FOSTER CHILDREN : A Charade of Justice for Adults Only : L.A. County: When abuse is suspected, children suffer a day in Dependency Court, fearful and bewildered and helpless to influence their own fate.

The van carrying abused children from the MacLaren Children’s Center drives up to an ominous high-rise building with “Criminal Courts” written on the entrance. The children are driven into a high-security garage and the same caged-off entrance where the Night Stalker was brought for his day in court. The children’s van halts behind a long black-and-white sheriff’s bus filled with men wearing jail-issue blue jumpsuits. The children, age 4 to 18, wait while the men disembark in shackles and chains.

Frequently the children ask if they are being taken to jail. But there is little time to explain that Dependency Court is separate from Criminal Court. The children, who have already suffered physical and sexual abuse, are frightened and disoriented.

The system is confusing, but it typically works like this:

Someone reports that children have been abused or neglected. Social workers investigate. If the children are in danger, they are taken away from home. Within three days, they must be brought into court for an initial detention hearing. During this period, they may be prevented from having any contact with their parents. The first time they are together again is in court, usually with an attorney sitting between the parents and the children. The proceeding will determine whether the children will return home or be put in foster care.

Last year, the Los Angeles County Juvenile Dependency Court conducted 56,136 hearings--nearly three times the caseload a decade ago. About 40,000 children, by conservative estimates, are now under court supervision in the county.

“The quantity of cases and shortcomings of CPS (Child Protective Services) create a substantial risk that the quality of justice desirable may not be achieved in this system,” says presiding Judge Paul Boland, a champion of children’s rights, who is doing his utmost to make the courts family-oriented. “Just as the children are at risk, the quality of justice in this system is at risk.”

Dependency Court is in the same judicial loop as the civil and criminal courts, and the contrast in how they operate is a reflection of the low esteem in which the county holds children at risk. In civil court, a judge may reserve 10 days to settle a $250,000 property dispute. In Dependency Court, a judge may have only 10 minutes to decide the fate of a child. Tens of thousands of children, predominantly minorities and poor, have had their lives changed in these 10-minute legal proceedings, in which the judgments often are based on fragmentary reports. But who dares protest? Children can’t vote.

While the court personnel prepare for the daily grind of justice, a boy with immaculately combed hair and sad eyes, wearing a red sweater and red bow tie, is brought up on a freight elevator and taken to a dimly lit room furnished with a television set and not much else. There he waits with dozens of other children until a stranger calls his name and he is taken to a courtroom. The children may wait for a few minutes or all day. Sometimes they are never called and they go back to MacLaren Hall to wonder where their families are, and if they will be reunited, and when.

In a holding tank converted into a narrow waiting room, the light filters through iron bars. A girl with blonde curls and a husky Latino boy are eating peanuts off the floor. “Animals!” a woman snaps at them, and goes on in this vein, unleashing her frustration. This out-of-control adult yelling at out-of-control children in the out-of-control courts is a snapshot of the whole out-of-control system.

Hundreds of people--mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, friends--sit on hard wooden benches in a corridor outside the courtrooms. There is no privacy. No place to consult quietly with an attorney.

Nine out of 10 families in Dependency Court can’t afford private legal counsel; they have court-appointed attorneys--the same attorneys who simultaneously represent the county. This is a conflict of interest that is routinely weighted against the child.

A bailiff calls a name, and a broken family--mother and ex-husband--goes into the courtroom. A toddler who was allegedly abused sexually by her mother’s boyfriend calls frantically after her. The little girl is given a lollipop. The judge, overwhelmed with papers, sends the girl back to live with her mother, despite allegations that the child-abusing boyfriend is surreptitiously visiting her. “They don’t listen!” laments the father.

Ten minutes later, in the same courtroom, a janitor pushes through the swinging gate and halts directly behind a desk where two parents with histories of drug abuse sit waiting for the verdict. A deputy dumps a waste basket into the trashbin and the janitor rolls it out, while the judge reads into the record that the couple’s three children are being placed in the custody of the state until 1992.

A generation of children is being treated like trash. The abuse of young lives and of justice is going on in full view of City Hall--and of the Los Angeles media that inhabit the hallways covering movie stars’ suits and celebrity murderers. The horror cases that make the news--children abandoned, tortured, even killed by their caretakers--don’t diminish the general horror of children routinely, systematically, neglected by the court.

Should society pour more money into this charade of justice? The county is considering plans for a new child-oriented Dependency Court facility away from downtown. But unless there is also a program to prevent abuse, the new courtrooms will immediately be overwhelmed.

“If funds were spent providing in-home family services at the point where the family first appears to be in crisis,” thousands of cases could be resolved without going to court, Judge Boland says.

Shortsightedly, child-abuse prevention doesn’t rank with crime prevention in Gov. George Deukmejian’s agenda. No wonder these stepchildren of the state, having suffered multiple abuses, including judicial and political neglect, predictably will turn someday against the state--and against themselves and their children.

At day’s end, the children leave the garage looking back with huge eyes at the Dickensian courthouse, which now stands between them and their families. Many of them will return to this building in shackles, and some will be remanded to the custody of the state for as long as they live.

Abused children cry out for protection, for affection and for guidance to grow up like other children. If they are denied what they deserve, they will come back to haunt us.