Jeffrey Baldwin: A thematic analysis of media coverage and implications for social work practice

ABSTRACT

Jeffery Baldwin died in 2002 in the care of his maternal grandparents. The case received intense media attention at various times over an almost eight-year period. Along with other public documents, the media coverage permits an analysis of the practice errors by Child Protection Services that are related to the failure to protect Jeffrey. Nine key themes emerged around core child protection practices: opening a file; the role of prior knowledge; issues related to assessment; knowing the child and their needs; the role of culture; case supervision; the child as the client; the enmeshment of child abuse; and the role of stability and healing. This analysis offers key lessons to be learned from such cases.

This article has been published in Child Care in Practice

Paige is a distressing story

The story of how a British Columbia First Nations girl was let down by child protection authorities has been documented in a report by the province's Representative for Children and Youth. It is a hard read. Page after page, you are left wondering how social workers decided to make the decisions they did - leaving this vulnerable child in care situations that were clearly risky; believing that interventions would work when there was little evidence that they would; failing to see the child. As the report notes on p.5, "Professional standards of care were not upheld in how Paige was treated."

This is a child who was subject to maltreatment throughout her life - from infancy to early adulthood when she would die. In some ways, looking back, you can see that she was destined to die early given the amount of maltreatment in her life. She experienced a number of adverse life experiences (ACEs). The ACE research project shows convincingly, that people who experience three or more of these events, have a dramatically higher rate of illness, addiction, mental illness and early death. Based on what is written in the report, her score may have well been in the range of 6.

It didn't have to be that way. Early intervention could have made a difference in terms of both the quality of her life and its duration. She need not have ended up in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver - one of the most social disadvantaged communities in Canada.

Having researched hundreds of reports like Paige, I am struck by the similarities of repeating problems including (but certainly not limited to):

• being too optimistic that change will occur thus minimizing or not seeing the ongoing and growing risk factors;
• failing to see that repeated efforts at change are not making a difference;
• not putting the needs of the child as the most significant priority;
• failing to coordinate information available from a variety of sources;
• failing to look for the permanent solution believing that being with biological parents was somehow preferable; 
• creating instability through multiple moves and placements;
• failing to follow up on case plans;
• having poor case supervision;
• not really knowing the file;
• not completing needed risk assessments;
• not understanding the nature of addiction.

The Representative's report states on p. 6:

This is a child who should have been permanently removed from her mother’s care at an early age. She was the subject of no less than 30 child protection reports during her 19 years, involving allegations of domestic violence, neglect and abandonment. Her mother was actively using alcohol and drugs and there were no signs of that behaviour abating. Paige was repeatedly returned to her mother by the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) despite glaring and unavoidable evidence that this was not a healthy, nurturing or safe environment for any child and wasn’t ever likely to be.

As a result, Paige’s life was a case study in chaos. By the time she was 16, she had moved no less than 40 times, between residences with her mother, foster homes, temporary placements and shelters. After her mother moved them to the DTES in September 2009, Paige lived with her in toxic environments and moved another 50 times, living in various homeless shelters, safe houses, youth detox centres, couch-surfing scenarios, foster homes and a number of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels.

As I noted, I have read quite literally hundreds of these reports from Canada, Australia, the USA, England, Ireland, Scotland --- the themes are painfully consistent. So why is that?

Often we think of systemic problems - poor resourcing, over worked social workers, funding problems, weak supervision of front line managers. These are all true. As a profession, however, we must start to look at the quality of care that we are providing. Ultimately, we are responsible for what we do with a client.

We also need to look at the education social workers receive. How well are we preparing students for the real world challenges of managing cases like Paige? We also need to look at politicians for honest leadership that is backed up with funding, resources and the sense that child protection is a priority as opposed to a service to keep the sad stories in check. Political leadership also recognizes that there are problems which child protection cannot solve - poverty, crime in communities and so on.

As a society, we need to have a longer attention span to these issues. Stories like page hit the headlines, people shake their heads and wonder how such a tragedy could occur, politicians nod and speak of change and then……… nothing. The story fades while the media seeks out the next big tragedy to talk about. The themes are telling about tragedy not about actual real change. When society really pays attention, things might change because then the politicians can expect to be held accountable.

The Poverty Narrative

A recent story in the Huffungton Post suggests that a majority of children are in foster care for reasons largely connected to poverty. The focus is on the notion that children are being neglected because parents cannot afford to meet the needs of the children. The article also suggests a series of other somewhat nefarious intrusions by child protective services in the United States.

Poverty and child protection have been issues that have been linked for decades. There would be little doubt that the poor have a long history of over representation in child protection systems. Indeed, if one looks at the early roots of this work, it was the friendly visitor who would come to help the less fortunate. Yet, there are also early cases of horrific abuse that also stood out.

Critics, such as the author of this Huffington Post article talk about how the media focuses on the high profile, emotional stories that tug at the public's anger and causes politicians to become enraged. I agree that these are typically the stories that get the media attention and rarely does the media talk about the cases where child welfare has kept families together; offered services that reunified families that needed intervention; helped parents get sober and then raise their children.  The media doesn't like those stories very much - they don't garner the attention.

One has to wonder why the critics do not slam the media for the attention on the stories that push politicians to over react and then thrust child protection to be more intrusive.

