(L to R) Eric Gjertsen from Payday Men's Network, Carolyn Hill and Celyn Camen from EMWM. Credit: Kanya D'Almeida/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
PHILADELPHIA, U.S., Dec 7 2013 (IPS)

Seated at a table in the dimly lit café in Philadelphia’s public library, Carolyn Hill looks no different from her fellow diners. A few minutes of conversation, though, are enough to reveal the extent of her distress.

She is fighting a fierce custody battle against the city of Philadelphia, whose Department of Human Services (DHS) removes more children of colour into state custody than any other city of its size in the United States."All of the services needed to run this operation represent the possibility of huge government contracts for private companies.” -- Celyne Camen

Hill told IPS the only reason she is unable to get back her children is because she is a low-income, single black woman – an analysis shared by many activists and experts working to reunite families torn apart by state authorities. [Read Part One of the series]

On Apr. 3, 2011, DHS Philadelphia placed Hill’s two nieces – one of them aged six months, the other just one-and-a-half years old – in her care, after their birth mother’s rights were terminated on charges of drug abuse.

Barely a year later – while the paperwork necessary to grant Hill status as the girls’ legal adoptive mother was being processed – a social worker from the Lutheran Children and Family Service, a private child support agency contracted by DHS, deemed Hill unsuitable for adoption, or even fostering.

Citing her lack of a GED as grounds for the immediate removal of the children, the social worker took the girls away, without notice, just before the Easter holiday.

“When they came to visit the kids, they would only stay 15 minutes,” she told IPS. “What can you learn about someone in 15 minutes? They call them home inspections, but they are more like home invasions.”

Unaware at the time of her rights as a caregiver and frantic for help, Hill stumbled upon a Philadelphia-based self-help group calling itself ‘DHS – Give Us Back Our Children’ (DHS-GUBOC).

Together with this community of volunteers and legal advocates, she has spent the last two years digging through to the nucleus of a systematic child removal policy in Philadelphia – beginning with overworked and under-qualified caseworkers sitting at the receiving end of child protection hotlines, and up through every level of social workers, agencies, courts and “child advocates”.

Anyone lodging a complaint against a parent need only call one of the many national hotlines, which refer calls to agencies like DHS for investigation.

(Philadelphia DHS did not respond to IPS requests for comment for this article).

Investigating caseworkers can then list the parent in a central register of child abusers based on nothing more than an hour-long interaction with the family.

“In some states, parents can appeal after the fact, in others there is no appeal at all,” Phoebe Jones, a member of the U.S.-wide Every Mother is a Working Mother (EMWM) Network, told IPS.

Once the allegation of abuse has been made, caseworkers can carry out strip searches and enter homes without warrants. In over 29 states, caseworkers are free to “confiscate” a child immediately if the parent resists any of these measures. In the rest of the states, Jones said, caseworkers can ask law enforcement to take the child for them.

Hill lays the blame for her current plight squarely at the feet of her own social workers. She says they were blinded by the fact that she lived in low-income housing, and failed to see that there was always food in the fridge, a home-cooked meal on the stove, and lots of laughter in her home.

“My nieces and I went out for walks together, took naps together, ate together, played together,” she said. “Now they are stuck in a daycare center from six in the morning until six in the evening every day.”

A lucrative enterprise

After fighting for a full year – protesting outside the courthouse, providing endless documentation as proof of her capabilities as a caregiver, enlisting the willing support of her extended family, her church and community – Hill finally managed to extract a retraction from the DHS.

But no sooner was she proclaimed fit to welcome back her children than the Support Centre for Child Advocates stepped in.

Child advocates, according to Celyne Camen of the EMWM Network, are tasked with representing children in ongoing dependency cases.

The advocate’s mandate is to press for what they think is best for the child, regardless of what the child may actually want. In the case of Carolyn Hill, one of the children in question was only 15 months old.

“How can a child of that age be represented by strangers who don’t understand her needs?” Camen asked.

In Camen’s opinion, the board of the Support Center for Child Advocates – which includes Swiss financiers, investment banks like Merrill Lynch, mammoth law firms like Blank Rome and some of the wealthiest CEOs of major drug companies – represents the huge financial incentives powering the child removal/foster care system in the U.S.

“These corporations are very interested in restructuring this particular sector to shift more influence into private hands,” she said. “All of the services needed to run this operation represent the possibility of huge government contracts for private companies.”

Aramark, a facilities management and supply firm, sits prominently on the board of the Support Centre. Among their many clients are 600 correctional institutions to whom they supply “everything from uniforms to pencils”, Camen said, pointing to a continuum between child care institutions and the vast archipelago of prisons scattered across the U.S – not unlike the widely covered “school-to-prison pipeline.”

In addition, added Eric Gjertsen from Payday men’s network, a Philadelphia-based group working with men impacted by DHS’s practices, cash cows also come in the form of parenting capacity tests, anger management classes, psychological evaluations and medical exams conducted by hundreds of private companies.

