Foster Care

Increasing the Hidden Abuse in LA’s Foster Care System

child-crying

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.

11 Comments

  • Each ideology has blind spots. For conservatives, it tends to be polluters, oil companies and the military-industrial complex.

    For liberals, it tends to be big government programs and the Foster Care-Industrial Complex: that web of public and private agencies that could not survive without a steady supply of foster children.

    But every time anyone tries to reform the system, that foster care-industrial complex has stood in the way. Private agencies are paid for every day they hold a child in foster care. If they do what they are supposed to do and work to reunite a family or, when that’s truly not possible, try for adoption, the payment stops.

    Try to curb institutional care and the foster care-industrial complex will do everything it can to stop it. Try to place more children with extended families and in their own neighborhoods, and they try to stop it.

    The National Commission on Children, found that children often are removed from their families “prematurely or unnecessarily” because federal aid formulas give states “a strong financial incentive” to do so rather than provide services to keep families together.

  • I don’t think I could use the phrase “foster-care industrial complex” with a straight face, but Pokey is basically right. I know that some years ago Andrew Bridge had to sue the county to change the rules so that some of the resources spent on taking kids away from their parents could be spent on keeping families together.

  • wexler, Edelstein and Freman have misssed the point and the issue, which is the elephant in the room about which no one wants to discuss or address…it’s called LEADERSHIP! I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who has worked in child welfare, private and public systems, since 1983, first as a direct line social worker, then a supervisor, then a program manager and agency director. I worked in LA County in the late 1990’s as a community provider and was routinely horrified by the toxic culture which fed the failure of DCFS social workers and their supervisors to appreciate the danger they routinely foisted upon children because of their often incompetent actions and failure to act. We have all heard the county supervisors repeatedly speak with great pride about Trish Poelhn’s rise to the top of DCFS as an “insider”; quite frankly, this is nothing about which they should be touting since she is part and parcel of this very toxic and corrupt culture. LA County DCFS is an organization which is power drunk rather than being child focused and family driven….it’s a system which would not only not recognize strengths based best practice but one which is absolutely lacking the culture to embrace and sustain it. I’m tired of hearing Supervisor Molina (especially) express outrage and talk about “system failures”. There is no such thing as a system failure! Systems are comprised of people and it is the people in these organizations, the ones we pay to protect our kids, who are the terrible failures. All of us who have worked in child welfare know that some children unfortunately will die even when everyone does everything right…however, NO CHILD SHOULD DIE BECAUSE SOME ONE DID NOT DO THEIR JOB! Poelhn has been in this job for over 2 years now…all the management research says that if a manager cannot or does not turn the corner in an organization within the first 18 months, nothing will change. It’s time to clean house. Let’s vet and hire people in these leadership positions who are more interested in doing their job rather than keeping their job, who are more interested in keeping kids safe and families together rather than focusing on making excuses for those under them who are paid to do their best work in this regard, and who have the courage to model the way and hold everyone in the “system” accountable. Let’s champion those in the system who are willing to not only ensure things are done right but who have the courage to ensure the right things get done. Let’s stop making excuses about caseloads and paperwork and get the job done for all of our kids. The LA County Board of Supervisors must STOP TALKING and must START DOING!

  • OPEN LETTER – YOU ARE THE SYSTEM

    November 18, 2010

    TO: LA COUNTY DCFS CSWs Federico & Dorsey. SCSW Henry. ARAs Montoya & Paahana. Executives, County Counsel Robin Leftwich, & DCFS Director Trish Ploehn
    Many of you entered into social work to save children from abuse. Maybe some of you were abused and know the pain and anguish of it. But what happened to you all? What changed? Why did you change? Why have too many of you become the abusers you once reviled and despised? And those of you who still are true to your calling and do your jobs – why do you allow the corruption and lies to infect your system?
    “But I was just doing my job. Just following orders. Just covering for my colleague. I’ve got too many cases anyway. I more interested in that other case anyway. Doing a favor for a friend. Noting personal.” Where have we heard those excuses before?
    I would be surprised if any of you can go home after work and truly enjoy your families and friends and get any real sleep at night knowing and not being able to tell anyone out of guilt and shame about the evil that you have done to so many children and families and to my seven children in particular.
    “If I just sort of exaggerate here, make up something there – I’m done for the day! No one checks this stuff anyway, No one ever challenges my Interim Reports to the Court, the County Counsels make sure no one questions these findings. I turn it in the day of court and the parents and their appointed attorneys have no time to read it or question it (they would dare if they want to keep their jobs anyway) and the court will schedule a hearing three or six months later – by then its all forgotten. I’m covered.”
    How can you look in the eyes of your own children, nieces and nephews, husbands and wives and even your own parents – and even think to tell them what really goes on with your child welfare system? Too many of you are perfectly comfortable with persecuting and framing innocent parents – got to fill those quotas – gotta to get those Federal monies to fed the Beast – earn those bonuses and promotions.
    Each step up you earn you knowingly sacrifice more layer of your humanity. Everyone does it to get ahead. Business is business, right? But does everyone destroy childrens and family’s lives to earn their paychecks, to get promoted? This is not like selling defective products to consumers.
    Too many of you – especially at the top of the DCFS pyramid – have turned children into statistics. Cold numbers. Some of them now dead cold bodies rotting in the ground. Just memories for their families. Lives lost. Yeah, sure, just like generals in a war – there are casualties, acceptable casualties you say to yourselves.
    They are not your kids – so what does it matter you? Pure Social Darwinism. “I am smarter so I deserve to be alive and on top and in control.” Those people were stupid. They shouldn’t have had kids. They fell into our caring and loving hands. Suckers. Besides – its all ‘For the Children’, right? Nothing in it all for us, right? And I would bet that there even some of you think that there are just too many darn people in world. Its all about sustainability. Too many pesky people. That is the real problem. As long as I have my green space and comfortable living zone – then everything will be okay, right? Enlightened self interest.
    Will you see the faces of Collette, Brittany, Wesley and Heidi in your dreams? Chris, Kyle or William? Or do just try to turn your head as you sleep hoping those faces will just go away as you try to go back to sleep?
    In the still of night, will you hear their anguished cries of despair as they try to sleep, lost in a nightmare world you created for them. And you then you might remember that you have documented in your reports their having cried night after night in an abusive foster home of a diagnosed mentally ill foster mother. Will these thoughts haunt you all for the rest of you lives? Awake or asleep?
    Is there no more morality and conscious left in your hearts and minds? Has it all come down to the paycheck and pension and the power to destroy childrens futures and their family’s lives forever? You cannot simply blame on the system or as ‘The Beast’ as so many of you aptly call it. YOU ARE THE SYSTEM.
    The time will come probably sooner than later, that your system will collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy and corruption. There will be casualties amongst you. The politicians will sacrifice some of you to save their own political hides and the news media will rail for a while on your abuses. And some of you might survive. But can you survive the public onslaught as your crimes are revealed one by one by the survivors of your system. Will you be able to survive the stare of the piercing hate in the eyes of your system’s innocent victims in civil and criminal courts in the years and decades to come? Just like in all holocausts, there are survivors who will bear painful witnesses and who will seek justice.
    I would not want to be you. At least I hold out hope that my children will once again know their father’s love and that I will be able to heal them and help them grow into strong, independent minded, moral adults and citizens.
    What do you hope for?
    Do you think my seven kids and the thousands of other kids will ever forget what you – your system – has done to them? As you are driving home from work today, think about it.

    Craig S. Coleman, Ph.D.
    Father of Seven Children

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