Studies have found abuse in at least one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The record of group homes is worse. So when Arizona’s so-called “Department of Child Safety” needlessly tore four little girls from their father and threw them into separate group homes, they should have known what was likely to happen.
You spanked
your ten-year-old boy too hard. We have
to punish you for this. So to punish you we’re going to arrange to have two of
your daughters sexually abused. That’ll teach you a lesson!
Absurd,
right? No one could possibly be so cruel
– and so shortsighted. But while the
part about the child protective services agency arranging the sexual abuse on
purpose is entirely made up, everything else really happened. And while of course no child protective
services agency would try to do this to a child on purpose, the caseworkers
should have known that the odds were better than 50/50 that something like this
would happen.
Here’s
the actual story, as told by the Arizona
Republic in the first installment of a series following five families over
two years. In addition to the print
stories, these families are the subject of a documentary that premiered in
Arizona on Nov. 11. The Republic included this except about the
case of Stephan McCray and his children.
Whichever is the case, had McCray
been white and middle class, odds are he simply would have been sent off to
“counseling” with a private therapist and that would have been the end of
it. But, of course, he is neither. (He’s also a follower of the Nation of Islam,
which, he says, further discomfited the white, middle-class caseworkers he
dealt with.)
Though there was never any
allegation that McCray abused or neglected his other four children, all of them
were taken – possibly illegally.
According
to the story:
Four of [the children] shouldn’t have been taken from him, [McCray] says: Stephan Jr. was the only child listed in the court order, so why were all five removed? But when he asks DCS, he says he’s told too bad, his attorney should have caught the error.
.
McCray also was charged criminally.
McCray’s own mother – a former
foster parent – was ready and willing to take the children. But she was turned
down - because she didn’t see her son exactly the way DCS did – as a danger to
his children.
What did
DCS think was going to happen? Did they
think McCray would sneak into his mother’s home through an open window in the
middle of the night to spank his kids?
And then,
Stephan and his mother say, two of the young girls were sexually abused.
High rates of abuse
in foster care
Multiple studies have found abuse in
one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes. The record of group homes and
institutions is even worse. Thus, DCS
had every reason to know that if they took five young children and placed them
in five separate group homes, at least one of them was likely to be abused
there.
Nevertheless
the “Department of Child Safety” took away four children who they never so much as alleged were abused in their own homes and placed them at enormously high risk of abuse. And that, of course, is
on top of all the emotional trauma inflicted on the children by being taken
from their father, their extended family and each other.
Ultimately,
DCS decided it would be o.k. to place the children with their grandmother after
all. Then, two years after they were
removed, the children were reunited with their father – much the worse for the
experience.
For the "Department of Child Safety," it’s not really about child safety
The agency
name notwithstanding, “child safety” was never really the point.
Critics of
the system often say that it is not really a child protection system at all;
it’s a parent punishment system. The
child welfare establishment denies this. So it was striking to find a 30-year
veteran of that establishment actually admit as much, albeit accidentally.
Karen Kline, a former caseworker
who now runs child welfare initiatives for something called the Family
Involvement Center. In the story and the
documentary, she pays the usual lip service to understanding the trauma of
removal. But when she is asked about
allegations by McCray and his mother that the case was affected by racial bias,
she replies:
Case managers get training in racial and cultural sensitivity, she says. But it's wrong to equate a punishment for spanking with racial bias, she says. [Emphasis added.]
Kline is
wrong. Punishing a parent for spanking might not be racial bias if all parents
who spanked their children were treated the same way. An overwhelming
body of research tells us they are not.
But more
revealing is Kline’s apparent acknowledgment that the primary purpose here was
to punish the parent. That would help
explain how easy it was for DCS to be blinded to all the harm the agency was
doing to the children.
Other typical blunders
The story reveals other examples of
child welfare practices that are as typical as they are harmful to children.
● One of
the strikes against McCray in the spanking case was the fact that he’d been in
trouble with DCS before – for what was, in fact, a classic example of child
welfare confusing poverty with neglect. As the story explains:
Five years earlier, DCS checked out complaints of neglect against him after he left his younger children alone in his apartment while he ran to a school, less than a block away, to walk his daughter home from kindergarten.
For that the children were placed
for two years in kinship foster care – with the same grandmother DCS later
would say was unfit to be a caretaker.
● At one point, McCray was
criticized for missing drug testing, something required because he was on
probation due to the criminal charge.
But why were drug tests ever ordered in the first place? There is nothing in the story suggesting McCray
abused drugs.
● McCray
pled guilty to the criminal charge – because, his lawyer said, if he fought it
the case would drag on and on, foster care would be prolonged, and DCS then could
turn around and use the very fact of the delay to move to terminate his
parental rights. But that means he has a
criminal record – so it’s harder to get a job.
● At one
point, he had a job but he lost it “due to the demands of court hearings,
classes and meetings mandated by the state plan to reunify him with his kids.” Then, not having a job itself became an
obstacle to getting his children back.
● The final
obstacle was housing – making the McCray children among the estimated 30
percent of foster children who were kept away from their families because of housing. Ultimately, as McCray himself notes, DCS really
did help with that – but it never should have been an issue at all.
None of
this agency behavior would make sense in a real child protection system. It
makes perfect sense in a parent punishment system.
