Show notes
It has been a very troubling few years at Vermont’s Department of Children and Families. In 2014 there was a string of child deaths in Vermont–children in families involved with DCF. These deaths prompted intense anger and at least four investigations into the department. Then on August 7, 2015, Lara Sobel, a caseworker at DCF, was shot as she left the DCF offices in Barre, Vermont. She was shot and killed by a woman who was angry after losing custody of her daughter to DCF the month before. The Department of Children and Families flares up in the news, then the news subsides. We hear from the governor, from the DCF commissioner, from legislators and journalists and commentators. But the people we never hear from are the people who actually do the work. And this is by design. The work that DCF caseworkers do is intensely private, and in order to protect the privacy of parents and children, caseworkers are not allowed to talk publicly about their cases. In a way, their silence shields us from some of the darkest, most complex, most intractable problems in our state. In this show you’ll hear from three DCF caseworkers from three different areas of Vermont. For their own safety, I’ve chosen not to use their names. They talk about what it’s like to have a job where the lives of children and families are at stake. TRANSCRIPT below thanks to Jennifer Jorgenson of UVM! Credits and Thanks Music for this show by Brian Clark and Peter Cressy I would like to thank Luciana at DCF, and all the caseworkers who gave me such generous time in the making of this show. Thanks also to Tally Abecassis, Mark Davis, Scott Carrier, Kelly Green, and Colin McCaffrey for various and sundry and important support. TRANSCRIPT Erica Heilman: Welcome to Rumble Strip Vermont, I’m Erica Heilman. On the afternoon of Friday, August 7th, 2015, Lara Sobel, caseworker at the Department of Children and Families was shot as she left the DCF offices in Barre, Vermont. She was shot and killed by a woman who was angry after losing custody of her daughter to DCF the month before. In the aftermath of this killing, there was a rash of truly disturbing commentary in social media [00:00:30] from people expressing sympathy with Lara’s killer, people who look on DCF case workers as home wreckers, baby snatchers. But there’s a whole different contingent that believes DCF doesn’t intervene in families enough. In 2014, there was a string of child deaths in Vermont. Children in families involved with DCF. These deaths prompted intense anger and at least four investigations into the department. [00:01:00] DCF flares up in the news, then the news subsides. We hear from the governor, we hear from the DCF commissioner from legislators and journalists and commentators. But the people we never hear from are the people who actually do the work. And this is by design. The work that DCF case workers do is intensely private. And in order to protect the privacy of parents and children, case workers are not allowed to talk [00:01:30] publicly about their cases. And in a way, their silence shields us from some of the darkest, most complex, most intractable problems in our state. These are the problems and the stories that DCF case workers live with every day. In this show, you’ll hear from three DCF case workers from three different areas of Vermont. For their own safety, I’ve chosen not to use their names. They’ll talk about what it’s [00:02:00] like to have a job where the lives of children and families are at stake. Welcome. I figured we would start just by talking about what does DCF do? Because I don’t know that everybody knows that really what it is, and also what it isn’t. Speaker 2: So family services, our primary role is to ensure the safety [00:02:30] and care of children in the state of Vermont. We are not baby snatchers. We are not police. Our main objective is to work with families that have children and to ensure that their children are safe and working with them, connecting them with different services within the community, and ensuring basically that [00:03:00] the care or the risk that there is for the children in the home is either eliminated or mitigated in some way. When we receive reports of abuse and neglect of children, poverty is pretty much what we see all the time, but that is not to say that child abuse and neglect doesn’t occur in middle class or upper class homes. We just don’t get that many reports from there. Erica Heilman: Can you [00:03:30] give people a kind of a… If you can just give people a sense for what kinds of worlds you enter into in this work? Speaker 3: Yes, I can try to answer that. So this work does bring me to all walks of Vermont and even beyond. Our district, the Hartford district is the largest of the 12 district offices. We cover the larger towns of Randolph, Bradford, and White River [00:04:00] Junction. And we also cover all of the rural towns in between that. We do home visits on back dirt roads. Sometimes they’re not even real roads. And we do these visits in the winter in our state cars, and we hope the tires are going to get us to where we need to go. And we’re usually doing these visits alone. We sometimes team if we feel there’s a safety concern, but generally if I’m doing a home visit, I go out and do these home visits alone, [00:04:30] and they can be