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Children
of the State
Trapped
in the System
Once in the system, virtually every family is chained to a mental
health plan — in which children must undergo treatment and parents
must admit guilt regardless of circumstances.
David and Teresa Rodriguez learned the consequences of bucking the
system when, in 1998, the state of Utah seized all four of their
children, ages 8 to 15, for a second and final time — ending a
two-year battle.
The trouble began in 1996, when the parents took action to meet the
educational needs of the children, starting with oldest son Erick, who
was years behind grade average, and daughter Jetaime, who had severe
learning problems. Jetaime also complained of molestation by a school
official, which the parents reported to school authorities. David and
Teresa obtained approval for homeschooling, to which they added
younger siblings. Jessica, who showed signs of poor progress, and
Christopher, who had been diagnosed autistic.
The parents said they requested that the Salt Lake City School
District provide special education services, but were refused. They
sought a competent mental and academic assessment of each child so
that their needs could be met. That brought them to the state mental
health system at Valley Mental Health and affiliated University
Neuropsychiatric Institute in Salt Lake City. From that point, there
was no turning back.
The assessments were completed and recommendations made. According
to Teresa, psychiatric drugs were to be tried on Christopher until one
“worked.” She was told she would have to monitor her son closely
for manic attacks, heart trouble and other complications from the
drugs. The boy was also to be placed in a special class although
Teresa was told it was unequipped to deal with autistic children.
Psychiatric plans involving drugs were also recommended for the other
three children.
Failure to “Cooperate”
The Rodriguezes refused the plans, not wanting to place their
children on dangerous psychotropic drugs. Instead, “we insisted on
actual educational services they [the state] are required by law to
provide, and which they also get federal funds to provide,” said
David. The bottom line, they charge, is neither Valley Mental Health
nor the public school system wanted to foot the bill for the
children’s educational needs.
Discouraged, the Rodriguezes applied for Social Security benefits to
send the children to private facilities, following a recommendation of
one of the evaluating doctors.
Teresa said she and David were warned by workers on their case that
if they failed to “cooperate,” Utah’s Department of Child and
Family Services (DCFS) would be called upon to take the children. They
were accused of isolating and environmentally depriving their children
— a charge aimed at their homeschooling, which commenced only after
the older children were failing in public school. They were also
accused of making their children mentally ill in order to receive
money — although they received no benefits, and only considered
asking for them after it was recommended by a state employee.
Law enforcement officers stormed the Rodriguez home in December
1996, taking the four terrified children into custody. According to
Teresa, force was used on them, including pepper spray to compel
8-year-old Jessica to let go of her mother.
A judge found the seizure unwarranted and ordered the children
released to their parents. The children, however, were not released,
and the matter was put before another judge who overturned the ruling.
“We became prisoners of Utah,” said Teresa. “Unless we
admitted to medical and educational neglect we were not guilty of, and
agreed to a DCFS treatment plan, we wouldn’t get our kids back.”
According to the Rodriguezes, their public defender threatened to quit
if they refused to take the proffered course of action. Thus, while
informing the court they were being forced to take action against
their wishes, David and Teresa admitted guilt and were reunited with
their children.
The Rodriguezes made plans to move to Arizona, where Teresa’s
parents lived, and obtained court approval to leave Utah to buy a
house. After exhausting most of their life savings, they re-started
their life in Arizona in 1997.
“The kids were all in school and really doing well. They had a
great home, and a wonderful life. There was nothing more important to
us,” Teresa said.
“They Just Expect Us to Go on”
But back in Utah, the assessment was far from wonderful. The
Rodriguezes said their public defender quit before filing for
termination of Utah’s jurisdiction over their case, which they did
not learn about for a month. The new defender refused to request such
a termination, wanting the family back in Utah instead. A false report
was lodged in the system that the Rodriguezes had fled Utah, and in
October 1997 a warrant was issued to pick up the children. Teresa and
David reported to local Arizona officials, and reportedly were
promised that the order would not be honored.
That promise was shattered at 2 a.m. on March 6, 1998, when Arizona
law enforcement officers, acting for the state of Utah, entered the
Rodriguez home, seized the children and handed them over to Utah
authorities. Teresa’s parents sought but were denied foster parent
status for the children.
