by Beam, Cris
Other times, Cruz-Katz was charged with driving these newly removed kids to visits with their biological parents, or to and from court. “I remember it wasn’t the best of cars; my neighbor had just unloaded his car on me, and I’d be carting around five kids with everybody on laps,” he said. “A lot of this comes down to the agency itself—they just didn’t care. I do remember them giving me a car seat, though.”
But they didn’t train him how to use it. Cruz-Katz also had to do investigations, knocking on doors and interviewing family members and looking in drawers and refrigerators. If, by whatever judgment a twenty-two-year-old could cultivate, there was enough “imminent risk” to warrant driving away with the kids, then that’s what he’d do. And sometimes, looking back, it seemed to Cruz-Katz that he was the one taking risks with the children—based on sheer inexperience.
“There was one crack-cocaine-addicted newborn—I took her out of her family home, and they were all yelling at me,” Cruz-Katz said. He didn’t explain what the family’s circumstances were, but he said no police or supervisors came along for the investigation. “I had never been in contact with a child that young before. I didn’t know how to hold her head, and I didn’t know if she had to have her diaper changed or what to do if she did. I had to hope that I put her in the car seat correctly.”
I spoke with a top executive at ACS about this problem, a person with several hundred employees under her command and therefore too much on the line to risk giving her real name. She said she found it deeply troubling that the people on the decision-making front lines, the people who choose to physically remove kids from their parents and their homes, are often just barely out of childhood themselves. These recent college graduates are often the only people who will accept the low pay and difficult demands of a caseworker job. They can make snap decisions, based on the black-and-white sense of justice that comes with the righteousness of youth rather than with the nuance and compassion that can come with age and experience. The commissioner herself was once one of these caseworkers.
“When I think back to the way I made decisions when I was twenty-two, it was horrible,” she admitted, saying she moved one girl in her charge nine times in one year, always looking for a better fit. At ACS, the entry-level case managers now earn salaries in the $40,000 range; supervisors earn about ten grand more.
New York recently hired a new commissioner for ACS, and he says that the front-line investigators now have an average caseload of nine—a record low. Reduced job pressure means, ideally, that workers can make more careful, reasoned decisions about removals. The agency had also hired more detectives and consultants —experts in domestic violence and abuse—to advise the investigators when they were unsure about a case. Still, although every city manages child welfare somewhat differently, they all pay famously low wages for entry-level positions, so they generally resemble New York in that they hire the young and inexperienced to handle the most front-line work. Washington, DC’s child services, however, required that its case managers have master’s degrees a few years back. There, the benchmark figures for children’s adoptions and reunifications with biological parents have gone up somewhat, though not enormously.
Abuse, slippery as it is to grasp and define now, is also a cultural idea that shifts with time. Whipping your child as a punishment was once perfectly acceptable; it isn’t anymore. Spanking is borderline depending on whom you ask; who knows where we’ll stand on spanking in thirty years?
Pan back further into our history and Puritan ideology sounds like modern emotional neglect. Even parental love was a carnal impulse once, and according to one Puritan observer, parents then should have kept a “due distance” from their children because “fondness and familiarity breeds and causeth contempt and irreverence.” In the northern states in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poor or destitute white children were removed from their parents and forced to work as indentured servants to richer families. Children on the streets, whether they were homeless or their parents were busy at work, were routinely rounded up and tossed into almshouses or even jails. By the 1850s, a New York State investigation of county almshouses found that “common domestic animals are more humanely provided for” than the children who were “poorly fed, poorly clothed, and quite untaught.” This, by today’s standards, would be considered state-sanctioned, institutional abuse.
But the state was interfering because the parents of these children were seen as unfit. Being poor, in the nineteenth century, was largely perceived as a moral failure, and charities, both religious and city-operated, were growing to stem the degeneracy.
In general terms, there were three major periods of child abuse legislation in American history—and none, argue some historians, were prompted by an uptick in actual child abuse, but rather by changes in other social conditions. The first was in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Puritans of Massachusetts enacted the first laws anywhere against wife beating and “unnatural severity” toward children. These laws were intended to control what the Puritans believed was their divinely sanctioned community, to protect the group from God’s punishment, and to set a religious example for the world. The second major legislation came in 1874 with the foundation of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children—which was launched after a child had been brutally beaten, daily, and a neighbor had complained. (That parent, ironically, was the girl’s foster mother. ) The name sounds familiar for a reason; there was an ASPCA and legislation protecting animals before there was a similar society for children, but the concept quickly spread. By 1910, there were 250 child protection associations nationwide. Still, some historians argue that the copycat organizations didn’t emerge from a renewed devotion to children (the founders advocated flogging as punishment) but rather as a misdirected response to violent crime waves that had been hitting urban centers at the time. These associations were a way to monitor, and contain, pockets of violence and often control the children of immigrants.
