The Child Protection eNewsletter

Are troubled homes better than foster care?

A USA Today report states that children whose families are investigated for abuse or neglect are likely to do better in life if they stay with their families than if they go into foster care, according to a pioneering study. http://www.usatoday.com The findings intensify a vigorous debate in child welfare: whether children are better served with their families or away from them.

Kids who stayed with their families were less likely to become juvenile delinquents or teen mothers and more likely to hold jobs as young adults, says the study by Joseph Doyle, an economics professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management who studies social policy. "The size of the effects surprised me, because all the children come from tough families," Doyle says. The National Science Foundation funded the study.

Doyle says his research, which tracked at least 15,000 kids from 1990 to 2002, is the largest study to look at the effects of foster care. He studied kids in Illinois because of a database there that links abuse investigations to other government records. To avoid results attributable to family background, he screened out extreme cases of abuse or neglect and studied kids whose cases could have gone either way. The full study is available online at http://www.mit.edu/~jjdoyle/doyle_fosterlt_march07_aer.pdf.

A University of Minnesota study used a different methodology and measured different outcomes, but came to similar conclusions. (Byron Egeland, et. al., "The impact of foster care on development" Development and Psychopathology, (Vol. 18, 2006, pp. 57–76)) It is available online at http://journals.cambridge.org/

Studies, including those by Mark Courtney while at the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children, show that the 500,000 children in U.S. foster care are more likely than other kids to drop out of school, commit crimes, abuse drugs and become teen parents.

CBS’ Leslie Stahl reports on growing efforts in several cities at “family finding” for foster children. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/14

An attempt at family placement didn’t work out so well for 7-year-old Chandler Grafner, who died on May 6 in Denver. Chandler and his 5-year-old half-brother, Dominick Phillips, were removed from their mother's custody and temporarily placed in their maternal grandmother's care. Jefferson County Social Services then removed the boys from their grandmother's care and gave Dominick's father, Jon Phillips, and his girlfriend Sarah Berry, custody of both boys earlier this year.

Chandler, who weighed only 34 pounds at the end, died of dehydration and starvation, the Denver coroner said. http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news According to the coroner's report, Chandler's death was ruled a homicide because his death was due to "restricted access to fluids and caloric intake." The boy also had dozens of cuts and bruises on his body, and died after going into cardiac arrest, the report said. His legal guardians, Jon Phillips and Sarah Berry, face charges of first-degree murder. Prosecutors said they locked Chandler in a closet and didn't feed him.

Documents held by several agencies and obtained by 7NEWS show that on January 17, 2007, officials at Holm Elementary School, where Chandler was in kindergarten, made a hotline call to the Denver Department of Human Services. The call was to report the suspected abuse of Chandler and said he had a "bruised and swollen right ear" and a "mark on his neck." According to the report, Chandler told his kindergarten teacher, "Dad kept slapping my ear in the shower. He smacked me in the neck and kept putting me in the water."

Sources close to the investigation say it wasn't until January 19 that a case worker from Denver attempted to contact Chandler, but his foster parents kept him out of school. On January 23, sources say case workers interviewed school staff and learned that Chandler had been sent to school in the December snow with one shoe and no coat. They also learned that Chandler told his teachers that his parents were angry and that he could not talk with [his teachers] anymore. Three months later, on April 17, Denver Human Services received another hotline call from Holm Elementary about Chandler. The report said, "Child has not been seen in school since March 9, 2007," and "Staff called home many times. Dad reported there were 'family problems.'" There is no state requirement that children attend kindergarten so the call and the complaint were not accepted for assessment by the department.

In other news… 

A prison security video showing guards struggling to enter a cell where a convicted killer was strangling a defrocked pedophile priest has turned up on the Internet. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/Massachusetts prison officials were investigating how the 10-minute video, shot from outside former Roman Catholic priest John Geoghan’s cell during his slaying, (see http://www.childprotectionprogram.org/newsletter/vol4_iss2.html and http://www.childprotectionprogram.org/newsletter/vol4_iss4.html)
made it onto YouTube. The video was posted last month and may have been brought to the Boston Herald's attention by Joseph Druce, who was convicted in January of killing Geoghan at the Souza-Baranowski maximum security prison in August, 2003.

A judge sentenced the son of an imprisoned Utah polygamist to 180 days in jail Tuesday for having sex with a 13-year-old girl he met on the Internet site MySpace.com. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288837,00.html William Green, 19, must avoid pornography, stay out of Internet chat rooms and pay a $500 fine, 3rd District Court Judge Royal Hansen said. His attorney, David Leavitt, who had prosecuted Tom Green, said William Green was a victim because he grew up in an environment where there was no sensitivity to age-appropriate sex.

A lawyer sought in Australia on child sex charges was sworn in Tuesday as the Solomon Islands’ Attorney General, sparking condemnation from the Australian government. http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD Julian Moti, an Australian who evaded extradition to his home country last October when he escaped custody in Papua New Guinea, is a close friend of Solomons’ Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.

The most "far-flung and exotic fugitive investigation ever conducted by the U.S. Marshals Service" ended early Sunday with convicted child molester Alan Horowitz in custody on U.S. soil. http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/09/child.molester/index.html Alan Horowitz was convicted in 1991 on 34 counts of child molestation. He fled U. S. jurisdiction while on parole. O fficers from the U.S. Marshals service arrested the 60-year-old at Newark Liberty International Airport after a 15-hour flight from New Delhi, India. The ordained Orthodox rabbi and former child psychologist was arrested on May 22 at a seaside resort in Mahabalipuram, India, according to parole officer Robert Georgia.

Just two hours before America's Most Wanted was to air a profile on Mark Petersimes, the sex offender wanted by authorities was caught in Denver. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288596,00.html Petersimes, 47, was arrested after an 11-year-old girl went into a Family Dollar store in Lakewood and told a clerk a man had attempted to rape her, according to MyFoxColorado.com. Petersimes had been on the run for more than a year after he escaped from a halfway house in Dallas. He cut off his GPS tracking ankle bracelet and disappeared on May 2, 2006, according to America's Most Wanted.

The body of a 4-year-old Kentucky boy who disappeared outside his home near Churchill Downs was found in a garbage truck over the weekend, and authorities said Monday that they believe he was slain. Read More Trash workers discovered the body of Cezar "Ivan" Aguilar-Cano in the same neighborhood where he was last seen playing outside his apartment building on June 29 near the home of the Kentucky Derby.

An Indianapolis woman whose 3-year-old son was found wandering on a busy highway pleaded guilty Monday to child neglect charges. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/ Nancy Dyer, 31, was arrested December 30 after stunned motorists found her son running on Interstate 465 on the city's northwest side, wearing only a diaper and a T-shirt. The boy was not hurt.

A New Jersey mother has disappeared and her 11-month-old baby was found in a Delaware hospital parking lot. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3345664 The baby’s father, who is married to someone else, is missing after flying out the country and not returning. He is considered ‘a person of interest.”

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