Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Who will care for these children?
While private and governmental moneies are spent importing international children for adoption, or creating designer babies...to fill the arms of thsoe allegedly "desperate to parent", children like these are left to fall through gaping chasms - not cracks - in a system with more holes than swiss cheese...and few care...
A Tough Road for Siblings Who Survived Abuse
By NINA BERNSTEIN NY Times
In death, they have become indelible symbols of the city's failures to protect the weak from the cruel: Five-year-old Adam Mann, killed by parents for eating a piece of cake in 1990. Six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, battered and burned by her mother in 1995. And now, 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, who the authorities say was tortured over time and finally beaten to death by her stepfather for taking a container of yogurt.
In life, the dead children's surviving siblings are often forgotten. Yet in many ways, their hard journey toward adulthood may show more about the day-to-day problems and progress of the city's child welfare system than the fatalities that capture so much public outrage. Will the survivors find safe, permanent homes, or be bounced fro
m one foster care placement to the next? Will they be kept together, or scattered far apart?
Sometimes, children taken from the most notoriously abusive homes have, years later, come full circle: In the Mann case, the oldest surviving sibling returned by choice to live with his mother, who had served prison time in the death of his abused brother.
For Nixzmary's two surviving half sisters and three half brothers, aged 9 months to 9 years, the journey began Wednesday after their sister's battered body was discovered in their mother's apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. For now, said Sharman Stein, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services, all five of Nixzmary's siblings are in a home in Brooklyn with Spanish-speaking foster parents specially trained to deal with psychologically fragile children.
That they are together reflects an achievement. A decade ago, siblings were as likely as not to be separated. In 2004, sibling groups entering foster care were placed together almost 90 percent of the time.
But the road ahead is long. The plan is to avoid the black holes of the old foster care system, in which damaged children cycled through temporary placements heedlessly - in the case of the surviving Mann siblings, the city eventually paid thousands of dollars in damages in a lawsuit brought on their behalf.
The challenge of healing the shattered lives of Nixzmary's brothers and sisters underscores some of the unmet goals of the new system, which is still struggling to reduce the time that children in foster care wait for permanent homes.
Though details of Nixzmary's ordeal are still emerging, her younger sisters, in kindergarten and first grade, and her older brother, a third grader, have traumas of their own to overcome.
The authorities said the girls had been sexually abused by their stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, and that he punished them in one of the ways he punished Nixzmary, by plunging their heads under water. The youngest boys, Mr. Rodriguez's sons, apparently escaped abuse - part of a pattern of scapegoating that is familiar to experts on child maltreatment.
"It's likely that these children have been terribly damaged," said Marcia Robinson Lowry, the executive director of Children's Rights, an advocacy group. "They now face a foster care system in which the average length of care is four years. So having faced one terrible situation, they may wind up in another."
Some child welfare experts consider the city's child welfare system - overhauled since Elisa Izquierdo's death more than 10 years ago - close to a national model. And even veteran critics like Ms. Lowry, who called the current commissioner of children's services, John B. Mattingly, "the best ever," acknowledge that the system has vastly improved.
But the average length of time it takes for children either to be safely returned to their parents, or to be successfully adopted, Ms. Lowry said, is much longer in New York than in many cities.
Ms. Stein, the spokeswoman for the children's services agency, said the cases of siblings who survived some of the city's worst child abuse fatalities are among the system's greatest challenges.
"What is the future for kids whose own parents have shown in the worst possible way that they are not viable?" Ms. Stein asked. The system has to go step by step, she said: "First, trying to see if there's a good family member to take them, trying to keep siblings together, trying to get them help, and, once parental rights are terminated, trying to get them in a permanent placement."
The story of the Izquierdo siblings, now 12 to 19 years old, illustrates how the bad old days of a chaotic, overwhelmed system can still haunt the lives of children and parents today.
About a month before Elisa's birth on Feb. 11, 1989, child-protection workers found her half sister and half brother neglected and took them from their mother, who was using crack cocaine.
Elisa was lucky at first. She went from the hospital to the custody of her father, Gustavo Izquierdo. But after his death, she was sent to the home of her mother, Awilda Lopez, joining older siblings who had also been returned after Ms. Lopez had drug treatment and settled into an apparently steady relationship with a new man, Carlos Lopez.
