Pity the child

By Max J. Castro

It is said that the quality of a society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members. By that standard American society is in a sorry state indeed, especially when it comes to how we treat children who, through no fault of their own, are born to parents in poverty, into undocumented immigrant families, or perhaps worst of all, those end up as wards of the state because of abusive or negligent parents.

Lately the local headlines in Miami-Dade have been dominated by the case of Nubia and Victor Barahona, the twins who suffered horrific abuse, physical and mental torture —  and in the case of Nubia, death — at the hands of their adoptive parents.

This sad story raises a multitude of questions — at the individual and the institutional levels — none of which have an easy answer.

Why choose to become an adoptive parent and then beat your adoptive daughter to death while in the next room her twin brother is forced to listen to his 10-year-old sister’s agonizing screams until they stop for good?

What makes a person capable of inflicting prolonged agony and a painful death on a defenseless child, and what kind of society engenders such monsters and allows them the opportunity to repeatedly commit heinous crimes upon the bodies and minds of minors?

How could so many warning signals from such varied sources be missed by a Miami-Dade county child welfare system that has experienced more than enough recent horror stories as to have learned the lessons needed to prevent these tragedies from recurring?

The Barahona case is unfortunately not an isolated example, in this county, this state, or this nation. Indeed, in an extensive and excellent front-page story last Sunday (“Déja vu over child deaths,” March 27, 2011), The Miami Herald documents a disturbingly characteristic pattern:

“For months a little girl goes to school, battered and bruised. Teachers’ calls to the state’s abuse hot line go unheeded. She disappears and is found, days later, dead. The prime suspect is her father.

“A shocked state calls for reform, and a panel investigates what went wrong. It finds little urgency among front-line workers in the state’s child welfare system, too little credibility given to the concerns of educators and a startling lack of people using common sense.

The group concludes: ‘It is imperative that the children of Florida be protected better.’”

It sounds exactly like what has just taken place in the Nubia Barahona case here in Miami but it’s not. Rather, it’s the case of Kayla McKean, who was beaten to death in 1998 in Lake County, an area located in northwestern central Florida. It’s also a template for the cases of many other children in this state.

The Herald reports that, on average, in the 1990s a child death task force was set up every two years. Between September and October 1997 alone, six children who had repeated contact with the state’s child welfare agency (the latest name of which is the Department of Children and Families or DCF) were killed.

Consider the infamous 2001 case of Rilya Wilson, a perfect storm of dishonesty, incompetence, and sheer poor judgment. Wilson was a Miami-Dade foster child who disappeared for a year before child welfare authorities took note that she was missing. Then they waited an additional week to notify police. The ensuing investigation discovered that the case worker assigned to Wilson had lied for months about visiting the child at her foster home and that, contrary to the established qualifications for becoming a foster parent, Geralyn Graham, Rilya’s foster mother, had a criminal record.

How do these outrages occur over and over? In many cases the reasons mirror those highlighted by a task force appointed 25 years ago to investigate the 1985 death of four-month-old Corey Greer, a child with a heart condition who was placed in a foster home licensed for four children but that actually housed 12. The infant died after his heart monitor was not turned on and he was left in a very hot room. The task force appointed by former Gov. Bob Graham concluded that “high turnover and low pay among case workers” were implicated in the fatality.

Modesto Abety, CEO of The Children’s Trust (full disclosure, Abety is a close personal friend), a Miami-Dade county group governed by an independent board but which annually receives about $100 million of property tax money (as approved by voters by overwhelming margins in two separate elections) to fund carefully screened children’s programs, believes the same problems exist today. He recounts that recently he discovered that there were current performance evaluations for only about half of child protective investigators. The reason: more than 40 percent of the workers did not stick around for a year to qualify for an evaluation.

The core of the problem, according to Abety, involves the assessment of individual cases, especially the critical decision of whether or when to remove a child from a parent or a foster home. It’s often an inherently difficult judgment call for the best-trained professionals. Given the abysmally low salaries paid caseworkers, DCF does not get the cream of the crop. To qualify for the position of child protective investigator, a candidate does not have to have attained a college degree in social work, psychology, or another relevant discipline. A bachelor’s degree in any subject suffices, and caseworkers are given scant training while on the job. As a result, many positions remain vacant, even in today’s very tough job market.

The problem of preventing the death of children under state supervision is a complex one. But to a significant extent, it comes down to two factors:  You get what you pay for, and your results reflect your priorities.

The U.S. armed forces do not get to throw the nation’s weight around the globe from the proceeds of bake sales. The United States Defense Department spends about as much money yearly as all other militaries combined — including nuclear countries with gigantic populations and land masses like China, Russia and India — and that’s not counting the huge outlays for the country’s sixteen intelligence services, at least one which (the CIA) conducts paramilitary operations. Not even the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the other global superpower (the Soviet Union) prevented U.S. defense expenditures from maintaining their upward trajectory.

Contrast this with the policy and budget priority given to children’s programs at the federal and state levels. The “welfare reform” of the 1990s co-authored by a Republican Congress and the always triangulating President Bill Clinton — in order to save money by eliminating the quintessential anti-poverty program — created a Hobson’s choice, a supposedly free choice where only one real choice is possible, for many single mothers: join the job market at a low wage job and neglect the children (given the lack of affordable day care) or lack the income to feed, house, and clothe the entire family.

At the state level, in Florida, the state child welfare agency, in the words of The Miami Herald, “has been chopped, renamed, centralized, decentralized, and mostly privatized.” What has not been done to it has been to assign the required funds and priority to make it work. Instead, a vicious circle, aptly described in the Herald piece, has been created: “Lapses meant less money. Less money led to more lapses—followed by panels.” Did the United States starve its armed forces after the Vietnam debacle? No. Did it do so after the Iraq snafu? Same answer.

Meanwhile in the Sunshine State in 1995, one of the recommendations of the panel that investigated the death of Lucas Ciambrone, was for state legislators to “stop passing child welfare laws without the money to pay for them.” The lawmakers’ response: to eliminate thirty-three child abuse investigator positions.

You might think that the shameful appropriation and value choices that have led to the needless deaths of so many children could not sink lower. But wait, here comes brand-new Gov. Rick Scott and a veto-proof Republican majority in the legislature. Scott is proposing to cut many jobs in the already understaffed DCF and to lower the disposable income of paid state workers — including those whose jobs is protecting childrens’ lives — by forcing them to contribute to their pension funds, a sure-fire way to sap morale and performance and to scare away any talent that might consider working for the munificent state of Florida.

Bottom line: We can create as many panels and task forces as we like, and appoint to them knowledgeable and concerned citizens, and unless the state and the nation change their priorities, you will have to rely on blind luck or divine intervention to get a different result.