New Report: Foster Care System Disregards Fathers

http://www.glennsacks.com/new_report_foster.htm

New Report: Foster Care System Disregards Fathers
By Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks

When a mother and father are divorced or separated, and a child welfare
agency removes the children from the mother's home for abuse or neglect, an
offer of placement to the father, barring unfitness, should be automatic.
Yet according to a new report by the Urban Institute, few fathers are able
to reunite with their children, who are instead pushed into the foster care
system.
The new report, What About the Dads? Child Welfare Agencies' Efforts to
Identify, Locate, and Involve Nonresident Fathers, examines the foster care
systems of Massachusetts and three other states. The report contains a
shocking finding: when fathers inform child welfare officials that they
would like their children to live with them, the agencies seek to place the
children with their fathers in only 8% of cases.

All fit parents have a fundamental right to raise their own children without
state interference. Moreover, fathers can offer their children a sense of
permanence, security and emotional support that a foster family (or a
succession of foster care placements) cannot provide.

Fathers are also a much better source of long-term resources and
sponsorship. Many foster children are pushed out of their homes and into a
tenuous existence when they turn 18 and the foster parents no longer receive
state subsidies.

Research shows that fathers matter. The rates of the four major youth
pathologies--juvenile crime, teen pregnancy, teen drug abuse, and school
dropouts--are tightly correlated with fatherlessness. For example, one
long-term study of teen pregnancy published in Child Development found that
a father's impact is so large that income, race, the mother's
characteristics and a host of other normally powerful factors all mattered
little. What mattered was dad.

It is true that the fathers of children seized by child welfare agencies
tend to be younger, less stable and less fit than the average father. They
are more likely to have drug or alcohol problems, and more likely to be
involved in the criminal justice system. Yet behind child welfare agencies'
disregard for fathers lie two largely unfounded beliefs-that fathers are
often a safety risk to their children, and that most dads have little
interest in their children.

Our societal image of family violence centers on abusive men. However,
according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' new report
Child Maltreatment 2004, when one parent is acting without the involvement
of the other parent, mothers are almost three times as likely to kill their
children as fathers are, and are more than twice as likely to abuse them.

Many absent fathers are not a part of their children's lives because mothers
have driven them out by denying visitation, moving far away or employing
spurious abuse charges. Some fathers only find out that their children have
been put in foster care when they are hit for child support to repay the
state's costs. Many had no way of knowing that their children were in peril.
Others were brushed aside by authorities when they asserted that their
children were being abused.

For example, in one highly-publicized case, seven year-old Kaili
Warrington-Sims was starved down to 29 pounds and imprisoned in a bedroom by
her mother and her mother's live-in boyfriend before being rescued by her
father, Daniel Sims. The couple had spirited the girl around New York state
and then to Florida to deny Sims access. Sims struggled through a maze of
bureaucratic indifference and hostility to get to his daughter. He arrived
just in time--the girl would have only lived a few more weeks in her
condition.

What About the Dads? makes it clear that many child welfare workers treat
fathers as an afterthought. The report found that even when a caseworker had
been in contact with a child's father, the caseworker was still five times
less likely to know basic information about the father than about the
mother. And 20% of the fathers whose identity and location were known by the
child welfare agencies from the opening of the case were never even
contacted.

These policies are seriously misguided. When a mother is deemed unfit to
care for her children, dad shouldn't be just one option out of many. He
should be first in line.

This column first appeared in the Boston Globe (6/8/06).