Preserving chaos
Murphy, Patrick T.
APRESERVING CHAOS THE RIGHT IGNORES THE UNDERCLASS, THE LEFT PATRONIZES IT On September 15, 1994, the Chicago police charged a thirty-one-year-old woman living on the West Side with endangering...
...schools that do not-and cannot without parental involvement-educate...
...At the trial, testimony showed that [the mother] for years stood idly by as her three daughters were beaten and raped by [the boyfriend...
...Instead of admitting to the problems of the underclass and welfare dependency, the Left purposely misstated the statistics, arguing that the majority of individuals on welfare are white...
...The Office of the Public Guardian represents abused and neglected children, primarily at the Juvenile Court of Chicago...
...The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) had been "working with" the mother for the past half-dozen years...
...The argument that poor children are being singled out for punishment is garbage...
...He also prophesied that the implications of this report could lead to increased misery among very poor African-Americans...
...Worker changed Pamper and baby was so raw from diaper rash, skin literally came off in diaper...
...At times, child protection means preserving the family...
...In 1974, I wrote a book, Our Kindly Parent the State (Viking Press, Penguin Books), about my experiences in representing abused and neglected children and their families...
...Of course this is true, but the vast majority of Americans are also white...
...The review required for family preservation is a great idea if there is a family to preserve...
...the philosophy these reviews seek to uphold has been shown to be not only muddleheaded, but positively counterproductive, in that it harms the very people it seeks to help...
...Because in our major cities, the underclass is primarily African-American, the majority of our abused child clients are black...
...I implore you to devise ways to cut down the federal bureaucracy and guidelines, which stifle creative thinking on the local level and which seem to exist only to uphold a politically correct philosophy, which no longer makes sense...
...Family preservation also makes little sense in the larger scheme of welfare services...
...Back then, we argued that most children were taken from poor parents because of the middle-class bias of state social workers...
...I suppose it is only fair that the liberals place the blame on him for the underclass because conservatives have excoriated LBJ's expansive and "irresponsible" programs for the same problems...
...But the true believers in the child welfare industry argue that these adults are victims who must be helped at the expense of the child's safety...
...To succeed today, you need at least a high school diploma and probably more...
...I now see five or six generations, fifteen years apart, of welfare-dependent families without constant male authority figures...
...The goal of child welfare should be child protection...
...It is cultural...
...They purchased beds and hired workmen to install a hot-water heater and fix the holes in the wall...
...and the whole mess a Gordian knot resisting solutions and ready to explode in the outer cities as random violence and in the inner city as rioting and looting...
...People of the underclass do not have the high school education plus more...
...a welfare system depriving people of dignity, fostering irresponsible behavior, and belittling self-discipline...
...Imagine the response of feminists (or conservative, traditional women, for that matter) to anyone who argued that such behavior toward a nonconsenting adult woman is not serious...
...We cannot tell you first-hand the effects of reviews required by the Adoption Assistance Act, but we can tell you first-hand that these reviews appear to make no difference other than to increase bureaucracy...
...I compare the underclass I currently see in court to the poor I represented in the sixties and seventies, and the comparison is invidious...
...I began with an actual case, and I could write pages about the number of kids I have seen beaten, raped, or killed while the state was trying to preserve a family that was not a family at all, but instead, a couple of people whose sexual relations led to the birth of a child...
...I submit to you that this is a patronizing message...
...The Bane/Ellwood studies show that when first-time recipients of AFDC are broken down by race, 60 percent are white, 35.7 percent black...
...Children having children do not finish their high school education...
...The Democrats have predictably blamed Ronald Reagan, who has become the liberals' favorite whipping boy for all the social ills facing our country...
...To understand the underclass and the problems of the underclass, legislators, members of the administration, and other politicians should not read boring statistics which can be argued every which way...
...We believe that these reviews and the philosophy of family preservation they entail should be done away with because: experience shows that they do not help...
...Therefore, a majority of cases where your friendly pervert screws a child are not serious...
...Instead, the drug addict, actively abusing or neglecting her children, may get a housekeeper, money, intensive social work services, chauffeuring to appointments, and even several months' rent for a new apartment, so that she can move out of the projects...
...These mothers make decisions on how to spend the money and live off the checks as much as the children, and some times more...
...Four years earlier, DCFS, with juvenile court approval, had taken the kids from the mother because she left home to get her welfare check and didn't come back for two days...
