System Overload: Rise in Abuse, Neglect Results in a Sputtering Juvenile Court

Each day, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Harris sits behind his cluttered desk at Juvenile Court, a cigarette dangling aimlessly from one hand, and is host to a parade of social workers bearing bad news. The litany is invariably horrific:

A young girl says her mother’s boyfriend has a habit of fondling her and urinating on her.

A boy exhibits cigarette burns on his back and reports his parents gag him and his siblings with handkerchiefs if they misbehave.

A teen-age boy whose father forced him to watch while he killed his mother needs a foster home and counseling.

For Harris, this grim daily agenda has become all too routine. In the past several years, the number of children whose tragic home lives have become an issue for the court has skyrocketed, nearly doubling since June, 1984. Month after month, the lineup of youngsters taken from abusive or neglectful families and designated dependents of the court grows longer, with the severity of physical and sexual injuries they endure increasing as well.

Numbers Numb the Mind

The statistics are staggering. In fiscal year 1986, there were 52,000 reported cases of child abuse in San Diego County, with almost 3,100 of those resulting in requests that the court assume jurisdiction over the child. That’s up from 26,000 total cases and 1,700 so-called “dependency petitions” in fiscal 1982.

Besides victims of physical abuse, sexual molestation and neglect, the youngsters who become dependents of the court include children abandoned by destitute families, runaways whose parents say they can’t control them and babies born to drug-addicted mothers. Some juveniles are being prosecuted in separate proceedings for criminal offenses.

Experts, noting that the increase in such cases far outstrips that which might be expected to accompany the county’s population growth, point to a combination of factors to explain the surge, from an increased vigilance by society toward child abusers to the erosion of the traditional family structure that served as a deterrent to abuse.

Whatever the reasons behind the increase, there are obvious consequences.

The mushrooming numbers have literally overwhelmed the county’s Juvenile Court system, designed for a much smaller caseload typical of a bygone era. The district attorney’s office is woefully understaffed, with lawyers stretched so thin they have scant time to prepare their cases before court appearances.

Meanwhile, the stress of the burden on county social workers--who sometimes juggle twice as many cases as the 27 the state says is manageable--has contributed to a critical attrition problem. About 30% of the employees have been leaving the ranks annually in recent years. Officials say the turnover means a disturbing percentage of workers are green, which can lower the quality of an investigation in a given case.

Judges, too, have felt the weight of the swelling tide. In November, the court’s eight judges and referees presided over 5,000 dependency and delinquency hearings--up from 2,000 in 1982. Many jurists frequently handle 40 case reviews in a single afternoon, quitting as late as 6:30--well after their colleagues in Superior Court downtown close for the day.

Finally, the court’s physical plant is Finally, the court’s physical plant is creaking under the load as well--with no relief in sight. There aren’t enough seats in the lobby--where the constant din and teeming crowd make it resemble the floor of the New

York Stock Exchange--or spaces in the parking lot. An eighth courtroom was added recently to cope with the expanding calendar, but with its cramped confines and lack of a telephone or other basic amenities, officials admit it’s makeshift at best.

“It has just been horrible,” said Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell, presiding judge at Juvenile Court for two years. “The D.A. does not have adequate staffing; the social workers are in tears from the stress of not being able to do their job because they are spread too thin. Everybody is breaking their backs and just wearing out. Something has to give.”

Those who work in the Juvenile Court arena say it is not the personal strain of the growing load that bothers them most. Rather, they worry that the burden is compromising the quality of care given the hundreds of cases that chug through the system each day.

Even the most conscientious social worker or the most dedicated deputy district attorney will make mistakes under such overwhelmingly hectic conditions, they say. And in this line of work, those mistakes can have tragic consequences for the young victims and their families.

“When you take the number of cases that go through these courtrooms each day and divide that by the number of minutes available, you’ll see there is very little time that can be allocated to each one,” said Carlos Armour, supervising deputy district attorney in the Juvenile Division. “With that kind of non-stop pressure, there are bound to be mistakes. When you place an abused little girl back in the home and aren’t 100% sure you’ve done the right thing, that really weighs on you.”

Jane Via, one of seven deputy district attorneys assigned exclusively to do dependency work, said the bottom line is “There simply is not enough attention given to these cases at every step in the process.

“When it’s 4:20 and you’ve been there since 8 in the morning and you’ve still got 23 cases to go that afternoon and you’re thinking, ‘Am I going to be here until 7:30 tonight, again? ‘ everyone’s attitude becomes a lot more pragmatic,” Via said. “That means that very important decisions deeply affecting a child’s welfare aren’t getting the kind of consideration they should.”

Officials with the county’s Children Services Bureau have similar worries. Lana Willingham, the bureau’s deputy director, laments that the increasing stress on social workers--compounded by relatively low salaries--has made it more and more difficult to recruit and retain quality people.

“Turnover is a huge problem,” Willingham said. “Half of the people on our (child abuse referral) hot line have less than one year of experience. And of the 60 new people I’ll be hiring next year, only 10 are at the (master’s degree) level we prefer. The rest have as little as 24 (undergraduate) units of a behavioral science.”

