In every way, at every point in the process, a foster-care panic hurts children. And so far, nearly a year-and-a-half after getting the job, New York City Administration for Children's Services Commissioner David Hansell has done nothing about it.
Buried on page 4 of a
report from New York City’s Independent Budget Office is an alarming
statistic: During City Fiscal Year 2017, the number of children thrown into
foster care at one stage of the process soared 30 percent over the previous
year. And in CFY 2018, which ended June
30, removals stayed at nearly that same, much higher, level.
This jibes with what a report from the Center of New York
City Affairs found. Their recent report, discussed in this
previous post to this Blog, covered a slightly different time frame, but found
almost exactly the same rate of increase for so-called “emergency” removals –
in which the city’s Administration for Children’s Services takes the child on-the-spot
and then goes to court to try to get a judge’s approval after-the-fact.
While depressing, the figure is not surprising. It’s a
classic foster-care panic, a sharp, sudden
increase in removals of children from their homes following the death of a child
“known to the system” that gets enormous media attention.
The ACS Excuse-of-the-Month club
But apparently, ACS has a new excuse to try to pretend this
foster-care panic doesn’t exist, and, it seems, the budget office bought it.
As you may recall, Excuse #1 was that removals hadn’t
increased at all. That
wasn’t true. Then cane Excuse #2:
Well, o.k., we admit the number of children torn from their families increased
but only at the same rate as the increase in child abuse investigations. That wasn’t true either. So now, behold Excuse #3: Supposedly, there
is no foster-care panic because the proportion of petitions dragging families into court that result in foster care has
declined a little.
That, of course, is not because the number of children
removed as declined. Rather it’s because the number of petitions, many of them
unnecessary, has skyrocketed at a rate even faster than removals.
Why has that happened? Not because there actually are vastly
more cases that need to be dragged into the court. An ACS caseworker explained the real reason
to the Center for New York City Affairs:
“At this point everybody’s so afraid, they’d rather cover their ass. Take the case to court and let the judge say no. Then we can document we tried. Nobody wants to end up with their face in the Daily News. They don’t want to face criminal charges.”
So the fact that foster care is rising proportionately more
slowly than petitions does not mean there’s no foster-care panic. Rather, it
means that when there is a foster-care panic, that panic infects every stage of
the process.
After a high-profile case makes headlines:
● Professionals who are required to report alleged child
abuse panic. The law in New York says they should report when they have “reasonable
cause to suspect” abuse or neglect. But now they’re terrified of being fired,
suspended, demoted, pilloried on the front page - or worse. So they are more likely to report anything
and everything no matter how absurd. So reports and investigations go up because of
a foster-care panic.
● In some cases, ACS workers are terrified of those same
consequences if they say a report is unfounded and then something goes wrong.
So they label a greater proportion of reports as “indicated” (New York’s term
for what most states call “substantiated”). In New York, it means only that the caseworker
thinks there is “some credible evidence” of abuse or neglect – even if there’s
more evidence of innocence. So the rate of substantiation increases
because of a foster-care panic.
● In other cases, those same workers are terrified of those
same consequences if they decide that,
So they file vastly more court
petitions and drag far more families into court because of a foster care panic.
● In still other cases, those same workers are terrified of
those same consequences if they decide only to drag the family into court. So
they remove the child on the spot. So
the number of children thrown into foster care increases because of a
foster-care panic.
In short, the whole point of a foster-care panic is that it
lowers the threshold for interfering in a family at every stage of the process.
And while ACS seeks to portray its approach as more
benevolent – see, we’re only seeking court supervision, not foster care – that also
is probably misleading.
New York City is unusual in the extent to which high quality
defense counsel is available to indigent families caught in the ACS net. With their own support staff, they can craft
alternatives to the usual “cookie cutter” service plans offered by ACS, and
show judges that there are ways to keep children safe in their own homes even
when ACS would prefer to remove the children.
That means both that judges are less likely to rubber-stamp
ACS foster care recommendations and ACS, knowing it will face real opposition,
is less likely to recommend foster care where it’s not necessary.
Past ACS administrations do deserve credit for supporting
this approach to family defense, even
as other places in New York State reject it.
Why did the IBO seem to buy it?
I don’t know why the Independent Budget Office seems to have
bought into the latest installment from the ACS Excuse of the Month Club. But
it might be because they’ve also bought into the Big
Lie of American child welfare.
Repeatedly, the report claims that there is a “natural tension” between
the goals of keeping children safe and keeping families together.
In other words, IBO appears to accept the false assumption
that family preservation is inherently risky but if you tear apart the family
you might traumatize the child terribly but at least she or he will be
physically safe.
But in the overwhelming majority of cases, family
preservation isn’t just more humane than foster care, it’s safer than foster care. There is a tension, alright, but there is
nothing natural about it. It is
artificial, created by those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach to
child welfare, and politicians seeking their 15 minutes of fame at children’s
expense.
In fact, the problem with foster-care panics, at every stage
in the process, is that they harm children.
Children are harmed when they are victimized by traumatic
investigations and stripsearches. Children
are harmed when cases are wrongly substantiated and their parents wind up
barred from jobs working with children because they’re listed in a
central registry of alleged child abusers with little or no way out. Children are harmed when families are forced
to jump through all sorts of meaningless hoops while under court supervision. Here’s
a case in point. Children are, of
course, harmed by needless foster care.
And children are harmed when all those extra investigations,
all that extra court-ordered supervision and all that needless foster care
steals the time of workers from finding children in real danger who really do
need to be taken from their homes.
In every way, at every point in the process, a foster-care
panic hurts children. And so far, nearly a year-and-a-half after getting the
job, ACS Commissioner David Hansell has done nothing about it. Instead, he's cranked up the ACS excuse machine to try to persuade us that what's right before our eyes isn't happening.
