The news link below details issues with many child neglect / abuse cases in New England. Bella is mentioned about half way through; so I've thought to include it here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/out-of-the-shadows-child-neglect_5612aeaae4b076812702b61a
We need to be better than this.
So sorry you were let down Bella; by all the people who were supposed to protect you.
Where I lived in Minnesota, the county govt determined the funding snd the rules DCF runs by along with rules from the state.
The taxpayer does not want to pay. It is super expensive to put kids into foster care. In addition, there are no homes to put them into.
This talks about the two tier system which probably is used in many states.
We, the taxpayer, have chosen this. Most people do not realize this, but your elected representative in your local govts has chosen this.
From the article
risk?
William James Berry’s shaking death, some say, points to weaknesses in a system launched in 2009 to help social workers separate cases where children are in imminent danger from those where the family simply needs help.
The policy, part of a national movement, was quickly embraced in Massachusetts: in 2013, 38 percent of child abuse reports were assigned to the lower-risk group, DCF records show.
The higher-risk cases, including allegations of sexual or serious physical abuse or neglect, are referred to social workers whose “primary purpose” is to investigate and “determine the safety of the reported child,” state documents show. Social workers are supposed to “engage and support families” when the child is in the lower-risk group.
The state social worker’s union opposed the state’s two-tier system from the onset, MacKinnon said, because of concerns that families considered lower-risk may get short shrift. The social workers who do the full child abuse investigations are provided more training on how to interview children and ferret out signs of child abuse, he said, leaving people with less specialized training to handle lower-risk cases.
Currently, caseworkers who handle lower-risk cases are less likely to interview the child away from parents — often a key to getting at the truth, explained Taunton DCF social worker Laurie Cyphers. They are less capable, she said, of pushing parents to cooperate if they refuse state help. She worries that social workers with less experience and less training won’t be able to accurately assess safety risks.
“They don’t have the training and they don’t have the experience to fall back on,” said Cyphers, a 14-year DCF veteran who mainly oversees lower-risk cases.
There is no national data tracking deaths of children who had been placed on the lower risk track. But there have been enough incidents, here and elsewhere, to lead some child welfare advocates to question the idea of a two-tier system. In Minnesota, for example, the murder of a 4-year-old boy who had been placed on the lower-risk track prompted statewide scrutiny and recommendations to narrow, and perhaps do away with, the program.
