TV REVIEW : ‘Crimes Against Children’ Takes Disturbing Look at Foster Care

Nine years ago, ABC reported on America’s foster care system and basically found it nothing short of scandalous.

Too many children were being placed in foster care, they were poorly supervised and they were often forgotten and left in the system far too long.

Children were being victimized by the very system designed to help them.

Subsequent federal legislation initially brought improvements, ABC says tonight in its disturbing “Closeup” documentary “Crimes Against Children: Failure of Foster Care” (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42 at 10). But today the country’s foster care service is in even worse shape.

The social pathologies of the 1980s--rises in child abuse and unwed pregnancies, plus poverty, homelessness, drug abuse and even AIDS--have increased the number of children in foster care and thrown an inherently shaky system into a state of crisis, ABC says.

More than 450,000 children will spend time in foster care this year, according to Rebecca Chase, who anchors tonight’s report. A series of interviews with several articulate veteran foster children is heartbreakingly revealing of the destructive effects of growing up as a foster child.

Chase also reports the grisly details of several case studies of babies being beaten to death, complete with morgue photos. They are powerful, worst-case examples of how horribly the system can fail. But, is it necessary to squeeze every last drop of emotion from the story of Tameka, a young girl who was hideously tortured to death by elderly foster parents who, though fully licensed by the State of Illinois, had a long record of abusing their previous foster youngsters?

Like many TV documentaries on complex social and legal problems that have no simple solutions, “Crimes Against Children” is often frustratingly fuzzy when it comes to hard facts and figures. A little less sensationalizing would have left the producers, Megan Crowley and Roberta Oster, more time to better explain how the foster care system functions and to talk to some experts about alternatives to perpetuating the current system, among other things.

Generally, however, the hour does a good job of illuminating the major failings of a seemingly intractable problem.