Legislators can stem tide of tragedy
Emotional issue: Officials must implement programs that can prevent child deaths and abuse and help families heal.
Mary Margaret Oliver - Special
Sunday • December 12
Every member of the Georgia General Assembly knows, or knows of, a friend, family member or constituent who has been falsely accused of child abuse.
The false charges most often arise in a contested child custody case, and permanent damage is caused to everyone connected with the horror. Every member of the General Assembly also knows the tragic facts of a child who has been killed or injured by physical or sexual abuse or neglect, and knows that the permanent harm done to the child was preventable.
The conflict felt by the legislator who confronts the realities and intractability of child abuse is emotional and personal. Where there is an absence of leadership and strong-willed management, progress and protections fail.
Policy makers are stopped more often from seeking solutions to child abuse by hopelessness and uncertainty of effective action than they are by a lack of money. It's difficult to prove that policy changes and leadership can change human behavior that is rooted in drugs, alcohol and mental illness. There are, however, policies and programs that can and do effectively prevent child deaths and child abuse and allow families to heal, while protecting the most vulnerable victims of violence.
Among the programs that have proven to protect children and enhance families are:
Healthy Families Georgia: In 16 Georgia locations, a voluntary home visiting and parent education program is offered to families with newborn infants who have been identified in a screening process to be at high risk for child abuse. Approximately 1,200 families have chosen to participate, and ongoing research is showing a significant decrease in child abuse reports from the participating families.
In other states, reliable research, home visiting programs, both voluntary and involuntary, supplemented with federal Medicaid dollars have produced results. There have been fewer reported cases of child abuse and better outcomes for families that were significantly at risk.
Both Healthy Families and First Steps, another early intervention, hospital-based volunteer program, have grown in Georgia, and rely on principles of early intervention, education and positive role models for very young mothers, or mothers and fathers who have no other support systems and problematic family histories.
Both the First Steps and Healthy Families in Georgia programs, with continued rigorous research and evaluation to track success, should be expanded.
Adoption reforms: Under Gov. Zell Miller, the state's adoption services were reorganized, and policies incorporated to speed the adoption of children in state custody. This new leadership, combined with additional federal funds for families who adopt special-needs children, the privatization of adoption services and recruitment of suitable adoptive parents, has reduced the number of children who have languished in multiple foster homes, and increased permanent adoptions significantly.
Legislation that required the Department of Family and Children Services to follow specific timetables to terminate the custody rights of the biological parents where there has been significant abuse and there is no opportunity for the family to be reunited, has been passed in other states and upheld by the courts. Placing a greater evidentiary weight on the best interests of the child, instead of the rights of the parents, can also serve to protect children, and these legislative reforms should be enacted.
First Placement/Best Placement: Removing a child from an abusive home and into traditional and institutional foster care is dangerous for the child when the move results in multiple placements and disruptions. A child with all his possessions in a paper bag, waiting at a police station or a DFACS office in the middle of the night for a new home, is a daily occurrence across Georgia. Caseworkers are forced often to make "emergency placements" with little or no information about the child and his unique needs.
First Placement/Best Placement is a newly funded and managed placement procedure that mandates immediate evaluation of the child's needs with a goal that will serve the child best in a difficult transition.
In Georgia, a public-private contract between the Department of Human Resources and the Georgia Association of Homes and Services, an organization of private child service providers, organizes the resources and available placements.
Georgia faces many challenges, including:
Providing better infrastructure to the courts and the agencies that protect children. The juvenile courts and our social service agencies have a checks and balances relationship. DFACS caseworkers do the primary investigation and work with at-risk families. When a case gets too serious, it must be brought before the court. The court evaluates the evidence to determine if a child must be removed or can stay with more support.
Representatives from both the courts and the agencies that serve children complain about the lack of basic safeguards for protecting abused and neglected children. For example, many caseworkers, judges and attorneys in the child protection system have objected vigorously about the lack of treatment facilities and services for children.
Children who are very young and have few behavior problems are usually easily placed in both foster care and adoptive homes. Children who are severely mentally ill can also get placement in appropriate facilities. But the children in between (the majority of children in the foster care system) have trouble getting help. Often these children have suffered abuse and/or neglect and now need counseling, a special needs foster home or a very structured environment. Those children are often referred to as "second-tier kids."
We must meet the needs of these second-tier children before their problems get worse. At this time, these children are often put on a waiting list for special placements. We must create incentives to provide more special needs group homes, and more short-term, intensive services. We also need strict evaluation and accountability of these placements.
Not only is this the right thing to do, it is the most cost-effective. These children will only cost society more if we do not meet their needs up front.
Data collection and tracking: Research, evaluation and accountability can only be conducted when we know who are the children in danger, where they live and go to school and how they are progressing. A major barrier to improved placements, and thereby protecting children from further violence, is the lack of any reliable and user-friendly data and tracking system.
Revising the mechanics of data collection, in compliance with significant federal mandates in welfare reform, and incentives to reduce fraud is behind schedule. Not knowing how many children are touched directly by protective services and how services and protections have been extended to abuse victims is not only inefficient, it is disastrous for the child. As with the state Department of Education in its student performance tracking system, data collection and improved technology systems for child protective caseworkers have been slowed by bidding mistakes, mismanagement, and the cost and complexities of the job.
The first priority for protecting children is to bring modern technology and data collection systems to the caseworker on the front line. Costs savings in other states have been large, and the caseworker's job has eased with modern support systems and computers that workers in large corporations have learned to operate and appreciate.
As Gov. Roy Barnes has rightly focused on accountability measurements for children learning in school, so must he also insist on rigorous accountability standards for the prevention of child deaths and child abuse. If 75,000 reports of child abuse are made each year in Georgia, and the numbers grow annually, measuring the failures of the state's child protection system by counting the funerals cannot be the only statistics noticed.
Some of the components of Georgia's child welfare system reform have been part of an initiative in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Birmingham and, Albuquerque called Family to Family. This initiative was developed in consultation with community leaders and child welfare practitioners nationwide who recognized the difficulties in protecting children and families when caseworkers are faced with increased drug use among parents and skyrocketing caseloads. The Annie E. Casey Foundation funded this initiative, and Georgia has begun similar reform efforts with programs like Healthy Families, First Steps and First Placement/Best Placement.
To benefit from this beginning, Georgia must encourage the growth of these and similar programs, learn from the success and failures across the nation, and implement effective measurement and evaluation systems using the technology embraced by the private sector.
Mary Margaret Oliver, a former state senator from DeKalb County, is a board member of the Georgia Council on Child Abuse.