Protecting Children, or Pretending to Protect Children?

After a career as a child protection social worker, I have been doing foster care with my wife for the last three years. We have taken in children of all ages, but in the last year we have specialized in babies. We made that choice because we found that our own six children are not threatened so much by babies as they are of children closer in age to themselves. Also because we like to adopt, so we take children who someone in the system believes will become available for adoption, because it appears that the parental rights are headed for termination.

We currently have a precious little girl who is now 6 and one-half months. She has been with us for two and one-half months. Her mother is an exotic dancer with additional experience in the cooking of crystal meth. Her father is a man with a long criminal history. She was removed from the home after her father was arrested for domestic violence and her mother received a broken nose from the baby's macho dad.

After going through the intake process, which invoved several caseworkers, she was assigned to an "on-going" caseworker. That caseworker and the lawyer (Guardian ad Litem) appointed to make sure that the case served the best interests of the child, actually took their charge seriously. They were determined to see changes in mom along the lines of sobriety and an ability to provide safe living conditions for her daughter. Likewise, they were determined that the father would show evidence of learning that beating the crap out of mom was a stupid way to show his manhood.

Suddenly, the caseworker quit and decided to go home and take care of her own babies.
A different caseworker received many of her cases, plus some from another worker who had quit. Gone was the determination to protect the innocent baby. The new worker appears to be a go along and get along type person. A caseworker who truly insists on protecting children faces many obstacles and conflicts. The way to advance in the system is not to make many waves. The system is not about protecting children. The system is about pretending to protect children, while making sure that not too much money is spent on protecting the child and providing needed services to the child to bring her up to where she needs to be developmentally.

So now we have a foster family, each of whose eight members adores and is bonded to the baby, a baby who is wonderfully bonded to each member of the foster family, and a Guardian ad Litem, who we hope is still committed to protecting this baby. We shall see what we shall see.