anywhere from right here in town in White River to sometimes an hour and a half away. I have currently 25 children in custody on my caseload. I also serve, I think, about 10 additional children under conditional custody orders. So I have approximately 35 children that I am assessing safety for on sometimes a daily basis. Speaker 2: Primarily we’re working with families that are really impoverished [00:05:00] and that there’s mental health issues and/or drug related issues. Some families are living with a known untreated sex offender, so we get calls from anybody from the next door neighbor to a doctor to teachers reporting that they have concerns about the kids or the kids have disclosed that they’ve been physically abused or sexually [00:05:30] abused. So we meet with the families and try to sort it out. So this is a mental health issue, so how can we connect a person to a local agency. If it’s a substance misuse issue, again, having them participate in a drug and alcohol assessment, developing safety plans around, “Okay, so if you lapse, then is there somebody that’s clean and sober [00:06:00] that can care for your child while you’re using? And is that person safe to be around children too?” Erica Heilman: And how would you characterize most of your relationships with those parents? Are most positive and amicable or how would you describe them? Speaker 2: I would say most are positive. There’s definitely tension in the relationship, because I’m pushing them to follow through with their substance [00:06:30] misuse program or trying to extract them from a relationship that’s not healthy for the children or for them. So there’s tension in those things. But I feel like I’m kind of like a coach, kind of like a life coach pointing in the direction. So there’s this road and this road and this road, and you can take any of these paths you want. You’re the one that’s in control here. [00:07:00] And it’s up to you to do this. Speaker 4: I think one of the hardest parts about this job is that we all have our own set of values, our standards of living, and each of us is very different. And when we meet with families, it’s really important that we not put our own value judgment on these families, because we’re all different. I can’t stand dirt on the floor and all those kind of things, and when I walk into someone’s house and there’s dirt on the floor, [00:07:30] that’s my value. That’s not theirs. And that doesn’t constitute a right for DCF to come in and remove children. And I know I hear that all the time. You’re going to take my kids because I have a dirty house. We’re not the dirt police. We are there because there’s a risk to the children, either from an external source or from something that the parent has done, not based on the fact that you have dirt on your floor. Do we get involved? Yes. If there’s something on the floor or something that the children can have access to that can cause them harm, absolutely. Dried dog feces [00:08:00] on the floor left all over with a baby crawling is not safe. We are there for imminent risk into concerns about the child’s safety and wellbeing. We are not there to criticize you because you don’t have enough money to pay for your heat. Erica Heilman: You’ve been here long enough to see the way that people respond to the work as they come in. Looking at the social workers around you, what do you notice happen happens? Speaker 3: I think what’s most difficult for myself and [00:08:30] for coworkers that I have seen leave, having difficult relationships with our clients is expected. Having difficult relationships with other professionals can be incredibly wearing. I do hear DCF is not doing enough. Why can’t you get involved with this child? And people don’t necessarily understand that DCF is a child protection agency, not a quality of life agency. When teachers contact me because a child has not come to school having breakfast or having [00:09:00] a jacket, those are horrible things, but that’s not necessarily a reason for DCF to become involved with them. And I think that a lot of people don’t know that. Speaker 2: Unless there are objects in the home that are hazardous, then we have no call to pull children out of that. So the condition of the home doesn’t immediately affect the child. [00:09:30] That’s not child abuse. Does it tell you something about how the people in that home are living? Is it a picture of depression? Yeah, absolutely. There is a lot of stuff in people’s houses and it’s filthy, and sometimes a whole family is just living in one room, just mattresses and [00:10:00] beat up couches and just really chaotic and animals, and I didn’t want to sit down and there were just things crowding in, it’s just claustrophobic. It’s almost always dark. There’s always blankets across the windows. And most of the stuff is just broken down, like broken toys and [00:10:30] garbage and debris and clothing. It is really hard to describe what you go into. I don’t know, it’s… But you don’t want to judge them for that. And we’ve been asked by state’s attorneys, “Well, take pictures.” And I just won’t, because I feel [00:11:00] like that’s such an invasion. I’m already invading and now I’m recording how they are living in their homes. Poverty is just the key issue. I don’t know who said this, but I totally agree with it. They said