The consequence, Willingham says, is that seasoned workers are forced to make up for their rookie colleagues, and thus are saddled with even greater workloads. That phenomenon cuts deeper into the amount of time a worker can invest in each case.

“When you do that, you limit the worker’s ability to build a strong relationship with the family, which is one very key tool in trying to reunify the family,” Willingham said. “When you’re not able to develop that close contact, then the problems you’re trying to remedy escalate because you’re not able to intervene before more abuse occurs.”

Most dependency cases begin with a call to the county’s child abuse hot line, staffed around the clock by social workers who take reports from teachers, doctors, law enforcement personnel, neighbors, and relatives who have observed signs of abuse or neglect. Since the hot line was launched by state law in 1977, the calls have soared--peaking at more than 102,000 in the last fiscal year. Nearly half that number lead to in-home investigations, and 6% prompt the district attorney to ask that a child be designated a dependent of the court.

Theories of Why Abound

There are a plethora of theories explaining the ballooning numbers. Much of it, experts say, can be attributed to society’s growing familiarity with child abuse, sparked largely by increasing media attention to the topic.

One television program about incest, for example, triggered an unprecedented flood of calls to the hot line that lasted six weeks.

New legislation has contributed as well. The mandatory reporting law--requiring anyone who works with children to call authorities if they suspect neglect or abuse--has been around for years, but workshops and other training mechanisms designed to help people better recognize abuse have multiplied recently.

“Teachers now get X amount of in-service training, law enforcement officials have protocols developed by the attorney general, and psychologists and social workers must receive a certain amount of training in child abuse to get credentialed,” Willingham said. “All of this has an impact.”

Dr. David Chadwick, director of the Center for Child Protection at Children’s Hospital and perhaps the county’s leading expert on child abuse, says the deterioration of the nuclear family--and the failure of society to make up for that with affordable, accessible child care and related support services--has undoubtedly played a role.

“Mobility, with the absence of extended families, has certainly created situations where there is greater vulnerability for abuse,” Chadwick said. Willingham agreed, and said that though an increase in abuse and neglect cases is visible nationwide, San Diego “is experiencing something even more dramatic because we’re going from a small town into a major urban environment, complete with lots of newcomers feeling the stresses of finding housing and employment. Those stresses compound and build into child abuse.”

Also fueling the increase is the growing sophistication of physicians who examine children who appear to be victims of abuse.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Harris said Chadwick and his team of nurses and support staff at Children’s Hospital have “done outstanding work in terms of identifying physical evidence of sexual molestation. That has allowed verification of a report and the filing of a case when in fact a child may be non-verbal.”

Further inflating the workload are cases tied to drug abuse. Harris estimated that he handles as many as four dependency cases a week involving infants born to drug-addicted mothers. The proliferation of those cases stems largely from the medical community’s heightened ability to recognize signs of chemical abuse and predict high-risk births.

According to lawyers, judges and social workers, the rising flood of cases has dwarfed Juvenile Court and strained its ability to accomplish its mission. At one time, Judge McConnell noted, dependency cases composed only a fraction of the court’s time, with the balance occupied by the prosecution of juvenile offenders. Now, 70% of the court’s time is devoted to dependency work, McConnell said.

Among deputy district attorneys, a stint in juvenile was once viewed as a vacation--a laid-back respite from the high-pressure life of the criminal prosecutor. No longer. The seven attorneys assigned solely to dependency work operate at breakneck pace, often handling one or two trials during the morning and then lugging a 2-foot-high stack of as many as 40 files into court for an afternoon of case reviews--the periodic evaluations of cases by judges.

Such a schedule leaves virtually no time for interviewing witnesses, talking to doctors about medical evidence or boning up on research that might prove useful in a given case, the deputies say.

“Theoretically, it would be nice to be able to open a file and maybe read the social worker’s report before going into court for a case review, just to see if there are any red flags that need attention,” Via said. “But I can assure you that never happens. There simply isn’t time.”

In a role contrary to that typically played by the district attorney’s office, deputies in the Juvenile Division act as lawyers for the county Department of Social Services in its efforts to have children declared dependents of the court because of neglect, abuse, abandonment or other reasons. Using evidence from social workers’ investigations, psychological reports, medical examinations and other sources, the attorneys piece together cases designed to convince the court to take over parental rights for a given child.

It is a job different from any other likely to confront a prosecutor--who is trained to make charges stick against criminal offenders--and supervisors say it often takes several months for deputies to grasp the legal and procedural intricacies involved in the work.

“You need a mature individual with a commitment to this kind of work, because you don’t just walk in and pick it up,” Armour said. “The training is difficult, and sitting in court all day and watching what horrible things people do to their kids takes a lot out of you.”

Harris, who coordinates the assignment of dependency cases for the office, said, “We have reached an irreducible minimum in terms of case preparation time. Already, I know there are things we overlook that we would pick up if we had the time. But we don’t.”

The consequences, some say, are troubling. Willingham said it is not unusual for an attorney representing the parents of a dependent child to bring up an issue in court that the deputy district attorney may not be familiar with or may not have discussed with the social worker in the case.

