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Friday, May 24, 2013
Sacramento: Child removal capital of California
by Richard Wexler, published on June 15, 2010 at 6:11 AM
Storyline: Child Welfare
Sacramento is now California’s capital in more ways than one.Data released today by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform show that Sacramento County is the child removal capital of California.
Among the state’s larger counties, Sacramento County takes away proportionately more children than any other, when the number of children taken away is compared to the number of impoverished children in each county. Sacramento takes children at a rate nearly double the average for these counties.
NCCPR released its latest California Rate of Removal Index Monday. It’s available on our website here.
The Index shows that in recent years, much of California has made remarkable progress in reducing the trauma of needless foster care and making children safer. But that hasn’t happened in Sacramento. And while progress is threatened everywhere by budget cuts, in Sacramento County, progress also is threatened by the take-the-child-and-run mentality that makes all children less safe.
(NCCPR’s ranking of counties factors in child poverty because we believe it is the fairest way to compare county performance. But when entries are compared to total child population, Sacramento County still performs atrociously, with the second worst rate of removal, only slightly better than Imperial County).
HOW FAMILY PRESERVATION MAKES CHILDREN SAFER
Given the kinds of child welfare stories that have made headlines in Sacramento for the past few years, some may be tempted to applaud the county’s status as number one in child removal. After all, “gut instinct” says that if we just take more and more children from their parents, those children will be safer.
But the best way to fix a child welfare system often is to listen to gut instinct – and do the opposite. That’s because tearing apart families unnecessarily doesn’t just do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken. It also steals time and resources from finding children in real danger – and that almost always is the real reason for the tragedies that make headlines in Sacramento County.
Many counties that take proportionately fewer children do better than Sacramento on the two key measures of child safety used by the federal government to evaluate child welfare systems.
That’s because, contrary to the common stereotype, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more common are cases in which a family’s poverty is confused with child ‘neglect.’
Several studies have found that 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing. And single parents, desperate to keep their low-wage jobs when the sitter doesn’t show, may have to choose between staying home and getting fired, or going to work and having their children taken on ‘lack of supervision’ charges. Other cases fall between the extremes, the parents neither all victim nor all villain.
Sacramento County children are victims of a “take-the-child-and-run” mentality that has been part of the culture of Child Protective Services for at least 14 years. And every time there is an attempt to bring needless removal under control, scapegoating of family preservation by The Sacramento Bee, in the wake of a high-profile tragedy, starts another “foster-care panic” – a sharp, sudden increase in child removals, fueled by caseworkers terrified of landing on the front page if they leave a child in his own home and something goes wrong.
One sign of such panic can be found in a report released Thursday by the Sacramento County Grand Jury. According to that report, of all the children torn from their families by Child Protective Services, about a third are sent home again within 30 days. That’s plenty of time to do great harm to a child’s psyche. But if a child can be sent back home in a month, odds are that child never needed to be taken away in the first place.
THE MOST DANGEROUS PHRASE IN CHILD WELFARE
Attacks on family preservation typically are justified with the false claim that only adults suffer when children are taken needlessly and agencies have to “err on the side of the child.”
In fact, there probably is no phrase in the child welfare lexicon that has done more harm to children than “err on the side of the child.”
When a child is thrown needlessly into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates. For a young enough child it can be an experience akin to a kidnapping. A major study of foster care “alumni” found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be ‘doing well.’ How can throwing children into a system which churns out walking wounded four times out of five be “erring on the side of the child”?
Two more studies, of more than 15,000 typical cases, found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help fared better, on average, than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.
All the harm of foster care can occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than revealed by official statistics, which involve agencies investigating themselves. That same alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they’d been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home.
Switching to orphanages won’t help -- the record of institutions is even worse.
Furthermore, the more a foster care system is overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be there, the less safe it becomes, as agencies are tempted to overcrowd foster homes and lower standards for foster parents. That probably goes a long way to explaining the tragic case of Amariana Crenshaw, who died under mysterious circumstances in a foster home with a long history of serious problems.
If a child is taken from a perfectly safe home only to be beaten, raped or killed in foster care, how is that “erring on the side of the child”?
