By CHRIS POWELL
Last week state legislators had nearly won their campaign to persuade Connecticut that home-schooled children are the most endangered in the state when state government’s child advocate disclosed another disaster at the Department of Children and Families.
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In an open letter to the DCF commissioner, the child advocate said a child in a family that long had been scrutinized by department had committed suicide an hour after telling a department social worker that he or she felt unsafe at home and wanted to enter foster care, and the social worker rejected the request.
The child advocate wrote that in addition to its long history with the department, the child’s family lacked stable housing and had repeatedly moved in and out of state, and none of its children were in school.
The child advocate charged that DCF had not followed proper procedure in the case.
The commissioner promised to investigate.
Meanwhile, just coincidentally, the General Assembly was advancing legislation to increase funding for foster care and to create a committee to study child welfare services, such studies being the legislature’s usual method of abdicating with tough issues.
The suicide case will now probably just disappear. The child advocate has provided no identifying details that would facilitate independent verification of her account by news organizations, and since DCF itself did not disclose the case to the public, the department has already impugned whatever investigation it may undertake.
Some accountability to the public might be guaranteed only by police investigation producing a criminal charge and prosecution in open court, or by the legislature’s own public investigation. But the child can’t talk to detectives, and the legislature never does serious investigation.
A public investigation of the suicide case might be revealing and even shocking. For compelling questions are obvious.
Why did DCF not remove the children from the household despite its longstanding troubles? Why did the department countenance the failure to enroll the children in school? What exactly did the child who went on to commit suicide tell the DCF social worker about feeling unsafe? How exactly did the social worker reply, and why? What supervisors at the department oversaw the case and what if any direction did they provide? Were procedures violated? What if any corrective action is to be taken? Will anyone responsible here be identified publicly?
Child protection cases can be difficult and are usually a matter of judgment, and there will always be some mistakes, some of honest misjudgment and some of negligence. Some will prove fatal. To ensure correction, serious mistakes must be examined in public, not concealed.
There also will be mistakes of policy in child protection. DCF policy is ordinarily to try to keep families together and, if children must be removed, to place them with relatives or friends to reduce trauma. This makes sense. But how much incompetence, negligence, and risk is to be indulged?
Such policies can be formulated and evaluated only by the example of specific cases. So the child suicide case should be detailed fully in public, not just to achieve accountability with the personnel involved but also to achieve some accountability with policy — and not just policy within DCF but also child welfare policy in the broadest sense.
In the past when children involved with DCF have died or been badly injured, whatever accountability has been achieved has ended with the department and with any perpetrator convicted criminally. But anyone held accountable for mistakes at DCF may be entitled to rebuke the indignant public for its own lack of accountability — its failure to appreciate the worsening social disintegration and depravity throughout the state, social disintegration and depravity engendered by a welfare system that has been destroying families and perpetuating poverty for generations and an educational system that long has been replacing learning with empty self-esteem.
It is long past time for Connecticut not just to try to remediate the worsening child neglect and abuse but to ask: Where are all the disturbed kids coming from?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 