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Another View: Volume, not neglect, is what CPS is hindered by, ByRichard Wexler
Another View: Volume, not neglect, is what CPS is hindered by
By Richard Wexler - Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, July 6, 2008 Story appeared in FORUM section, Page E3 http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/1061438.html Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, is responding to The Sacramento Bee's two-part investigation, published June 22-23, "Unprotected: An investigation of Sacramento County's Child Protective Services." NCCPR's comparison of California counties is available at www.nccpr.org. The reason so many children "known to the system" continue to die in Sacramento County is not because Child Protective Services "abandoned its promises" to adopt what amounts to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. The problem is that they kept those promises – with a vengeance. Sacramento County takes children at the third-highest rate among the state's larger counties – a rate more than 60 percent above state and national averages, and vastly higher than systems widely regarded nationwide as models. That high rate of removal overwhelms workers, and that explains why so many children are re-abused – and so many die – even after they're known to the system. When workers are overloaded, they make snap judgments, leaving more children in dangerous homes even as they take other children from homes that are safe, or could be made safe, with the right kinds of help. The Bee's investigation found that "the tipping point for kids' safety often comes down to seemingly small things: … an unanswered knock at the door, a miscue between agencies, a lack of follow-through, an incomplete background check …" Those are exactly the mistakes more likely to happen when workers are overwhelmed with children who never needed to be taken in the first place. The only systems that consistently improve child safety are those that do more, not less, to keep families together, giving workers more time to find, and rescue, the children in real danger. The evidence goes beyond dry statistics. The most comprehensive study ever done of case outcomes, involving 15,000 cases in all, found that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes generally fared better in later life than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care. That's less surprising than it may sound. Though it's the horror story cases that grab headlines, as they should, far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with "neglect" or "in-between" cases, in which the parents are neither all victims nor all villains. None of this means no children ever should be taken from their parents. Rather, it means foster care is a highly toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses. For 11 years, Sacramento County has been prescribing mega-doses of foster care. Last month, The Bee revealed the tragic results. |
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