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Guest column

Children take back seat to PR

By RICHARD WEXLER
Published October 26, 2005

To understand why so much of Florida remains in the child welfare Stone Age, one need look no further than the plight of the children of a Spring Hill couple, Barbara Josephine Lane and Jeffrey Beecher (Deputies find 2 kids alone, arrest mother, Oct. 8 Times).

Neither parent beat the children, nor raped or tortured them. Rather, the children, ages 2 and 4, wandered into a neighbor's yard. They were unsupervised for five hours while Lane was asleep and Beecher was at work. Lane allegedly takes several prescription medications and sometimes smokes marijuana with Beecher.

Beecher told police he hadn't smoked pot in four weeks. He passed a drug test. There is no indication in news accounts that the family had been in trouble with the Florida Department of Children and Families before. Sheriff's deputies, who have been urged to get more involved in child abuse cases on the theory that they would be tougher on parents, concluded it was safe to leave the children with their father.

But District 13 DCF workers overruled the law enforcement professionals, took the children and left them to the tender mercies of the Florida foster care system.

It's not hard to guess why. This year, in the same district, DCF came under fire in the case of 3-year-old Preston Quillen, who drowned after wandering off from a sleeping mother (2-year-old boy drowns in pond, Sept. 17 Times). The fact that the family circumstances in the Quillen case were more serious proved irrelevant. No worker in District 13 was going to have the next Preston Quillen on her caseload. Even the district's spokesman alluded to Preston in justifying the taking of Lane and Beecher's children.

These children's emotional well-being, and maybe even their physical safety, was sacrificed in the name of good public relations.

And it probably will work. After all, why not just "err on the side of the child" and snatch the children whenever a mother falls asleep and might have used drugs? In fact, there probably is no phrase in the English language that has done more harm to children than "err on the side of the child."

At best, these children are likely to be traumatized emotionally by separation. Indeed, for children of this age it can be akin to a kidnapping. The 4-year-old may well believe she has done something terribly wrong and now she is being punished. Perhaps they will be returned home quickly, reducing, but not eliminating, the harm done to them. Or they may be split from each other, losing their only remaining source of comfort. And then they may bounce from home to home, emerging years later unable to love or trust anyone.

A recent study of foster care systems that are better than Florida's found that foster care alumni suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder at double the rate of Gulf War veterans. Only one in five was doing well as a young adult.

DCF took the children of Lane and Beecher from a mother whose worst crimes may have been mixing up her medications and smoking pot, and a father who appears blameless. Then DCF threw them into a system that churns out walking wounded four times out of five. How is that "erring on the side of the child?"

There is no allegation these children were abused in their own home. But that same alumni study found that one-third of foster children reported being abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. (The study didn't even ask about one of the most common forms of abuse: foster children abusing each other.)

How can taking children from a home where there is no allegation of abuse, and placing them in a system where the odds of abuse are at least one in three, be "erring on the side of the child"?

Ever-conscious of good public relations, the folks at District 13 will point to official statistics that give much lower figures. But academic studies always find far more abuse in foster care than the official numbers reveal. That's because official numbers involve agencies investigating themselves - creating an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file.

That District 13 is more interested in scoring public relations points than helping children is clear when it is compared to a few districts in Florida that have turned the corner. They've rejected the take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare that has dominated the state for the past six years.

In the nine months ending May 31, the foster care population in District 13 soared by 25 percent - the worst record in the state. During the same time period, the foster-care population in Miami-Dade dropped by 15 percent.

Yet it is Miami-Dade that consistently keeps children safer. For example, in District 13, a child left in his own home is twice as likely to be reabused as in Miami-Dade, which now emphasizes safe, proven programs to keep families together. Similarly, look at the proportion of children returned from foster care who must be placed in foster care again and again. District 13 is above average while Miami has the second-best record in the state.

It's not as surprising as it sounds. When workers take fewer children needlessly, they have more time to find children in real danger. They then have time either to craft intensive help for the family in their own home, or, if that's truly not safe, remove the child.

Other states that are leading the nation in keeping children safe learned this years ago. Now, even some parts of Florida are catching on. Why not District 13? Perhaps they are too afraid of bad publicity.

Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform based in Alexandria, Va. The organization's reports on child welfare in Florida are available at www.nccpr.org Guest columnists write their own opinions on subjects they choose, which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.

[Last modified October 26, 2005, 00:44:15]