Usually updated
weekly, usually on Mondays
By Richard Wexler, NCCPR Executive Director
LOOK WHO’S TALKING!
NCCPR
has long supported allowing child welfare agencies to comment on specific
cases, just as we support opening court hearings in child maltreatment cases
and creating a rebuttable presumption that almost all documents in such cases
are open records.
The
reason for this is to overcome the “veto of silence” in cases where a family
tells a journalist that a child was wrongfully removed and the agency
spokesperson heaves a theatrical sigh and tells the reporter: “Oh, there’s
really so much more to it and we wish we could tell you, really
we do, but we just can’t – confidentiality, you know.” Too often, reporters accept this veto of
silence and abandon the story – especially when they never really wanted to
pursue this kind of story in the first place.
The
other reason to give agencies this right is that sometimes there really is
“more to it” and in those cases, it’s important that the agency be able to
vindicate itself.
But I
was never under any illusion that, if given this power, child welfare agencies
would tell the whole truth and never shade facts or try to mislead
reporters. And in Texas they’re serving
up the half-truths with a heaping helping of hypocrisy on the side.
Texas
is one of those states where the child welfare agency routinely hides behind
“confidentiality” and refuses to comment.
And yet, in the case of the Eldorado 464, the agency is blabbing
away. I suppose they could claim that
there is no confidentiality issue because they’re talking about a whole group
of cases, not just one. But from the
beginning, Texas CPS has urged the courts to treat this as one case, and, in
fact, to treat the YFZ ranch as one family.
They can’t have it both ways.
Furthermore,
many of the children have the same last names, and their dress makes the girls
and women, in particular, quite conspicuous.
So whatever issues of individual privacy apply in other cases would
apply here.
That
doesn’t mean I want Texas CPS to stop talking.
On the contrary – I’d like to see this case become a precedent. I’d like to see reporters refuse to accept
the veto of silence on any other case, now that Texas CPS has shown that its
claims about confidentiality are a sham.
And it
would be nice if the claims from Texas CPS, which always seems to come up with
a new “revelation” just when it needs one, were treated with a little more
skepticism.
The
most prominent example actually is one that doesn’t bother me all that much:
that’s the claim about the number of women who are underage and pregnant and/or
have children of their own. The claim
has been widely accepted as fact, with little details, like the fact that CPS
is simply guessing based on how old the mothers look to them, relegated to the
fine print in many news accounts. There
also is an incentive for the women to lie and say they are underage. As noted
on this Blog before, in the eyes of Texas CPS if you’re a 17-year-old mother
you’re considered a victim and your children can stay with you, if you’re 18
you’re an abuser and your children are consigned to foster care on their own.
But, as
I said, this one doesn’t bother me as much because age isn’t the only reason to
be concerned about the fate of some of the women. If a woman of any age is coerced into a “spiritual marriage” or a
legal marriage, or if a woman or any age, married or not, is forced to have
sex, that’s rape. That’s why some form
of intervention was necessary in this case, and that’s why it’s quite possible
that some of the children needed to be taken from the ranch, though not from
their mothers.
But
there have been other claims from CPS that are more problematic.
Remember the one about some kind of document
concerning cyanide, obviously offered up to evoke images of Jonestown? Early on, a spokesman for Texas’ own
Department of Public Safety told the Deseret
News "Those
were simply pages from a first-aid book, nothing more."
And
then, just as people were wondering why, if the issue is abuse of teenage
girls, younger children had to be taken, CPS conveniently tells us that 41 of
the children, including some young children, at some pint in their lives, had
broken bones. Only in the fine print is
it noted that this determination was made without benefit of, say, x-rays.
More
important, this time, two newspapers added some useful context. One was, of course, the Salt Lake Tribune:
A
broken bone does not automatically indicate a child has been abused, child
abuse experts said. The context of the injury is considered.
"A lot of it would depend on the
age of the kid," said Julie Bradshaw, director of the Center for Safe and
Healthy Families at Primary Children's Medical Center. "We would be much
more concerned about broken bones in a child not yet walking than in an older
child."
[Texas CPS] did not provide a breakdown of
ages of children who have had broken bones.
The Tribune
also noted the allegation by the FLDS that one child broke her arm while in
Texas CPS custody.
And
this time, a Texas newspaper did some checking as well. This is from the Austin
American-Statesman:
Dr. David Teuscher, a Beaumont
orthopedic surgeon, said that 41 of 464 children with a fractured bone
"could have been the elementary school around the corner."
"It is really not an
extremely high number," he said. "We see children who all the time
who do crazy things and break their bones."