that poverty is the worst form of violence that there is. And I totally agree with [00:11:30] that. Erica Heilman: So if someone is concerned about a child and makes a call to family services, DCF may or may not investigate. We don’t know. Because after that phone call, the case becomes a private matter between DCF and the family. This privacy is endlessly frustrating to the accused, to teachers, to defense attorneys and journalists, really anyone who wants to know [00:12:00] what’s going on and isn’t DCF, and it’s impossible to hold the state accountable for its handling of these cases if we can’t see them. On the other hand, this privacy protects children and can protect people who are falsely accused. And because of this privacy, we don’t really know what these case workers do. In this next segment, case workers talk about some of the problems they work with. And this is not easy to listen to, but in order to understand the nature [00:12:30] of their work, we have to hear about some of the challenging situations they face. Speaker 3: Kids being physically abused because their parents don’t know any other way to parent them. Kids being exposed to substantiated sex offenders. Substance abuse is an epidemic in Vermont right now. That’s not a secret to anybody. How that relates to child safety is [00:13:00] parents not waking up until noon. Three year olds taking care of their six month old baby brother. Children not eating because their parents can’t get out of bed. Children not getting to school because their parents can’t get them there or can’t get them on the bus. Kids are being left outside while the parents are inside doing drugs on a winter day. Situations where children are seeing [00:13:30] their mothers being abused by their mother’s partners. Those are some of the situations that I have come across and what I am experiencing, or what I know about the family is probably the tip of the iceberg that the children are actually being exposed to. The children that I am involved with, this has been their life for years before I have become involved with them. Speaker 4: [00:14:00] I used to have a majority of my investigations or assessments would involve sexual abuse or physical abuse. Now a majority of them involving risk of harm, because these pregnant moms who are using in utero, using while pregnant, and we’re opening assessments before the child’s birth to determine whether or not they’re safe. I mean, that’s the stuff that we here as the office is seeing right now. I mean this explosion of infants who have parents [00:14:30] who are using. The example I could think about is when I was, technically by the legal terms, assaulted by a mother. She spit in my face during a removal of her children. Got information that she was using, and we went to her house and she was completely out of it. She was slurring her words. She was not able to stand appropriately. She was argumentative, combative to the point that the police had to put her in handcuffs. The house was an absolute disarray compared to what it used to be. [00:15:00] There was dirty diapers all over the floor. The baby was left in a crib with just a diaper on and the feces had exploded out of the diaper and they were caked onto the baby. I mean, she had runny nose that was crusty and was screaming because she was so hungry. And mom had been passed out on the couch, not able to take care of her. She had a sibling there that was trying to get her a bottle who was like three, four years old. And mom was erratic, [00:15:30] combative, aggressive, just out of control. Speaker 2: I’ve seen bruises on children, scratches, welt marks, child pornography. Something you want to kind of just scrub your brain of once you see it. I’ve read an autopsy report on a four month old baby. You just see the fear [00:16:00] in kids’ eyes, their confusion and desperation in parents’ faces. It’s really hard work. You try not to think about it too much or to take it in too much because you couldn’t possibly do your job if you did. Speaker 3: [00:16:30] Some families that I am currently working with I was working with six years ago, and every service under the sun has been into these homes, sometimes on numerous occasions, because more children have been born into these homes that warrant different services coming into place. And there’s not always a positive outcome. There is situations where children are remaining in homes that may not to you or I be a [00:17:00] safe or adequate home, but that’s also how this family is choosing to live, and it’s not unsafe for the child. The ideal would be to have service providers go into the home and work with these families, and they come out and everybody’s happy and everybody’s needs are getting met. But they can not always make the changes that are being recommended because there are incredibly complex issues that we’re working with, especially when children are still placed [00:17:30] at home. That’s when the agency sits with the highest risk. And that’s when I personally feel like I sit with risk. When children are still in the home of parents that are struggling with substance abuse, unresolved mental health, yet the risk does not warrant the child coming into custody, but does warrant that I remain involved, but chang…
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