SavetheChildren2009
Desperate Children In Need!
Abuse & Neglect
Stories: Abuse in foster care
These stories focus on the abuse many foster children are subject to while in the foster care system.
They are the stories no one wants to hear -- children, abused and neglected, some to the point of death. Many of them must leave their families to go into shelters or foster care. Often these children leave their homes with only a garbage bag to hold their clothes and favorite toys, the most are routinely tossed from one temporary placement to another, often ten or twenty times during their most formative, vulnerable years.
This is the continuing saga of crimes against Foster children. Children are dying, inside and out of the foster care system.
These stories are in memory of children died of neglect or abuse while under the care of the social service agencies! Many died suspiciously or from neglect. Most of their lives and deaths went unnoticed. Until now. But you likely never heard of them. The deaths of these children -- and what government agencies did or didn't do to save their lives -- Even when they die, their stories are rarely told
Abused toddlers replacing teen-agers in foster care
March 18, 1999
Oregon had a record number of abused and neglected children in 1998, and almost half of them were 5 or younger
By Kate Taylor of The Oregonian staff
The number of Oregon children confirmed as abused and neglected -- almost half of whom are in the first years of life -- leapt to a record high in 1998.
Drug abuse by parents fueled the increase, but so did more calls for help from the community and an expanded response by the state's child-protection agency.
A report released Wednesday by the State Office for Services to Children and Families shows the total number of confirmed child abuse victims rose 4 percent, to 10,147. Of those cases, nearly half involved the most vulnerable children, those 5 or younger.
Child-protection workers say severely troubled parents are leading to the increase. In the past decade, the number of children entering care whose parents have mental disabilities doubled; those whose parents are criminally involved went from one-fourth to half; and the number with parents who have drug and alcohol problems moved from half to 60 percent, according to Portland State University's Child Welfare Partnership.
But the surge of very young children in foster care -- from 30 percent 10 years ago to 47 percent now -- also mirrors the agency's new mission: to focus first on the children who are least able to protect themselves.
The change is seen most clearly in the state's 3,700 foster homes, where the sound of teen-age phone calls and loud radios has been replaced by lullabies and toddlers' squeals.
Foster mothers such as Jill Nelson are taking more and more younger children. And the abuse they see among children under 2 is more disturbing than ever. Nearly all of the 40 children who have passed through Nelson's home have families ravaged by drugs, she said.
"They (the children) can be so physically abusive toward one another, just wanting to tear into everyone and everything," she said. She has seen a child as young as 21 months filled with aggression learned in a biological home, having learned to survive by biting, screaming and kicking.
"It's very shocking," Nelson said. "It's very sad."
And while it is troubling that so many very young children are moving into foster care, it does show that the agency is making swifter decisions about children and making sure they don't languish in dangerous homes.
The Best Interest of the Child bill, passed two years ago, mandates that the agency give abusive and neglectful parents only one year to make their home safe before their children are placed in permanent adoptive homes.
"We are making sure early on that parents understand -- right up front -- that this is very serious and that things need to change or your child can be placed in another permanent situation," said Betty Uchytil, director of field operations for the child-protective agency.
The agency also is able to respond more swiftly to abused and neglected children because last legislative session lawmakers approved 163 more hot line and social workers. The impact of those workers was marked by a 14 percent increase in the number of abuse investigations in 1997. In 1998, that figure rose only 0.7 percent to 17,300 cases, because most of those workers had already been hired. The last few will be on board by April.
If Oregonians want to help children of all ages, they have to better finance programs that work to help families before problems become serious and children get hurt, said Ben de Haan, chairman of the board for the Children's Trust Fund of Oregon, a state agency that funds programs to help struggling families. It will take more than just hiring more caseworkers, he said.
While SCF officials always stress the importance of community safety nets -- natural links between parents, teachers, neighbors and others that work to protect children -- de Haan said the state needs far more specific strategies to protect children, such as parenting training, anger management and drug treatment programs.
The report released Wednesday does bear some good news, Uchytil said. The number of child abuse and neglect deaths is down from 34 in 1997 to 17 in 1998. But the 1997 figure involved clusters of deaths that were neglect-related, such as fires.
The increase in reports also shows that communities are more vigilant than ever about their children. Since 1997, the number of abuse reports jumped 12 percent to 31,456 in 1998.
There has also been a decline in drug-affected babies.
But behind the report's figures is a tragic picture of many older children who are left in abusive homes or are left on the streets because the state doesn't offer enough services.
Oregonians will feel the repercussions of that when those older children become chronically unemployed adults, said Don Grossnickle, an analyst with the Child Welfare Partnership at Portland State. Six years ago, those older children stood a much better chance of becoming successful adults because they were still getting services, Grossnickle said.
