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Children re-abused state custody NY, CPS expose
Foster Care Crisis: Let The Numbers Speak
By Sharon Secor (http://www.everybodysmag.com/) Although white people continue to make up the majority of the population in New York City, children of color fill the foster care system. In fact, just over 96% of all children in New York City foster homes last year were children of color. According to a New York State Office of Children and Family Services report from June of 2003, a mere 3.4% of the children in foster care were white. This disparity is nothing less than shocking. It is offensive, an affront to common sense. Are we really expected to believe that parents of color are that much more likely to abuse or neglect their children? I’d like to be able to tell you that the New York City branches of the NAACP are outraged by this fact and what it says about the way child protective services are administered in this city, but I can’t. Indeed, while the Columbus, Ohio, chapter of the NAACP recently came out against increasing funding for their local child protective services agency with a statement that used phrases such as “Nazi Gestapo,� “genocidal death camps,� and “time of slavery� in describing the effects of child protective services on black families and the Compton branch is making remarkable strides against the chemical control and restraint of black children, New York’s NAACP seems rather complacent about the matter. I wish I could tell you that the NYCLU was on the case, but I can’t. “I don’t know that it is an issue for us,� said Sheila Stainback, Director of Communications for the New York Civil Liberties Union, in a recent telephone conversation. “It may not be the usual suspects on this.� With 96 out of every 100 children in New York City foster care being of color, it certainly seems as though someone’s civil liberties are being violated, usual suspects or not. “Children don’t always arrive in foster care through abuse or neglect,� said Stainback. And, that is, indeed, true. More so, perhaps, than she is aware of. While Stainback is referring to the small percentage of children who are in care because they are orphaned, their parents hospitalized, jailed or otherwise absent and children that are ‘voluntarily relinquished’ to the state, the fact of the matter is that a frightening number of parents have had children seized without ever being proved to have committed crimes against their children. While nobody would deny that there are children who are terribly abused, those types of cases compose a minority of those in the child protective system. The vast majority of children in foster care are not there because of sexual or serious physical abuse. According to a National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information report detailing child maltreatment data from 2002, published this year, less than 20% of substantiated reports to child protective services involve serious physical abuse, with approximately 10% having to do with sexual abuse. The United States Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families Child Welfare Outcomes Annual Report from 1999, published in 2001, states that nationally, in addition to the children who had substantiated reports of neglect or abuse, “an estimated additional 49,000 children who were not victims (i.e., children with unsubstantiated reports) were placed in foster care.� Consider that for a moment, using the government’s own numbers. Without significant legislative change, at that rate, within a period of 10 years almost half a million children in our nation will be traumatized by wrongful and needless removal from their families due to what the government itself refers to as unsubstantiated reports. And in New York City, almost all of these children will be of color. The concepts of substantiated and unsubstantiated reports of neglect or abuse have little real meaning in the context of the processes by which these determinations are made. Even the term substantiated has different meanings in different states, ranging from “probable cause� to “reasonable� to “credible� to “preponderance� to “clear and convincing.� Thus, what is substantiated in one state may not be in another. Outside of the small percentage of cases in which the degree of abuse or neglect makes the decision to remove painfully obvious, CPS workers theoretically rely on risk assessment, assumption and instinct. As described by Emrich Thoma in Predicting the Future and the Codification of Poverty, risk assessment is “the systematic collection of information to determine the degree to which a child is likely to be abused or neglected at some future point in time.� There is not a uniform standard of risk assessment in place nationally and frequently there are significant differences in standards even within a single state – often, almost as many standards as there are caseworkers. For example, different states have different ages at which it is deemed acceptable to leave a child at home alone. Some states have no specific age at all. Thus, where one CPS worker may find 10 years to be an acceptable age, another may find that leaving a 13-year-old at home alone is an act of neglect worthy of removing the child. The majority of children seized from parents are taken for neglect, often the result of a highly subjective decision making process, all too often left in the hands of a narrowly educated case worker, lacking experience or education in other cultures and religions. Often, many researchers have found, poverty and neglect are confused, or thought to be one and the same. Middle-class standards of financial achievement and material possessions are the norm against which all others are compared, despite the fact that the vast majority of the world lives with much less. In determining who is neglectful, class and race play a major role. A disproportionate number, for example, of mothers that test positive for drugs at the time of birth are poor and/or of color because these are the women who are most likely to be tested, not because white women over the poverty level do not use drugs or alcohol. Economic status and ethnicity affect the way situations are assessed. A light skinned woman with a certain degree of financial security who articulately explains childrearing practices based on studies on attachment parenting and the family bed and a less financially stable, darker skinned woman or one that struggles a bit with the English language without obvious sleeping accommodations for her child are judged differently. One is an enlightened and sensitive parent and the other is neglectful, unable to provide even a crib for her child. Yet, if a family is in financial crisis, the political and welfare systems begrudge every dime of assistance that they receive. Often the state will pay more to take a child from a poor mother than they would to help that family stay together. “We spit on the welfare mother as a parasite,� wrote Nev Moore in a Massachusetts News article of May 27, 2000, describing a typical mother on welfare with two children who receives $539 per month in assistance. “The foster mother who gets her kids gets $820 plus,� Moore continued, “yet we hold the foster and adoptive parents… up as saints.� At first CPS contact, a parent enters a distorted mirror image of what our legal system is supposed to be. Everything is backwards. There are no Miranda warnings, yet everything she says will be used against her, and perhaps even some that she hasn’t. Her accuser can choose to remain anonymous. Which makes little difference, as she has no right to know who is accusing her. The confidentiality of the reporter is guaranteed by law. The parent is presumed guilty and must prove innocence. "There's definitely an assumption of guilt. People who commit murder have more rights than a family that has its children taken away," said Republican Senator Parley Hellewell, according to a Sunday, January 18, 2003, Salt Lake Tribune article by Kirsten Stewart and Rebecca Walsh. The entire investigative process is built upon coercion and a deliberate misleading of families as to their rights. CPS workers won’t mention that parents do not have to let them in, nor do they have to submit themselves or their children to interrogation without a warrant and in many systems case workers are directed by superiors to deny that these rights even exist. This, despite Supreme Court constitutional interpretations and rulings to the contrary. Yet, even if parents are aware of the few constitutionally protected rights that they do have at that first knock on the door, it frequently becomes clear that by asserting these rights, they run a risk of an immediate retaliatory removal for at least 72 hours. The case worker has up to three days after the removal to get what is often a rubber-stamped court order for an emergency removal – yet another subjective concept -- from a busy and overburdened system that doesn’t devote much time to a real consideration of individual circumstances. In addition to the purely arbitrary nature of that initial removal, the CPS worker pays no consequences for a wrongful removal. Not even if a child is hurt or killed while in state care. On a national level, even using the most conservative of government figures, one simple fact stands out. Children in the custody of the state are more likely to be neglected, abused, sexually assaulted or killed than they are in the general population. The sheer number of children who go into the system, many without real cause, and come out beaten, maimed, sexually assaulted, emotionally disabled or damaged from the powerful drugs used to keep them submissive is more than shocking. It is the abuse of human rights on a broad scale. City Agency’s Psych Drugs Imperil Foster Kids, an April 16. 2001 article by Douglas Montero, described the “cocktail of psychiatric medications� that many New York City foster children are forced to take. Sometimes these are made up of four or more powerful drugs. The Administration for Children’s Services, according to the article, isn’t sure how many of the 31,000 children in their care have been prescribed psychiatric drugs, but “a state audit of 401 randomly selected kids last year found that more than half were being treated for mental problems – and that most likely means medication.� If Montero’s name seems familiar, it may be from his recent New York Post article, in which he wrote of a shocking abuse of drugs, power and infants in state foster care. And, we know from which ethnic and financial groups those babies in all probability came from. In a story published on February 29, 2004, Montero reported that the New York State Health Department “has launched a probe into potentially dangerous drug research conducted on HIV-infected infants and children� -- foster children at Incarnation Children's Center in Manhattan. With money from “federal grants and, in some cases, pharmaceutical companies,� approximately 36 different experiments were performed, including 13 that used about 50 children – some just three months old -- to test the effects of high does of AIDS medicines, according the information cited in Montero’s report. Other experiments included studying the "safety," "tolerance" and "toxicity" of AIDS drugs, through methods that mixed up to six different medications. Yet another sought to determine the effects of double-dosing infants with measles vaccine. "They are torturing these kids, and it is nothing short of murder," said Michael Ellner, as quoted by Montero. Ellner is a minister and president of Health Education AIDS Liaison, which is an advocacy group for HIV parents. Dr. David Rasnick, a biochemist and expert in the field of AIDS medicine, was, according to Montero, “outraged,� citing the “acute toxicity� and fatal potential of the medications, as well as the variety of severe side effects associated with the drugs. Montero also wrote that “the foster-care agency described the experiments on its own Web site, which was abruptly shut down after The Post began making inquiries.� As citizens, frequently we look to our government when we seek information concerning the governmental policies that affect our lives. The current child protective climate is built primarily upon two governmental acts, the Child Abuse Prevention And Treatment Act (CAPTA), which has continued to evolve since its initial legislative appearance in 1974, and the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA). And, indeed, our government does address the question of why such great numbers of children are removed from homes in which, as so many experts agree, they could remain, with the appropriate services. In fact, unnecessary removals are specifically mentioned. “While reimbursement for foster care and related case management services is open-ended, title IV-E funds may not be used for other types of services that could prevent a child from needing to be placed in care in the first place or that could facilitate the child's returning home or moving to another permanent placement,� said Wade F. Horn, Ph.D., Assistant Secretary for Children and Families Department of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, in a statement given to the Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, U.S. House of Representatives, on June 12, 2003. “Furthermore,� continued Horn, “a State that is successful in preventing unnecessary removals or in shortening lengths of foster care stays actually is apt to receive less Federal funding than a State where children remain in foster care for long periods of time.