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I’ve been speaking to Rotaries and other community and professional organizations about the elimination of the well-established and child friendly County CASA Guardian ad Litem volunteer program in Minnesota.
There may be no single right answer
to Child Protection in Minnesota –
but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater
A friend (Ned) offered this analogy about how these decisions are made by CPS (Child Protective Services) and other big governmental industries. He makes the point that over time, institutions develop and cling to self-destructive habits and then fight tooth and nail to keep them. A few of the more common habits;
- Efficiency over effectiveness
- Determining what will or will not be measured
- Managing information and reporting only what makes them look good
- Circling the wagons when problems arise
- Stamping down individuals and programs that shine too much light on our organization
What is the defect that causes many of the people who run child welfare bureaucracies to be nearly blind to the harms that are so prevalent in institutional care?
Ned suggests that the defect is institutional and personal self-interest.
Most people are primarily concerned about themselves and their immediate families. The institutions interest and personal interests of administrators are served by expansion. Efficiency is good – sometimes at the expense of effectiveness. Not using all available funding is bad for the organization. How funding is used is less important than that it be used.
The larger the organization, the better-paying are the jobs of its executives.
It’s a rare Child Protection executive who boasts;
“this year I helped increase child well-being and the effectiveness of our organization by cutting caseloads and increasing community involvement in saving and healing children. I discovered that our metrics have never included the benefits of community involvement of the thousands of community volunteers over the last 40 years. Now we have metrics to show how important community involvement and personal time with the CASA child advocate (CASA) are”.
“The world will be a better place when we stop pretending that we, an institution, can be good parents. My most important objective was to reduce caseloads for workers and increase community involvement for the benefit of the children we are chartered to serve”.
One can visualize a pretty good analogy in the automobile safety context. Let’s imagine a government that controls (1) automobile safety standards, (2) the state inspection for compliance with automobile safety standards AND (3) the automobile repair industry, all within the same department, and all done in official secrecy so as to protect the privacy of would-be drivers.
And let’s also suppose that the people who drive automobiles are, 98% of them, poor and very young people, who have no effective political voice.
The stricter the safety standards, the more workers will be needed to enforce them. The more employees, the higher the pay and prestige of the bureaucrats who administer the agency and greater perceived value of the organization.
Let’s suppose we are talking not about child welfare, the bureaucratic institution, but about “CW,” an accursed, nearly immobile brand of automobile. The CW has nearly cornered the market, but it doesn’t go anywhere. As they say in the UK, it “isn’t fit for purpose.”
You point to fatal defects in the CW: it’s gas tank holds only one cup of gasoline, it lacks both headlights and windshield wipers,. It can’t go anywhere when it’s raining, which is much of the time.
The CW, I say, has no gearshift, and the engine is mounted in a way that can only drive the vehicle backwards. And it has no rear window and no rear view mirror, so to the extent one can get it to go anywhere, it goes backwards blindly, creating havoc. To get any benefit from the device, one would have to repair both sets of defects: provide headlights, provide windshield wipers, but also provide a gearshift so that the vehicle can go forward as well as backward.
In child welfare, one set of defects is seldom mentioned. I think it’s important to see and deal with it.
In the world of the real-life child welfare system, the second set of defects, I suggest, is the conflicts of interest built into the system.
The people running child welfare departments have less than perfect vision when they assess the harms of leaving children to suffer in the homes of seriously inadequate or malevolent parents, but they also have near blindness when it comes to assessing the harms imposed by a childhood of shuffling among inadequate foster parents and the impersonal cruelties of institutional care.
In defense of the millions of people working every day to make life better for at risk children and families;
- These people entered this field to help children and improve their community (it doesn’t pay that well).
- Workers are restricted by policies, resources and training (some of theses are absurd, many just don’t help).
- It is a rare CPS worker that is encouraged to speak of troubling conditions within the institution.
- This is hard and psychologically demanding work that often ends in failure and secondary trauma for the worker (social work turnover is high).
- When a child dies in CPS care, the worker is almost always blamed – even though the visits were made and all the boxes checked – the need to blame and discredit must fall somewhere (it’s what we do when we have rage but no answers).
To improve the core problems at CPS are we to address;
- Administrators doing what administrators do to protect their institution and act as administrators act under pressure to meet the metrics set by other boards and political forces?
- . A depleted news media that doesn’t have resources or inclination to invest in reporting on seven million children reported to CPS each year (pre COVID)?
- Legislators bombarded by well paid lobbyists leaving little chance the pernicious problems of generational child abuse suffered by voiceless children will be understood and meaningfully addressed?
- Involving a public that has been woefully under informed about the exponential growth in and long-term impact of child abuse and trauma in our community?
Ned thinks metrics are the answer. What’s measured get’s noticed and improved. What’s not measured festers.
Terminating Minnesota’s Volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate program is certainly not the answer – but it is happening. Please forward the link to this article to your State Representative (and anyone else you think might help reverse this terrible decision).
Kids At Risk Action writes and reports on child abuse issues &
provides a passionate voice for at risk children
All Adults Are the Protectors of All Children
Draft of Part II Below;
Systems are created with the understanding of issues and events of the time. The orphan trains were one of few options to lessen child endangerment before the depression of 1929. Today, America’s early childhood care functions with about one 20th of the federal funding of what other advanced nations spend.
We complain that our cost per student in the schools is starkly higher than most of our peer nations and our students don’t do as well.
Why?
It has been our choice as a society to not support at risk children and families. Instead, we spend lavishly on police, courts, prisons and jails.
Any serious study of the way other advanced nations treat young families and at risk children demonstrates a much greater concern for other people’s children than we do (just study the chart above).
It is not hard to see that fifty states and over 3000 separate counties cobbling together a plethora of disconnected policies, procedures and models based on decades old understanding of mental health and child development demonstrate why our institutions are unable to meet the demands placed on them today.
As the Casey Foundation articulated as it delivered it’s study of Minnesota’s child protection system some years ago calling it a child endangerment system.
Or as Minnesota’s Former Chief Supreme Court Justice spoke, “90% of the youth in Juvenile Justice have passed through Child Protective Services”. Or, my words; now we have an institution that is creating exactly what it was designed to stop.
My question, can anything change without a public outcry and support for other people’s children?
Without public understanding and support, our institutions may never have the fuel, right parts, service and resources to operate effectively.
This article contributed by long-time CASA volunteer and child advocate Mike Tikkanen
- SHARE THIS ARTICLE WIDELY and it might help a child – if you don’t, it can’t
- Contact the White House
- Contact U.S. Senators
- Contact U.S. House of Representatives
- Contact State Governors
All Adults are the Protectors of All Children
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