Just wait till every state outsources it to for-profit contractors.
Tell me about it. They haven’t privatized investigations yet but Foster Care our state’s goal is to privatize more and more every year. Turns out when you pay private workers $12/hr they don’t care all that much and cases go to hell. I am lucky to work in a county with a director who is resisting this so not so many of our cases are getting sent to private agencies. A standard worker after 5 years starts at around $18/hour and tops out at about $28/hour. In this state we have a union. I can only imagine what others in non-union states go through. Would you take a soul crushing job for that for years and years knowing you could find something else? Longevity is not a thing among us unless you are crazy (me? Maybe).
Side note: I am also a foster parent (own separate thread I guess, my wife and I take teenage girls) and I demanded it be written into my contract that we don’t take children from private agencies. Nothing against the kids, but the workers are either fresh out of college or so bad at their job that they still make $12/hour and can’t find something better.
Glad you asked random person who exists:
Terrible. I can’t name a single coworker after three years or so who doesn’t name every friend as a coworker. No one asks “how was your day” more than a few times than they break that friendship off. I don’t blame them. They have to protect their own well-being and I get it. No one wants to hear this than other workers who get it.
Stop reading now if you still have a soul:
I can remember a case a few years ago. No one had heard from a diabetic girl for a few weeks. The school was concerned. The police had originally made a contact with the mother who said the child was having diabetic complications and needed to rest per doctors orders. Didn’t come to CPS because that sounded reasonable.
A few weeks later, still no girl. The CPS worker goes to the door with another worker because “this doesn’t feel right”. We pound on the door to nothing. Eventually because things don’t feel right the door is kicked in. The child has been dead for weeks due to medical neglect. The flies will never be forgotten. The flies were the worst. The mother is trying (and successfully) stabbing herself with a butcher knife in an attempt at suicide because her daughter died several weeks prior. Later evidence is able to prove she made visits to several stores post-death to gain food and other supplies. Mother cannot handle that her daughter died. Luckily no emergency personnel were hurt and the mother is in a safe place to work through the mental and criminal issues.
So how you all doing after work? Lol. The lol is meant to be ironic and heartfelt, but we see ourselves as those who have to soak this up year after year and keep on going, because who else is going to do it.
This post got dark and I don’t meant it to be. There is plenty of humor in this job because we have to. I am struggling to find an example right now but if it comes up other than our standard terrible jokes I will offer it.
Oh, wow, cannot say anymore!
But the babies can do it to us!??!?!:o
Thanks for doing your job, Captain_C. How often do you get the Mongolian spot story?
[spoiler]Every parent of Asian children knows the Mongolian spot story.
My cousin, who is a pediatrician and was the head of the NICU at her local hospital, has two daughters adopted from South Korea. Asians sometimes have the aforementioned Mongolian spots, which are areas of dark pigmentation under the skin. They are harmless, but they can look like bruises. My cousin had her daughter in day care, the day care worker was changing the girl’s diaper, noticed the Mongolian spots, thought they were bruises, and (very properly) called the police to report suspected abuse. The day care worker did not believe what she thought was a lame excuse from my cousin. Fortunately, Asian adoption is common enough in her area that the police had, in fact, heard about Mongolian spots, and were able to convince everyone that there was no abuse involved. [/spoiler]
Regards,
Shodan
The following situation is really mild, but I’d like to know what if anything would be doable:
mother, main caretaker, has a superb reputation in the community, is emotionally abusive and medically neglectful; father is working way too many hours; children have been taught by mother to “never bother daddy” (anything which leads to daddy noticing the children aren’t perfectly cared for leads to hefty punishments); oldest child is the real main caretaker.
Would you be able to get some sort of counseling services going or something, or is it just mild enough that the kids’ only option is holding their breath until they grow up and can get the hell out of Tucson?
Yes, because it’s not intentional.
I know of two different people who have had kids with some sort of condition which makes them extremely sensitive to getting any sort of bang, such that they need to go to the ER if that happens. (I forgot just what it is, but it’s not hemophilia.) These people had to get notes from their pediatrician that they keep with them, such that if they bring their kids in they can show the note and alleviate suspicion.
