Fixing Families

Parents, Power, and the Child Welfare System

Jennifer A. Reich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136075544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

In Fixing Families, Jennifer Reich takes us inside Child Protective Services for an in-depth look at the entire organization. Following families from the beginning of a case to its discharge, Reich shows how parents negotiate with the state for custody of their children, and how being held accountable to the state affects a family.

1

INTRODUCTION

In northern California, in the early part of 1996, a three-year-old boy lost consciousness in his home after his mother “disciplined” him by beating him and throwing him on the floor. The older of his two sisters—ages six and eleven—noticed that he wasn’t breathing and called emergency services. The story of this boy, whom I will call Adam,¹ became the lead story in the area, with television and newspaper coverage providing frequent updates not only on his medical condition, but on the conditions that led to this tragic moment. After several days in a coma in the hospital, Adam died.

Like other battered children whose violent deaths expose the inadequacies of the social services designed to protect them, Adam’s death became a flashpoint for public policy in the county in which he lived at the time and the two neighboring counties in which his family had also recently lived. Newspaper articles revealed that child welfare agencies in at least two of these counties had, on multiple occasions in the prior two years, investigated allegations that Adam and his sisters were in danger, and finding the allegations credible, had opened cases on them. Their mother—a single woman known to be a methamphetamine user—completed parenting classes, evidenced by the certificate of completion that hung on a wall near where Adam’s unconscious body was found, and other county-provided services. By virtue of having an open case, the family would have received monthly visits from a social worker who was inspecting their home, checking on the welfare of the children, and working with Adam’s mother to identify lingering needs she may have had that might prevent her from adequately caring for her three children. Having satisfied the requirements of her case plans, social workers (at least one from each county) decided that she no longer presented a danger to her children and the agencies closed their cases. Adam died six months after the last case was closed.

Adam’s death and the failures that led to it became the focus of public outrage. At least fifty-seven articles, editorials, and letters of which he was the focus appeared in the largest regional newspaper that year, with more than one hundred items referencing him between 1997 and 2002. It seemed difficult at the time to live nearby and not find oneself engaged, whether at the grocery store or at social events, in a discussion of Adam’s fate. The week after his death, I met a sociologist friend for lunch. Although the sunny patio at the café in the quaint downtown area seemed worlds away from Adam’s family’s dilapidated publicly subsidized apartment, he had lived less than ten miles away, a proximity that kept Adam’s story omnipresent. As someone whose own research explores issues of drug use and child welfare intervention, my friend was acutely aware of the case. As we sat down to catch up, she almost immediately mentioned the coverage Adam and his family had received and the mammoth public response to it. Having observed other cases like this, she sighed, “It is always a blonde boy under the age of three.”

Adam’s death rocked the community and transformed my own life. A few months after his death, the board of supervisors for one of the counties that had monitored his family but failed to identify the serious risk he faced formed a series of oversight committees to both identify how such a failure had occurred and the necessary changes to county policy and practice. Armed with a catchy acronym that included terms like “integration” and “team,” a half-dozen subcommittees were formed, each comprised of agency administrators, practitioners, and community members including religious leaders, educators, and members of community-based organizations. These committees were charged with finding ways to revise child welfare practice so that similar tragedies might be prevented. I was asked to serve on one of these committees as the sociologist.

At that particular moment, this county was not the only body committed to addressing perceived failures in the child welfare system. The federal government had just reconfigured welfare, transforming the entitlement program of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) into a time-limited program replete with potential sanctions and work requirements called Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Following on the perceived success of welfare reform, Congress began tinkering with the child welfare system. Since 1980, federal law has specified that whenever possible, families should be provided services to prevent the removal of children from their homes, and when that fails or is not possible, services should be provided that can enable children to safely return to their natal families. This law, and the sentiment embodied in it—that children should return to their parents whenever possible—are often blamed for cases like Adam’s. Often in response to such tragedies, public sentiment reflects a belief that parents like Adam’s are given too many chances, a fact which is never recognized until it’s too late.²

The worst images of this perception are represented by one of two scenarios: in one, a child “languishes” in foster care for several years while his or her parents make half-hearted attempts to comply with service plans; the child is left without a permanent home or stable care-givers, and without a realistic expectation of ever returning to his or her parents. In the other, a parent completes required services and children are returned, only to again be neglected, abused, or, like Adam, killed. In 1997, with these situations in mind, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), a law that defined situations in which parents should not be provided an opportunity to regain custody, shortened the window of time in which parents who are eligible for services can regain custody of their children, and articulated a greater preference for adoption when feasible.³ ASFA, like the local reforms I was observing, aimed to provide children with safe homes where they could remain permanently, even as it created additional hurdles for biological parents to overcome in order to maintain their parental rights. With these new federal priorities as a backdrop, the county retooled its own procedures.

