by Cris Beam
[>] two years on average nationwide: The average length of stay in foster care for children in the United States is 25.3 months, as of September 30, 2010, according to The AFCARS Report, No. 18 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau, June 2011). http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/resource/afcars-report-18.
[>] three years in New York: The average length of stay for foster children in New York as of 2008 was 36.7 months. Reported in “Child Welfare in New York” (Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund, January 2010), citing data from U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Background Materials and Data on the Programs Within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means (2008), Tables 11–62 and 11–72, calculations by CDF. http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/state-data-repository/cwf/2010/child-welfare-financing-new-york-2010.pdf.
[>] $15 to $20 billion a year: The actual figure is difficult to calculate, as child welfare is funded through a combination of federal, state, and local sources. In 2005, the Urban Institute completed the fifth in a series called The Cost of Protecting Valuable Children: Understanding State Variation in Child Welfare Financing, by Cynthia Andrews Scarcella, Roseana Bess, Erica Hecht Zielewski, and Rob Geen (May 2006), available at http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/311314_vulnerable_children.pdf. Based on an analysis of forty-seven states, the authors found that, in 2004, states spent $23.3 billion in federal, state, and local money on foster care. Although this was the last study of its kind, and foster care enrollment figures have gone down overall since 2004, this same study claimed that federal spending accounted for 49 percent of total foster care spending, state spending for 39 percent, and local spending for 12 percent, and these percentages have likely remained relatively stable. The budget estimate for the lion’s share of the federal portion of foster care funding (the federal government also provides capped grants and other monies) for 2012 was $7,256,000,000, according to the Fiscal Year 2012 Budget for the U.S. Government’s Department of Health and Human Services, page 91, available at https://www.acf .hhs.gov/sites/default/files/olab/fy_2012_bibpdf.pdf. We can assume that the total figure for 2012 is somewhere between $15 billion and upwards of $20 billion.
[>] upwards of $100 billion: Ching-Tung Wang, PhD, and John Holton, PhD, Total Estimated Cost of Child Abuse and Neglect in the United States, an Economic Impact Study published by Prevent Child Abuse America, and Time for Reform: Investing in Prevention, Keeping Children Safe at Home, by Kids Are Waiting (KAW), a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, in September 2007 found that, in 2007, the costs associated with child abuse and neglect were $103.8 billion. The study is available on the Pew Charitable Trusts website at http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=34676.
[>] I said to Frankie: Name has been changed.
[>] serious emotional problems: From the “Facts About Foster Care” page of the watchdog and advocacy organization Children’s Rights, based in New York City, citing the American Academy of Pediatrics’ “Testimony of Laurel K. Leslie, MD, MPH, FAAP, House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support Hearing on the Utilization of Psychotropic Medication for Children in Foster Care,” May 8, 2008. http://www.childrensrights.org/issues-resources/foster-care/facts-about-foster-care/.
[>] by their twenty-first birthdays: Twenty-two percent of foster care alumni are homeless for a day or more after exiting foster care, compared to 2.6 to 6.8 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the general population in any given year. Casey Family Programs fact sheet “Foster Care by the Numbers.” http://www.casey.org/Newsroom/MediaKit/pdf/FosterCareByTheNumbers.pdf.
[>] No state met more than two of the seven criteria: Robert Pear, “U.S. Finds Fault in All 50 States’ Child Welfare Programs, and Penalties May Follow,” The New York Times, April 26, 2004.
1. King Solomon’s Baby
[>] so they can share: Kings 3:16–28, New International Version.
[>] without a warrant: Technically, in New York, parents have the right to refuse entry to ACS investigators, though it’s not always in their best interests to do so. According to the Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP), ACS could decide to file a neglect or abuse case in family court, or request a warrant for the parents to come to court. They could also simply return with the police, who can enter the home without permission or court order. Child Welfare Organizing Project, The Survival Guide to the NYC Child Welfare System: A Workbook for Parents by Parents, http://www.cwop.org/documents/survivalguide2007english.pdf; and Mike Arsham, executive director of the Child Welfare Organizing Project, e-mail correspondence, July 2012.
