On The Welfare of Children
All across the country – from Florida to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and over to California – there are controversies brewing about how well child welfare agencies are doing to protect children at risk for abuse and neglect. My take on it is that, literally all things considered, they are doing pretty well.
This phrase “all things considered” is crucial in any conversation about this because most of us do not know what to consider. We do not know what consideration to make for the overburdened caseworkers. We do not know how to consider the magnitude of the shredded social contract that we, as a society, have abrogated with the poor in our midst. And we certainly do not know how to consider factors like high school dropout rates, and multi-generational incarcerations, and babies having babies.
So, instead of considering all things considerable, instead of doing the heavy lifting of renegotiating a social contract that supports the common good, as a society we lazily recoil into the disingenuous language of “accountability”. We do what societies have always done when they are unwilling, or unable, to acknowledge that they have allowed the binding social structures and nurturing relationships that feed and support their society to erode and degrade well past any semblance of a tipping point. We blame. We focus on the last set of fingerprints to touch the catastrophe – the social workers and child welfare workers, and the agencies themselves.
Yet, who among us has met a social worker who chose the field because they lacked all hope for the future? Who among us knows a child welfare worker who is apathetic about the welfare of children? Probably none of us has.
At the same time who among us knows a child welfare worker who is bone tired at the end of the day? Who over time begins to succumb ever so slowly, fighting every inch of the way, to the cynicism and hopelessness that surrounds them all day long? Probably all of us.
In a sense working in child welfare agencies is a bit like working for the phone company or the Post Office– the stakes are higher to be sure, but the measure and methods of accountability are not all that dissimilar. There was a time, long forgotten now, when a person would pick up a telephone and listen for a dial tone and then begin dialing. There was a time when people would drop a letter in a mailbox and have no idea how long it would take to arrive at the destination, or if it would arrive at all. Those times are so long ago that such memories will die with the earliest of the boomers.
Now, except for some major natural disaster like an earthquake, or hurricane and the like, the land line telephone system’s dial tone is up and running for all but less than four seconds a year. More than ninety percent of all domestic first-class mail arrives at it destination in four days or less. Our stories, though, are different. More dramatic, more conspiratorial. The phone line needed to make an emergency call was dead. The check that never arrived, and so on.
Technological systems as they mature become more predictable. One day soon dropped cell calls will be as rare as no dial tone. Human systems, infinitely more complex human relationships, do not necessarily share this evolutionary pattern that we have instilled in our cybernetic brothers and sisters. For certain, we do develop systems to predict behavior, especially on a large scale. Modern pollsters and marketers are testament to that. On the level of the individual, however, such tools are rudimentary at best.
There was a time not so long ago, perhaps three or four generations ago, when news of a dead infant was hardly news at all. There were too many mouths to feed, and so infants were abandoned – the whole was greater than the one. There were mythical explanations for such things as SIDS, and seizure disorders. Actually, in some parts of the world that is still the case. Today, in this country anyway, the death of an infant is news, often big news. And that is a good thing.
Modern child welfare workers are professionals armed with many assessment tools backed by years of solid research. They are well trained, and are earnest about their work. But not unlike medicine, their expertise is as much or more an art as it is a science. They sometimes must follow a hunch, even as they analyze the data. And they often have to make incredibly difficult decisions in unimaginably difficult situations. They must find this particular child at risk of drowning, a child who is swimming in a sea filled with thousands of other children all barely able to swim. And when that child’s hand slips from their grasp, rather than saying: What happened? What can we learn from this? How can we tighten our grip? we ask instead: Who is to blame? Why did you let this happen?
When these children die, it is often those working in the system who mourn most deeply for their loss. They often have fabricated loving and caring bonds with those children. Yet, who cares for them? Who comes to them and puts their arms around them to console them? Who sits with them to witness as they grapple with their guilt? Who listens with compassion as they sit with their grief? Who heals their wounds? Probably none of us.