What Happened in the Woodshed by Lawrence R. Ricci M.D. & Stephen Ludwig

Author:Lawrence R. Ricci M.D. & Stephen Ludwig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Chapter Six

Failure to Protect: The Taking of Justice

No one in the field of child welfare wants to judge a family as hopeless, undeserving of even the effort of family preservation or reunification services. Yet, sometimes our very hope for preserving or reunifying a family puts a child at lethal risk.

Anyone who has participated in case reviews of how and why children die from abuse soon arrives at the sickening conclusion that the stories are always the same. The same risk factors are present. The same warning signs are present. The same mistakes happen, again and again. Unfortunately, we have not yet figured out how to protect children from severe, often fatal abuse at the hands of high-risk parents.

In 1987, Doctor David Jones, a psychiatrist in the United Kingdom, published a paper that was provocatively titled “The Untreatable Family” (Jones 1987). Jones defined the untreatable family as one where it is, and may forever be, unsafe for an abused child to live. His contention flew in the face of family preservation and family reunifications advocates.

Jones noted that, if a child is physically abused, there is a significant chance of further abuse if left in the same home. Worse still, some families do not respond to intervention to prevent such further abuse. Some of the factors predictive of a poor outcome in his review were severe abuse in the parent’s childhood, persistent denial of abusive behavior, refusal to accept help, severe personality disorder, and substance abuse. All this is made worse if a parent lacks empathy for his or her child. He also noted that severe abuse such as fractures, burns, and premeditated infliction of pain are more likely to prove untreatable. Jones closed his review by suggesting that, if such “untreatable” families can be identified, children can be saved from further abuse as long as they do not remain with those families.

In The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children’s Lives, Richard Gelles, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, described the tragic case of David, an infant murdered by his mother after multiple involvements with the child welfare system (Gelles 1996). Gelles blamed David’s death on the doctrine that social service agencies are required “to make reasonable efforts” to keep an abused child with their parents or, if removed, to reunite the family as soon as possible. He condemned the commonly held belief that children are nearly always better off with their parents if keeping them with their parents puts them at further risk of abuse. He rejected the policy of what he felt was uncritical family preservation and reunification. He argued that child safety rather than family preservation should be the first priority of the child welfare system. He also suggested that more accurate risk assessment tools are needed to help child welfare professionals determine which families pose the greatest risk.

Astonishingly, in the United States, the lifetime prevalence (through age 17) of a child being investigated by the child welfare system is 37 percent (Hyunil et al.

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