We send armies of investigators into homes to probe reports of child abuse or neglect — and leave scared and distrustful families behind. New York is now exploring what other states already know: Helping families can help protect kids, too.

Safe and sound

Leonie Fough seems like a mother who should have nothing to fear. She lives with her husband and two children in a Harlem brownstone, with plants in their sun-filled windows, encyclopedias in her children’s rooms and a drum set in the basement. When her first child was born, Fough left her job as a medical transcriber to be a full-time mother. Now 9 and 11, her children go to swimming and piano lessons, and Fough volunteers at their schools.

But for several years, her 9-year-old son, Lyvasco, was struggling. He had received a scholarship to attend the elite private school Dalton, but Lyvasco felt like an outsider, and sometimes other children teased him. He was one of only two black children in his grade. He is also a Jehovah’s Witness, which further set him apart.

Exactly what happened one winter day two years ago is unclear. Lyvasco told city child protective workers that a playmate had a pen in his pocket, and that when they were chasing each other, the pen jammed into his hand. His case report notes that Lyvasco had a small hole, about two millimeters in size, in his right palm. But school officials suspected that Fough had inflicted the wound on her son and called the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). (Neither the city nor Dalton will comment about the incident.)

That evening, a man and a woman rang the Foughs’ doorbell. They showed their badges, and told Fough someone had alleged that she had abused her son. They searched through her pantry to see if she had food in the house. They took the children into their bedrooms to ask them privately about the allegation, and asked them to remove their clothes, so they could look for marks on their bodies. They woke up Fough’s husband, who worked nights for the Transit Authority, to question him. They asked Fough whether she had stabbed her son, how she disciplined her children, and what she did when she was stressed. They told Fough they would be coming back.

After two months, the Child Protective Services worker told Fough she believed the case would be closed. But a few nights later, Fough recalls, ACS called and said, “You need to be in court Monday morning.”

The case dragged on for seven more months, despite letters of support from the children’s Legal Aid lawyer and other adults who know the children well — all stating they believed the case should be closed.

Fough spent much of her time in bed crying. She would think of all the horror stories she’d heard about children being abused in foster care. She developed stomach pains.

Lyvasco began to have even more trouble in school, and Fough’s children became afraid to sleep alone. With the expenses of the lawyer, plus a family therapist, the Foughs found themselves $30,000 in debt. The piano and swimming lessons stopped. Fough also began to limit what her children did for fear that they would hurt themselves. “I used to take my kids skating every week, but I thought, if anything happens to them, ACS will blame me for it. I would tell my kids, ‘Don’t run. Don’t jump,’ because ACS is coming.”

After nine months, the courts ruled in the Foughs’ favor, and ACS closed the case, but the original finding that Fough inflicted the wound in Lyvasco’s hand still stands. Fough says she constantly tells her son, “‘It won’t happen again. It was a mistake. It’s not against you.’ But in his world he’s seeing, ‘All these adults are against me.’ I don’t think they realize what they do to people’s lives. I really, really don’t think they realize.”

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In the case of the Foughs, child protective services ran roughshod over a family. But the investigation the Foughs endured was, at its core, a standard procedure. Protective workers routinely enter homes — 55,925 times last year in New York City — trying to judge whether seemingly minor symptoms like a wound from a pen are indications of more serious harm to children.

Many families that come to the attention of Child Protective Services are not like the Foughs —middle-class and well-adjusted. Most often, caseworkers are dealing with families who are really having a hard time. The child is acting out or missing school. Or a former boyfriend is harassing the mom; or a daughter is running away and it’s suspected she’s being sexually abused; or the mother is depressed and stressed and has no help. She may be tuned out to her children’s needs because she’s using drugs.

But only in about one out of seven cases is it clear to child protective workers and their supervisors that their most obvious power — removing children and placing them in foster care —is the right response to a situation in a home. “Typically, you don’t come into a home and see a big hand mark on a child’s face, and a needle sticking out of the mother’s arm, and the mother saying, ‘If you think I’m going to stop using PCP, you’ve got to be crazy,’” notes Margaret Young, a New York City CPS worker from 1996 to 2002, who now works as an intern in the Public Advocate’s office. Much more often, Young says, she would investigate an allegation that a parent was using drugs, but there would be no direct indication of drug use. There would be no sheets on the bed, one child would have rotten teeth, and all the children would be falling asleep in class. “In those cases, you know something is wrong because this is the third report already, but you don’t know what,” Young recalls.

