The Unintended Consequences of Child Protection Laws

Grandparents can make the difference.

There is a growing number of children finding themselves separated from their parents for one reason or another. The Child Protection Services agencies have determined that permanency in a child's life is vital, and has expedited the process of attempting to rehabilitate a parent who has neglected or harmed his/her child. The current rule is that if the child has spent 15 of the past 22 months in an out of home placement, such as foster care, the states can petition the court to terminate the parental rights and seek adoptive homes for the children. At this point in the process, grandparents may step in and petition the court for custody. Many are finding that if they have not continuously been involved in the case before this stage, the agencies recommend against grandparent custody. Many times, some innocent event in your distant history can eliminate you from consideration as a caregiver for your own grandchildren. If the agency and the attorney or advocates for the child align against your taking custody, you will have to fight a legal battle in the courts which can bankrupt the average family. This problem may never intrude on your family, but if it does, the only protection for your grandchildren is to know your rights, and know the children's rights before you encounter the "intervention". This is definitely one of those things we all presume only happen to low income or "other" people. My research indicates that this presumption could not be more wrong.

A string of well-intended legislation, coupled with some poorly designed incentive programs are now culminating in a climate of hysteria. Americans have historically over-reacted to crises, often doing more harm with the perceived remedies. This is a classic example. While no one wishes to leave an abused child in a dangerous home, it appears that the combination of our desire to protect a child, and our failure to embed proper safeguards in the laws is causing a generation of children to be traumatized in many instances unnecessarily.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families has collected statistics for several years from reports which are required of the states to receive federal reimbursements and block grant funds. Although those statistics are not always reliable, and often are only partially collected, or using varied, unstandardized criteria for collection from state to state, even the somewhat anemic reports reveal some startling facts. According to the ACF:

· In 2002, 2.6 million reports alleging possible maltreatment of approximately 4.5 million children were made.

Many of these reports are made anonymously, due to legislation intended to encourage the reports. It was believed that persons who might hesitate to call, in fear of retaliation from families, would be more likely to report, possibly saving a child, if they were allowed to do so anonymously. The UNINTENDED consequence of this legislation is that false allegations can be made without any danger of prosecution for that false report. Nearly all states have laws against this sort of report, but it is rare to find those being enforced. An angry ex-spouse, intent on discrediting the other parent to gain full custody, or a disgruntled neighbor, or some intrusive stranger in a grocery store can call in an anonymous report and start a series of events which can destroy a family and forever sever a child from his home. Much like most government agencies, the machinery often fails to see individuals, instead of simply funding streams and statistics. There is possibly no other arena where individual agent responsibility and good faith is more vital.

· About two-thirds of those reports were found to warrant further investigation or assessment. That would amount to 1,742,000 reports involving an estimated 2,970,000 children.

Those investigations culminated in the determination that approximately 896,000 children were abused or neglected.

This would mean that 2,074,000 children were interrogated, frightened and traumatized for no reason. The very nature of a child protection investigation is scary for a child. He is often questioned relentlessly, sometimes without benefit of parent or advocate present. He is often physically examined, subjected to forensic interviews, and many times removed from his family for at least a few days until the validity of the report can be ascertained. This common decision to "err on the side of the child" neglects to consider or give proper recognition to the fact that unless that child is in serious danger, the protection intervention may be the most trauma he ever experiences. The reliance of a child on his family, even when that family is not optimal, is absolute. His world depends on his sense of safety and security and on the sense of his own place in the world Even older children need their place in the family tree to anchor their own sense of self worth. When we disrupt that faith, we forever shake the foundation upon which healthy children grow. Children who feel that they don't belong, or who feel unsafe tend to develop emotional maladies which may take years to emerge.

Statistics show that over half, about 60% of those 896,000 children were the victims of neglect. This amounts to about 537,600 children.

About 20% of those children were physically abused. That would be about 179,200.

About 10% of those children were sexually abused. That would be 89,600.

Roughly 7% were found to be emotionally or psychologically neglected, which includes criticizing, rejecting, or refusing to nurture a child.

