Child protection industry conspiracy

Having your parental rights to a child terminated must be a traumatic experience. Whether the parent has intentionally abused a child, suffered from serious mental health issues or intractable addictions, there is a permanent hole in the parent's life when a child is lost to them. Even parents who have children removed on a temporary basis, still get up in the morning and see the place where the child used to sleep and feel the loss. Taking a child into care is a step that impacts all involved.

However, there is also a belief amongst some that child protection workers are somehow rewarded with removals and the subsequent adoption of children. Some theorists argue that funding formulas, such as those in the USA, support states taking children into care as opposed to leaving children in families and then trying to improve the family situation.

An example of this thinking can be found in a YouTube video Documentary on the Child Protection Industry. It is not that well done, but it certainly illustrates the thinking.

Critics are able to point to some high profile cases where child protection really did get it wrong. An example is the death of Logan Marr. She was placed in foster care. The foster mother, who was also a former child protection worker, was subsequently convicted of killing Logan. The PBS program Frontline has done a documentary on the case.

Logan Marr

There are many other cases where errors have led to high profile media reports. Like any system, a child protection system is going to get it wrong at times. The challenge of course, is that the price of errors can be high. At the same time, little pubic attention is given to the multitude of cases where things go well and sometimes, brilliantly. Little media time is given to the child who is alive and well today because of CPS interventions.

Child protection workers are constantly walking the line between protecting a child and preserving a family unit. Most child protection legislation seeks to have this balance tip towards family preservation. The appropriate standard for a parent to keep raising the child is not perfection or even being close to it. The standard is good enough.

As my colleague Sandra Engstrom and I are noting in an article we are preparing for publication:

Budd, Clark & Connell (2011) identiCied three domains that they concluded formed elements of minimally adequate parenting. These include:

• meeting the physical needs of the child including the provision of a stable and safe home environment as well as meeting such things as medical and dental needs;
  
• providing for the cognitive and developmental needs; and
  
• addressing and responding to emotional needs including affection and sensitivity, appropriate discipline in order to promote positive behavior (p. 105).

 These same authors also suggest that issues of fit between parent and child form part of minimal parenting capacity. These include child factors such as the developmental stage of the child and the presence of any special needs. Can the parents meet both the needs of the child as well as their own needs? These authors further note that environmental considerations come into play such as culture, socioeconomic status and interpersonal stressors (p. 105). 

However, to suggest that child protection workers, in general, seek to remove children in order to meet the needs of adopting parents, as the above noted documentary suggests, is not supported in any credible research I have been able to find. No doubt, there are some outlier cases where this may appear to have occurred, but there simply is not the evidence to suggest that this is a goal of child protection. Yet, those who have been affected by CPS can well feel aggrieved and seek to shift blame.

My research focuses on child protection errors - cases where they indeed got it wrong and children have suffered. Yes, there are definitely cases of practice errors - Logan Marr is one of those cases. Many errors occur, however, due to systemic problems such as high case loads and insufficient funding of CPS and the intervention systems that can help families.

Social work needs to keep working on the practice errors. Like any system, engineering, aviation, medicine, the profession must learn from its errors. That is essential.

Allegations of conspiracy to take children in order to support adoptions as well as the employment of social workers and other allied mental health professions does little to advance an understanding of the errors. Yet, within their criticisms can be found some powerful areas for discussion as well as an understanding of the deep pain that parents feel who lose their children.

Child protection's inconvenient truth: Is Daniel Pelka an example?

Media in the United Kingdom are swarming around the death of Daniel Pelka. He was four years old at his death at the hands of his mother, Magdelena Liczak and step father, Mariusz Krezolek, . They have now been convicted of his murder. He was starved and treated cruelly for at least 6 months prior to dying.

Daniel Pelka

The media reports are slowly leaking into Canada, although they are not creating the sensation that even a casual reading of UK papers suggests is going on there.

There is a serious case review in the matter, but its publication has been delayed until next month. Apparently the SCR panel learned information in the trial that it must now consider. That, in itself, is a fascinating statement suggesting that those working on the case had information gaps. At this point, it is not clear the child protection had a significant, or even any role in the family. The case is, none the less, highly reminiscent of many cases such as Jeffrey Baldwin, Victoria Climbie, Khyra Ishaq, Logan Marr and so on. Here in Canada, we have another tragic case subject to a public review that has just finished up. This is the case of Phoenix Sinclair. It will be several months before we hear what the commissioner, Justice Ted Hughes has to say.

In all of these cases there are valuable lessons to be had on child protection practice. These cases highlight the ways in which case management and interventions can go wrong. They also help us to see the sorts of common errors that occur. It is those errors, in particular, that need avoidance.

Cases such as these raise the delicate balance between protecting children and preserving families. The challenge with these cases is that they inevitably result in several things:

1. A scapegoat will be sought. In Daniel's case, the politicians are already doing this;
2. In some fashion, a politician will also state that the protection of children is paramount and that they intend to get to the bottom of this so it will not happen again;
3. New procedures will be introduced, manualized and bureaucratized; 
4. New training will be recommended; 
5. Social workers will become wary and fearful of making a mistake; and
6. Another child will die.

I am reminded of the article by anthropologist  China Scherz in the United States who looked at how social workers try to put into place good judgement while also trying to manage that balance between protection and family. She looked at the introduction of actuarial tools to help better identify risk. Her article is well worth reading. What one concludes is that there is a real risk that we create what looks to be science (e.g. actuarial tools, structured decision making processes, formal assessment processes) which mask the reality of child protection in science. It is a false mask.

While I am a supporter of these various types of tools, there is still the reality that a front line worker is going to have to make decisions from that information - leave the child in the home? close the file? remove the child? offer services? Scherz's article shows that this still is a very individual decision that a worker must make, and that there can be a wide variance in the ways that workers see a case.

There is no way to remove the worker and the personal decision making from the work. Workers bring training, experience and, yes, beliefs into the day to day interaction with families. No matter how much structure and science you try to wrap around that, this truth remains.

Which leads to the inconvenient truth in child protection - mistakes will be made, children will be subject to further abuse and maltreatment that might have been avoided if a different decision was made, and a small number of children involved in child protection will die - but most will not.

To expect perfection in child protection is unrealistic. Let these tragic cases continue to serve as educational opportunities so that the common mistakes can be highlighted and the highly unusual errors can also be brought to light.

Reference:

Scherz, C. (2011). Protecting children, preserving families: Moral conflict and actuarial science in a problem of contemporary governance. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 34 (1), 33-50.