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HALF OF KIDS IN FOSTER CARE NEEDLESSLY



 
 
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Old December 12th 03, 04:53 PM
Malev
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Default HALF OF KIDS IN FOSTER CARE NEEDLESSLY

(Greg Hanson) wrote in message . com...
This is not unique to L.A. Not at all.

Last week a story was posted from Arizona where
a CASEWORKER acknowledged that half of all reports
of abuse there are from grandparents who "don't like
the way the grandkids are being raised".

(IE. Second Guessing parents for non-ABUSE reasons.)

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/news/120...tor_probe.html
Up to Half of Fostor Children Needlessly Placed in System
LOS ANGELES (CNS) ? Up to half of Los Angeles County's foster children
were needlessly placed in a system that is more dangerous than their
own homes because of incentives in state and federal laws, a two-year
probe has found.
A Daily News investigation discovered that the county receives nearly
$30,000 a year from federal and state governments for each child
placed in the system - money that goes to pay the stipends of foster
parents, but also wages, benefits and overhead costs for child-welfare
workers and executives. For some special-needs children, the county
receives up to $150,000 annually.

"Called the 'perverse incentive factor,' states and counties earn more
revenues by having more children in the system - whether it is opening
a case to investigate a report of child abuse and neglect or placing a
child in foster care," wrote the authors of a recent report by the
state Department of Social Services Child Welfare Stakeholders Group.

Since the early 1980s, the number of foster children in California has
gone up fivefold, and doubled in the county and nation. About one in
four children will come into contact with the child welfare system
before turning 18, officials say.

This has overwhelmed social workers, who often don't have time to help
troubled families or monitor the care children receive in foster
homes.

The hundreds of thousands of children who have cycled through the
county's system over the years are six to seven times more likely to
be mistreated and three times more likely to be killed than children
in the general population, government statistics reveal.

Officials acknowledge that more than 660 children embroiled in the
county's foster care system have died since 1991, including more than
160 who were homicide victims.

"The county's foster care system makes Charles Dickens' descriptions
look flattering," said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director at the American
Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

David Sanders, who took over as director of the Department of Children
and Family Services in March, said experts estimate up to 50 percent
of the 75,000 children in the system and adoptive homes could have
been left in their parents' care if appropriate services had been
provided. He said DCFS comes into contact with nearly 180,000 children
each year.

The Daily News' investigation of the child-welfare system, which is
shrouded in secrecy by confidentiality laws, involved the review of
tens of thousands of pages of government and confidential juvenile
court documents, studies, computer databases and several hundred
interviews.

As the investigation progressed, state and county officials
acknowledged that the financial incentives built into the laws
encourage the needless placements of children in foster care, and
officials have started taking steps to reform the system.
-----------------------------------

http://www.presstelegram.com/Stories...814323,00.html
Article Published: Saturday, December 06, 2003 - 4:22:16 PM PST

Money motive in foster care
Children: Half of county placements unnecessary, often driven by
desire for funding.

By Troy Anderson Staff writer

Up to half of Los Angeles County's foster children were needlessly
placed in a system that is often more dangerous than their own homes
because of financial incentives in state and federal laws, a two-year,
Los Angeles Newspaper Group investigation has found.

The county receives nearly $30,000 a year from federal and state
governments for each child placed in the system money that goes to pay
the stipends of foster parents, but also wages, benefits and overhead
costs for child-welfare workers and executives. For some special-needs
children, the county receives up to $150,000 annually.

"Called the 'perverse incentive factor,' states and counties earn more
revenues by having more children in the system whether it is opening a
case to investigate a report of child abuse and neglect or placing a
child in foster care,' wrote the authors of a recent report by the
state Department of Social Services Child Welfare Stakeholders Group.

Since the early 1980s, the number of foster children in California has
gone up fivefold, and doubled in the county and nation. About one in
four children will come into contact with the child welfare system
before turning 18, officials say.

