From: petel@sequent.com (Pete Lancashire)
Newsgroups: misc.kids,alt.dads-rights,alt.child-support,soc.men,soc.women
Subject: Re: Neglected or Abused Children, CPS, Foster Care and Prison
Date: 15 Dec 92 18:35:47 GMT
Article-I.D.: sequent.1992Dec15.183547.8871
Organization: Sequent Computer Systems, Inc.

bobk@dogear.spk.wa.us (Bob Kirkpatrick) writes:

>sbishop@desire.wright.edu writes:

>> Most of the kids I see in our area are not from extremely poor families, but
>> from working class or middle class families that are extremely dysfunctional.
>> Sad to say, abuse is not tied to poverty or lack of money.

This, poor=abuse vs !poor=!abuse is a social problem that I feel is left
over from the days of you just didn't talk about such things. The 13
year old I tried to help this summer is in a middle class family, the
step father could care less, the mother demands her 'quality time'.

In Oregon, the system just does not have time for them. If his family
was on welfare, the 'system' would then get involved. The school does
not have the staff or the training, etc.

>Here in Spokane, we have a majority of a pre-teen placements, but there are
>a significant number of teen placements as well. We find that abuse knows no
>fiscal boundaries --abused children come from the spectrum of poor through
>well-to-do. Neglect cases, however, remain chiefly associated with poverty,
>and are exaserbated by drug use in the home.

You are very lucky, Spokane is not the 'norm' for me.

>The number of people willing to be foster parents is way too low, and CPS
>usually has to go begging to get quality people. (Even in their need, they
>are pretty picky about who they'll take on).

I don't know why either, taking a 'non scientific' sample of my
co-workers, most just would not be interested.

>What often happens will be a placement into extended family, and close
>monitoring of the circumstances. This does raise the workload of the case
>workers, but they do pretty well on the whole. (I say this speaking from
>the position of someone whose job it is to make sure they do the Right
>Thing (tm) by the kids.) 

CPS/CSD/etc. should be picky,

A new way has to be found to 'market' these kids. One thing that is done
in Portland is a local TV station has spots I think are called 'Wednesday
Kids'. These are older kids, give a 1-2 min. talk about the kid, show
him/her etc. I don't know if it works or not. I'd bet most people just
klick to another channel.

>Washington also provides case services. They coordinate assistance from
>private and church organizations and other state agencies. What's kind
>of interesting is that the more affluent the parent in a case is, the
>less willing they are to participate in these services. I'll let a soc-
>iologist figure out why, I just know it happens. Related is the fact
>that there are fewer case reopenings with the poorer people. I say it's
>related because I *suspect* that the extension services have a good
>impact, and are taken advantage of predominantly by the poor.

I don't think it would take much to find out why affluence!=interest,
but If the reason is what I think it is, the sponcer of the research
whoud cover it up. afflence==votes==sales==$$.

One thing is a lot of people feel that since thay have meet some
financial goal, feel that they then have the skills to do anything.

Just throw money at the problem. That the problem I had as a kid,
my parents thought that they could solve my problems by buying books,
taking me to a shrink, etc. etc. they never would admit that they
might have problems as well, they just concluded that I was a failure
and nothing could be done about it.

It looks like Washington could teach Oregon some things.

>--- 
>Bob Kirkpatrick <bobk@dogear.spk.wa.us>
>Dog Ear'd Systems of Spokane, WA 

-pete
Pete Lancashire
petel@sequent.com
Newsgroups: misc.kids