But these stories were the
exceptions. When the three major
broadcast networks reported the broken bones story on their evening news
programs, only NBC added the context that some medical experts don’t consider
the proportion of children who allegedly had broken bones to be unusually high.
In fact, in any community of 464 children and
their parents, there probably are some child abusers. It may turn out that some of the broken bones were not
accidents. But that doesn’t justify the
wholesale confiscation of the children.
All of this comes on top of
something I mentioned when this case began: the general tendency of child
welfare agencies to cry wolf. As I
noted then, the classic example is the rash of prosecutions over alleged mass
molestation of children in day care centers in the 1980s, the most notorious
being the McMartin Preschool. Almost
every conviction everywhere in the country ultimately was overturned – but not
until enormous harm was done to the children.
And just as one of the worst
problems with the day care child abuse witch-hunt of the 1980s is that it
undermined the credibility of real victims, here, too, there is a danger that
Texas CPS’ broad brush and wild claims could wind up undermining the
credibility of women and children at the ranch who really may have been maltreated. That, after all, is the problem with crying
wolf.
So by all means, Texas CPS, keep on
talking. But that doesn’t mean we have
to believe every word you say.
May 5, 2008
TIP OF THE ICEBERG?
Here’s, a brief item from the Salt Lake Tribune
Sunday. Apparently unlike every
newspaper in Texas, the Tribune did some basic checking on the Texas child
welfare agency website:
A check of the Department of Family and
Protective Services Web site shows some facilities now housing FLDS children
have been written up for violations.
Kidz Harbor in Liverpool,
for example, was cited in February for lack of supervision that allowed two
children to engage in sexual activity. Also this year, Cal Farley failed to
report bruises on a child and a critical injury; a staff member also ridiculed
a child for not finishing a task.
Presbyterian Children's Homes &
Services, which operates both foster homes and group shelters, was cited last
year for foster parents who held inappropriate conversations in front of
children; used discipline that included use of a belt and making a child stand
on one foot in a closed closet; and failing to report a 17-year-old girl had
run away.
Of course, some might argue this record really isn’t so
bad; after all these are big places.
But that ignores the basic fact that states do a horrible job of
investigating abuse in substitute care.
Based on their own statistics, state child
welfare agencies typically claim that fewer than one percent of foster children
are abused in every given year. Yet one
objective, well-researched study after another reports that 25 to 30 percent of
foster children are abused in foster care – and those studies typically don’t
cover one of the most common forms of abuse in foster care, foster children
abusing each other. The record of group
homes and institutions is even worse.
The reason is obvious: When it comes to abuse in foster care, agencies
have an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and
write no evil in the case file.
Texas
is particularly notorious for ignoring abuse in its institutions, as a comprehensive report
from the former State Comptroller makes clear.
And,
of course, since the children have been taken not only from the YFZ ranch but also,
in most cases, from their mothers, the record of abuse in Texas foster care
should properly be compared with the number of allegations of abuse against the
mothers of these children: Zero.
Yes,
I know all the excuses for separating the children from their mothers. One advocate in Texas, someone who is the
state’s leading proponent of the take-the-child-and-run approach and the
Godsource for Texas media, has concocted a bizarre scenario in which the
mothers and children might sneak back to the ranch. Never mind that the ranch probably is under surveillance and FLDS
women are nothing if not conspicuous.
In any event, the odds of that happening need to be compared to the odds
that the children will be traumatized by the separation from their mothers and
the odds of abuse in foster care itself.
The sneak-back-to-the-ranch scenario is far less likely.
Then
there’s the argument that the mothers worked to undermine the
investigation. But it’s not as if the
children are on the ranch at risk of abuse by the men at any time. It’s obvious that the courts are going to
let CPS hold these children as long as it wants; so CPS can wait out any
uncooperative mothers. Also, as I’ve
noted before, this would not explain why even mothers of children barely over
one year old have had those children taken from them. Memo to CPS: You can sometimes get an 18-mohth-old to talk, but
usually you can’t get her to say much.
And finally, there’s the one about how the mothers
“allowed” their children to be abused or, presumably, allowed the possibility
that they might be abused years in the future.
But that’s based on some remarkably arbitrary distinctions between
abuser and abused. If a mother is under
18, CPS says she is herself a victim and, in fact, sometimes can live with her
children. If the mother is 18 or over,
CPS says she’s not a victim, she’s an abuser or at least guilty of failing to
prevent abuse or failing to prevent possible future abuse, and her children suffer
for it by being taken from her.
Similarly,
mothers are apparently a danger to healthy children but not to sick ones. Again, according to the Salt Lake Tribune,
When the last three FLDS children were released from the hospital, two of the
children were punished for regaining their health by having their mother taken
from them (the third is under a year old).