Eventually, five siblings would watch helplessly as their parents targeted Elisa, sexually abusing her, beating her and at one point forcing her to eat her own feces.
Ms. Lopez was sentenced to 15 years to life for her role in Elisa's beating death and is still in prison. Mr. Lopez, who pleaded guilty to attempted assault of his stepdaughter, was sentenced to one and a half to three years.
Fewer than 10 percent of foster care cases involve abuse, not neglect, and child homicides are extremely rare. The instability the Izquierdo siblings experienced in foster care is all too common, however. Three years after Elisa's death, the four youngest had moved through four different homes, as ill-prepared foster parents gave up on them.
But now, said Ms. Stein, the spokeswoman for the agency, two of Elisa's siblings have been adopted and are living with a family on Long Island. A third, who does not want to be adopted, lives with them. A fourth sibling is in a separate foster home.
In late 2002, Ms. Stein said, after seven years in foster care, the oldest boy, now 19, went to live with his biological father, who was not involved in Elisa's life or death. Such an outcome after years in care is far more common than the public imagines, experts say, especially when adolescents leave foster care with no other family to call their own.
In the Mann case, too, the oldest surviving son returned to live with a parent, his mother, Michelle Mann, who served time for assault in Adam's death and was released from prison in 1994, according to Ms. Lowry, of Children's Rights. She and his father, Rufus Chisolm, who pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter, subjected all the siblings to terrible beatings that culminated in Adam's death.
The case was the focus of a celebrated "Frontline" documentary detailing how the city had failed to properly investigate earlier reports of abuse and neglect. But years later, as the parents were nearing the end of their prison terms, all but the youngest, the only girl, were still being shuttled from foster home to foster home. Ms. Lowry filed a wrongful-death suit against the city on behalf of the estate of Adam Mann, and won $183,000 for the survivors.
"These are the cases in which intense public scrutiny is focused on child welfare agencies," said Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, which supports programs to keep children safe in their own homes whenever possible. "If those agencies can't even do well by these children, imagine what happens to the hundreds of thousands of children, almost all of them anonymous, taken each year and thrown into foster care."
A Tough Road for Siblings Who Survived Abuse
By NINA BERNSTEIN NY Times
In death, they have become indelible symbols of the city's failures to protect the weak from the cruel: Five-year-old Adam Mann, killed by parents for eating a piece of cake in 1990. Six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, battered and burned by her mother in 1995. And now, 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, who the authorities say was tortured over time and finally beaten to death by her stepfather for taking a container of yogurt.
In life, the dead children's surviving siblings are often forgotten. Yet in many ways, their hard journey toward adulthood may show more about the day-to-day problems and progress of the city's child welfare system than the fatalities that capture so much public outrage. Will the survivors find safe, permanent homes, or be bounced fro
m one foster care placement to the next? Will they be kept together, or scattered far apart?
Sometimes, children taken from the most notoriously abusive homes have, years later, come full circle: In the Mann case, the oldest surviving sibling returned by choice to live with his mother, who had served prison time in the death of his abused brother.
For Nixzmary's two surviving half sisters and three half brothers, aged 9 months to 9 years, the journey began Wednesday after their sister's battered body was discovered in their mother's apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. For now, said Sharman Stein, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services, all five of Nixzmary's siblings are in a home in Brooklyn with Spanish-speaking foster parents specially trained to deal with psychologically fragile children.
That they are together reflects an achievement. A decade ago, siblings were as likely as not to be separated. In 2004, sibling groups entering foster care were placed together almost 90 percent of the time.
But the road ahead is long. The plan is to avoid the black holes of the old foster care system, in which damaged children cycled through temporary placements heedlessly - in the case of the surviving Mann siblings, the city eventually paid thousands of dollars in damages in a lawsuit brought on their behalf.
The challenge of healing the shattered lives of Nixzmary's brothers and sisters underscores some of the unmet goals of the new system, which is still struggling to reduce the time that children in foster care wait for permanent homes.
Though details of Nixzmary's ordeal are still emerging, her younger sisters, in kindergarten and first grade, and her older brother, a third grader, have traumas of their own to overcome.