Shortly after the county committees began meeting, senior administrators from the county child welfare agency, referred to throughout this book as child protective services—or CPS—unveiled the agency’s new policy.⁴ These reforms included a zero tolerance policy for illicit drug use, body checks of all children less than five years of age during investigations, and a commitment to more thorough home inspections. The CPS administrators claimed these policies would better identify children who face harm so they could be adequately protected. The county felt certain these changes would make a difference, and the public seemed to believe it too. Approximately one week after the reforms were announced, another toddler, Sarah, was murdered in her home. In a low-income neighborhood in the same county, Sarah’s mother’s boyfriend—reportedly in an effort to discipline her—held her under water in an ice-cold bath. Two-year-old Sarah lost consciousness and died a few days later in the same hospital as Adam. Like Adam’s family, Sarah’s had been monitored by CPS. After her single mother—who also had a long history of methamphetamine use—completed services, the case had been closed.

The public outrage that followed the news of Sarah’s death was palpable. The ire revolved around two points: Sarah’s death revealed that her mother’s boyfriend had been molesting Sarah’s siblings, and that the CPS social workers who had been monitoring their family and conducting home visits had failed to identify the serious, on-going abuse Sarah and her four siblings endured—or worse, had wrongly believed that Sarah’s mother was rehabilitated and would now keep her children safe. Town hall meetings were held, the director of the agency resigned, and the media again demanded accountability. What community members most wanted, it seemed, was assurance that no other children would die on CPS’s watch. Through it all, I continued to attend the monthly committee meetings.

I came to this committee with substantive training in welfare policy and an awareness that policy reformations rarely benefit biological parents. Historically, state welfare policies have failed to recognize the ways race and class intersect to limit individuals’ ability to affect change in their own lives. State policies have often judged poor families and families from racial and ethnic minority groups against a white middle-class definition of adequate parenting. Central to this legacy is the reality that most families who rely on public assistance are female-headed. Thus state policies have enforced dominant definitions of gender and what it means to be appropriately maternal. I had expected agency members to voice many of the assumptions embedded in the history of U.S. welfare racism.⁵

At these meetings, I found community members, administrators, and front-line service providers who were all guided by a desire to help struggling families. Contrary to my expectations, they did not represent a monolithic state body whose aim was to dissolve poor families and families of color. Rather, they were beleaguered bureaucrats who found themselves able to do little more than provide proverbial Band-Aids to gaping wounds. Although I appreciated their sincerity, I was also aware that, in the conference room where we drank weak coffee, discussed CPS goals and practices, and tried to imagine a better system, I was also observing efforts to increase state surveillance of families. Despite class- and race-blind rhetoric, these surveilled families were almost always poor and disproportionately African American.

The CPS system is comprised of a series of interlocking agencies and service providers. In the CPS system, social workers, attorneys, therapists, parenting and anger management course instructors, drug treatment counselors, other service providers, and judges evaluate parental behavior and determine whether it is in the children’s best interest to live with their parents or to live somewhere else. Social workers investigate allegations of abuse or neglect and determine whether children should remain in their homes or be placed in state custody for their own safety. They coordinate services for families whose children have been removed by the agency and who are attempting to regain custody of them. In addition, they find places for children who will not return to their parents to live long term. The other state actors are charged with either providing services to improve parents or evaluating whether they are rehabilitated. This is a complex bureaucratic system where case outcomes are often heartbreaking. The longer I observed efforts to reform CPS, the more I came to believe that the seemingly compatible, but often contradictory goals of protecting children from their families and helping families remain together are permanently in tension, a fact better understood by those who are responsible for the workings of the system.

In observing policymakers trying to improve practice without being able to resolve this core tension, I began to wonder how child welfare workers conduct their work and how state policy, despite the good intentions of its practitioners, serves in the end to reinforce dominant definitions of family life. After all, their work is to ferret out “dangerous” families from “safe” ones, to then transform the former into the latter, and to identify correctly when they have done so successfully. At stake are the very meanings of state intervention into family life. Public intervention is never equally applied, with poor families, female-headed families, and families of color receiving the bulk of state attention. CPS is a system that seeks to rehabilitate or resocialize parents so they can address those aspects of their familial life that appear to place children at risk and then adequately care for their children. These attempts to “fix” families require parents to attend meetings, demonstrate their desire to improve their lives, and comply with state definitions of adequate parenting. Embedded in these expectations are meanings of family life that reflect beliefs about gender, race, and class. It is in these ways that the therapeutic state serves to reinforce dominant definitions of family life without addressing the underlying structures of inequality that contribute to parents’ perceived failures.

