To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (10 page)

Of all the foster kids I've talked with over the years, Arelis and her seven biological siblings have endured some of the worst, and perhaps most sadistic, abuse I've ever heard recounted. The Rosario kids I know have been starved, beaten, locked in closets, abandoned in shelters and hotels for weeks at a time, and yet they were repeatedly removed and then sent home again to live with the mother who abused them. Arelis speaks now from a position of relative safety; her mother's rights have been terminated, and she and several of her siblings have been adopted by a kind and fiercely intelligent woman named Mary Keane. Arelis admits, though, that before Mary came along, she would have told any social worker who visited that she wanted to be returned to her mother.

It can be difficult to tease apart signs of abuse from signs of a parent's external stressors in infants, but recognizing abuse in children who are old enough to talk is especially tricky. Older children will lie out of fear or a desire to protect their parents, or they won't know how to express the problems at home. For them, the problems are the only reality they know.

After cycling in and out of foster care several times, the six youngest Rosario kids were abandoned for good. The two oldest girls were already separated from the family: one had had a baby and run off with a boyfriend, and the other had been stranded in a shelter and picked up by ACS. That left Arelis, at fourteen, to care for her siblings, ages eleven, ten, eight, seven, and four, in their father's empty apartment; he was serving time. Before their mother left them there, she went grocery shopping and filled the cupboards with food. Unlike the other times she'd skipped out for weekends or took gambling trips to Atlantic City, she left the doorknob attached so the kids could come and go. At the beginning, Arelis said, they watched a lot of
Murphy Brown
since that was her favorite TV program and she had control over the remote. They figured their mom would come back eventually, but the weeks kept ticking by. Arelis said it “wasn't within my mind to grasp, ‘Let's all go to school together,'” but some days she would walk the youngest ones to the library and read to them. It also wasn't within her grasp to call ACS—and none of them wanted to go back to that, largely because there were so many of them and the chances of them being placed in the same home were exceedingly slim. They'd been separated before, and Arelis said she felt tremendously worried and guilty. So when the food started running out, they stole from grocery stores. Pretty soon, the electricity was shut off. And then the water. They lasted for six months, until finally they called their older sister Aileen, who was in foster care, and she told them to call ACS.

Now all the Rosario kids were safely accounted for. Mary had taken in six of them—even Brenda, the oldest, was living upstairs with her eleven-year-old daughter, and Aileen lived down the block with her husband and two kids. The two youngest siblings had been fostered, and then adopted, by another family, and Arelis felt good about that and still saw them all the time. But now she looks back on all her suffering and wishes the parental termination could have happened faster. She didn't know any better, when she was little, than to keep wanting the mom who called her “Daughter of Satan.” But she knows now, and she thinks the child welfare workers who removed her the first time around should have removed her for good.

I told Arelis about Dr. Rittner, the director of the social work school who was so reluctant to terminate parental rights. At the conference, Rittner said she terminated only two times in all her years of work (later she remembered a few more), but I recounted Rittner's public speech, and Arelis exploded. “For you to oversee a thousand cases and terminate only two, you're doing something wrong!” She slammed her hands on the table and gazed up at the ceiling in exasperation.

Coming from Arelis, this seemed a perfectly reasonable response. But I remember hearing Dr. Rittner tell the story. It was at a big conference at NYU, and the audience of social workers had responded positively to her theory that parents inherently want to do best by their children; I too had nodded right along.

“Did the people in the meeting call that lady out? Did they think she was doing her job?” Arelis, who generally speaks softly and with a slight lisp, raised her voice again and then had to get up for a cigarette. On her way out, she fumed, “Less than half the parents could get better if you gave them the right help.
Did they have a former foster child there to speak for us?”