"You've got a limited number of resources, so you put your money into prevention" by moving children out of troubled homes while they're still young, Grossnickle said. "Unfortunately when that happens, the older kids get dropped off."
When children are abused in foster care
By Josh Sweigart | Tuesday, July 15, 2008, 03:31 PM
It appears to have happened again.
Since 2006, when 3-year-old Marcus Fiesel died at the hands his Butler County Children Services foster parents, the issue of children being abused in foster care has been a contentious one.
On Tuesday, a local 16-year-old who ran away after he was allegedly abused in a foster home in Warren County, was returned to the agency’s care safe — but not unharmed. Click here for the child’s story.
It was just in May that the agency launched an ongoing investigation into another allegation of abuse in Trenton.
Agency Director Michael Fox said children being abused in foster care is shockingly common. An e-mail to this effect he sent to the paper incensed foster parents, who say Fox doesn’t support foster homes enough.
Said Fox Tuesday: "As we’ve said, even when the system works and we do everything right, bad people do bad things to children. That is unfortunately the case here."
FOSTER MOTHER CHARGED WITH ABUSE
FALL RIVER, Mass. - Police have charged a 29 year old women with using a hair iron to burn her 4 year old foster son's arm so severely he needed skin graft surgery.
Police say Kelly O'Brien is charged with wanton or reckless endangerment of a child and permitting substantial injury to a child.
Doctors said the child suffered from third-degree burns to his right upper arm and second-degree burns to the left upper arm that did not seem to be self inflicted.
O'Brien told investigators the boy had hurt himself.
Daycare mom 'caged kids'
11/01/2006 07:55 - (SA)
Santa Barbara - The owner of a daycare centre was arrested for allegedly caging three of her adopted children in locked rooms and forcing one to sleep in a small grilled cupboard in California, said authorities.
Sergeant Erik Raney said a 13-year-old boy and girls aged six and nine appeared malnourished and were wearing clothes soiled with urine and faeces after sheriff's deputies who acted on a tip and went to the home of Sylvia Jovanna Vasquez discovered them.
Raney said investigators determined the children were locked in their rooms for "extended" periods and were fed "minimal diets of bread, water and peanut butter". He said they rarely if ever ventured outside.
Raney said: "There was documentation from the children describing physical abuse. All of the doors in the residence had external locks, giving the ability to lock the children inside of the rooms." All kids 'related'
Another adopted child, a 12-year-old girl, was clean and healthy.
Raney said: "The 12-year-old was definitely cared for differently than the other three, almost like she was preferred or pampered ... didn't seem to be subject to the same cruelties as the other three."
The sergeant said he didn't know if the children were related. All four were turned over to the county's Child Welfare Services.
Authorities said Vasquez, 50, was arrested for investigation of child cruelty and remained jailed on Tuesday. She had spoken to investigators, but they declined to comment on a possible motive.
Authorities said Vasquez was licensed to care for up to a dozen children.
- AP
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org CHILD ABUSE AND POVERTY
It is an article of faith among "child savers" that "child abuse crosses class lines." They tell us that we are as likely to find maltreatment in rich families as in poor, but the rich can hide from authorities. But like most child saver "truisms," this one is false. Prof. Leroy Pelton of the University of Nevada – Las Vegas School of Social Work, calls it "The Myth of Classlessness."
Like the tailors in the fable of The Emperor's New Clothes, the child savers have invented a whole group of invisible, middle-class child abusers only they are wise enough to see. Of course there are some middle class child abusers. But the evidence is overwhelming that poverty is by far the most important cause of child maltreatment -- and the most important reason families end up in "the system" whether they have maltreated their children or not.
The federal government's Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3) compared families with an annual income of under $15,000 to families with an annual income over $30,000. Their findings:
Abuse is 14 times more common in poor families.
Neglect is 44 times more common in poor families.
The study emphasized that the findings "cannot be plausibly explained on the basis of the higher visibility of lower income families to community professionals."[1]
Studies in which all the subjects are equally open to public scrutiny (groups made up entirely of welfare recipients, for example) show that those who abuse tend to be the "poorest of the poor."[2]
The Myth of Classlessness doesn't just run counter to research. It runs counter to common sense. It is well-known that child abuse is linked to stress. It is equally well-known that poor families tend to be under more stress than rich families.
The gap between rich and poor is widest in the area of "neglect" -- which makes up by far the largest single category of maltreatment reports. That's because the poor are included in our neglect laws almost by definition.