As long as the children were in the hospital, their mother could stay
with them.
In
fact, the more that the allegations of Texas CPS turn out to be true, the more
impossible it would be for the mothers to fight back, or even know that
anything was wrong. So why punish their
children in some bizarre attempt to take vengeance on their mothers?
There
is a fair case to be made that some of the children were, in fact, in danger on
the ranch. But more of them are in
danger right now in Texas foster care.
The harm to the children is becoming so obvious
that even the “law guardians,” appointed not to actually represent children but
to advocate for whatever they decide is best for them – and normally reliable
rubber-stamps for any child welfare agency - are getting restless. And once again it’s the Salt Lake Tribune
that has the story. According to today’s Tribune:
Vince Nowak, an Amarillo attorney,
said he believes that hearing provided no justification for removing the five
boys he represents from their homes. The boys, ages 12 to 15, are all healthy -
and all homesick.
"They want to go home,"
Nowak said. "They feel they've been unjustly removed from their
mothers."
Two days ago, I noted that there are some in Texas who claim
that the children from Eldorado won’t suffer as badly as so many other Texas
foster children because they’re in the national media spotlight. Therefore, it is argued, they’ll get extra
attention.
I argued then that even were that true, it would mean
only that other Texas foster children will be even worse off, since the eyes of
Texas CPS would be taken off their cases. Evidence for that came Monday, when Texas announced that enough
caseworkers will be assigned to these 463 children to give each a caseload of
“only” 15 cases – or maybe it’s 15 children; news accounts vary, and it
makes a big difference. The typical
Texas caseworker has more than 45 cases and, of course, many of these cases
will involve more than one child.
But if CPS means 15 cases, imposing this kind of a cap on
the Eldorado cases may mean that three times as many other Texas foster
children suddenly are going to be without a caseworker. And if CPS means 15 Eldorado children
per worker, then the number of other children who will lose their caseworkers
will be even greater. Who’s going to handle their cases? Odds are, they’ll further inflate the
caseloads of the remaining workers. And
of course, a brand new worker will have to relearn all about each of these
children.
A CPS spokesman says not all of the workers assigned to
the Eldorado children will be workers who normally handle such cases, so not
every worker will be diverted from an existing caseload. But that simply means these workers either
were sitting around doing nothing, or something else children need isn’t going
to get done.
The impact already is being felt. The Parent Guidance Center reports
that families already are having visits with foster children canceled by
caseworkers, citing the workload from the Eldorado case as an excuse.
As for the Eldorado children benefiting from extra
attention from CPS, the track record so far is not promising.
●
Two days ago, we noted that CPS broke its promise not to institutionalize the
youngest children.
● Now, The Salt Lake Tribune reports, one of the children’s law
guardians says they’ve broken another promise, the one about not splitting up
siblings.
● CPS has admitted that nine of the children have
been hospitalized and, as of Tuesday, three still were in the hospital.
●
And CPS is having trouble with even the most rudimentary tasks. Again, according to the Tribune (which
generally has been well ahead of Texas media on this story) some mothers still
haven’t been able even to contact the caseworkers assigned to them. CPS provided lawyers for some of the mothers
with a list of caseworker names. But
they neglected to include phone numbers.
1.8 ELDORADOS EVERY DAY
During a Dateline
NBC story Sunday night about the raid on the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, Texas,
the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, made two comments that are absolutely
accurate, and very, very scary.
First, when asked about things like taking away children
with little evidence and taking children not only from suspected abusers but also
non-offending parents, he noted that “we do it all the time.”
Can’t argue with that.
In fact, nationwide children are taken from their parents more than
300,000 times every year – that’s the equivalent of 1.8 Eldorado raids every
day. In some cases, taking away those
children was essential. In many others,
it will inflict enormous suffering needlessly.
Indeed, thanks to the landmark
MIT study of foster care outcomes, it’s theoretically possible to calculate
how many more children will wind up in juvenile jails, be unable to hold a job
and, yes, become pregnant, as a result of needless foster care.
As
for Abbott’s “but everybody else does it” rationale, well, we all know what we
told our own children when they’d say something like that.
But even scarier was Abbott’s astoundingly casual answer
when asked: What if it turns out that the allegations are untrue? Replied Abbott: “If it turns out it’s
untrue, they’ll be put back in their home.
It happens every day.”
Oh, well then. If
we just put the children back, no harm done.
It’s just like delivering a package to the wrong address, right? I don’t know what’s worse, if he’s trying to
put one over on us or if he really believes this.