� “The county,� wrote Troy Anderson, of the LA Daily News, in Foster Care Cash Cow, one of a series of investigative articles concerning the foster care system and published over the last few months, with the most recent appearing on March 5, 2004, “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.� Without a continuous influx of children, the system would collapse. Jobs and pensions would be lost. Executives would suffer. According to Anderson, a report by the state Department of Social Services Child Welfare Stakeholders Group described the situation as being "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." And, thus, it would seem, we arrive at the bottom line reason why it is the families of the poor and families of color that are ravaged by the child protective system. These are the families that often lack the resources and power to fight back. And when the organizations that are traditionally associated with protecting the rights of those in need fail to act, what can a parent do? Parents must arm themselves with knowledge, so that they are able to protect themselves and their families, so that they can make informed decisions. There are national organizations, such as the American Family Rights Association that are able to provide a great deal of information. On the local level, Harlem hosts two excellent organizations. One, People United For Children, began a class action lawsuit against the City of New York in 1998 concerning the removal of children from their parents without investigation. The organizations director, Sharonne Salaam is an accomplished and committed activist. The other, the Child Welfare Organizing Project, offers what was described by the New York Women’s Foundation as “peer-led training on parent’s rights and responsibilities that will build a network of parent advocates to improve the child welfare system.� The most important thing we must do as a community, to protect our children as a whole, is to actively support legislation and organizations that seek to address these issues. Part of that is becoming informed and informing others. The numbers speak for themselves. We need to understand exactly what these numbers say about us and what they mean to our families and our communities. Are we that much more likely to abuse or neglect our children? descriptors: NY, NEW YORK HARLEM, CPS, ACS, ADMINISTRATION CHILDRENS SERVICES, DSS, KINSHIP CARE, AFRICAN AMERICANS, CHILD PROTECTIVE, KIN CARE, SOCIAL WORK, FAMILY LAW, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, URBAN LEAGUE |
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On 15 Sep 2004 14:15:21 GMT, (Fern5827) wrote:
....no! Fern didn't write anything...just cut and pasted yet another poorly thought out propaganda piece. Let me help to quell the confusion. There could be other reasons than the City of NY simply targetting black families. THAT is what is not addressed in this opinion piece. What I notice in such bits and piece of the flotsam and jetsom Fern dumps into this ng or others, facts and knowledge aren't necessary components of rabble-rousing rhetoric -- and that it's more important to speak "passionately" than to speak intelligently or truthfully When looking at an issue one can be easily misled of they do not look at more than one factor: http://usliberals.about.com/b/a/2004_03_01.htm "Half of Black Men in NYC Unemployed, Report Says" It may be that black families are extremely resource poor, some even seeking help from the state. In fact the same article about points to the report finding that the employment rate for black women in the same time period was 57.1. And people that are unemployed often spend a great deal of time at home with their children, thus increasing the chance of abuse. Frustrated people have been known on occasion to lose it. And, sadly, the opening claim by the author of this propaganda pile is incorrect....whites do NOT compromise over half the population of NYC. In fact they were, in the 2000 census, as this excerpt from the source http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/pop2000.html shows, at 35%. "Among those of a single race, white nonhispanics remained the largest group, accounting for 35 percent (2.80 million) of the city’s population., while for the first time in a census, Hispanics were the largest minority group, with a 27 percent share (2.16 million). Among others of a single race, Black nonhispanics comprised 24.5 percent (1.96 million), and nearly 1-in-10 New Yorkers (783,000) was Asian and Pacific Islander nonhispanic. Those with a multiracial nonhispanic background accounted for 2.8 percent (225,000) of the population." It might be possible to make some of the arguments the author makes based on the actual census figures, but credibility flies out the window when the first claim is shown to be bogus. But whites very nearly are not the largest minority, as they are only 8 percentage points from a tie with Hispanics, let alone the "majority" as the author claims. No More Lies. Or misinformation, please. This was too easy to look up to just be a mistake. Or this publication has no, or very poor fact checkers. Foster Care Crisis: Let The Numbers Speak By Sharon Secor (http://www.everybodysmag.com/) I am amazed that someone writing for THE CARIBBEAN-AMERICAN MAGAZINE "Everybody," would make such a strange mistake as to claim that whites are in the majority in NYC. That was shown not to be so in the 2000 US Census. Although white people continue to make up the majority of the population in New York City, children of color fill the foster care system. In fact, just over 96% of all children in New York City foster homes last year were children of color. According to a New York State Office of Children and Family Services report from June of 2003, a mere 3.4% of the children in foster care were white. That is a product, most likely, of the racist institutional reality of NYC, rather than any deliberate desire to take children of color over white children. Whites routinely have more resources, and hence could obviously be getting more in-home services. For instance, whites tend to live in more upscale dwelling, people of color in less so....could it be that chidren are not being returned for in home services because of racist situations such as this, and is this CPS responsibility or some other agency? http://www.nmic.org/nyccelp/Documents/browner.htm On the other hand, I wonder how many of those children of color are in fact in kinship care...with relatives but under foster system supervision: Well now..shucks...seems that of the 9,583, nearly 20 percent are in kinship care with relatives. Kinds of changes the complexion of things....if we don't know if those children are white or children of color. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/pub/soc006.pdf Foster Care The number of children in foster care is continuing to decline. In FY 2001, on average there were 30,858 children in foster care. Admissions to foster care were 8,729, an 8.9% decrease from FY 2000, when 9,583 children were admitted into foster care. While the total number of admissions into foster care decreased overall, new admissions placed in kinship foster homes increased by 2% from 1,868 to 1,906. A total of 2,201 children were admitted into kinship care in FY 1999, compared with 2,054 children in FY 1998. And in addition I will admit to having my research abilities taxed beyond capacity. I am able to find lots of information from the city of NY administration and government, but am unable to find any mention of this 96% of all children in foster care being children of color. If any of you know of a source for this besides an unfounded claim, I'd be grateful for the information...and access to the source. This disparity is nothing less than shocking. It is offensive, an affront to common sense. Are we really expected to believe that parents of color are that much more likely to abuse or neglect their children? No, but there are circumstances being ignored or undiscovered, that may well be a major part of the issue of children of color exceeding, disproportionately, the number of white children in out of home care..foster placement...and it may have nothing to do with their color...as being something for CPS to use, but rather a condition of institutional racism that creates conditions that are high risk for those children that do not exist for white children. NYC provides Section 8 vouchers to allow families to recover their children from foster care if housing (the number of homeless families is amazing..look it up) is the only reason the family is waiting for the child to return. I’d like to be able to tell you that the New York City branches of the NAACP are outraged by this fact and what it says about the way child protective services are administered in this city, but I can’t. What would the NAACP have to do with "the way child protective services are administered in this city?" They are not a child protection agency. Indeed, while the Columbus, Ohio, chapter of the NAACP recently came out against increasing funding for their local child protective services agency with a statement that used phrases such as “Nazi Gestapo,� “genocidal death camps,� and “time of slavery� in describing the effects of child protective services on black families and the Compton branch is making remarkable strides against the chemical control and restraint of black children, New York’s NAACP seems rather complacent about the matter. A very strange statement. Columbus is likely a very different place than NYC. In fact the paragraph itself is questionable as to everything but the clear message this is a propaganda piece....notice the quoting of that old ploy, that brings in the Nazi's? Hell, I've used it myself, but much more appropriately to actual behaviors. And the writer didn't give us enough of the context to know if it was appropriate and applied to NYC as well. I wish I could tell you that the NYCLU was on the case, but I can’t. Notice how that statement attempts to misconstrue the following as not being a "case" for the NYCLU...who clearly stated they don't know if it is an issue for them...suggesting possibly, or rather strongly, that they looked at it and couldn't find the blatant misinformation warranted more attention. Or that it isn't an issue they can address because of their mandate. Or that they know something the author isn't telling us...more likely. And they are not a "New York City" focused agency...they are a state wide focused agency. The ALCU and it's chapters do not take class actions as I recall...the thrust of this plea...but they take a lot of individual cases. Check out the NYCLU website. They list them. And they are searchable. It's not like they haven't been involved in child issues before. “I don’t know that it is an issue for us,� said Sheila Stainback, Director of Communications for the New York Civil Liberties Union, in a recent telephone conversation. “It may not be the usual suspects on this.� And with the opening of this entire piece being a lie, or at best, misinformation, how credible should the report of a "telephone conversation" be? I'd want to see in writing if the NYCLU was in fact not concerned about the number of children of color (remember, that doesn't mean just Black children) in CPS cases. With 96 out of every 100 children in New York City foster care being of color, it certainly seems as though someone’s civil liberties are being violated, usual suspects or not. It would seem the truth is being violated if the census figures are correct. Already only 35% of the city is white, and NYC is a target destination for white SINGLE folks last I heard. In may be the actual numbers of white children do not adhere to the even the 35% ratio overall. “Children don’t always arrive in foster care through abuse or neglect,� said Stainback. And, that is, indeed, true. More so, perhaps, than she is aware of. While Stainback is referring to the small percentage of children who are in care because they are orphaned, their parents hospitalized, jailed or otherwise absent and children that are ‘voluntarily relinquished’ to the state, Nonsense. That's not a small number at all..only one of those is likely to be small....orphaned...and we might squeeze "voluntary relinquishment" if it meant what the writer thinks it means, coming to the door and dropping your kids off...but it has to do with much later TPR. There a lot of children in CPS systems everywhere because of incapacity of the parent...jail being a rather common one. NYC is not immune from the Meth epidemic. the fact of the matter is that a frightening number of parents have had children seized without ever being proved to have committed crimes against their children. As long as you stick to the propaganda notion that civil violations aren't crimes. The author ignored, or is ignorant, that only a minority of child abuse offenses go to criminal court...but I doubt the ignorance. I think this is a willful distortion of facts. No More Lies, Please. While nobody would deny that there are children who are terribly abused, An, the old, "I wouldn't defend abusers," while in fact such schemes as coming in this piece and in the population of anti CPS folks on this ng and in the organized outfits are doing exactly that. They just want abuses and negect bar lowered to their standards...which are painful and injurious to the child. those types of cases compose a minority of those in the child protective system. Nonsense. No line establishing "no serious abuse" has even been established. There is no standard for it, and neglect gets lumped in as less serious. This whole thing of trying to say that some abuse is serious and deserves attention and the less serious should be left alone is just misleading nonsense. None of the proponents can actually name what is "less serious" and should be allowed because they KNOW the citizens would NOT stand for where THEY want to draw the line. And because neglect is across the nation higher in death rates than abuse, and neglect is found in more than half the cases by far, either by itself or along with abuse and considered "less serious" it would be covered as that...and deadly to children. And to families that let it get to the point of "serious." The vast majority of children in foster care are not there because of sexual or serious physical abuse. Yes, that is true. Many are there for the more often fatal circumstances of neglect. Neglect doesn't make the news as abuse does. According to a National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information report detailing child maltreatment data from 2002, published this year, less than 20% of substantiated reports to child protective services involve serious physical abuse, with approximately 10% having to do with sexual abuse. That is correct...and it is not appropriate to negate or diminish the importance of the 80% that are at risk, or are suffering from neglect. Again, just as we see in this ng, information is tendered that is incomplete, prefaced and bolstered throughout by a careful trimming of enough information from the rest of the context for the reader to make an objective less biased conclusion. The United States Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families Child Welfare Outcomes Annual Report from 1999, published in 2001, states that nationally, in addition to the children who had substantiated reports of neglect or abuse, “an estimated additional 49,000 children who were not victims (i.e., children with unsubstantiated reports) were placed in foster care.