Social Worker Justice - going to jail for CPS

Last spring, the Brooklyn district attorney took the unprecedented step of charging NY child welfare supervisor Chereece Bell with criminally negligent homicide. This is just one of a few cases nationwide where child welfare workers have been charged with a criminal act for doing--or not doing--their job.

In June 2010, Philadelphia caseworkers Julius Juma Murray, Miriam Coulibaly and others pleaded guilty or were found guilty of fabricating reports and destroying documents to hide the fact that caseworkers skipped hundreds of home visits to dozens of clients, including 14-year-old Danieal Kelly who starved to death in 2006.

New York Magazine recently wrote a thoughtfully nuanced profile of Chereece Bell and the difficult choices she faced while doing her job in one of New York City's toughest neighborhoods.

The decision to arrest two ACS workers all but guarantees headlines for the D.A.’s office. As far as anyone knows, this marks the first time in New York City history that child-welfare workers have been indicted in connection with the death of a child on their caseload. Bell and Adams appear all over the media: local TV news, the tabloids, the front page of the New York Times. In all the photos, they look sullen and sleep-deprived—every bit the stereotypical tabloid criminals.

By the afternoon of March 23, Chereece Bell—mom of two, graduate of Brooklyn College, onetime city supervisor—has tumbled to the bottom of the city’s social ladder, joining that sorry parade of accused criminals being led out of the courthouse and onto buses bound for Rikers Island. Never mind that she doesn’t know exactly why she is being taken to jail. Nor does she understand how she could be charged with the murder of a girl she never met. But those questions will have to wait. First, she has a more urgent problem: figuring out how to make her $25,000 bail, so she can get back home to her children.

…

In many ways, the job of caseworker had become a writing job. Caseworkers are supposed to document everything they do: every phone call, every visit to a family, every conversation with a doctor or teacher or neighbor. There are so many cases coming in—and there’s so much writing to do for each one—that it seemed almost everyone was behind on their paperwork, sometimes weeks behind. To try to stay on top of their cases, workers ate lunch at their desks, stayed at the office until 7 or 8 p.m., and logged in from home.

…

One of the toughest parts of Bell’s job was figuring out which cases were so serious that the kids needed to be taken from their parents. If possible, it’s always best to keep a family intact, but she could never know for sure what happened in a household after one of her caseworkers walked out the door. This was the most maddening part of the job: Even if you clocked 60 or more hours a week, even if you managed to keep track of every case, there was simply no way to stop every parent hellbent on scalding—or killing—their kid. As Bell puts it, “You don’t have any real control over human behavior.”

Read this entire excellent article here.

If you don't have time to read, then at least listen to the NPR interview of the article's author, Jennifer Gonnerman, here.

After you've finished, come back here to post your comments.

Child Pornography Victims Abandoned at the Supreme Court

Last week, the Solicitor General filed this brief with the United States Supreme Court which effectively denies child victims the ability to obtain criminal restitution from the thousands of child molesters and pedophiles who collect and share child pornography.

The defendant in the case currently pending before the Supreme Court, Amy v. Monzel, admitted to law enforcement that he sexually abused his granddaughter and traded images of girls being sexually abused. A search of his home uncovered more than 800 child sex abuse images including pictures of Amy, the victim in this case. The defendant pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The District court ordered the defendant to pay just $5000 in criminal restitution to Amy, a girl whose rape and sexual abuse images were found in his collection. That award was overturned on appeal. Amy then appealed to the Supreme Court where three amici joined her in asking the Court to take the case.

Despite supporting the victims in the lower courts, the government abandoned victims of child pornography at the Supreme Court by asking the Court not to review the Court of Appeals’ denial of restitution. The Solicitor General's position on this issue effectively strips victims of child pornography the ability to obtain criminal restitution from any of the thousands of child molesters and pedophiles who collect and share their child sex abuse images.

