by Cris Beam
[>] He blamed the death on ignorance and dysfunction: See Associated Press, “Mother Guilty of Murder in Death of 4-Year-Old”; Orin Yaniv and Rich Schapiro, “Mother Found Guilty in Marchella Pierce’s Death,” New York Daily News, May 9, 2012, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/prosecutor-describes-brooklyn-mom-trial-4-year-old-starvation-death-heartless-article-1.1075182; Jose Martinez, “Jury Finds ‘Monster’ Mom Guilty in Daughter’s Starving Death,” New York Post, May 9, 2012, http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/make_monster_mom_pay_for_daughter_BssjFrOlIF84vkWzFGRuTJ; and Mirela Iverac, “Mom Found Guilty in Daughter’s Death,” WNYC News Blog, May 9, 2012, http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2012/may/09/summations-begin-trial-mom-accused-murdering-toddler/.
[>] and 10 percent sexual abuse: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau, “Child Maltreatment 2010.” http://archive.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubx/cm10/cm10.pdf.
[>] leave the baby with an older sibling: The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) is a good example of an organization that advocates for fewer removals and family preservation, in part because far too many investigations and removals are based on family poverty. See the NCCPR issue paper 5, “Who Is in ‘The System’ and Why” at the NCCPR website: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/05SYSTEM.pdf.
[>] children do better with their (even marginal) birth parents than with foster parents: The most reliable data on this comes from Joseph Doyle at MIT, who used the removal tendency of investigators as an instrumental variable to identify causal effects of foster care placement on a range of outcomes for school-age children and youth. Doyle looked at roughly sixty-five thousand children between the ages of five and fifteen in the state of Illinois whose families had been investigated for abuse. All of these children were right on the margins of being removed—and a rotational assignment process effectively randomized their families to their investigators. Doyle’s results suggest that children assigned to investigators with higher removal rates are more likely to be placed in foster care, and they have higher delinquency rates, teen birth rates, and lower earnings. Large marginal treatment effect estimates suggest caution in the interpretation, but the results suggest that children on the margin of placement tend to have better outcomes when they remain at home, especially older children. Joseph J. Doyle, PhD, “Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care,” American Economic Review 97, no. 5 (December 2007): 1583–1610.
[>] This is called a “secure attachment”: This is an oversimplified description of an enormous and dynamic theory. When young children’s attachment is disrupted, for example, they develop what’s known as “avoidant attachment,” “resistant attachment,” or “disorganized attachment.” For a good article on various attachment responses to foster care placement see Mary Dozier, Deane Dozier, and Melissa Manni, “Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up: The ABC’s of Helping Infants in Foster Care Cope with Early Adversity,” Zero to Three 22, no. 5 (April/May 2002): 7–13.
[>] scientific papers on foster care’s child-parent dynamics: Attachment theory is referenced in the abstracts of nearly a thousand articles retrieved in the Social Science Citation database of the Institute for Scientific Analysis since 1996, and 1,600 times in the American Psychological Association’s PsycInfo database since 1998, according to Richard P. Barth, Thomas M. Crea, Karen John, June Thoburn, and David Quinton, “Beyond Attachment Theory and Therapy: Towards Sensitive and Evidence-Based Interventions with Foster and Adoptive Families in Distress,” Child and Family Social Work 10, no. 4 (2005): 257–68.
[>] really rooting for the kid: Douglas F. Goldsmith, David Oppenheim, and Janine Wanlass, “Separation and Reunification: Using Attachment Theory and Research to Inform Decisions Affecting the Placements of Children in Foster Care,” Juvenile and Family Court Journal 55, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 1–13. Some experts, like Barbara Rittner, PhD, a dean and director of the PhD program at the University of Buffalo SUNY School of Social Work, and Rick Barth, PhD, professor and dean at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, have argued for understanding children’s behavior in broader or different constructs, such as in the context of trauma or a tremendous loss of resources. See Barbara Rittner, Melissa Affronti, Rebekah Crofford, Margaret Coombes, and Marsha Schwam-Harris, “Understanding Responses to Foster Care: Theoretical Approaches,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 21, no. 4: 363–82; and Barth et al., “Beyond Attachment Theory and Therapy.”