In the business of child protection, most cases fall in that gray area, yet investigators find that the very nature of investigations often makes it harder to help these parents. Investigations can be aggressive and punitive, and make parents and children scared and angry. As a result, families hide their problems, even when they actually need and want help. Investigators can mandate preventive services, but the counselors who work with families say much of their energy goes simply into battling parents’ distrust.

Bernice Guyton is a member of the Child Welfare Organizing Project, a grassroots organization advocating to make the child welfare system more responsive to parents. Guyton used to be, in her own words, a recreational drug user. About once a weekend, according to Guyton, she would send her children, 16, 14 and 5, to spend the night at her mother’s, and she would get together with friends in the neighborhood and get high on cocaine. She says her children regularly attended school and earned good grades, and she had a 9 to 5 job making $18,000. Guyton believes her drug use was not affecting her children. The child protective system believed it was.

At 11 one night while Guyton was taking a shower, two CPS workers arrived at her apartment to investigate. The next evening when she returned from work, her children were gone. “I lost my mind. I called the police, I called the school. I said, ‘Where my kids at?’ I was screaming,” she says. “The only person I didn’t call was the president, and he crossed my mind.” ACS had taken her children to foster care. The agency returned them just a month later.

Guyton says the experience made her kids fearful, and left her with a fierce anger at child protective services. “They totally violated my rights as a parent, as a human being,” she said. “They stripped my rights as a mother.” (ACS would not comment for this story.)

Her experience is not unusual. “The whole event will be everlasting in my memory, because how do you forget the day it seemed possible that the city was about to remove your child from you?” remembers Caroline Marrero of East New York. Marrero had a relatively good encounter: The child protective worker told her son, who had run away after a family fight, that he should be “proud to have a mother who loves him so much.” But Marrero recalls the fear most of all. “The memories of it still terrorize me,” she says.

A steadily growing number of practitioners, researchers and advocates nationwide have been questioning the current approach to child protection. How can child protection efforts encourage more families to cooperate with a social welfare system that can offer support and resources over the long haul? Might a less intrusive child protective system--one that looked more like social work and less like police work--in fact leave children more, rather than less, safe? Could more resources be better applied to support programs, and to those investigations that truly do demand a high degree of intensity? These questions are now the subject of intense debate in the child-welfare world.

More than a dozen states have decided that it’s better to intervene in troubled families’ lives in a more constructive way. Cases that are obviously high risk--involving evidence of serious abuse, or clear parental incompetence — would still be investigated as usual. But when there is reason to believe a family would benefit from help, it would instead receive an assessment and, if warranted, a referral to social services, such as counseling. That framework, known as “dual track” child protection, is slated to be tested in Westchester and in one community in the Bronx.

Not every child advocate supports dual track. One concern is that states in budget crisis will turn to it as a way to cut spending, giving nothing more than a telephone call and a referral to families with serious problems. At the same time, it’s clear to virtually everyone working in child welfare that something must be done to make investigations something other than a home invasion.

Child protection as it is practiced in most states “does nothing to foster trust,” says Susan Notkin, director of the Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare. “And too often, it focuses on specific allegations without looking at underlying needs and what caused problems in first place.”

Richard Gelles, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania who made his name in child welfare as a safety hawk, is among the critics who believe child protection needs a careful overhaul. He has his own variation on the dual track idea: Following his credo that “they could do as well by flipping a coin,” Gelles wants to see an actuarial system that would send out investigators only in cases that involve multiple risk factors known to be associated with abuse and neglect. Everyone else would receive an offer of social services. Says Gelles: “All those people subjected to intrusive investigations, with the risk that their children will be taken away, doesn’t create a formula for embracing the help that’s offered.”

“We’re intruding in a police kind of way into tens of thousands of homes a year,” agrees Jim Purcell, the executive director of the Council of Child and Foster Caring Agencies, a trade organization of New York private child welfare agencies, including many that provide foster care and preventive services under contract with the city. “But in four out of five of those cases, we’re not doing anything to help.”