None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. Rather, it means that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that must be used sparingly and in small doses. But for more than a decade, Sacramento County has been prescribing mega-doses of foster care.
CPS: ONLY DAMNED IF THEY DON’T
Sacramento County child protective services might well respond by claiming to be “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”
Don’t believe it. In 34 years of following child welfare, I have never seen a caseworker fired, demoted, suspended, reprimanded or so much as slapped on the wrist for taking away too many children. All of these things have happened to workers who left even one child in her or his own home and had something go wrong.
When it comes to taking away children, caseworkers are not damned if they do and damned if they don’t – they’re only damned if they don’t.
And that’s one reason why Sacramento is the child removal capital of California.
Former journalist Richard Wexler is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, based in Alexandria Va. The full NCCPR California Rate of Removal Index and comprehensive recommendations for reforming child welfare in California and nationwide are available at www.nccpr.org
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At Roger Dickinson's breakfast meeting one month last summer, the head of CPS made a presentation. She cited cases where workers were criticized for both--not disciplined but severely criticized. Workers ARE damned if the do and damned if they don't. Citing numbers of removal means little in a dept caseload of 58,000 and psychic damage to those who are removed is often exaggerated or judgmental.
Even if one child is left in a home where parent(s) don't want him/her and suffers physical and emotional abuse or death, that is one too many. Recent national publicity of mothers charged with killing directly or through neglect their own unwanted children supports the seriousness.
I agree the foster family program is badly broken and needs some severe changes in oversight and measuring results of those paid to provide care. Like in any program there are good results and poor results. But when a foster care family produces a non-functional child at 18-someone who has acquired no basic survival skills in an environment to which they are tossed, that family should never be trusted with another child.
I have known many people decades after they left foster care and group care before the latter was eliminated due to a few over-hyped bad cases many years ago. Some were thankful for their treatment in foster care and others were very bitter. Those who were placed in group care like Boys Town (now accepting boys and girls) were unanimous in their gratitude for the discipline, values and skills learned which prepared them for a world outside.
There is a vast difference between being criticized and being fired. You don't get *fired* for taking away too many children, you only get fired when you *don't* take away a child and something goes wrong - so you're only damned if you don't.
I can't imagine why you would argue that the psychic damage of removal is exaggerated - the inherent trauma of removal is one of the few things on which researchers in the field mostly agree. And while I know it's not your intent, in saying that, for some young people, you're rubbing salt into some very deep wounds.
Take a look at our summary of the landmark studies of 15,000 cases - including links to the full studies, available on our website here: http://bit.ly/acX4gw and our summary of the landmark study finding that foster care churns out walking wounded four times out of five - again, with a link to the full study: http://bit.ly/aY75vT Other studies are cited in our Issue Paper #1 comparing foster care to family preservation available here: http://nccpr.info/issue-papers/
As for orphanages, they were, and remain, by far the worst option. Decades after a trauma it's not unusual for people to bury the hurt and view the experience through rose colored glasses. But the research on the harm of institutionalization is overwhelming. Some of it is summarized in our Issue Paper on orphanages and our summary of the research on residential treatment, both available at www.nccpr.org
Yes, even one child harmed in her or his own home is one too many - and so is one child harmed in substitute care, where the rate of maltreatment is vastly higher.
1. I am definitely not an advocate of foster care. As I said, it has failed miserably in far too many cases. But I have personally seen children in abusive homes where they should have been removed. CPS workers in their visits would have no way of finding out what we neighbors knew. The benefits you describe from which some children are being torn, i.e. ties with other relatives or siblings, neighborhood friends, schoolmates often do not exist, which is why one size does not fit all.
2. Further verbal abuse, ridicule and degradation can be even more destructive to the psyche than physical being separated from friends, etc. Like one friend who was abused physically, verbally and emotionally as a child said to me, ”my physical wounds healed but my loss of confidence, insecurity and guilt have lasted to this day.”
3. Don’t forget that in most cps agencies, public criticisms made by various forms of media, churches and the public go into personnel files and can and are used later for dismissal.
4. I wrote nothing to advocate government operated ”orphanages” which conjure up Charles Dickens stories. There are many other well-run residential groups that house children who were mistreated, abandoned or other wise separated from biological parents.
