Trish Ploehn, the Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, will step down from her post, according to the Los Angeles Times.
It was through Trish’s DCFS that I learned what foster care is. The myriad errors that break children and the myriad miracles that make some successful despite incredible odds. Initially, I was like most, easily angered when I heard of the failings of the system. But then I learned that all systems have their failings and that this system was going up against the largest failing of them all. The failing of parents who abuse and neglect their own; the failing of us to create a society where all children are safe.
Last week, I visited with a unit of DCFS emergency response workers in Glendora. These are the people who go into broken homes, unarmed and try to first keep families together and then if left with no option have to lift children up and out of their biological homes. They were a strong bunch, everyday seeing the worst that the world can dish out: parents who hurt their own children and every day going back out, clear-eyed, facing this evil and trying to work past it. It was a room full of heroes; that is without question.
This was just one of many groups of workers who all reported to Ploehn a woman who had, like them, come up through the ranks.
Not knowing the full circumstance of Ploehn’s removal, I can only offer what I do know. Under her watch the number of children in care was dramatically reduced, sparing thousands of children from the trauma of removal. She was the architect of a culture shift that compelled social workers to toe the scary line between the safety of foster care versus the value of leaving that child in a family home.
“This is not the easy route,” Ploehn wrote in a letter to her workers announcing the end of her tenure. “But it is what we know to be best for the children and families we serve. And this is the work that needs to be done moving forward – ensuring that each and every child in our County truly enjoys a sense of wholeness, of the security that comes with being a member of a safe, strong, loving family.”
From the outside things seem black and white. But we as a culture left those hard decisions to the workers under Ploehn’s watch. They were the ones who had to decide whether a child was safer in his or her family home or in a foster care system known to be imperfect. As one worker told me “the only way they [the children] would be safer is if we slept in the homes with them.”
But the workers don’t sleep in broken homes and humans have the capacity to act horribly. Whenever that happened, we looked for someone to blame. Too often that was the Department and its head. Now she is gone. Without someone to blame, maybe it is time we all ask what we can do to help our collective children.
-Daniel Heimpel
Fostering Media Connections (FMC) is a project of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI). FMC harnesses the power of journalism and media to drive public and political will behind policy and practice that improve the well-being of children in foster care.
In the United States of America our child protection industry is engaging in Medicaid fraud, racketeering and human rights abuses. We have granted the child protection industry unlimited power to remove children from their families on the basis of suspicion alone. There is no system of accountability or oversight in place to deter this. Its mission of protecting children has been undermined by a criminal element. We are allowing criminals to use child protection for their own greed and personal agendas. It has to end.
Child abuse is a crime. It is assault, rape, torture, starvation and homicide. It is violent crime and the evidence is obvious. There is no mystery to it. We must bring science, logic and reason back into the way we handle violent crimes against children. We must base our statistics on scientific evidence, not mere accusations. We must remove the perpetrator, not the child.
We are accusing our citizens of crimes without the use of forensic evidence and denying them due process in a criminal court of law. We are tearing children out of the arms of their mothers and fathers, and their extended families without evidence of a crime. We are warehousing children in foster homes and facilities across the nation without evidence of a crime. We are allowing these children to be exposed to sexual abuse in the custody of the states. We are allowing these children to be used in servitude in the custody of the states. We are allowing these children to be brutalized and murdered in the custody of the states. There are children aging out of foster care into homelessness and crime. Our prisons are filled with children who grew up in foster care. It has to end.
Taking children for profit and abusing them in state custody is not what Walter Mondale had in mind when he signed CAPTA into law in 1974. It is not what Bill Clinton had in mind when he signed ASFA into law in 1997 and it is not what Hilary Clinton had in mind when she wrote “It Takes a Village.”
These leaders entrusted our professionals working within the child protection industry with the resources to protect abused and orphaned children. It was a noble gesture. But child protection let us down. They failed to fulfill their promise to our children, our leaders and to our great nation. They engage in egregious violations of law and human rights abuses. The industry has been taken over by criminals who have no decency or integrity. They have crossed the line. They have turned child protection into a national disgrace and it has to end.
We can’t reform an industry that commits atrocities against children. We must start over with new ideas and a completely different approach. We must change the way we think about child abuse and child protection. We must focus our efforts on helping impoverished families build better lives for themselves, not try to turn a profit on human suffering. It is not only impoverished families who are being subjected to brutality. It is any family who can’t afford a costly legal defense against this brutality that is now vulnerable. Your family could be next. It has to end.
If we tear down the child protection industry and return to the practice of criminal investigations under due process of law in criminal court, the number of cases will drop dramatically. We will have the resources we need to help our impoverished and save billions of tax dollars at the same time. We must do better than this for the future of our nation.
We must free our mandated reporters from the threat of losing their licenses if they don’t report their suspicions. Let them go back to healing, teaching, protecting and serving without this constant threat hanging over their heads. We must trust that they are competent and intelligent enough to make a distinction between crime and poverty.
We are turning neighbor against neighbor, family against teachers, doctors, police officers, politicians and our country by allowing the criminal element in child protection to continue on this course. It has to end.
I encourage every American to join together to:
1. Call for an immediate nationwide moratorium on all child abuse investigations that do not use forensic evidence;
2. Call for the immediate transfer of power from child protective services to a division of law enforcement specializing in investigations of violent crime. These investigations must include the use of forensic evidence, and must be conducted independently of anyone working within child protection or in the promotion of child protection, with no financial incentives for taking children whatsoever;
3. Call for immediate state and federal investigations of every organization affiliated with child protection and family court across the nation for the crimes of Medicaid fraud, racketeering and all other crimes, including crimes against humanity;
4. Call for the return of children to families who were accused of crimes and denied due process in criminal court keeping in mind that some children may never be going home.
5. Call for a repeal of CAPTA to end mandated reporting and the child abuse hotline and end the practice of central registries for all cases not proven in a criminal court of law.
Keeping kids in families that will eventually kill them must be cheaper. Why she’s still employed anywhere is a mystery.
Disregard the ‘apologists’ for Trish Ploehn. She was the consummate ‘INSIDER when she took the job. Any true outsider with professional pride and who gave a sh*t about children would have been appalled by this REAL WORLD Administrative Nightmare inherent in LA County DCFS CORPORATE CULTURE.
She had 7,500 employees – the second largest government bureaucracy in LA County after the LAPD! And she failed kids that needed protecting and persecuted innocent families to get the numbers of seized / kidnapped kids to justify the federal monies to pay for this Beast including the parasitic rubber stamping Dependency Court and foster care system it feeds.. DCFS openly stated in January 2009 THAT IT WOULD N LONGER FACILITATE FAMILY REUNIFICATION SERVICES!
This is Fraud. This was an open defiance of court orders for reunification of families with their kidnapped kids.This place is a perfect storm of managerial tyranny and malfeasance coalesced with Union protected technocrat social workers who donate BIG $$ to the LA County Board of Supervisors. (Gee, smells like a CONFLICT OF INTEREST, doesn’t it ? Supervisors regulate and oversee an agency whose unionized members donate big money to their re-election for life campaigns?) Ms. Ploehn and her cronies mistake was getting caught in covering up state law mandated report on data on child deaths and abuse within the LA County DCFS system.
Where are the criminal charts Mr. DA and Ms California Attorney General? Hey! Big Secret… THE SYSTEM IS STILL IN PLACE! Nothing is changed.