[>] this law is often ignored: Arsham, e-mail correspondence, July 2012.
[>] even if they’re related: Data on state licensure requirements is compiled by the National Resource Center for Family-Centered Practice and Permanency Planning at the Hunter College School of Social Work. http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/socwork/nrcfcpp/downloads/Foster_Home_Licensing.pdf.
[>] one of the roughly thirty foster care agencies: As of early 2012, ACS had contracts with thirty-two foster care agencies. A list of current agencies can be found on the ACS website: http://www.nyc.gov/html/acs/html/home/home.shtml.
[>] That was Russell: Name has been changed.
[>] fifty family court cases every day: According to a spokesperson from the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York, 64,035 petitions were filed in family court in 2008. There are forty-seven judges to hear all of these cases, meaning that each judge hears about fifty-one cases per day. A lawyer with ACS, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, said that in her experience, judges heard this many cases daily.
[>] to live in ten or twenty different houses: Reducing the number of placements is a clear goal in child welfare, and thankfully, as kids spend less time in care we may start seeing a shift in the number of moves these kids make. In New York in 2010, 56 percent of the kids who had been in care for twenty-four months or longer had experienced three or more placements—a 3 percent drop from 2007. From “Child Welfare Outcomes Report Data,” 2010, a report that is published annually by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to meet the requirements of section 203(a) of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA). http://cwoutcomes.acf.hhs.gov/data/tables/six_one_more_than_24?years[]=2007&years[]=2008&years[]=2009&years[]=2010&viz=table&states[]=33&state=®ion=.
[>] Oliver’s mom, Caitlin: Caitlin’s name, as well as the names of her boyfriend and his family members, has been changed.
2. Eye of the Beholder
[>] three-quarters of the maltreatment cases in this country: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau, “Child Maltreatment 2010,” reported that there were 695,000 kids who experienced substantiated abuse or neglect in fiscal year 2010. Of these, 78.3 percent suffered neglect; 17.6 percent suffered physical abuse; 9.2 percent suffered sexual abuse. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm10/cm10.pdf#page=9.
Still, one-third of New York’s foster children have spent three years or more in foster care, according to The Long Road/One Year Home Symposium: Proceedings (New York: Children’s Rights, November 2011), and in 2006, ABC Primetime published a brief wherein they claimed, “It is not uncommon to hear of children who have been in 20 or 30 different homes.” “Facts on Foster Care in America,” ABC Primetime, May 30, 2006. http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/FosterCare/story?id=2017991&page=1#.T_2iuGjDPww.
[>] with this as its minimum definition: The child abuse and neglect definition was obtained from the “Definitions of Child Abuse and Neglect State Statutes Series,” Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2007. http://www.childwelfare.gov/systemwide/laws_policies/statutes/define.cfm.
[>] assistant attorney-in-charge of the Juvenile Rights Practice: When I met him, Rudy Estrada was
the LGBTQ coordinator at New York’s ACS, creating training models for working with queer kids, recruiting foster and adoptive parents for them, and developing policies to protect them from further discrimination. Before this job, he was actually suing ACS and state welfare administrations like it, in his job as a staff attorney for Lambda Legal’s Foster Care Project in Chicago.
[>] The agency had also hired more detectives and consultants: Ronald Richter, personal interview, June 14, 2012.
[>] benchmark figures for children’s adoptions and reunifications with biological parents have gone up: A lawsuit was filed in 1989 (LaShawn v. A. Gray, C.A. No. 89–1754, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia) against DC’s child welfare, seeking whole-scale reform. The case was appealed, but in 1993, a modified eighty-four-page final order was handed down, which mandated, among many other things, that all persons hired as social workers must have a master’s degree in social work. See LaShawn A. v. Dixon, Modified Final Order (November 18, 1993), 47, retrieved from http://www.childrensrights.org. The system was reorganized as a Cabinet-level agency within the District government, and there were many internal changes, so it’s difficult to tell what influenced what precisely, but still, according to a major independent audit conducted in 2009, benchmark figures were still not as high as expected. See An Assessment of the District of Columbia’s Child Welfare System (as of January 31, 2009) (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Social Policy, April 30, 2009). Also, according to Richard Barth, PhD, professor and dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, there are many other counties that require a master’s degree in social work—as well as more than twenty states where the MSWs getting trained spend two years specifically learning about child welfare work.
