Children are dead because activists say it’s racist for ACS to act
When a child is found dead with bruises on her wrists and torso, the first💃 question is always: Were there warning sign🧸s?
In the case of 6-year-old Jalayah Eason, the answer is undoubtedly yes.
It wasn’t just the upstairs neighbor who heard the child “screaming for her dear life” and yelling, “Stop, stop, stop!” Who told a ꦯreporter, “You could hear the thumps, bro.”
Nor was it the reports of her 8-year-old brother, who told a classmate that his mother was “whipping him, slapping him.”
Nor was it the school that reported long stretches of absences ꧃by the brother, that he was regularly picked up more than an hour late from school, that he wore the same clothes 👍each day and smelled like urine.
Nor was it the brother who came to school with a bruised and swollen face and told a teacher his mother had punched and kicked hi🌺m for drinking out of the sink.
It was also the worker at the Administration for Children’s Serviಞces who went to the home, heard the boy♔’s account and then listened as the mother explained she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder but was not being treated.
The Administration for Children’s Services is apparently trying to peddle a story that this tragedy is in par🐲t the result of an agency that is stretched too th🌼in.
Accordi𝓡ng to the New York Times, that neighborhood’s “caseworkers have an average load of 12.5 cases, ACS said — about 17 percent higher than the citywide average.”
Never mind that the avꩵerage caseload nationwide is between 24 and 31 children. Or that it is well beneath the Child Welfare League of America recommendation of 15 children per social worker.
Just like smaller class size doesn’t guarantee a better education if the teachers are incompetent or spouting ideologi💎cal nonsense, it has been clear for years that New York City’s child welfare problems do not stem from caseworkers being overwhelmed or children “falling through the cracks.”
Between 2008 and 2020 (the last year for which data are available), the number of deaths of children in 🌸families who had been previously reported and investigated by ACS increased from 49 to 52 even while workers’ caseload plummeted from 18 to fewer than six children per employee at one point.
These tragic situations are often the result of deliberate decisions by agency leaders to leave children ওin ꦦsituations that are unsafe.
There are two narratives driving these decisions.
The first is that ACS is racist. Activists argue the reason black children are placed in foster care more often is structural bias in the system. They want to abolish child p💛rotective services the same way they want to defund the police.
In her speech to fellow CUNY Law graduates last week, Fatima Mousa Mohammed proudly mention𓃲ed her classmates had gone to court to reunite families “torn apart” by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services.
ACS has all but embraced this rhetoric, commissioning a survey of 50 black and Hispanic🧜 employees (in an agency with thousands of employees) that concluded child welfare is a “predatory s🐓ystem that specifically targets Black and brown parents.”
The other narrative is that families are investigated and children are removed from their homes simply because of poverty, a💧nd claiming a parent is engaging in neglect is really the same as just saying she’s poor.
While it is true families involved in the child welfare system are disproportionately poor, correlation is not causation. A recent study of almost 300 California case files that cited neglect, for in💮stance, found 𝄹99% “included concerns related to substance use, domestic violence, mental illness, co-reported abuse or an additional neglect allegation (i.e., abandonment).”
Substance abuse and mental illnesꦅs often lead to poverty. They also make it hard to properly care for ♛children. But that doesn’t mean poverty is the root cause of child neglect.
Agency leaders say they make a distinction between neglect and abuse and u🐽nderstand there are circumstances in which child꧋ren are not physically safe.
But in the case of Jalayah, the evidence forౠ abuse was there. ACS says its caseworker didn’t see vis♌ible signs on Jalayah’s brother, but that’s probably just an indication it took too long to investigate.
It is time for the agency to stop taking its cues from activists driven by progressive ideology and start putting the safety of childrཧenꦡ first.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.”
