Most foster care cases begin with an investigation. A report of abuse or neglect is phoned into a local child welfare agency by a child’s teacher, doctor, relative, or neighbor. A caseworker, often called a field or protection officer, is sent out to determine whether the report is accurate and, if it is, what should be done with the child. The caseworker’s job is easy—in a manner of speaking—if the child is covered with lash marks, cigarette burns, or other obvious signs of abuse. But often the traces even of a brutal beating are hard to distinguish from the ordinary bruises and scars of childhood. And neglect or sexual or psychological abuse often leave no visible traces at all. Caseworkers try to gain insight into parents’ and children’s true natures by watching how they act, but behavior too can be difficult to evaluate. Some children respond to abuse by becoming subdued or fearful, while others respond in exactly the opposite way, by becoming hyperactive or excessively friendly; moreover, any of these behaviors could be caused simply by the presence of a stranger in the living room. The parents’ behavior can be equally hard to evaluate: guilty or innocent, the parent is going to be upset at the intrusion of a government official into private family matters. Guilty or innocent, the parent is going to deny abuse or neglect, with perhaps the most dangerous parents of all—the sociopaths—able to practice the most convincing denials.
Even when caseworkers do uncover textbook evidence of mistreatment, it is often difficult to tell how serious it is. One reason for removing a child from her home is “educational neglect,” which is when a child misses school for an extended period of time without being ill or having some other justified reason for absence. But suppose that during an investigation the caseworker finds out that it is the mother who is ill, and that she is keeping the child home to nurse her and to help care for a younger sibling. Is this really neglect? What if the mother comes from a village culture where the obligation to help family in trouble is considered more important than the right to education? Is she really neglectful when applying such values in the United States? And would it really be better for a child suffering such “neglect” to be placed in the foster care system?
Although cultural conflicts like this come up all the time in foster care investigations, the cases are rarely so simple. Let us imagine that, as he tries to explain the importance of education in America to this woman, the caseworker notices the smell of alcohol on her breath and, later on, sees an open bottle of whiskey in the kitchen. This is all the evidence he has. None of the other people he has spoken to in his investigation—neighbors, the child’s teacher—have said anything about the mother having a drinking problem. But the caseworker thinks that alcohol on the breath at eleven in the morning is evidence enough. What next? Does a drinking problem combined with illness and educational neglect justify removal of the child? Or to put it another way, is it clear that the child would be at greater risk in such a home than in the foster care system?
To answer this question, the caseworker must not only divine secrets that the mother may be keeping from herself (how serious is her drinking?) but also be able to see into the future: Even supposing the mother does not have a true drinking problem now, what will happen if her boyfriend leaves her? Or beats her? Or if she is mugged, raped, or suffers any of the other catastrophes that life so routinely hurls at the very poor? And if she is required to go to Alcoholics Anonymous as a condition of keeping her child, will it help her? Will she go? And what about her medical condition? Suppose the caseworker talks to a doctor (not perhaps the most realistic of suppositions, given the size of most caseloads) and finds out that 60 percent of women with the mother’s illness make a full recovery, provided they receive adequate treatment. Is that mother going to be among the 60 percent? Is she going to get the treatment she needs? And how long will recovery take? What will happen to the child in the meantime?
The questions go on and on and on. To make a risk-free decision about what to do with this child—or any child—the caseworker would have to combine the wisdom of Solomon with the omniscience of a deity. All the obscurities of the human heart would have to be transparent to him. The future would have to be an open book. He would have to be able to figure out what life a child might have under each of the possible courses of action (removal, staying with parent, therapy, and so on), and then compare the benefits and drawbacks of each of these possible lives. . . .
Which is to say that there are no risk-free decisions in child welfare. All decisions are based, at least in part, on hunches, educated guesses, superstition, and prejudice. They have to be. And mistakes, inevitably, get made—not just regarding the initial disposition of the child but in every phase of foster care. Even the best trained, most intelligent, diligent, compassionate, and experienced caseworker, with all the best services at her fingertips, can decide to return children to parents who will kill them, or to keep children away from parents whose problems might be easily solved if they were not so distraught at the forced breakup of their family.
Mistakes are an inescapable component of the human condition. And insofar as they are inescapable, insofar as they are a function of the limits of human intelligence and strength, they are not morally culpable, no matter how tragic their consequences. No one can be blamed when their best efforts are not enough. We can only be morally culpable when we truly have a choice, when there is something that we could do to help a child, and we know that we could do it, but we simply don’t.
Most of the things that we can and should do to help endangered children are fairly obvious, and have been obvious for a very long time.