[>] “causeth contempt and irreverence”: Stephen O’Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 10.
[>] indentured servants to richer families: Local governments removed children via “poor laws” based on a British system of the same name. Jillian Jimenez, “The History of Child Protection in the African American Community: Implications for Current Child Welfare Practices,” Children and Youth Services Review 28, no. 8 (August 2006): 888–905.
[>] almshouses or even jails: See Mimi Abramowitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1988), chapter 5. This was happening particularly in New York, according to O’Connor, Orphan Trains, 37.
[>] “quite untaught”: O’Connor, Orphan Trains, 103.
[>] religious example for the world: For a more thorough discussion of this idea, see chapter 1 in Elizabeth Pleck’s Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
[>] the girl’s foster mother: “The Catalyst: 1870–1874,” on the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children website: http://www.nyspcc.org.
[>] 250 child protection associations nationwide: Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (New York: Vintage, 2001), 8.
[>] flogging as punishment: Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 10.
[>] hitting urban centers at the time: There had been lurid reports of violent crimes and murders in crime gazettes after 1874. Ibid., 79.
[>] control the children of immigrants: Historian Elizabeth Pleck writes about many reasons for the rise of SPCCs. Because of all of the violence and crime reported in the papers, some people argued for drastic measures to stop the children of immigrants, primarily, from becoming criminals. Most SPCC directors didn’t talk about the family directly, or even the prevention of cruelty, really, but rather a kind of faulty moral character that emerged in society too. A wealthy urban elite was fearful of the social disorder and disease and poverty they saw in the cities, and they blamed the immigrant, Catholic, and poor inhabitants. They wanted to stop the kids of these families from becoming thieves and drunks. Ibid., 70, 76, 79.
[>] remove a child from an unsafe home: States reaffirmed an old English law, called parens patriae, which establishes the state as the ultimate parent for children. The law had been in use since the mid-nineteenth century, but only in cases of property inheritance. Suddenly it became a firm legal principle justifying a social worker’s right to remove a child from an unsafe home—without police and without a warrant. It’s still in use today. Jimenez, “The History of Child Protection in the African American Community,” 892.
[>] on the books: John E. B. Myers, “A Short History of Child Protection in America,” Family Law Quarterly 42 (2008–9): 456.
[>] more than a million in 1980: Ibid.
[>] two or three a month: Don’t Turn Back: Reform Has Made New York’s Children Safer, an analysis of trends in New York City child welfare (Alexandria, VA: National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, released January 2006; updated, January 2009). http://www.nccpr.org/reports/dontturnback.pdf.
[>] Her murder was nationally publicized: Elisa Izquierdo was featured on the cover of Time magazine; the article was David Van Biema, Sharon Epperson, and Elaine Rivera, “Elisa Izquierdo: Abandoned to Her Fate,” Time, December 11, 1995. Her story was also featured on Dateline in August 1996.
[>] “removing the child from harm’s way”: The Honorable Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mayor of the City of New York, and Nicholas Scoppetta, Commissioner, Protecting the Children of New York: A Plan of Action for the Administration for Children’s Services (New York: Administration for Children’s Services, December 19, 1996).
[>] ACS removals had increased by 50 percent: Don’t Turn Back: Reform Has Made New York’s Children Safer.
[>] no running water: These three examples come from Rachel L. Swarns, “In a Policy Shift, More Parents Are Arrested for Child Neglect,” The New York Times, Section A, “Metropolitan Desk,” October 25, 1997, 1.