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Families like the Foughs come to the attention of Child Protective Services in part because the number of abuse and neglect reports has skyrocketed. In 1974, when the federal government began requiring that professionals like teachers and doctors report signs of abuse and neglect, there were only 60,000 reports nationwide. By 1980, that number hit 1.1 million. Then came the crack and AIDS epidemics. By the early 1990s, there were 3 million reports each year.

About 88,000 New York City children were investigated by ACS between July 2001 and June 2002. The number of reports is particularly high in poor, minority neighborhoods. Each year, parents or guardians of approximately one out of every 25 children in Harlem, the South Bronx and parts of Brooklyn are investigated for abuse or neglect. On any given block and in most buildings in those neighborhoods live children and parents who have gone through a child protective investigation.

Without question, some of the cases investigated warrant a severe response. In 2001 in New York City, for instance, there were 552 reports of parents choking, twisting or shaking their children, 654 cases of parents fracturing their children’s bones and 218 cases of abandonment. There were 5,159 reports of sexual abuse and 130 fatalities.

But there were also 16,946 reports of educational neglect that year, 25,717 reports of a parent’s alcohol or drug misuse and 15,470 reports of inadequate food, clothing and shelter. Some of those reports are signs of much worse problems. Others are simply what they appear to be. All are investigated using an identical procedure.

About two in three reports phoned into the State Central Registry get sent on to ACS for mandatory investigation. State law requires the city to interview children’s teachers, doctors, neighbors and anyone else who can provide insight into their lives; visit a home within 48 hours; and interview each child in that home in private, so that fear of a parent or sibling won’t keep them from talking. Investigators watch how parents and children interact. Sometimes they ask children to undress, to see if there are bruises on their bodies.

Social workers are not only trying to make a broad assessment of the children’s safety--they are legally ordered to decide whether a particular act of abuse or neglect has occurred. In two-thirds of cases, CPS workers don’t find enough evidence to substantiate the allegation. One-third of cases are marked “indicated,” meaning there’s evidence to suggest abuse or neglect took place. When a case is indicated, it stays on a parent’s record for 10 years after the youngest child in the home turns 18. It prohibits that person from working in child care or becoming a foster parent. It is also part of the public record, and shows up on job- and security-related background checks.

Having a case indicated does not, however, mean that children are necessarily in so much danger that they should be put in foster care. It doesn’t even obligate ACS to provide the family with social services, like therapy, housekeeping help or anger management classes. In fact, in 40 percent of cases where a report is indicated, families receive no further support from ACS.

Yet evidence shows that all is not well with many of the families whose cases are quickly closed. One in four are reported again, and families in which children die at the hands of their parents often have had multiple investigations in the past. For all the aggressive measures Child Protective Services takes to insulate children from harm, and despite declines in recent years in fatalities among children whose families have been investigated by ACS, safety too often remains elusive.

“There’s a fine line between a family that needs help and a family where there’s abuse and neglect. That’s why there are so many repeat reports,” says Judith Meltzer, deputy director for the Center for the Study of Social Policy, which seeks to improve ways that states and localities work with disadvantaged communities and families. “The real goal is to have a system that is perceived by the community and by families as helpful, so we can get involved sooner and help families develop the skills they need so that the next time there’s a crisis, they’ll have links to supports and services to deal with it. It may not be the first crisis but subsequent crises that lead to abuse and neglect.”

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It’s a rare day in politics when legislators of any state agree that the law is too tough on parents who may have abused or neglected their children. Since 1993, however, more than a dozen states as dissimilar as Missouri, Florida, Minnesota, Texas and South Carolina have decided they can keep more children safe if they treat child abuse and neglect less like crimes and more like a public health problem. They have implemented a dual track (also known as “differential response”) child welfare system, strengthening investigations that target the highest-risk cases while instituting more collaborative, parent-friendly contact for the rest.

The model is based on the premise that not all family problems are the same, and they shouldn’t be treated the same. In high-risk cases, states have sought to expand the police-like skills of CPS workers, and partnered more closely with the police. Florida completely transferred investigations for the most serious cases to the police. But in cases judged lower risk, which are about 40 to 60 percent of the total, states have said families should be “assessed for services” rather than investigated.

