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GOOD INTENTIONS FOUNDER IN ABUSED-CHILD SYSTEM: [FIRST Edition]

Jonathan Kaufman Globe Staff. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext); Boston, Mass. [Boston, Mass]18 Oct 1982: 1.

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Politically, support for preventing child abuse has not been a high priority since Gov. Francis W. Sargent appointed a special committee on child abuse in l973. As a result of that commission, Massachusetts passed one of the most sweeping child abuse reporting laws in the country, requiring physicians, teachers, social workers and a wide variety of others to report any suspected case of child abuse to the state.

Then Gov. Michael S. Dukakis promised in l974 to reform and strengthen the state's child abuse prevention system. But in l978, Greater Boston Legal Services filed suit against Dukakis - the same lawsuit that prompted Judge [Robert Keeton]'s conclusion that abused children in Massachusetts had suffered "unspeakable injuries to body and spirit." At the time, social workers handling child abuse cases were dealing with an average of 40 cases - twice the maximum level recently mandated by Keeton.

In l979, the Legislature set up the Department of Social Services to coordinate and improve state child abuse services. It started operating in 1980. In l981, Gov. Edward J. King tried to cut the department's $185 million budget by $30 million. The department fought the cut successfully and kept ts l982 funding at the same level as l981. This year it asked for $216 million. The Legislature appropriated $198 million, about half of which pays for services designed to prevent child abuse. The rest of the money goes for other services such as adoption.

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The baby, born retarded, overwhelmed the mother. He required frequent feedings and was having trouble learning how to crawl and walk. A worker at a hospital telephoned the state Department of Social Services saying the child might be "at risk." The mother - young, living in a small apartment with more than 10 brothers and sisters - was having trouble caring for the baby properly.

A social worker persuaded the mother to put the child in a state- supervised foster home. When that home didn't work out, the social workerput the child in another home, then in a third, then back to the second, then in a fourth - five homes in less than 18 months.

"We were trying to protect the child," recalled the social worker who handled the case. "But it wasn't that easy. The foster homes weren't specialized for a disabled child. They weren't equipped to deal with this kind of situation."

What happened to that child happens to hundreds of other children in Massachusetts each year. The Department of Social Services, the agency empowered since l980 to protect children from abuse, fails them. Its good intentions are undone by poor planning, lack of money and an overburdened organization that receives 18,500 reports of child abuse every year.

Massachusetts over the past decade has embarked on a sweeping program to alert people to the dangers of child abuse. But it has failed to support the program with the nitty-gritty services that social workers and psychologists agree make life more bearable for the families and help prevent child abusefrom recurring. The situation has been compared to the state's deinstitutionalization of thousands of state mental patients 10 years ago - which, critics say, occurred without the state setting up enough community support services to help the patients adjust.

Examples of the state's failure to deliver promised services to abused children and their families are plentiful:

Today, working mothers who may abuse or neglect their children and turn to the department for help face a one-year wait for day care in many parts of the state and a three-month wait for homemakers and housekeepers, according to Department of Social Sevices officials and social workers.

Reports of child abuse, which are supposed to be acted on within seven days, float around department offices for months without any action being taken, according to court documents, because social workers are too busy working on 20 or more other cases to pay attention to them.

Children under the department's care sometimes go as long as a year without a social worker visiting them, again because the social workers have too many cases and because the department doesn't keep a written record of what treatment every child has received, court documents show.

The effect of all this on the 25,000 children who receive care from the Department of Social Services is at times devastating. Frequently, the problems stem from overworked social workers and sloppy administrative practices.

In March l981, for example, the department received a report that a baby was severely malnourished and bruised. A social worker visited the child, according to court documents, and reported the baby in "good shape." Six weeks later, the baby was taken to a doctor with severe burns that went deep enough to leave scars.

The social worker, overworked, had never contacted the baby's doctor, the baby's father - who was in prison but was allowed to visit the baby on weekends - or any other relatives to find out whether the mother had in fact been abusing the child.

In another case, the department recently received a call that a woman visiting a welfare office with her two school-age children was incoherent, vague and apparently on drugs. The department, according to court documents, never responded.

A few months later the children were taken to a hospital bleeding and covered with red marks. The mother had beat them with an extension cord. She was subsequently committed to a mental hospital.

Abused children in Massachusetts "have suffered unspeakable injuries to body and spirit," US District Judge Robert Keeton declared in a recent court order mandating extensive changes in the department's policies. "State officials charged with protecting them have fallen short of what they undertook to do."

Keeton has threatened to cut off all federal funds to the department unless it reduces the caseloads of social workers and speeds up the processing of child abuse cases.