� Notice how careful the author is to NOT give you the total figure of substantiated reports, nor to explain what "substantiated" actually means.......which would allow the reader to understant, "unsubstantiated" does not mean the abuse didn't happen. The child may be in the hospital..but if the injuries can't be tied at least in civil court to the accused the case is "unsubstantiated." And many a case closes, as authorities have admitted, with a stamp of "unsubstantiated" simply because time ran out and unless they have solid enough evidence WITH THE PERP IDENTIFIED, they cannot mark it substantiated...even if the term used in this ng is, "substantiated for abuse, or neglect." The child can still be abused and neglect. Just no perp. Consider that for a moment, using the government’s own numbers. With spin, with a failure to consider the meaning of the numbers in context, with using terminology that is unclear in meaning, and with a lot of coatings of fertilizer one can claim just about anything. Without significant legislative change, at that rate, within a period of 10 years almost half a million children in our nation will be traumatized by wrongful and needless removal from their families due to what the government itself refers to as unsubstantiated reports. And in New York City, almost all of these children will be of color. The nonsense claim, built on misinformation and lies. Sad, isn't it. No mention of the the children abused by their parents, both substantiated, and interestingly "unsubstantiated" but still abused or at risk. The concepts of substantiated and unsubstantiated reports of neglect or abuse have little real meaning in the context of the processes by which these determinations are made. Why yes, that is correct. I wonder if the author stopped to consider she just built an argument indicting NYC by using national information of "substantiated," and "unsubstantiated." This piece of, as it was from the opening sentence, falling apart. Much abuse happens that cannot be substantiated...but the child has the marks, nonetheless. Even the term substantiated has different meanings in different states, ranging from “probable cause� to “reasonable� to “credible� to “preponderance� to “clear and convincing.� Thus, what is substantiated in one state may not be in another. Outside of the small percentage of cases in which the degree of abuse or neglect makes the decision to remove painfully obvious, CPS workers theoretically rely on risk assessment, assumption and instinct. And they should rely on what in their place? Leaving the child and waiting, while hoping for the best, is to be preferred? The risk assement tools are based on decades of empiracal data and hundreds of thousands of case outcomes, good and bad, to create indicators that have high probability of harm if no intervention is made. And some that indicate it is unlikley to come to harm...that is why people that call in sometimes don't see a worker show up at their neighbors, or their daughter-in-laws. I'll give you an example. If the neighbors are regularly feeding the children, then that is AN INDICATOR THERE IS NO NEGLECT...even if the mother NEVER feeds the child. This gets many a neighbor into the "special certs" placement fostering volunteerism when later the mother DOES do something dangerous and the children are removed...guess whose call will be remembered....why, yes, the caring neighbor. smile As described by Emrich Thoma in Predicting the Future and the Codification of Poverty, risk assessment is “the systematic collection of information to determine the degree to which a child is likely to be abused or neglected at some future point in time.� Do look up Thoma and his hobby. And it's Emerich. He's a long time critic of CPS. Some of that criticism is useful and true. And indicator lists are well conceived and executed systems of risk assessment. Yep...and it's good enough I'd love to have the same odds in Vegas. There is not a uniform standard of risk assessment in place nationally and frequently there are significant differences in standards even within a single state – often, almost as many standards as there are caseworkers. For example, different states have different ages at which it is deemed acceptable to leave a child at home alone. Some states have no specific age at all. Thus, where one CPS worker may find 10 years to be an acceptable age, another may find that leaving a 13-year-old at home alone is an act of neglect worthy of removing the child. I'm always amused at arguments such as this. Stop and think, if you haven't already caught on and are chuckling.........the point of STATE law over FEDERAL law is to address the concerns of individual states as to their differences from their neighbors. A kid in rural Alabama wandering about their front, side, and back yard or the lower fourty unattended for hours at a time is a bit different than a kid in NYC, in some of its parts, under the same conditions. What passes for moral and ethical in one place does not in another, and the states have always fought for the right to decide their own fate, in all things...including child rearing practices. Should liberal CA have exact same standards, and hence laws, that conservative, and very religious, OK has? And in fact I have heard, by propagandists, and also by those that think and are honest, the very opposite argument against NATIONWIDE conformity in child welfare issues. It imposes restraints or standards that are not, as a judge would say, community standards. The majority of children seized from parents are taken for neglect, often the result of a highly subjective decision making process, Nothing to rebut that with but that it's simply utter BS and a lie. Anyone even minimally familiar with the issue knows that neglect is harder to spot, but much more deadly than abuse...easy to see usually. And the assessments for neglect are highly OBJECTIVE because they nearly always require a professional...usually a medical professional to even make that determination. And there is somewhat more objectivity than "subjective" decision making going on in those neglect cases by virtue of medical assessment. The claims are rot, but then rot is good fertilizer. all too often left in the hands of a narrowly educated case worker, lacking experience or education in other cultures and religions. Once would be "all too often." The language of the propagandist, as usual. Appeals to emotion subtly encased in what appears to be fact but is not. Cultural sensitivity is the watchword at CPS and has been for years. Certain "jacklegs" that have been blamed for sucking up the tax payer's money have been doing trainings on the subject for 2 decades. Now it's done by colleges and universities for state agencies and has been for years in many states. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i... lege&spell=1 Which only came up with the following results title: "Results 1 - 10 of about 6,110 for "cultural sensitivity" state employees college" And, what this writer fails to tell you is this: Hiring practices for the past ten years have given priority to minority recruiting...and I know of at least one state that pays their workers who speak another language a small extra pay boost....because they are often pulled away from their regular work to rush out to reception and help a walkin, or a client whose reglar worker, who share the same language, is absent. Hispanic recruiting for foster parents is specially funded project in some areas. Now we are seeing the same thing for Eastern Europeans, of the old soviet block, getting the same thing. Often, many researchers have found, poverty and neglect are confused, or thought to be one and the same. Well, by those dim enough to believe propaganda pieces such as this. So tell me reader, are YOU confused about the difference between poverty and neglect, other than figuring out for yourself that the incidence might be a tad higher in the poor than the rich? Middle-class standards of financial achievement and material possessions are the norm against which all others are compared, despite the fact that the vast majority of the world lives with much less. Oh ****....that went out in the 70's, as a product of the consciousness raising of the 60 and 70s. What a crock. It's reflected in the routine dressing down that workers do who have high contact levels with the public....they just can't show up in court that way. And it's basic training for all workers that such standards are not allowed to apply. There is no doubt that some workers might fall into this bias but it isn't a practice and can be claimed as "possible" for anyone NOT from the social strata of "poverty." Is anyone fooled so far? In determining who is neglectful, class and race play a major role. A disproportionate number, for example, of mothers that test positive for drugs at the time of birth are poor and/or of color because these are the women who are most likely to be tested, not because white women over the poverty level do not use drugs or alcohol. And white women, and their babies, aren't tested? Mandatory testing is for those that have a history of drug and alcohol abuse. Color and income has nothing to do with it. One can turn down the test, but face the possibility of a warrant if they have any history, such as a DUI, or drug related arrest. Or even the behaviors of the patient. "The possible dual use of toxicology results for both medical and legal purposes also raises important questions about informed consent. Community standards vary for obtaining consent in cases involving prenatal substance abuse. Some medical facilities conduct toxicology testing under a general "conditions of admission" form that authorizes various medically indicated procedures. Other facilities require a special consent specifically authorizing toxicology testing. Other hospitals require that a patient be specifically informed of potential legal consequences before testing is conducted. Many hospitals conduct toxicology screening of newborns, either under the general admissions "conditions of admission" form or in accordance with State child abuse and neglect laws that allow for certain testing and evaluation procedures without parental consent for the purpose of diagnosing prenatal drug exposure. Other institutions, however, require specific parental consent for toxicology screening. If parents refuse permission for testing, a court order can then be obtained in some States. Because practices vary, it is important that professionals are aware of alcohol and drug abuse confidentiality regulations (e.g., 42 CFR, Part 2), the standards used within their local communities for obtaining consent for toxicology testing and for disclosing test results to child protection agencies. Hospital protocols also provide guidance for staff as well as help ensure consistency in hospital practice. " Economic status and ethnicity affect the way situations are assessed. A light skinned woman with a certain degree of financial security who articulately explains childrearing practices based on studies on attachment parenting and the family bed and a less financially stable, darker skinned woman or one that struggles a bit with the English language without obvious sleeping accommodations for her child are judged differently. One is an enlightened and sensitive parent and the other is neglectful, unable to provide even a crib for her child. And reverse the colors and what do you get? The same assessment would free up the darker skinned woman and result possibly in a report on the white women. This is just nonsense. Yet, if a family is in financial crisis, the political and welfare systems begrudge every dime of assistance that they receive. Whaaat! What the hell is this babbling accomplishing? It's an appeal to emotions because the author can count on EVERYONE reacting negatively because ALL POLITICAL AND WELFARE SYSTEMS begrudge every dime of assistance received. That's what the feeilng is when one has to answer reams of questions on reams of forms. Often the state will pay more to take a child from a poor mother than they would to help that family stay together. "Often?" Well when they also have a file filled with information on the poor past parenting, substance abuse, or other higly limiting factors. “We spit on the welfare mother as a parasite,� wrote Nev Moore in a Massachusetts News article of May 27, 2000, describing a typical mother on welfare with two children who receives $539 per month in assistance. “The foster mother who gets her kids gets $820 plus,� Moore continued, “yet we hold the foster and adoptive parents… up as saints.