Children have died because activists say it’s racist for ACS to act

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Naomi Schaefer Riley

Notice

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

May 31, 2023 | 1:20 p.m.

When a child is found dead with bruises on his wrists and chest, the first question is always: Were there any warning signs?

In the case of 6-year-old Jalayah Eason, the answer is definitely yes.

It wasn’t just the upstairs neighbor who heard the child screaming for his dear life and shouting: Stop, stop, stop! Who told a reporter, you could hear the shots, bro.

Nor were it the reports of his 8-year-old brother, who told a classmate that his mother whipped him, slapped him.

Nor was it the school that reported long periods of absence from the brother, that he was regularly picked up more than an hour late from school, that he wore the same clothes every day and that he smelled of urine.

Nor was it the brother who came to school with a bruised and swollen face and told a teacher that his mother had punched and kicked him for drinking from the sink.

It was also the child services administration worker who came to the house, heard the boys’ story, and then listened to the mother explain that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder but she was not being treated.

The Children’s Services Administration is apparently trying to peddle a story that this tragedy is partly the result of an overstretched agency.

Jalayah Eason died after being found unresponsive and unresponsive in an apartment with bruises to her wrists and body on May 26.Lynija Eason/Instagram

According to The New York Times, which neighborhood social workers have an average caseload of 12.5 cases, ACS reported about 17% more than the city average.

Never mind that the national average workload is between 24 and 31 children. Or that it is well below the Child Welfare League of America’s recommendation of 15 children per social worker.

Just as smaller class sizes don’t guarantee a better education if teachers are incompetent or spout ideological nonsense, it’s been clear for years that New York’s child welfare problems don’t stem from the fact that workers social workers are overwhelmed or children slip through the cracks.

Neighbors reportedly heard Jalayah screaming for his dear life and shouting, Stop, stop, stop! Robert Miller

Between 2008 and 2020 (the latest year for which data is available), the number of child deaths in families that had previously been reported and investigated by the ACS increased from 49 to 52, although the number of cases of workers dropped from 18 to less than 6 children per employee at one point.

These tragic situations are often the result of deliberate decisions by agency leaders to leave children in dangerous situations.

Two narratives drive these decisions.

Jalayah’s 8-year-old brother told a classmate that their mother whipped him, slapped him.Lynija Eason/Instagram

The first is that ACS is racist. Activists argue that the reason black children are placed in foster care more often is a structural bias in the system. They want to abolish child protective services the same way they want to defund the police.

In her speech to other CUNY law graduates last week, Fatima Mousa Mohammed proudly mentioned that her classmates had gone to court to reunite families torn apart by the city administration for services to childhood.

ACS practically embraced this rhetoric, commissioning a survey of 50 black and Hispanic employees (at an agency with thousands of employees) that concluded that child welfare is a predatory system that specifically targets black parents and brown.

Lynija Eason, mother of Jalayahs, at her arraignment.Tomas E. Gaston

The other story is that families are investigated and children are taken from their homes simply because of poverty, and to claim that a parent is engaging in neglect is really to say that she is poor.

While it is true that families involved in the child welfare system are disproportionately poor, correlation is not causation. A recent study of nearly 300 California cases alleging neglect, for example, found that 99% included concerns related to substance use, domestic violence, mental illness, co-reported abuse, or further allegation of negligence (i.e. abandonment).

Addiction and mental illness often lead to poverty. They also make it difficult to properly care for children. But that does not mean that poverty is the root cause of child neglect.

ACS says his social worker did not see any visible signs of abuse on Jalayah’s brother.Lynija Eason/Instagram

Agency leaders say they make a distinction between neglect and abuse and understand that there are circumstances in which children are not physically safe.

But in Jalayah’s case, the evidence of abuse was there. ACS says his social worker didn’t see any visible signs on Jalayah’s brother, but that’s probably just an indication that it took too long to investigate.

It’s time for the agency to stop taking inspiration from activists driven by progressive ideology and start putting child safety first.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/31/children-are-dead-because-activists-say-its-racist-for-acs-to-act/?utm_source=url_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons

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