INVASION OF THE CHILD SAVERS: No one is safe in the war against abuse
Wexler, Richard
INVASION OF THE CHILD SAVERS No one is safe in the war against abuse BY RICHARD WEXLER The strangers always arrived around midnight. At least five times over a two-year period, they demanded...
...Standards of proof would be tightened and the degree of permissible intervention would vary according to circumstances...
...An estimated half million children are in foster care in the United States, and some 300,000 of them were placed there because they allegedly were abused or neglected...
...He was withdrawn and doing poorly in school until he discovered running...
...At the Florence Heights housing project in Northampton, Massachusetts, a tenant notes matter-of-factly that "one thing people do here, if they don't like their neighbor, is to call the child protective...
...The child savers would have us believe that parents living a comfortable middle-class life, who never want for food, clothing, or shelter, and who can afford baby sitters and day care, are as likely to strike out in frustration at their children, or to neglect them, as is the single parent who runs out of food at the end of the month and is constantly living on the edge...
...Child saving, as critics of the practice call it, is nothing new...
...He did it between June and November 1983, when he was eleven years old...
...Michael Wald, a professor of law at Stanford University and director of Stanford's Center for the Study of Youth Development, is co-author of a model statute that would curb the grounds for coercive intervention by focusing on actual or imminent danger to the child, rather than on the conduct of the parents...
...At least five times over a two-year period, they demanded entry into the Jersey City home of Althea Clark, and she had no choice but to let them in...
...For most of this century, Americans denied the existence of child abuse...
...A majority of these also involve "deprivation of necessities...
...Each time, the children were awakened and dragged from their beds...
...In effect, a family placed in this position is guilty until proven innocent...
...Some credible evidence" is all that is needed to place a family in a central register, and a "preponderance of the evidence"—the lowest standard in American jurisprudence—is all that is needed to remove a child "temporarily" from the home...
...Albert Solnit, former director of the Yale University Child Study Center and one of the strongest critics of current laws, argues that the only way to ensure protection of all children is to put all parents in jail...
...More than one million reports of child abuse and neglect are filed in the United States every year, but only one in every hundred such reports turns out to involve the sort of serious physical battering the public generally thinks of as child abuse...
...The real question is: Who is more likely to protect the interests of most children most of the time, parents or the State...
...Physicians, unwilling to believe what they saw, went so far as to speculate that some children's bones might be exceptionally fragile...
...She couldn't afford to fix it...
...A social worker reported him as such because he missed school to complete the run...
...After she left] I sat on the floor and cried my eyes out...
...If the child savers shifted their focus and lobbied successfully for a narrower neglect law and more limited reporting provisions in exchange for expanded funding of voluntary services, some parents surely would neglect their children and get away with it...
...Such sweeping laws apply not only to actual abuse but also to "neglect...
...The reporting laws can also be a potent tool of harassment...
...Danny began running when he and his mother lived in California...
...But in a free society, you have to decide which risks you take...
...Of all the children in the United States believed to have died of child abuse or neglect, an estimated 25 per cent were known to child protective agencies at the time of their deaths...
...Those efforts have fostered what Martin Guggenheim, former director of the family law clinic at New York University Law School, calls "an atmosphere of hysteria...
...some were social workers from the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services and others were Jersey City police officers...
...The professionals who oppose these laws, typically called "nonintervention-ists," say the laws severely injure thousands of children who have never been harmed by their parents because they confer on child-protective investigators the power to disrupt children's lives...
...Danny Meyer's mother, Jean, says that as a result of the state's diligent efforts to "protect" him, "Danny came home from school in tears, saying that the kids were teasing him because his parents are child abusers...
...Legislative action has brought on an invasion of latter-day "child savers" who sometimes destroy children in order to save them...
...The Meyer family is now listed in the New York State Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment...
...Most states require that every case so reported be investigated...
...Under statutes that would delight Hastings Hart, a child can be taken from the home and placed in foster care for years at a time if the child's "condition or environment is such as to warrant the state, in the interests of the child, in assuming his guardianship" (Ohio...
