We don't have to have a "child protection"
system that destroys children in order to save them. We can create a system
that intrudes far less often on innocent families, places far fewer children in
foster care and reaches many more children who really have been abused. And it
can be done without spending more money. These are some of the ways to do it:
1. Reverse financial incentives that encourage
foster care and discourage programs to keep children out of foster care.
Because foster care is what child savers have always wanted to provide, foster
care is where the money is. The federal government spends at least nine times
more on foster care than on services to keep families together[1]
-- and that's a conservative
estimate. In states where local governments make placement decisions, state
reimbursement formulas usually are similarly skewed. As a result, although
family preservation costs less in total dollars, it may cost more for local
decision makers because reimbursement formulas are geared to what child savers
want instead of what children need. The National Commission on Children found
that these incentives are a key reason for needless foster care placement.[2] For more on
financial incentives, see Family
Preservation Issue Paper 12.
The
new federal adoption law adds a new layer of incentives without removing the
old. State and sometimes local governments still are reimbursed for much of the
cost for each day they keep a child in foster care. But now they also receive
bounties for every child placed in an adoptive home over a specified number.
(See Family Preservation Issue
Paper 14, Family Preservation and Adoption.) So now there are incentives to
keep children in foster care and incentives to find adoptive homes - but no
incentives to keep children in or return them to their own homes.
2.
A rational system must be established for screening calls to child
protective hotlines. Hotline workers must be trained to ask detailed
questions of callers and to screen out calls where there is not
"reasonable cause to suspect" maltreatment.
The argument against screening is that some real cases
will be missed. That is true. But we miss far more real cases now by
overwhelming protective workers with false allegations and trivial cases. Other
emergency services recognize this. Calls for ambulances are screened for
seriousness, for example. And that screening continues even though dispatchers
sometimes make mistakes. That's because the people who run these systems
know that if they sent out an ambulance for every call, they soon would run out
of ambulances and more people in real danger would suffer. The child savers
need to learn the same lesson.
For
the same reason, hotlines should refuse to accept the reports repeatedly found
to be least reliable: anonymous reports. On most cases, people who report
maltreatment should retain the right to keep their names secret from the person
they are turning in, but not from Child Protective Services.
3.
Narrow the definition of neglect to make it more difficult to confuse
neglect with poverty. If a child is endangered because of unsafe housing,
for example, the law should require the state to fix up the housing or move the
entire family, but it should not permit the removal of the child.
4.
When children are removed on a worker's own authority, require daily visits
between children and parents in most cases, until a full-scale trial is held.
No matter how much we try to narrow laws, child savers will find ways around
it. But if they are forced to bear the burden of arranging daily visits between
children and parents whenever they remove children on their own authority, they
are likely to use far more care when exercising that authority – and the daily
visits will help ease the trauma of removal for children.
5.
Prohibit searches of homes and strip-searches of children without either the
informed consent of the parents or a warrant based on "probable
cause" to believe maltreatment has occurred. Parents must be told they
have the right to refuse search requests without a warrant and CPS workers must
be prohibited from holding such refusals against parents.
6.
Improve training and experience requirements for CPS workers -- with
commensurate improvements in pay and working conditions. This
recommendation comes with a caveat: Child savers often treat it as a panacea.
They argue that there is nothing wrong with the system that better-trained
workers won't cure, and we should keep everything in place until the workers
are trained perfectly. In fact, much of the training is done by child savers,
making it useless or worse. The training director for the Homebuilders family
preservation program says she often has to "untrain" the workers who
come to her. And America remains a government of laws, not of caseworkers. Even
perfect training is no substitute for due process of law.
There
are many other ways the system can be reformed. Some of them are in our Family Preservation Issue
Papers and in our publication, Eight Ways
to do Child Welfare Right. Contact us and we'll be glad to tell you
more.
1. Testimony of Betsy Rosenbaum, American Public
Human Services Association before the House Ways and Means Committee
Subcommittee on Human Resources, May 10, 2001. Rosenbaum cited Congressional
Budget Office estimates Back to Text.
2. National Commission on Children, Beyond Rhetoric:
A New American Agenda for Children and Families (Washington, DC: May,
1991), p.290. Back to Text.
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