By Johana Scot and Richard Wexler
Special to the Star-Telegram

Posted on Sun, May. 11, 2008

During the Vietnam War, an American major surveyed the ruins of a village and explained that "it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." That same "logic" appears to be behind the decision of Texas Child Protective Services to take every child from the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, not only from those accused of abusing them but from their mothers as well.

As often happens when the topic is child abuse, the debate about the fate of the children is polarized. Some argue that the state trampled on religious liberty and should leave the families alone; others support the decision to take all of the children and scatter them across the state.

Ruth, 34, an FLDS member and mother of four children in state custody, becomes emotional during a news conference outside the Yearning For Zion ranch near Eldorado on April 24. She had been separated from her children earlier in the day.

Neither approach helps children. But there is a third way, and it might be the only way to avoid destroying these children in order to save them.

Everyone knows the allegations about the place the children were taken from. Less is known about the harm of the place they went: foster care. Hard data belie the bromides from CPS about how the children are "doing well."

Our jails, psychiatric centers and homeless shelters are filled with former foster children. A study of foster care "alumni" by Casey Family Programs and Harvard Medical School found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of Persian Gulf War veterans, and only 20 percent are "doing well."

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study compared outcomes for 15,000 children in cases where the decision on removal could have gone either way. That study found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help fared better, on average, than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.

The trauma is so great that even Texas' own star witness, child psychiatrist Bruce Perry, warned against separating the youngest children from their mothers. But Texas CPS did it anyway.

These rotten outcomes occur even though most people in the system mean well.

Removal from a parent is so inherently harmful that even good foster care often can't undo the damage. And not all foster care is good. The Casey alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they'd been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. Many other studies have found similar results, and the record of institutions is even worse.

Although the YFZ Ranch raid is probably the largest mass confiscation of children in U.S. history, and a similar raid on the same sect in 1953 might be the second-largest, the third-largest mass evacuation of children probably took place in Illinois in 2004 -- at a faith-based orphanage housing foster children, a place once touted as a model institution, until news accounts revealed that it was rife with abuse.

As former Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn's "Forgotten Children" reports revealed, the landscape of Texas is dotted with isolated "compounds" where children are at risk of abuse -- but they're some of the very places that the state puts children taken from their parents. Had the people running the ranch in Eldorado really wanted to abuse children, they could have simply called the place a residential treatment center -- and Texas CPS would have looked the other way.

Of course, child abuse is not a feature of every institution. Many try to do the best they can for the children in their care. But more than a century of research has found that, no matter how well-intentioned the staff and how pretty the grounds, the act of institutionalization is itself enormously damaging.

It's been argued that the Eldorado children would fare better because the case is being watched so closely by state and national media. But that attention didn't stop CPS from breaking its promise not to institutionalize the youngest children, or from breaking its promise not to separate siblings.

The problem with foster care

One of the reasons that foster care is so traumatic is the harm caused by multiple placement -- bouncing children from one home or institution to another.

Charles Gershenson, former senior evaluation analyst at the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, has said that once an agency moves a child three times, odds are "you have an agency-made sociopath. This child will never trust an adult again." Many of the Eldorado children already have been moved at least twice.

And even if the Eldorado children get better treatment because their cases are under more scrutiny, that means only that things will get even worse for the typical Texas foster child.

Caseworkers assigned to the Eldorado children have extra-low caseloads. But that means hundreds of other children either are going to go without a caseworker or will get a brand-new caseworker who doesn't know them and is desperately overloaded -- this in a system that, just last year, was regularly warehousing children in state offices.

None of this means that no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. Rather, it means that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in very small doses.

Instead, Texas CPS responded to the allegations at Eldorado with megadoses of foster care, and the children will suffer enormously for it. Rather than erring on the side of caution, Texas CPS made a profoundly reckless decision, throwing the children into a system that churns out walking wounded four times out of five.

The allegations in this case are very serious. The issue is not polygamy -- the issue is child rape. It is likely that some of the Eldorado children really needed to be taken from the ranch. Others probably did not.

