One of the few charms of working for the Hartford Business Journal is the certainty of your status within the organization, the clarity of the protocol, the reliability in knowing that things will never really ever get better.
We must worship the publisher, politely tolerate the editor, be satisfied with no raises until the price of Saudi crude drops to $3 per barrel, and always wear a reliable watch, since the 15 minutes allotted for lunch flies by before you can finish your crust of bread.
With the exception of businesses hamstrung by constipated union work rules, precision of purpose, consistency of message, is a worthwhile objective, as a means to get the workforce from here to there by sundown.
Even public education, where a certain level of consistency is assumed, is hard at work on a national “core curriculum,” so that whether you’re schooled in North Dakota or Connecticut, a one-room schoolhouse or an urban education factory, theoretical physics won’t be so theoretical that no one has learned the same thing.
There’s nothing terribly new in this. “Bilingual education” programs have been a fuzzy mess for decades, as teacher and bureaucrats and politicians quarrel over whether the kids should be screamed at in English, until they learn it, or whether they should be taught math and science and literature and chemistry in their native tongue, until they sort of, kind of, maybe, catch up on the English thing.
Nowhere is the lack of focused precision more mysterious and often ghastly than in the area of government child protection — the agencies that are empowered to protect kids from mom’s crazy boyfriend, pouting in the back room — among other family disintegration symptoms.
There have been endless debates, both academic and political, over the matter of whether the child protection folks should work extra hard to keep a basket-case family “intact” — or whether the damaged kid should be yanked from real or potential danger at the first sign of trouble.
Befuddled case workers, as well as veteran family-court judges, will see agency commissioners come and go — all with a different philosophy about how in love they are with “intact” families. While in any individual case where an at-risk child ends up dead or severely injured, there is inevitably someone on the child-protection side to blame, in truth, this is an area where law and squishy social-science and cultural differences come together in one, big unholy mess.
The latest grotesque example in Connecticut revealed itself in January, where the father of a dead three-month-old was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the killing — with the prosecutor publicly questioning whether the state Department of Children and Family Services was a bit goofy with the “family preservation” philosophy, in the face of evidence that the “family” in question wasn’t fit to keep a goldfish.
On the other hand, there are squadrons of lawyers who specialize in such cases — many of whom suggest that DCF is often too fast to pull the trigger and subject the suspicious families to unnecessary stress and legal turmoil, rather than a pat on the head from a kind and gentle case worker.
Many, if not most, of the hideous families under review don’t get any better. A 2009 study in Texas found, to the surprise of no one, that almost half of the children killed in child abuse cases belonged to families previously investigated by Texas Child Protection Services.
Precision? Clarity? That’s not how it works in the child protection game.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