When the definitions of those terms are reviewed, and the common "treatments" applied by social workers, the problems become crystal clear. For instance:

In the agency terminology, "neglected" means that the parent or responsible adult failed to provide some component of the basic needs of 537,600 children. This could be something as innocuous as allowing the water service to the house to be interrupted for failure to pay the bill. While this is not a preferable situation, often those children were removed and their families subjected to months of agency management viewed as "rehabilitative services" which created stress and duress far more than the original condition in the home. Once a child has been removed, despite the claims of the agencies that they are only "helping", the process becomes very adversarial and accusatory. The laws in family courts are not what anyone who has not encountered it would expect, and often the result is the destruction of families who truly needed help. Almost universally, the ignorance of the process and the language renders a parent helpless before a veritable room full of people who presume the worst of them.

The law requires that a list of "core services" intended to help families remedy minor problems be offered before a foster placement is initiated as a last resort. Because of the perverse incentives which inadvertently were built into the funding mandates, those services are often not offered, and are more often not funded adequately. The ACF reports that in this same year, 2002, $6.5 Billion Dollars (with a 'B') was spent on Foster care and adoption subsidies while only $630 Million Dollars (with an 'M') was spent to help families in crisis to prevent the need for a removal or to reunify families who were separated. If the worker sees a child in possible need of services, and the only way to access the funding to provide those services is to remove the child, the perverse truth is that often, children who could have been kept at home with some help provided to families are removed and traumatized horrendously in the process. Simply realigning our priorities would remedy this unintended consequence, but so far, the machinery just seems to be growing more and more lop-sided.

When you examine the official definition of the terminology used in the legislation, and consider the possible subjective interpretations of the laws, you will readily see a huge gap between the clear intent of those laws, and the actual result of their day-to-day application. The term "reasonable efforts" is liberally found throughout the manuals and statutes related to child protection. A cursory examination of the legislative intent of the mandate that reasonable efforts will always be made to avoid a removal of a child from his family, will reveal that there is a vast disparity between the intent and the actual bottom line results of our zeal to protect children.

The conclusion of my research in this area is that the government has long-since begun to do more harm than good with our billions of dollars in funding. When the occasional legislative hearing is held to examine the failures of the system, the various professionals align to declare that those failures are the result of needing more money, more staff, more programs. It has been estimated by national data surveys that over 25 individuals derive their primary income from the removal and foster care of a child. The most egregious horror stories are paraded to punctuate their claims that they are just expected to do too much with too little, motivating the legislators, with all good intentions, to appropriate more funding. What is rarely done is an examination of how the current funds have been spent. Even a very limited look at the statistics will assure you that we are NOT doing a good job of budgeting and monitoring. As with any government agency, public oversight is the only sure way to prevent rogue and unaccountable results.

Our generation, the grandparents, are the watchdogs. We must know the details of this agency above all others, and demand that it work efficiently, and with open accountability to the public. It is the only way that true child abuse prevention will ever come about. Confidentiality laws are said to protect the identities of children. Truly, simply redacting their names would be sufficient, however the agencies routinely refuse all public access to documents, standing behind the supposed need to shield the child. The effect is to provide a screen behind which any and all manner of agency malfeasance and incompetence can be hidden. The public must demand full accountability and disclosure.

It is estimated that the placement of one child in a foster home will cost the tax-payer about $3000 per month on the average. Many times, helping the single mother gain proper child care, or teaching her to discipline properly, or helping the family to find community resources to address a loss of income, or other crisis would cost us pennies comparatively. As long as the funding streams are weighted so heavily on the foster care services, those preservations will never be honestly implemented. The only solution I can find is for more grandparents to know the facts, know the laws of their state, and take an active part in the protection of their grandchildren.

The good news is that although many times, an intervention will be unavoidable, if a grandparent is aware, and able to assert his/her rights soon enough, the child can be saved from untold emotional upheavals. Even though parents may believe that the social worker will never knock on their door, we, the older generation realize the fallacy of that belief that such things only happen to other people. We can prepare our adult children, educate ourselves and our grandchildren, and we can also press our legislators to address the unintended consequences of previous poor planning and research. Above all else, my research convinced me that the answer will be found by my generation, the grandparents who realize the danger of allowing the government to take over the management and protection of families.

If you are interested in doing some reading and research of your own, I highly recommend typing terms like "family rights" or "child protection services" into your favorite search engine. The revelations will astound you. The safety and integrity of your family may depend on your knowledge of the truth.

Christine Korn is the director of Colorado Family Rights Advocacy Institute, a non-profit agency dedicated to education related to child neglect and abuse, and to the preservation of the fundamental human right to family association.