� If you haven't recognized a propaganda piece by now, does the name Nev Moore ring a bell for you? At first CPS contact, a parent enters a distorted mirror image of what our legal system is supposed to be. Nonsense. Everything is backwards. More nonsense. There are no Miranda warnings, yet everything she says will be used against her, and perhaps even some that she hasn’t. Then just make all civil proceedings have the same requirement in investigation and proceedures that criminal ones do. Simple, eh? Except the public won't buy. Her accuser can choose to remain anonymous. She isn't "convicted" on the word of the accuser, but on found or not on the evidence. Which makes little difference, as she has no right to know who is accusing her. The confidentiality of the reporter is guaranteed by law. Because it's not a criminal proceeding, as the author would like you to believe, without naming civil law as the issue. The parent is presumed guilty and must prove innocence. Again and appeal to emotions based on the fear we all feel, even when pulled over by a police officer...for what may well turn out to be a taillight out. "There's definitely an assumption of guilt. People who commit murder have more rights than a family that has its children taken away," said Republican Senator Parley Hellewell, according to a Sunday, January 18, 2003, Salt Lake Tribune article by Kirsten Stewart and Rebecca Walsh. The issue is just a tad more critical for the accused in murder than child abuse. Now if these folks would prefer the proceedures common to a murder charge, there are likely large segments of the public that, fed up with "services," and their cost, would be more than happy to bump all child abuse up to criminal status, close to or the same as a murder charge. The entire investigative process is built upon coercion and a deliberate misleading of families as to their rights. "The entire?" Please. Hyperbole. Much of it is based on actual evidence that leads to more evidence...exactly as if I saw someone climbing into a window of a store at night and reported it to the police, and they questioned the person they found climbing out....who turned out to the be store owner, innocent of any crime.....or THE STORE OWNER COMMITTING ARSON for insurance. There are many ways an investigation proceeds, but you can be sure if the police know "coercion" or deliberate misleading as to one's rights, they damn well will use it if you are stupid enough to fall for it. And IT'S PERFECTLY LEGAL. As in this definition of Coercion under that for issues pertaining to law: "\Co*er"cion\, n. [L. coercio, fr. coercere. See Coerce.] 1. The act or process of coercing. 2. (Law) The application to another of either physical or moral force. When the force is physical, and cannot be resisted, then the act produced by it is a nullity, so far as concerns the party coerced. When the force is moral, then the act, though voidable, is imputable to the party doing it, unless he be so paralyzed by terror as to act convulsively. At the same time coercion is not negatived by the fact of submission under force. ``Coactus volui'' (I consented under compulsion) is the condition of mind which, when there is volition forced by coercion, annuls the result of such coercion. --Wharton." Notice the "moral force" bit....that IS what CPS is about. It is an agency of society to enforce moral controls over the citizens the citizens have agreed to. When the law changes that, then it's gone. Until then, it is the law of this land. CPS workers won’t mention that parents do not have to let them in, Nor do police or other investigators, not even the health department inspectors, unless you wish to press it. Then they'll call in a requrest for a warrant while they sit there and block your exit with the possible evidence. nor do they have to submit themselves or their children to interrogation without a warrant and in many systems case workers are directed by superiors to deny that these rights even exist. Lie. This, despite Supreme Court constitutional interpretations and rulings to the contrary. It has been a regular practice for years to inform those being questioned initially that they do not have to answer without a lawyer or others present. Yet, even if parents are aware of the few constitutionally protected rights that they do have at that first knock on the door, it frequently becomes clear that by asserting these rights, they run a risk of an immediate retaliatory removal for at least 72 hours. Or an immediately removal for safety. That's an interesting way to use the requirement for the state to produce evidence within the 72 hours as to the reason for removal...but it's the law, not something dreampt up by corrupt CPS workers or their supervisors. The case worker has up to three days after the removal to get what is often a rubber-stamped court order for an emergency removal – yet another subjective concept -- from a busy and overburdened system that doesn’t devote much time to a real consideration of individual circumstances. In addition to the purely arbitrary nature of that initial removal, the CPS worker pays no consequences for a wrongful removal. Not even if a child is hurt or killed while in state care. Speculative nonsense, and proven untrue by actual events. If someone else murders a child though, where YOU left that child...your own say...do you think it fair if you are charged with a crime in criminal court? Or that the child's attorney, a petitioner such as a g'parent can start that up easily, should sue you for the child's estate? On a national level, even using the most conservative of government figures, one simple fact stands out. Children in the custody of the state are more likely to be neglected, abused, sexually assaulted or killed than they are in the general population. No, they are more likely to be caught and counted. And the wordage is misleading. And inaccurate. ...that would be children in the physical custody of the state...as in removed from the home....where the test cannot ethically be made to determine that claim as true or false. If all children, or even a reasonable sample size for research, at random, were left with parents they would have otherwise be removed from would THAT sample show a lower incidence of abuse and child fatality than a random sample of the same size from similar bio families placed in foster care, or other state physical custody, such as treatment centers. (The data doesn't really count foster PARENTS, but "foster care" meaing the child died in a location, but not by a specific identified person.) The date was recently posted and pointed to with clickable URL by myself, and I believe Ron. The sheer number of children who go into the system, many without real cause, and come out beaten, maimed, sexually assaulted, emotionally disabled or damaged from the powerful drugs used to keep them submissive is more than shocking. It is the abuse of human rights on a broad scale. That is yet another blatant lie. We do not KNOW that those conditions prevailed before they were placed in out of home care, or if the total number of "the children who go into the system" where in state physical custody, or in their own bio homes with in home services and state custody...something different from physical custody. City Agency’s Psych Drugs Imperil Foster Kids, an April 16. 2001 article by Douglas Montero, described the “cocktail of psychiatric medications� that many New York City foster children are forced to take. Sometimes these are made up of four or more powerful drugs. The Administration for Children’s Services, according to the article, isn’t sure how many of the 31,000 children in their care have been prescribed psychiatric drugs, but “a state audit of 401 randomly selected kids last year found that more than half were being treated for mental problems – and that most likely means medication.� That is a blantant lie. The author cannot know that for a fact. A great many children are receiving mental health treatment without drugs. If Montero’s name seems familiar, it may be from his recent New York Post article, in which he wrote of a shocking abuse of drugs, power and infants in state foster care. And, we know from which ethnic and financial groups those babies in all probability came from. In a story published on February 29, 2004, Montero reported that the New York State Health Department “has launched a probe into potentially dangerous drug research conducted on HIV-infected infants and children� -- foster children at Incarnation Children's Center in Manhattan. With money from “federal grants and, in some cases, pharmaceutical companies,� approximately 36 different experiments were performed, including 13 that used about 50 children – some just three months old -- to test the effects of high does of AIDS medicines, according the information cited in Montero’s report. Other experiments included studying the "safety," "tolerance" and "toxicity" of AIDS drugs, through methods that mixed up to six different medications. Yet another sought to determine the effects of double-dosing infants with measles vaccine. "They are torturing these kids, and it is nothing short of murder," said Michael Ellner, as quoted by Montero. Ellner is a minister and president of Health Education AIDS Liaison, which is an advocacy group for HIV parents. Dr. David Rasnick, a biochemist and expert in the field of AIDS medicine, Methinks one should, whenever offerred "authority" on subject, as in the logical fallacy of "an appeal to authority," look up that person. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i... Google+Search Dr. Rasnick is an outspoken opponent of certain widely held assumptions about AIDS and its cause and treatment...and not in the majority in his position. It would be nice if he were right...but...... was, according to Montero, “outraged,� citing the “acute toxicity� and fatal potential of the medications, as well as the variety of severe side effects associated with the drugs. Montero also wrote that “the foster-care agency described the experiments on its own Web site, which was abruptly shut down after The Post began making inquiries.� This is a different issue than everything up to this point. An aside and the usual overkill employed by propagandists. This may well be an issue, and highly deserving of citizen action, but it changes nothing on the issue of whether or not children of color are being targetted by NYC at the rates claimed by the author. As citizens, frequently we look to our government when we seek information concerning the governmental policies that affect our lives. The current child protective climate is built primarily upon two governmental acts, the Child Abuse Prevention And Treatment Act (CAPTA), which has continued to evolve since its initial legislative appearance in 1974, and the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA). I see this isn't about the 'outrage' of children of color being targetted by NYC at all, now is it? And, indeed, our government does address the question of why such great numbers of children are removed from homes in which, as so many experts agree, they could remain, with the appropriate services. In fact, unnecessary removals are specifically mentioned. Notice how, even as dependent on vague generalities to convince the reader of the malfeasance of CPS this piece was, it has decended into even more vague generalites? "as so many experts agree, they could remain with the appropriate services," Honey, I could remain almost anywhere if I had the resources to. There is such a thing as a limit. Well, if they are mentioned let's see that mention and the supporting argument. “While reimbursement for foster care and related case management services is open-ended, title IV-E funds may not be used for other types of services that could prevent a child from needing to be placed in care in the first place or that could facilitate the child's returning home or moving to another permanent placement,� said Wade F. Horn, Ph.D., Well now let me see....as I recall there are OTHER programs to address that...one is called ADC. That IS one of the preventive programs, along with others. CPS is not mandated to FIRST do prevention. It is primarily an enforcement agency, but is NOT allowed to contact families that are NOT reported to them to offer services...since that would encroach on OTHER programs that have services and outreach to address prevention. http://nccanch.acf.hhs.gov/topics/pr...rs/federal.cfm http://www.friendsnrc.org/contacts/nrccontacts.asp Why do we not hear more about these when we are looking at child protection? Because they are so universally underused by the families that come to be investigated for abuse and neglect. Essentially...they do not care enough about their children to seek aid for their malparenting, nor their drinking, drugging, and partying. As usual, the propagandists move far from the real problems and focus on issues they do not even represent correctly, and demand solutions from sources that are not involved in that part of the problem. CPS is not a prevention agency except in it's risk assessment portion, and casemanagement to put client and resources together, often just such resources provided that some would refer to as being staffed by "jacklegs." Freeloaders and opportunists...unfortunately those "jacklegs" are in such short supply that the "experts" themselves are the one's pointing out the lack of adequate service access as a major problem in child protection and welfare. Assistant Secretary for Children and Families Department of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, in a statement given to the Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, U.S. House of Representatives, on June 12, 2003. “Furthermore,� continued Horn, “a State that is successful in preventing unnecessary removals or in shortening lengths of foster care stays actually is apt to receive less Federal funding than a State where children remain in foster care for long periods of time.