An impressive video statement about the importance of attending to the needs of youth. Cheers for our neighbors to the north.
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Monthly Archive for April, 2010
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/20100430_Ex-judge_pleads_guilty_in_Luzerne__kids-for-cash__scandal.html This judge should go to prison for the thousands of young lives he destroyed with his money making scheme to send kids to detention facilities while he was paid millions in commission (20 people were in on the deal, including a school superintendent).
There are strong arguments to be made for separating private enterprise and policing and punishment, not the least of which Michael T Conahan has proven beyond mere words (2.8 million dollars in commissions).
I can tolerate the stealing of money but I am not able to stand by and watch children denied their youth because those of us that vote (and run this nation) don’t see the connection between healthy institutions and healthy children.
It is up to us as citizens to have the depth of understanding and concern with our community to see how what happened in Pennsylvania is happening by degrees to youth throughout our state and our nation (just without the commissions).
We have not yet fully understood and agreed that healthy youth make healthy adults and citizens, and that ensuring that youth have a solid chance to be healthy is worth the investment.
Until that happens, we will continue to underfund programs that help struggling children and families with health and mental health and live with the results that we have been getting for so many years. I draw your attention to the ACE study in Ramsey County that points out the great majority of violence and serious crime committed by juveniles in St Paul was committed by youth from three or four percent of the families in the community http://www.tacommunities.org/getfile/view/id/1000/cid/1004/p/folder_1004%252Ffolder_5040
Helping these children helps us all. Better schools, safer streets, a more educated work force, and healthier communities (less frightening newspapers and TV news).
Let’s get behind this; Denounce the cuts in programs (it won’t save money in the long run) Vote for the people that understand the value of healthy youth and families.
Continue reading ‘Kids For Cash, Privatizing Punishment, What Could Be More Wrong?’
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If it bleeds it leads, is the standard newsroom motto. Adults suffer the consequences of trial by media regularly and I don’t see that changing in my lifetime.
*We live in a time when newsrooms don’t have budgets to adequately follow complicated stories, like child protection, adoption, foster care & the other very serious issues that social workers, educators, parents & other service providers must study deeply to manage abused and neglected children.
A brief interview covering the death of a child in child protection leads to a short news story making a social worker look inadequate (or worse) bringing outrage from a community, and even less support for an already overburdened department of human services. Almost no attention is paid to the lack of resources, low salaries, and patchwork system that holds together the millions of children and workers across this nation.
When a baby is found in a dumpster, too many of us are not trained to dig down deep for compassion and understanding and ask ourselves what we could do to prevent this. Just where could we put more and better resources? Who could I call to show support for programs supporting pregnant preteen moms?
Our media response quite often drives us to an opposite response of quick anger and blaming, and even less compassion and support for our already overworked social workers, foster care providers, educators and everyone else in the system.
It is telling to note that we were in the top five as a nation in the quality of life indices for over twenty years among the 24 industrialized nations with 200 year democracies and now we don’t compare ourselves to them (but to the 90 or so “emerging nations”).
We desperately need to agree that children in need of services will receive them. The cost is minimal as compared to their expense in crime, prisons and jails over their lifetimes and is now well documented.
How to deal with a media that does not have resources to adequately report the details that lead to the baby in the dumpster, drowned in the bathtub, or 7 year old that hung himself?
My suggestion is to change the rule social workers are taught during their training from “never talk about your work outside of work” to “use your own judgement, be legally and personally discreet, but feel free to discuss the nature of child protection, the circumstance that are common to you in your work, and by all means, the needs you see not being met in the lives of abused and neglected children”.
As it is today, abused and neglected children have no voice in the terribly abusive homes they are raised in nor the court system once they are removed from those homes.
Some of us, preferably some of us educated in the study of the issues; social workers, health and mental health providers, and others close and sympathetic to abused and neglected children, needs to give these children a voice in their own lives other than a Media that has to sell itself with “if it bleeds it leads”.
*I’m not blaming anyone. Newspapers don’t have money to pay people, the system is what it is. There are many great reporters trying to do good work, but it is an uphill slog against terrific odds. This is a complicated topic that does not lend itself to the type of news we have prepared American citizens to comprehend.
Kids At Risk Action needs your support for its successful launch of televised public service announcements building awareness to the issues surrounding child abuse.
In collaboration with award winning Salo of Finland, KARA is working to create and place ads on national TV.
These ads will reach millions and create interest and understanding of this important and often misunderstood subject.
Contact KARA with your questions and support. Please contact us with your questions, referrals, and donations.