3. Timing Is Anything
[>] mentor the biological parents of their kids: This program was called the Model Approach to Partnerships in Parenting, or MAPP, and it’s described in Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mayor, and Nicholas Scoppetta, Commissioner, A Renewed Plan of Action for the Administration for Children’s Services (New York: Administration for Children’s Services, July 2001). http://www.nyc.gov/html/acs/downloads/pdf/pub_reform_plan_2001.pdf.
[>] this program didn’t have a lot of traction: In the 2009 Children’s Rights report, The Long Road Home, the authors reported that, based on their research into the cases of 153 children in foster care whose permanency goals were designated as Return to Parent (RTP) or Adoption for two years or more, foster care agencies did not “regularly take steps to facilitate relationships between parents and resource [foster] parents—and that they typically had to take their own initiative to reach out to one another. Additionally, while nearly three-fourths of the caseworkers interviewed said they had received training on how to facilitate these relationships, 27 percent had not received any such training. Contacts between parents and resource parents were rarely documented in the case files of the children in the study sample, and little documentation existed regarding the nature of the relationships between the two.” The Long Road Home: A Study of Children Stranded in New York City Foster Care (New York: Children’s Rights, November 2009), 8.
[>] number of adoptions from foster care growing from 25,693 in 1995 to 52,468 in 2004: Richard P. Barth, “Adoption from Foster Care: A Chronicle of the Years After ASFA,” in Intentions and Results: A Look Back at the Adoption and Safe Families Act, a paper series produced by the Center for the Study of Social Policy and the Urban Institute (December 9, 2009), 65. http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=1001351.
[>] but only fifty thousand adoptions: Ibid.
[>] will be adopted eventually: Ibid.
[>] reportedly affected by substance abuse: Nancy Young and Sid Gardener, “ASFA Twelve Years Later: The Issue of Substance Abuse,” in Intentions and Results: A Look Back at the Adoption and Safe Families Act, a paper series produced by the Center for the Study of Social Policy and the Urban Institute (December 9, 2009), 94. http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=1001351.
[>] documented substance abuse among investigated parents: This comes from a study based on the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NASCAW) cited in Young and Gardener, “ASFA Twelve Years Later.”
[>] asking instead for more research: Ibid.
[>] meant to accomplish from the start: Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002), 111.
[>] preventive and family reunification programs: New York State passed its own law, analogous to AACWA, called the New York State Child Welfare Reform Act of 1979. According to Mike Arsham, executive director of the Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) in New York, New York once led the nation—but even by 1980, funding for foster care continued to outpace funding for prevention by about a ten-to-one ratio (Arsham, e-mail correspondence, June 2012).
[>] build their skills and their bonds: Elizabeth Bartholet, Nobody’s Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift and the Adoption Alternative (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 42.
[>] the number of New York’s foster children almost doubled: Douglas J. Besharov, “Crack Children in Foster Care: Re-examining the Balance Between Children’s Rights and Parent’s Rights,” Ch
ildren Today 19, no. 4 (July/August 1990): 51, citing Children of Substance Abusing/Alcoholic Parents Referred to the Public Child Welfare System: Summaries of Key Statistical Data Obtained from States, final report submitted to the American Enterprise Institute (Washington, DC: American Public Welfare Association, February 1990).
[>] annually to fifty-four thousand within five years: Roberts, Shattered Bonds, 105.
[>] $6,000 for each “special needs” adoption: Ibid., 110.
[>] agencies that successfully reunify families: For instance, see Lynne Miller, “‘You Have to Get It Together’: ASFA’s Impact on Parents and Families,” in Intentions and Results: A Look Back at the Adoption and Safe Families Act, a paper series produced by the Center for the Study of Social Policy and the Urban Institute (December 9, 2009).
[>] providing further motivation for parental progress: Variations of this idea have been presented many times, notably by Richard Wexler, author of Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), 263.
