AL DAVIS STARES, HIS EYES UNblinking, as Diana Roper talks herself into a frenzy. "I don't know why the tests came back that way. There's no way I'm using now." Already under scrutiny by California authorities for drug possession and leaving her two young children unattended, Roper, 36, knows that her latest drug test, with its traces of methamphetamines, could land her in jail and her two kids in foster care. "They got CHILD ABUSE stamped on my file, and that is not true. I neglected my kids, I'll admit that, but I never abused them." Sitting in a cramped second-floor apartment in East San Diego carpeted with dirty laundry and food remnants, the single mother abruptly changes tack. "What if I go to jail? Who'll take care of my kids?" Davis breaks into Roper's panicked monologue. "I gotta think about this and make some calls, Diana. I'll get back to you."
"Shoot," he mutters as he walks back to his beat-up Toyota. "See, these are the ones." Davis means the cases that despite his 13 years of experience investigating child-abuse cases in San Diego County still poison his sleep and send him off to a therapist periodically. "The ones where the kids have broken bones are easier," he says. In those cases, Davis has little difficulty deciding that the children would be better off in the custody of strangers. But what to make of a case like Roper's? Her seven-year-old son is attending school regularly. Her two-year-old daughter seemed content as she perched on the Naugahyde couch, watching cartoons. And Roper appeared genuinely distraught at the prospect of losing her kids. But what about the drug test? And the presence of a new boyfriend in her apartment? "I don't know who this 'Doug' guy is," Davis says. "The kids are O.K. one day, but what about the next day? I can't predict human behavior."
Yet that is exactly what Davis and the nation's other 33,000 caseworkers are required to do. Dispatched into unfamiliar, often dangerous surroundings, they are expected to make instant predictions about tomorrow, based largely on a sixth sense about the data their five senses gather today. Certainly many people outrank them in the child-welfare hierarchy, yet their views carry the greatest weight. Only they "walk up the drug-filled staircase, sit on the dirty couch and talk to the teenage mother," says Marc Parent, who spent four years as a caseworker in New York City. As the Elisa Izquierdo case demonstrates, "if you get a caseworker who goes to somebody's home and says it's fine, then it's fine," notes Parent. "That's how important their voice is." They get no public recognition when that voice is right and they help mend a broken home or rescue a child from harm. But when a child is killed or injured, they are the first to be second-guessed and blamed.