The New York Times
The Lost Children
By ANDREW BRIDGE
Published: January 14, 2007
MY mother never explained to me how she met that short, thin man with the pockmarked neck, why she decided to let him move in with us or what made her leave me with him that day when she went to work. I guess she didn't have any other choice. But when she got home and found that her 6-year-old son had been beaten, thrown against the wall, slashed on his back repeatedly with an electrical cord -- all because I had changed the television channel -- she knew enough to throw that man out.
Sadly, Quachaun Browne wasn't as lucky. One year ago this month, prosecutors say, 4-year-old Quachaun was beaten to death by his mother's companion. As in the case of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, whose mother and stepfather are about to go on trial in her death, workers at the city's Administration for Children's Services were investigating the family but they were unable to save the child. This failure has resulted in some positive changes at the agency. The number of children removed from their homes and placed in foster care is the fewest in decades. But unfortunately, this number is now rising at a significantly faster pace since Nixzmary's death, up by about 55 percent in 2006 over the first 10 months of 2005.
In 1995, Los Angeles County's foster care system underwent a similar upheaval after a 2-year-old boy was returned to his family only to be beaten to death months later. Just as New York has done, officials in Los Angeles redoubled training, took over individual cases and hired frontline workers, then descended on communities to root out failing families. The system bloated to 70,000 children under the county's supervision. Officials soon discovered that taking children was easier than returning them. As a result, thousands of children languished in foster care for years.
New York City's system has some critical differences, but the rising number of children taken into foster care this year suggests that we're still focusing more on removing children than on helping families stay together. No wonder social workers find mothers reluctant to ask for help. They're afraid their children will be taken from them.
Friends, family and neighbors share these fears and often resist calling child welfare until it's too late. Social workers would be more effective if the bureaucracy that employed them understood that even failing families may have something valuable to offer their children.
That afternoon with the man with the scarred neck was a long time ago; I am now a lawyer and I've spent my career working on behalf of the frightened children who fill our nation's foster care systems. When I ask them about their lives they almost always answer that they want nothing more than to be returned to their mothers, who want nothing more than to be given back their children. As long as a mother is not abusive, child welfare succeeds most when it finds the means to help mothers.
Like so many mothers I have worked with, my mom was poor and never graduated from high school. Fortunately for me she got rid of that man before he had the chance to kill me -- though for her bravery he returned and raped her. Within a year, she and I were living in a motel, foraging for food from trash bins.
As we slid deeper into poverty, child welfare officials offered little more than threats that I would be taken from her. A social worker eventually arrived with a police escort. While my mother screamed on the sidewalk, I was hustled into a waiting car. She loved me but she lacked the resources to care for me. I remained in foster care until I was 18.
That was decades ago, yet child welfare has changed little. In the glare of public scrutiny, officials too often respond with reforms that drive up the number of children taken from their families. One can barely comprehend the evil of an adult who murders a child, but few parents, even those tangled in child welfare systems, are monsters. If greater trust existed between impoverished communities and child welfare systems, if mothers felt that calling child welfare meant more than losing their children, if their neighbors felt the same, help might arrive more often in time to prevent a tragedy.
Andrew Bridge, a lawyer, is the author of the forthcoming ''Hope's Boy.''