In the first of his mystery novels set in Shanghai, Chinese émigré writer Qiu Xiaolong writes about how, in the days of Mao Zedong, The People’s Daily would run stories about “National Model Workers” to inspire the masses.
There is an equivalent in the journalism of child welfare – and a comment Crocker Stephenson made during one of the online “chats” he conducted in connection with his recent stories makes me wonder if it may be his next project at the Journal Sentinel:
After bashing a child welfare agency for leaving children in dangerous homes, reporters decide that finally it’s time to tell the other side of the story. No, not children wrongfully removed – that would run counter to the master narrative that drove the original stories.
Instead, the typical version of “the other side of the story” isn’t really the other side at all. On the contrary, it reinforces the master narrative, rather than challenging it. For this story, or series, the reporter follows around a caseworker for an agency like the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare for a day or a week or, in rare cases, longer. Of course, we’re not talking about the typical caseworker, who almost always is well-meaning, but new to the job and sometimes pretty clueless. No, we’re talking about a worker almost always chosen by the child welfare agency itself – someone handpicked for her inspiring passion and dedication. In other words, a National Model Worker.
Just how ridiculous this kind of thing can get is illustrated by what happened a few years ago in Seattle, when it still was a two-newspaper town:
Baby M was 2 days old when Mary Marrs, a veteran CPS investigator, showed up. "Do you know why I am here?" she asked Liz and Mike.
--Seattle Times, December 8, 2005
"Why do you think I'm here?" [Mary] Marrs asked the young mother, beginning the same way she always does.
--Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 28, 2005
So, what does the reporter usually learn from the National Model Worker? He learns that caseworkers are “damned if we do and damned if we don’t” and that life and death decisions for children come down to a “gut feeling” or “gut instinct.”
YOU’RE ONLY DAMNED IF YOU DON’T
In fact, in more than 30 years of following child welfare, first as a reporter and now as an advocate, I've never heard of a caseworker being fired, demoted, suspended, or even slapped on the wrist for taking away too many children. All of those things have happened to workers if a child died or was seriously hurt in her or his own home. The same is true of judges and agency chiefs.
You can take away huge numbers of children needlessly, subject perhaps one-third of them to abuse in foster care itself, (a fact Crocker Stephenson goes out of his way to leave out of his recent series) destroy the psyches of many of the rest, and have them emerge years later, unable to love or trust anyone, and while the children will suffer terribly, the worker or the judge or the agency chief will endure no penalty. They might even be praised for it, gaining a laudatory nickname like "The Terminator" or "Cap'n Hook."
When it comes to taking away children, caseworkers are not “damned if they do and damned if they don’t” they’re only damned if they don't.
As for gut feelings, it never seems to occur to reporters, when they hear this comment, to ask whether we’re supposed to be a nation of laws, not digestive tracts. And, it seems, no reporter, certainly not Crocker Stephenson, would find a truly passionate, committed parental defense attorney (if there are any in Milwaukee) and follow her or him around for awhile and learn how their work actually helps children. Indeed, it seems, he wouldn’t even bother to speak to one, the way, say, the Brooklyn Eagle did recently.
And you can bet that any National Model Worker Crocker Stephenson follows will offer up the usual boilerplate about, really, truly hating to remove children and only doing it as a last resort (ever hear anyone say they use foster care as a first resort)? But, after all “children’s rights” have to come before parent’s rights and we can’t “wait around” forever for the parents to “clean up their acts.”
Whenever I hear that latter phrase, and one hears it often from people who share Stephenson’s view of child welfare, I think of a man I wrote about 20 years ago in my book, Wounded Innocents. His name was James Norman.
Norman was a steelworker in suburban Chicago,
He had to give up full-time work to care for his wife when she became ill.
After she died he developed a heart condition. Eventually he fell behind on the bills and the electricity to his apartment was cut off. Then, the helping hand of child protective services struck.
A caseworker found a messy home with food spoiling in the refrigerator because there was no electricity. So she took the children the spot – and charged James Norman with “financial neglect.”
The foster home was ten miles and three bus rides away. Norman walked a mile at each end of the trip to visit his children.
The people at the child welfare agency could have provided James Norman with homemaking help, but they did not. They could have provided emergency cash so he could get the power turned back on, but they did not. They could have helped him find a job, but they did not. At least they could have provided transportation to help him visit his children. But they wouldn’t do that either.
In effect, the agency told James Norman to drop dead. And 12 days before a hearing at which he might have gotten his children back, he obliged child protective services and did just that.
James Norman died at the age of 38. He’d always had a weak heart, but it took child protective services to break it – and to make orphans of the Norman children.
James Norman left a noble legacy. He was the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that led to a ruling that Illinois routinely broke up families because they were poor. A settlement requires providing a series of services to families on the verge of losing children to foster care because of poverty, including emergency cash, called “Norman money.”
Even now, that’s not always done, of course. But it’s one of the reasons a child in metropolitan Chicago is only one-quarter as likely to be taken from her or his parents as a child from Milwaukee.
But whenever I read about the supposed need for parents to “clean up their acts” I wonder: What was it, exactly, about James Norman’s “act” that needed to be cleansed?
All of which leads me to this comment from one of the online chats conducted by Crocker Stephenson in connection with his series, and Stephenson’s response:
Q: CM, WI - When are you going to do an article on the day to day tasks of a Buearu worker? The workers get bashed for not caring, not doing their jobs, not looking out for parents and children, yet from the articles I have read the past several years, no one has outlined a workers daily job. …
A: Crocker Stephenson and Kristyna Wentz-Graff - CM, Good caseworkers should get to wear super-hero costumes. They are amazing. A story of what they do is long over-due.
I can’t wait.
(Actual date of post: September 27, 2010)