Yes, some of the children might be “put back.” Someday.
But they’re going to be a lot worse for the experience. Some of the children already have become
ill. Given the usual odds, if the
children stay in foster care long enough, at least 100 of them are likely to be
abused in foster care itself. Most of
them are likely to suffer enormous, debilitating emotional trauma that may
haunt them for the rest of their lives.
And almost all of this trauma could have been avoided had
Abbott and his pals at Texas CPS simply decided not to do what they do
“all the time.” If only they’d decided
that the challenge of Eldorado was to find a more humane way to deal with
children. If only they simply treated
the mothers and children as refugees and kept them together – keeping them
away, until things are sorted out, from the only people ever likely to be
accused of impregnating one of the teenagers: The men living at the ranch.
Instead, they decided to do to these children precisely
what they do to so many others – every day.
Finally, there’s a story from a
national newspaper, The New York Times, that said as much about the
dangers of where the children from the YFZ Ranch are going as about the dangers
of where they’re coming from.
That’s a start.
But the story also revealed something more disturbing: the extent to
which the adults who are pushing these children around and shunting them from
place to place – or acquiescing in it - are practically drowning themselves in
self-delusion to avoid facing up to the harm they’re doing to hundreds of
children.
About a third of the way in, the Times gives some sense
of what the children are really in for:
[T]he
Texas child welfare system, those experts and insiders say - underfinanced and
understaffed in the best of times, dysfunctional in the worst - can do only so
much to make the road easier.
A
damning 2004 state report found that the system was overwhelmed with caseloads
and staff turnover, that children with violent criminal records were being
mixed in the general foster-care population, and that medically fragile
children were often under served.
A
study in 2006 by the Texas Department of Health Services said that more than
half of all foster children ages 13 to 17 were being given psychotropic drugs
to control behavior. And a dire shortage of foster home beds means that at least
500 foster children were forced to sleep one night or more in a state office
building in 2007, according to a report last fall by a nonprofit legal group,
Texas Appleseed, which advocates what it calls social and economic justice.
Some
child welfare experts say the risks are great that Texas could fail the
children of the sect, compounding and exacerbating whatever damage, if any,
that they suffered in their lives before the raid. …
"We
could have a situation where the cure is worse than the original problem,"
said Richard LaVallo, a lawyer in Austin who has represented children for 25
years. "I think that really categorizes what could happen if we don't do
this right."
That may have been borne out, almost literally, by a story in the Salt Lake Tribune
today. According to earlier news
accounts, doctors and nurses who examined the children right after they were
removed said the children were healthier than most. But since then, the Tribune reports today, nine of the children
reportedly were hospitalized and some still may be in hospitals. According to the Deseret News,
a foster care facility reported that one child is in intensive care. The Texas child welfare agency denies this.
While
it’s good to see the Times call attention to just how awful Texas foster
care really is, the self-delusion is apparent in that last paragraph.
On the one hand, it’s good to see a lawyer who
“represents children” in these kinds of cases express any concern at all. For starters, it’s important to understand
the role of such lawyers, typically called “law guardians” or guardians ad
litem. Typically, they do not, in fact, represent children, not in terms of
fighting for what the child wants.
Rather they urge the judge to do whatever they think is best for
the child. That almost always turns out
to be whatever the child welfare agency says.
Law guardians lack the time, the resources, and often the inclination to
actually find things out for themselves.
In at least one state, they actually had to be ordered to even see the
children they supposedly represent. So
they simply rubber-stamp the agency.
It says a lot about just how much harm is being done to
children in this case that even the law guardians at least are starting to
wring their hands.
But then the self-delusion kicks in, as seen in this
sentence: “I think that really categorizes what could happen if we don’t do
this right.”
The delusion is that is a way to “do this right.” There isn’t.
This story, and many others focus on the special problems
that will make foster care even worse for the children of the YFZ ranch – the cultural
issues and the exceptionally dismal state of Texas foster care.
But the hard fact of foster care life, the one everyone
in Texas is so anxious to avoid, is that even if foster care were perfect and
these were typical cases, foster care with strangers always means throwing
children “in the middle of the pond in an alien world.” One of the central barbarities of child
welfare is the fact that adults in the system regularly pay lip service to this
very fact, and then proceed to do it to children 300,000 times every year
anyway.
The inherent harm of foster care can be seen in the
results from a study
I’ve cited before, the one which found that foster children had twice the
level of post-traumatic stress disorder of gulf war veterans and only 20
percent could be said to be doing well.
This study actually posed the question: How much better would these
rotten outcomes be if we made foster care virtually perfect, if we stopped
compounding the inherent trauma of removal?
