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Eline’s children feared going to sleep in the closet of their studio apartment, but it was the only place they would be safe from the rats. Covered in blankets from neck to toe, Eline would keep an eye on the kitchen entrance and followed the sounds of the rodents rummaging in the cupboards.
I represented Eline (I can’t disclose her real name), a mother of two, in Bronx Family Court when she was charged with neglect. Her younger son had been deemed undernourished because of faltering weight. Eline had struggled to keep up the feeding regimen prescribed by the kids’ pediatrician. Doctors are required by law to report suspected neglect, so the pediatrician reported her to the Administration for Children’s Services. The agency filed a case in family court, and the children went into foster care for three years.
When I met Eline, she described how the rats made it impossible to store fresh food in the apartment. She was a single mother with no family members who could help her. She struggled with depression and a chronic health condition that often required her to go to the hospital. She needed assistance. Instead, the city tore her children away from her and provided more than $1,000 each month to a foster family. After this, she turned to alcohol.
For more than a decade, my colleagues at the Bronx Defenders and I have represented thousands of parents like Eline in child-protection proceedings. A majority of them have never abused a child. Yet child services charges them with “parental neglect,” something of a catchall term that seems to cover poverty, substance abuse and untreated mental illness.
There is a misconception that the child-protection system is broken because child services fails to protect children from dangerous homes. That’s because the media exhaustively covers child deaths, but not the everyday tragedy of unnecessary child removals.
The problem is not that child services fails to remove enough children. It’s that the agency has not been equipped to address the daily manifestations of economic and racial inequality. Instead, it is designed to treat structural failings as the personal flaws of low-income parents.
In that framework, the answer is not affordable housing or transportation, meaningful employment, health care or access to healthy foods, as it should be. Why is the focus always on removing children to foster care and imposing parenting classes? This never-ending cycle traps generations of low-income families in a punitive system of state surveillance and foster care. Worse, it makes parents fear contacting child services when they need help caring for their children.
“Neglect” cases are often not what they look like on paper. Our clients are trying to raise their kids under tremendous economic and psychological pressures. Often they have faced significant challenges, like homelessness or incarceration. They love their children and cherish their identity as parents. But in court, they face the loss of what is most precious to them: their children.
Any parent would agree that raising a child is hard work. But our clients in the Bronx do the difficult job of parenting in circumstances that would reduce most of us to utter despair.
The Bronx has the highest percentage of homeless schoolchildren in the city, the largest unemployment rate in the state and the highest rate of food insecurity in the country. Some parents we represent live in areas where the median household income is under $9,000 and nearly 90 percent of children live in poverty.
And yet parents of color in the Bronx are held to a standard that few white parents in more privileged neighborhoods are expected to meet. A parent in Park Slope, where I live, can deal with depression or anxiety privately. A parent in the South Bronx cannot. A parent in Park Slope can smoke marijuana or lose her temper and still be considered a good parent. A parent in the South Bronx would lose her kids for months, if not years, and have to go to drug-treatment and parenting classes to get custody back.
In the end, Eline reunited with her children after she completed the court-mandated parenting classes and found a rodent-free apartment. Her family is doing well, but what they had to endure is unacceptable.
Eline did not need parenting classes; she already loved and cared for her children. She needed a home that wasn’t infested with rats. The city should have helped her find one. She needed support to care for her son’s medical needs, as well as her own. The city should have provided her with a visiting nurse service. And it should have given her the financial assistance that went to the foster parents. The trauma of this approach cannot be underestimated: studies show that foster care, even for short periods of time, can carry risks to children and diminish outcomes.
Policy makers must help families get jobs and permanent homes. Substantially increasing the monthly $300 housing subsidy for families involved with the child wefare system would go a long way.
The city also must work more closely with local health and child-care providers to make services easily accessible. It ought to hire highly trained social workers to support families instead of relying on police officers to investigate them.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has spoken about the need to bridge “two cities,” but he has not taken a hard look at how the child welfare system exacerbates the disparities. Until we identify the real problems, our solutions will fall short.
By Emma Ketteringham
22 August 2017
