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Lost
Children of Florida and Massachusetts
Serious issues regarding the safety of children at the
Germaine Lawrence School in
Arlington (click here)
Nev
Moore
June 17, 2002
The
disappearance of Rilya Wilson in Florida has caught the attention of
the media worldwide, as well it should. The five-year-old foster
child was missing for 16-months before the state's Child Protective
Services agency noticed that she was unaccounted for.
But let's
not be too concerned about Florida children. On average, DSS in
Massachusetts "loses" around 400 foster children a year, according
to the Legal Services Reporter.
Some, of
course, are found. Like Latasha Cannon, 17, and Kelly Hancock, 14.
The fact that they were missing and unaccounted for by DSS became
known to the public only after they were found murdered.
The
National Runaway Switchboard states that "problems with DSS" are the
third leading cause of children running away. The leading two are
rebelling against parental authority and peer pressure. It's
interesting to note that when children do run away from parental
homes, they are usually rebelling against structure, rules and
authority.
When we
talk to adolescents who run from DSS, they tell us it's due to bad
conditions or abuse in the foster homes -- or the simple fact they
want to go home. It's not uncommon for DSS not to report missing
foster children to law enforcement as they continue to collect
foster care payments and social security checks for their missing
charges. In Florida, they were unable to account for the whereabouts
of 1000 foster children after Gov. Jeb Bush ordered them to account
for all children in state custody. They only reported 155 out of the
1000 missing children to law enforcement.
Infant
Marlon Santos, who mysteriously disappeared from his Worcester
foster home in 1998, was never found. The foster mother didn't
report the baby missing for two days. After the baby had been gone
for six days, DSS informed the press that they had looked back over
the foster parents' history and found "a few unsupported allegations
of neglect." But "the reports were investigated and found to be
without merit," according to DSS spokesperson Lorraine Carli.
Within a
month, foster father Jose Castillo was charged with multiple counts
of child rape of previous foster children. Those were the complaints
that DSS had found "without merit." The Castillos had been approved
as foster parents by DSS in spite of the fact that Castillo had been
convicted of federal drug charges in Florida. They eventually had 51
foster children pass through their home. Of course, the
Massachusetts media let DSS off the hook on that one.
Dialing Into 'Party' Lines
In
Massachusetts, children in the protective custody of DSS run and
become missing simply because no one is watching them and paying
attention to their activities as a parent would. When children are
placed in DSS contracted residential homes they are not allowed to
call their parents. However, the new "in" thing for adolescent girls
in DSS residential placements is to call the Boston party line. This
is a service where anyone can join a conversation that takes place
among many teens on the line at the same time. The conversations
often become sexually charged, amounting to not much more than
"phone sex."
We were alerted to this by a mother whose
13-year-old daughter was in DSS custody at the Germaine Lawrence
School in Arlington. After her daughter told her about the party
line, the mother called it several times and listened in.
Alarmed at
what she heard, she set up her own "sting" operation, keeping her
daughter under surveillance and following her when the girl snuck
out of Germaine Lawrence. She caught her daughter meeting a
35-year-old man who was a regular customer on the party line. He
represented himself to the girls as a young, good-looking guy in
their peer group as he lured them to run away from their DSS
placements to meet him. The girls at Germaine Lawrence who are
calling the party line are as young as eleven.
The other
"in" thing to do at the DSS placements is to pass their 'phone
numbers around to inmates in prison. The institutional homes allow
the girls to accept collect calls from inmates, even though they do
not allow them to call their parents. Germaine Lawrence is just one
of hundreds of DSS contracted institutional homes that are making
millions warehousing children for DSS.
Some
children in state care, like Rilya Wilson, are taken from their
homes for good reason. Their parents are not able to provide a
minimally decent environment based on the parents' conscious poor
decisions, such as crack use.
Other
situations may not be so clear-cut, yet others are blatantly
frivolous and the children should be left at home. Whatever the
circumstances, in cases where children really must be removed from
their homes, we must, at the very least, have a better place to put
them than the environment they were removed from in the first place.
The foster care system has rarely provided that, making it an
exercise in futility, wasted tax-dollars and resources, and, bottom
line - a cruel and dysfunctional system that does children more harm
than good.
Congress and Beacon Hill Are Aware
Your
legislators are quite aware of this disaster for children. Congress
is aware. The major media is aware. They have been for twenty years.
Only the public, whose tax dollars fund this lethal charade that we
call Child "Protection," remain unaware. After all, what an
embarrassment to the government. Twelve billion a year in federal
money, plus billions more in state funding, is being poured into
this system under the guise of protecting children from abuse and
neglect in their homes. How embarrassing to lose them.
The tax
payers might start to kick up a fuss were this to become public
knowledge. They may even start to demand accountability from this
broken system that has never worked, no matter how many billions
we've sunk into it.
While we
all pray that Rilya is safe somewhere, we also pray that this case
will open the media's eyes to the plight of the tens of thousands of
other children taken from their families, many to disappear forever.
No one knows. No one asks. No one demands answers. And, the ones who
are responsible, the social service agencies, never face any
consequences.
I myself
have for years called the plight of America's abused, murdered and
missing foster children, "America's Dirty Little Secret." And a
secret it has remained. The media suppresses it - who cares about
all those poor kids anyway? Liberals don't want to talk about
systemic failure and their flawed ideology. Conservatives are
distracted by other things, and, anyway, a lot of those families
who've had their children taken.well, after all, many of them were
on welfare, so what do you expect? As a politician friend of mine
put it: "It just isn't a sexy issue."
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