4

D
OREEN SOTO IS A MOTHER
and grandmother who now lives in a brand-new building in the South Bronx. I first met Doreen in 2007, when she was an inmate at Bayview Correctional Facility and a student in my precollege writing class. Doreen has a big body and an easy laugh, and she always sat at the back of the classroom, her left leg kicked out in front of her, resting from a recent surgery. Even in her state-issued forest-green pants and matching button-down shirt, Doreen had style. Her work boots were laced just so, her hair was shorn close to the scalp, and a gold pinkie ring glinted every time she raised her hand with an answer, which was often. Doreen grasped the complexity of the Baldwin we were reading on sight, perhaps because she had swallowed so many sharp paradoxes in her own life, or had to live with so much ambiguity.

“You gotta accept the system,
and
fight it,
and
be good with you,” Doreen said, summing up
Notes of a Native Son
. She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms across her three-hundred-pound frame, and smiled.

Doreen lost her daughter, Shameka,
to the system when Shameka was eighteen months old. Shameka's now twenty-three, and her own daughter—Doreen's granddaughter—is in foster care. Drugs were the reason that ACS (then Special Services for Children) took Shameka away from Doreen. And drugs are behind Doreen's three long state bids in prison.

 

There's no way to talk about foster care without bringing up substance abuse; methodological approaches vary, but most studies show upwards of two-thirds of system-involved parents have some substance use problem—and others put the figure much higher.
“Other than a case with one schizophrenic mother,” Dr. Rittner said to me after her talk about terminating parental rights at the conference at NYU, “I don't think I knew anyone where alcohol and drugs weren't involved.”

Despite all her arrests, her years in prison, her homelessness, the beatings and the prostitution and the drug sickness she's endured, Doreen says the worst day of her life was the day a cop and child welfare investigator came to her apartment to take her baby away.

“I was dopesick that morning, so I put Shameka on the bed, surrounded by pillows, and went out. The drug spot was around the corner,” Doreen said. She noticed an older white woman loitering in her hallway. “Can I help you?” Doreen asked the woman. The woman just told her she was waiting for someone, so Doreen went to get her drugs.

“When I came back, I could hear the baby screaming, and the lady was still there. I was like, ‘They didn't come yet?' She just said, ‘No, they're on their way,' so I went inside my apartment,” Doreen said. “Shameka had fallen behind the bed! So I'm comforting her, and trying to not let her fall asleep, because they say if you fall and hit your head you're not supposed to go to sleep. That's when the doorbell rang.”

Doreen continued: “It was the lady. I was high. I hid the bag. I say, ‘Can I help you?' And she says, ‘No, unfortunately, I'm from BCW [Bureau of Child Welfare, the old name for ACS/Special Services] and you've been under a ninety-day surveillance.” Doreen narrowed her eyes, hardened her tone. “I was like, ‘Ninety-day surveillance of
what?
'”

The woman told her that BCW had received an anonymous phone call that Doreen had been neglecting her child. “She said, ‘Remember when you went out? And you came back and your baby was crying? I bear witness to that.'”

It was then that a policeman stepped in and told Doreen to start packing a bag for Shameka.

“I said, ‘What do you mean pack a bag? Where are we going?' The woman answered, ‘Well, we're going to take her.' And I said, ‘You're not taking her without me!' But the woman told me I couldn't come, and she handed me her card. I thought, ‘You're taking my baby, and all I get is a fucking card?'”

Doreen said she was sobbing as she packed Shameka's bag and, although the BCW woman was decent, the policeman's presence didn't make it any easier. “I knew that cop,” Doreen said. “He was a crooked cop. He used to get paid off by the cocaine dealers on 164th and Amsterdam. He just kept saying, ‘We can do this easy, or we can do this hard.' I wanted to say I knew who he was, but I said to myself, ‘No, bitch, you don't want to end up in jail, because they're still gonna take your daughter.'”

The worst part was handing Shameka over. “She didn't want to go,” Doreen said. “She was holding on to me, and screaming at the top of her lungs. But then the cop and the lady went out and I watched them go from the kitchen window. My daughter was screaming and looking at me; she was turning blue from crying so hard. I was sobbing and thinking, ‘I'm no good, I'm no good.'”

