Will We Save the Children? New York City as Child Abuser

...That hasn't happened...

...The will is not...

...Neighbors are also encouraged to do so...

...A hundred and thirty years ago thousands of homeless children, mostly offspring of immigrants, roamed New York streets, hawking newspapers or begging, stealing, prostituting themselves...

...To this mother, the well-publicized mores of the Upper East Side, where children of rich parents stay out all night bar hopping, seem neglectful and dangerous...

...But in its response to the manifestations of these ills, doesn't society have an obligation to act more decisively against abuse of children...

...A nationwide study of family violence found that the factors having the strongest bearing on family violence were age, income, and employment...

...Blacks, for instance, were more concerned about matters relating to protection and supervision of children and failure to fulfill general parenting responsibilities while Hispanics showed particular concern over matters of physical injury, sexual abuse, and drug and alcohol abuse...

...The major long-term goal is to organize preventive, protective, and foster-care services as a "continuum of care" so that children do not get lost in the system...

...His organization has assembled a coalition that is pressing for short-term goals: • $5 million to upgrade salaries in the public and private sectors and introduce a differential between master's-degree and bachelor-degree social workers as an incentive for workers to seek more training...

...Few now speak of alliances between clients and workers...

...When I told friends I was working on this article I often found two reactions: (1) Why do they let so many children go back to dangerous homes...

...In addition, it is extremely difficult to predict which situation will turn into a death-dealing one...

...About one in three from neighbors and other people is "indicated...

...The second statement is more troubling, for no sweeping generalization can be made about any one group of people...

...There are several explanations for the discrepancies...

...It one who looks at the situation believes that better city services would mean no abused and neglected children...

...Families earning more than $20,000 had a rate of violence half that of families earning under $5,999...

...Better utilization of Special Services for Children's informational systems in order to clear cases more quickly...

...This was not perhaps of the severity we associate with "real" abuse, but as Alice Miller points out in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, the costs are high...

...David Tobis of Welfare Research, Inc., notes that fewer than 60 percent of eligible individuals in New York receive welfare...

...Between the time this article was written and when it appears in print, twenty-five or thirty children will have died of abuse or neglect in New York...

...Instead, public reaction ranges from a punitive one that would break up families to a not-so-benign neglect based on an "appreciation" of "cultural differences...

...A doctor told one researcher that a child seen in a public hospital emergency room was five times more likely to be reported than a child with the same injury seen by a private doctor...

...There are cultural differences in raising children that look like abuse to us but aren't to other people...

...Currently owners of cooperative apartments have not been subject to these taxes...

...What happens to those families...

...and poor people and ethnic and racial minorities are more violent, but that's the way they are, and we shouldn't intervene...

...Noting that the mayor prides himself on a combative "leadership style," Murphy believes that Koch has "made it easier for people to look away" from what is perceived as mostly a problem of the poor (read: blacks and Hispanics...

...This mother runs a greater chance, though, of ending up in the abuse-allegation network than any of those parents who have no idea where their children are...

...forerunners of the twenty-fourhour child-abuse hotline and state child-abuse registry were born...

...Potentially severe ambivalence may be generated from the professionals' dual identification, with both the abused child and the abusing parent," say Giovannoni and Becerra...

...The authors warn: "Cultural differences in the use of corporal punishment cannot justifiably be translated into evidence of FALL • 1987 553 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES cultural differences in the acceptance of 'child abuse.' " Parents who fear that their children will become involved in a drug culture if left to run in the streets restrict their movements, perhaps beating them if they stay out too late...

...After six years of the Koch administration, its brazenness should not have shocked...

...Parents who cannot care for their children need help to be able to do so...

...The emotional effects of child abuse are well-documented—the children who grow up to take out their rage on society and on their own children or turn it inward in selfdestructive ways...

...The ways to prevent most child abuse and neglect are known, but they are costly...

...Abraham could have killed Isaac with no legal repercussions...

...2 John Demos, Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986...