� Then those states need to wake up the one classification of society mandated to do something about the problem...the senators and representatives that vote for programs...and have them vote to have more money given to prevention. This is not brain surgery,,, and diatribes such as this author offers is leading the reader directly away from reform through representation lobbying...and to what? Screaming in the streets? Whining at the keyboard? Nothing but hand wringing? Or more suits...and more money for those that are on the anti CPS bandwagon? “The county,� wrote Troy Anderson, of the LA Daily News, in Foster Care Cash Cow, one of a series of investigative articles concerning the foster care system and published over the last few months, with the most recent appearing on March 5, 2004, “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.� Yep. $30,000 a year for a child in out of home care doesn't sound like all that much, when you think about it. And especially when you think of all the services provided....legal costs (no, they don't come free), counseling, therapy, rehab, transportation, medical support. Without a continuous influx of children, the system would collapse. Jobs and pensions would be lost. Executives would suffer. Nonsense. The usual. Same old nonsense. The problem, as defined by the author, would disappear with just one thing: the ending of parents abusing and neglecting their children. CPS doesn't create that. Citizens do, and other citizens feel responsible for society, and the child, and the family, and have mandated their government act. According to Anderson, a report by the state Department of Social Services Child Welfare Stakeholders Group described the situation as being "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." And how would this need be paid for sans the "incentive" to do investigations and placement? And, thus, it would seem, we arrive at the bottom line reason why it is the families of the poor and families of color that are ravaged by the child protective system. These are the families that often lack the resources and power to fight back. This sad attempt founders on an interesting fact...the state can bill, and does, the family for services. Now consider, who would best be able to pay for those services...the poor, or the rich...so why isn't CPS going after the rich? If it's "Show Me the Money" they sure got the wrong target. And when the organizations that are traditionally associated with protecting the rights of those in need fail to act, what can a parent do? A completely mindless question. CPS hasn't failed to act. The complaint in this piece is that they HAVE acted. It's just an emotion laden entrancing spin to capture your feelings rather than your reason, as the reader. Parents must arm themselves with knowledge, so that they are able to protect themselves and their families, so that they can make informed decisions. And neither CPS or the government is against that. There are national organizations, such as the American Family Rights Association that are able to provide a great deal of information. R R R R R R ............and I suggest every single thing they offer in the way of information be closely examined and researched for both logic and risk. On the local level, Harlem hosts two excellent organizations. One, People United For Children, began a class action lawsuit against the City of New York in 1998 concerning the removal of children from their parents without investigation. They would be right to do so, if that were the case...if no followup investigation were conducted, after the removal to determine the risk or offense. It would be interesting, but inhumane, to leave all the children until the conclusion of an investigation and see what happens to them in the interum...my bet is the older ones who themselves said they were abused and neglected in interview would suddenly recant,,,and we might have a few children disappear. The organizations director, Sharonne Salaam is an accomplished and committed activist. The other, the Child Welfare Organizing Project, offers what was described by the New York Women’s Foundation as “peer-led training on parent’s rights and responsibilities that will build a network of parent advocates to improve the child welfare system.� I should hope. It's a responsibility of citizens to improve our government legally mandated institutions. Let's hope they aren't a pack of phony crusaders though. I've seen far too many of those simply destroy and then replace with something more fitting their ambitions and agendas, than actually solve any problems. Much graft and fraud have grown out of destruction and replacement. The most important thing we must do as a community, to protect our children as a whole, is to actively support legislation and organizations that seek to address these issues. Part of that is becoming informed and informing others. The numbers speak for themselves. We need to understand exactly what these numbers say about us and what they mean to our families and our communities. Are we that much more likely to abuse or neglect our children? Yes, or it wouldn't be happening. No, if it's not. The question isn't, JUST that some group is being targetted, but what are the real factors that causes more of that group to be involved? Is it solely just their vulnerability, as this author would have you believe? Are there other factors the author leaves unexplored? How does the author propose to reform CPS? The ONLY reform suggestion in the entire piece is force by suit. With one exception, and that one questionable....information promulgated by groups that may or may not have activism as they first goal...but rather sueing as the force they will use. Will they be activists in the full sense of the term? Gathering and distributing unbiased objective information? More importantly lobbying their representatives with that information? Willing to participate in bill making work groups, or for amendments to existing laws? Are they real reformers, or are they phonies? If this piece is representative, with it's opening a piece of blatant misinformation, then I have something less than full support for them. They'll have to clean up their act to earn more. No More Lies, Please. Kane descriptors: NY, NEW YORK HARLEM, CPS, ACS, ADMINISTRATION CHILDRENS SERVICES, DSS, KINSHIP CARE, AFRICAN AMERICANS, CHILD PROTECTIVE, KIN CARE, SOCIAL WORK, FAMILY LAW, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, URBAN LEAGUE |
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Kane,
Thank you for this response. I began writing a response to this absurdity but your response was far better than mine. Fern's propaganda is exhausting but I no longer view his/her propaganda as dangerous. The posts are too absurd to be believable. I also wonder if we are encouraging this individual by continuing to respond to his/her posts. The individual would disappear if no one responded. LaVonne Kane wrote: On 15 Sep 2004 14:15:21 GMT, (Fern5827) wrote: ...no! Fern didn't write anything...just cut and pasted yet another poorly thought out propaganda piece. Let me help to quell the confusion. There could be other reasons than the City of NY simply targetting black families. THAT is what is not addressed in this opinion piece. What I notice in such bits and piece of the flotsam and jetsom Fern dumps into this ng or others, facts and knowledge aren't necessary components of rabble-rousing rhetoric -- and that it's more important to speak "passionately" than to speak intelligently or truthfully When looking at an issue one can be easily misled of they do not look at more than one factor: http://usliberals.about.com/b/a/2004_03_01.htm "Half of Black Men in NYC Unemployed, Report Says" It may be that black families are extremely resource poor, some even seeking help from the state. In fact the same article about points to the report finding that the employment rate for black women in the same time period was 57.1. And people that are unemployed often spend a great deal of time at home with their children, thus increasing the chance of abuse. Frustrated people have been known on occasion to lose it. And, sadly, the opening claim by the author of this propaganda pile is incorrect....whites do NOT compromise over half the population of NYC. In fact they were, in the 2000 census, as this excerpt from the source http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/pop2000.html shows, at 35%. "Among those of a single race, white nonhispanics remained the largest group, accounting for 35 percent (2.80 million) of the city’s population., while for the first time in a census, Hispanics were the largest minority group, with a 27 percent share (2.16 million). Among others of a single race, Black nonhispanics comprised 24.5 percent (1.96 million), and nearly 1-in-10 New Yorkers (783,000) was Asian and Pacific Islander nonhispanic. Those with a multiracial nonhispanic background accounted for 2.8 percent (225,000) of the population." It might be possible to make some of the arguments the author makes based on the actual census figures, but credibility flies out the window when the first claim is shown to be bogus. But whites very nearly are not the largest minority, as they are only 8 percentage points from a tie with Hispanics, let alone the "majority" as the author claims. No More Lies. Or misinformation, please. This was too easy to look up to just be a mistake. Or this publication has no, or very poor fact checkers. Foster Care Crisis: Let The Numbers Speak By Sharon Secor (http://www.everybodysmag.com/) I am amazed that someone writing for THE CARIBBEAN-AMERICAN MAGAZINE "Everybody," would make such a strange mistake as to claim that whites are in the majority in NYC. That was shown not to be so in the 2000 US Census. Although white people continue to make up the majority of the population in New York City, children of color fill the foster care system. In fact, just over 96% of all children in New York City foster homes last year were children of color. According to a New York State Office of Children and Family Services report from June of 2003, a mere 3.4% of the children in foster care were white. That is a product, most likely, of the racist institutional reality of NYC, rather than any deliberate desire to take children of color over white children. Whites routinely have more resources, and hence could obviously be getting more in-home services. For instance, whites tend to live in more upscale dwelling, people of color in less so....could it be that chidren are not being returned for in home services because of racist situations such as this, and is this CPS responsibility or some other agency? http://www.nmic.org/nyccelp/Documents/browner.htm On the other hand, I wonder how many of those children of color are in fact in kinship care...with relatives but under foster system supervision: Well now..shucks...seems that of the 9,583, nearly 20 percent are in kinship care with relatives. Kinds of changes the complexion of things....if we don't know if those children are white or children of color. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/pub/soc006.pdf Foster Care The number of children in foster care is continuing to decline. In FY 2001, on average there were 30,858 children in foster care. Admissions to foster care were 8,729, an 8.9% decrease from FY 2000, when 9,583 children were admitted into foster care. While the total number of admissions into foster care decreased overall, new admissions placed in kinship foster homes increased by 2% from 1,868 to 1,906. A total of 2,201 children were admitted into kinship care in FY 1999, compared with 2,054 children in FY 1998. And in addition I will admit to having my research abilities taxed beyond capacity. I am able to find lots of information from the city of NY administration and government, but am unable to find any mention of this 96% of all children in foster care being children of color. If any of you know of a source for this besides an unfounded claim, I'd be grateful for the information...and access to the source. This disparity is nothing less than shocking. It is offensive, an affront to common sense. Are we really expected to believe that parents of color are that much more likely to abuse or neglect their children? No, but there are circumstances being ignored or undiscovered, that may well be a major part of the issue of children of color exceeding, disproportionately, the number of white children in out of home care..foster placement...and it may have nothing to do with their color...as being something for CPS to use, but rather a condition of institutional racism that creates conditions that are high risk for those children that do not exist for white children. NYC provides Section 8 vouchers to allow families to recover their children from foster care if housing (the number of homeless families is amazing..look it up) is the only reason the family is waiting for the child to return. I’d like to be able to tell you that the New York City branches of the NAACP are outraged by this fact and what it says about the way child protective services are administered in this city, but I can’t. What would the NAACP have to do with "the way child protective services are administered in this city?" They are not a child protection agency. Indeed, while the Columbus, Ohio, chapter of the NAACP recently came out against increasing funding for their local child protective services agency with a statement that used phrases such as “Nazi Gestapo,� “genocidal death camps,� and “time of slavery� in describing the effects of child protective services on black families and the Compton branch is making remarkable strides against the chemical control and restraint of black children, New York’s NAACP seems rather complacent about the matter. A very strange statement. Columbus is likely a very different place than NYC. In fact the paragraph itself is questionable as to everything but the clear message this is a propaganda piece....notice the quoting of that old ploy, that brings in the Nazi's? Hell, I've used it myself, but much more appropriately to actual behaviors. And the writer didn't give us enough of the context to know if it was appropriate and applied to NYC as well. I wish I could tell you that the NYCLU was on the case, but I can’t. Notice how that statement attempts to misconstrue the following as not being a "case" for the NYCLU...who clearly stated they don't know if it is an issue for them...suggesting possibly, or rather strongly, that they looked at it and couldn't find the blatant misinformation warranted more attention. Or that it isn't an issue they can address because of their mandate. Or that they know something the author isn't telling us...more likely. And they are not a "New York City" focused agency...they are a state wide focused agency. The ALCU and it's chapters do not take class actions as I recall...the thrust of this plea...but they take a lot of individual cases. Check out the NYCLU website. They list them. And they are searchable. It's not like they haven't been involved in child issues before. “I don’t know that it is an issue for us,� said Sheila Stainback, Director of Communications for the New York Civil Liberties Union, in a recent telephone conversation. “It may not be the usual suspects on this.� And with the opening of this entire piece being a lie, or at best, misinformation, how credible should the report of a "telephone conversation" be? I'd want to see in writing if the NYCLU was in fact not concerned about the number of children of color (remember, that doesn't mean just Black children) in CPS cases. With 96 out of every 100 children in New York City foster care being of color, it certainly seems as though someone’s civil liberties are being violated, usual suspects or not. It would seem the truth is being violated if the census figures are correct. Already only 35% of the city is white, and NYC is a target destination for white SINGLE folks last I heard. In may be the actual numbers of white children do not adhere to the even the 35% ratio overall. “Children don’t always arrive in foster care through abuse or neglect,� said Stainback. And, that is, indeed, true. More so, perhaps, than she is aware of. While Stainback is referring to the small percentage of children who are in care because they are orphaned, their parents hospitalized, jailed or otherwise absent and children that are ‘voluntarily relinquished’ to the state, Nonsense. That's not a small number at all..only one of those is likely to be small....orphaned...and we might squeeze "voluntary relinquishment" if it meant what the writer thinks it means, coming to the door and dropping your kids off...but it has to do with much later TPR. There a lot of children in CPS systems everywhere because of incapacity of the parent...jail being a rather common one. NYC is not immune from the Meth epidemic. the fact of the matter is that a frightening number of parents have had children seized without ever being proved to have committed crimes against their children. As long as you stick to the propaganda notion that civil violations aren't crimes. The author ignored, or is ignorant, that only a minority of child abuse offenses go to criminal court...but I doubt the ignorance. I think this is a willful distortion of facts. No More Lies, Please. While nobody would deny that there are children who are terribly abused, An, the old, "I wouldn't defend abusers," while in fact such schemes as coming in this piece and in the population of anti CPS folks on this ng and in the organized outfits are doing exactly that. They just want abuses and negect bar lowered to their standards...which are painful and injurious to the child. those types of cases compose a minority of those in the child protective system. Nonsense. No line establishing "no serious abuse" has even been established. There is no standard for it, and neglect gets lumped in as less serious. This whole thing of trying to say that some abuse is serious and deserves attention and the less serious should be left alone is just misleading nonsense. None of the proponents can actually name what is "less serious" and should be allowed because they KNOW the citizens would NOT stand for where THEY want to draw the line. And because neglect is across the nation higher in death rates than abuse, and neglect is found in more than half the cases by far, either by itself or along with abuse and considered "less serious" it would be covered as that...and deadly to children. And to families that let it get to the point of "serious." The vast majority of children in foster care are not there because of sexual or serious physical abuse. Yes, that is true. Many are there for the more often fatal circumstances of neglect. Neglect doesn't make the news as abuse does. According to a National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information report detailing child maltreatment data from 2002, published this year, less than 20% of substantiated reports to child protective services involve serious physical abuse, with approximately 10% having to do with sexual abuse. That is correct...and it is not appropriate to negate or diminish the importance of the 80% that are at risk, or are suffering from neglect. Again, just as we see in this ng, information is tendered that is incomplete, prefaced and bolstered throughout by a careful trimming of enough information from the rest of the context for the reader to make an objective less biased conclusion. The United States Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families Child Welfare Outcomes Annual Report from 1999, published in 2001, states that nationally, in addition to the children who had substantiated reports of neglect or abuse, “an estimated additional 49,000 children who were not victims (i.e., children with unsubstantiated reports) were placed in foster care.� Notice how careful the author is to NOT give you the total figure of substantiated reports, nor to explain what "substantiated" actually means.......which would allow the reader to understant, "unsubstantiated" does not mean the abuse didn't happen. The child may be in the hospital..but if the injuries can't be tied at least in civil court to the accused the case is "unsubstantiated." And many a case closes, as authorities have admitted, with a stamp of "unsubstantiated" simply because time ran out and unless they have solid enough evidence WITH THE PERP IDENTIFIED, they cannot mark it substantiated...even if the term used in this ng is, "substantiated for abuse, or neglect." The child can still be abused and neglect. Just no perp. Consider that for a moment, using the government’s own numbers. With spin, with a failure to consider the meaning of the numbers in context, with using terminology that is unclear in meaning, and with a lot of coatings of fertilizer one can claim just about anything. Without significant legislative change, at that rate, within a period of 10 years almost half a million children in our nation will be traumatized by wrongful and needless removal from their families due to what the government itself refers to as unsubstantiated reports. And in New York City, almost all of these children will be of color. The nonsense claim, built on misinformation and lies. Sad, isn't it. No mention of the the children abused by their parents, both substantiated, and interestingly "unsubstantiated" but still abused or at risk. The concepts of substantiated and unsubstantiated reports of neglect or abuse have little real meaning in the context of the processes by which these determinations are made. Why yes, that is correct. I wonder if the author stopped to consider she just built an argument indicting NYC by using national information of "substantiated," and "unsubstantiated." This piece of, as it was from the opening sentence, falling apart. Much abuse happens that cannot be substantiated...but the child has the marks, nonetheless. Even the term substantiated has different meanings in different states, ranging from “probable cause� to “reasonable� to “credible� to “preponderance� to “clear and convincing.� Thus, what is substantiated in one state may not be in another. Outside of the small percentage of cases in which the degree of abuse or neglect makes the decision to remove painfully obvious, CPS workers theoretically rely on risk assessment, assumption and instinct. And they should rely on what in their place? Leaving the child and waiting, while hoping for the best, is to be preferred? The risk assement tools are based on decades of empiracal data and hundreds of thousands of case outcomes, good and bad, to create indicators that have high probability of harm if no intervention is made. And some that indicate it is unlikley to come to harm...that is why people that call in sometimes don't see a worker show up at their neighbors, or their daughter-in-laws. I'll give you an example. If the neighbors are regularly feeding the children, then that is AN INDICATOR THERE IS NO NEGLECT...even if the mother NEVER feeds the child. This gets many a neighbor into the "special certs" placement fostering volunteerism when later the mother DOES do something dangerous and the children are removed...guess whose call will be remembered....why, yes, the caring neighbor. smile As described by Emrich Thoma in Predicting the Future and the Codification of Poverty, risk assessment is “the systematic collection of information to determine the degree to which a child is likely to be abused or neglected at some future point in time.� Do look up Thoma and his hobby. And it's Emerich. He's a long time critic of CPS. Some of that criticism is useful and true. And indicator lists are well conceived and executed systems of risk assessment. Yep...and it's good enough I'd love to have the same odds in Vegas. There is not a uniform standard of risk assessment in place nationally and frequently there are significant differences in standards even within a single state – often, almost as many standards as there are caseworkers. For example, different states have different ages at which it is deemed acceptable to leave a child at home alone. Some states have no specific age at all. Thus, where one CPS worker may find 10 years to be an acceptable age, another may find that leaving a 13-year-old at home alone is an act of neglect worthy of removing the child. I'm always amused at arguments such as this. Stop and think, if you haven't already caught on and are chuckling.........the point of STATE law over FEDERAL law is to address the concerns of individual states as to their differences from their neighbors. A kid in rural Alabama wandering about their front, side, and back yard or the lower fourty unattended for hours at a time is a bit different than a kid in NYC, in some of its parts, under the same conditions. What passes for moral and ethical in one place does not in another, and the states have always fought for the right to decide their own fate, in all things...including child rearing practices. Should liberal CA have exact same standards, and hence laws, that conservative, and very religious, OK has? And in fact I have heard, by propagandists, and also by those that think and are honest, the very opposite argument against NATIONWIDE conformity in child welfare issues. It imposes restraints or standards that are not, as a judge would say, community standards. The majority of children seized from parents are taken for neglect, often the result of a highly subjective decision making process, Nothing to rebut that with but that it's simply utter BS and a lie. Anyone even minimally familiar with the issue knows that neglect is harder to spot, but much more deadly than abuse...easy to see usually. And the assessments for neglect are highly OBJECTIVE because they nearly always require a professional...usually a medical professional to even make that determination. And there is somewhat more objectivity than "subjective" decision making going on in those neglect cases by virtue of medical assessment. The claims are rot, but then rot is good fertilizer. all too often left in the hands of a narrowly educated case worker, lacking experience or education in other cultures and religions. Once would be "all too often." The language of the propagandist, as usual. Appeals to emotion subtly encased in what appears to be fact but is not. Cultural sensitivity is the watchword at CPS and has been for years. Certain "jacklegs" that have been blamed for sucking up the tax payer's money have been doing trainings on the subject for 2 decades. Now it's done by colleges and universities for state agencies and has been for years in many states. