(4 of 5)
Even when "family preservation" is the right goal in theory, caseworkers say, it is becoming increasingly difficult to enact, owing to wholesale cuts in the programs they use to shore up a household in crisis. Drug and alcohol counseling, mental-health services, emergency housing funds, day care, homemaker assistance and parenting courses have already been scaled back in most places, and may disappear entirely under the legislation that Congress is considering, which would also slice up to $2.9 billion more from child-protection services nationwide. Republican cost cutters insist that the states can do more with less. "A lot of these agencies built the bureaucracy and have trouble dismantling it," says Florida Republican Representative Clay Shaw, "but the states can't keep up with the red tape, the regulations and the reports they have to file." Child advocates disagree. "What do you think it means to cut back on protective services?" asks Gail Nayowith, executive director of the Citizens' Committee for Children in New York. "It's like calling 911 and having the ems dispatcher tell you, 'I'm sorry, but we've already come to your neighborhood once this week. You'll have to wait.'"
Victoria Case knows that family violence demands immediate action. Last week she was trying to ensure the security of a woman named Sandy and her three children. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Sandy's husband Bruce beat her up, blackening her eyes and breaking her nose. At Case's urging, Sandy has obtained a restraining order against him. But now, having observed many battered women, Case is worried that Sandy's resolve is flagging. "The kids love their daddy," Sandy insists. "He's really a very good person."
Yet Sandy has told Case that Bruce twice fired a shotgun in the house, once while four-year-old Charlie was seated in Sandy's lap, another time as eight-year-old Amber huddled in a closet. "I have a problem with you putting your children at risk with this man," Case tells her. "Your little girl is way too O.K. with this, and that's not O.K. She thinks this is a way of life, and she'll find a man who hurts her too." Sandy agrees to send the two youngest children to her mother's home.
After two years on the job, Case, who has a joint psychology-law enforcement degree, makes $19,100. (Caseworker salaries in big cities average about $37,000.) A single mother, she is on call 24 hours a day and gets no reimbursement for the $5-an-hour baby-sitting fees she incurs responding to an emergency. She logs more than 1,000 miles on her car each month, and the 22ยข a mile she is compensated barely covers the costs of gas, let alone the wear and tear on her 1983 Toyota Corolla. Yet she is indefatigable. "Every night when I'm driving home, I think, 'Are all my kids safe? Will they stay that way until tomorrow morning?"' Case says. "If not, I turn around and head back to the office."