Assessment-track cases include those involving allegations like educational neglect; inadequate food, clothing, and shelter; and leaving kids home alone. In Iowa, legislators decided the state would neither investigate nor assess cases of minor physical injury that were considered unlikely to recur. North Dakota made the radical decision that all families who were the subject of an abuse or neglect report would be assessed rather than investigated.

Typically, for cases placed on the assessment track, workers no longer judge whether or not a parent is guilty of anything. There are no indicated reports, and a family’s file, while open to social service agencies, is otherwise sealed to the public. Workers are trained to ask families, “How can we help you?” rather than, “Have you done something wrong?” Parents have the right to accept or refuse any and all services. Workers also ask families what resources they themselves might turn to, like relatives, neighbors, or a community group. The thinking is that the more in control a family feels, the more likely it will be to want to address its problems.

But the new regime is not entirely touchy feely. Workers still gain leverage over families in part through coercion and fear. The initial meeting with a worker is mandated, and sometimes, workers say, they feel the need to pressure families who are refusing services into accepting them. Typically, they’ll use the threat that if there are subsequent reports, not cooperating now could make it more likely that they’ll have their children removed in the future.

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To most New Yorkers, Minnesota seems a world away. But in 1999, when the state decided to pilot a dual track model, child protective services in Minnesota were confronting problems familiar to those in New York. Minnesota investigated 17,000 reports each year, largely among families living in poor communities and single-parent households. In about 44 percent of cases, the state determined that parents had indeed abused or neglected their children, but only one in four families received services after the initial investigation. Says Dave Thompson, who has worked in child protection for more than 25 years and runs the child protection program in Ramsey County, which encompasses the city of St. Paul: “We decided that the system was unnecessarily adversarial, intrusive and disrespectful.”

In 1999, state officials gave counties the option of moving ahead with dual track child protective services. (Today, 62 of 87 counties participate.) Each county determined which cases it would classify as lower-risk. Many decided that families who’d had a prior investigation would be excluded, no matter what the allegation. Other counties decided that no case involving domestic violence, or in which drug use was the primary allegation, would be classified as lower risk, because families in those kinds of cases are particularly likely to have reports called in on them again in the future. In most counties, though, between 50 and 60 percent of families were placed on an assessment track.

For each family going through assessment, workers in Minnesota receive $2,000 to use at their discretion. Minnesota took seriously the idea that families should be in control of what services they receive, and many families say they need concrete aid in order just to function, like a place to live, car repairs, affordable child care, or help getting the lights turned back on. A worker might think that parents also need anger management classes or family counseling, but if parents turn down those services, according to the law, that’s OK.

There are other changes as well. Workers no longer make unannounced visits. The initial contact is usually a family meeting, far different from traditional Minnesota investigations, where workers not only interview children in private but also tape record the interview. After the initial meeting between worker and family, about one in three families accepts services, says Suzanne Tuttle, a supervisor in Anoka County.

To be sure, a fair number of families refuse services and leave caseworkers with lingering concerns about children’s well-being. And indeed, preliminary research hasn’t shown that children are safer on the assessment track. Whether they receive an assessment or an investigation, recidivism rates for families with similar problems are about equal.

But the data haven’t shown that children are less safe, either, and researchers tracking statistics for the state say this is a significant finding. “The assumption was that an approach that’s adversarial and provokes fear insures child safety,” says Tony Loman, one of two researchers in charge of studying Minnesota’s dual track program. “The first thing we wanted to be able to show was that there was no decline in safety, and in Minnesota, we did.”

The research also shows that families are accessing services at a rate far greater (30 percent versus only 12 percent of families given a traditional investigation), and accessing them more quickly. Researchers say it is still too early to judge what the long-term effects will be. What is clear already is that both parents and caseworkers report being happier with the new system. (Information about how children feel is not available.)

“Now when I go to a home,” says Brenda Lockwood, a worker from Anoka County, “parents are usually feeling defensive, they’re feeling threatened. But when I ask them to tell their story, and I validate who they are as a family, I can very quickly see their shoulders go down, the creases in their faces go away.”

