Suffer the children: how government fails its most vulnerable citizens - abused and neglected kids.

• Author: Stoesz, David

Wearing suits and solemn expressions, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the city's commissioner of the Administration of Children's Services recently held a press conference to announce the suspension, for 30 days without pay, of the caseworker and supervisor who had mishandled the Elisa Izquierdo case. Elisa was the six-year-old Bronx girl whose grotesque life and death prompted outraged headlines last November. She had been forced to eat her own feces; she had been sexually abused with a hairbrush; her mother had used her head as a floor mop.

Most maddening of all, city officials had repeatedly been warned by neighbors and school officials that Elisa was in danger, yet they had allowed monitoring of the household to lapse. "It's about time that people be held accountable for their actions, their negligence, and probably even worse than that," the mayor said. "It's the only way you're going to build accountability into the system."

Giuliani had it right. Despite more than 24 deaths of children whose cases were supposedly being monitored, no child welfare employee had ever been dismissed or even suspended by the city. In the wake of Elisa's death, the Child Welfare Administration refused to answer questions about the services it had--or had not--provided the Izquierdo family. When journalists and city officials finally penetrated the wall of confidentiality, they found that the agency mandated to protect children from abuse was incapable of doing so.

On average, two children died from abuse and neglect in New York each week. A review of child fatalities by the city's public advocate concluded that "in one third of the cases CWA's own neglect either allowed or contributed to the tragedy." A subsequent state audit found more bad news: In one of five cases child protection workers failed to interview all children in an allegedly abusive family; in two of five cases, workers didn't examine previous reports of child abuse. Nearly a fifth of cases were closed prematurely despite the of risk of future abuse.

The need for accountability is obvious. But at the same time, in pinning the blame on individual employees, we may be missing the forest for the trees. Yes, caseworkers are often poorly trained or underqualified; considering the job description--low pay and daily exposure to profound cruelty--that's not surprising. But most child welfare workers aren't uncaring or indifferent, and they aren't necessarily incompetent. They're simply overwhelmed. The problem is less individual misfeasance than institutional breakdown.

And it's not just the Bronx. In virtually every metropolitan area, services to abused children are in the process of collapse. By early 1996, the public services to care for children had so deteriorated that child welfare agencies in 21 states and the District of Columbia were under court supervision. (Washington, D.C. got its court-appointed receiver when child welfare workers were unable to locate one in four children in foster care.)

In 1995, the U.S. Advisory Commission on Child Abuse and Neglect placed the number of child deaths attributable to abuse and neglect at 2,000 per year; of those, most are under the age of four. Together, battering and neglect by parents are a leading cause of death for young children in this country. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the number of children abused or neglected annually has more than doubled in the past decade--from 1.4 million to 2.9 million.

No government function is more crucial than protecting those who cannot protect themselves; no members of our society are more vulnerable than children. Yet few government services are in as much disarray, and as starved for resources, as child welfare services.

Some of the problems, such as archaic and overlapping bureaucracies and a shortage of good applicants, are all too common to city government in the '90s. But piecemeal policymaking at the federal level has also saddled the system with too many cases--and too few funds. Child welfare efforts have been further distorted by political pressures that have elevated preserving the family above protecting the child.

The result is an overloaded system in which too many children are consigned indefinitely to the purgatory of foster care--or are returned to...