Commentary––

Social Work’s False Premises

 Make Deaths Inevitable For DCF Children

By Chris Powell

In a memo sent the other day to all 3,400 employees of the state Department of Children and Families, Governor Rowland said he was “dismayed and disgusted” by the murder of a 10-month-old boy in Hartford whose family, if it can be called that, was being monitored by department social workers. Rowland reminded DCF employees to “err on the side of safety” when dealing with children in deficient homes and to remove all children in a home when one has been removed. Thus the governor implied that his dismay and disgust included not just the murder of the child but also the department’s handling of his case.

In response Connecticut’s social work industry practically exploded. The problem at DCF, industry spokesmen said, is not the negligence of social workers but their overwork, and removing more children from deficient homes may endanger them as much as leaving them alone, since the state’s capacity to provide foster care is inadequate.

Too many cases per social worker? That has been a problem, but then most DCF cases that produce fatalities or serious injuries to children fit a pattern recognizable to anyone who has read a newspaper if not necessarily earned a master’s degree in social work and triumphantly added the corresponding three-letter abbreviation to his signature: a hapless, unskilled, and unmarried mother, often with a succession of children by different and absent fathers, and an exploitive or predatory boyfriend for whom the kids are mere impediments to his gratification. Sometimes there is drug abuse and sometimes, as seems to be what happened in the recent case in Hartford, the children’s relatives clamor about their sense of impending disaster but are not heeded by the authorities.

Of course not all such situations result in injury or death, but injuries and deaths are the inevitable result of the public policy decision to work with such situations, the inevitable result of the premise that government should more or less coddle childbearing outside marriage and the whole slob culture that goes with it. Hartford particularly and Connecticut’s cities generally are full of situations at which better public policy well might scream: You have no business having children, no business handicapping them so, no ability to care for them; your conduct is more antisocial and more damaging than some conduct for which government imprisons people; and so, for the sake of the children, all the influence of the government will be brought to bear against your conduct.

The governor says he wants all children removed from a household when any one child there is determined to have been abused, and the General Assembly seems about to wash its hands of the problem by putting that policy into legislation. But someone else –– DCF –– still will have to decide what constitutes abuse, and without clearer guidance from the governor and the legislature, social workers and child welfare administrators are unlikely to start distinguishing their helping from their enabling. That is because most situations requiring the sustained attention of child welfare authorities already justify removing the children involved. Anything less accepts a higher probability of serious injury or death.

But even if the social work industry’s attitude could be transformed overnight by political leadership, or by enough child injuries and deaths, the attitude of Connecticut’s political authorities would not be ready –– would not be ready to confront and deter the slob culture, and would not be ready, as the social work industry complains, to place removed children quickly and permanently in adoptive homes or group homes, humane orphanages.

As was suggested, if only inadvertently, by the official investigation of a DCF disaster three years ago, the suicide in jail of a disturbed 16-year-old Naugatuck girl, Falan Fox, children require precisely what the premises of social work in Connecticut deny them –– permanence and security –– in preference for the eventual rehabilitation of unfit parents. Instead that doomed Naugatuck girl got bounced around among abusive parents, doctors, foster homes, institutions, and other authorities.

Is Connecticut ready politically to turn off the child abuse and neglect and mental illness machines by taking full custody of hundreds more children every year and building and maintaining group homes for the many who will not be placed by adoption? Is Connecticut ready to discard the false premises of child welfare, ready to stop baby-sitting the slob culture?

Hardly. Connecticut’s political authorities aren’t ready for anything more than telling DCF to do its job better while keeping to the social work industry’s false premises. Indeed, beating up on DCF and, alternatively, making excuses for the industry have become empty political rituals at the state Capitol. Fortunately for the political authorities, the public has come to expect only incompetence and mayhem from DCF and to consider the child welfare problem insoluble, just another reason to flee the cities, just another proof of the social disintegration people move away from in droves but government still cannot see.

Even as Hartford’s latest child abuse case was reaching its deadly conclusion, the city’s overwhelmed police department asked for the loan of 80 state troopers through the summer and settled for two dozen. If state government cannot begin to reflect on this social disintegration and what is feeding it, the city might as well be ringed with razor wire.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)