The question of poverty though remains crucial. It is easy to blame child protection for being intrusive when not asking society at large why they remain so unwilling to solve the problems of poverty. Why are we so unwilling might be linked to our unwillingness to pay the taxes. It might also be because we have seen such failed efforts at the "welfare" state in places like the United Kingdom.

Economic policies that continue to create greater divides between the wealthy and the poor will only add to the child protection system needs.

As the world economy gets worse, there will be greater pressures on child protection systems. More children will come into care because of poverty related issues.  This can be seen in a tragic case in Greece reported in the Sydney Morning Herald where a family struck down by economics sought the placement of some of their children.

There are also public policies that will ensure more children come into care. In Canada, we are seeing the introduction of new crime legislation that will result in more people going to jail. This will have many negative consequences on Canadian society that will include parents not being able to look after children or families sliding into poverty as the bread winner goes to jail. I am certainly not supporting crime, but one must consider the downstream impacts of legislation.

There are no easy solutions for child protection who act as society's clean up scheme when we are unwilling to collectively address the core issues that exist. I agree with the author of the Huffington Post article that children are, in many cases, not better off in foster care. But children will end up there if we are not going to address the larger systemic issues.

As the Lilly Manning story shows, the solutions can be as bad or worse than the original problems.

However, I must take exception to the author of the Huffington Post story that social workers, lawyers and judges live with a master narrative of parents as brutal, devious and monstrous. This may be his experience but it is not mine. Yes, I have met those parents - the ones who do brutally abuse their children or the ones whose addiction is so profound that the children are significantly neglected or the parent who sexually abuses their children. But mainly I have met parents who try to sort their way through poverty or other adverse events in life. I have met lawyers, judges, social workers who believe strongly that finding ways to support families and keep them together is the preferred solution. This is not to suggest that mistakes are  not made - but it is to suggest that, at least in my experience, that the master narrative that he suggests is not so pervasive.

Child Protection Critics - valid and not valid

Critics of child protection seem to fall into one of several groupings. This matters as a way to think about what you are reading. It allows the reader to bring critical analysis to what is being said. This is true of myself, of course.

My groupings of the critics go as follows:

1. The professionals – this includes academics, public policy makers and clinical practitioners. This group tends to approach the issues quite analytically and seek changes from a more pragmatic level. However, this group also includes some broad thinkers who seek to blend the practical with practice reform. A recent example is Harry Ferguson, a British academic who was once a frontline social worker. He has recently published a book suggesting some rather fascinating changes that include workers being very aware of their own experiences and how child protection work can trigger this.

2. The appointed overseers – This group includes those who have been positioned to engage large scale overviews typically of tragedy. One of the most famous examples is the Lord Laming review of the Victoria Climbe case in England. There are others in this role such as Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the child advocate in British Columbia, who has a longer term, ongoing mandate to review and publically report on child protection issues in that Canadian province. Serious Case Reviews in the UK, child death reviews in other jurisdictions are also examples of these roles.

3. The Media is another important set of critics, although they will often approach their role with a sensationalist bent. The stories are typically about something that went wrong and seek to hold someone accountable. There is often a target to the story and the media has, at times, simply got it wrong in terms of who they were going after or what the real issues were. The best example is the reporting of the Baby P case in the UK. The media has done some very good reporting, however, that has led to some rather excellent reforms or, at least, nudged systems to better practice. Good examples are the PBS Frontline reporting of the tragic death of Logan Marr by her foster mother or the CBC Fifth Estate story on the death of Jeffrey Baldwin by his grandparents.

4. The Advocacy groups – These often have the mask of professionalism and will have names that suggest they are some sort of professional think tank. They seem most evident in the USA. Yet, they typically have strong policy biases that they are promoting. They have a sense of what they believe child welfare work should look like and filter what they report and write from that perspective. Rarely will you see material that contradicts their agenda being reported by them and, if it is, it is being attacked. Thus, even when they report academic research, they are often disingenuous with it selecting out the bits that support their policy agenda.

5. Parents who have been affected by the system. In the majority of the cases that I can find, these are parents who have lost children to the system and feel quite betrayed by it. This is not an unexpected or unwarranted emotion although it is very difficult to judge the merits of a case by their reporting. They are quite naturally and understandably biased. They do not claim any neutrality. Yet their stories are important as they provide a human face to the impacts of child protection work.

6. The children – there are occasions when children get to tell their stories of growing up in the system or of having been part of the system. These are blends of success, challenges and failures. They too are important, as they are the real life experience of some who have lived the story. In the USA there is a film circulating that tells the story of a few former foster children. It is a difficult watch at times but also quite powerful.

In looking at the vast material that is available on child protection, I have found it important to carefully consider who is writing and what is their agenda.

Another area of concern is how terminology is used. As Faller (2007) has noted, there are cases that are substantiated and many that are classified as unsubstantiated. Many critics of child protection see that as proof that child welfare is interfering in families that need not be investigated. Unsubstantiated is about there not being sufficient evidence to draw a conclusion. It is not the same as saying it did not happen. Those cases are classified as did not happen or false allegations. That group might include situations where the allegation was made maliciously or where actions were misunderstood, for example. False allegations occur but research suggests that they are small.

Child protection deserves criticism when it fails to do its job – either by failing to protect or failing to provide good case management, which can avoid apprehensions and sustain family units. But criticism also needs to be carefully assessed to determine the agenda as well as the information included or excluded.