Last year, Lockwood visited a father who had kicked his teenage daughter in the shins during a fight she was having with her sister. The girl talked about it with a school counselor, who reported it. When Lockwood showed up at the house, the father, a large, imposing figure, was angry, and his initial response was to defend himself: “He was saying, ‘I’m in charge here and my daughter’s going to listen. If she had sat down, I wouldn’t have kicked her.’ He wanted to talk about how unjust it was that the report had been sent to child protection, and how much he loved his kids and would die for them. He gave me about a 10 minute lecture,” Lockwood says.

In the past, Lockwood continues, she would probably have substantiated an allegation of abuse, given the father a warning, but then, because the abuse was not severe, would have closed the case and left. Instead, Lockwood told him she thought it was normal for him to be upset, and he began to calm down.

Then Lockwood asked the daughter to speak. She was upset that her father had kicked her but she was also upset that a report had been filed. She said she loved her father. The two played sports together and went to the movies. She also said that her father yelled too much. The conversation lasted for about an hour. The father refused Lockwood’s suggestion of short-term therapy. But by the end of the conversation, she said, he was also willing to say, “‘My daughters are growing up, and I need to be more flexible.’”

It is possible, of course, that there were far greater problems in the home than Lockwood realized. She hopes that if that’s the case, the positive interactions they had with her might make them consider calling her for help if they have similar problems down the line. Just as important, she believes, is that she did not make the situation worse.

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New York State is now taking a serious look at legislation that would give cities and counties the option of piloting a dual track model. Much of the momentum comes from the efforts of Karen Schimke, director of a child welfare research and advocacy organization, the Schulyer Center for Analysis and Advocacy. In the mid-1990s, Schimke was commissioner of the Department of Human Services in Buffalo, and she had come in contact with her share of “CPS junkies” — workers who “wanted to be little cops. I even had CPS workers who wanted to carry guns.” But in general, she says, it was not individual workers but the system itself that made it difficult to work positively with families.

At Schuyler, Schimke took a close look at what Minnesota and other states were doing, and she helped draft legislation to make it happen in New York. Two different versions emerged: The Democrat-led Assembly sought to launch dual track in up to 10 localities, while the Senate would have kept that number to just three. The bills gathered broad support. Last year, the assembly bill passed, and the Senate came surprisingly close to passing its version.

The climate for reform is considerably worse this year, with legislators far more concerned with addressing the budget crisis than with introducing policy legislation. Most child advocates are simply trying to hold the line in the face of cuts.

Officials in Westchester County decided they didn’t want to wait for state legislation, and they plan to launch a dual track model in Mount Vernon and Peekskill later this year. The legislature is considering a bill that would exempt Westchester from the child protective procedures the rest of the state must follow, including the requirement that agencies must mark all cases as “indicated” or “unfounded.”

Nancy Travers, first deputy commissioner for social services, says Westchester is a prime county to pilot dual track because it has a well-developed child welfare infrastructure and is “very service rich.” Over the last year, officials have also worked hard to recruit informal family allies, like churches and community groups. “We’re trying to find out who Mom turns to during difficult life situations,” Travers said. “Does she turn to the person in the nail salon, or a person in her church? Or maybe there’s an aunt who helps her who could drive Johnny to his therapy appointments if Mom is feeling overwhelmed.” Travers says the goal is to involve the entire community in taking responsibility for making sure children are neither abused nor neglected. “Even at its best and even with unlimited resources,” Travers argues, “government alone cannot keep children safe.”

Dual track is also about to get a tryout in one New York City neighborhood. ACS has been meeting with several private foundations to pilot a project in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, one that would go even further to involve an entire community in keeping children safe. Highbridge has one of the highest foster care placement rates in the city, and its streets and homes are rife with many of the forces — poverty, violence, domestic violence, drugs, crime — that typically put children at risk for abuse and neglect. At the same time, notes David Tobis, executive director of the Fund for Social Change, which is helping launch the project, it is also a community with a strong social service infrastructure and active community groups.

About a year ago, the Fund for Social Change and the Open Society Institute, began working with community members to craft a proposal that would establish Highbridge as a demonstration project for dual track. Each foundation agreed to contribute a quarter of a million dollars to the project, which has a total budget of about $610,000. (Some of the social services will be provided through organizations that already do this work under contract with the city.) The foundations hoped their commitment would be an incentive for the city to agree to the project. Indeed, Tobis says he has been both “surprised and encouraged” by the interest ACS has shown so far, and he’s optimistic that dual track, in some form, will be in operation later this year. ACS still needs to make at least one big commitment: It has yet to decide which kinds of cases it will allow to proceed with an assessment and services, and which cases will still be subject to a full investigation.