What is neglect? In Ohio, it's when a child's "condition or environment is such as to warrant the state, in the interests of the child, in assuming his guardianship." In Illinois, it's failure to provide "the proper or necessary support ... for a child's well-being." In Mississippi, it's when a child is "without proper care, custody, supervision, or support." In South Dakota, it's when a child's "environment is injurious to his welfare."[3]
Such definitions make a mockery of the oft-repeated child-saver claim that "we never remove children because of poverty alone."
Imagine that you are an impoverished single mother with an eight-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son. The four-year-old is ill with a fever and you need to get him medicine. But you have no car, it's very cold, pouring rain, and it will take at least an hour to get to and from the pharmacy. You don't know most of your neighbors and those you know you have good reason not to trust. What do you?
Go without the medicine? That's "medical neglect." The child savers can take away your children for medical neglect. Bundle up the feverish four-year-old in the only, threadbare coat he's got and take him out in the cold and rain? That's "physical neglect." The child savers can take away your children for physical neglect. Leave the eight-year-old to care for the four-year-old and try desperately to get back home as soon as you can? That's "lack of supervision." The child savers can take away your children for lack of supervision.
And in every one of those cases, the child savers would say, with a straight face, that they didn't take your children "because of poverty alone."
Or consider some actual cases from around the country.
· In Orange County, California, an impoverished single mother can't find someone to watch her children while she works at night, tending a ride at a theme park. So she leaves her eight-, six-, and four-year-old children alone in the motel room that is the only housing they can afford. Someone calls child protective services. Instead of helping her with babysitting or daycare, they take away the children on the spot.[4]
· In Akron, Ohio, a grandmother raises her 11-year-old granddaughter despite being confined to a wheelchair with a lung disease. Federal budget cuts cause her to lose housekeeping help. The house becomes filthy. Instead of helping with the housekeeping, child protective services takes the granddaughter away and throws her in foster care for a month. The child still talks about how lonely and terrified she was - and about the time her foster parent took her picture and put it in a photo album under the heading: "filthy conditions."[5]
· In Los Angeles, the pipes in a grandmother's rented house burst, flooding the basement and making the home a health hazard. Instead of helping the family find another place to live, child protective workers take away the granddaughter and place her in foster care. She dies there, allegedly killed by her foster mother. The child welfare agency that would spend nothing to move the family offers $5,000 for the funeral.[6]
· In Paterson New Jersey, parents lose their three children to foster care solely because they lack adequate housing. When the children are returned, one of them shows obvious signs of abuse – bruises and new and old burn marks -- in foster care. The parents are suing. And so is their first caseworker. He never wanted the children taken away. He’d even found the family a better apartment. But that’s not what his superiors wanted. Indeed, the caseworker says that because he insisted on trying to help the family, and refused to alter his reports to make the parents look bad, he was fired. Why were his bosses so anxious to take away the children? There was a rich, suburban couple ready and waiting to adopt them. And according to the lawsuit filed by the caseworker, a supervisor told him that "children should be taken away from poor parents if they can be better off elsewhere."[7] It is NCCPR’s position that no child should ever be removed from the child's family for neglect alone, unless the child is suffering, or is at imminent risk of suffering, identifiable, serious harm that cannot be remediated by services.
Even when child savers don't remove the children, the "help" they offer impoverished families can be a hindrance. For such families, demanding that they drop everything to go to a counselor's office or attend a parent education class is simply adding one more burden for people who already are overwhelmed.
Step one to ensuring they can provide a safe environment for their children is offering help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty. Family preservation programs do just that, (see Issue Paper 10). And that is one reason they succeed where other efforts fail.
Updated January 1, 2008
1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, The Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3), September, 1996, Chapter 5, pp. 2-17; Summary: Chapter 8, pp.10-11. Back to Text.
2. e.g. Bernard Horowitz and Isabel Wolock, "Material Deprivation, Child Maltreatment and Agency Interventions Among Poor Families," in Leroy Pelton, ed., The Social Context of Child Abuse and Neglect (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1981), p.138. Back to Text.
3. Ohio Statutes, Sec. 2151.04; Illinois Statutes, Chapter 23, Sec. 2053; Mississippi Statutes, Sec. 43-21-105; South Dakota Statutes, Sections 26-8-6 and 26-8-2. Back to Text.
4. Laura Saari, "Checking Up on the Children," Orange County Register, Jan. 17, 1999, p.E1. Back to Text.
5. Donna J. Robb, "Child Abuse Charge Unfair, Group Says" The Plain Dealer, March 11, 1998, p.1B. Back to Text.
6. Nicholas Riccardi, "Grandmother Blames County in Latest Death of Foster Child" Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1999, p.B1. Back to Text.
7. Jennifer V. Hughes, "Lawsuit Says DYFS Ordered False Reports," The Record, May 4, 2001, p.L3. Back to Text.