...A Puerto Rican mother tells of hitting her seventeen-yearold daughter when the youngster returned home at 3 A.M...

...I would argue that the hidden memories of being small and powerless cause us to turn away from the problems of these children...

...Most of us grew up subjected to either emotional or physical violence or very much aware that we could be...

...As a result, a national law was passed requiring physicians to report suspected abuse...

...3 Mary Ann Jones, A Second Chance for Families: Evaluation of a Program to Reduce Foster Care (New York: Child Welfare League of America, 1976...

...Only within the past twenty-five years has child abuse per se become a public policy issue...

...Translations: those people are either "animals" or sick and their children will be better off without them...

...The answer to the first question can be summed up in the old adage "blood is thicker than water...

...Ask any abused child whether he wants to stay with his parents or go elsewhere, and the answer will be to stay with the parents...

...There was a feeling then that you could change things...

...At the time there were no organizations devoted to protecting children or statutes under which to prosecute abuse of children...

...Class prejudice and racism can be openly acknowledged as barriers to helping children...

...The issues were identified at a time of economic growth and liberal social policy, but * Most works on child abuse trace a dismal history of officially and privately sanctioned behavior toward children that would now be considered abuse...

...The Alterbudget lists several other taxes or giveaways that could be tightened...

...5 as executive director of a voluntary agency...

...Closing this loophole would result in an additional $60 million...

...That there has been such a major shift in attitudes regarding abuse indicates that massive public education could change our perceptions of children...

...In 1985 the turnover rate for protective-services workers in Manhattan was 89 percent, giving them hardly enough time in which to learn the nuances of difficult and highly emotionally charged situations...

...Instead, the grown-up child takes it out on someone smaller...

...About one in every two cases reported by a professional turns out to be valid...

...There is also the possibility that untrained protectiveservices workers are not always able to detect abusive situations...

...It may sound very cold to say this," a black man with a background in social work recently told the Village Voice, "but I wish we had a good number of white kids beaten to death and abused almost to death...

...FALL • 1987 • 551 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES Henry C. Kempe and four other physicians published "The Battered Child Syndrome" in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Since 1946, when advances in diagnostic radiology allowed doctors to see both old and current fractures, there had been speculation that some children's recurring injuries were not accidental...

...None of the lay groups in the study had any trouble identifying situations involving sexual abuse, extreme physical abuse, and lack of supervision as very serious...

...Every charge must be checked out within twenty-four hours, and Child Protective Services appears to do heroic work in meeting that goal.* But checking out complaints is frequently the end rather than the beginning...

...It's too late to use the tax giveback from this year, but the Alterbudget recommends such actions as extending mortgage-recording and real-property transfer taxes to cover cooperative apartments...

...Orphanages and adoption efforts were primarily for children whose parents were dead...

...Notes Brenda McGowan, Jeanne A. Bertrand, Amy Kohn, Anne S. Lombard, The Continuing Crisis: A Report on New York City's Response to Families Requiring Protective and Preventive Services (New York: Neighborhood Family Services Coalition, 1986...

...Few people ever take out their rage on the authority figure who humiliated them, says Miller...

...Although there had been instances, even in colonial times, of public concern about abuse of children living in their own homes, the landmark case that sparked reform in that area took place in New York in 1874...

...In fact, a sampling by the state of a Special Services for Children office in Brooklyn showed that 40 percent of the families in which abuse or neglect was found were not referred to services...

...The article made clear what many doctors had refused to face—that some parents repeatedly beat and injured their children...

...He quotes Robert B. Edgerton: "Child abuse . . . has become a serious social problem in the United States and in some other industrialized societies, yet it occurs infrequently or not at all in many of the world's [non-industrialized] societies...

...and (2) You have to be careful about your middle-class bias...

...By the mid-1970s the emphasis had shifted to keeping children in the home, working with parents, and providing increased training and reimbursement for foster parents...

...The child welfare system has always been overwhelmed, but today two of the most striking factors that keep us from fulfilling that obligation are class prejudice and racism...