[>] Shirley Wilder case in New York: A famous, and sadly typical, case of the time was that of Shirley Wilder, an eleven-year-old African American child in New York City in 1971. Because of inadequate housing options for black children (because the agencies that contracted with the state were religious and not public, they were exempt from antidiscrimination laws and could choose, for instance, to serve only Catholic or Jewish children), she was placed in a turn-of-the-century detention center in the South Bronx. When it rained, the kids had to wade through several inches of dirty water to get their meals. At this home, Shirley was sexually assaulted by the older girls, and she ran away. When the authorities caught her, she was considered harder to place because of her wariness and tendency to run, and while they waited for a suitable home to open up, they placed her in a boys’ jail, because they had nowhere else to put her. By the end of her tenure in foster care, Shirley was pregnant and her baby was put into foster care at birth. This story comes from Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (New York: Vintage, 2001).
Wilder’s case was famous because the lawyer, Marcia Lowry, filed a class-action suit on her behalf in 1973. She claimed that the public oversight of religious foster care services was a constitutional violation of the First Amendment, and since these charities discriminated based on religion and race, they also violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Lowry finally demanded that the city stop placing children in “injuriously inadequate programs” (Bernstein, 44–45). The case took twenty-six years to resolve, with the numerous appeals and the city requesting more time for implementation. The core focus of the case grew from one of prejudice (as the city can no longer discriminate on the basis of race or religion) to one of poor services overall—and a call to restructure the entire system. Ultimately, the judge terminated the Wilder case in favor of another of Lowry’s lawsuits that she had filed against the city, along with another agency, after the death of Elisa Izquierdo and the creation of the newly titled ACS. Finally, Lowry settled; a panel of independent national experts would come in, investigate ACS, and make requirements for systemic change. See Sarah Hultman Dunn, “The Marisol A. v. Giuliani Settlement: ‘Innovative Resolution’ or ‘All-Out Disaster’?” The Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems (Summer 2002): 275–90. For the whole story of the shift from the Wilder case to the Marisol A. v. Giuliani case, read Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder.
[>] take months or even years: In New York, for instance, as of February 2011, of the children in care for at least fifteen of the previous twenty-two months, the time between filing a termination of parental rights petition and actually becoming free for adoption exceeded two years for 36 percent. Of all legally freed children in care for at least fifteen of the prior twenty-two months, the time between placement and freeing was four or more years for 44 percent, and seven or more years for 13 percent. The Long Road/One Year Home Symposium: Proceedings (New York: Children’s Rights, November 2011), 9–11.
[>] “death penalty of child welfare”: Mike Arsham, e-mail correspondence, June 2012.
[>] “parenting is more about bonding than blood”: Bartholet, Nobody’s Children, 243.
[>] one-third being abused by an adult in the home: National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, “Foster Care vs. Family Preservation: The Track Record on Safety and Well-Being,” Issue Paper 1, updated January 3, 2011. http://www.nccpr.org/reports/01SAFETY.pdf.
[>] if you gave them the right help: This is not an actual statistic, but rather a theory Arelis is positing based on her own anecdotal experience. It’s difficult to obtain real data on the types of biological parents she’s referring to because they can be under the influence of so many factors—mental illness, substance use, domestic violence, and so on—and then the types of services they’re offered range so dramatically too.
4. Drugs in the System
[>] daughter, Shameka: Name has been changed.
[>] others put the figure much higher: Targeted Grants to Increase the Well-Being of, and to Improve the Permanency Outcomes for, Children Affected by Methamphetamine or Other Substance Abuse: First Annual Report to Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau, current through July 2012). http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/targeted_grants/targeted_grants.pdf.
[>] baby is born “positive tox,” or drug-exposed: Child Welfare Information Gateway, a division of the Administration for Children and Families, Parental Drug Use as Child Abuse, State Statutes Series (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2006). http://www.childwelfare.gov/systemwide/laws_policies/statutes/drugexposed.cfm.
[>] (meaning a fetus can be abused in utero): Ibid.