...Today's child savers, aided by a compliant and superficial press, have lumped together cases of serious abuse with dep-rivation-of-necessities cases and reports that were just plain false, leaving the impression that abuse is so rampant that customary considerations of due processor, for that matter, of common sense—must be abandoned...
...if the child is "without proper care, custody, supervision, or support" (Mississippi), or if the child's "environment is injurious to his welfare" (South Dakota...
...Some children would be hurt and some would die...
...The strangers would stare at the children, looking them over from head to toe...
...In Webster, New York, Danny Meyer is something of a local hero...
...Lest this last definition leave the courts with insufficient authority, the South Dakota legislature added that "this chapter shall be liberally construed in favor of the state...
...Any child in an inner-city ghetto could fit that definition if an agency chose to apply it...
...the family must fight its way out afterward...
...They separate children for petty reasons and for no reason all the time...
...In Kansas City, a study found that 57 per cent of foster children sampled were at high risk of being abused or neglected in their foster homes...
...For example, where a child's living situation is dangerous through no fault of the parents, intervention to improve those living conditions would be permitted, but removing the child from the family would not...
...In that atmosphere, all fifty states have passed laws of breathtaking scope, and more laws are on the way...
...Despite the breadth of current laws and the low standards of proof required under them, an additional sixty in every hundred reports turn out to be totally false...
...In contrast, ten cases involve what the American Humane Association, which collects such data, calls "deprivation of necessities...
...If they're wrong, they are just another group of welfare workers coping with poor people and broken furnaces...
...If the case is considered serious enough, the worker can take the family to court, where a judge can order a child removed from the home...
...As a result, the Meyers may have lost the chance to adopt other children...
...Finally, the strangers would order Mrs...
...I couldn't believe that anybody could do that to me...
...This does not mean it would be a good idea to go back to ignoring the problem...
...The caller, shielded by anonymity and a cloak of legal immunity, can start the whole process up again at any time...
...Sam Liberman, acting executive director of the National Juvenile Law Center in St...
...In Massachusetts, for example, caseloads of thirty or more per worker were common until a Federal judge intervened...
...J. Lawrence Aber says "the vast majority" of so-called neglect cases are really poverty cases...
...Mrs...
...One of her children became ill because of the cold...
...This has been aptly referred to as "the myth of classlessness...
...Federal judges are supervising foster-care systems in New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Kansas City, Missouri...
...Danny suffers from dyslexia, which impedes his Richard Wexler is a reporter for City Newspaper in Rochester, New York...
...writing, and aphasia, which impairs his speech...
...for a child's well-being" (Illinois...
...But when the evidence became too strong to ignore, says J. Lawrence Aber, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, "we went from doing nothing to trying to do everything...
...Three times in as many years, someone—they suspect an "unstable" neighbor—has called in anonymous accusations of child abuse against them...
...The problem of child abuse is serious and real...
...Louis, says there is "a lot of false, vindictive reporting...
...The Children's Defense Fund cites the case of an impoverished woman whose furnace broke down...
...Patrick T. Murphy, former head of the Juvenile Litigation Office of the Legal Aid Society of Chicago, has written that "the [neglect] statute is one of those broad nets of legislation that catch every fish swimming through and allow the fisherman to pick which he wants to keep and which to throw back...
...Two more such investigations followed...
...Unfortunately, the laws tend to give us both...
...The Meyers say their listing in the central register also prompted an agency to cancel its plans to place Korean triplet boys with the family for adoption...
...But the myth persists, perhaps because it does so much for the status of the child savers...
...Child savers insist, and journalists obligingly report, that "child abuse crosses class lines...
...The child savers pay lip service to prevention, but they usually oppose helping parents by any means that they cannot control...
...The principal of his present school says Danny's class work has improved dramatically...
...There is no perfect system," says Solnit...
