New York City Gets Tough On Child Welfare
If you want to start a firestorm, forget the matches. All you really need to get a spark is to say you are going to do something about child welfare.
Want proof? Since Lisa told you a few months back about how UNICEF's child welfare stance favors anything but adoption, her post has been read more than 600 times. UNICEF sees its work as benevolent; its critics, like Elizabeth Bartholet, the founder and director of Harvard Law School's Child Advocacy Program, see the opposite. Here's what she wrote in an article just published in the Georgia State University Law Review:
Opposition to international adoption cannot be justified based on any best interest of the child principle, despite the claims of many children’s rights organizations. Instead it is grounded in a group of commonly shared but deeply flawed ideas about children and the role of the state, and driven by adult agendas that are not truly informed by children’s interests.
Now, it's New York City's turn to stoke the debate on what is in the best interest of a child--but from a completely opposite point of view. Stung by a string of high-profile child abuse cases, the city enacted in late April a law to speed the removal of children from troubled homes. The city's not-unreasonable position is that children born into homes that have already been flagged for child abuse problems are at substantial risk and should be placed in safer foster care.
Foster care in New York City is far from perfect. The city, like many places around the country has difficulty recruiting parents that won't be solved by a $75,000 donation from Wal-Mart. But those limitations are a poor justification for keeping children in biological homes that are incapable of or unwilling to provide for their well-being.
But predictably there are groups that see New York's law as government at its high-handed worst. According to a report today in The New York Times, the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform--a critic of foster care in America--called it a "confiscation-at-birth policy." The Child Welfare Organizing Project, a New York City-based group that says it is dedicated to child welfare reform there, waived a red flag for the law to be litigated as a violation of civil rights.
And they don't seem to have even discovered that UNICEF has its headquarters in New York City.
Image credit: Microsoft ClipArt
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It is incredibly hard to
It is incredibly hard to have a child removed from an abusive home in our state because there are not enough foster parents. However if they are found in a home where someone is cooking meth, they are removed immediately. In a previous job I had to call Child Protective Services fairly frequently, but must admit, that I failed in getting even one child taken from their abusive parent in almost a year. Horribly depressing.
Lisa
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury
What about the child's civil rights??
"The Child Welfare Organizing Project, a New York City-based group that says it is dedicated to child welfare reform there, waived a red flag for the law to be litigated as a violation of civil rights."
I will never understand why some groups care more about the civil rights of the abusive parents than they do the civil rights of a child. Doesn't every child have the "civil right" not to have his bones broken and/or be raped in his own home?
People who abuse children do so because the children are there. There is not something "special" about one child that elicits abuse that will not happen with another child. My abuse began when I was around 18 months old. Same story with my younger sister. Abusers repeat their patterns.
I am baffled as to why any group would believe that a person would abuse one child and then be a great parent to a second child ... or third or fourth or fifth. That seems extremely naive to me.
- Faith
++++++++++
We must BE the change we wish to see in the world. - Ghandi
Children really need to be a
Children really need to be a higher priority in this society.
Seriously, it's ridiculous. You have so many kids out there who need care all around the world and what happens?
It all gets bungled! It's so illogical. I don't know why it is that folks have to havef such outmoded concepts when it comes to children. Do they even live in this real world?
At the risk of sounding insensitive, I don't CARE about the rights of parents who blatently abuse their children and will abusve another one born to them.
I care about the children who end up traumatized for life if they survive because of how they are treated in this illogical system.
I agree
Call me cynical, but I think the bottom line is that kids don't vote and abusive parents do. Also, our laws are set up so that children are more like property than people. It's sickening.
- Faith
++++++++++
We must BE the change we wish to see in the world. - Ghandi
I was hoping that had
I was hoping that had changed decades ago.
What needs to happen is a reform of the foster care system...
Then tackling the plight of children in other parts of the world.
Maybe both could be done at the same time.