“No One Knows What Could Be Happening to Those Kids”
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Some might suggest that the reason for this low number of full-scale investigations is that CPS is inundated with false or unfounded reports—the kind of reports, for instance, filed by parents who level child abuse allegations against their ex-spouse to win divorce or custody cases. Not so. In the past thirteen years, the number of children living in Texas has shot up by 16 percent, to 5.5 million. Of those, 1.5 million—more than 25 percent—live in poverty, which child abuse experts say is where most abuse and neglect occurs. It is no secret that rampant use of drugs like crack cocaine has also led to the greater deterioration of families. CPS reports that nearly 900,000 Texas children were at risk for abuse or neglect in 1998, a 7 percent increase over 1992.
The first warning bells about Texas’ child abuse crisis were set off last year by state district judge F. Scott McCown, who oversees many of the child-welfare cases for Austin and the rest of Travis County. While flipping through some old records, he noticed that in 1985, when the state’s child population was just under 4.8 million, CPS officially designated 62,233 children as abused or neglected. How, he wondered, could the number of children being abused have dropped from 62,233 children in 1985 to 44,536 in 1998? He then discovered that the number of potential child abuse cases assigned for investigation was also dropping steadily year after year. In 1993, 21.91 cases were investigated for every 1,000 reports made. But in 1997, only 16.93 cases were investigated per 1,000 reports. Upon further examination, McCown realized that CPS caseworkers in Texas were not removing children from abusive or neglectful environments as often as caseworkers in other states did. Texas ranked thirtieth in “removals,” taking a mere 7,723 children out of their homes—a far cry from California, which had 26,987 removals. If Texas had just raised its numbers to the national average, an additional 5,897 children would have been removed from their homes.
What was going on? How could it be that, while other states were increasing their investigations and confirming a larger percentage of cases of abuse or neglect, Texas’ CPS caseworkers were doing fewer investigations, confirming a smaller percentage of those cases, and then not removing enough children from potentially life-threatening circumstances?
The answer, of course, has to do with money. Texas ranks near the bottom of the fifty states in the amount it spends per capita for child welfare, and CPS officials are consistently told to cut their budget. Often that means cutting staff, since salaries and benefits are a particularly juicy budget line; in fact, CPS has fewer staff today than it did in 1995. The agency’s increasingly heavy workload compounds the problem. Not only is CPS charged with investigating cases, but also it is legally required to supervise all of the children it takes out of abusive homes and places in foster homes or with extended family members or close friends. In 1997 CPS was responsible for 23,595 children, nearly 15,000 more than in 1985. As a result, most of its money is spent on taking care of them, leaving less available every year to investigate the predicaments of children in need of help but outside the system. CPS is now little more than a leaky rescue boat, according to Judge McCown, “so heavily loaded with children . . . that it moves slowly to the scene of the next crisis and once there has little space for new passengers.”
What’s more, the department’s triage policy simply isn’t working, for as any CPS staffer can tell you, it’s often the smaller cases that quickly escalate into disaster. Some of the kids who are dying or showing up in emergency rooms with their bones broken have been the subjects of previous CPS investigations that were closed too early. Others are not saved because overly stressed caseworkers are starting to make mistakes. In Kingsville last June, a twelve-year-old boy was beaten to death with a belt, a hose, a board, and a rock by his father and stepmother. His body was found on the bathroom floor, covered with fire ants. The local CPS office had been informed about the allegedly abusive relationship, but as one CPS official admitted, the young caseworker who went to the house “didn’t see the bruises on the boy or have time to double-check answers or talk to other people about what they knew. He didn’t do any follow-up.”
Sadly, critics say, this is the rule rather than the exception. The policy of the state of Texas is, in effect, to put the safety of our at-risk children in the hands of young, typically inexperienced caseworkers who earn an average of $23,000 a year. And they do the most mind-numbingly difficult job imaginable, as I learned when I spent eight months following around Randy Shell’s Unit 25, one of three investigative units that cover Travis County. I wanted not only to see the kinds of challenges the unit faced but also to assess its ability—or lack thereof—to make a difference in the lives of children at risk. “There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t ask myself if this is the day a kid dies from my unit,” Randy told me not long after I met him. “It’s happened to me before, and I know how quickly it could happen again.”
THE BABY GIRL WAS LYING ON A WHITE table, her bruises shining like freshly washed plums under the hospital lights. Unit 25 investigator Christine Cheshire sucked in her breath as she listened to a nurse read from a chart. The girl, fourteen months old, had a large lesion on her chin, a burn on her shoulder, three bruises on her back, one bruise on her chest between her nipples, and more bruises on her arms, thighs, and buttocks. There were lesions in the area of her vagina that could not be explained. Her left leg was fractured in two places; one of the fractures was several months old. She had sustained retinal damage in her eyes that was consistent with shaken baby syndrome. A CAT scan revealed a bleeding bruise to the brain.
“It’s amazing she’s alive,” Christine said when she called Randy Shell. She tried to keep her composure. “The mother says she thinks the baby-sitter did it, and the baby-sitter says she thinks the mother did it.”
“Anybody else saying anything?”
“Nothing.”
It was late August, one month after Randy had assigned the cases involving the crack-addicted mother in the motel, the child left outside at night with the potato chips, and the little girl hiding in the drainage ditch. When I asked him what had come of those investigations, he paused. “Sorry,” he said. “We’ve had so many cases come through here since then that I have trouble remembering all of them.”
As it turned out, they’d been lucky in July. After two full days of searching, caseworker Jackie Rowe had finally found the motel where the mother was staying and persuaded her to let CPS move her two children to their grandmother’s home. “But to tell you the truth,” Jackie told me, “it’s probably going to be a matter of days before the mother realizes that CPS has filed away her case and goes back and gets her kids. And then, eventually, one of us will get another report about her.”
To help the teenage mother who was about to be released from the hospital with no clear idea how to care for her newborn, Randy had called his longtime contacts at other county agencies and arranged for social workers to be brought in to watch over the child. Still, on her off days, caseworker Reneé Munn was dropping by the house, just to say hello. “In a few weeks the social workers are going to leave that mother with the baby,” Reneé said, “and she is going be alone with that child.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“We have to cross our fingers and hope for the best.”
As for the girl in the drainage ditch, Stephanie Fambro tracked down the girl’s mother—she was in a tattoo parlor—then pointed her finger at her and told her to find relatives who would keep the child after school.
And Christine’s case of the two young sisters, one of whom had cigarette burns? She was able to get the courts to temporarily remove them from their home until the parents had gone through CPS-sponsored counseling (a three-hour session with a psychologist) and a series of parenting- skills classes. She had found the girls space in the usually packed Austin Children’s Shelter, which provides living quarters for abused kids who have no other place to go, and for a few minutes, before heading off to another case, she had sat with them in the kitchen of the shelter, watching them eat sliced peaches. They kept putting down their spoons and smiling at her. “Sometimes you try to tell yourself it’s all worth it, you know?” Christine said that week. “You think that, just maybe, you did something to make their lives a little better.”