At least since Hastings Hart’s investigation of the Children’s Aid Society’s Minnesota placements, we have known how important it is to adequately screen foster parents and to monitor children in their placements. And in fact, we have understood this simple truth for a lot longer, as evidenced by the fact that John Jackson, “the Runaway White Slave Boy,” was visited, however ineffectually, by an inspector from the Philadelphia House of Refuge when he was indentured to the Delaware farmer Mr. Mitchell in 1850. There are no longer nearly so many obstacles to screening foster parents and monitoring foster children as there were in the nineteenth century, thanks in part to paved roads, automobiles, telephones, and computers, but also because the trend for the last century has been to place children ever closer to home. Almost all foster children in the larger metropolitan areas are placed within their city’s boundaries. If the system of neighborhood-based foster care being proposed in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere is actually put into effect, most foster children will be placed within the same community where their biological parents live and the caseworkers who are supposed to look after them have their offices.
The lackadaisical screening and monitoring of the nineteenth century might also be somewhat excused by that era’s markedly different attitudes toward children. After all, John Jackson and most of the other older street children who first rode the orphan trains were considered quasi-adults who had already demonstrated their ability to look out for themselves, even if they could still have benefited from contact with a virtuous and loving family. Children nowadays—after the Mary Ellen Wilson case and the successes of the anti-child labor movement—are seen as far more vulnerable, and far more in need of protection, than their counterparts of a century ago. But our universally inefficient and underfunded child welfare system does not remotely begin to provide orphaned, abandoned, or endangered children with the level of protection or sensitive care we know that they need and that we are technically capable of providing.
It is true that, for the most part, dependent children today are far better looked after than those children who were indentured or rode the orphan trains, a substantial portion of whom were never visited even once by representatives of the organizations that placed them. According to a comprehensive 1997 study of the New York City child welfare system, 70 percent of the children under the protection of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) had at least one face-to-face meeting wi
th a caseworker in a six-month period. The problem is that under state and city regulations, such children and their parents are required to have two contacts every month with their caseworker. Only 3 percent of the cases studied met this basic standard, and as the original statistic indicates, 30 percent of cases involved no face-to-face contacts between children and their caseworkers for the whole six months.8 Another sign of the slipshod monitoring of New York’s foster children is the fact that the Administration for Children’s Services was unable to produce records for 22 percent of the cases randomly selected for the study. There were also huge discrepancies between the information about children in the state’s central computer and in the children’s files with the ACS. For example, 31 percent of incidents of abuse or neglect reported to the state via its hotline were not even mentioned in the files of the children who were the subjects of those reports.9 And in 60 percent of the cases the state computers and the local files even disagreed about such basic information as the dates when the ACS first began to investigate the child’s situation.10
It would be one thing if New York’s child welfare system were the worst in the country, but the fact is that it is only average. Although New York State has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, its child protection services have helped keep its abuse and neglect fatality rates close to the national mean, and it has one of the very highest rates for adoption of children in foster care.11 There are many reasons why American child welfare agencies tend to do such a terrible job monitoring the children in their care. One of the most obvious is heavy caseloads. The average New York City caseworker is supervising the care of twenty-five children at any one time, which is roughly twice the caseload recommended by the Child Welfare League.12 But caseloads in the forties and higher are not uncommon in many American cities. When Marcia Robinson Lowry, the executive director of Children’s Rights, a child advocacy group, asked a caseworker in Washington, D.C., how often he saw the children in his charge, he laughed bitterly and said, “I’m lucky if I see one of my kids on the evening news!”13
Another reason for inadequate monitoring is the quality of the people doing the casework. Child welfare casework—whether it involves the investigation of reports of abuse or the management of children under protection—is terribly demanding intellectually and emotionally. Like the police, caseworkers go in and out of the worst neighborhoods in their cities and routinely place themselves in the middle of dreadful domestic conflicts. Caseworkers are supposed to have police protection when they go to remove a child, but generally they don’t get it. Caseworkers also have to be masters of the skills of other professions. Not only must they be shrewd psychologists who have the insight to penetrate deceptions, but they must have the diplomacy to salve furious or frightened parents and children. They must also have a sophisticated understanding of the nature of and treatment for drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, and post-traumatic stress syndrome, since these are conditions that they encounter frequently in their clients. And finally, caseworkers must be able to balance a deep compassion for their clients with a firmness of conviction that will enable them to rip a weeping child away from a pleading mother when that mother is unfit or dangerous.
