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Introduction

I was just settling into my newly assigned desk, looking around and trying to get oriented my first hour on the job as a volunteer at the Department of Children and Families (dcf), in Tallahassee, Florida, when Helen, a caseworker whom I had not met, breezed by the desk, grabbed my arm and said, “Come on. I need some help. We may be picking up five children.”

She was responding to a report from the state abuse hotline alleging five children in the same family were victims of physical and sexual abuse. Our information was limited to the complaint, an address and the names and approximate ages of the mother and five children.

The house was only two miles away from the office and easy to find. Helen knocked on the door and after a long delay, it was opened by a shirtless man who seemed to have just woken up. He acknowledged knowing the woman we asked for, but he did not know where she lived, had not seen her for a long time and denied he was the father of her children. As we talked, two small children quietly edged up behind him and peered at us. After extensive questioning, Helen was convinced there had been a mistake and we returned to the office.

This was one of those reports that meet the criteria used in screening calls to the hotline-but which turns out not to be valid for various reasons: a mix-up in names or address, a malicious accusation, etc. About half of all reports to the hotline, the point of entry into the system, are closed with no confirmation of abuse or neglect.

My third day at work I managed to get lost in the woods of north Florida. The air conditioner of my 1990 Ranger was doing its job, but it wasn’t good enough to stem the sweat running down the inside of my arms. The sign at the bank we’d passed an hour before registered 91°, with humidity which had to be equally as high-a typical late April mid-afternoon in north Florida. We were plowing down a single-lane sandy road, miles into pine and scrub oak woods about 60 miles east of Tallahassee, trying to locate a particular trailer in an area of no-name roads, hog trails and what seemed to be randomly assigned mailbox numbers. The closest other person had to be several miles away from us.

My mounting discomfort derived from the frustration of driving more or less aimlessly for an hour, having been directed this way by various inhabitants at the handful of shacks we’d passed on the “main” road. Ancient black women on the front steps of shacks or sitting in broken plastic chairs in swept yards watched us pass. We swatted at swarms of pesky mosquitoes every time we lowered the truck window to ask the way. Unfortunately when we did find someone to query, the directions were either unintelligible or lacked a certain specificity-except for sending us further into the woods. We must have passed the last dwellings in America without a phone and I was silently railing at my resistance to getting a cell phone.

I admit that the main source of my anxiety was seated 18 inches away, finishing the last of a 64-ounce coke, the ice long melted. Carolyn was a physically mature, attractive, troubled redhead, who looked older than her 15 years. I knew only the few facts her caseworker had hurriedly passed on to me in the hall at the office. She’d left home, been on the streets briefly, was sexually active and had not restricted her smoking to tobacco. I was to deliver her to a foster home.

From the time we met in the office three hours earlier, our exchanges had been limited to periodic observations and questions on my part, with polite two- or three-word responses from her. Her longest comment came as a question: “Could we get something to eat?”

As I began to express some frustration over our failed search for the trailer which was to be her new foster home, she rallied a little, making supportive statements such as “Oh, we’ll find it.” But as the road lengthened and we seemed to have exhausted our supply of direction-givers, her voice developed a little edge: “Do you have any idea where we are?” and “Well, are we going to drive around like this all day?”

My immediate discomfort was prompted by an idea that should have come much earlier. I kept going over the story of a false accusation case I’d just read about in the St. Petersburg Times. Norman Peterson served 10 years of a 45-year sentence before his three daughters confessed they had lied and that he was innocent of sexual abuse. They testified that their mother put them up to framing their father and the culprit was their mother’s paramour, later her husband.

I was pretty sure my companion saw me as the harmless 73-year-old grandfather that I was and she seemed to show no evidence of malice toward me, but in my work as a psychologist I have heard enough about false accusations of sexual molestation, particularly within the child-protection system, to know that once such a charge is made, events snowball and are difficult to stop. And regardless of the outcome of the charges, total recovery is impossible, so even a man my age had no business being this deep in the woods alone with this girl.

In desperation and an attempt to be more systematic I started turning down every road that looked as if it would take a car. Finally we came upon a cul-de-sac containing two trailers. On the ground by the door of the second double-wide was a small hand-lettered wooden sign with the name we were looking for.

Greatly relieved, I bounced out of the truck and knocked on the door. After an hour-long minute, an African-American woman opened the door, looked at the redhead sitting in the truck and spoke in a flat voice: “I was looking for you yesterday. Can’t take her now. Have to go to work and there’s nobody else here.” The door was quickly closed and with a mixed feeling of frustration and relief, I turned back to the truck. Nothing to do but find my way out.