I gave the example of Boys Town because I have knowledge of men who were placed as boys in Boys Town Neb although there is more than one location now around the country. An excerpt from the National Research Institute describes what they told me. Not only that but they said they had formed in some cases life long friends who provided mutual support to obtain jobs and business opportunities.
“Two significant NRI studies indicate that former Boys Town youth use what they learn while in Boys Town’s care to become productive citizens and assets to their communities. The Five-Year Study and Sixteen-Year Study both illustrate that positive changes youth experience in our residential program continue long after they leave Boys Town.”
The social service industry is not fond of these places because operators do require standards of civil conduct, values are instilled and violators are disciplined. Consequently, the industries’ studies are subject to question, if not bias.
All options should be open for children to help children in dysfunctional homes and insisting they remain in such often sentences a child to a lifetime of misery.
Child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and cruel. They do indeed leave some children in dangerous homes, even as they take many more from homes that are safe, or could be made safe with the right kinds of help. But the two problems are related. The more that systems are overloaded with children needlessly removed, the less likely they are to find children in real danger.
2. The biggest harm inflicted by foster care is the emotional harm. Of course some children should be removed from their homes, and it's setting up a straw man to suggest that anything I've said indicates otherwise. But as I said in the original piece, foster care (a term I use generically - it definitely includes orphanages) is an extremely toxic intervention that needs to be used sparingly and in small doses. Sacramento County is prescribing mega-doses of foster care.
3. That's an interesting theory - but where's your evidence that workers are, in fact, dismissed specifically for taking away too many children? Can you produce even one news account from anywhere in the country that says something like "A caseworker with [county/state] Child Protective Services was fired yesterday for repeatedly placing children in foster care when better options were available"? I can cite plenty that speak of the firing of workers who left children in dangerous homes.
4. Most orphanages are not and never were government run. People avoid the term because the euphemisms sound better. But an orphanage is an orphanage is an orphanage, and no matter what name you use for it, the outcomes for the children tend to be rotten. And that's even when they are *not* rife with abuse. And over and over and over again, even orphanages once thought to be models are exposed as abusive. (One of the most comprehensive newspaper series on this, finding not rotten apples but rotten barrels, ran in the Sacramento Bee in the late 1990s - that's 1990s, not 1890s). Other examples are in our Issue Paper on orphanages available here: http://nccpr.info/issue-papers/
In contrast, the one time you cite something other than personal experience, it's not the study itself, but Boys Town's own account of the study - not exactly an unbiased source.
Compare that to an institution that was honest with itself, not far from you: EMQ Families First in Santa Clara County. Again, details on their story, and how they reformed themselves, and shut down almost all their institutional beds in favor of better options, are in our paper on Residential Treatment, available here: http://bit.ly/6neiVw
The problem in Sacramento County isn't that anyone is out to foreclose the option of substitute care - the problem is that Sacramento County repeatedly fails to use the option among "all options" that is best for the overwhelming majority of children the overwhelming majority of the time - family preservation.
Almost all of your comments are based on personal experience - "I know of..." "I've seen..." etc. We all are profoundly influenced by our personal experiences and, to some extent, that's as it should be. But it is one thing to be influenced by personal experience, it's another to be tyrannized by it. One of the biggest problems in child welfare is the tyranny of personal experience, because the problem with personal experience is: It's personal. For every anecdote you've got, I've got a counter-anecdote. When anecdotes collide, it's time to look at the data.
And that's why numbers do matter. That's why it *matters* that those studies of 15,000 cases (did you read them yet?) found that in the typical cases children left in their own homes typically did better than *comparably maltreated* children placed in foster care -and again, that's foster care in all its forms including orphanages. That's why it matters that two comprehensive reviews of the literature found that the outcomes for children raised in institutions tend to be dismal. But this point was made far better on The Daily Show; see the link to the relevant clip in this post to the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog: http://bit.ly/aen690
The fact remains that the winner of a race demonstrates the runner's success not the surrounding theorists who play the numbers game. I quoted winners while child protective services and its academic counterpart spew their hardline inflexible rhetoric which has produced far too many losers over the years.