“I’d rather the judge had executed us that day than take our
kids away. My kids are my life,” said Teresa. “They took my life,
and they just expect us to go on.”
The family has never been reunited, except for brief, supervised
visits by the parents. The four siblings were separated. According to
the Rodriguezes, the children have told them of abuse and deprivation
in their foster homes, and of being denied the right to practice their
Catholic faith. The oldest daughter ran away and has not been heard
from in months. The parents said they have been unable to attain any
report on son Christopher for months and suspect he could be severely
harmed or worse, dead.
The Rodriguezes are victims of a provision of Utah’s Child Welfare
and Reform Act of 1994, which allows the DCFS to effectively terminate
parental rights simply because the parents failed to comply with a
mental health treatment plan. Under the act, there is no need to prove
the children are in danger or that the parents are incapable.
Utah families other than the Rodriguezes say they were destroyed
under similar circumstances. Attorney Michael Humiston filed a $500
million class-action suit in 1998 against Utah Attorney General Janet
Graham and several other state officials, with five families as
plaintiffs. The lawsuit claims that the families were terrorized,
“torn asunder” and “deprived of their fundamental rights without
due process of law.” According to Humiston, the amount of damages
sought in the lawsuit is equivalent to the amount of child welfare
subsidies received by the state of Utah between 1994 and the time the
suit was filed.
Double Standard
Legal action for restitution of abuses in the system is increasing
as more families, family advocates and concerned professionals are
able to make facts known and provide the necessary network of support.
But authorities agree that preventive action is critical to stem the
tide of children needlessly being forced into the system.
Studies cited by the Family Advocacy Center report that children are
as much as 10 times more likely to be abused or neglected in foster
care or state institutions than in their own homes.
Though CPS agencies and the child welfare system claim to operate in
the best interest of the child, and many of their employees and
workers earnestly do try to do so, evidence reveals an alarming double
standard between what is considered acceptable child rearing when the
child is in the home as opposed to when the child is in the custody of
the state and placed in a group home, psychiatric institution or
foster home.
A series of bills known as the “Children’s Bills” introduced
in the state of Colorado in 1996 illustrate the problem. One of the
bills sought to protect children by removing them from the home if it
was even suspected that neglect or abuse might occur at some
point in the future. However, this legislation also proposed that
if those same children were placed in a psychiatric institution or
other state facility and actually harmed or abused, the facility would
be given 90 days to develop a plan to stop the abuse and 120 days to
implement it.
Though the legislation failed, case histories and investigations
suggest the child welfare system operates on this double standard. In
each of the cases investigated by Freedom, ample evidence
existed that the parents had not placed their child in danger.
Needlessly removing the child from the home did.
Deaths of children in psychiatric institutions became a national
issue during 1998 and 1999 after the Citizens Commission on Human
Rights, an international psychiatric watchdog group established in
1969 by the Church of Scientology and professor Dr. Thomas Szasz,
began investigating lethal abuse of restraints and turning evidence
over to media and authorities.
The Hartford Courant published a five-part investigative
report in 1998 documenting deaths by restraints of 142 patients across
the country in psychiatric hospitals, group homes and residential
youth facilities. Ages could be confirmed in only 114 of the cases; of
those, 26 percent were children — nearly double their percentage in
mental health facilities. Further, the actual number of deaths in such
facilities under the same circumstances, according to an independent
study conducted by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, is likely
between 50 to 150 per year — or one to three deaths every week.
Spanking a child can land a parent with charges of abuse. However,
in most of the cases reported by the Courant, little to nothing
was done to the individuals and facilities responsible for actual deaths.
Reports of deaths and severe abuse of children in foster care have
also been receiving increased attention.
In 1999, Colorado undertook reforms for the care of children in
state custody after four children under the age of 2 1/2 died in
foster care homes. In two of the cases, charges of child abuse were
filed. In a third case, a foster mother’s boyfriend was charged with
murder after he fractured a 14-month-old child’s skull. A state
report noted that in one foster home, the children were abusing each
other.
Abuses and dangers to children in the system have prompted
investigations and demands for reform in California, Florida and other
states.
Emotional and Physical Abuse
A prevalent danger is that many facilities for children in state
custody or foster homes try to placate children with heavy
psychotropic drugs, often just to make them easier to manage.