This has overwhelmed social workers who often don't have time to help
troubled families or monitor the care children receive in foster
homes.

The hundreds of thousands of children who have cycled through the
county's system over the years are six to seven times more likely to
be mistreated and three times more likely to be killed than children
in the general population, government statistics reveal.

Officials acknowledge that more than 660 children embroiled in the
county's foster care system have died since 1991, including more than
160 who were homicide victims.

"The county's foster care system makes Charles Dickens' descriptions
look flattering,' said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director at the American
Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

David Sanders, who took over as director of the Department of Children
and Family Services in March, said experts estimate up to 50 percent
of the 75,000 children in the system and adoptive homes could have
been left in their parents' care if appropriate services had been
provided. He said DCFS comes into contact with nearly 180,000 children
each year.

"There were probably issues the kids and their families were facing,
but if they had some kind of support services, the kids could have
stayed home,' Sanders said. "At the extreme, there are clearly parents
who never should have had their children. They torture their children
and everyone in the community would agree that they should not have
their children.

"On the other end, you clearly have situations where families have
done things, but may be under stress one day, have every intention of
taking care of their children and are not dangerous, but involvement
by child protective services ends up being much too intrusive.'

The newspaper group investigation of the child-welfare system, which
is shrouded in secrecy by confidentiality laws, involved the review of
tens of thousands of pages of government and confidential juvenile
court documents, studies, computer databases and several hundred
interviews.

As the investigation progressed, state and county officials
acknowledged that the financial incentives built into the laws
encourage the needless placements of children in foster care, and
officials have started taking steps to reform the system.

Social worker Anthony Cavuoti, who has worked 14 years for the county,
said DCFS employees use the most liberal of guidelines in deciding
whether to remove a child from their home. Some parents have had their
children removed for yelling at them, allowing them to miss or be late
to school or having a dirty home.

"The service that DCFS now provides is worse than the abuse that most
abused children ever experienced. The trauma they inflict on ordinary
children is unspeakable.'

Sanders said he thinks caseworkers have sometimes been too eager to
remove children from their homes a practice he is trying to change.

"I think children should only be removed when there is an imminent
risk. I've said consistently that we do have too many children who
have been removed,' he said.

"We need to provide the kind of supports to keep these kids at home.'

As early as 1992, the state's Little Hoover Commission cited experts
who estimated that 35 to 70 percent of foster children in California
should never have been removed from their families and have suffered
deep psychological trauma as a result. On any given day, a total of
175,000 children are now in the state child protective system.

In recent months, parents in several states have filed class-action
lawsuits and testified before Congress, alleging that thousands of
their children have been wrongfully taken from their homes.

State and county officials admitted recently that they have placed too
many children in foster care, especially poor and minority children.
California has 13 percent of the nation's total child population, but
20 percent of its foster children, statistics show.

Minorities make up 85 percent of foster children in the county and 70
percent statewide. Experts say so many minorities are placed in foster
care because the federal government pays for most of the costs of
caring for foster children from poor families while states and
counties are expected to pick up most of the tab for foster children
from wealthier homes.

"That's exactly right,' Sanders said. "The eligibility for foster care
reimbursements is poverty driven.'

State and county officials say not enough has been done to help
troubled families and the system has deteriorated into an "adversarial
and coercive' one that places too much emphasis on investigating
families for alleged mistreatment and removing their children.

About 80 percent of foster children in the state and county are
removed for "neglect,' which experts say is often a euphemism for
poverty-related conditions, such as dirty or cramped homes, a lack of
money to provide enough food, clothing and medical care to children or
a single mother who works more than one job, can't afford child care
and leaves her children unattended.

The Reason Public Policy Institute, a Los Angeles think tank, released
a report in 1999 that found the current child protective system
undermines parental authority, wrongfully accuses hundreds of
thousands of innocent families and leaves many children at risk of
mistreatment.

The study's author, Susan Orr, a former U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services child-abuse researcher, said too many unfounded
allegations drain the system's resources.