“So a decision may be made that is totally inappropriate for the child because no one is present to oppose it,” Willingham said. More often, a case is continued and “the child ends up in a limbo state where the confusion, fright and uncertainty they’re already feeling is stretched out even longer,” she said.

Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller is well aware of the onerous caseload of deputies in the juvenile division. The problem has been exacerbated, he said, because a request for two additional attorneys for the office went unfilled by the Board of Supervisors last year.

Beyond a desire for increased staffing, both Miller and Armour, the supervising deputy in Juvenile, would like to see the dependency caseload turned over to the county counsel’s office. San Diego, they point out, is one of only three major counties in the state where the district attorney--rather than the county counsel--represents the Department of Social Services in such matters.

“It’s a giant problem, one of my most understaffed areas,” Miller said. “I would either like to have the county give us more attorneys to cope with this increase or have the county counsel send over some of his attorneys, who we could gradually train to take over the work.”

‘Like Ducks Out of Water’

Armour echoed those desires and noted that having a deputy district attorney handle the civil work involved in dependency cases is incongruous. “We’re like ducks out of water. We’re trained to be in the trenches fighting it out on criminal cases. Juvenile is stressful, but it’s not typical work for a D.A. at all.”

Armour is also concerned about conflicts of interest the district attorney has in cases where juvenile offenders are prosecuted by the office on the one hand and represented by the office as a dependent of the court on the other. Also, there is an uncomfortable tension in cases when a deputy from the Juvenile Division is working to reunify a dependent youngster with his family while a colleague downtown is prosecuting a parent involved in the same case for child abuse.

County Counsel Lloyd Harmon said he had studied Miller’s proposal and would not be averse to assuming the job if given adequate staffing. Harmon said it would take 20 attorneys to handle the caseload now shouldered by seven deputy district attorneys.

“I suspect it will be a budget issue next year,” Harmon said. “I wouldn’t mind doing it--though some of my fellow county counsels say I’m crazy--but I wouldn’t do it without sufficient staff. And that would be expensive.”

For social workers, the mounting workload will be eased somewhat by the addition of 32 new employees in January. In the meantime, some say the burden is damaging their ability to give each case the attention it deserves.

“I personally feel I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got, but I know there’s a lot more I could be doing,” said Kim Kilsby, a social worker for two and a half years. “The major problem I see is a marked reduction in our ability to provide preventive intervention and an increase in our crisis emergency work. That means we’re constantly putting out fires or putting Band-Aids on situations.”

Judgment Is Questioned

When a caseload becomes particularly heavy, Kilsby said, “You begin to question your judgment. ‘Am I missing key points? Are there signs I should be seeing when I go out on a visit?’ That’s an uncomfortable position to be in.”

Concerned about protecting the confidentiality of minors and their families, officials were reluctant to provide specific examples of casualties caused by the overloaded system. But one name--Christa Hawkins--comes up repeatedly in conversations about the problem.

Christa died in early 1985, three months after her case entered the beleaguered, labyrinthine Juvenile Court system. Her stepfather was later convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison for beating the 3-year-old girl to death. In a report closing Christa’s case, a social worker wrote, “The Juvenile Court system, the social service system . . . all failed . . . and caused the death of this child.”

Dr. Chadwick hasn’t forgotten Christa. Nor does he believe her death is the last of its kind that he’ll see.

“When you look at what these people are doing in the face of the load of cases coming in each day, it’s just astonishing,” Chadwick said. “The workers on the hot line are performing telephone triage. The D.A.s are making quick, very critical decisions over and over again each day, often based on slim information.

“Until we see a change in society and a greater national commitment to family support and social services, there are going to be failures in the system.”

THE TRAGEDY

Officials are reluctant to provide specific examples of casualties caused by the overloaded system because of confidentiality. But one name comes up repeatedly. Christa Hawkings died in early 1985, three months after her case entered the beleaguered, labyrinthine Juvenile Court system. Her stepfather was later convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison for beating the 3-year-old girl to death. In a report closing the case, a social worker wrote, “The Juvenile Court system, the social service system . . . all failed . . . and caused the death of this child.”

THE PROBLEMS

Social workers succumbing to stress are leaving at a rapid rate. About 30% of them have been leaving annually. This leads to a disturbing percentage of workers who are green, which can lower the quality of an investigation in a given case.

The district attorney’s office is understaffed, and attorneys often have little or no time to review files before cases.

In November, the Juvenile system’s eight judges and referees presided over 5,000 dependency and delinquency hearings--up from 2,000 in 1982. Many jurists frequently handle 40 case reviews in a single afternoon.

Physically, there aren’t enough seats in the court’s lobby, which is constantly crowded and noisy, nor are there enough parking spaces.

THE THEORIES

Experts say much of the increase for the clogged system can be attributed to society’s growing familiarity with child abuse, sparked largely by increasing media attention.

The mandatory reporting law has been around for years, but workshops and other training mechanisms designed to help people better recognize abuse have multiplied recently.

Others point to the deterioration of the nuclear family and the paucity of affordable child care.