The authorities said the girls had been sexually abused by their stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, and that he punished them in one of the ways he punished Nixzmary, by plunging their heads under water. The youngest boys, Mr. Rodriguez's sons, apparently escaped abuse - part of a pattern of scapegoating that is familiar to experts on child maltreatment.
"It's likely that these children have been terribly damaged," said Marcia Robinson Lowry, the executive director of Children's Rights, an advocacy group. "They now face a foster care system in which the average length of care is four years. So having faced one terrible situation, they may wind up in another."
Some child welfare experts consider the city's child welfare system - overhauled since Elisa Izquierdo's death more than 10 years ago - close to a national model. And even veteran critics like Ms. Lowry, who called the current commissioner of children's services, John B. Mattingly, "the best ever," acknowledge that the system has vastly improved.
But the average length of time it takes for children either to be safely returned to their parents, or to be successfully adopted, Ms. Lowry said, is much longer in New York than in many cities.
Ms. Stein, the spokeswoman for the children's services agency, said the cases of siblings who survived some of the city's worst child abuse fatalities are among the system's greatest challenges.
"What is the future for kids whose own parents have shown in the worst possible way that they are not viable?" Ms. Stein asked. The system has to go step by step, she said: "First, trying to see if there's a good family member to take them, trying to keep siblings together, trying to get them help, and, once parental rights are terminated, trying to get them in a permanent placement."
The story of the Izquierdo siblings, now 12 to 19 years old, illustrates how the bad old days of a chaotic, overwhelmed system can still haunt the lives of children and parents today.
About a month before Elisa's birth on Feb. 11, 1989, child-protection workers found her half sister and half brother neglected and took them from their mother, who was using crack cocaine.
Elisa was lucky at first. She went from the hospital to the custody of her father, Gustavo Izquierdo. But after his death, she was sent to the home of her mother, Awilda Lopez, joining older siblings who had also been returned after Ms. Lopez had drug treatment and settled into an apparently steady relationship with a new man, Carlos Lopez.
Eventually, five siblings would watch helplessly as their parents targeted Elisa, sexually abusing her, beating her and at one point forcing her to eat her own feces.
Ms. Lopez was sentenced to 15 years to life for her role in Elisa's beating death and is still in prison. Mr. Lopez, who pleaded guilty to attempted assault of his stepdaughter, was sentenced to one and a half to three years.
Fewer than 10 percent of foster care cases involve abuse, not neglect, and child homicides are extremely rare. The instability the Izquierdo siblings experienced in foster care is all too common, however. Three years after Elisa's death, the four youngest had moved through four different homes, as ill-prepared foster parents gave up on them.
But now, said Ms. Stein, the spokeswoman for the agency, two of Elisa's siblings have been adopted and are living with a family on Long Island. A third, who does not want to be adopted, lives with them. A fourth sibling is in a separate foster home.
In late 2002, Ms. Stein said, after seven years in foster care, the oldest boy, now 19, went to live with his biological father, who was not involved in Elisa's life or death. Such an outcome after years in care is far more common than the public imagines, experts say, especially when adolescents leave foster care with no other family to call their own.
In the Mann case, too, the oldest surviving son returned to live with a parent, his mother, Michelle Mann, who served time for assault in Adam's death and was released from prison in 1994, according to Ms. Lowry, of Children's Rights. She and his father, Rufus Chisolm, who pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter, subjected all the siblings to terrible beatings that culminated in Adam's death.
The case was the focus of a celebrated "Frontline" documentary detailing how the city had failed to properly investigate earlier reports of abuse and neglect. But years later, as the parents were nearing the end of their prison terms, all but the youngest, the only girl, were still being shuttled from foster home to foster home. Ms. Lowry filed a wrongful-death suit against the city on behalf of the estate of Adam Mann, and won $183,000 for the survivors.
"These are the cases in which intense public scrutiny is focused on child welfare agencies," said Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, which supports programs to keep children safe in their own homes whenever possible. "If those agencies can't even do well by these children, imagine what happens to the hundreds of thousands of children, almost all of them anonymous, taken each year and thrown into foster care."
# posted by Senior Mom @ 1:34 PM 
