliorate the worst effects of
poverty.
Indeed some of those consulted by the consultants said that
the workers who are supposed to support families actually do little more than
monitor them. Others said the people who do these jobs are not well-qualified
to do much else.
● DHS misuses and overuses the worst form of “care” – parking
children in shelters. One youth told
the consultants: “No healing takes place in shelter care.”
●Foster parent complaints included “disrespectful treatment when,
as often happens, they are subjects of unwarranted maltreatment reports.” In
fact, the overwhelming
majority of all maltreatment reports are unwarranted, regardless of who is
accused. But I highlight this common complaint here because, just once, I’d
like to hear an Iowa foster parent say: “The agency really needs us. If this is how they treat us, imagine how they treat the
birth parents!”
● Both parents and children rarely saw their own lawyers at
any time except at court hearings. The consultants were too polite to say that
that means, so I will: It means neither parents nor children typically get
anything approaching adequate legal representation. It means everyone has to rely on DHS’ version
of the facts. And that means DHS almost always gets whatever it wants.
● The lawyers don’t seem to be the only ones who are out of
touch. Consider one of the report’s top
priority recommendations:
Review requirements for having face‐to‐face contacts with parents and other caregivers and for coordination between case managers and [caseworkers who work with families] to ensure that there is appropriate emphasis on having immediate, frequent, and purposeful contacts with parents, particularly parents of children in out of home care, to develop and implement a plan to achieve reunification or other timely permanency outside of foster care. Strongly consider requiring regular face‐to‐face contact with parents in their places of residence. [Emphasis added.]
Now, let’s stop and think about that last sentence for a
moment.
What kind of child
welfare agency is so backwards, so utterly out-of-touch with best practice - or
even minimally adequate practice - that it needs outside consultants to tell it
that workers who work with families actually ought to make regular face-to-face
contact with those families in their own homes?
The one that has been destroying the lives of children in
Iowa for decades.