The Solicitor General is essentially asking the Supreme Court to uphold a standard of proof that government cannot meet. During the past two years, the government has failed in hundreds of cases throughout the country to convince federal judges that the standard they are now defending in the Supreme Court will result in any restitution for victims of child pornography. In July, the government lost this case in the Ninth Circuit on just this issue and decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Victims of child pornography deserve their day in court. Three amicus filed briefs in the Supreme Court supporting this basic right, highlighting the importance of this issue for children who are sexually abused and exploited through child pornography.

As a candidate in 2008, President Obama supported the death penalty for defendants convicted of raping a child. Now the Solicitor General is promoting a standard which will save some of these same defendants from paying restitution to their victims. While millionaire child molesters are housed in government prisons at taxpayer expense, child sex abuse victims like Amy must rely on public assistance and charity to take care of their most basic needs.

When Congress—led by then Senator and now Vice President Biden—passed the child pornography restitution statute in 1994, it made restitution mandatory for victims. In fact, Congress felt so strongly that every child pornography victim receive the “full amount” of their losses that it used the word mandatory twice in the statute. Despite this clear requirement, federal courts throughout the country are confused and their often arbitrary approaches have led to widely differing outcomes for victims. A deepening split among the Courts of Appeals and the district courts require a decisive decision and direction that only the Supreme Court can provide.

Only the Supreme Court can conclusively guarantee a child pornography victim's right to restitution. Justice delayed is justice denied. Victims of child pornography have waited and suffered long enough.

Hacking Child Pornography

A new front has opened in the battle to control child pornography on the internet. Members of the Anonymous hacktivist movement have recently taken down more than 40 secret child-pornography websites and revealed the names of more than 1,500 members of one of the illegal sites.

According to Security News Daily:

The Anonymous campaign began Oct. 14, when members of the hacktivist group found a cache of child-pornography websites while browsing a secret website called the Hidden Wiki, a guidebook to hundreds of underground websites invisible to search engines and regular Internet users. The hackers singled out Lolita City, a file-sharing site used by pedophiles, and leaked the names of the site's 1,589 active members to Pastebin on Tuesday (Oct. 18), the Examiner reported.

Member of Anonymous deciding to hack a website whose stance they don't agree with is by no means shocking news. In the past year, Anonymous-affiliated hackers have gone after the New York Stock Exchange, the Westboro Baptist Church, the Recording Industry Association of America and government sites in Malaysia, Egypt, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.

However, in targeting child pornography sites, and in explaining its methods of attack, these Anonymous-affiliated hackers have revealed a deeply disturbing side of the Internet unknown to most people.

The so-called "darknet," from which this "Operation Darknet" hacking campaign takes its name, is any part of the Internet that is hidden from view — not just hard to reach, but deliberately concealed. In this instance, a darknet appears to have grown out of the free TOR routing service, which offers anonymous, encrypted Web browsing to any user.

The TOR-based darknet has reportedly grown into a private, encrypted constellation of websites offering a variety of shady and illegal services, from fake IDs and steroids to email hacking and tip on how to call in police raids as pranks. There's even a hidden site called "The Last Box" that bills itself as an "Assassination Market."

Not many people know about the "Darknet," and if you do you're probably up to no good. Anonymous' success in penetrating and disrupting Darknet is significant since only the most technically sophisticated hackers could perform such a feat. Unfortunately, given the scope and seemingly endless proliferation of child pornography, it is unlikely that Anonymous can or will have any lasting impact. Their actions do, however, demonstrate to law enforcement and others the possibility of a new approach to dealing with online child exploitation.

Read the entire story here.

Adopting Your Enemies' Children

Today's New York Times discusses the use of adoption as an act of war in Argentina during the dictatorship of the 1970s when the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.

The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

In a new twist to an old adage, "if you can't kill them, adopt them!" Unfortunately for many of these adopted children, their parents were killed and their identities destroyed.

Read the entire story here on the New York Times website.

Children's Law Center - Helping Children Soar

Clients of Children's Law Center talk about why they needed help from our lawyers and what they were able to achieve together. This video premiered at the annual Helping Children Soar Benefit on September 21, 2011 and focuses on CLC's adoption and guardianship work creating forever families. Visit www.childrenslawcenter.org for more information.