The answer: 22.2 percentage points.
In other words, if foster care were made as good as it could possibly
be, it would churn out walking wounded only three times out of five instead of
four.
So we need to start with an understanding of how dismal
the prospects would be for children even in a hypothetical perfect foster care
system before we can fully understand how bad things are likely to be for these
children. All the harms mentioned in
the Times story – the incredible culture shock, the dismal state of
Texas foster care – come on top of this wretched baseline.
And there are other harms the story didn’t have room to
explain fully.
●
One of the major harms of foster care, one cited by virtually everyone in the field
(even as they perpetuate it) is multiple placement; putting a child in one
place only to pry him up and transplant him someplace else, again and again and
again. Nearly 20 years ago, when I
wrote a book about child welfare, Wounded Innocents, one of the leading
researchers of the day told me that once an agency moves a child three times,
odds are “you have an agency-made sociopath.
This child will never trust an adult again.”
The Texas children already have been moved at least twice
with at least one more move planned – and that’s before all the “normal”
problems that lead to moving children from home to home kick in.
●
The problems also are compounded when children are institutionalized. The Times deals with part of this:
Mr.
LaVallo, among other experts, is critical of the state's decision to use large
group shelters across Texas for the children, who range in age from infancy to
17. Traditional foster homes with real parental figures instead of shift
workers and regimented institutional rules would be a better choice, those
critics say.
State
officials and some other child welfare experts say Texas was right to throw out
the old best-practice playbook in this instance. Group shelters, they say, will
allow the children to support and reinforce one another through the inevitable
trauma of separation and transition. A traditional middle-class foster home,
they say, would be even more of a shock to an F.L.D.S. child, especially
because many such homes in Texas are run by religiously minded Baptists and
Presbyterians.
Even if one buys the rationalizations for
institutionalizing some children, (note, though that, as so often happens, what
is most convenient for the agency also, supposedly, is “best” for the children)
even Texas CPS officials claimed to understand that institutionalization would
be terrible for the youngest children, and those children, at least, would get
a home. But the Times reports
that 22 children were sent to one of the worst types of placement of all, one
of those parking place shelters, where shift workers tend to the children until
they are shipped someplace else. And
none of those children is older than six.
(For more on shelters, see the Blarchive for August,
2006 and scroll to When Real Children Become Human Teddy Bears, Aug.
14, 2006).
Nor does it say much for Texas child welfare that one
reason the children need to be institutionalized apparently is that CPS has no
confidence in its own foster parents not to start indoctrinating the
children. Makes you wonder what happens
to all the other Texas foster children who don’t happen to have birth parents
who are “religiously minded Baptists and Presbyterians.”
The issue of all those other Texas foster children
illustrates a problem with one of the other key pillars in the temple of
self-delusion constructed by Texas CPS and its supporters. Call it the “eyes of Texas” theory.
This was expressed in an op ed column by someone at one
of the organizations most fanatical about a take-the-child-and-run approach to
child welfare. The sheer pomposity of
his opening sentence should make anyone who cares about children shudder.
The author writes: “I spend my days fighting to save the
lives of victims of child abuse, so I have a unique perspective on the turmoil
of the past few weeks…”
Then comes his own bit of self-delusion:
I am very hopeful that the children of Eldorado
will be well served this time because it is my experience that "what's
watched, works." In other words, the cracks, or gaping chasms if you
prefer, in our child protective systems will be closed because the whole world
is watching.
There are a few
problems with this. The first is all
that inherent harm of foster care noted above.
The second is the multiple placement.
The third is that, under the noses of the whole world, CPS already has
broken its promise not to institutionalize the youngest children in shelters.
But
the biggest problem is this: Even if this guy is right and these children will
suffer a little less because the eyes of Texas CPS are upon them, CPS in Texas
doesn’t have many eyes. Any extra eyes
on these children will be taken off other children who are not in the media
spotlight. So the chances that those
children will be abused in foster care and otherwise traumatized will only
increase.
Nevertheless,
you may be sure Texas CPS will continue to issue boilerplate statements about
how the children are “adjusting well.” There
might even be news stories in which volunteers at the shelters talk about how
the little children rush up to hug them and won’t let go. That will be seen as “success” because
neither the volunteers, nor the reporters, know that when a very young child
rushes up to hug a total stranger and won’t let go, it’s actually a sign of
very serious trauma caused by being taken from parents and then moved from
placement to placement.
When
all other forms of self-delusion fail, people will start talking about children’s
“resilience” – as in, no matter what we do to them, somehow they’ll survive
it. But even were that true, if a
parent were to break a child’s arm and then say “It’s o.k. because we can put
it in a cast and it will heal” that parent still would be a child abuser, and a
particularly sadistic one at that.