The next big turn in child abuse legislation came about in 1962, when child abuse was, in the modern sense, “discovered.” X-rays, a relatively new technology, allowed radiologists to recognize multiple, prior bone fractures in individual children, indicating intentional harm. A pediatrician named C. Henry Kempe and some colleagues compiled data on suspicious x-rays and then conducted a survey of emergency rooms where they saw further patterns of inflicted burns, brain damage, and other nonaccidental injuries. Kempe coined the term battered child syndrome, triggering a wave of articles and national discussion about the “epidemic” of child abuse. States started expanding their child protection laws to include a wider range of physical abuses, as well as neglect, and adapted an old English law to justify a social worker’s right to remove a child from an unsafe home.
Perhaps the most significant change was that certain professionals—such as teachers, police, and doctors—were suddenly required by law to report suspected maltreatment. Before 1963, there wasn’t a single law that mandated reporting “battered child syndrome”; by 1967 all fifty states had one on the books. Kempe’s discovery also came about in the television era, which meant a much wider audience for the hype. All of this—along with some other shifts in law and policy—caused maltreatment reports to surge: from sixty thousand in 1974 to more than a million in 1980. The agencies had to figure out how to manage all those kids.
Just as it was in Kempe’s time, the rate of removals today has less to do with the literal rate of physical abuse or neglect and more to do with a fickle public intermittently enraged by what they hear on the news. When kids die at the hands of their parents, headlines put child protection agencies under intense and sudden scrutiny. Investigators increase their removals, hoping to avoid another high-profile fatality. Child welfare administrators urge their workers to err on the side of safety, or “when in doubt, yank ’em out.” They also call in teams of experts to evaluate systems, and then they change agency direction, philosophy, and leadership. The point is, it’
s all reactionary: transformation is driven by disaster, and innovation, generally, is incidental.
At New York’s ACS, the biggest agency changes over the last twenty years have been in response to the tragic deaths of little girls.
Kids were dying under New York City’s child welfare in the nineties at the rate of about two or three a month, but in 1995, one child’s name rose above the rest. She was Elisa Izquierdo, a six-year-old beaten to death by her mother. Her murder was nationally publicized, and New York’s then mayor, Rudy Giuliani, made a dramatic decision: he established child welfare as a freestanding agency reporting directly to him. The agency would get a new name, a new commissioner, and a new mission. It would be called the Administration for Children’s Services.
The new ACS had a clear operating principle: “Any ambiguity regarding the safety of the child will be resolved in favor of removing the child from harm’s way.” It was legi-speak for “when in doubt, yank ’em out.” And what resulted was known as the great “Foster Care Panic.” In 1995, the old agency, called the Child Welfare Administration, removed eight thousand children from their parents in New York City; by 1998, ACS removals had increased by 50 percent—to twelve thousand. In 1997, when a mom left her ten-year-old and four-year-old alone for an hour and a half while she went grocery shopping, her kids were removed; she came home to an empty apartment and was arrested for endangerment. The same for a mother who let her child slip from sight when she was helping a friend move, and he wandered down the block alone. Another mother was essentially arrested for being poor; she lived alone with her son in an apartment with roaches and no running water. These were the years when many of the Greens’ foster kids, now teenagers, were removed from their parents.
Ironically, while the policy of these “panic” years was meant to stem child fatalities, they actually rose: from twenty-four in 1996 to thirty-six in 1998. This may be because of caseload overload; when workers bring so many new kids into the system, they also have to cut corners, often overlooking vital details or failing to provide lifesaving services fast enough.
The fledgling administration did make some changes that ran counter to this philosophy, cementing its contemporary incarnation as a kind of split-personality agency. ACS was sued after Elisa Izquierdo’s death, and a judge ruled that ACS be advised and monitored by an outside panel of experts. This panel recommended family reunification, fewer removals, and providing the parents support they’d need to keep their children—the precise opposite of the “yank ’em out” philosophy. From these recommendations, ACS implemented programs that helped the biological families. For one thing, they created the much-lauded “team conferencing” system for parents to have more of a voice: whenever a child was removed, parents and ACS would meet within seventy-two hours to decide where the kid should stay—before the case could be determined in family court. (This has since been shortened to twenty-four hours.) And so, after the initial three or four years of Foster Care Panic, the pendulum swung back in the opposite direction, and removals dropped.
The new agency also made efforts to keep kids in their original neighborhoods and to reduce time spent in care. The first ACS commissioner was followed by a second commissioner and finally by John B. Mattingly, who served on the original panel and was known for some progressive family reunification policies. And during their tenures, removals dropped further.
But then New York was hit with another high-profile murder, and the pendulum swung back. In January 2006, a little girl named Nixmary Brown was murdered by her stepfather for eating a cup of yogurt. ACS had known about this case and failed to intervene.
ACS was under fire once more. An independent investigation team was brought in to shore up the place; eight hundred new workers were hired. In the year of Nixmary’s death alone, child abuse reports rose by 63 percent, and the files on neglect rose by 163 percent. They were yanking ’em out once again, spurred by the stigma of one big mistake.