[>] or while still pregnant: Tara Husley, “Prenatal Drug Use: The Ethics of Testing and Incarcerating Pregnant Women,” Newborn and Infant Nursing Reviews 5, no. 2 (June 2005): 93–96.
[>] up to ten times more often than white women: This statistic comes from an oft-cited study conducted in Florida: Ira J. Chasnoff, Harvey J. Landress, and Mark E. Barrett, “The Prevalence of Illicit-Drug or Alcohol Use During Pregnancy and Discrepancies in Mandatory Reporting in Pinellas County, Florida,” New England Journal of Medicine 322 (1990): 1202–6.
[>] studies show that drug use: Minorities and Drugs: Facts and Figures, a survey (Washington, DC: The National Office of Drug Control Policy, 2007).
[>] but only 38 percent of the foster care kids: Fred Wulczyn and Bridgette Lery, Racial Disparity in Foster Care Admissions (Chicago: Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, 2007), 9.
[>] record or risk of removal: Robert B. Hill, “Institutional Racism in Child Welfare,” in Child Welfare Revisited: An Africentric Perspective, ed. Joyce Everett, Sandra P. Chipungu, and Bogart R. Leashore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 62.
[>] delinquent behavior or status offenses: Ibid., 63.
[>] in white families as “accidents”: Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002), 5.
[>] the system’s legacy of institutionalized racism: This theory of the three types of factors is commonly discussed. It’s summarized in Robert B. Hill, Synthesis of Research on Disproportionality in Child Welfare: An Update (Casey-CSSP Alliance for Racial Equity in the Child Welfare System, October 2006). http://www.cssp.org/reform/child-welfare/other-resources/synthesis-of-research-on-disproportionality-robert-hill.pdf.
[>] distribution in low-income families: Hill, “Institutional Racism in Child Welfare,” 57–76.
[>] strong risk factor for all forms of maltreatment: Andrea J. Sedlak and Dana Schultz, “Race Differences in the Risk of Maltreatment in the General Child Population,” in Race Matters in Child Welfare: The Overrepresentation of African American Children in the System, ed. Dennette Derezotes, John Poertner, and Mark F. T
esta (Washington, DC: CWLA Press, 2005), 47. In one large, longitudinal study on poverty in child welfare, the authors looked for class bias as a reason for the overrepresentation of poor kids in child welfare and determined “that the overrepresentation of poor children is driven largely by the presence of increased risk among the poor children that come to the attention of child welfare rather than high levels of systemic class bias.” Melissa Jonson-Reid, Brett Drake, and Patricia L. Kohl, “Is the Overrepresentation of the Poor in Child Welfare Caseloads Due to Bias or Need?” Children and Youth Services Review 31 (2009): 422–27.
[>] across any ethnic or racial lines: Sedlak and Schultz, “Race Differences in the Risk of Maltreatment in the General Child Population,” 47.
[>] 73 percent higher rate of black maltreatment over white: E. Bartholet, F. Wulczyn, R. P. Barth, and C. Lederman, Race and Child Welfare (Chicago: Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, 2011), 3.
[>] direct help toward the families that need it: The issue brief is Bartholet et al., cited in the preceding note.
[>] one of the most dangerous substances for a fetus: For instance, a baby with fetal alcohol syndrome can have skeletal, heart, or brain malformations or be born permanently mentally retarded. For more information, see “Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders; Fetal Alcohol Syndrome,” facts from the American Pregnancy Association, http://www.americanpregnancy.org/pregnancycomplications/fetalalcohol.html.
[>] exposure to cocaine and a decrease in functioning: Deborah Frank, MD, Marilyn Augustyn, MD, Wanda Grant Knight, MD, et al., “Growth, Development, and Behavior in Early Childhood Following Prenatal Cocaine Exposure: A Systematic Review,” Journal of the American Medical Association 285, no. 12 (March 28, 2001): 1613. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse launched the largest study of cocaine-exposed newborns and have been comparing these children to nonexposed kids living in comparable conditions for the past fifteen years. (See the Maternal Lifestyle Study at the government clinical trials website at http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00059540.)