Comments on: Foster Mom Charged In Killing, Abuse

By: Others Tried To Help Boy In Danger « The Underground Conservative

Others Tried To Help Boy In Danger « The Underground Conservative — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:40:56 +0000

[...] first blogged about it here. I still maintain that next to the actual murderer, the social worker bureaucracy has the most [...]

By: The Underground Conservative

The Underground Conservative — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 01:27:41 +0000

how much of a bad situation must exist before you’d take a kid from their “bad” family and put them with the “good” one?

That is a good question. I am not sure I have a precise answer, to be honest. I believe if you use a modicum of common sense, we could make good decisions. But when have bureaucrats ever shown that modicum of common sense? They live in the world of zero tolerance and “rules are rules.”

By: The Underground Conservative

The Underground Conservative — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 01:25:43 +0000

John,

I believe there is a racial component in the process. There is a mentality that exists which doesn’t want to presume the white suburban culture is superior to the black, urban, hip-hop thug culture.

I do agree that there needs to be a complete investigation of who had what information when and didn’t do what (or did do …), but I also don’t think it will make much of a difference. People who screw up here never are held accountable, let alone fired. If anything, they’ll get promoted.

By: John Foust

John Foust — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:34:17 +0000

Yes, they try to put kids back with their families. No, not all those bad, drug-pushing black families are doing as well as the comfy loving white families who have the means to be foster parents or adoptive parents. Please consider removing the racial assumptions from your post. Perhaps you should have a long talk with the people in the foster care system, both parents and administrators. They all make lots of difficult choices. To me, the proper blame in this situation could come only after examining the decisions made by the admins knowing the evidence they had in hand.

To take your suggestion and run with it, how much of a bad situation must exist before you’d take a kid from their “bad” family and put them with the “good” one?

By: The Underground Conservative

The Underground Conservative — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:34:32 +0000

There is an attitude among the social worker/child welfare community that minority children are better off culturally with a foster family of the same race. This came up back in the 1990s with an infamous case in Chicago when a black child was ripped out of the hands of a loving white family by the system, punctuated by a heartless liberal judge, and returned to the culture of crack in the ghetto. I seem to recall a similar case here in Wisconsin as well that got a lot of attention.

John’s point about returning children to their families is correct, unfortunately. It fails to consider whether that is in the best interests of the children. Would these kids have been better off with the loving family in West Allis? Or with someone with a history of mental illness and child abuse married to a blood relative who’s a drug dealer and now in the Crowbar Hotel?

You don’t need to work for NASA to answer that question.

By: HeatherRadish

HeatherRadish — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 06:55:59 +0000

The confessed child abuser wasn’t a “blood relative”; she’s married to the brother of the father of the dead baby (…and where was this guy while his niece and nephew were being beaten regularly?).

John Foust–that’s what I’m trying to get someone to explain to me. Why is it a “higher goal” to shuffle Christopher off to a shirt-tail relative than to make sure he was living in a safe, healthy home? The “right” of this woman to collect his monthly foster check from the state should not have trumped his right to see his second birthday.

By: John Foust

John Foust — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:09:14 +0000

How did you determine the placement was due to race? Isn’t the higher goal to return children to their families, including close relatives?

By: Mike Rabzich

Mike Rabzich — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:20:56 +0000

1. A good friend of mine is a social worker in Milwaukee. She is overloaded to literally three times the amount of cases she should have. This isn’t because of a lack of qualified people to work as social workers; it’s because of budget cuts and outsourcing to private, for profit firms. I have seen her CRY, she feels so bad that she simply does not have time in her week to make the home visits and other obligations she has, even when she is routinely working 70 and 80-hour weeks. Please don’t blame the social workers.

2. I think the children’s placement had more to do with the woman being a blood relative than with her being black, though I would like to know more about why the boy was taken from the West Allis family. How does that help children, moving them from place to place? Isn’t stability what they need?

3. You leave us hanging with the comment about homosexual couples adopting. What do you think about that?