Foster care panic makes workers safe, kids sorry

In trying to explain why the number of children in foster care soared by 50 percent in less than three years, Melissa Johnson of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute had this explanation for part of it, according to a Ledger-Enquirer editorial:

“The widely publicized 2013 deaths of two children whom DFCS had left in their families’ custody despite allegations of abuse left caseworkers, Johnson said, ‘more likely to be safe than sorry.’”

Safer for the workers, perhaps. But definitely not safer for the children. Johnson is describing a classic foster-care panic, a sharp sudden spike in removals after high-profile horror stories. Over and over such panics have left all children less safe.

Most parents who lose children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” Other cases fall between the extremes, the parents neither all victim nor all villain.

Consider the consequences of needless removal in typical cases:

• When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates. He is cut loose from everyone loving and familiar. For a young enough child it’s an experience akin to a kidnapping. Other children feel they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. The emotional trauma can last a lifetime.

So it’s no wonder that two massive studies involving more than 15,000 of those typical cases found that children left in their own homes fared better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

• That harm occurs even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population. Multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse. And the more a system is overloaded with children who don’t need to be there, the greater the temptation to lower standards.

• But even that isn’t the worst of it. The more that workers are overwhelmed with false allegations, trivial cases and children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger. So they make even more mistakes in all directions. That’s almost always the real reason for the horror stories that start foster-care panics in the first place. Then the panic makes everything worse. So it’s no wonder that, in the few places large enough to detect a pattern, foster-care panics typically are followed by increases in child abuse deaths.

The other reason cited by Johnson is “better reporting of child abuse and neglect …” But increased reporting is not the same as better reporting. Nationwide, more than 80 percent of reports are false — so workers spend more than 80 percent of their time spinning their wheels. Encouraging — and in some cases requiring — people to report anything and everything leads to huge increases in well-meaning, but false reports.

None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. But foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses. Right now, Georgia is prescribing mega-doses of foster care.

And that does enormous harm to children.

This story was originally published April 15, 2016 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Foster care panic makes workers safe, kids sorry."