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| Family defenders testify before the New York City Council about how the city child welfare agency abuses its power to throw children into foster care in "emergencies." |
We all know the classic party line from child welfare
agencies: Hey, they tell us, we don’t
take children, a judge has to approve everything we do, so there’s due process
for families.
As it happens, in a
column for Youth Today last
week, I just cited New York City as an example of why this isn’t true. At a New York City Council hearing last week,
the evidence that the claim is false became even more compelling.
Nearly two decades ago, in a case brought by NCCPR’s Vice
President, a federal appellate court found
widespread abuse of the emergency removal power. But those abuses have
continued under one ACS administration after another – causing enormous
needless trauma for thousands of children.
The very act of taking the child first and going to court
later further stacks the deck against families at that first court
hearing. That hearing usually is
supposed to take place in roughly one to three days - though ACS
has been known to stall.
The
number ACS finally disclosed
And that makes a number ACS finally owned up to this week
even more shocking: For months, ACS said it just didn’t have a way to count how
many times, at that first hearing, judges say, in effect: “This case is a load
of b.s.” and send the child home – or ACS simply admits as much – or, more
likely, comes up with some way to save face and let the children go home.
For an
example of such a case, and how it traumatized the children, listen to thisexcellent documentary from NPR’s LatinoUSA – in particular the section that starts at 17:05 in:
But at a City
Council hearing last week, ACS produced a number. ACS says that in City Fiscal Year 2018 20 to
25 percent of “emergency” removals were such non-emergencies that the children
could go home at that very first hearing.
That’s roughly between 370 and 460 children torn from
everyone they know and love, not knowing what would happen next, enduring a
trauma that, if a child is young enough, is akin to a kidnapping - only to find
that, as soon as someone other than ACS itself looked at the facts, they could
go right home again.
(In fact the number of needless “emergency” removals
probably is a lot higher, given the low standard of proof required to hold a
child in foster care and given one fact that never changes: Judges know that
they can rubber-stamp ACS hundreds of times and, though the children may suffer
terribly, the judge is safe. Overrule ACS once and have something go wrong and
the judge’s career can be over.)
And if the harm to these children isn’t bad enough, think of
all the time, money and effort wasted on these cases – time, money and effort that
was, in effect, stolen from finding children in real danger.
Of course ACS Commissioner David Hansell wasn’t about to
admit his agency was wrong to take away those hundreds of children. According to a story
in the Chronicle of Social Change, Hansell said that, in most cases, at that
first hearing
“ACS has consented,” to a judge’s decision to
return a child home — because, for example, a supervision plan had been put in
place with the parents or other family members, or an order of protection had been
approved against an abuser in the household.
But we’re talking about removals that often last a few days
or less – that’s long enough to traumatize a child but short enough to come up
with better alternatives – if you doubt it, listen to that Latino USA story.
Even assuming the ACS caseworkers got the basic facts right
– and that’s sometimes a stretch – consider the very example Hansell cites:
Instead of removing the child while awaiting that order of
protection how about removing the alleged abuser? There’s a mechanism for that: It’s called
“arrest.” There’s even a placement
available: It’s called “jail.”
As Tehra Coles, litigation supervisor for parent defense at
the Center for Family Representation, said at the hearing:
Many
of the cases filed, in our view, did not need a court filing. Any risk to a
child could have been mitigated by connecting the parents to needed services.
Is ACS backsliding on protecting children of battered mothers?
The hearing also raises new questions about how ACS is
approaching cases involving domestic violence.
Hansell said that one reason for a big increase in court
cases filed against families from 2015 to 2017 was “a sharp increase in the
number of indicated investigations with domestic violence present in the home.”
That can mean a lot of different things. But, thanks to another lawsuit (in which,
again, co-counsel for the plaintiffs was NCCPR’s Vice President) it happens to
be illegal in New York City, in fact in all of New York State, to take away
children because they witnessed domestic violence – typically the father or
another man beating up the mother.
That’s because all the inherent trauma of removal actually
is worsened for the child if that child is being removed from a mother who was,
herself, a victim of domestic violence.
Indeed, during testimony in the class-action lawsuit one
expert said that, for the child this is “tantamount to pouring salt
into an open wound.”
Under past administrations ACS did fairly well in complying
with the consent decree that emerged from this lawsuit. Indeed, compared to much
of the rest of the country, New York City was a leader.
But Hansell’s whole tenure at ACS has been marked by retreat
from reform and dissembling about data.
His comment at the hearing raises questions about whether ACS is
backsliding here as well.