Tobis and the residents of Highbridge hope to do far more than simply change how abuse and neglect reports are handled. The foundation money will be used to increase preventive services not only for families on an assessment track, but also for everybody in the neighborhood, so that fewer families reach a crisis or become the subjects of an abuse or neglect report. The funders have also committed to improving legal representation for parents being investigated by child protective services. The proposal further calls for funding grassroots organizing to strengthen parents’ and children’s voices regarding policy and management of the child welfare system. Says Tobis: “We’re trying to reduce the number of children who are inappropriately placed in foster care. We’re trying to test a new approach to child welfare where everybody in a neighborhood gets the supports they need.”

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In Highbridge and everywhere else, referring more families to preventive services would cost money, which is terribly difficult to get in these times of massive budget deficits. [See “The Prevention Pretension,” page 29].

For the last two years, New York’s preventive services have been paid for through a matching fund system: Cities put up 35 percent of the cost of services in return for 65 percent from the state. The formula has the potential to increase the overall money that counties and cities spend on preventive services. But to bring in the funds, budget-strapped communities must make an expensive commitment up front. And New York City, for one, is reluctant to make that investment: It is now moving to cut preventive services by 18.5 percent.

Gail Nayowith, executive director of the Citizens’ Committee for Children, says that while she favors legislation permitting experiments like the one in Highbridge, she thinks passing a full-fledged dual track law, without securing significant funding for the necessary social services, would put kids in danger. “I’m not willing to risk child safety in this kind of environment, when kids and families don’t have access to preventive services when needed, or foster care when necessary,” says Nayowith. “To pretend right now that it’s not a money issue is just erroneous.”

Preventive services, she says, must be universally available. “There would have to be a service guarantee for families, regardless of their status.” As she looks at dual track as it has been implemented elsewhere in the U.S., Nayowith says she has “lingering concerns that the level of funding for preventive services is inadequate.”

Nayowith points out that a record number of children already receive preventive services via ACS. Assessment for services, she notes, is already part of what investigators do: “Its reductive to think that Child Protective services’ function is limited only to investigations. Good investigation presumes good assessment.”

Other observers agree the existing framework could be put to more effective use. Maryanne Forjay, a professor of social work at Fordham University who worked in child protection for years, has been lobbying the state to change the way it trains mandated reporters--teachers, doctors, police and social service workers, who are required to make a report to the state if they suspect a child is being abused or neglected. These professionals account for 60 percent of reports.

When mandated reporters believe a child is “at substantial risk of harm,” the law requires that they call in a report to the State Central Registry. “When someone sees injuries to a child--bruises or burns--there’s not much choice what to do,” notes Forjay. But in other kinds of circumstances, if mandated reporters were trained to know how to connect children and parents to community-based organizations that could help them, she suggests, they might not feel that the risk to children was so high. “How you define substantial risk of harm can be dependent on what support services you have in place. What we’ve found across the board is that in trainings of mandated reporters, often there’s not even a mention of the preventive services structure.”

As for dual track, however, Forjay remains skeptical. “The truth is,” she says, “an investigation is not all that friendly, and it never will be.”

Schimke herself acknowledges that dual track is a political compromise. “We have such a shaved point of view, shaved by practice over the last 30 years,” she says, “that even if I thought it was right to move everyone into assessment, people would say I was being soft on bad parenting.” Still, Schimke believes dual track is the compromise with the greatest chance of reforming child protective services right now. “If we wait,” she adds, “we will have penalized generations of families. How long are we going to excuse misbehaving with families? I know for myself I can’t.”

Rachel Blustain is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and a contributing editor to Foster Care Youth United. Reporting for this article was done in association with the Center for New York City Affairs at New School University. In July, the Center will publish a full report on the options for dual track child protection in New York.

By Rachel Blustain
18 June 2003

http://www.citylimits.org/content/articles/articleView.cfm?articlenumber=1009

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