I remember that Reagan mandated that the emphasis on child abuse cases was to be to keep the nuclear family together.http://www.miamiherald.com/static/media/projects/2014/innocents-lost/stories/overview/index.html
Even in cases where parents can change enough to be fit parents, it might take too much time to avoid damaging their children for life.
If this many children have died from abuse or neglect, far more must be living hellish lives.
Some of the blame lies with the voters who don't want to pay taxes to protect helpless children.
By Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D.S. Burch
Mar. 16, 2014
Fraternal twins Tariji and Tavont’ae Gordon were born together but died two years, eight months and 24 days apart. One was buried in a potter’s field; the other was disposed of in a shallow grave covered by earth, plywood and a sheet of tin.
Tariji Gordon
Read her story →
Tavont'ae Gordon
Read his story →
Tavont’ae, the first to die, suffocated at 2 months of age while sleeping on a couch with his mother, Rachel Fryer, who later tested positive for cocaine. Child welfare authorities took Tariji from Fryer and put her in foster care. Then they gave her back, convinced Fryer had tamed her drug habit and neglectful ways. Three months later, Tariji was killed by a blow to the head.
Fryer stuffed Tariji’s body into a leopard-print suitcase, caught a ride and buried her 50 miles from her Sanford home. The girl’s pink-and-white shoe, an unintended grave marker atop freshly turned dirt, was the only hint of her life and death. She would have turned 3 this month.
The twins joined a sad procession of children who died, often violently, after the Florida Department of Children & Families had been warned, often repeatedly, that they or their siblings could be in danger.
They tumbled into canals and drowned, baked in furnace-like cars, were soaked in corrosive chemicals, incinerated, beaten mercilessly, and bounced off walls and concrete pavement. One was jammed into a cooler posthumously; others were wrapped like a mummy to silence their cries, flattened by a truck, overdosed and starved. An infant boy was flung from a moving car on an interstate. A 2-year-old girl was killed by her mom’s pet python.
The children were not just casualties of bad parenting, but of a deliberate shift in Florida child welfare policy. DCF leaders made a decision, nearly 10 years ago, to reduce by as much as half the number of children taken into state care, adopting a philosophy known as family preservation. They also, simultaneously, slashed services, monitoring and protections for the increased number of children left with their violent, neglectful, mentally ill or drug-addicted parents.
The result: Many more children died.
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The overwhelming majority of the children were 5 or younger, and slightly over 70 percent were 2 or younger — in many instances, too young to walk, talk, cry out for help, run away or defend themselves.
Drugs or alcohol were linked to 323 of the deaths, and yet the state cut dollars for drug treatment.
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Rather than go to court to force parents to get treatment or counseling, the state often relied on “safety plans” — written promises by parents to sin no more. Many of the pledges carried no meaningful oversight. Children died — more than 80 of them — after their parents signed one or, in some cases, multiple safety plans.
• Parents were given repeated chances to shape up, and failed, and failed and failed again, and still kept their children. In at least 34 cases, children died after DCF had logged 10 or more reports to the agency’s abuse and neglect hotline. Six families had been the subject of at least 20 reports.
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Fryer denied she killed her daughter, telling police she found the girl unresponsive and tried CPR and asthma medication, to no avail. However, one of her children told investigators Fryer would cruelly mistreat Tariji, hitting her with a broomstick. Tariji’s father said Fryer forced her to stand in a corner with her arms taped over her head. Three surviving siblings have been sheltered — again — and police reopened their investigation into Tavont’ae’s death.
Fryer, jailed without bond, is expecting another child.
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When 8-week-old Kyla Joy Hall was hospitalized with a bleeding brain and fractures to both legs, both wrists and a foot, police could not determine which of her parents injured her. One thing was certain: Someone had inflicted life-threatening harm on a newborn.
While Kyla healed in a medical foster home, child welfare authorities moved to strip both parents of their rights to her. But when her mother bowed out of the picture — to become an actress — her father transformed, without explanation, from abuse suspect into fit parent. Josi Hall, a Jacksonville firefighter, was awarded full custody despite the misgivings of his own mother.
Ten months later, Kyla’s father viciously attacked her. Her injuries included a “pulpified” liver, knuckle-sized bruises to her chest and, the decisive blow, a cleaved heart that sustained damage similar to “that of a kick from a horse,” an autopsy said.
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After the state outlined its goal of reduced out-of-home care, child deaths spiked
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Over five years, there were four investigations of the household. They alleged the children were malnourished, slept in urine-soaked beds and lived in a home with “cockroaches everywhere.” No one picked up on the degree of child neglect and endangerment in the home. Investigators learned later the three girls were being fed mostly Pop-Tarts, when fed at all, and were held as virtual prisoners in a bedroom, peering out at the world through a window coated on the inside with bugs.
One DCF supervisor suggested that some serious problems might lie behind the squalor, but that possibility was not explored — until the youngest child, Milo, died of malnutrition
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Under state and federal law, removing children from their parents is always a last resort and must be ordered by a judge;
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DCF would get a little more than a 1 percent increase in its budget — if the Legislature goes along.
That would be an apparent change in direction. The DCF budget has decreased in five of the past six years, sometimes marginally, other times by a lot. Including vetoes, DCF saw its budget reduced $100 million in the current fiscal year. It was a time of governmental belt-tightening, but DCF took a significantly bigger hit than the budget as a whole.
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The agency’s revamped child protection framework served two important masters: parents’ rights groups and some children’s advocates, who wanted the state to stop meddling in the lives of families — and lawmakers, who have cut funding for human services for decades. The two forces found common ground.
“Money,” said Dawson, the Orlando judge, “has frequently driven the bus.”
[How the heck could someone be a "children's advocate" and also allow parents to abuse their children.]
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Foster care agencies were “financially punished,” a Dade City judge wrote, if they did not reduce their caseloads.
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“Children under 5 years of age are at special risk of death,” the health department’s child abuse expert, McIntosh, wrote in 2008, because they were often being forced to remain with parents who could not cope with fussy, crying and hard-to-handle youngsters. McIntosh said DCF justified its policy by giving him academic studies that pertained to much older children than those who were being killed.
The step-grandfather of two Santa Rosa County youngsters complained to DCF in 2009 that a caseworker told him his infant grandson would “have to get hurt before anything could be done” to protect him from his mentally unstable mother.
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One supervisor in the Panhandle who studied child deaths for a decade warned her bosses that the department was making the same mistakes over and over, including executing unenforceable safety plans.
“As long as I was in that position, it never changed,” Linda Swan said.
She was laid off two years ago as part of a purge that eliminated 72 percent of DCF’s child welfare “quality assurance” watchdogs.
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