How much more sadistic is it needlessly to harm more
than 400 children, who could have remained safe by being kept off the ranch,
but with their mothers, and then justify it to ourselves based on some theory
of “resilience”?
There was a story on
NPR yesterday about rampant sexual abuse in isolated compounds, perpetrated
by religious leaders. Although there
were relatively few offenders, the number of victims is staggering. The “compounds” are Native Alaskan villages. The abusers were priests and lay volunteers
supervised by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fairbanks in the 1960s.
“It’s
practically genocidal in some villages,” a lawyer who won a series of civil
suits on behalf of the victims told the reporter for public radio station
KUAC. “There are some villages where I
can walk down the street and not see an adult who wasn’t molested as a child.”
But what about the parents? In the jargon of child protective services agencies they “failed
to protect” their children. Yet no one
was cruel enough – or stupid enough – to suggest that, on top of everything
else they suffered, the children should lose their parents, too.
The
parents “failed to protect” because either they never knew about the abuse,
(something CPS agencies sometimes say is no excuse) or never knew they could do
anything about it. There were no police
in these “isolated compounds” no lawyers, no counselors, not even many
telephones. And for many of those who
lived there, English was their second language. Said the lawyer: “They didn’t understand the difference between
church and state. They didn’t realize
there was a government they could go to that might investigate, might
prosecute.”
Similarly,
as I’ve noted before, when refugees fled in boats from Southeast Asia 30 years
ago, some of the boats were attacked by pirates who raped women and
children. But when the survivors
reached America no one was so cruel or so stupid as to suggest that the
children be taken from the mothers who “failed to protect” them.
Yet
now, as Texas CPS keeps coming up with new reasons to keep the children of the
YFZ ranch away from their mothers, it appears the latest excuse is “failure to
protect.” Yes, there are
differences. Some of the parents in
Alaska didn’t know what was going on; to the extent that there really was abuse
at the ranch, the mothers may well have known.
But they probably did not know that underage forced marriages are
abusive. Indeed one mother testified
she didn’t know what is abusive and what is not. These mothers also probably have little if any concept of the
difference between church and state.
One can dispute how much danger these children really
were in at the ranch, and whether the danger applied to all the children or
some. But it should be beyond dispute
that now that the children are out of the ranch, they are away from the
danger. So there is no danger to the
children in resettling mothers and children together, and having CPS offer
intensive help to the families – including teaching the mothers what is abusive
and what is not. (On second thought,
that particular task probably should be subcontracted.) In contrast, there is enormous danger to the
children – both emotionally and in terms of risk of abuse – in placing the
children in foster care.
But if this case ever was about protecting children, it
isn’t anymore. It’s about punishing
“bad mothers.” Texas CPS will never say
that, of course. They probably can’t
even admit it to themselves. Instead,
we’ll get the usual mumbo jumbo about “we have to make sure the mothers comply
with their ‘service plans’” and “we just want to be sure the children will be
safe with their mothers.” But there is
no way to be absolutely sure that any child is safe with any mother, or father,
or anyone else. You have to balance the risks.
And for these children, the risk of harm is far greater in foster care
than with their mothers.
Sadly,
the behavior of Texas CPS is not unusual.
It took a class-action lawsuit to curb similar practices in New York
City. (See “When Children Witness
Domestic Violence” on our website, for excerpts from the court
decision). And, as it happens, Alaska
takes children at one of the highest rates in the country. So one does have to wonder: If those Native Alaskans had realized
that “there was a government they could go to that might investigate, might
prosecute” and if they had called that government, would that government have
done the right thing? Or would that
government simply have increased the suffering of the Alaskan children by taking
them away on grounds of “failure to protect”?
CPS now plans to tear from their
mothers even the youngest children removed from the YFZ compound, after DNA
tests are completed.
Even
the star witness for Texas CPS didn’t want this.
That
would be Dr. Bruce Perry, who is held in high esteem by the state’s
reporters. As reported by ABC News on
the network’s website:
Perry also said that the youngest children are
probably least at risk if returned to parents in the short term because they
are not as likely to be influenced by FLDS unhealthy beliefs at such a young
age. He added that he thought it would be OK for young mothers to continue to
stay with their babies until a more long-term decision is made.
No news account has explained why
Texas CPS is doing this to the children.
When they separated the older children they claimed it was because that
would make it easier to make those older children talk, so they could find out
what "really" happened. So
now what? Are they expecting the
infants to talk if they’re separated from their mothers, too?