Back at the office, the caseworker speculated that the foster mother had rejected Carolyn because she was white. No matter. This city girl would not have stayed in those back woods for more than a few hours. (But not because of the foster mother’s race. The caseworker had already mentioned this fact to Carolyn, who assured her this would be no problem). But the search for a foster parent had to start over and meanwhile she had to scramble to find temporary quarters for Carolyn.

I never heard anything else about Carolyn or the five children we were looking for on that first morning. But I quickly learned that these two incidents were typical-and for me a good introduction to the stress placed on the workers.

In the spring of 1998 I received a phone call from a longtime friend, an attorney specializing in family law, whose primary work was representing the parents of children declared dependent by the state. She asked if we could have lunch to talk about a project. My friend always had some project going, and worthwhile as most of them were, it usually meant time and trouble for the people who lunched with her. With a tinge of reluctance, I agreed to meet the following week over Chinese food, and, as I suspected, this meeting shaped the way I spent a big junk of my time over the next four years. She had in mind establishing a center where troubled parents who had been separated from their children could visit with them under supervision, attend parenting classes and receive other help with their dismantled lives.

Some months after our luncheon, a nonprofit agency named Safe Place was a reality and I had been sadly educated to the fact that the need is so great that there is a national system of such centers. Most of these visitation centers are financially precarious and Safe Place was no exception, so in order to stay afloat in Florida some help would have to come from the state. However, even with this chronic shortage of visitation services, the clients weren’t coming because my attorney friend, the director of Safe Place, and the lead attorney of the district’s Department of Children and Families had been struggling over several issues, some personal and some philosophical. As a consequence Safe Place was under an informal boycott by the state.

I was asked to help mediate the conflict and so began meeting with a variety of people working in child protection at the district and state level. As I listened, I was impressed by the challenges they faced, their limited resources and the inappropriateness of some of the guiding policies, e.g. the requirement that a poor, uneducated, dysfunctional mother, whose child has been removed from the home, must be “rehabilitated” within 12 months in order to get her child back. This seemed a highly improbable requirement, given the fact that many times the case plan designed to effect family or parental rehabilitation is not even in place until six months after the child’s removal-and the necessary services are rarely available.

As the months passed, I was drawn into reading the current literature on child abuse, reviewing governmental reports and observing the process in dependency court. Daily reports in the media about child abuse and neglect now caught my attention as never before.

Informally, in conversations with a range of people, I heard divergent opinions about how the child protection system functioned. It was clear that if I wanted to know what was happening I needed to get closer to the action. I told John Awad, a former student and longtime district director for dcf, of my interest in a short-term job as a child protection worker. He gave me the depressing news that there was a 13-week training period-discouraging because I knew at this point in life I could not endure that much sitting in a classroom-or being taught how to fill out endless forms. Besides, it seemed unfair to have the state spend so much money training me for what would be a short-term job. Dr. Awad’s suggestion that I volunteer seemed a much better idea.

So, in January 1999, after being fingerprinted, photographed and passing a law enforcement background check, I became a part-time aide three mornings a week with the investigative unit of the Child Protective Services in Tallahassee. As an official go-fer, I found myself running around town to law enforcement agencies picking up background reports on parents, swinging by the health department for birth certificates, transporting children and parents, supervising visits between separated family members or delivering papers to attorneys. Free time I spent reading case files, talking to workers, or sitting in on daily conferences where case plans were developed. The job put me in touch with people at every point in the system.

There were frustrating experiences: two- or three-hour drives that turned out to be dead ends; long periods in doctors’ waiting rooms while a child was being examined (something I had chafed at even when I was the patient); occasional rude behavior from some functionary; scrambling to find a car seat for a child I was picking up at the end of a trail.

As a university professor, licensed psychologist and court mediator, I was used to a modicum of respect from certain narrow audiences-on a good day even a touch of deference. I found that a volunteer aide doesn’t even get into the ballpark. Lots of days I wondered whether I shouldn’t be elsewhere-like on a tennis court or in the fiction section of the library.

But the caseworkers were grateful for any help and seemed to care only that I had been cleared to do the work. Initially, I think there must have been some curiosity about my motivations (walking down the hall I overheard one ask another “Why in the world would he be willing to take that job?”). But they were used to seeing an occasional volunteer around the office and took at face value my explanation that I was trying to understand how things worked. They had little interest in my personal life.