...Early efforts to deal with abuse involved removing the child from the home...

...The money is there...

...States enacted legislation requiring other professionals to report...

...In fall 1986 the Coalition issued a comprehensive report on child abuse and neglect in New York City, The Continuing Crisis, which faulted forty years of official "political management/ damage control" (and could have gone back a lot further).' The report spelled out specific steps, some expensive, others not, that could alleviate the suffering of the 60,000 children reported to be abused or neglected each year...

...The second reason for our failure to aid children is a more subtle cultural one having to do with how we view them and how we were viewed when we ourselves were children...

...3 "It's been easy to pass legislation for mandatory reporting, but now that everyone's neighbor can turn them in, the system is swamped...

...An alternative budget drawn up by the City Project describes a need in 1987-88 for an additional $48 million to provide early intervention, increased staff salaries, increased child-care and homemaker services, neighborhood centers to service high-risk families and children, etc...

...And what of the professionals and laypeople who have made reports...

...Agamemnon may have been punished for it, but he believed he had the right to sacrifice Iphigenia...

...The question remains: Why is it so hard for us to care for one of the most vulnerable populations in our city...

...A study by Giovannoni and Becerra on definitions of child abuse—which presented case vignettes to groups of doctors, social workers, police officers, and lawyers, then to groups of white, black, and Hispanic laypeople—found that laypeople were much more likely to consider situations serious than were professionals...

...They were seen as criminals and near-criminals who might yet be saved by industriousness and exposure to a different environment...

...The women's movement changed that, and although spouse abuse still exists, social tolerance for it is diminishing...

...Day care, homemaker service, counseling, financial aid, quality foster care are in short supply...

...Alterbudget Agenda: Revenue and Expenditure Priorities for the New York City Budget 1987-1988 (New York: The City Project, 1986...

...2 the legislation was passed as the country entered a period of economic recession and political conservatism...

...But not all unfounded calls are malicious...

...Case closed...

...Courts will often go with the child's wishes against the recommendations of protectiveservices personnel, especially since the actual services available are so minimal...

...The dominant culture accepts the idea of physical punishment of children, and so, say Giovannoni and Becerra, "In a very real sense all parents are at risk of some time crossing the threshold into 'child abuse.' " In a sense, many of us have been abused, and it is that experience of helplessness and anger that shapes much of our ability to respond to children...

...She points out that the more people report suspected abuse and neglect, the lower the percentage of "indicated," or well-founded cases...

...A hint of this occurs in accounts of physicians who refused to acknowledge and report cases of abuse when they saw them...

...The first "Orphan Train" left New York in 1854, and until this exploitation of unpaid labor became an issue, good-hearted New Yorkers thought they were doing the right thing by contributing to this cause...

...Too many cases, she charges, end with the notation, "Indicated...

...The challenge for the state is not to ignore what are widely accepted as abuse situations, but to intervene effectively and to respond to what the community sees as abuse and neglect...

...Social mores regarding children could also be changed...

...Where would the money come from...

...Although confidentiality is supposedly guaranteed, families often know who reported them, and professionals frequently find that any hope they had of influencing the family has disappeared in suspicion, even as the conditions remain unchanged...

...Child Protective Services used to be a service," Jones complains...

...6 We are both immobilized by our own unacknowledged rage and impotence, and caught up in a cultural web of complicity that supports that violence, drawing very fuzzy lines between "strict disciplinarians" and "child abusers...

...These actions were thought to be common in times when public floggings, torture, and maiming of adults were legal punishments...

...Still, it did, for the photo and slogan underscored the callousness with which successive city and state administrations have treated the needs of New York City's abused and neglected children...

...Yet in a recent book, historian John Demos argues that it is the stresses of modern life that have led to this problem...

...There's no will to solve the problem...

...New York State passed the Child Protective Services Act in 1973 and the Child Welfare Reform Act of 1979, which called for preventive services to keep children in their own homes and cut down on foster care...