...APRESERVING CHAOS THE RIGHT IGNORES THE UNDERCLASS, THE LEFT PATRONIZES IT On September 15, 1994, the Chicago police charged a thirty-one-year-old woman living on the West Side with endangering her nine children, aged six-weeks to adolescence...
...drugs sold on street corners as freely as soda, and guns as available as drugs...
...The goal of welfare reform should not be to prevent women from having children, but to encourage teen-aged girls to make decisions based upon microeconomic realities, and to delay child bearing until they are adults who are capable of supporting their children...
...AFDC checks go to moms, not kids...
...Most of the cases we see in juvenile court involve the underclass...
...Children, primarily from the underclass, are pouring into the juvenile court and child welfare bureaucracies, primarily because of the failures of our welfare system...
...Instead, they should spend a few days, weeks, or even months in our criminal and juvenile justice courts in any moderate-sized city...
...A culture of welfare-dependent individuals recycles their welfare dependency and misery to a new generation every fifteen years or so, and that population, for reasons dating back to slavery and segregation, is primarily African-American...
...As a society, we should demand excellence from everybody, but most particularly from those who have no one else to motivate them to reach their potential...
...Not surprisingly, four years later, the kids were in worse shape and there were three more of them...
...The Right ignores the plight of the underclass, and the Left patronizes it, which is just another form of racism...
...Not the seven families providing heroically for their children or even the families who are providing marginal care...
...The most depressing part of my job is to walk into juvenile court on any day, and to see kids about the same age as my own two sons, with the same potential for excellence and achievement, who will never have the chance to attain that potential...
...In the 1970s, cases of actual child abuse were rare in my experience...
...The authors of the report listed only 6 percent of all sexual abuse cases as serious, even though one-third of all sexual abuse cases included penile penetration ("National Incidence and Prevalence of Child Abuse and Neglect," 1988, revised report, Rockville, MD, Westat, September 1991, as reported by Douglas Besharov and Lisa Laumann, "Don't Call It Child Abuse if It's Really Poverty," Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton...
...The problems of the underclass are exacerbated by the flight of companies to underdeveloped countries...
...In my view from the bottom of the mountain, at a collectively unconscious level, society simply does not consider the underclass kid to have the same worth as a middle-class child, white or black...
...Or try suggesting that a boss mouthing sexual innuendos is not guilty of a serious infraction...
...In Illinois, these services include housekeepers in the home, cash vouchers up to $500, down payments for two months' rent, psychiatric or other counseling, and chauffeuring services...
...The daughters were four, six, and eight at the time that the younger one was murdered by the boyfriend...
...Beat up or have sex with your own child and you'll get a social worker and a housekeeper...
...After a few months, DCFS returned the kids to the custody of the mother and began to offer her benefits of a program called Family Preservation Services, including a housekeeper five days a week...
...The cost of AFDC may not be astronomical, but it is devastating in terms of spinoffs such as children who ultimately end up in the criminal justice system, who are abused and neglected, or who simply live out their lives in despair on welfare themselves...
...But at any one time, 48 percent of recipients are white and 47.5 percent are black, and of individuals on AFDC for more than ten years, 15 percent are white and 33.7 percent are black...
...What they were really saying is that we cannot openly discuss the implications of the report because so many Americans are racist, and they will surely take these statistics to mean that African-Americans are somehow less stable, less moral, less ethical, and less family-oriented than their white counterparts...
...The Left would have no part of Moynihan or his report, both of which were labeled as racist...
...We can't take children away just because of poverty...
...And it's only moderate sex abuse when in one-third of the cases the lout actually screws the kid...
...But federally mandated child preservation too often means that services are lavished on irresponsible individuals who have seriously harmed their children...
...In 1980, Congress passed the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, which mandated that the state provide Family Preservation Services to keep children at home...
...In some instances, she had been in the same bed with [the boyfriend] as he sexually attacked her daughter, according to the testimony...
...In other words, although he didn't call it that, he was alluding to what has since been tagged as an underclass...
...But it does seem just a bit much for the liberals to shirk their own responsibility, when it was we, liberals, who hushed up the "Moynihan Report" when its author warned us in 1965 of the coming underclass syndrome...
...The police reported: "Each child smelled of human feces, there was inadequate cleanliness, inadequate food, roach-infested conditions, and two inches of water in the house...
...Because it involves the underclass, which in our major cities is comprised primarily of African-Americans, it is a racist message...