Speaking as a layperson, I would imagine that the reason for CPS standards is because you have to have evidence of harm. What can you prove, really, without marks? I was subject to egregious emotional abuse as a child that messed me up far worse than the sexual abuse, but it was impossible to prove anything and I understand it is very rare that emotional abuse is considered reason to involve the system. There was physical abuse but I would call it comparatively mild - being held down and slapped repeatedly in the head, for example. Only once did she leave a mark, she scratched my face to bleeding. For the most part it was objects she destroyed in her rage - typically doors, windows, fragile objects in my bedroom, but once shredded the couch with a kitchen knife. In the midst of this was what I can only describe as a pure psychological hell of constant emotional torment. My husband describes it as the kind of treatment that you would give a child if you were trying to raise a sociopath. She would scream insults at me until I cried and begged for forgiveness, and then would mock me for crying. It would go on for hours. And then I would get the silent treatment for up to days, until I said something innocuous to piss her off and it would start all over again. It got to the point where I just started abusing myself, hitting myself in the head with books and things because I didn’t know how else to frame it except I was 100% the cause.
While science has a decent grounding in the very real trauma of emotional abuse, including the impact of said abuse on neurological development, many folks don’t really see the big deal, and they can’t point to a wound as readily as you can to a broken arm or leg. Plus ‘‘emotional abuse’’ can mean anything from passive-aggressive remarks about a kid’s weight, to the kind of thing I experienced, and I’m sure worse exists.
What can you do with that? I often described it as ‘‘My mom yells at me and makes me feel bad.’’ I used to talk to my Aunt about it when I was a teen, and I was under the impression she understood – she certainly validated that my mother was a loon while all of this was happening – but I had a conversation later with her as an adult in which it was clear she had no clue how bad it really was. She was shocked and horrified. So even when I thought I was telling her, I wasn’t really telling her.
At one point my mother threatened to shoot me with my stepfather’s shotgun (the gun was in the next room, she wasn’t pointing it at me, but I utterly believed her when she said she would shoot me with it.) He called social services (my other abuser - he was going to get her out of the picture and have me ‘‘to himself’’ as he explained to both me and my mother) and they told him there would have to be multiple reports before anything could be done. I was between 13 and 15 at the time. There was an incident not long after that where she held a glass bottle to my head and told me she was going to break it over my skull and put me in the hospital. I kinda wished she would, so that someone would intervene at last.
I truly believe there were points in my childhood that my mother could have easily lost control of her temper and killed me. I don’t think it would have been intentional, she was just reckless as hell when she was angry. She was pissed off at my Dad once and announced that she was going to kill herself and jumped in a truck to drive away. I tried to stop her by standing in front of the truck, and she hit the gas, totally intent on plowing right through me. I can’t compare what I went through to what many kids endure, but it also radically altered who I am as a person and left me with a permanent psychological trauma that can never be undone.
But what could, or would, CPS do about it? No marks.
Which reminds me - if I had a nickel for everytime some school staff member interrupted my story to say, ‘‘Don’t tell me any more,’’ because they didn’t want to have to call social services…
It’s funny the prejudice seems to run in the opposite direction (people overreporting) given my personal experience. In my case the system didn’t get involved until I was 17 and that’s because I disclosed the sexual abuse to a therapist. I started talking to a therapist about my Mom when I was maybe 15, and I think he was really starting to catch on to what was really going on, and even named it as emotional abuse, but as soon as my Mom realized I was talking about her, she pulled me out of there immediately. You’d think that would be a red flag in itself.
Sorry - Canadian colloquialism (possibly regional) to mean “many”, since a hockey sock is a long garment and could therefore hold a lot…
Now,
After taking several courses with sexual assault crisis/victim support specialists, I was told that the cases of false rape/sexual assault reporting is on par with most other major crimes, with one exception - custody cases. So much so, that reports of sexual abuse disclosed during custody battles make them very nervous -
Did you find the same? Does it seem to be accurate?
