WHO IS IN "THE SYSTEM"?

Andrea Brown did not beat her children.   She did not torture them.   She did not try to sell them on the street for drugs.   In fact, the Administration for Children's Services considered Brown such a good parent, they placed two foster children with her.

Yet Andrea Brown's children lost their mother for more than two years.   What “crime” did Andrea commit?   “I had to go to work,” Brown said.   “I had to take care of my kids.”

It was December 1997, during the height of the foster-care panic.   Brown had just landed a job as a toll collector on the Triboro Bridge and she was desperate to keep it.   Her sitter was running late, but promised to be at the Brown home any minute.   So she left her 11-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son at home with the foster children.

The sitter showed up minutes after Brown left – and called the police after finding the children home alone.

Brown had to fight ACS for more than two years to get them back, and to get criminal charges against her dropped. [i]

Such cases are not aberrations.

In   1987, a study of "lack of supervision" cases in New York City by the Child Welfare League of America found that in 52 percent of the cases studied, the service needed most was what one might expect -- day care or babysitting. But the "service" offered most often was foster care. [ii]

And the easing of the foster-care panic has not ended the problem.

Kim Braithwaite was working a night shift as assistant manager of a McDonald's in Brooklyn on October 12, 2003, when her sitter didn't show.   But she didn't want to lose her job and be unable to support her nine-year-old and one-year-old children.   That could lead to homelessness – and to having ACS take the children.

So she went to work, calling home repeatedly to see if the children were all right.   The last time she spoke to her son, it was 10pm.   But home was a basement apartment, allegedly converted illegally.   And when, fire officials suspect, someone set the apartment on fire, there was no escape, and the children died.

Braithwaite was arrested and could have faced up to 16 years in prison. [iii]   Charges were dropped after her story made the front page of The New York Times.

New York State guidelines say that "school aged children (age six to twelve years) may not be ready for the responsibility of being on their own for even short periods of time.” [iv]   But one study found that ten percent of New York children of those very ages are left home alone daily. [v]

Every day, impoverished parents are forced to risk their children's safety – and risk someone calling ACS and having the children thrown into foster care.

It's the cases of parents who beat, torture and kill their children that capture headlines.   But nationwide, o ut of every 100 children investigated as possible victims of abuse, six are “substantiated” victims of all forms of physical abuse, from the most minor to the most severe, about three more are victims of sexual abuse. Many of the rest are false allegations or cases in which a family's poverty has been confused with neglect. [vi]

Far more common than a child who comes into care because he was beaten are cases like the cases of Andrea Brown and Kim Braithwaite.   Or a child's illness may go untreated after parents were kicked off Medicaid. Or, among the most common reasons for needless removal of children: The parents lacked decent housing.

Here, too, the problem has been well-known for decades.

                    · In the 1980s, two studies found that families struggling to keep their children out of foster care were stymied by two major problems: homelessness and low public assistance grants. [vii]

                    · And, in a decision upheld all the way to the state's highest court, the City was found guilty of repeatedly keeping families apart solely because they lack decent housing. [viii]

But the problem continues.   In 1996, Children's Rights Inc. charged that "It is not unusual for case plans to ... refer parents who simply lack housing to a parenting class." [ix]     In still another lawsuit, People United for Children cites the case of Agatha Sibley, described in the Village Voice :

                    "In July 1997, ACS investigators entered 76-year-old Agatha Sibley's apartment and found a distressing scene. The ceilings in the bathroom and the bedroom closet had partially fallen in, and water and plaster had rained down. Clothes

once kept in the closet were scattered    everywhere. Sibley's three grandchildren romped among the mess.

                    "To Sibley's dismay, ACS declared her

housing situation inadequate and the environment unsafe for children. The agency seized her three grandchildren and--with the approval of a family court judge--put them in foster care.

                    "Sibley was desperate. And, because she lived in public housing, confused. How could her landlord--the city--ignore requests for the most basic repairs on her apartment and then ACS--the city--remove her kids saying the apartment was unsafe? Hadn't she gone to the Housing Authority, to housing court, and even her political representative in an effort to make the city repair her apartment?

                    "'I don't know why they did this,' Sibley says …” [x]

Five years later, it is still commonplace for ACS to refuse to return children to birth parents solely because the agency doesn't like those parents' housing arrangements. [xi]

Many of the parents who lose their children to foster care could keep them if they simply received hundreds of dollars per month per child.   That's how much New York City pays to strangers to take care of a foster child.   Group homes and institutions get far, far more.

What about drugs?

But what about drug abuse?   We constantly hear that a huge proportion of families entering “the system” have substance abuse problems.   Like the problem of child abuse, the problem of drug abuse is serious and real.   But the solutions have been phony.

Figures concerning the percentage of parents with substance abuse problems are little more than guesses.   And they lump together the mother who tried to sell her baby on the street for crack with the mother who may have smoked a marijuana cigarette to ease the pain of labor.

But perhaps even more important, the best way to help the children of substance abusing parents is rarely to tear them away.   The best way to help the children is to provide their parents with drug treatment.

Even in cases where mothers used crack, babies often were harmed not by the drug itself, but by the mothers' avoiding prenatal care for fear their children would be taken.   And when those children were taken, the removal itself caused serious harm. [xii]

In a University of Florida study of so-called   “crack babies,” one group was placed in foster care, the other with birth mothers able to care for them.   After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better.   For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. [xiii]