Common sense would dictate that such professionals be highly trained and paid, but the facts are that frontline caseworkers—those who have the most intimate and influential contact with children and their families—are generally required to have only a bachelor’s degree. In New York the median pay for private agency caseworkers is $28,000, with starting salaries in the mid-twenties.14 These salary levels are particularly shocking when one considers that city garbage truck crew members start at $28,000 and have a median salary of $36,ooo.15 The Administration for Children’s Services has recently raised its starting salary to $28,000, but its pay cap is $50,000.16 Such low pay combined with grueling, stressful workloads is a classic formula for burnout; and indeed, the mean annual turnover rate at New York private agencies is 33 percent, and is nearly 50 percent at a quarter of the agencies.17 A foster child told me:
One time I went through five, six workers in a three-month period. They’d just decide they wanted to leave, and I’d end up getting a new social worker, a new social worker, a new social worker. They’d leave because a lot of them told me they’re overworked, underpaid, and on high stress. A lot of them told me you have to do this kind of work because you love it. You can’t do it for the money. They left and they were so happy—some went back to school, some went to other agencies. A couple I stayed in contact with, and they said, “I’m so relaxed! My blood pressure is down!” They got their youth back.18
Another effect of the grueling workload and low pay is that child welfare casework has little social prestige. Most university social work programs neglect it in favor of clinical psychology, and graduates who do choose to go into the field are generally looked down upon. Time and again as I interviewed child welfare and foster care scholars, administrators, and lawyers for this book, I would be asked, always in tones of mockery, variations of the following: “Have you ever met one of these caseworkers? Most of them are real troglodytes, believe me!” Although many intelligent, well-trained, and compassionate men and women do become frontline caseworkers, there are obviously not nearly as many of them as there would be if our society granted the profession respect and remuneration that remotely corresponded to its difficulty and importance.
Under federal guidelines, children are supposed to be in foster care for only two years at most after it has been decided that they cannot go back to their parents and must be adopted. The main reason why American foster children average four and a half years in the system, with many children spending five or six years or even longer, is the inefficiency of the family courts. Like the rest of the child welfare system itself, the family courts are overwhelmed. In many municipalities there are simply not enough judges, so court calendars get jammed up; if cases have to be adjourned, months can go by before the next hearing. And like caseworkers, the lawyers who represent the various parties in adoption proceedings are overworked and underpaid. In New York City, for example, the average lawyer gets $200 per hour (with corporate lawyers getting $350 to $450 per hour). But lawyers representing private agencies in family court are paid only $85 an hour, and the state-appointed lawyers for birth parents get only $40 for in-court work and a mere $25 for out-of-court work.19 Again, some of these lawyers are talented and saintly, but not enough, and not nearly as many as there would be if they were paid and respected more in accordance with the other members of their profession.
Another reason for the backlog in family courts is that judges and agencies want to give biological parents time to respond to the therapies and services that might help them solve whatever problem led to the removal of their children. This would seem to be an unavoidable delay, at least as long as we believe that, if at all possible, birth families ought to be kept together. The problem is that very often neither birth parents nor foster parents get the services they need. According to the 1997 study of New York’s child welfare system, for example, 76 percent of cases deemed to need family preservation services never got them. Fifty-six percent of birth parents who could have benefited from parenting skills training did not get it. Housing was not provided in 58 percent of the cases for which it was planned. And 43 percent of foster parents did not get needed services such as psychological counseling, medical care, or day care. This study also found that the biggest obstacle to families getting services was not the unwillingness of the recipients to take advantage of the services (169 incidences) but the failure of caseworkers to suggest the services in the first place (197 incidences).20 As a result, not only are lengthy adjournments sometimes wasted because the biological parents are never given the services the adjournments are ostensibly meant to provide time for, but many family court judges, well aware of how shabbily biological parents are treated by agencies, often issue orders and call for long adjournments simply to force the child welfare agencies to provid
e parents with the services they should have been getting all along. Essentially what these so-called pro-parent judges are doing is forcing the agencies simply to abide by the law and by accepted social work practices and regulations. This is not wholly an unworthy effort, given the ferocious prejudice against the generally poor, ill-educated, and mightily overburdened birth parents within the child welfare community, but its cost is borne primarily by the children who end up spending unnecessary months and years in the system not knowing whether they are going to go back to their parents or move on to adoption.
Another thing that we can do, and have known we should do for a very long time, is to treat children as individuals. The vast majority of children in foster care have been removed from their families because their mothers have substance abuse problems, but this does not mean that the situations of all of those children are alike. Some alcohol and drug abusers are able to provide their children with considerable love and consistency, even in the midst of their addiction, while others simply forget their children, or come to hate them as nagging rivals to their one and only love. Some addicts truly hit what twelve-step programs call “rock bottom,” and then find the strength to rebuild their lives, while others, when they reach a similar crisis in their addiction, only sink into total self-annihilation. The same dichotomy exists in children. Some have the inner strength to thrive despite considerable deprivation and abuse, while others are utterly destroyed by far lesser hardships. Some children have grandparents whom they love, and who can be trusted to give them the care and support they need, while for others the grandparents are the true authors of their misery—since they were the original abusers of the children’s abusive parents. For some children it is more important to be placed with siblings than to have unusually compassionate and competent foster parents, while for others the reverse is true. Some children will suffer crippling identity conflicts being raised by families of a different racial or ethnic group, while for others skin color, language, or religion will be insignificant beside the love—or lack thereof—that they find in their new families.
Orphan Trains Page 41