National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va.

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(703) 212-2006 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org

Presentation to the
COMMUNITY DIALOGUE
Tabernacle United Church, Philadelphia
December 3, 2010
By Richard Wexler, Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

I’m honored to have the opportunity to speak to you this evening. And I’m

pleased to be able to congratulate DHS - Give Us Back Our Children not only on this

documentary but also on the progress they have achieved in improving the lives of

Philadelphia’s vulnerable children and families.

I am familiar with the work of many grassroots family advocacy organizations

around the country; none has come so far so fast – and certainly none is more energetic.

And that determination and energy are beginning to produce real results.

Across the country, efforts of groups like DHS - Give Us Back Our Children and

NCCPR have led to progress. In the most recent year for which data are available, the

number of children torn from their families nationwide declined by about 6.5 percent.

But in Philadelphia, where it is harder to make progress than in many places, the

decline was ten percent.

That’s 369 children. That means 369 fewer children were subjected to being torn

needlessly from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care.

That’s 369 children who won’t face the terrible risk of abuse in foster care itself.

It also means that the time DHS workers would have wasted on those cases could

be spent finding the relatively small number of children in real danger who really do need

to be taken from their parents.

What could account for this change? Only two things really are different: The

Philadelphia Daily News stepped forward to cover the stories that the Philadelphia
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Inquirer systematically ignores – with the notable exception of Carolyn Davis’ excellent

story about the making of this documentary.

And, DHS - Give Us Back Our Children is here, making the case for real reform

to the press and to the public.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that there still is such a long way to go.

Philadelphia still tears apart families at a far higher rate than any other big city.

Looking just at America’s five largest cities, the rate of removal in Philadelphia is more

than 30 percent higher than Los Angeles, double the rate of New York City, nearly

quadruple the rate of Houston and nearly six times the rate of Chicago. And these figures

factor in child poverty rates.

There are two possible reasons for this.

Either: Philadelphia is, in fact, a cesspool of depravity, with twice as much child

abuse as New York and nearly six times as much child abuse as Chicago.

Or: DHS still is taking away far too many children.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Philadelphia still makes far too much

use of the worst form of care: Group homes and institutions.

Nationwide, about 16 percent of children are trapped in such places – and that

figure is too high. In Illinois it’s 12 percent. Maine, another place where child welfare

went from national disgrace to national model, institutionalizes only ten percent. In

Philadelphia it’s more than 30 percent. That, too is an improvement, but only a slight

improvement, from the previous year.

This also is why no one should be allowed to get away with claiming the problem

is lack of money.
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I’m a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. But the paradox of child welfare is:

the worse the option, the more it costs. Safe proven programs to keep children out of

foster care cost less than foster care which costs less than group homes which cost less

than institutions.

Stop warehousing all those children in group homes and institutions, and there

will be plenty of money to build the infrastructure of prevention, family preservation, and

due process of law that Philadelphia needs.

Of course some would argue that thanks to this take-the-child-and-run mentality,

Philadelphia’s children must be safer. Sure adults may suffer when their children are

needlessly taken away, but, it is claimed, we have to “err on the side of the child.” In fact,

there probably is no phrase in the child welfare lexicon that has done more harm to

children than “err on the side of the child.”

When a child is thrown needlessly into foster care, he loses not only mom and

dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and

classmates. For a young enough child it can be an experience akin to a kidnapping. A

study of foster care “alumni” found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress

disorder of Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be “doing well.” How

can throwing children into a system which churns out walking wounded four times out of

five be “erring on the side of the child?”

Two more studies, of more than 15,000 cases, are even more devastating. Those

studies found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help

fared better, on average, than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. So

whenever anyone tells you that rushing to tear children from their parents is “erring on
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the side of the child” please remember the 15,000 children who would gladly tell you

otherwise if they could.

Or maybe 15,001: Ask Lawanda Connelly’s daughter if DHS was erring on the

side of the child when they took her away from her mother.

All that harm can occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority

are. And we should not forget the foster parents who are true heroes, like Jazmin Banks.

But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized. That same

alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they’d been 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 in foster care, foster children abusing each other).

Switching to orphanages won’t help -- the record of institutions is even worse.

If a child is taken from a perfectly safe home only to be beaten, raped or killed in

foster care, how is that “erring on the side of the child”?

But even that isn’t the worst of it. Everyone knows how badly caseworkers are

overwhelmed. They often make bad decisions in all directions – leaving some children in

dangerous homes, even as more children are taken from homes that are safe or could be

made safe with the right kinds of services. The more that workers are overwhelmed with

children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in

real danger. So they make even more mistakes in all directions. That is almost always

the real explanation for the one kind of horror-story guaranteed to make headlines in the

Inquirer.

