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When a mother and father are divorced or separated, and a child
welfare agency removes the children from the mother’s home for
abuse or neglect, an offer of placement to the father, barring
unfitness, should be automatic. Yet according to a new report by
the Urban Institute, few fathers are able to reunite with their
children, who are instead pushed into the foster care system.
The new report, What About the
Dads? Child Welfare Agencies’ Efforts to Identify, Locate, and
Involve Nonresident Fathers, examines the foster care
systems of Massachusetts and three other states. The report
contains a shocking finding: when fathers inform child welfare
officials that they would like their children to live with them,
the agencies seek to place the children with their fathers in
only 8% of cases.
All fit parents have a fundamental
right to raise their own children without state interference.
Moreover, fathers can offer their children a sense of
permanence, security and emotional support that a foster family
(or a succession of foster care placements) cannot provide.
Fathers are also a much better
source of long-term resources and sponsorship. Many foster
children are pushed out of their homes and into a tenuous
existence when they turn 18 and the foster parents no longer
receive state subsidies.
Research shows that fathers matter.
The rates of the four major youth pathologies--juvenile crime,
teen pregnancy, teen drug abuse, and school dropouts--are
tightly correlated with fatherlessness. For example,
one long-term study of teen pregnancy published in Child
Development found that a father's impact is so large
that income, race, the mother's characteristics and a host of
other normally powerful factors all mattered little. What
mattered was dad.
It is true that the fathers of
children seized by child welfare agencies tend to be younger,
less stable and less fit than the average father. They are more
likely to have drug or alcohol problems, and more likely to be
involved in the criminal justice system. Yet behind child
welfare agencies’ disregard for fathers lie two largely
unfounded beliefs—that fathers are often a safety risk to their
children, and that most dads have little interest in their
children.
Our societal image of family
violence centers on abusive men. However, according to the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services' new report Child
Maltreatment 2004, when one parent is acting without the
involvement of the other parent, mothers are almost three times
as likely to kill their children as fathers are, and are more
than twice as likely to abuse them.
Many absent fathers are not a part
of their children’s lives because mothers have driven them out
by denying visitation, moving far away or employing spurious
abuse charges. Some fathers only find out that their children
have been put in foster care when they are hit for child support
to repay the state’s costs. Many had no way of knowing that
their children were in peril. Others were brushed aside by
authorities when they asserted that their children were being
abused.
For example, in one
highly-publicized case, seven year-old Kaili Warrington-Sims was
starved down to 29 pounds and imprisoned in a bedroom by her
mother and her mother's live-in boyfriend before being rescued
by her father, Daniel Sims. The couple had spirited the girl
around New York state and then to Florida to deny Sims access.
Sims struggled through a maze of bureaucratic indifference and
hostility to get to his daughter. He arrived just in time--the
girl would have only lived a few more weeks in her condition.
What About the Dads? makes
it clear that many child welfare workers treat fathers as an
afterthought. The report found that even when a caseworker had
been in contact with a child’s father, the caseworker was still
five times less likely to know basic information about the
father than about the mother. And 20% of the fathers whose
identity and location were known by the child welfare agencies
from the opening of the case were never even contacted.
These policies are seriously
misguided. When a mother is deemed unfit to care for her
children, dad shouldn’t be just one option out of many. He
should be first in line.
This column first appeared in the
Boston Globe (6/8/06).
Jeffery M. Leving
is one of America's most prominent family law attorneys.
He is the author of the book Fathers' Rights:
Hard-hitting and Fair Advice for Every Father Involved
in a Custody Dispute. His website is
www.dadsrights.com.
Glenn
Sacks' columns on men's and fathers' issues have appeared in dozens of America's
largest newspapers. Glenn can be reached via his website at
www.GlennSacks.com or
via email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.
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