It has been quite a long time since I last posted here. It is no coincidence that the last post was announcing that I was beginning to represent children and indigent parents in care & protection ("C&P") actions. My experience as privately paid counsel in such cases did not prepare me for the accelerating floodwaters of the new C&P cases being filed by the Department of Children and Families. I have been incredibly busy maintaining my private practice and expanding my work into this new area of social justice.
While there are excellent, caring individual social workers and attorneys who work for DCF and are seriously committed to protecting children and families, many are jaded, cynical and burning-out. Children are being taken for insufficient or barely sufficient reason because DCF as a state organization is afraid to be seen as not doing enough; services aren't sufficiently (or at all) provided, especially to address underlying problems of homelessness, unemployment, mental health issues, and lack of transportation; and cases are rushed to the 'termination' (adoption or guardianship) court track having been pushed there by external pressures having nothing to do with the case at hand. Social workers are overwhelmed by their caseloads, often so large as to be in violation of their union contracts. Even the adversarial nature of the C&P case undermines the interests and abilities of parents to work with DCF.
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| Photograph by Mark Wolfe (FEMA) |
There are no easy answers. I can tell you this, from my brief experience over the past year - more and more children are being permanently removed from the custody of their parents because the root of their problems is that their parents lack stable housing, employment, and access to transportation. No judge would say,
or (I believe) would ever think, that 'This parent has no home, no car and no job - you are therefore unfit.' But homelessness, unemployment, and no transportation leads directly to showing up late for DCF visits; to having already-limited housing options disappear because so many areas of Massachusetts lack public transportation; to lacking access to basic hygiene, so parents are forced to appear slovenly or smelling of cigarettes, alcohol or pot (not necessarily their own) to DCF appointments where they are observed and noted as such by their social workers; to lacking access to communication, which means being handicapped in any job search; and to experiencing a disastrous peak in the basic stressors of daily living - resulting in mental health crises and addiction relapses.
Parents and children whose family is displaced are experiencing a hurricane-level trauma. Their family home (metaphorically speaking) has been smashed. Then they are expected to rebuild their home when all the Commonwealth and DCF can offer them is a garden trowel and point them to the hardware store. Is it any wonder that many, many parents' homes are not rebuilt under such conditions?