None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. Rather,

it means that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that must be used sparingly
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and in small doses. But even with the recent improvement, DHS continues to prescribe

mega-doses of foster care.

But this isn’t the only evidence that if we really want to err on the side of the

child, we need to err on the side of the family.

Earlier I mentioned that Philadelphia takes away children at a rate nearly six times

higher than Chicago. Part of the reason for that is that the State of Illinois operates under

an unusually progressive consent decree as a result of a lawsuit brought by the Illinois

Branch of the ACLU.

That consent decree requires independent court-appointed monitors to evaluate

every aspect of the system. They found that, as Illinois dramatically reduced foster care,

child safety improved.

Miami is another city that takes proportionately far fewer children than

Philadelphia. In Florida, a waiver from federal funding restrictions requires independent

evaluation. The evaluations found that as Florida has significantly reduced foster care,

child safety has improved.

These cities understand what Philadelphia has yet to learn. Child safety and

family preservation are not opposites that need to be balanced. These cities understand

that you can’t have child safety without family preservation.

The reason for that goes back to what I said on the video: Who really is in the

system and why – the confusion of poverty with neglect, and all those cases that fall

between the extremes, the parent neither all victim nor all villain.

And thanks to this video and to the excellent reporting of the Daily News,

Philadelphia has learned about some of those cases.

So how can we build on the progress made so far?

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On our website, we have a series of recommendations. I want to focus on three of

them.

First, things are far more likely to change when reporters and the public can see

for themselves what really happens in the typical cases, not just the horror stories the

Inquirer loves. But for that to happen, reporters need to be able to walk into any

courtroom hearing a case of alleged child maltreatment, unannounced, and monitor

what’s going on.

Thanks largely to the persistence of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that can be done

in Allegheny County – and that’s one of the reasons that county’s system has improved

so much. It needs to happen everywhere.

Well over a dozen states have opened their courts since 1980. Not one of them

has closed them again. And that’s because the Chicken Littles were wrong: None of the

fears of opponents came to pass, and many of those former opponents now are among the

strongest supporters of open courts.

Second, you heard NCCPR’s president, and one of the people I most admire in

child welfare and in law, Prof. Martin Guggenheim, talk about what typically passes for

legal representation.

That needs to be replaced by a system of representation by institutional providers

with low caseloads and strong support staff. Not because we want to get child abusers

off, but because the only way a judge really can decide what’s best for a child is if all

sides can present the strongest possible case for what is best.

That’s why Pennsylvania’s foremost statewide child advocacy organization,

Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, strongly supports this approach.

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They already do it in much of Washington State. As a result, families are far

more likely to get the services they need, and to use them. The program is so successful

that even the lawyers representing the child welfare agency like it, because it gets the

cases that don’t belong in the system out of the system, and it keeps children safe.

And once again, it’s a money saver.

In New York City, the Center for Family Representation provides this kind of

legal help. It costs between $4,000 and $6,600 per family. In contrast, foster care costs

an average of $18,000 to $49,000 per year per child.

Of course, you only achieve the savings if you keep the children safety out of

foster care. This model does just that.

Even in cases where CFR didn’t get involved until after the case had been brought

to court, they kept half the children out of foster care entirely, and children represented

by CFR spend 73 percent less time in foster care.

I’ve heard DHS Commissioner Ann Marie Ambrose say she supports this kind of

representation – at a meeting in Washington. I’d like to read that she is saying it, often

and loudly, in Philadelphia and in Harrisburg.

And finally, I speak often about the lousy financial incentives in foster care, in

particular, how the federal government gives money to the states.

But in Pennsylvania, the state gives out aid to the counties in ways that also

encourage lousy options. The outgoing governor had an excellent proposal to change

that. Counties would get a smaller percentage of their costs reimbursed for warehousing

children in group homes and institutions, and a larger percentage for using family foster

homes and keeping children out of the system in the first place.
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This, too, is high on the Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children priority list. It

should be high on the priority list for the new governor as well.

____________

When I wrote my book about child welfare, 20 years, ago, I said the war against

child abuse had become a war against children.

I want to close with a quote from another war, World War II.

Toward the end of 1942, it looked like the tide in that war finally was turning.

And in a speech to his nation, Winston Churchill said: “…this is not the end. It is not

even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Thanks to the work of DHS - Give Us Back Our Children, the Daily News, and

many others, we still are nowhere near the end of Philadelphia’s war against vulnerable

children and families. But we just might be at the end of the beginning.

See following page for NCCPR Big City Rate-of-Removal Index

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