CPS also made one exception. The agency says the young children can stay
with their mothers – if the mothers are under age 18. What harm, exactly, would an 18-year-old mother do to a young
child, if she got to stay with that child, that a 17-year-old would not?
The younger the child the greater
the likely emotional trauma of separation from their mothers. And the younger
the child the more slowly they perceive the passage of time. In other words,
for a very young child, the anguish of being apart from their mothers is
magnified by the fact that time seems to pass so much more slowly.
And then there's the risk of abuse
whenever a large group of vulnerable children is left in the care of strangers.
You may be sure, however, that CPS
will issue bland, boilerplate statements about how the children are "doing
well" - even as they either bar the media from seeing for themselves
entirely or prevent them from talking to anyone unless a CPS minder is hovering
over the reporter's shoulder.
But wait, it gets worse: According to one news account, when these
children, including the infants and toddlers, are placed in foster care, they
won’t even be with families. They’re
going to be institutionalized – in other words, shipped off to group homes and
orphanages. Institutionalization is, by
far, the worst form of care for children and, again, the younger the child, the
greater the damage.
But I can imagine the excuse for
this one as well: The children were in a large compound before, so CPS will
claim it’s better for the children to be institutionalized now. (That’s not the real reason. The real reason almost certainly is that,
with needless removals of children having soared in Texas over the past several
years, CPS has no place else to put the children).
In any event, the excuse doesn’t hold up. The compound the children used to be in was,
in fact, a collection of homes, where the children were with people they
considered family. They are being moved
to places in which total strangers, sometimes working in shifts, dispense
indiscriminate pseudo-love to anyone who walks in the door. And that’s the best-case scenario. For worst case, see the report issued by
the former Texas State Comptroller about some of the institutions Texas
routinely relies on for warehousing children.
I hope CPS is simply
clueless about child development and the enormous trauma they are inflicting
needlessly on these children by keeping them away from their mothers. Because
any other explanation would be even worse.
Also:
--Susan Hays, the law guardian who
seems to have emerged as some kind of spokeswoman for the various law guardians
assigned to the children in this case, has been making some disturbing
comments, even when those comments seemingly favor reunification. Among other things, she's quoted in the Deseret
News as expressing some admiration for what she saw at the YFZ Ranch. Said Hays: "These people can build
houses. It's an amazing facility, amazing construction. These aren't poor kids living in trailers."
And therefore what? If children are poor and live in trailers,
and don't live in homes that can dazzle a law guardian their parents must love
them less so it's OK to take them away?
Is a father who is too poor to live in more than a trailer less fit than
a father who, if the allegations are true, may have forced a 14-year-old to have
sex with him?
--Has anybody,
besides assorted lawyers, been to the "compound" where the children
are being warehoused now? What are the conditions like? How are the
children coping with being institutionalized - in many cases, separated from
everyone they know and love? And now that the children have spent all this time
in an isolated compound, in absolute secrecy, at risk of abuse, barred from
contact with the outside world - by an organization which essentially makes up
its own rules as it goes along - it's worth remembering: That's what CPS said
they were protecting the children from in the first place.
On CNN this evening, a law guardian for one of the children said
it would be tragic if toddlers who had been living at the YFZ Ranch were
deprived of their mothers because there might be sexual abuse two houses away.
But, as I am sure this law guardian understands, these children already have
been deprived of their mothers, and for a toddler, a few days is an eternity.
It also was reported that one mother after another said they would do anything
the state wants in order to be reunited with their children. But even if the
mothers are not telling the truth, as a practical matter, the state has
everything it needs to hold the children indefinitely. So there is no reason to
keep the mothers and children apart another minute – and no reason to prolong
the children’s agony while waiting for their mothers to jump through all the
usual hoops.
It’s common for people to complain that news stories are “one
sided” and journalists didn’t get “the other side of the story.” But often the
bigger problem is when journalists stop at two sides.
That seems to be what is happening now in Texas. We hear the mothers deny that
anything at all was wrong and the state justify tearing the children from the
mothers as the only way to get their stories out of them. (When this Blog
predicted this would happen, and predicted the rationale, I noted that it also
would be easier to get the children’s stories if they waterboarded them. Memo
to the Texas child welfare agency: I was being sarcastic; please don’t get any
ideas.)
But here’s a third side of the story: The children may well have needed to be
removed from the ranch. But under the laws that govern American child welfare
systems there is no way they’re going back until and unless their “stories” are
fully known; and probably not then, either. So there was no excuse for further
traumatizing them by tearing them from their mothers. There is no reason the
children and their mothers could not be resettled, in effect, as refugees.