In Adam’s case, the state failed to determine whether or not his family was a safe place for him, a public failure that was followed by demands for accountability. The public calls following Adam’s death facilitated the release of information. One publicized study conducted by the county death review team found that of the 101 children who were identified as having died because of abuse or neglect in the preceding six years (the role of maltreatment in another 120 child deaths was undetermined), more than half had been in contact with CPS. One-third of the children who were killed were being supervised by the county agency when they died, but in most cases remained with their parents. The study also identified young children, children of color, and poor children to be at greatest risk, with half of the children killed being between the ages of one and four years, sixty percent coming from families that had received AFDC, and African American children disproportionately more likely to die of all causes, including abuse. This report was a Rorschach test of sorts, allowing its readers to assign a variety of meanings to it, depending on their own views. Not surprisingly, these results were interpreted by many as further evidence of agency failure. They inspired me to wonder what happens in the interactions between child welfare officials and the families that seem to be struggling, and sometimes failing. Understanding these interactions could allow for greater understanding of how state actors enact their contradictory goals and how expectations of race, class, and gender in family life are communicated.

This book aims to provide greater understanding of these interactions by detailing the inner workings of cases in the child welfare system in one northern California county. Specifically, I examine the interactions between parents and system insiders to better understand why the system operates as it does. Actors in the CPS system interpret parental behaviors in order to identify imminent danger that children face. Investigators decipher cues from parents’ answers, attitudes, demeanor, and environment to create their assessments (narratives) of risk. In creating case plans and outcomes, social workers, attorneys, service providers, and judges look for signs that parents want to be or have been rehabilitated and can now be appropriate parents. Although parents have little authority or recourse in this system, they are nonetheless active participants in how these assessments, evaluations, and representations are shaped. Though they often disagree with the outcomes, parents’ actions influence the depictions of them and their families.

Parents and state actors negotiate power at several critical moments of interaction: when a social worker investigates allegations of abuse and neglect; when a parent participates in reunification services, court proceedings, or meetings with social workers to regain custody of his or her children; and at the moment when the court ultimately decides whether a parent will regain custody and/or retain legal rights over his or her children. By examining these “moments,” I demonstrate how parents and state actors struggle to shape case meanings and propose solutions. These critical moments of interaction provide a unique opportunity to examine how power is negotiated between individuals and the state over meanings of the family. I gained access to these moments by accompanying social workers as they investigated allegations of maltreatment or monitored cases of children who had been placed in state custody, observing court proceedings of CPS cases in the juvenile court, interviewing parents and attorneys, and reviewing court documents and reports. (The methodological appendix provides more detail about data collection.) In discussing these data, I move between my observations and the accounts provided by parents, social workers, and attorneys to understand case meanings, processes, and outcomes. These narratives may not capture “the truth” and may instead simply provide pieces of larger mosaics of what has transpired. Yet as parents and state actors present stories of themselves, their allies, and their opponents, they are revealing what they think is important—and valued—in this large welfare bureaucracy.

In this book I strive to paint a portrait of the CPS system, tinted with the intentions and perspectives of the many players who, though often making competing claims to advocate for different outcomes, are usually acting with the best of intentions. Simultaneously, I reveal how, in the end, and despite good intentions, the system participants reproduce the same fractures along lines of gender, race, and class that have always plagued state welfare systems, and in doing so, reify larger social inequalities. This book is about child protection as a system and not about the specifics of protecting children. Much of existing social research on this system tries to address the long-standing public controversy that circumscribes questions of whether CPS acts appropriately when it removes children from or returns them to their parents.⁶ In the course of my research, I found these questions largely unanswerable, and even circular. We know agencies make the wrong decisions because tragedies—like those of Adam and Sarah—occur. In response, some would argue that the only correct policy would be one of removing all children who are allegedly maltreated. Simultaneously, others hold that children should only be removed in the most egregious cases of abuse, since they are often safer with their flawed natal families than in the deeply troubled foster care system. These poles reveal that conceptions of ideal agency practice more often reflect concerns over who should be raising children and what constitutes appropriate parenting than they clarify how the bureaucracies that regulate them should be retooled. Hence I avoid discussing whether CPS should or should not remove children and whether children should be placed in state custody more or less oft...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Child Protection: A Historical Perspective
• Chapter 3 The Hated Do-Gooders: Social Work in Context
• Chapter 4 Expected Parental Behavior: Theorizing Subordination and Deference in the Investigation
• Chapter 5 Reforming Parents, Reunifying Families
• Chapter 6 Court-Ordered Empowerment and the Reformation of Mothers in CPS
• Chapter 7 Biology and Conformity: Expectations of Fathers in Reunification
• Chapter 8 Beyond Reunification: When Families Cannot be Fixed
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• Appendix: Methods
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index