[>] from twenty-four in 1996 to thirty-six in 1998: Don’t Turn Back: Reform Has Made New York’s Children Safer.
[>] monitored by an outside panel of experts: Marisol v. Giuliani, Settlement Agreement, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, 95 CV 10533 (RJW), December 1, 1998. http://www.childrensrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/1998-12-2_ny_marisol_city_settlement.pdf.
[>] “yank ’em out” philosophy: Nina Bernstein, “Effort to Fix Child Welfare Draws Praise,” The New York Times, December 8, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/08/nyregion/effort-to-fix-child-welfare-draws-praise.html?scp=390&sq=&st=nyt&pagewanted=1.
[>] case could be determined in family court: Ibid.
[>] reduce time spent in care: Ibid.
[>] removals dropped further: Since the reforms began after the height of Foster Care Panic in 1998, reabuse—or parents reabusing their kids after being given preventive help—also fell 30 percent by 2005.
[>] eight hundred new workers were hired: Todd Venezia and Tim Perone, “ACS at Fault in 10 Kid Deaths—Probe Bares ‘Tragic’ Carelessness, Pattern of ‘Lying’ and Covering Up,” New York Post, August 10, 2007.
[>] files on neglect rose by 163 percent: Sewell Chan, “Rise in Child Abuse Reports Has Family Court Reeling,” The New York Times Abstracts, The New York Times Company, January 12, 2007.
[>] children die from abuse or neglect every single day: The advocacy organization Children’s Rights claims that four children die per day in the United States from abuse or neglect. Madelyn Freundlich, Sarah Gerstenzang, Pamela Diaz, and Erika London, Continuing Danger: A Report on Child Fatalities in New York City (New York: Children’s Rights, February 2003). http://www.childrensrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/continuing_danger_february_2003.pdf.
[>] convicted of murder in May 2012: Associated Press, “Mother Guilty of Murder in Death of 4-Year-Old,” The New York Times, New York Edition, May 10, 2012.
[>] a kernel of corn in her belly: Mirela Iverac, “Girl, 4, Had Just a Kernel of Corn in He
r Stomach at Time of Death: ME,” WNBC News Blog, May 3, 2012. http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2012/may/03/medical-examiner-take-stand-trial-4-year-olds-death/.
[>] “evidence of alleged systemic failures” at the agency: N. R. Kleinfield and Mosi Secret, “A Bleak Life, Cut Short at 4, Harrowing from the Start,” The New York Times, New York Edition, May 9, 2011.
[>] criminally negligent homicide: When this book went to press, the caseworker and supervisor were awaiting trial.
[>] supporting the families with intensive home-based therapies: Ronald Richter spoke about this at a forum at the New School in New York City entitled “The Ties That Bind: Reimagining Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare for Teens, Families and Communities,” held on February 2, 2012.
[>] medically fragile children like Marchella: A Planning Group was formed by ACS and the public advocate in November 2010 following the death of Marchella Pierce. The Planning Group investigated the work of ACS as well as services available to medically fragile children and recommended that $11.7 million for preventive services and $2.6 million for homemaking services be fully recognized and stabilized in future budgets, to provide care for at-risk and medically fragile children. The mayor agreed that these services should be funded. From an ACS press release, “ACS and Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio Release Children’s Services Group Report on Death of Marchella Pierce,” March 31, 2011. Retrieved from the ACS website: http://www.nyc.gov/html/acs/html/home/home.shtml.
[>] law later that summer: Governor Cuomo signed a bill on August 20, 2012, that would make assaulting a social worker a felony—affording caseworkers the same protection as transit workers and hotel employees. David Sims, “Cuomo Enacts Bill to Give Social-Service Assaults Felony Status,” The Chief Leader, August 27, 2012. http://thechiefleader.com/news/news_of_the_week/cuomo-enacts-bill-to-give-social-service-assaults-felony-status/article_38215e34-f04f-11e1-91e6-0019bb30f31a.html.