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i... lege&spell=1 Which only came up with the following results title: "Results 1 - 10 of about 6,110 for "cultural sensitivity" state employees college" And, what this writer fails to tell you is this: Hiring practices for the past ten years have given priority to minority recruiting...and I know of at least one state that pays their workers who speak another language a small extra pay boost....because they are often pulled away from their regular work to rush out to reception and help a walkin, or a client whose reglar worker, who share the same language, is absent. Hispanic recruiting for foster parents is specially funded project in some areas. Now we are seeing the same thing for Eastern Europeans, of the old soviet block, getting the same thing. Often, many researchers have found, poverty and neglect are confused, or thought to be one and the same. Well, by those dim enough to believe propaganda pieces such as this. So tell me reader, are YOU confused about the difference between poverty and neglect, other than figuring out for yourself that the incidence might be a tad higher in the poor than the rich? Middle-class standards of financial achievement and material possessions are the norm against which all others are compared, despite the fact that the vast majority of the world lives with much less. Oh ****....that went out in the 70's, as a product of the consciousness raising of the 60 and 70s. What a crock. It's reflected in the routine dressing down that workers do who have high contact levels with the public....they just can't show up in court that way. And it's basic training for all workers that such standards are not allowed to apply. There is no doubt that some workers might fall into this bias but it isn't a practice and can be claimed as "possible" for anyone NOT from the social strata of "poverty." Is anyone fooled so far? In determining who is neglectful, class and race play a major role. A disproportionate number, for example, of mothers that test positive for drugs at the time of birth are poor and/or of color because these are the women who are most likely to be tested, not because white women over the poverty level do not use drugs or alcohol. And white women, and their babies, aren't tested? Mandatory testing is for those that have a history of drug and alcohol abuse. Color and income has nothing to do with it. One can turn down the test, but face the possibility of a warrant if they have any history, such as a DUI, or drug related arrest. Or even the behaviors of the patient. "The possible dual use of toxicology results for both medical and legal purposes also raises important questions about informed consent. Community standards vary for obtaining consent in cases involving prenatal substance abuse. Some medical facilities conduct toxicology testing under a general "conditions of admission" form that authorizes various medically indicated procedures. Other facilities require a special consent specifically authorizing toxicology testing. Other hospitals require that a patient be specifically informed of potential legal consequences before testing is conducted. Many hospitals conduct toxicology screening of newborns, either under the general admissions "conditions of admission" form or in accordance with State child abuse and neglect laws that allow for certain testing and evaluation procedures without parental consent for the purpose of diagnosing prenatal drug exposure. Other institutions, however, require specific parental consent for toxicology screening. If parents refuse permission for testing, a court order can then be obtained in some States. Because practices vary, it is important that professionals are aware of alcohol and drug abuse confidentiality regulations (e.g., 42 CFR, Part 2), the standards used within their local communities for obtaining consent for toxicology testing and for disclosing test results to child protection agencies. Hospital protocols also provide guidance for staff as well as help ensure consistency in hospital practice. " Economic status and ethnicity affect the way situations are assessed. A light skinned woman with a certain degree of financial security who articulately explains childrearing practices based on studies on attachment parenting and the family bed and a less financially stable, darker skinned woman or one that struggles a bit with the English language without obvious sleeping accommodations for her child are judged differently. One is an enlightened and sensitive parent and the other is neglectful, unable to provide even a crib for her child. And reverse the colors and what do you get? The same assessment would free up the darker skinned woman and result possibly in a report on the white women. This is just nonsense. Yet, if a family is in financial crisis, the political and welfare systems begrudge every dime of assistance that they receive. Whaaat! What the hell is this babbling accomplishing? It's an appeal to emotions because the author can count on EVERYONE reacting negatively because ALL POLITICAL AND WELFARE SYSTEMS begrudge every dime of assistance received. That's what the feeilng is when one has to answer reams of questions on reams of forms. Often the state will pay more to take a child from a poor mother than they would to help that family stay together. "Often?" Well when they also have a file filled with information on the poor past parenting, substance abuse, or other higly limiting factors. “We spit on the welfare mother as a parasite,� wrote Nev Moore in a Massachusetts News article of May 27, 2000, describing a typical mother on welfare with two children who receives $539 per month in assistance. “The foster mother who gets her kids gets $820 plus,� Moore continued, “yet we hold the foster and adoptive parents… up as saints.� If you haven't recognized a propaganda piece by now, does the name Nev Moore ring a bell for you? At first CPS contact, a parent enters a distorted mirror image of what our legal system is supposed to be. Nonsense. Everything is backwards. More nonsense. There are no Miranda warnings, yet everything she says will be used against her, and perhaps even some that she hasn’t. Then just make all civil proceedings have the same requirement in investigation and proceedures that criminal ones do. Simple, eh? Except the public won't buy. Her accuser can choose to remain anonymous. She isn't "convicted" on the word of the accuser, but on found or not on the evidence. Which makes little difference, as she has no right to know who is accusing her. The confidentiality of the reporter is guaranteed by law. Because it's not a criminal proceeding, as the author would like you to believe, without naming civil law as the issue. The parent is presumed guilty and must prove innocence. Again and appeal to emotions based on the fear we all feel, even when pulled over by a police officer...for what may well turn out to be a taillight out. "There's definitely an assumption of guilt. People who commit murder have more rights than a family that has its children taken away," said Republican Senator Parley Hellewell, according to a Sunday, January 18, 2003, Salt Lake Tribune article by Kirsten Stewart and Rebecca Walsh. The issue is just a tad more critical for the accused in murder than child abuse. Now if these folks would prefer the proceedures common to a murder charge, there are likely large segments of the public that, fed up with "services," and their cost, would be more than happy to bump all child abuse up to criminal status, close to or the same as a murder charge. The entire investigative process is built upon coercion and a deliberate misleading of families as to their rights. "The entire?" Please. Hyperbole. Much of it is based on actual evidence that leads to more evidence...exactly as if I saw someone climbing into a window of a store at night and reported it to the police, and they questioned the person they found climbing out....who turned out to the be store owner, innocent of any crime.....or THE STORE OWNER COMMITTING ARSON for insurance. There are many ways an investigation proceeds, but you can be sure if the police know "coercion" or deliberate misleading as to one's rights, they damn well will use it if you are stupid enough to fall for it. And IT'S PERFECTLY LEGAL. As in this definition of Coercion under that for issues pertaining to law: "\Co*er"cion\, n. [L. coercio, fr. coercere. See Coerce.] 1. The act or process of coercing. 2. (Law) The application to another of either physical or moral force. When the force is physical, and cannot be resisted, then the act produced by it is a nullity, so far as concerns the party coerced. When the force is moral, then the act, though voidable, is imputable to the party doing it, unless he be so paralyzed by terror as to act convulsively. At the same time coercion is not negatived by the fact of submission under force. ``Coactus volui'' (I consented under compulsion) is the condition of mind which, when there is volition forced by coercion, annuls the result of such coercion. --Wharton." Notice the "moral force" bit....that IS what CPS is about. It is an agency of society to enforce moral controls over the citizens the citizens have agreed to. When the law changes that, then it's gone. Until then, it is the law of this land. CPS workers won’t mention that parents do not have to let them in, Nor do police or other investigators, not even the health department inspectors, unless you wish to press it. Then they'll call in a requrest for a warrant while they sit there and block your exit with the possible evidence. nor do they have to submit themselves or their children to interrogation without a warrant and in many systems case workers are directed by superiors to deny that these rights even exist. Lie. This, despite Supreme Court constitutional interpretations and rulings to the contrary. It has been a regular practice for years to inform those being questioned initially that they do not have to answer without a lawyer or others present. Yet, even if parents are aware of the few constitutionally protected rights that they do have at that first knock on the door, it frequently becomes clear that by asserting these rights, they run a risk of an immediate retaliatory removal for at least 72 hours. Or an immediately removal for safety. That's an interesting way to use the requirement for the state to produce evidence within the 72 hours as to the reason for removal...but it's the law, not something dreampt up by corrupt CPS workers or their supervisors. The case worker has up to three days after the removal to get what is often a rubber-stamped court order for an emergency removal – yet another subjective concept -- from a busy and overburdened system that doesn’t devote much time to a real consideration of individual circumstances. In addition to the purely arbitrary nature of that initial removal, the CPS worker pays no consequences for a wrongful removal. Not even if a child is hurt or killed while in state care. Speculative nonsense, and proven untrue by actual events. If someone else murders a child though, where YOU left that child...your own say...do you think it fair if you are charged with a crime in criminal court? Or that the child's attorney, a petitioner such as a g'parent can start that up easily, should sue you for the child's estate? On a national level, even using the most conservative of government figures, one simple fact stands out. Children in the custody of the state are more likely to be neglected, abused, sexually assaulted or killed than they are in the general population. No, they are more likely to be caught and counted. And the wordage is misleading. And inaccurate. ...that would be children in the physical custody of the state...as in removed from the home....where the test cannot ethically be made to determine that claim as true or false. If all children, or even a reasonable sample size for research, at random, were left with parents they would have otherwise be removed from would THAT sample show a lower incidence of abuse and child fatality than a random sample of the same size from similar bio families placed in foster care, or other state physical custody, such as treatment centers. (The data doesn't really count foster PARENTS, but "foster care" meaing the child died in a location, but not by a specific identified person.) The date was recently posted and pointed to with clickable URL by myself, and I believe Ron. The sheer number of children who go into the system, many without real cause, and come out beaten, maimed, sexually assaulted, emotionally disabled or damaged from the powerful drugs used to keep them submissive is more than shocking. It is the abuse of human rights on a broad scale. That is yet another blatant lie. We do not KNOW that those conditions prevailed before they were placed in out of home care, or if the total number of "the children who go into the system" where in state physical custody, or in their own bio homes with in home services and state custody...something different from physical custody. City Agency’s Psych Drugs Imperil Foster Kids, an April 16. 