The journalist Clarence Page once observed that, in ten years, his then three-year old son would be a member of the most feared group in America—the black teenager.
And what if this teenager grew up in the streets? What if he went from foster home to foster home because he was hard to manage even at age seven or eight? Might he be one of those rampaging men who recently terrorized women in Central Park? Too often we hear of children killing children. Or being victimized by biological or foster parents.
There are the good stories, too. Of the loving foster parents who lead children from months of blind alleys. Or of the letter in the newspaper from the now-grown child who gratefully acknowledges his foster mother. Or of the teenager once strung out on drugs, but now ready to graduate from college despite having two babies while in high school. That's the stuff of child welfare services—how to prevent the loss of a generation to the streets, to jail, or to the insecurities of occasional work and poor education? How to achieve maximum success with constrained resources? How to care for and protect the young when much of society devalues and discounts their mothers?
Whether the stories are of havoc in children's lives or of quiet success, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), like comparable departments in every state, encounters it all. They do so with neither the staff, often very young and marginally trained, nor the resources to do the job. They are readily blamed for their failures but rarely noted for their achievements. Every day, child welfare agencies encounter ethical problems that challenge understandings of such concepts as informed consent, confidentiality, and appropriate boundaries between client and worker. Every day, the boundaries between investigation and service challenge case workers. Constrained by regulations and policy preferences, child welfare workers often have few treatment options. Some child welfare professionals suggest that all the regulatory constraints disempower people at the bottom and limit flexibility and creativity. Workers are often unable to recommend what they consider best for the child because of the requirements of laws or regulations. The law, for example, wants foster children to be reunited with their natural mothers as quickly as feasible, but case workers can rarely offer inner city mothers the effective drug treatment that would satisfy the conditions for reunification. Even after reunification, families lack continued support to keep children from being forced back into the system.
For the past two years, the Park Ridge Center and DCFS have collaborated in a pilot project exploring key ethical questions that arise in child welfare work. With limited options at their disposal, how can child welfare workers think about moral issues and moral conflict? How can the department monitor the many private agencies now central to the child welfare system? How can workers with heavy caseloads take the time to reflect about the decision-shaping values they bring to each case? How can agencies and the department address structural and legislative issues while meeting their mandate to help children thrive? This mandate seems simple; in practice, agencies face overwhelming odds.
A twenty-two year-old case worker, to take one example, establishes a strong relationship with a seventeen-year-old mother, but uses poor judgment when she finds alcohol and signs of an unsupervised party in the client's apartment. Her supervisor doesn't catch up with this incident soon enough to use it as a teaching moment, so the relationship between case worker and ward is threatened. Is the case worker letting her sympathy cloud her judgment? How can judgment skills be taught to young workers without jeopardizing good relationships?
The pilot project, which will soon produce teaching videos, will seek funding to undertake the complex task of developing new knowledge, exploring the threats to ethical practice in child welfare services, and engaging in sustained ethical analysis of issues identified by child welfare workers, supervisors, and their critics. Child welfare services hold a sizeable warrant on the future of many troubled children. DCFS and the Center have learned much in the pilot phase of our work together. We look toward a richer and more extensive collaboration.
