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| Suspecting Parents Doesn’t Protect Kids — Training and Partnership Do |
| By jjie.org - Tamar Birckhead |
| Published: 10/07/2013 |
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I know something about social services and foster care. For a year between college and law school, I worked for child protective services in New York City. I was hired as a case investigator in 1988 after Mayor Ed Koch ordered an expansion of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). I was 23, raised in suburban New Jersey, and knew little of Manhattan aside from its museums and Broadway theaters. I wanted to do something meaningful before entering graduate school, and an ad in The New York Times stating that helping children required only a college degree (mine was in English literature) caught my eye. After a short period of so-called training (10 or 12 weeks) at a desolate outpost in Queens, I was unceremoniously given the power to decide if there was “credible evidence” of child maltreatment, such that children should be removed from their homes and placed in the custody of the state of New York. I spent much of the work day taking the subway to and from pockets of the city I had never seen, knocking on doors of small apartments in rundown housing projects, finding little food in the refrigerator or clean clothes in the closet, and trying to decide whether poverty — often coupled with drug addiction, alcoholism or mental illness but rarely signs of physical abuse or neglect — warranted removal. I received no supervision, and the bureaucratic machine required forms to be completed in triplicate. I constantly felt overwhelmed and under-qualified. I recalled these experiences when I recently watched “A Life Changing Visitor: When Children’s Services Knocks,” a short documentary produced by New York University Law School’s Family Defense Clinic. Three law students in the clinic — Molly Greer, Jessica Rubin-Wills and Dara Young — interviewed parents who had been subjected to child-welfare interventions and whose children were ultimately placed in foster care. In the film, the parents speak powerfully about their love for their children and the needlessly destructive impact the child-welfare system has wrecked upon their families. One parent shares the following: “No one wanted to see that I was in pain. No one wanted to see that I’m a human being. They just think you’re some type of monster. When you are in the child-welfare system, you’re guilty until proven innocent, and you’re never really proven innocent. You’re just branded for the rest of your life as a bad parent.” Read More. |
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