The KARA team.
ps… pass this on to those you think might appreciate the opportunity;
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Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune article http://www.startribune.com/world/92016859.html?page=1&c=y clearly explains the abject failure of giving traumatized veterans psychotropic medications without adequate therapy. The Public and the Media are beginning to understand the consequences of under-treated mentally damaged soldiers (violence/suicide/shattered lives) and the value of proper medical attention given early.
We learn slow as a nation, but we do learn. This story needs to be repeated (pass it on).
Almost nothing is known about the rivers of psychotropic medications that are poured into the millions five, seven, and nine year old children that pass through child protection systems in America without sufficient mental health services.
Judge Heidi Schellhas shared with me the quantity of Prozac, *Ritalin, and other mind altering psychotropic medications poured into the very young children that passed through her court room each year. The amounts were staggering.
One of my first cases as a volunteer guardian ad-Litem took me to a four year old girl at the suicide ward at a Minneapolis hospital. Many of my cases of very young children were taking powerful psychotropic medications and not receiving access to mental health professionals. There was almost no coordination of services for these children, one provider had no idea what another provider was doing or how they might work together in the interests of the very troubled child.
There is no doubt that traumatized children and veterans need better access to mental health services. Veterans are fortunate in that their traumas are readily understood, discussed, and addressed.
Not so with abused and neglected children. The Media and the Public fail to see that child do not end up in child protection services unless they have been traumatized.
It is America’s “Imminent Harm Doctrine” that rules child protection law, and it only allows children to be removed from a home if their lives are endangered. In my experience over twelve years as a guardian ad-Litem, all children removed from their homes have been endangered and severely traumatized. Many children that were not removed from their homes were traumatized also. They need help too.
It would serve us well as a nation to help them. Our schools, communities, families, and children would benefit.
*Ritalin was banned in Sweden in 1968 because of a huge increase in suicides in the nation attributed to its use.
Kids At Risk Action needs your support for its successful launch of televised public service announcements building awareness to the issues surrounding child abuse. In collaboration with award winning Salo of Finland, KARA is working to create and place ads on national TV. These ads will reach millions and create interest and understanding of this important and often misunderstood subject.
Please contact us with your questions, referrals, and donations.The KARA team.
Continue reading ‘Drugs Without Therapy Is Ineffective & Can Be Dangerous’
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Kids At Risk Action needs your support for its successful launch of televised public service announcements building awareness to the issues surrounding child abuse.
In collaboration with award winning Salo of San Ramon CA, & the Academy on Violence and Abuse www.avahealth.org KARA is working to create and place public service ads that bring attention to child abuse on national TV.
These ads will reach millions and create interest and understanding of the children impacted by abuse.
Contact KARA with your questions and support. Please contact us with your questions, referrals, and donations.
The KARA team.
ps… pass this on to those you think might appreciate the opportunity;
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Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.
ChildTrauma Academy
When: Thursday, June 17th
Registration: 8:30 a.m.
Training: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Mystic Mystice Lake Casino, Shakopee MN
Cost: $40 Standard, $30 JJC Community Member, $30 Student Rate
Scholarships available
Targeted Audience: Policy makers, professionals and practitioners in education, the court system, law enforcement, corrections, human services, community-based organizations, mental and chemical health, parents, youth, advocates, elected officials and others.
Presenter:
Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. is the Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy, a not-for-profit organization based in Houston that promotes innovations in service, research and education in child maltreatment and childhood trauma (www.ChildTraumaAcademy.org). Dr. Perry is the author with Maia Szalavitz of The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing, a book based on his work with maltreated children. Over the last twenty years, Dr. Perry has been an active teacher, clinician and researcher in children’s mental health and the neurosciences holding a variety academic positions.
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This is a compilation of recent news that reflects the conditions of youth and youth policy in the U.S. this past few weeks. Thank you Jamie Wilt for your hard work and Century College for your great programs.
I would like reader comments on the style and substance of this article and appreciate receiving information from you about youth programs, policy, and data.
Continue reading ‘This Weeks Important At Risk Youth News’
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A great new nonprofit is reaching out to improve and reform child welfare through citizen-led advocacy. This is a Minnesota effort, but every state needs it.
What is Safe Passage for Children? http://safepassagemn.org/
Our strategy is based on two principles: citizen involvement and data.
On the grass roots level Safe Passage recruits volunteers to lobby local and state elected officials in a grass roots campaign to improve the child welfare system. We train them to use reports that highlight key state and county performance measures.
Going forward Safe Passage will engage civic and business leaders in a broader reform campaign that will complement the grass roots effort.
How Does Safe Passage Work?
