(PART TWO)
(Ned’s industrial comparison)
There may be no single right answer
to the problems of Child Protection in Minnesota –
but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater
Continuing Ned’s observations on self-destructive decisions & habits. 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 (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: its 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.
Until there is institutional transparency and
meaningful metrics to gauge policy success and failure,
we will never know what works and what doesn’t.
This is destroying faith in our institutions and producing
what the institution was designed to stop.
In requesting funding from the MN legislature last year, program administrators did not disclose that it would be eliminating CASA Volunteers from the program if funding was provided. Senior Judge Lyonel Norris has allowed me to quote him; “…an all employee model can create an institutionalizing effect upon child”
KARA believes this was misleading and must be addressed. It’s a terrible waste of resources and demoralizing to have the volunteer program in conflict with the funding of paid staff.
Terminating Minnesota’s Volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate program
Will end community participation/oversight and 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).
LINK TO PART ONE
LINK TO PART THREE
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 these 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 transparency & metrics are the answer. What’s known and measured gets noticed and improved. What’s not measured festers.
Are you or do you know, someone that will step forward to be part of this conversation?
Contact info@invisiblechildren.org with Volunteer Program in the subject line
KARA Signature Video (4 minute)
Public Service Announcement( 30 Second)
Support KARA in making life better for abused and neglected children.