...The midnight visits, the awakening of the children, the strip-searches— all were done in the name of "child protection...
...Clark's two preschool-aged children...
...He ran first with local high school students, then in the Boston and San Francisco marathons, then down the coast of California...
...Each "raid" on the Clark family had been preceded by an anonymous telephone call to a child-protective "hotline" alleging that the Clark children were victims of child abuse...
...Heath says, the worker "spent almost two hours in my house going over the same allegations over and over again...
...Emphasis'added...
...Clark (not her real name) would remove the children's clothes...
...Kathy and Alan Heath know what Liberman is talking about...
...I'd rather see a family disrupted than a bunch of dead children," says Jean Schafer...
...If they're right, they are on the cutting edge of "treating" a "disease"—the "battered-child syndrome...
...Even when the children get to keep their clothes on, the emotional damage to the entire family can be considerable...
...In so-called emergencies, the worker can do this temporarily without a court order...
...However, many child welfare professionals are not persuaded by these rationalizations...
...The child savers claim to be defending "children's rights...
...Even the child savers don't really believe the myth of classlessness...
...Vague laws and low standards of proof make it easy to pull children away from their parents and throw them into the nation's chaotic system of foster care...
...The reason for this widespread failure is no mystery: Protective service agencies have been buried under an avalanche of reports, most of them false, that must be investigated...
...It's the solutions that are phony...
...There is no hearing beforehand...
...The Humane Association acknowledges that these "abusers" are often guilty of nothing more than being poor...
...Asked about the large number of abuse reports that turn out to be false, Anne Cohn, executive director of the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, replies: "There is no evidence to suggest that large numbers of these unfounded reports in fact are not child abuse cases...
...In the last legislative session alone, New York considered forty-three bills, while California looked at 100...
...Where neglect is real, troubled families often find it difficult or impossible to get the help they need...
...All fifty states have enacted legislative "solutions"—a series of startlingly broad, vague laws under which professionals are required, and the rest of us encouraged, to report any suspicion of child maltreatment...
...Another twenty reports in a hundred turn out to be cases where no abuse or neglect has taken place, but where children are described as being "at risk...
...At one point, twenty-seven cases were assigned to a clerk-typist...
...New York City Mayor Ed Koch greeted Danny at City Hall, Governor Mario Cuomo sent him a personal letter of commendation, and the New York State Assembly passed a resolution honoring him...
...But as Judge Rena Uviller, former director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Juvenile Rights Project, has pointed out, children are incapable of exercising whatever "rights" they have on their own...
...All of the reports were false...
...Today's child savers support only those preventive services that are grafted to the existing child protective empire without replacing any of it...
...Connecticut, for example, defines a neglected child as one who "is being permitted to live under conditions, circumstances, or associations injurious to his well-being...
...They would have you believe that the system works so well that they only separate children when it's absolutely necessary," Guggenheim says...
...This means that investigators disrupt the lives of innocent families an estimated 780,000 times every year, often removing children from their homes only to find out later that the parents or guardians have done no wrong...
...Guggenheim believes more than half the children now in foster care could have been safely left at home...
...Patrick T. Murphy puts the figure at 90 per cent, and Martin Guggenheim says it exceeds 95 per cent, including so-called voluntary placements...
...The American Humane Association acknowledges that abusing families "tend to be involved in deprivation of necessities or neglect more frequently than any other kind of maltreatment which likely is related to their economic status...
...Clark believes the calls were made by a relative bearing a grudge, but she'll never be able to prove it...
...All three times, those reports were determined to be "unfounded," but only after painful investigations by workers from the Monroe County Department of Social Services...
...In Ohio, where Jean Schafer says that "if there is even one child out here that maybe needs our help, that's our business," the average caseworker handles thirty to forty cases, by Schafer's own estimate...
...We will make mistakes...
...The strangers were not child molesters...
...The Meyers and the Clarks are among hundreds of thousands of American families who have become innocent casualties of a war against child abuse that turns, all too often, into a war against children...
