Increasing the Hidden Abuse in LA’s Foster Care System

Lawmakers have a habit of racing too quickly to solve one highly publicized problem, only to inadvertently create a whole new set of problems. If we are not very careful, Los Angeles County is heading straight toward a bunch of unintended consequences in reaction to a pair of tragic events relating to LA’s foster care system.

Let me explain:

Because of the nature of much of my past reporting, I’ve monitored at close range a number of cases where the Department of Children and Family Services swooped in and took kids away from their parents and into foster care. In the cases that I happened to observe, the kids were put in the system, not because of some kind of hideous neglect or because they were being physically or sexually abused, but because an otherwise decent parent made a lousy choice. Most often it was that somebody in the family’s house had been busted for drug possession and/or dealing.

As a consequence, the kids were yanked away from everything familiar, from the people who loved them, from their friends, their school, their siblings, and put in a house with strangers.

And, guess what? They did poorly in the county’s care. It was awful. Damage was done. No, of course, it is not good for children to grow up in a household where drugs are used or in evidence, or where somebody’s boyfriend or husband or cousin gets arrested for dealing….any of those things. But there are ways to intervene in the lives of children, while also keeping the families together.

Yet, I found that the system is designed—and incentivized really—to do other than that.

In the past I had always been of the impression that the problem with LA’a foster system is that social workers didn’t take kids away from bad parents soon enough, so terrible things happened, as in the heart shattering cases of Dae’von Bailey and Lars Sanchez. Or that DCFS occasionally placed children with foster parents who turned out to be monsters.

But reporting in and around the DCFS system, I learned that while the horror stories do happen, they are the rarities, the lightening strikes. And certainly there are plenty of non-monsterous, non murderous but abusive and neglectful parents who need to have their kids removed until they can get their respective acts together (if they can get their acts together).

However in the cases I followed, I encountered a much different kind of abuse:For instance, with the family I followed the mostly closely, I saw six kids removed for mind-numbingly stupid reasons from the care of parents who were, on balance, very loving and caring—imperfect, but good enough. I watched as those same children were separated from each other and shoved into the maw of a system that behaved toward them with haphazard indifference on its best days. When finally the parents got their family back a half year later, the effect on the kids had been utterly traumatizing. There was no other word for it. The parents too were deeply traumatized.

And it didn’t have to happen. No good was served.

Now because of the panic over those two high profile deaths, the County Supervisors are stumbling over each other in their haste to make it still easier to take kids away from parents, and harder for the parents to get them back.

This is a potentially disastrous fix.

Wednesday’s LA Times has a crucial Op Ed by Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection, who talks about this issue in knowledgeable detail.

I hope very much for the safety of LA County’s children that those in position to make decisions on such matters take to heart what Wexler has to say. If they do not, there will be hell to pay. And it will be a hell visited mostly on certain unlucky children.

Here are a few clips:

Gerardo R., as he is known in court documents, never beat his children. He did not torture them or stab them or brutalize them. He was a loving father who’d always been a part of his children’s lives — and when their mother lost custody, he immediately stepped forward. But he had to fight for his children’s right to live with him.

Why? Because he was unable to afford housing deemed satisfactory to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. For that, his children were denied the chance to live with their father and even had their right to have him in their lives terminated forever, until a California appellate court intervened.


There is nothing unusual about such cases. Contrary to the stereotype, most parents who lose their children to the county and to foster care are nothing like the sadists and brutes who make headlines. Tragedies like the ones this summer — in which two youngsters, Dae’von Bailey and Lars Sanchez, were killed within family units that the county had evaluated — are rare. Far more common are cases in which parental poverty is confused with parental neglect.

[SNIP]

As it turns out, it is a serious mistake to pull children out of their homes just because their parents are poor or imperfect, just as it is a mistake to leave them in homes where parents are dangerous brutes. A landmark study of 15,000 typical foster care cases showed that children placed in foster care usually fared worse in later life than comparably maltreated children left in their own homes.

The foster children were more likely to commit crimes, more likely to become pregnant as teenagers and less likely to be able to hold a job as young adults. Another study found that only one in five former foster children was doing well as a young adult. That’s not really surprising, considering that foster children often bounce from placement to placement, emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone.

These everyday horrors of foster care don’t get much notice; they accumulate over years, and they are often hidden by confidentiality laws that protect not the children but the child welfare system itself. So the public, understandably, assumes that the only mistake the system makes is to keep children in dangerous homes.

Please, please read the rest.