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1 Chapter One Introduction: Child Welfare and the Politics of Scandal After one-year-old Ayveionse died in the care of her father’s girlfriend, state officials announced that they were taking a close look at investigative procedures employed by child welfare agencies around the state. Ayveionse’s grandmother said that she had reported earlier abuse to the Department of Children and Youth Services and charged that by failing to protect her granddaughter, “child services is just as responsible for her death.” —(“State Probes Child Welfare Safeguards; ‘Something in the System Is Broken,’ a Department of Public Welfare Spokeswoman Said after the Death of a Harrisburg Toddler,” Harrisburg [PA] Patriot News, May 16, 2009) A state senator called for the state to audit the Department of Children and Families and the Milwaukee Bureau of Child Welfare after the death of 13-month Christopher Thomas at the hands of his aunt, into whose care he had been given by the child welfare agency. His two-year-old sister was also found to have been tortured over many months. The abuse occurred “despite repeated visits” from child welfare workers. —(“The Death of Christopher Thomas; Darling Calls for Audit of Agencies. Legislator Questions ‘Why Children Are Dying?’”, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, January 6, 2009) The Fulton County Office of the Division of Family and Children’s Services [DFCS] came under scrutiny when 16-month-old Amiya Brown died of blunt force trauma to the face and head while in the care of her mother’s boyfriend. DFCS had opened a case on the child nine days earlier after she was taken to the hospital with broken arms and legs. Amiya was allowed to return home with her mother, and at the time of her death, a follow-up visit from the agency had yet to occur. —(“Injuries Noticed before Death; Suspicions at Hospital Didn’t Keep DFCS from Sending Baby Home,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 31, 2008) 2 Chapter One As these synopses of articles illustrate, state child welfare policy is frequently characterized by scandal. When a child is removed from his or her parents only to be abused in foster care, or when a child remains with, or is returned to, his or her biological parents only to be harmed again, the child welfare system can become the object of not only state scrutiny but sometimes national scrutiny. Because of the high visibility of these incidents, observers of child welfare policy commonly make the argument that policymaking is largely reactive—that “child welfare policy is set by a pendulum that swings from crisis to crisis” (Orr 1999, 4). Views on whether this responsiveness to crisis is good or bad vary. Some activists argue that these high-profile cases provide opportunities to introduce badly needed reform. However, some child welfare experts argue that these cases divert attention from the more common problem of child neglect in favor of the much rarer cases of severe abuse. In both instances, however, the assumption is that child welfare systems do respond to scandal. Legal scholars have written extensively on the shift in federal policy away from an emphasis on family preservation toward an emphasis on faster adoptions . These scholars credit much of this shift to the power of crisis to set the policy agenda (Wilkinson-Hagen 2004). They point out that congressional debate over the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 highlighted horrible stories of children who were abused by members of their own family after a social services agency had made the decision to return or not remove the child (Bailie 1998; Brooks 2001; Roberts 1999a). At the state level some observers similarly suggest that child welfare crises result in substantive policy change. Describing high levels of volatility in state expenditures on child welfare programs, an Urban Institute report hypothesizes that this volatility is due in part to the fact that spending levels change in reaction to “media or political pressure following a child’s death from abuse or neglect” (Bess, LeosUrbel , and Geen 2001, 5). Finally, some anecdotal evidence also suggests that policy implementation at the street level is shaped by crisis. In another Urban Institute study that looked at the relationship between welfare reform and child welfare services, caseworkers, the street-level bureaucrats of the child welfare system, reported that “highly publicized child death cases” affected their day-to-day decision making (Geen and Tumlin 1999, 9). Despite the prevalence of this conventional wisdom, however, little work has been done to systematically analyze...

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