In a situation in which the allegations revolve around the rape of young teenage girls, there was time to do a comprehensive investigation and make a case-by-case determination before removing the infants, toddlers and boys. (Yes, CPS is now making claims about young children with broken bones, but CPS acknowledged that it made these claims without such basic tools as X-rays, and doctors unaffiliated with the sect have said the proportion of children with broken bones is not necessarily unusual.)

But now that the children have been taken, there is a third way -- an option in between sending them back to the ranch and continuing to subject them to the risk and trauma of Texas foster care. The state can treat these children, and their mothers, as what they really are: refugees.

The third way

Both mothers and children have suddenly been transported into a world so different from what they are used to that, for some, it's like another planet.

Something similar was endured by the "boat people" who fled Southeast Asia 30 years ago. Some boats were attacked by pirates who raped the women and children. But when these refugees finally reached our shores, no one was so unspeakably cruel as to suggest that the children should be traumatized by being taken from their mothers because those women could not stop them from being raped.

Instead, families were resettled together. Each had an American "sponsor" family that led them through the adjustment to a new world. Churches and social service organizations wove a safety net around these families, keeping a close eye on them and helping with any problems. Several families were relocated into the same neighborhood so they could gain support from one another.

The children of Eldorado, and their mothers, should be treated the same way.

Of course, the two situations are not identical. For starters, the refugees wanted to leave their homelands. But that only means the trauma for the women and children of Eldorado will be greater.

Some argue that even though not one mother has yet been accused of abuse, some might have condoned or aided abuse by the men. These are the same sorts of claims used all over the country to tear children from battered mothers. They are accused of being "bad mothers" for being unable to stop the abuser from attacking the children, or even for "allowing" the children to "witness domestic violence" when they themselves were beaten.

But when a child really has been abused, taking her or him from the non-offending parent actually is even more traumatic than when the child never was abused at all. The child feels that the abuse must have been her fault -- why else would she be "punished" by being taken from her mother?

It is likely that most of the women of Eldorado either didn't know the alleged practices on the ranch were abusive or had no way to stop them. There is a reason why a book by an ex-sect member is called Escape.

Indeed, when it comes to the women, Texas has drawn some arbitrary distinctions.

A 17-year-old mother is considered a victim herself, and her children are allowed to stay with her and be comforted by her when they need her most. An 18-year-old is deemed a suspect, and her children are punished by being taken from her.

It's also been claimed that the mothers are impeding the investigation, and the children need to be taken from them in order to make it easier to get their stories out of them. If the children were with their mothers, there would be no need to rush. Now that Texas CPS has the children, the agency can hold them for as long as a judge allows. That means no matter how long the children and their mothers stuck to a phony story that CPS didn't believe, the children still would be safe, because they'd remain away from the alleged abusers. The children would not go home until any such ruse ended.

And the "get the story out of the children" argument doesn't explain why even children barely over the age of 1 were taken. Memo to Texas CPS: You might be able to get a toddler to talk, but you can't get him to say much.

We've even heard it argued that if the children were left with their mothers, they might sneak back to the ranch. But the ranch probably is under surveillance, and the FLDS women are nothing if not conspicuous. In any event, when the odds of such a bizarre scenario are compared with the odds of harm in foster care, it's no contest. Children are more likely to try to return to the ranch -- by running away -- if they are deprived of their mothers.

If we really want to put the children first, we need to find a third way: We need to put them with their mothers.

Read the studies online

To learn more about the studies cited in this essay:

Casey "alumni" study: "Improving Family Foster Care: Findings from the Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study," www.casey.org/Resources/Publications/NorthwestAlumniStudy.htm

MIT study: "Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care," www.mit.edu/~jjdoyle/doyle_fosterlt_march07_aer.pdf)

Texas comptroller's "Forgotten Children" reports:

www.window.state.tx.us/forgottenchildren

Johana Scot is executive director of the Parent Guidance Center in Austin ( www.parentguidancecenter.org). Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform )

http://www.star-telegram.com/245/story/634733.html

Emphasis added by H4K Editor