...Even sexual abuse, the current cause ce-lebre, accounts, at most, for three in every hundred cases...
...Uncovered" cases—those for which no worker was available—piled up on supervisors' desks, and reports that were supposed to be investigated within twenty-four hours were delayed for weeks...
...In California, a private agency sends out pamphlets urging people to turn in their neighbors to authorities if the neighbors' children seem to be too fat, too thin, too loud, too quiet, too imaginative, or too reluctant to participate in sports...
...In fact, however, studies indicate that poor children are the ones more likely to experience abuse...
...The resulting exertions have proven far more therapeutic to legislators, social workers, and the general public than to abused children...
...And the child savers are right when they say many more cases go unreported...
...But preventive services will never succeed if they must compete for scarce dollars with the giant, coercive system that already exists...
...Jean Schafer, director of Child Protective Services in Ohio, says she favors the present system because "I'm child-focused...
...In 1899, Hastings Hart, secretary of the Children's Home and Aid Society of Chicago, summed up the child savers' approach when he urged that "dependent" children "be taken from the slums and placed in clean homes, physically and morally...
...This article is based, in part, on a documentary he produced for WXXI-TV, the public television station in Rochester...
...A social worker, acting solely on personal discretion, can usually list a family in a state's central register for life...
...The welfare department wouldn't give the mother $250 to fix the furnace...
...Workers have no time to deal effectively with the cases of serious abuse and neglect that prompted the creation of these systems in the first place...
...Then the strangers would demand that the children be stripped naked...
...The child savers see current laws as a trade-off...
...The noninterventionists would use the money saved by narrowing the scope of the laws to beef up efforts to prevent abuse and neglect and to keep families together...
...And child-neglect laws blur the distinction between poverty and neglect...
...The first time the family was accused, Mrs...
...The Heaths (not their real name) say that even after they were "proven innocent" three times, the county did nothing to help them restore their reputation among friends and neighbors who had been told, as potential "witnesses," that the Heaths were suspected of child abuse...
...After the family moved to Webster, a suburb of Rochester, Danny decided he wanted to run across the entire North American continent...
...But that—and worse—is happening now...
...But to the Monroe County Department of Social Services, Danny Meyer was just another "neglected" child...
...Social agencies proposed it and social agencies love it...
...That's what they do with kids when they don't know what else to do with them— throw 'em in foster care...
...Though the agency acknowledges that the cancellation came at the last minute, it denies having acted because of the listing in the register...
...Even if innocent families never were harmed by the present system, even if no child ever were wrongfully placed in foster care, and even if everyone agreed that the surrender of our civil liberties was not too high a price, our present child-protection laws would suffer from one fundamental problem: They don't work...
...On each occasion, they demanded to see Mrs...
...To charges that the system hurts thousands of innocent families, leaves many neglected children worse off than they were before, and makes it impossible to help severely abused children who really do need the coercive intervention of the State, child savers respond that the critics cite only aberrations from a well-functioning norm...
...Even one case in a hundred adds up to 13,000 severely abused children in a year...
...if the parent "does not provide the proper or necessary support...
...That's bullshit...
...Foster care is the garbage dump," says a former foster child who had been in nine homes by the time she was nine years old...
...They also respond with a belief that any family that is reported to authorities must have done something wrong...
...The family doctor, who approved the run, says it worked wonders for Danny's behavior and self-confidence...
...Instead, it went to court, had the children declared neglected, and took them away from their mother...
...In Illinois, for example, strip searching of children alleged to have been abused has become so commonplace that the state's Division of Children and Family Services claims even the slightest attempt to limit the practice "would immediately bring the child abuse hotline investigations to a halt...
...Clark to leave the room so they could be alone with the children...
...The reporter is guaranteed anonymity...
...Such comments are no longer heard, but over the years the practice has changed less than the preaching...
...She went through everything from a strap to an iron, to everything that could cause bruises, asking me if I did those things...
Vol. 49 • September 1985 • No. 9