Thank you. I too was baffled. I thought maybe you were dictating to Siri or Alexa or whoever and she/it had a loose wire. The only thing more unreliable than auto-spell check is auto-voice recognition.
It makes perfect sense as a metaphor once you explain it.
Mongolian spot - My agency’s training for new caseworkers specifically discussed Mongolian spots. I don’t know if this was standard or if was just because I worked in NYC.
Emotional abuse - I could get anyone counseling who I thought needed it and agreed to go. If they didn’t agree to go, that was another story. A court was not going to order counseling unless there was an extreme situation that was clearly affecting the children. Not so much because it was believed that emotional abuse was “not a big deal” but because the options for when the parents don’t follow a court order are limited and can be just as traumatic to the child as the emotional abuse.
I did have one case where a child was placed in foster care due to emotional abuse. She was “Cinderella” except that at least Cinderella was allowed to live with her family. As best as I could ever figure out, the stepmother was adamant that her husband’s child with another woman should not divert any of his time or attention away from their joint children and the father was unwilling to oppose her. The child did not live with her father, stepmother and half-siblings - she lived downstairs with her stepmother’s family. Two or three family houses entirely occupied by relatives are pretty common around here, and it’s not unheard of for a child to have a bedroom in the grandparent’s apartment due to a lack of space in the parent’s apartment. They generally participate in family life with their parents and siblings and simply sleep in the other apartment.But this family was the only time a parent ever told me he saw his child a couple of hours a month and explained that the reason was “She lives downstairs”. Or told me he didn’t know his daughter had outgrown her clothes because “She lives downstairs”. I’m pretty certain it was those and similar statements that moved the court to intervene.
Police officers can pretty much say the same thing.
No training on this, but only know about it from personal research. Had a few cases like this. Basically, we waited to see if the bruise would fade. Since it didn’t, we were pretty sure it was a Mongolian spot that hadn’t been diagnosed in previous medical exams. If it had changed shape while we waited and observed over a few weeks, maybe that decision would have changed, but it didn’t. I was glad to run into this early in my career. In a 95% white community, I don’t know how many of my co-workers would have reacted.
Interesting statistic: We had 1,500 or so allegations of Mental Injury in our state last year. 17 of those were substantiated. Mostly because without a therapist saying it is Mental Injury, we got nothing. Take from that what you will. Therapist who won’t put their money where their mouth is? Parent who won’t take the kid to therapy?
My dad got really drunk once and put me in a roasting pan and put matches all around the pan and was putting me in the stove just as my mom walked into the kitchen yelling at him ! I guess if mom came into the room a few minutes later I would had been dead or had third degrees burns over my whole body ! My oldest sister saw this happen and she told me and I wish to hell she never did ! I am very sorry to hear you were so horribly abused too and it left you permanently psychological trauma . 
What… :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
Sometimes the most dangerous situations are ones that essentially are invisible to CPS. I’m sorry that happened to you.
One of my old pals from college became a child psychologist in private practice back in the '80s.
He ended up abandoning that practice and switching to adults plus teaching at the U because he could not handle the horror and futility of spending one hour a week trying to help a kid who was being actively destroyed by the parents the other 167 hours of the week.
It wasn’t that he was unwilling to fight for the kid; there simply wasn’t any legal horsepower there and then. And once the parents figured out the doc thought they were part of the problem, the kid was pulled from therapy and gosh knows what horrors the parents dumped on the kid in retaliation.
Some were truly deliberately abusive. Most just seemed to be a combo of ignorant and temperamentally unsuited to being a parent. Or plain crazy.
One of the most frustrating parts of the job is “shitty parenting or being an asshole is not against child protection law”. We hate it too. At least 75% of my cases are with a parent who has a mental illness.
purplehearingaid, I don’t even know where to go with that. That is horrific. The fact that happened to you, I am sorry, and I am sorry the State failed you. What else can I say other than… WTF…
I wish I could give more insight into specific issues