It hurts me to see people in high positions who are responsible for child protection make claims that there's nothing to see here, things are just fine, child protection is working as it needs to ("Counties are committed to safety of kids," April 25).
There is very little fine about it, and by accident or by design, information about it is hard to find and rarely published. By almost any measure and from my perspective over many years as a volunteer guardian ad litem within the system, there are not enough resources, record keeping is poor, child protection cases need to be over the top to get into the system, and children stand only a small chance of getting what they need to recover from the years of abuse and neglect they have suffered.
Things have gotten worse since Minnesota went from screening out one-third of the cases to screening out two-thirds. Screening out 90 percent of cases (as four Minnesota counties do) is a very big deal.
Abused and neglected children have no voice. They are invisible, silent, until a mandated reporter makes a report and it is recorded somewhere (and the report is not ignored or discarded) or until a baby is found raped or killed and makes the paper. Thank you, Brandon Stahl, Star Tribune reporter, for "7 of 10 abuse calls not checked" (April 20). The discrepancies between counties when it comes to child protection are a very serious matter. It's not OK to leave children in dangerous homes. It's cruel.
Former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz's statements that "90 percent of the youth in the juvenile justice system have come through child protection services" and "the difference between that poor child and a felon is about eight years" are still true today.
Social workers, educators, foster and adoptive parents, and others working with abused and neglected children work with the training, resources and support that they have. Short them, and we short children.
While counties offer services to some of the two-thirds of families that are screened out in Minnesota, most of those services are declined. The child remains in a home that could very well be toxic and nothing is done. About half of my guardian ad litem cases involved child sexual abuse (one as young as 2, two as young as 3 and none older than 11 when the abuse started).
The good news is that we are finally talking about this. Until the layers of this onion are peeled, and the layers of inadequate and problematic policies are identified and discussed, we will live with the racial disparities, education, safety and justice issues that would be solvable except for our own negligence.
