birdwatcher

   Then, on January 31, I was watching the news and heard that a five-year-old girl named Logan Marr had been killed in her foster home.
It was initially described as "an accident, an episode of discipline gone too far."
   I immediately thought of Marie, my first foster child, who was abused badly in the foster home before mine, and of the excuses the social irkers made for it.
   As the days went by, more and more details came out about Logan's death. Foster mom, Sally Schofield, had put her in a high chair for time-out and it tipped over. No wait! Foster mom had duct taped her to the chair and it tipped over. No wait! Foster mom had duct taped her mouth and she suffocated and the chair tipped over.
   Soon videotape was released to the media. It showed the child on her last visit with her birth mother, complaining about mistreatment by her foster mom. We hear a voice on the tape say, "Let's talk about happier things."
   Again, I was reminded of Marie. Every time she tried to talk to social workers about the abuse she had suffered in a past foster home, they replied, "Let's just be happy you're in a better place now."
   Then Logan's mother started to show up on the news. She was young, very sad, but surprisingly articulate. She blamed DHS for her daughter's death.
   The DHS response: "Maybe if you had been a better mother in the first place, your daughter wouldn't have been in foster care and she wouldn't be dead."
   What had that mother done? I asked myself. By then I knew how little it took to lose a child to the system. Could Logan's mother have done anything worse than was done to her in foster care? Worse than murder?
   DHS tried to block that information from ever seeing the light of day. They invoked confidentiality rules every time they were asked, even as they hinted that it was pretty bad. At a training session I went to, the instructor said he knew people in DHS and we would all be shocked if we knew what he knew about Logan's mother.
   I thought back on all the times I asked social workers how Marie could possibly have been better off with her abusive foster parents than with her own parents.
   "Oh, you have no idea," they'd said. "Her parents are terrible people."
   Just as I eventually learned that Marie's parents were nowhere near as terrible as her foster parents were, the state of Maine finally learned the truth behind the Marr case. The media got hold of the charges that had cost the grieving mother her child in the first place. It seems she: 1) moved too much, 2) allowed her daughter to witness her own abuse at the hands of a boyfriend, 3) let the child visit a grandfather who had been charged with sexual abuse of a minor (teenager) 20 years earlier, and 4) let the child get into "Jell-O shots" that were in the refrigerator at a party. It all adds up to neglect and failure to protect.

Pages upon pages upon pages.

Вот хорошая вещь

Вот хорошая вещь

no subject