-=> Quoting Sondra Ball to Robin Arnhold <=-
Hi, Sondra,
  > SB> Words With a Friend's Adopted Child
 > SB> by Sondra Ball
 
 RA>I think that little girl is very lucky to have you for a neighbor;
 >otherwise, I do not think she would ever have a chance to learn anything
 >about what it means to be an Indian.
 
 SB> It's interesting that this adoption is one of the few times that I
 SB> have "approved" the adoption of a small Indian child by whites, simply
 SB> because the child protective services had so blundered the case, that
 SB> by the time the adoption issue arose, it really *was* the kindest thing
 SB> to do for the child.    This child was taken from her mother,
 SB> and placed with them at birth.  The child protective services were
 SB> right in taking her from her mother.  Her birth mother is truly crazy,
 SB> and has spent most of her adolescence and adulthood in mental
 SB> hospitals.  She is schizophrenic, and often hallucinating.  When the
 SB> little girl was born, the doctors lay her in her mother's arms, and her
 SB> mother threw her across the delivery room.  So the social worker put
 SB> her in my friends' home; did an initial contact with the birth father,
 SB> who signed release forms (and didn't want her); and then dropped the
 SB> case.  She lived for a couple of years with my friends, who kept asking
 SB> the social worker to procede with termination of parental rights of the
 SB> mother, so the child could be placed for adoption.  The social worker
 SB> was "too busy" with other cases, and the child was "in a safe place",
 SB> so nothing was done; No relatives, not even the grandparents, were
 SB> contacted at this point, although that would have been the normal thing
 SB> to do in a foster care placement.  Grandparents, aunts and uncles often
 SB> take in their relatives.  
Yes.  One of the ladies I work with adopted her niece and nephew and is
raising them by herself.  One of my friends arranged to raise her
cousin's children when her cousin was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
One of Mom's good friends raised her daughter's children after her
daughter passed away.  So this is very common.  It would seem to be a
common sense idea for social workers to routinely look to see if there
are relatives willing to raise a child or even shelter a child
temporarily, not to mention that in this money-conscious era, it would
save a lot of taxpayer dollars.
 
 SB> In any case, the kid was a couple of years old when the child
 SB> protective services finally made their first moves to terminate
 SB> parental rights, was three by the time the courts completed the
 SB> termination, and by that time a strong bond had formed between the
 SB> foster parents and her; so it really did seem right to keep her there.
One of the problems with the adoption system is that it was set up years
ago when unmarried women who had babies wanted to hide themselves from
any moral stigma, so the birth records were sealed and all contacts with
the birth family rendered virtually impossible.  I think this needs to be
rethought so that a child need not be routinely completely severed from
his or her kindred.  
 SB> All of that could have been avoided, however, if the courts had placed
 SB> her for adoption at six to twelve months, as they should have done.
A lot of times this doesn't seem to happen.  Debbie, my neighbor next
door, has been a foster mom for over fifteen years now.  Over the years,
she and Vic have adopted two of their foster children.  They want to
adopt a third child, who has been with them since birth.  The little
girl, whose name I can't remember offhand, is three-four years old and
the social service agency still hasn't moved on terminating parental
rights.  Good grief!  This little girl was a crack baby who was given up
at birth by her biological mother.  There is no reason for waiting this
long to terminate parental rights.
 
 SB> The result is one more genocidal move in a genocidal society.  But I
 SB> honestly don't think the social worker was thinking genocide.  I think
 SB> the social worker was incompetent, did to this kid what she has done
 SB> to others, and will do to others (except most of these kids she's doing
 SB> it to are white or black, and not as isolated from their cultures.)
I would also toss plain ignorance into the picture.  There are a lot of
different cultures making up society in the US and they tend to have
widely differing views on adoption.  Some believe it doesn't matter who
adopts a child as long as that child is raised in a loving home.  Some
believe in the statement 'we take care of our own', some view a
mixed-blood child as an unwanted outcast, others do not, etc., etc.  I
doubt if social workers are taught that there are such cross-cultural
differences and that these differences need to be taken into account.
I consider this a glaring omission, but in some sense hardly surprising.
This year they offered a class in cross-cultural communications at work
for the very first time.  About half a dozen people signed up for the
class, so they postponed it from June to August in hopes of getting a
few more people.  A few days before the rescheduled date, one of the
people in the human resources department called to say that they had to
postpone the class again because the instructor had cancelled out and
they were having trouble finding a replacement.    
 SB> However, incompetency isn't the only answer.  One thing I'm
 SB> learning,
 SB> now that I'm working more closely with the child protective services
 SB> of this county, is how very, very overworked they really are. The
 SB> office is severely understaffed.  Case loads run 200 to 1000 kids,
 SB> sometimes more. When people resign from a county board, it may be
 SB> months, or even a couple of years, before the state will approve a
 SB> replacement worker. Our county is curently three social workers short
 SB> in the child protective services division, and can't get the state to
 SB> approve more hirings.  Most of the social workers work far in excess of
 SB> 40 hours a week, for no extra pay.  Most of them really care.  There's
 SB> some truth to her statement about this small Indian child.  The social
 SB> worker *was* too busy, and the child *was* safe.
Child protective services are required by law to investigate every report
of child abuse and make decisions about whether or not to leave the child
in the home, etc.  Doctors, nurses, and the schools are required to
report every instance of suspected child abuse to the child protective
services for investigation.  Considering the rising social sensitivity to
abuse issues, it's no wonder the social workers are overworked.  I do
think organizing files properly would help--establishing a time frame in
which various actions should be taken and then flagging files so that
they can be given at least a quick glance at the appropriate time to see
if the action appropriate to that time frame should be taken.  The
problem is, such things tend to look like they'll take a lot of time and
tend not to be attractive to overworked people, but they actually save
time in the long run by moving things along.
 
 SB> It's downright frightening.  Social workers pull kids out of good
 SB> homes on heresay, and fail to act in truly atrocious cases.  
What's more, people end up in jail for child abuse when, in fact, child
abuse has not occurred or if it did, somebody else did it.  Oftentimes
this is because social workers and investigative personnel are too
overworked to examine cases thoroughly, but I also know of a number of
cases where the accusation was the result of a grudge.
Take care,
Robin
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.20
---------------