P.S, You are wrong that no states in the history of this country ever ran or controlled what you call orphanages.
What I actually wrote: "Most orphanages are not and never were government run. "
What you quote me as saying: "You are wrong that no states in the history of this country ever ran or controlled what you call orphanages."
Mr. Wexler's "reporting" is peppered in all the appropriate places with carefully chosen phrases that color the foster care system as an inherently bad idea [ "foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that must be used sparingly and in small doses. But for more than a decade, Sacramento County has been prescribing mega-doses of foster care." ] Mr. Wexler has compared the very selfless act of welcoming someone else's child into one's home to Michael Jackson's "drip". The foster care system needs the full support of the community as do troubled parents. But mainly, children whether "removed" from the home or not deserve an honest accounting of what is individually best for him/her on a case by case basis. The problem I see with studies and reports like the one quoted is the whole blanket statement of it all. Sacramento County is facing huge budget cuts and to be honest I trust less in CPS' ability to answer to emergency calls in a timely fashion than in it's ability to monitor foster care effectively. Average emergency response times average around 72 hours!!! None of us in this conversation can concede that as an acceptable safety net when by and large foster homes are good homes.
Thought I'd share my "expert" opinion.
Why would you want to ignore studies that find only one in five former foster children doing well in later life because that doesn’t jibe with, here we go again, your personal experience? Why would you ignore the research that looked at the case-by-case outcomes of 15,000 cases because it doesn’t match what you see in your own case?
To carry the medical analogy further, foster care is like the most extreme, most debilitating form of chemotherapy – sometimes you really have to use it, but you’d better be sure that the patient really does have cancer, that the chemotherapy won’t make things worse, and there is absolutely no other way to cure the patient. That’s true regardless of how kind and well-meaning the oncologist is.
I am, however, very glad you brought up the issue of kinship care – which is what you are providing. Kinship care does, indeed, cushion the blow of foster care. Kinship care placements typically are more stable, better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.” (But that’s just those darn studies again – should I ignore all that if the next comment happens to be from a former foster child who was abused in kinship care?)
But here’s where those pesky data come in again: Sacramento County actually has a dreadful record for using kinship care. During the same year examined in our California Rate-of-Removal Index, Sacramento County placed only 9.3 percent of foster children with relatives. The state average was 17.4, Contra Costa County used relatives for 26.2 percent of placements and Orange County used relatives for 29.4 percent of placements – which may help explain why Orange County has the best safety outcomes in the state. (Links to all data sources are included with the Rate of Removal Index, available at www.nccpr.org).
So had I not, as you put it, lumped in kinship placements with stranger care placements, Sacramento County’s record would have been even worse.
Do you see any problem with this low rate of kinship care? Or does it just show that grandparents and other relatives in Sacramento County are typically inferior to their counterparts elsewhere, and the county is making good “case by case” decisions? And how would you feel about relying on the good judgment of caseworkers to do the right thing, case by case, were they suddenly to decide tomorrow that they don’t like you for some reason and think your nephew would be better off with a stranger?
Of course every decision should be based on the facts of that particular case. But that’s one of those inarguable bromides that gets us nowhere. You need guidelines, rules, laws – and data – to have any idea if those case-by-case decisions really are serving children.
Finally, you’re right to be worried about those budget cuts. But the more that caseworkers are overloaded with false allegations, trivial cases and children who don’t really need to be there, the less likely they are to find those children in real danger who really do need to be taken from their homes – especially now.
You wrote, "Even if one child is left in a home where parent(s) don't want him/her and suffers physical and emotional abuse or death, that is one too many." If one child is placed into foster care and suffers physical and emotional abuse or death there, is that not also one too many? Are you aware of any such cases?
Your characterization of Mr. Wexler's point-by-point rebuttal of your arguments (that you admit you read too fast) as "verbose rhetoric" is more indicative of your own mindset than it is descriptive of his writing.
Mr. Wexler makes a very good point: because of the emotional impact of personal experience, it is hard for anyone personally affected to be open-minded. That's why it is important to look at the data. The studies are good ones. Once you've had a chance to cool off, I hope that you will take the time necessary to read the papers offered. The studies are good ones, and there is something to be learned from them.