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The neglect and abuse of children is the "nation's shame," says Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services. There has been an alarming 25% rise in cases between 1988 and 1993, a year when 2.9 million incidents were reported to child-welfare agencies and 1,028 kids died of maltreatment. At the same time, burnout and budget cuts are steadily thinning the ranks of child-welfare workers, and those who remain are juggling unwieldy case- loads with dwindling resources. In 22 states and the District of Columbia, child-protection systems have been ruled inadequate by the courts and now operate under some form of judicial supervision. Despite that, each Washington caseworker still carries double the 17 cases recommended by the Child Welfare League of America, and at least two dozen caseworkers in one of the department's divisions still wrangle over five cars. In Georgia's Barrow County, the general emergency funds to pay rent deposits, buy milk or fill a prescription usually run out by the middle of each month, and all the mental-health programs have waiting lists. Caseworkers in New York City lack computers; pens, white-out and photocopying paper are also limited. Sometimes, as a matter of policy, they put the phones on hold to reduce the volume of calls.
Training budgets have also been slashed in many jurisdictions, though a grounding in child development, substance abuse and human behavior is essential to making informed judgments. (Some states require caseworkers to hold a degree in social work, but others, such as New York, do not.) Says Richard Gelles, a family-violence expert at the University of Rhode Island: "It is only mildly facetious to talk about child-protective workers being 26-year-old art-history majors with 20 hours of training who do risk-assessment based on how the toys are lined up."
Yet even for seasoned workers such as Davis, the job is a high-wire act. "People who work in emergency response are like the first Marines on the beach: you don't know what kind of situation you're walking into," he says. "You're in a gang neighborhood. You knock on a door and you can find yourself in a room full of people. Maybe the woman has a black eye. Where are the kids? You're keeping real cool, trying to assess the situation." Bernadette Boozer, who works some of the toughest housing projects in Washington, explains that because so many of the families she visits are on federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children, "when you identify yourself as a child-protective person you immediately pose a threat, not only to the children, but a threat to the person's income." Says Davis: "One day one of us is going to get killed out here."
"I know what I'm doing is right and good," says Victoria Case, 26, of Shelby County, Kentucky. "But it's a lonely life as a social worker, because people have a skewed idea of what we do. They think we're baby snatchers." Yet the 1993 case that has left child-welfare workers in her state embittered and defensive was just the opposite: social workers failed to snatch 22-month-old Daniel Reynolds and were subsequently charged with complicity in his murder.