In response to Keeton's decision and widespread criticism from child abuse workers not affilitated with the state, officials of the Departmenmt of Social Services say the state does a better job protecting children now than it did four years ago, when child abuse services were split among four agencies and the state was rocked by the beating death of 2-year-old Mary Jane Gallison and the repeated beating of her brother Edward, 3.

That case sparked a review of child abuse services in Massachusetts and led to the creation of the Department of Social Services two years later.

Denise Gallison, the mother of the children and an abused child herself, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison.

"We inherited an agency so out of control and so neglected" said Mary Jane England, head of the Department of Social Services since its founding in l980. "We had an average caseload of 40 to 1 (twice the current rate) . . . . Untrained workers would walk into homes and pull kids out . . . We were supposed to handle disabled people and we didn't have accessible offices."

Social workers and department officials charge too that the department has become a scapegoat for problems the state, and society, do not want to solve. When an unemployed father becomes drunk and begins threatening his children, "it's not our fault that he lost his job," said Eleanor Dowd, area director of the department's Beaverbrook Office. "It's not our fault that a school refuses to put a handicapped child in a special needs class."

Critics of the social services agency concede that social workers face a daunting task in trying to prevent child abuse. Even granting that, they say, the department is not doing as good a job as it could. The reason, according to critics both inside and outside the agency, is part politics, part philosophy and part money.

Politically, support for preventing child abuse has not been a high priority since Gov. Francis W. Sargent appointed a special committee on child abuse in l973. As a result of that commission, Massachusetts passed one of the most sweeping child abuse reporting laws in the country, requiring physicians, teachers, social workers and a wide variety of others to report any suspected case of child abuse to the state.

Then Gov. Michael S. Dukakis promised in l974 to reform and strengthen the state's child abuse prevention system. But in l978, Greater Boston Legal Services filed suit against Dukakis - the same lawsuit that prompted Judge Keeton's conclusion that abused children in Massachusetts had suffered "unspeakable injuries to body and spirit." At the time, social workers handling child abuse cases were dealing with an average of 40 cases - twice the maximum level recently mandated by Keeton.

In l979, the Legislature set up the Department of Social Services to coordinate and improve state child abuse services. It started operating in 1980. In l981, Gov. Edward J. King tried to cut the department's $185 million budget by $30 million. The department fought the cut successfully and kept ts l982 funding at the same level as l981. This year it asked for $216 million. The Legislature appropriated $198 million, about half of which pays for services designed to prevent child abuse. The rest of the money goes for other services such as adoption.

Philosophically, the department has been caught among conflicting opinions on how to help parents who abuse their children. In the early l960s, child abuse specialists believed the best way to stop child abuse was to remove children from the home and put them in foster homes or group homes. Ten years later they changed their minds: Individual counseling for parents was most important; families should be kept together wherever possible.

Nowadays, specialists - including Comr. England - say support services like housekeepers, day care and baby-sitters are most crucial. They make life easier for parents, giving them time to cope with their problems.

But the way the Department of Social Services spends its money suggests it is still caught in the philosophy of another era. Almost half of the agency's child abuse money goes to support foster and group homes that take children away from their natural parents, according to England. By contrast, about 20 percent goes to pay for parent-aides, who help with shopping; homemakers and baby-sitters, although England says she would like to see this proportion increase.

"In this state we've long had the view that people who abuse their children are crazy and that the role of a social worker is to talk to them," said Eli Newberger, head of the child abuse team at Children's Hospital and a prominent critic of the Department of Social Services. "But love and talk won't cure problems like alcoholism or what happens when both parents are working and come home irritable at the end of the day."

Critics like Newberger charge that the department doesn't have a coherent policy to prevent child abuse; without one, giving the agency more money will make little difference. But a lack of money is another factor crippling the Department of Social Services.

The department, for example, has told Judge Keeton that it could not comply with his order to reduce the ratio of cases per social worker to 20 to 1 and to assign all suspected child abuse cases to a social worker within 24 hours.

The department, in a response filed last week, told the judge that reducing caseloads and speeding up the processing of cases would mean hiring more social workers, and the agency didn't have any money for hiring.

Time and again, it is the children who lose out. "You spend so much time fighting the system," said the social worker handling the case of the retarded baby who spent 18 months in five foster homes. "Fighting to get day care, fighting to get a homemaker."

Sometimes, the cases end happily. After placing the retarded baby in five foster homes in 18 months, the social worker found a special home that houses retarded children released from state hospitals. The mother has agreed to give up custody of the boy, but she will be allowed to visit him on a regular basis.

In an interview, the social worker spoke with pride of her success in that case. But she also wondered about the scores of other families and children she tried to help during the 18 months she fought so hard to find a home for the boy.

None of them, she said, had received the same amount of attention. Few of them, she said, had worked out so well.


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Copyright Boston Globe Newspaper Oct 18, 1982















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