...Let me give you one more case, but I'll let the Chicago Tribune explain it: "A mother who stood idly by as her boyfriend repeatedly sexually and physically abused her three daughters, including one who later died, should be flown at taxpayer expense to Florida four times a year to visit her two surviving girls, [DCFS officials] are recommending...
...If we do not stop now, examine the problem, and, as a society, try to do something about it, it will explode to haunt the rest of us and our children for generations to come...
...Most mothers receiving AFDC checks do use the money for the benefit of their children...
...Society, schools, and the Left expect nothing from inner-city African-American kids, whether bright, average, or dumb...
...Infant was saturated with urine when child was taken into custody...
...The problem is not racial, but neither is it economic...
...A recent study divided all injuries suffered by children into four categories: fatal, serious, moderate, and inferred...
...Poorhygiene...standing water...soiled pampers throughout bedroom floor...
...The Adoption Assistance Act was the culmination of the do-not-blame-the-victim philosophy of the late sixties and seventies, in this case expressed by the view that a poor, powerless, and misguided parent is as much a victim as the child whom he or she has neglected or abused...
...If, for instance, you take any floor of any housing project in the nation, you may find seven families struggling heroically against impossible odds to raise their children adequately, three or four families providing marginally for their children, and one or two crack-cocaine addicts who abuse their children or leave them alone while they go out looking for drugs...
...The federal guidelines mandate that even when the children are taken away, the states must bend over backward to send the children back home...
...Or that a goon who slaps his wife or girlfriend around leaving "injuries or impairments for which observable symptoms persisted for at least twenty-four hours" constitutes only "moderate abuse...
...The purpose of the legislation was to provide state services so that parents could learn to care for their own children...
...Holes in walls and falling plaster...
...In that book, and later, on at least two occasions before congressional committees, I argued that the poor were being victimized by the state's approach to child welfare...
...The "Moynihan Report" was one of the earliest victims of political correctness...
...Older children admitted they had not had any breakfast for two days, only lunch at school and a sandwich for dinner...
...But welfare cast as a children's issue makes questions of welfare dependency disappear...
...Beat up or rape the kid down the block and you'll end up in the can for a good long spell...
...Moderate was defined as "injuries or impairments for which observable symptoms persisted for at least twenty-four hours (for example, bruises, depression, or emotional distress...
...When the statistics are studied realistically, it is clear that a welfare-dependent, primarily African-American underclass wallows in misery...
...Which of the parents receives additional services from the taxpayers...
...And it is only "moderate" sex abuse when the mom's paramour or the dad comes up behind a twelve-year-old girl and fondles her breast, or pats her butt, or bites her on the shoulder, or strokes her leg or crotch as they're watching MTV...
...There was no food at all in the refrigerator, all baby formula was spoiled, even the bottle the child was drinking from...
...Somewhere along the line, however, they forgot to make sure that the mother kicked her drug habit...
...After the police took the kids from the woman, a DCFS spokesperson said: "From the time we've been involved with the family, we've been dealing with issues related to poverty...
...Along with others, I argued that family preservation would be cheaper for the government and better for the child...
...The underclass was not created by welfare, but today it is sustained by a welfare system that encourages dependency...
...Moynihan pointed out what he perceived to be an alarming statistic-that 25 percent of all black children were being born to single moms...
...But it is a horrible idea if it involves keeping children (or returning them) in a situation where they can be seriously harmed...
...Her six children were left with an invalid grandmother...
...I have been representing abused and neglected children since 1968, first as a legal services lawyer, then in private practice, and since 1986 as Public Guardian of Cook County...
...anything we can do to reduce federal bureaucracy and to return decision making to those who actually face these problems is a step in the right direction...
...Under its aegis, irresponsible behavior is rewarded and responsible behavior is denigrated...
...According to investigators at that time, the four children, "were without coats...
...Act responsibly and you get nothing...
...The message to people in the underclass is: Act irresponsibly and you will get help...
...We are lawyers trying to represent, as best we can 31,000 children, ranging in age from a few-days-old to swaggering, defiant, frightened adolescents...
...The child welfare crowd frequently takes a blase" attitude toward child abuse...
...These poor children are fungible commodities to be experimented with by sending them back to parents who have tortured or neglected them...
...We see life from the bottom of the mountain, not the top...
Vol. 122 • March 1995 • No. 6