• Safe Passage recruits volunteer advocates to lobby elected officials for improvements
• Volunteers are trained in reports that highlight basic county and state performance measures
• Those who have not lobbied previously are paired with more experienced individuals
• Volunteers impress legislators because they are advocating on behalf of children in general, not because they need services themselves or work for a nonprofit that is requesting money
• Advocates attend one training session and one organizing session per year, and make 2-3 visits – one each to their state representative, state senator, and county commissioner
Continue reading ‘Safe Passage For Children’
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If child protection means anything, it should mean that a child already traumatized by a lifetime of abuse will not be subjected to another series of poorly made decisions by the adults in his life.
If there is one thing that we do know, it is that adoptees need time and help adjusting to new surroundings, people, life, & everything else that has changed in their O so chaotic little universe.
If there is one thing a nation should stand for, should agree on, could vote for,… it might be providing protection for children seven and under.
Even our coarse, money driven hard bitten society might find a majority to support basic systems to insure that 7 year olds are not sent back into even worse circumstances than they are now experiencing.
What would it take to have put in place services that the Hansen family could have relied on to manage their very serious problems that would have negated casting the boy so harshly out of their home?
Of all the billions we spend on war, medications, beer, football, and advertising, where does Artyom Savelyev and his seven year old counter parts fit in?
From an international perspective, this must look like a three ring circus. From a guardian ad-Litems perspective, the conversation around child protection systems and children’s rights is long overdue.
Let’s move it along. I would really like to hear from the legal world, and stories from people that have found remedies for abused children. Continue reading ‘Deeper Questions About 7 Year Old Russian Boy’
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Minnesota Adoption Resource Network (Marn) is launching an inspired program that should become a national model for dealing with foster and adoptive care. Ten adoptees from diverse ethnic backgrounds have combined their wisdom & energy to provide adoptee-to-adoptee training, connections and resources.
A calender full of adoptee-focused events, support groups, website, networking and discussion tools.
Wow. This is a heartfelt and logical pooling of talent and concern that could make a world of difference to a world full of adoptees.
Best wishes to everyone in this grand new venture. Read their newsletter;
Continue reading ‘Adoptees Have Answers…and lots of questons’
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How many of us would do well with no long term relationships, friends to fall back on, a family (even a very troubled family) to turn to when life kicked us in the stomach?
NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/us/07foster.htmlrecaps the terrible data that we all know and have been unable to fix for many years.
Why the gangs flourish, schools fail, streets become unsafe & preteen girls give birth.
The last study showed 80% of youth aging out of foster care leading dysfunctional lives.
Blaming children for being born into dysfunctional families would not be a stated public policy, but I have found it to be de facto public policy. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz has stated that “90% of the youth in juvenile justice have come through the child protection system”.
Every child deserves a chance to obtain the skills necessary to lead a productive life.
It is a much better investment to grow a child than it is a convict, a preteen mother, or an unstable person. Continue reading ‘Fixing Foster Care’
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Just a few years ago in Red Lake, Jeff Weiss committed multiple murders and then killed himself after months on poorly proscribed Prozac & genuinely reaching out to his community for mental health help and not finding any. Jeff’s mother had told him that she wished he’s never been born. Jeff had a website openly discussing homicide/suicide.
In Red Lake and other communities that have suffered such mayhem, much money has been spent after a tragedy to put in place services that should stop the next Virginia Tech, Red Lake, Columbine.
Mental health is the cornerstone of a healthy life. We all have our ups and downs. Some of us start lower than others and sink lower than others. Throw in alcohol or drugs (proscribed or not) & bad things begin to happen.
Programs that help youth understand these issues and how to cope with them are one of the best investments that we can make in our youth and our community.
Not having programs is expensive. Just ask the people that lost family and friends in Red Lake, Columbine, & at Virginia Tech.
The following articles are an expansion on the topic of money and teen substance abuse (thanks Jamie);
Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate
Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk
Continue reading ‘Mental Health, Drug & Alcohol Abuse Programs Don’t Cost They Save’
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It is easy to blame people doing the work, but almost always more honest to look upstream to see what process is in place for the workers to follow. Poor process almost insures bad results. Add to that extensive workloads and minimal resources, any positive results become elusive.
I have found social workers to be hard working and caring people, & frustrated like the rest of us in our troubled communities.
In business, outcomes are measured and process is controlled by results desired.
Once the process has been understood, measured, and adjusted, outcomes improve, and the resulting efficiencies save money and improve lives.
There are existing models for measuring social service outcomes, my favorite is; http://www.socialsolutions.com
Why our nation does not demand this software for its social service providers is a mystery to me.
The following article shows that the U.S. is not alone in its child protection troubles; Continue reading ‘How To Improve A Child Protection System’
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