“When taken from the home, a child suffers trauma and begins
misbehaving in the foster home,” said Suzanne Shell from the Family
Advocacy Center. “Social services does not recognize this and says
it is from the trauma suffered at home. So when the child gets out of
control, they put him on drugs,” worsening the situation.
Children under the influence of psychiatric drugs have suffered
drug-induced psychosis, hallucinations, abnormal heart activity,
uncontrollable tremors, liver problems and other “complications,”
including death.
Judges in Los Angeles County were so concerned about the wholesale
drugging of children in the system that they implemented a program
which requires each psychiatric diagnosis and prescription be reviewed
by the county psychiatrist before court approval. It does not,
however, appear to have helped. A 1997 Los Angeles grand jury reported
that an audit of 158 cases found that in nearly half of the cases the
children were drugged without the required legal consent.
An in-depth investigation conducted by The Los Angeles Times in
May 1998 found that thousands of children in state foster or group
homes were being administered powerful psychiatric drugs, mostly for
the purpose of making the kids easier to manage. In Los Angeles County
alone, dependency court judges approved requests to medicate 4,500
children in one year.
The Los Angeles County’s child protective system came under
renewed scrutiny and criticism in January 2000 in a report issued by
the LA County Board of Supervisors-appointed Foster Care Task Force.
The task force, formed after an alarming increase in deaths of
children in foster care between May and August 1999, charged that
safeguards are lacking and that children in foster care have no
greater protection than other children in the community.
Laws which provide
for automatic termination of parental rights generally
assume parents are guilty until proven innocent, and
place the burden on parents to prove they are fit to
raise their children – as opposed to the state
to prove that they are not.
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The problem is not unique to Southern California. In Florida,
between 1997 and early 2000, child abuse investigators found evidence
of abuse or neglect of at least 55 children in state-licensed
psychiatric treatment centers, with many of the victims being in
foster care – removed from their homes for purported abuse, only to
suffer real abuse at the hands of those charged with their safety and
well-being.
Even with legal consent for drugging, however, the problems are far
from alleviated. Any psychiatrist, whether government-appointed or
not, by nature of his training and profession is likely to lean toward
prescribing children drugs — a tendency which is increasingly coming
under scrutiny as unproven and highly dangerous. The very problem of
overdrugging in the system stems from psychiatrists, thus any review
or oversight by psychiatrists to curb the problem is unlikely to
produce much result.
Information on the full extent of drugging and abuse in custody care
is murky due to a lack of reporting rigor. The Federal Child Abuse and
Prevention Act of 1974 was amended in 1996 to include, among other
things, a provision requiring annual reports by states on certain
categories of events that happen to children in custody, including
abuses and deaths.
“The improvement was only on paper,” said sociologist James
Roger Brown. “What I have found in trying to collect the reports
that are supposed to be produced, is that no one has actually produced
any of them.”
Suzanne Shell added, “When a child is abused in a foster home or
in an institution while in state custody, the state investigates
itself. That is something we cannot tolerate.”
Restoration of Rights
Family advocates are presenting evidence to state and federal
representatives and urging that a congressional investigation be
called toward the end of revamping the laws governing child protective
agencies and child welfare.
High on the list for reform are state codes which provide for
automatic termination of parental rights. These generally assume
parents are guilty until proven innocent, and place the burden on
parents to prove they are fit to raise their children — as opposed
to the state to prove that they are not.
“It is a fantastic breach of due process of the law,” said
attorney Michael Humiston, who refers to Utah law which allows the
state Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) to terminate
parental rights merely because parents have failed to comply with a
DCFS “treatment plan.” The state neither has to prove a child is
in danger from the parents, nor show the parents are incapable.
“When children are removed from homes, parents are often effectively
charged with child abuse,” he said. “Yet they are given none of
the due process protections given to other persons accused of
crimes.”
Further, state employees involved in removing children from homes
and caring for them once in state custody enjoy immunity from
prosecution. Eliminating such immunity is a key step in righting the
wrongs, according to Shell and Brown.
“Each individual worker has to be held accountable for what they
do to the children and the family — for their action or for the lack
of action they take that is harmful,” Shell said.
Until such reforms are widely adopted, the rights of countless more
families like the Chaplins, Castillos and Rodriguezes will
disintegrate in a system being abused by those who do not have the
best interests of children at heart.
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