Creepy families, crazy boyfriends, drug-addicted moms, abused kids and assorted pregnant young girls are an unappetizing stew of pathology and bad news.
Each morning, the heads of various state and county child protection and family services agencies across the country wake up and rip open the local newspaper, hoping against hope that there will be no corpses for which they will be held responsible.
Some of the agencies are inclined to yank a kid out of a basket-case family at the first sign of trouble; others tend to favor the encouragement of “intact” families — assuming the family is not one step removed from a mental hospital or prison.
Some of the agencies are well-funded; some are not — although the magic number for taming the wild beast of nutty families is open to considerable interpretation.
Some of the case workers are dedicated and professional; some are dedicated, but not so well trained. Other case workers are lazy and dumb and don’t follow up on obvious cases of abuse. Others are hardworking, but dumb — and forget to fill out the paperwork in triplicate.
The agencies exist in a stew of earnest, if often oblique, legislative confusion, enforced by weird criminal and administrative law that often staggers into family court — where judges wonder why they ever bothered to go to law school, since they are usually meting out social work/psychiatric judgments that don’t make anyone very happy.
One “solution” to this chaos is the occasional lawsuit, questioning whether a child and family protection agency is fulfilling its murky responsibilities. Depending on the circumstances, this kind of litigation can be friendly or contentious. For the most part, state officials quietly appreciate such litigation, because any obligation to throw new pots of money into the fray can be blamed on the judges — or, on an overseer appointed by the court.
It was 20 years ago that Connecticut was targeted with such a suit. Its Department of Children and Families has been living under the tender mercies of a federal court overseer for all that time. Was Connecticut’s agency so nightmarish that it required 20 years of guardianship? No, the length of oversight is not that unusual. Other jurisdictions have seen similar slapping around; it is difficult to pull the plug on oversight, when what is being overseen is subject to so many unfortunate variables.
Connecticut has now officially requested that the oversight be lifted. That suggests that at least on matters of budget and staffing, things have been prettied up sufficiently to make the case.
The state’s own “child advocate” questions whether liberation from federal tyranny is justified, in the face of “unmet needs,” but, of course, “unmet needs” is the chant of every social service advocate searching for that next dollar to spend.
Almost every state goes through a mea culpa at some point to explain or justify the inevitable cluster of child protection tragedies and catastrophes. It was 2008 when Massachusetts chose to create its Office of the Child Advocate, after several high-profile deaths of kids who were theoretically under state protection.
That same year, Maryland Department of Juvenile Protection caseworkers were dragged into new and improved “training” after a drug-involved teen was returned home to mom, who, of course, was herself on probation for drug crimes.
Texas and Florida, with large populations of distressed and disturbed families from Hell, are creative and entertaining sources for all manner of horrific stories of child-protection mistakes.
Will Connecticut succeed in receiving its federal seal of approval? Probably. Until the next round of embarrassing, horrible incidents occurs.
There are no guarantees in this game.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
