Advocates see risks in the push to keep some families intact
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By Ofelia Casillas Tribune staff
reporter
November 26, 2006
More than once, residents of a
southwest suburb found two young brothers outside, underdressed and
unsupervised.
Workers later determined the boys did not have enough food
and clothing. When asked why they had patches of missing hair, the older boy
said his father had pulled it out.
The Illinois Department of Children
and Family Services keeps track of investigations into abuse or neglect with
letters of the alphabet. The first is an A sequence, the second is a B. Before
the two boys and their younger brother were finally made wards of the state,
their case became an M sequence--DCFS investigated the family 13 times over
about four years.
For almost a decade, DCFS has made a priority of
keeping families together. Allegations of abuse among families kept together by
the agency have remained steady in recent years, according to DCFS
figures.
But anecdotally, advocates point to this case and others to
illustrate the potential dangers of going too far in trying to work through
allegations of abuse and neglect, in order to keep troubled families
intact.
The move toward keeping families intact is the latest shift in a
child welfare system that has contracted and expanded, trying to find a healthy
balance.
"You get hung if you take kids out of the home, and you get hung
if you leave kids in the home and something happens," said Jimmie Smith,
executive director of Kids Hope United, a child welfare agency that handles
cases involving intact families.
"The pendulum in child welfare, it
swings. You see it swing from `Let's not place anybody,' then you have enough
tragedies and you move to a pendulum swing and too many children are removed
from their homes," Smith said.
In 1993, a mentally ill mother killed a
3-year-old boy. The tragedy ignited a rush to bring children into foster care,
creating a bloated, troubled system by the late 1990s.
That spurred a
push to get children adopted, while providing more services to keep biological
families intact. The number of children in foster care shrunk from 51,331 in
1997 to 16,593 this year--the level of 1988.
John Goad, a child welfare
expert who served as a high-ranking DCFS official until 2003, said that means
many more high-risk cases are found among families designated by the agency as
"intact"--receiving help from the agency, without children removed from the
home.
If trouble is brewing, it is not obvious from the
statistics.
In 2006, the system recorded 11,356 intact families, with 6.4
percent credibly accused of new instances of abuse or neglect, the DCFS
said.
The percentage of intact families facing new, credible allegations
of abuse or neglect has dwindled slightly over five years--from 10.9 percent in
2001 to 6 percent in 2004 and 6.4 percent this year, the data
indicated.
To some advocates, that shows the system is working.
"I
don't see much evidence that we are leaving kids in genuinely dangerous
environments. You can remove fewer kids and make better decisions," said
Benjamin Wolf, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer.
Nor, he added,
is foster care automatically safer than a biological family.
"Substitute
care is very dangerous, and some of these home environments are very dangerous.
We like to say it's not a cliff--it's a tightrope. If you err on either side,
you endanger children," he said.
Kendall Marlowe, DCFS spokesman, said
his agency does not see any direct relationship between the reduction in foster
care and the increased problems that providers say they are experiencing in
intact families.
"We don't see any evidence, research or administrative
data that would support that intact family cases have become more severe or are
staying in intact status longer," Marlowe said.
A shift in
contracts
In response to a federal review, DCFS is revamping its intact
family contracts for January, Marlowe said.
But a draft of the proposed
contract, obtained by the Tribune, lowers the bar for agencies serving intact
families, allowing them to meet goals even if the number of abuse or neglect
allegations rises.
At the same time, some experts are trying to figure
out how to reduce the risk.
A study by the Children and Family Research
Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that increased
problems elsewhere in the household--substance abuse, spousal violence and
health problems--were significant predictors of renewed abuse of
children.
For each additional problem an intact family experienced, the
risk of new abuse of the children rose by about 33 percent, the center found in
2000.
By then, Tamara Fuller, the center's associate director, had begun
to hear from child welfare workers about the increasing severity of intact
cases. Fuller said that as the severity of the cases rises, only better state
services can prevent abuse rates from rising.
Kim Perez, vice president
of child and family services at Lifelink Corp., which helps 20 intact families
at a time, is one of the providers who said she has seen more serious incidents
among intact families.
Though foster care problems tend to show up as
chronic issues, she said, new problems in intact families tend to be more sudden
and serious. "The volume of families that had experienced sexual abuse within
this 20-family contract was much greater than what we saw in our much, much
larger foster care contract," Perez said.
Angela Fadragas of Association
House of Chicago, which handles roughly 50 intact-family cases a year, said many
of them would have been in foster care a decade ago.
The increased
severity makes these cases difficult to monitor, she said.
Carl Koerner
of Uhlich Children's Advantage Network, which provides services to intact
families, said tolerance for risk has changed since the 1990s.
"The
critical issue is what is the dividing line between keeping a child at home and
going into placement. If you think of that as being on a continuum, the dividing
line has moved further, so that children with more severity of family
circumstances are being retained at home," he said.
Children in
danger
One such case is that of three boys left in the care of their
parents after DCFS found evidence that the boys were in danger.
State
child welfare workers first became aware of the mother in the late 1980s and
1990s when she was using drugs. She gave up her first three children--two to a
relative and one to adoption, according to state documents.
Again, the
family came to the attention of DCFS in 2001 when caseworkers found the parents
put one of their new sons at risk because they fought while holding
him.
In 2003, the mother used cocaine and heroin, then gave birth to her
youngest son. After finding that she had put her son at risk, the child welfare
system opened an intact family case.
While the case was open, a neighbor
found the two older boys outside without clothes on and the youngest crying at
home. The boys' father and baby-sitter were drunk and passed out, state records
showed.
The mother had been referred for counseling and a drug
evaluation, but case notes said she did not comply. In 2004, the parents said
they were moving to Indiana; DCFS closed the case.
The family surfaced
again later that year when an anonymous caller told DCFS the children were
unsupervised, the mother was using drugs and the family was living out of their
car and in drug houses. DCFS found credible evidence of inadequate supervision,
substantial risk of physical injury and environmental neglect, records
indicate.
When DCFS finally brought the boys into state custody in
November 2004, workers tried to understand what they had been through in their
short lives.
Small for his age, with pink cheeks and a toothy smile, the
oldest boy now lives in a residential facility, where he hugs therapeutic dogs
and learns to spell.
He suffers from post-traumatic stress, major
depression and wakes up at night screaming.
After evaluating the boy,
workers concluded: His "view of the world can be described as a never-ending
disappointment."