While nationally, children die from abuse or neglect every single day, it seems that little girls around kindergarten age stir the most public outrage. The latest in New York was Marchella Pierce. Her mother was convicted of murder in May 2012, after a Brooklyn medical examiner testified that the four-year-old died weighing eighteen pounds, with acute drug poisoning, more than seventy injuries, and only a kernel of corn in her belly.
ACS had known about Marchella’s family; worried neighbors had called, caseworkers had visited. When she died, the Brooklyn district attorney called for a grand jury to explore “evidence of alleged systemic failures” at the agency. And then, for the first time in the history of ACS, the caseworker and the supervisor originally assigned to Marchella’s family were charged with a serious crime: criminally negligent homicide.
Ten months after Marchella’s death, Commissioner Mattingly announced his resignation. The new commissioner is a former family court judge named Ronald Richter, and it’s not clear, just yet, where his politics will fall. So far, he’s gone on record saying he’d like to keep more teenagers at home, supporting the families with intensive home-based therapies. And his administration will be funding more in-home preventive services for medically fragile children like Marchella. But based on historical precedence, ACS could swing back toward family breakups, especially now that the caseworkers, who watched their colleagues get arrested, are likely scared. I spoke with the new commissioner about this at the ACS headquarters a few blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan, and he said that investigators weren’t leaving their jobs; retention was higher than ever. He talked about advocating for continued resources for them—like the detectives and consultants and supervisors hired to help them decide when to remove children. And he was supporting a bill that would make assaulting a caseworker a felony, which the governor signed into law later that summer. Still, I thought, as Richter praised his workers’ savvy, something shifted with the Marchella Pierce case. ACS is responsible for sixty thousand investigations a year, and in any investigator’s eyes, a hasty removal could be better than this disturbing new specter of jail.
The lawyer for Marchella Pierce’s mother didn’t debate whether or not she had abused her daughter. He blamed the death on ignorance and dysfunction : Marchella was born underweight and relied on a feeding tube, and the lawyer argued her mother didn’t know she couldn’t raise her the way she had raised her two healthy boys. Once again, abuse—even when it results in death—always has a reason.
The more progressive, or left-leaning, child welfare agencies and leaders tend to look for this reason and then help parents wherever they’re struggling. Barbara Rittner, PhD, a dean and director of the PhD program at the University of Buffalo SUNY School of Social Work, thinks that, overall, agencies need to trust biological parents’ better instincts. Dr. Rittner worked in child welfare for more than twenty years before turning her attention entirely to university work and has personally overseen somewhere near a thousand cases in three different states. In all of her years, working her way up from a case manager to a director overseeing 250 employees, Dr. Rittner terminated parental rights only four times.
One of Rittner’s parental terminations was with a mother with schizophrenia who threatened to kill her daughters with a knife. A second had already killed one child and severely injured another. Another mother dropped her kids off at the child welfare office, had coffee with Dr. Rittner, and simply walked away; and the fourth just disappeared. Dr. Rittner believes most parents want to do right by their kids, and it’s the state’s job to help them do that. Removing children, she believes, is often damaging to the kids, and it’s always demoralizing to the parents—often taking away whatever will they had to get better in the first place. When Rittner told a variation of this story to a room full of social workers at a conference in New York City, she received a huge round of applause.
For several years, Rittner had worked on a parental termination unit, and she said her decisions were fueled by experience: the biological families stayed connected whether she termina
ted rights or not. They found each other on Facebook; they reunited after high school graduations; and so on. Her approach, she said, was to motivate parents to be the parents they inherently wanted to be.
For me, Rittner’s approach is too idealistic, as I’ve known people who don’t love the children they have, or who are so broken themselves they can’t access that love in this lifetime, no matter the resources you throw at them. For me, it’s nearly impossible to judge a parent’s ultimate potential by her words, or even her actions, because we can’t truly peer inside the wreckage.
And yet, some are forced to judge. Which brings me to Oliver, my friend’s baby. I don’t know if Oliver should have been placed in foster care. I do know removals are based less on actual abuse and more on the experience of the individual investigator, and the culture of the agency, and what’s been on the news this month or year. Also, Oliver technically wasn’t earmarked for investigation because of suspected abuse, but rather neglect: his mom hadn’t been giving him his medication or giving him healthy milk. Again, more than 75 percent of all child maltreatment cases in this country are neglect cases (as opposed to roughly 15 percent physical abuse, and 10 percent sexual abuse). Many child welfare reform advocates argue that neglect is just another word for poverty. Kids come into care because the food stamps ran out, or the parents were kicked off Medicaid, or somebody had to work and leave the baby with an older sibling.
If I read Oliver’s story on paper, or saw his mother, Caitlin, in some courtroom, if Steve and Erin were generic and faceless foster parents and not my dear friends, I might agree with Dr. Rittner and be on Caitlin’s side. Besides, I know the statistics: children do better with their (even marginal) birth parents than with foster parents. Drugs alone aren’t usually a reason to remand a child, and Caitlin had been showing all the signs of getting better; I believe the state should support such progress.