The overwhelming majority of the people working in child protection, from the top policy makers to the workers in the field, read and think little about larger issues. They are busy trying to digest the food piled on the plate before them-budgets, demands from the legislature, court orders, risk-assessment forms, the press, arranging visits between separated children and parents, learning how to operate the camera used to document the injuries of abused children, returning phone calls to clients and other professionals and dealing with the always waiting paperwork

Retired from my university job, I was in the fortunate position of having time to try putting the fieldwork in a broader context and began by turning to the worldwide web. Clicking on search and naïvely entering child abuse, I stood back aghast at the avalanche: books, technical reports, statistics, advocacy organizations, personal horror stories, model legislation, research and evaluation, with links to sites about foster parents, poverty, domestic abuse, addiction, toll-free hotlines, dependency courts. My web research yielded a sea of words, most of them dating from the publication of a 1961 article on the battered child syndrome. In a short 40 years we have moved from the “rediscovery” of child abuse to a massive child protection system of control that has lost its rudder.

In all this research, analysis and information, agreement can be found on a single point-the child protection system at the turn of the 21st century is pitifully flawed. Beyond that, disharmony reigns, intense at times and from across the political spectrum. There is no consensus on how we arrived at this mess, or how we are to emerge from it. There is heated debate, sometimes involving surprising alignments of peoples and organizations.

Much of this is not new. As early as 1921 the foster care system was having a hard time finding suitable families, children were subject to multiple placements, siblings were separated, services were limited and abuse was common in foster homes. The major change has been the emergence of a large child welfare bureaucracy focused almost exclusively on child protection, as opposed to general child and family welfare.

The critics have found easy pickings. On a daily basis we are reminded by the media of the horrible deaths of children at the hands of their caretakers, with about a third of these deaths occurring in families already known to the child protection system. These high profile deaths evoke calls to remove more children from their families, recruit more foster families, clamp down on incompetent caseworkers and back off from attempts at family preservation.

The increased rate of removal of children from their families sets in motion a chain of events that increases the overall harm to children in the system. dcf is swamped at the entry point, the abuse hot line, on through the courts, the foster care system and adoptions. Continuing problems are less time to deal with each case, hiring inexperienced case workers, high turnover rates, failures in foster care and the tendency to err on the side of caution by removing children when there is the slightest hint of abuse or neglect.

Over 20 years ago two psychoanalysts and an attorney wrote Before the Best Interests of the Child. The questions Goldstein, Anna Freud and Solnit pose in their opening paragraph are still pertinent for any analysis of the child protection system:

When and why should a child’s relationship to his parents become a matter of state concern? What must have happened to or in the life of a child before the state should be authorized to investigate, modify or terminate an individual child’s relationship with his parents, with his family? Considering what a child loses when he passes, even temporarily, from the personal authority of parents to the impersonal authority of the law, what grounds for placing a family under state scrutiny are reasonable? What can justify overcoming the presumption in law that parents are free to determine what is “best” for their children in accord with their own beliefs, preferences and life-styles?

We will be struggling here with each of these uncertainties but the two overarching questions are: How did we get into this mess and how can we get out of it?

As a favor for those friends who would like to convey the impression that they have read this book without doing so, here is a succinct sketch of my major conclusions:

how did we get into this mess?

_ The child protection net has been overly enlarged and woven too tightly.

Far too many children are being removed from their families under the misguided policy of emphasizing the “safety of the child” as opposed to the “preservation of the family,” a false dichotomy. These actions have caused the system to be overloaded at every point and may well have increased the number of deaths of children due to delays in investigations.

_ Child welfare departments have moved away from providing services to families and now focus primarily upon investigation and control.

Most of our limited resources go either to the front end of the system-investigation, court appearances, responding to inappropriate calls to the abuse hot line-or to the back end of the system- the recruitment and monitoring of foster parents and other “temporary” living arrangements and adoptions. Relatively few resources are left for services to families.

_ We have tried to hire caseworkers on the cheap and yet whenever things go wrong it is the caseworkers we blame.

At the bottom of the food chain, the caseworkers get chewed on by administrators, legislators, clients and the media. They are trained and motivated to provide services, but this is the last thing they are free to do. Either they are accused of removing too many children or too few-but it should be noted that workers are not sanctioned for removing too many children. They are accused of being family-destroying “Nazis,” “lazy and incompetent.” Pay is low, morale is poor and a large proportion of workers quickly move on to other jobs-leaving young, inadequately trained, inexperienced and overloaded workers to make crucial decisions.