She noted that nearly 50 percent of child-abuse deaths occur in
families that have had some contact with children's services agencies.
That statistic, say experts, shows the system is failing in its basic
mission of protecting children from truly abusive parents.

A review of more than $25 million in foster care lawsuit settlements
and judgments in Los Angeles County since the early 1990s found about
half involved the unnecessary removal of children and their subsequent
mistreatment or wrongful deaths, according to the county's own
admissions of wrongful seizures in county Claims Board documents or
assertions by the families' attorneys.

In a newspaper group review of 139 claims against the county an action
that usually precedes the filing of a lawsuit against the county 26 of
the claims involved allegations of wrongful seizures of children. In
two cases, parents alleged their children were seized by the county
for financial gain because local governments receive revenue for every
child taken into the system.

Parents also have alleged in dozens of recent appeals to state
appellate courts that their children were needlessly taken from them.

"It's legal kidnapping to make a profit,' said Lancaster resident John
Elliott, a 54-year-old former Warner Bros. special-effects technician,
who filed a claim alleging social workers made false allegations
against him and placed his daughter in foster care.

After he spent $150,000 fighting to get his daughter back, the county
ultimately admitted it was mistaken in taking his daughter and
returned her to him.

"They tell lies to keep your kids in the system,' Elliott said. "My
daughter was abused the whole time she was there. It's a
multibillion-dollar business. It's all about profit.'

Santa Ana attorney Jack H. Anthony, who won a $1.5 million verdict in
2001 in a case involving the death of a foster child burned in
scalding bathtub water, said parents often call asking him to file
lawsuits over the unnecessary placement of their children in foster
care. But, social workers are generally immune from liability for the
wrongful placement of a child in foster care, Anthony said.

"It's very difficult to hold anybody responsible for making a
negligent decision to take the children,' Anthony said. "In most of
the cases I see, the children would have been better off had they not
been taken from their parents.'

For years, DCFS had no clear standards defining what child abuse or
neglect was. The decision whether to remove a child was often left up
to overworked social workers' hunches about how safe children were in
their parents' homes, Sanders said.

Bruce Rubenstein, DCFS deputy director from 1991-97, said the
department intimidated social workers into removing children for
little or no reason after a couple of high-profile cases where
children returned from foster care to their parents were murdered.

"The word was, 'Remove everybody. Remove all the kids.' It's pretty
fundamental that the county was breaking up families that didn't need
to be broken up,' Rubenstein said. "Only new leadership giving clear
messages can free that department from this sickness.'

DCFS recently began training social workers in a research-based tool
called "structured decision-making,' that Sanders hopes will help them
make better decisions about when to remove a child. The method has
been successful in reducing unnecessary foster care placements in
other states and counties.

The stakeholders report found the vague definition of neglect,
unbridled discretion and a lack of training form a dangerous
combination in the hands of social workers charged with deciding the
fate of families.

Despite a quadrupling in reporting of child mistreatment cases since
1976 due to greater awareness of the child abuse problem in the
nation, the number of actual cases of abuse and neglect annually has
remained flat.

Unfortunately, experts say in explaining the large number of false
accusations, the DCFS Child Abuse Hotline has become a weapon of
choice for malicious neighbors and angry spouses and lovers in child
custody disputes.

"A lot of people use child protective services for revenge,' Cavuoti
said. "About half of the cases we get are completely bogus. They are
just people calling to get back at a neighbor.'

While about 7,500 children enter the county's foster care system each
year, only a small percentage are reunified with their families. A
recent study found that nationwide 76 percent of children are returned
home from foster care within a year. But in Los Angeles County, only
19 percent are returned home within a year of entering foster care.

Coming Monday: Following years of scandals and heartbreak in the
nation's largest child-protective system, Los Angeles County officials
and child advocates hope a new director and innovative ideas will
dramatically improve the lives of local foster children.



Interesting, thanks.
 




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