(3 of 5)
According to court documents, four caseworkers in Wayne County were confronted at least four separate times with evidence of physical abuse yet failed to remove Daniel permanently from the home. In one instance, when he was found to have a leg broken by twisting and marked with a handprint-shaped bruise, frustrated hospital staff testified that the Wayne County caseworkers only reluctantly ordered the boy placed in foster care. Yet within two months, Daniel was back with his violent stepfather. Around the time that new bruises darkened his face, a caseworker wrote in Daniel's file that "everything was fine." The month before the boy was fatally bashed in the head with a force that the medical examiner likened to being dropped from a three-story building, a caseworker acknowledged that the stepfather had failed to attend court-ordered parenting classes but that Daniel appeared "well and active."
It took a jury only 90 minutes to exonerate the caseworkers. (The parents were convicted in a separate trial.) Outside the Monticello courthouse, a crowd of their colleagues burst into cheers. But the state Secretary of the Cabinet for Human Resources, Masten Childers II, was less partisan: within hours of the verdict, he launched his own inquiry into Kentucky's protective services. While the investigation found understaffing and other systemic inadequacies, its vice chairman, David Richart of the private-sector Kentucky Youth Advocates, acknowledged that the Wayne County workers "missed the obvious signs and pushed family reunification at all costs."
In fact, agencies are mandated by federal law to make "reasonable efforts" to keep children in the families whenever it is safe to do so. This is a sharp departure from the 1970s, when the favored strategy was to remove children quickly from potentially dangerous situations and place them in foster care. But as the national pool of foster homes shrank and the bill for long-term foster care continued to mount, the pendulum swung back toward helping the family rather than breaking it up.
It remains a controversial policy, however, both in the field and among child-welfare experts. "We're not able to do as much as we'd like to protect the child," says Kentucky's Case. "Even though there are cases where we would never want to reunite the family, that has to be our first goal because of the federal mandate. That's just not appropriate when you have severe physical or sexual abuse." Adds Gelles of the University of Rhode Island: "The principle of human behavior is that you predict what they are going to do tomorrow on the basis of what they did yesterday. If somebody has a substance-abuse problem, you don't give him five years and 16 trips in and out of rehabilitation to clean it up while a kid is held hostage in a foster-care system." Dr. Michael Baden, a forensics expert with the New York State Police who has seen too many corpses of battered children, takes an even harder line: "Why do we treat the beating of a spouse as a crime and the beating of a child as something that doesn't require police intervention?"