NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

Usually updated weekly, usually on Mondays

By Richard Wexler, NCCPR Executive Director

 

 

May 8, 2008

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.

 

And even the law guardians are getting restless

 

            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."

 

 

April 30, 2008

THE EYES OF TEXAS ARE AVERTED

 

            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.

 

 

April 29, 2008

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.

 

 

April 28, 2008

THE ROAD TO AGENCY-MADE SOCIOPATHY

 

            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”?

 

 

April 22, 2008

“FAILURE TO PROTECT” – FROM THE DIOCESE OF FAIRBANKS

 

            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”?

 

April 20, 2008

UPDATED: IT KEEPS GETTING WORSE

 

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.

 

April 18, 2008

PROLONGING THE CHILDREN'S AGONY

 

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.

 

April 17, 2008

THE THIRD SIDE OF THE STORY

 

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.

 

 

April 15, 2008

CPS GETS EVEN

 

            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.

 

 

April 14, 2008

WINNING TRUST, AND BETRAYING IT

 

            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