Poor mothers and children all over the U.S. continue to be separated by the classist and racist Foster Care and CPS system
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by Christina Heatherton with Dee Gray/ For Courtwatch/PNN POVERTY. "I am an invisible man", declares the narrator in the opening lines of Ralph Ellison's landmark novel The Invisible Man. Many Berkeley residents encountered Ellison's nameless narrator over the summer months as they participated in a city wide reading of the book, sponsored by the Berkeley Public Library and the Berkeley Arts Festival. Today, nearly fifty years after the novel was written, Ellison's critical reflections on the American experience, particularly the African American experience of invisibility in America, endures. As every African American I interviewed about the book noted, "Black people are still invisible". Walking around Berkeley, one realizes quickly that it’s not just African descendants who are invisible. A young white girl on Telegraph Ave. counts a thousand unseeing faces pass her by as she panhandles with her infant son. An elder man on Shattuck echoes the words of Ellison’s narrator who says when people refuse to see you, "you often doubt if you really exist." Scanning the news recently, I’ve also come across another invisible population: Poor mothers. In Steubenville, Ohio last week, a poor woman was arrested on three felony counts of child endangerment because her children had gotten sunburned. In Jacksonville, Florida, a five year old child was taken from her grandmother’s home by Child Protective Services and lost in a gross oversight by the foster care system there. PNN’s CourtWatch recounts the testimonies of mothers whose children were seriously injured or abused while in the "protection" of Child Protective Services (CPS). Just as poor men of color, particularly African American men, have become grist for the prison industry’s mill, so have poor minority mothers been exploited to feed the colossal child welfare machine, or as some call it "The Child Abuse Industry". CPS receives an absurd amount of money for each child they take in. The children who are targeted are most often those of poor, single women who do not have the capacities to fight back. From the testimonies I’ve read, it seems that CPS often acts with the arrogant assumption that they are doing what is best for the children while actually destroying the family structure and the mental and physical health of the children. I’ve been assigned to cover the Child Protective Services in light of two recent groundbreaking cases; one in Los Angeles where a mother won a million dollar cash settlement and an apology from the county for their mistreatment and subsequent death of her son, and the other before Judge Weinstein in New York - who ruled that Foster Care is a form of slavery, in regards to the separation of children from Battered Mothers. These cases illustrate the invisibility of the rights of poor mothers. Debra Reid’s nine year old son, Jonathan, was seized in 1997 after phony allegations that the boy was not receiving proper medical care at his mother’s hands. The boy suffered from severe asthma and was prone to panic-driven anxiety attacks. According to an article in the New Times, (link below) the onset of Jonathan’s attacks occurred after his four year old brother was taken away by Department of Children and Family Services, or DCFS. Among the false claims of the county was testimony by a doctor that Reid suffered from a mental disorder called "Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy" where a parent fakes their child’s illness in order to gain the glory and praise of being the child’s caretaker. The doctor based this diagnosis without ever meeting Reid. The diagnosis also overlooked the fact that the symptoms of Jonathan’s ailments: asthma and diabetes can not be falsely created. Investigators additionally ignored testimony from Jonathan’s doctor and nurses that Reid was taking excellent care of her son. For his protection, Jonathan was taken by DCFS. DCFS workers ignored Reid’s repeated pleas to attend to her son’s asthmatic condition. They told her that her son was healthy. The New Times Article reports that Jonathan repeatedly asked to go home to his mother and tried running away to her, even jumping out of his social worker’s moving car. Six weeks after being placed in foster care, Jonathan died from an asthma attack. PNN co-editor, Tiny, a lifelong sufferer of panic driven asthma – often an ailment of being poor, insists that the child died from terror. Debra Reid received word that her son had died from the hospital. She never received a phone call from DCFS to tell her that her son was dead much less an apology from them. Reid has fought the county in court for five long years ever since. On July 30, Reid spoke before L.A. County Board of Supervisors pleading for a criminal investigation into her son’s death. She was awarded a $1 million dollar settlement and a tearful apology from County Supervisor Gloria Molina. ABC news quotes Reed as saying, "We sought true justice, and we have not received it….Until someone sends this case for criminal investigation, our family has not received justice." After much work and extensive organizing, Reid has gained a settlement and visibility for her and her son’s rights. The case also sets a precedent that will perhaps enable other mothers to gain visibility in the CPS system. Courtwatch will be following her progress and trying to aid her as best as we can as she works for a criminal investigation into her son’s death. The case of Debra Reid and other mothers entangled in the CPS system speaks for a larger population of poor minority invisibility. Their pleas can be read in the final lines of Ellison’s novel: "Being invisible, without substance, Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you too?" The New Times Article "Protected to Death" can be located at: http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/1998-10-08/feature.html/page1.html |