_ The current drive to privatize child welfare will result in fragmented programs of decreased quality, with increased costs, while failing to solve the problems of bureaucracy.

Desperate for any way out of the mess and pushed to take some action, policy makers have rushed to embrace privatization and managed care, a move that has the effect of transferring problems from the state to the local level and ultimately decreasing public support for child welfare programs.

_ Now, more than ever, child welfare policy is driven by ideological and anti-government attitudes.

Significant reform is unlikely without an awareness of the direct impact of this little talked about but important factor.

how do we get out of this mess?

The cure lies in reversing what brought us to this point. First, we need to turn off the faucet-the abuse hot line-by restricting the definition of abuse to serious physical harm and giving the hotline workers and mandated reporters more discretion in making reports. Some of the pressure could be lifted by separating abuse from neglect and turning over the neglect cases for intensive family services. In short, we need to back off from the emphasis on investigations at the front end and the ensuing massive foster care system that follows when a child is removed from the family. To do this, we must accept a reality that we tend to deny: there are no easy fixes for the problems of child abuse and neglect and at best we will be muddling through with less than ideal outcomes. The old dictum of medicine applies: “First, do no harm.” We may not yet be at that point.

Anyone close to child welfare programs might well respond to the above paragraphs with “So, we’ve heard all that. What’s new?” Well, for openers, not everybody has heard it. And among those who have, there is significant opposition to every point, as well as to the plots and subplots that underlie each of the issues and recommendations. We are dealing here with fundamental problems that call for continuing debate.

In order to demonstrate the connections between policy at the state level and what ensues in the field, I have chosen to concentrate on a single state, Florida, where all the dynamics referred to above are currently in play. Certainly there are significant differences across the states, just as there is variability between units within a state; however, child welfare programs are remarkably similar across the country, particularly in most urban states where their problems are similar in origin, as are the attempts to deal with them.

State policy necessarily tracks federal funding requirements, and to note the remarkable commonality of problems you only need to look at the lawsuits being filed and read the newspapers. For example, on the day I am writing this, news stories reported that Georgia and Illinois are having the same problems of children “lost in the system” that have been highly publicized in Florida.

After all, Florida reflects what the nation will soon look like. It ranks fourth among the states in population, with a mix of ethnicities. Hispanics (15%) now outnumber Afro-Americans. The state is both urban and rural, with the young and the old being the fastest growing segments of the population (the over-85 and under-five groups). It is a politically diverse and mobile population, and having worked in the state capitol for almost five decades, I write about Florida with hard-earned confidence.

Rilya, the missing child that caught the nation’s attention in the spring of 2002, has a story that illustrates all these issues only too well. I will start with her story and then continue with an overview of the national scene at the turn of the century, looking at the continuing controversy over child safety and family preservation, listening to the critics of the system and observing the tension between privacy rights and the obligation of the state to protect children.

From there I proceed to a detailed look at developments in my state that led to a national focus on Florida’s child welfare system, including the role of child abuse as an issue in the 2002 governor’s race. The increased flow of children under the supervision of the state has significantly impacted the day-to-day work of the courts. This, together with the role of class-action suits, is defining current policy which I feel points out the benefits of using more mediation.

My look at how caseworkers manage under this system is meant to portray a bit of the job demands and the policies and structures that shape and frustrate the original motivations that brought workers to child welfare. And then I will look at the different challenges associated with abuse as opposed to neglect and characteristics of the clients.

There can be no understanding of child protection policy without some appreciation of the broader context that shapes it. Thus I have included a discussion of the ideology behind anti-government attitudes, the role of poverty, domestic violence and addiction as these impact child welfare. Attention is given to the possibilities and limitations of further bringing faith-based organizations into the delivery of social services. That brings us to the recent move toward privatization. Current developments in Florida have made me conclude any move to further privatize child welfare services is a serious error.

In the following pages I hope to bring you along with me on the paths that led me to my understanding of the current child protection system. I am convinced that significant reform is possible; that we know what to do; and, of possibly greater importance, what to quit doing. It is a matter of finding the will.

Many of our state and national political leaders are giving up, turning their backs on child welfare programs, hoping that somehow individual acts of compassion will fill the void. We must turn them around and insist on retaining some corporate responsibility for the most vulnerable among us.