The ABC
News website tells the third side of the story today. Though the headline
asked who did more harm, the sect or the state, that’s not really the issue.
One can believe the sect did more harm and still think it’s a bad idea for the
state to harm the children further by separating them from their mothers.
The actions of Texas CPS remind me more than anything of a notorious comment
made by a general during the Vietnam War. Surveying the destruction of a
village he explained that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
So here’s the third side of the story in Texas: Don’t destroy these children in
order to save them.
Hardly a week goes by that I don’t get a call or an e-mail
from people who say their children were wrongfully taken and they want to tell
their story. In many cases it would
help the cause of reforming child welfare systems if they did just that. But I always give the same advice:
Don’t. At least
not until they’ve checked with their lawyer (if they have one).
That’s because child welfare agencies can be very, very
vengeful. They are agencies with
enormous power and little accountability.
Inevitably, that breeds a certain arrogance, even in people with the
best of intentions. The system also is
geared toward extracting confession and repentance from parents. So the very act of challenging a caseworker
or supervisor is seen as evidence that a parent is guilty, and further
justification for keeping the child away from the parent.
Because these are actually parent punishment systems, not
child protection systems, the harm this does to the children is rationalized
away.
So, it is likely that, when some of the mothers whose
children were taken from them in Texas dared to speak out – CPS got even. That’s not how they rationalized it to
themselves, of course, but that’s likely what really is behind the decision to
tear the children taken from the YFZ ranch from their one remaining lifeline,
their mothers. (Similarly, look what
happened after cell phone photos of conditions in one of the shelters turned up
in the Deseret News: CPS allegedly confiscated the mothers’ cell
phones.)
In some cases, it’s going to be virtually impossible for
the mothers even to visit their children.
ABC News reports that they’ve been shipped 400 miles away to “Cal Farley's Ranch for
Boys and Girls,” in other words – an orphanage and/or residential treatment
center; the worst kind of placement for children taken from their homes.
According to ABC News:
“Dan Adams, director of the Cal
Farley ranch, told ABC News.com that the placement of 27 teens from an austere
religious sect was ‘a little extraordinary.’ He said the children usually sent
to his ranch are in need of supervision. Mixing the two, he conceded, is ‘going
to be difficult.’
No kidding.
No
doubt Texas CPS will claim that they had to get the mothers completely out of
the way to make it easier to get the children to tell them what happened at the
YFZ Ranch. That may be true (though, on
the other hand, tearing a child from her or his mother, apparently through
trickery, may not be the best way to win a child’s trust.) It also would be easier to get information
out of the children if you waterboarded them – but that doesn’t make it a good
idea.
As a practical matter
there is no way a judge is going to send these children back to the YFZ
ranch. And the nature of child welfare
law is such that child protection agencies can do pretty much whatever they
want whenever they want to whomever they want.
Given the minimal standards in law, they don’t need more from the
children in order to hold onto them. So
there is no possible justification for inflicting upon them the emotional
torment of separation from their mothers.
And notwithstanding the
happy talk from CPS’ house doctor, torment is the right word. Here’s what the doctor told the Salt Lake
Tribune:
“But Sandra Guerra-Cantu, a physician with the
Texas Department of Health Services, said Monday: ‘In general, children are
very resilient in adapting to change. These children are adjusting to their new
environment.’ Asked about the children's mental health, Guerra-Cantu said
people were made available for the children to talk to, and the same service
was offered to the caregivers.
Oh, well
then. As long as the children have
total strangers to talk to, obviously there’s no problem. One can only fear for the psyches of
children left to the tender meries of the likes of Dr. Cantu.
On Friday, a spokeswoman for the Texas child welfare
agency said that workers with her agency are trying to win the trust of the 416
children they took from the compound of a fundamentalist Mormon sect.
But there are signs that whatever trust they may have
gained already has been betrayed – with a bigger betrayal likely later this
week.
If the children really were raped and beaten by men at
the compound the betrayal of trust is even bigger than if the allegations are
false. Indeed, the worse the abuse, the
bigger the betrayal. Because when
abused children have a parent who didn’t abuse them, there may be nothing more
important for their well-being than the chance to remain with that parent. CPS in Texas already is denying this chance
to some of the children, and may soon deny it to many more.
If the allegations are true, the mothers themselves were victimized by repeated rape in the name of “spiritual marriage” and held in isolated communities from which there was little chance of escape. It would be nice if just once, for the sake of the children, a child welfare agency could put aside the knee-jerk reaction of blaming the mother whenever someone else abuses a child. Because if the allegations are true, there is a good chance that keeping these children from their mothers will