As a CASA guardian ad-litem with many years in child protection I’ve met many terribly abused children that have fallen through the cracks of overwhelmed child protection workers (and they never make the papers).
In my world, 99% of the abused and neglected children go unnoticed except to the overworked & under-resourced social workers and under- appreciated adoptive/foster parents.
Part of the problem is that since newspapers have been in decline, the old beat reporters just don’t exist anymore (at least in my community) & the topic is painful.
It hurts to confront the cruel reality that our communities deliberately visit on these children.
To appreciate the meanness of some states I point to (Mitch Daniels) Indiana’s stealing (redirecting) the funding promised to parents that adopted abandoned special needs children (after these children had been adopted) & Minnesota’s fiscally irresponsible de-funding of subsidized daycare which forced the county to place children in foster homes because their father’s job did not pay enough to afford daycare.
It costs way more to place children in foster care than it would have to subsidize his daycare payments.
It cost Hennepin County millions of dollars to pay for the care of the four year old boy the court thought would be better off with his father even though dad had a court order to stay away from young boys because of what he did to them. My client is now is now 23, has AIDS, and has been in over 30 foster homes and he will be a ward of the state until he dies. He was been tied to a bed, starved, beaten, sexually abused and left alone for days at a time from 4 to 7 years of age. That never made the paper. Nor did the four year old girl who I visited in the suicide ward of Fairview hospital (her sister’s story was much worse).
If you read Jordan’s reporting, it will be easy to hate the social workers involved. Please remember that under-training & under-funding combined with giant case loads, makes their task impossible.
Like blaming teachers for failed schools or cops for full prisons, it’s the wrong place to focus.
We did this; our state legislators, governors, and the mean spirited political hate fest that rallies around fear and war at the direct cost to American children.
When a baby is found in a dumpster, the mother has horrible mental health issues & needs help, but our communities have accepted that we just don’t support young mom’s or their troubled children.
It’s all wrong and we know it. It is up to us to talk about these issues and bother our media and legislators until positive change happens.
Continue reading ’43 Child Deaths Due Policy Violations In Colorado Social Services’
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