That night, when Doreen went to get high, she was arrested for the first time in her life. She never lived with Shameka again.

 

Doreen thinks it was her own mother who made the call to child welfare. This can happen, but it's far more common for mothers like Doreen to be “caught” when they have to interact with some institution. Such as when they go into labor.

This is what happened to Robbyne Wiley—another African American woman in her forties—who had her baby taken from her in the hospital back in 1991. Robbyne had three children already, and she'd been warned when her last child, a daughter, was born positive for crack cocaine to stop using. But Robbyne didn't expect, the morning after delivering her fourth child, that her doctor would walk in empty-handed.

“I said, ‘Can you bring me my baby?' And he said, ‘Your baby's not here.' They just took my baby like that,” Robbyne explained, her eyes growing round with the memory. “And I did not get him back until he was four years old.”

The federal government requires that all fifty states have a system in place to notify Child Protective Services if a baby is born “positive tox,” or drug-exposed.
Twelve states and the District of Columbia define a positive tox delivery as child abuse or neglect (meaning a fetus can be abused in utero),
and twenty-five states have laws that allow a woman to be incarcerated for such a crime—either at delivery or while still pregnant.
A sad byproduct of this legislation is that moms in many parts of the country won't seek prenatal care, as a dirty urine test could land them in jail.

There's no universal testing for the newborns; in most places doctors simply decide who looks like a drug user and test subjectively. But black women have been reported to health authorities at delivery up to ten times more often than white women,
even though studies show that drug use
is relatively equal, for instance, between blacks and whites (9.5 percent and 8.2 percent, respectively), and that more pregnant white women use drugs than pregnant black women (113,000 versus 75,000).

Racial prejudice in drug testing is only one reason that there are proportionally more kids of color than white kids in foster care. Nationally, African American children represent 47 percent of the children in foster care placement, but they constitute only 19 percent of the total child population. White kids have an inverse situation: they constitute 61 percent of the children in this country but only 38 percent of the foster care kids.

Part of the current inequality in foster care comes from infinite reproductions of the drug-testing scenario in places where families of color are scrutinized by those mandated to report suspected neglect or abuse—places like schools, mental health settings, welfare offices, and hospitals. Studies have shown, for instance, that African American kids are more likely to be suspended or expelled or labeled “aggressive” in their schools than their white counterparts—and these actions trigger calls to Child Protective Services. African American youth are also more likely to be prescribed psychiatric medications for their aggressive behaviors, or to be labeled schizophrenic, and sent to lockdown correctional facilities, whereas white youth with the same violent behavior are more likely to be referred to outpatient clinics, without any marks on their record or risk of removal.
(Fifteen percent of all kids in foster care were placed there because of delinquent behavior or status offenses,
meaning acts prohibited by their status as minors.) Back at the hospital, doctors are more likely to report injuries in African American families as “abuse” and in white families as “accidents.”

Still, this doesn't explain the reasons families of color are maintained in the system year after year after year. Reformers talk about this question a lot, and in broad terms, they fall into three camps. There are those who say that children of color are overrepresented because of a statistical pileup of family risk factors—like teen parenthood, substance abuse, domestic violence, incarceration, and poverty—all of which are stressors, all of which can lead to child maltreatment. Others argue that overrepresentation isn't so much about race as neighborhoods—which, for African Americans, can have disproportionately high levels of homelessness, unemployment, poverty, drug use, and street crime, both adding stress and making families more visible to police scrutiny. And the third group looks at systemic problems, blaming child protective leadership, government, workers' cultural insensitivity, and the system's legacy of institutionalized racism.
In terms of where to direct reform efforts, each group would propose different solutions: fix the family, fix the community, or fix the system from the top down. The real answer is probably yes, yes, and yes.