Todd Lloyd, child welfare policy director of the non-profit organisation Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children (PPC), says housing alone for a single child could cost anything from 10,000 to 66,000 dollars a year.

“Keep in mind,” he told IPS, “that placement costs are not the only costs involved with out-of-home removal – there are other administrative, court and case management costs that come into play as well.”

All told, the finances required for statewide child removal operations grant DHS Philadelphia an annual operating budget of 600 million dollars – “Enough to transform the conditions for many children said to be neglected, along with their families,” Jones told IPS.

Hill says her struggle has put her in touch with dozens of parents fighting for their children. Many of them are juggling large families of five or more kids, and the vast majority report losing their parental rights over minor shortfalls.

“I met a mother whose aunt called DHS on her. When they arrived they didn’t find anything wrong except that the toilet in her house was backed up. But they took her kid away. That don’t make no sense – if your toilet is backed up you don’t need DHS, all you need is a plumber.”

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While only 50.3 percent of Philadelphia’s children are black, they comprise 73 percent of children in foster care. Credit: Bigstock

By Kanya D'Almeida
PHILADELPHIA, U.S., Dec 6 2013 (IPS)

It is nearly impossible in this day and age to turn on the news without hearing about systemic racial discrimination in the United States.

Ample evidence shows that disproportionate numbers of African Americans are imprisoned, subject to police brutality, excluded from employment opportunities and denied decent healthcare, compared to their white counterparts."Thirty percent of foster children in the U.S. could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing." -- Richard Wexler

One government agency has, by and large, escaped such scrutiny. It goes by different names in different places: Child Protective Services, the Department of Youth and Family Services, or the Department of Child and Family Services.

In Philadelphia, it’s known as the Department of Human Services, or DHS, and by its own admission it is responsible for moving roughly 3,000 children in this city of 1.5 million people into “out-of-home” care every year.

According to Todd Lloyd, child welfare policy director of the non-profit organisation Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children (PPC), “The most recent annual data shows 9,205 children entering foster care in [the state of] Pennsylvania, with about 71.7 percent of those children being first-time entries, as opposed to re-entries.”

Lloyd told IPS that Philadelphia County has the highest “placement rate” in the state, with 14 per 1,000 children being moved to out-of-home care every year – over twice the national rate of 6.4 per 1,000 children.

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR), meanwhile, reports that DHS Philadelphia removes children at up to six times the rate of other cities of its size. 

It is not the rate of transfer alone that has families in Philadelphia on edge but the racially lopsided nature of the entire child welfare system: studies show that while only 50.3 percent of Philadelphia’s children are black, they comprise 73 percent of children in foster care.

Officials dismiss this discrepancy with a single explanation: poverty. The poverty rate for African Americans in Philadelphia, according to a survey conducted by Pew in 2013, is 39 percent – exceeded only by the poverty rate in Detroit, Michigan.

Still, to remove a child from his or her home, federal law states that human services agencies must first establish proof of neglect, mistreatment or abuse. [Read Part Two of the series here]

In reality, critics say, this provision is a catch-22 for low-income families. For instance, the state of Pennsylvania’s definition of neglect includes “failure to provide essentials of life, including adequate medical care, that endangers a child’s life or development or impairs the child’s functioning” – in short, a perfect definition of poverty.

According to NCCPR Executive Director Richard Wexler, the correlation of poverty with neglect is so widespread that a full “30 percent of foster children in the U.S. could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing.”

Child protection agencies like Philadelphia’s DHS – which declined IPS requests to comment on the issue – say the vast majority of children removed from their homes were being abused. Indeed, some 3.6 million children were investigated as potential victims of abuse in 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Digging a little deeper, however, the NCCPR found that “2.8 million of those children – nearly four-fifths of them – were subjects of reports that turned out to be false.”

That child abuse is a reality in far too many homes cannot be denied. According to Lloyd, the most recent annual child abuse report issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare found 3,408 “substantiated” reports of child abuse in 2011.

But activists working with families whose children have been taken from them say this data must be carefully examined in the context of racial bias: several studies have shown that toddlers with similar injuries were three times more likely to be reported to DHS Philadelphia if the family was African-American or Latino.

Phoebe Jones, a member of ‘DHS – Give Us Back Our Children’ (DHS-GUBOC) – a Philadelphia-based self-help group coordinated by the Every Mother is a Working Mother Network (EMWM) – told IPS that foster homes have become notorious as places where abuse is rampant.

“In general, children are worse off as a result of fostering,” she said, citing several studies that found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. “The record of group homes and institutions is even worse,” she added.

Earlier this year dozens of families – particularly mothers, aunts and grandmothers – expressed outrage when the United Nations bestowed its prestigious Public Service Award on DHS Philadelphia for its efforts to “improve the outcomes of children in foster care”.

“DHS is breaking up families in this city,” Jones said in a press release back in June. “We want to know why the U.N. gave this award without consulting families in Philadelphia. Did they decide on this honour from conferring with officials at cocktail parties?  We never heard of them conferring with grassroots people impacted.”

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