...4 Whites were least likely to consider situations serious...

...It stated that its sponsors would know they had failed if another blue-ribbon panel were appointed as a result...

...Day care, expanded homemaker services, better trained and paid staff—all would help alleviate child abuse and neglect...

...No one expects that...

...Understanding of neglect came later...

...What is less welldocumented, but follows, is that all of us who as children were physically coerced carry that rage and fear...

...If poverty makes abuse more likely, then easing financial strains is a major remedy...

...Now it's an investigative apparatus...

...But the 1960s and the hopes of the civil rights movement that fueled its reform movements are far away...

...Media publicity about the latest child-abuse "crisis," the coalition work of Murphy and others, and city efforts to cut case loads, hire new staff, increase foster-care reimbursements, and coordinate protective and preventive services—plus lawsuits now pending in the courts—promise some relief...

...We can still do something about the thousands who remain...

...They could be saved by being sent to the frontier to work on farms and be cared for (read: indentured in many cases) by country folk who would offer wholesome homes...

...6 Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1983...

...Only quite recently has anyone questioned the idea of children as property...

...It may not be as great as that experienced by more brutalized people, but it is there and it immobilizes us...

...FALL • 1987 555 556 • DISSENT...

...Jeanne M. Giovannoni and Rosina M. Becerra, Defining Child Abuse (New York: The Free Press, 1979...

...What has changed is our awareness of the problem...

...A church worker, horrified by the brutal beatings suffered by a child forever to be known in the textbooks as Mary Ellen, persuaded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to bring charges against the stepmother and father...

...Thirty thousand mothers and children are inappropriately terminated from the welfare rolls every month, even though their financial status has not changed...

...No one knows until and unless they turn up again with a dead child or such life-threatening problems that drastic action is * There is no doubt that ex-spouses or disgruntled neighbors use the hotlines for harassment...

...But what can be done immediately...

...Despite repeated findings that abuse cuts across all racial and class lines, public perception is that it is a problem of the lower classes and minorities...

...A 75-percent state reimbursement formula for financing preventive and protective services so as to eliminate the current incentive to label client needs in artificial ways tied to a bogus reimbursement formula...

...Thus most articles on the subject speak of the dramatic rise in reporting rather than actual incidence, because no one can guess whether there is more or less child abuse now than twenty or thirty years ago...

...Within recent memory wifebeating was not considered criminal...

...They all cost 554 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES money...

...Their pain will have ended...

...The watershed date was 1962, when Dr...

...Asked what a "pie-in-the-sky" budget to attack the problem would be, Dick Murphy notes that it's possible that this could be done for $1 billion...

...5 Murray A. Straus, Richard J. Gelles, and Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980...

...Politicians always take the cheap way out," says child welfare researcher Mary Ann Jones, whose study on preventive services was used to help gain passage of the 1979 Child Welfare Reform Act...

...Pressures of poverty, overcrowding and homelessness, lack of education, substance abuse, mental illness, unemployment, and societal tolerance of violence against children won't be wiped out by bigger appropriations from Albany or City Hall...

...We remain hesitant about interfering in the parent-child relationship...

...This problem didn't start with Ed Koch or Mario Cuomo," says Richard Murphy, coordinator of the Neighborhood Family Services Coalition, but they have let it continue...

...Then maybe the mayor would pay more attention . . . ." Says Dick Murphy: "There's a feeling at City Hall that there's a portion of kids who can't make it...

...In their study, Giovannoni and Becerra found that even though laypeople rated all examples as more serious than did professionals, they tended to rate physical injury as relatively less serious...

...Today in New York State, police officers, teachers, and social workers as well as health professionals are legally obliged to report suspected abuse and neglect...

...552 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES taken...

...Murphy sometimes thinks that as a caseworker in the welfare department under John Lindsay he had more power than he does now * Although poor people and minorities are overrepresented statistically, it can be argued that they are more likely to come to the attention of public authorities than middle- and upper-class child abusers...