2001 article by Douglas Montero, described the “cocktail of psychiatric medications� that many New York City foster children are forced to take. Sometimes these are made up of four or more powerful drugs. The Administration for Children’s Services, according to the article, isn’t sure how many of the 31,000 children in their care have been prescribed psychiatric drugs, but “a state audit of 401 randomly selected kids last year found that more than half were being treated for mental problems – and that most likely means medication.� That is a blantant lie. The author cannot know that for a fact. A great many children are receiving mental health treatment without drugs. If Montero’s name seems familiar, it may be from his recent New York Post article, in which he wrote of a shocking abuse of drugs, power and infants in state foster care. And, we know from which ethnic and financial groups those babies in all probability came from. In a story published on February 29, 2004, Montero reported that the New York State Health Department “has launched a probe into potentially dangerous drug research conducted on HIV-infected infants and children� -- foster children at Incarnation Children's Center in Manhattan. With money from “federal grants and, in some cases, pharmaceutical companies,� approximately 36 different experiments were performed, including 13 that used about 50 children – some just three months old -- to test the effects of high does of AIDS medicines, according the information cited in Montero’s report. Other experiments included studying the "safety," "tolerance" and "toxicity" of AIDS drugs, through methods that mixed up to six different medications. Yet another sought to determine the effects of double-dosing infants with measles vaccine. "They are torturing these kids, and it is nothing short of murder," said Michael Ellner, as quoted by Montero. Ellner is a minister and president of Health Education AIDS Liaison, which is an advocacy group for HIV parents. Dr. David Rasnick, a biochemist and expert in the field of AIDS medicine, Methinks one should, whenever offerred "authority" on subject, as in the logical fallacy of "an appeal to authority," look up that person. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i... Google+Search Dr. Rasnick is an outspoken opponent of certain widely held assumptions about AIDS and its cause and treatment...and not in the majority in his position. It would be nice if he were right...but...... was, according to Montero, “outraged,� citing the “acute toxicity� and fatal potential of the medications, as well as the variety of severe side effects associated with the drugs. Montero also wrote that “the foster-care agency described the experiments on its own Web site, which was abruptly shut down after The Post began making inquiries.� This is a different issue than everything up to this point. An aside and the usual overkill employed by propagandists. This may well be an issue, and highly deserving of citizen action, but it changes nothing on the issue of whether or not children of color are being targetted by NYC at the rates claimed by the author. As citizens, frequently we look to our government when we seek information concerning the governmental policies that affect our lives. The current child protective climate is built primarily upon two governmental acts, the Child Abuse Prevention And Treatment Act (CAPTA), which has continued to evolve since its initial legislative appearance in 1974, and the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA). I see this isn't about the 'outrage' of children of color being targetted by NYC at all, now is it? And, indeed, our government does address the question of why such great numbers of children are removed from homes in which, as so many experts agree, they could remain, with the appropriate services. In fact, unnecessary removals are specifically mentioned. Notice how, even as dependent on vague generalities to convince the reader of the malfeasance of CPS this piece was, it has decended into even more vague generalites? "as so many experts agree, they could remain with the appropriate services," Honey, I could remain almost anywhere if I had the resources to. There is such a thing as a limit. Well, if they are mentioned let's see that mention and the supporting argument. “While reimbursement for foster care and related case management services is open-ended, title IV-E funds may not be used for other types of services that could prevent a child from needing to be placed in care in the first place or that could facilitate the child's returning home or moving to another permanent placement,� said Wade F. Horn, Ph.D., Well now let me see....as I recall there are OTHER programs to address that...one is called ADC. That IS one of the preventive programs, along with others. CPS is not mandated to FIRST do prevention. It is primarily an enforcement agency, but is NOT allowed to contact families that are NOT reported to them to offer services...since that would encroach on OTHER programs that have services and outreach to address prevention. http://nccanch.acf.hhs.gov/topics/pr...rs/federal.cfm http://www.friendsnrc.org/contacts/nrccontacts.asp Why do we not hear more about these when we are looking at child protection? Because they are so universally underused by the families that come to be investigated for abuse and neglect. Essentially...they do not care enough about their children to seek aid for their malparenting, nor their drinking, drugging, and partying. As usual, the propagandists move far from the real problems and focus on issues they do not even represent correctly, and demand solutions from sources that are not involved in that part of the problem. CPS is not a prevention agency except in it's risk assessment portion, and casemanagement to put client and resources together, often just such resources provided that some would refer to as being staffed by "jacklegs." Freeloaders and opportunists...unfortunately those "jacklegs" are in such short supply that the "experts" themselves are the one's pointing out the lack of adequate service access as a major problem in child protection and welfare. Assistant Secretary for Children and Families Department of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, in a statement given to the Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, U.S. House of Representatives, on June 12, 2003. “Furthermore,� continued Horn, “a State that is successful in preventing unnecessary removals or in shortening lengths of foster care stays actually is apt to receive less Federal funding than a State where children remain in foster care for long periods of time.� Then those states need to wake up the one classification of society mandated to do something about the problem...the senators and representatives that vote for programs...and have them vote to have more money given to prevention. This is not brain surgery,,, and diatribes such as this author offers is leading the reader directly away from reform through representation lobbying...and to what? Screaming in the streets? Whining at the keyboard? Nothing but hand wringing? Or more suits...and more money for those that are on the anti CPS bandwagon? “The county,� wrote Troy Anderson, of the LA Daily News, in Foster Care Cash Cow, one of a series of investigative articles concerning the foster care system and published over the last few months, with the most recent appearing on March 5, 2004, “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.� Yep. $30,000 a year for a child in out of home care doesn't sound like all that much, when you think about it. And especially when you think of all the services provided....legal costs (no, they don't come free), counseling, therapy, rehab, transportation, medical support. Without a continuous influx of children, the system would collapse. Jobs and pensions would be lost. Executives would suffer. Nonsense. The usual. Same old nonsense. The problem, as defined by the author, would disappear with just one thing: the ending of parents abusing and neglecting their children. CPS doesn't create that. Citizens do, and other citizens feel responsible for society, and the child, and the family, and have mandated their government act. According to Anderson, a report by the state Department of Social Services Child Welfare Stakeholders Group described the situation as being "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." And how would this need be paid for sans the "incentive" to do investigations and placement? And, thus, it would seem, we arrive at the bottom line reason why it is the families of the poor and families of color that are ravaged by the child protective system. These are the families that often lack the resources and power to fight back. This sad attempt founders on an interesting fact...the state can bill, and does, the family for services. Now consider, who would best be able to pay for those services...the poor, or the rich...so why isn't CPS going after the rich? If it's "Show Me the Money" they sure got the wrong target. And when the organizations that are traditionally associated with protecting the rights of those in need fail to act, what can a parent do? A completely mindless question. CPS hasn't failed to act. The complaint in this piece is that they HAVE acted. It's just an emotion laden entrancing spin to capture your feelings rather than your reason, as the reader. Parents must arm themselves with knowledge, so that they are able to protect themselves and their families, so that they can make informed decisions. And neither CPS or the government is against that. There are national organizations, such as the American Family Rights Association that are able to provide a great deal of information. R R R R R R ............and I suggest every single thing they offer in the way of information be closely examined and researched for both logic and risk. On the local level, Harlem hosts two excellent organizations. One, People United For Children, began a class action lawsuit against the City of New York in 1998 concerning the removal of children from their parents without investigation. They would be right to do so, if that were the case...if no followup investigation were conducted, after the removal to determine the risk or offense. It would be interesting, but inhumane, to leave all the children until the conclusion of an investigation and see what happens to them in the interum...my bet is the older ones who themselves said they were abused and neglected in interview would suddenly recant,,,and we might have a few children disappear. The organizations director, Sharonne Salaam is an accomplished and committed activist. The other, the Child Welfare Organizing Project, offers what was described by the New York Women’s Foundation as “peer-led training on parent’s rights and responsibilities that will build a network of parent advocates to improve the child welfare system.� I should hope. It's a responsibility of citizens to improve our government legally mandated institutions. Let's hope they aren't a pack of phony crusaders though. I've seen far too many of those simply destroy and then replace with something more fitting their ambitions and agendas, than actually solve any problems. Much graft and fraud have grown out of destruction and replacement. The most important thing we must do as a community, to protect our children as a whole, is to actively support legislation and organizations that seek to address these issues. Part of that is becoming informed and informing others. The numbers speak for themselves. We need to understand exactly what these numbers say about us and what they mean to our families and our communities. Are we that much more likely to abuse or neglect our children? Yes, or it wouldn't be happening. No, if it's not. The question isn't, JUST that some group is being targetted, but what are the real factors that causes more of that group to be involved? Is it solely just their vulnerability, as this author would have you believe? Are there other factors the author leaves unexplored? How does the author propose to reform CPS? The ONLY reform suggestion in the entire piece is force by suit. With one exception, and that one questionable....information promulgated by groups that may or may not have activism as they first goal...but rather sueing as the force they will use. Will they be activists in the full sense of the term? Gathering and distributing unbiased objective information? More importantly lobbying their representatives with that information? Willing to participate in bill making work groups, or for amendments to existing laws? Are they real reformers, or are they phonies? If this piece is representative, with it's opening a piece of blatant misinformation, then I have something less than full support for them. They'll have to clean up their act to earn more. No More Lies, Please. Kane descriptors: NY, NEW YORK HARLEM, CPS, ACS, ADMINISTRATION CHILDRENS SERVICES, DSS, KINSHIP CARE, AFRICAN AMERICANS, CHILD PROTECTIVE, KIN CARE, SOCIAL WORK, FAMILY LAW, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, URBAN LEAGUE |
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