The Child Is the Loser in Bitter Custody Fights : Juvenile justice: In O.C. case, court faults both parents and gives girl to neither. They say system hurts her worst.

The little girl with the dark hair and the bright smile was 4 years old when Orange County took her away from her parents. She’s 7 now. And even though each parent wants her back, neither appears likely to get her.

Ivette Ferrao and Vijay Manghirmalani are each permitted to visit their daughter--whom we will call Sara--one hour a week. Their phone calls to her are limited. Sara lives with 30 other children at Canyon Acres, a county-run “group home” in Anaheim Hills for children ruled by the courts to have been abused, abandoned or neglected.

In Sara’s case, the abuse was emotional, a judge decided, the result of a bitter divorce in which she became the pawn in the parents’ battle. That’s why she can’t go home.

Ferrao said her daughter has been harmed more by the system that separated mother and child than by her. “Haven’t they ever heard of separation anxiety?” she wondered.

“I still don’t have my baby home,” said Ferrao, 40. “Every time I see her, she’s worse. She’s lost all hope of coming home.”

The county has scheduled a hearing in two weeks on whether to put Sara into the hands of foster parents. To get the girl ready for life as a foster child, or perhaps for adoption, social workers have recommended cutting back her parents’ visits from one per week to one every other week.

“It’s so difficult and so frustrating to have an attachment with my daughter,” said Manghirmalani, the girl’s father. “I mean, I love my daughter to death, I’ll do anything for her. But it’s creating a drift. It starts affecting your life.”

Sara’s story is a tale without clearcut heroes or villains, a clash of parents, social workers and the courts. When government intrudes in family matters, the reasons are usually obvious. But cases like Sara’s show how the issues can become far more complicated, the solutions less obvious and government’s job more complex.

Divorce frequently brings emotional trauma to children, but when is the parents’ behavior so abusive that a judge is forced to take a child from them?

Juvenile Court in California is split in two. One part handles youngsters under the age of 18 who are accused of crimes but are treated more leniently because of their age. The other part helps children who are victims, who have been physically or emotionally harmed through no fault of their own.

The removal of a child can be triggered in any number of ways. A neighbor sees a mother beating her daughter. A child shows up malnourished at school.

From the moment a child is removed from a home, parents who want to regain custody are put on the defensive. They have to satisfy outsiders to get their child back. They are bombarded with interviews by social workers, lawyers, psychologists. There is an initial detention hearing, then a disposition hearing, a six-month review, a 12-month review, an 18-month review.

In Orange County, five judges handle the “juvenile dependency” hearings in which youngsters are victims. In the most recent year for which statistics are available, 1,800 new cases came into the system. Judges say the number has increased during each of the past few years.

Juvenile Court proceedings are shrouded in secrecy. There are no juries, no spectators, usually no outsiders. There are mechanisms to monitor judges’ and social workers’ actions, but they, too, operate in secrecy. Still, Juvenile Court judges say they are well aware of their power: They call the taking of a child from the parents “the death sentence.”

Harold LaFlamme, an attorney with years of experience in juvenile dependency hearings, said 90% of the cases in which a child becomes a ward of the court are clear-cut: A father is addicted to crack cocaine and ignores his kids; a mother beats and starves her daughter. The children deserve better and society must step in.

But the lawyer said other cases are not as clear. He cited one in which a mother slapped her child for tearing up food stamps and flushing them down the toilet. She promised not to hit the child again, and the child was returned home.

With Sara’s parents, he said, “you put it in the 10% of the cases that are unusual. You simply can’t generalize about it.”

Many parents become obsessed--not surprising when a child is taken away. Mothers and fathers copy every court document they can, detailing their travels through the social services bureaucracy. They telephone anyone they think can help. They encourage scrutiny of their most intimate records, including psychiatric reports that cast them in a poor light.

Patricia Stanton, a Garden Grove foster mother who cared for Sara for several months, said Ferrao may be penalized by the system because she is “very excitable . . . very emotional, as who wouldn’t be? It’s her child.”

But whether you’re dealing with a cop, a judge, the DMV or some other bureaucracy, “you cannot be emotional” or it is held against you, Stanton said. Both she and her husband, who have been licensed foster parents for 10 years, believe Ferrao should regain custody of Sara.

“You’ve got to consider the child didn’t do anything wrong,” said Stanton. “It’s just unfortunate, because (she) is the one who gets hurt.”

Complicating cases even more is the fact that even “seriously neglected” children want to go home, according to Michael Giannini, an assistant public defender who has represented numerous parents trying to get their children back. The children “love their parents,” he said.

“A social worker, or judge--I’m not being sarcastic--they are playing God. Is it better to take this kid away from the parent, whom they love, and give him to someone else?” Giannini said. The law emphasizes keeping families together, when possible. “But when does a human judge say, ‘We’ve gone beyond that; this child should be taken from the home permanently.’?”

Manghirmalani, 36, and Ferrao, 40, provided The Times access to many of their court records. But because the judge, social workers, psychiatrists and most lawyers involved in the case declined to discuss it, questions remain.

What is clear is that last June, after an eight-day trial--very long by Juvenile Court standards--Superior Court Judge Robert Thomas said testimony from social workers and psychiatrists left no doubt that Sara had suffered “severe emotional distress” and had become a “pawn” in her parents’ bitter divorce.

Battles over children, though destructive, aren’t exactly unheard of. Just ask anyone who has divorced, has watched friends split up, or has seen movies like “Kramer vs. Kramer.” And if most parents don’t lose their children to the county for that reason, most parents don’t have quite the loathing for each other that Manghirmalani and Ferrao came to have. One psychologist characterized their attitudes toward each other as “highly poisonous.”

Vijay and Ivette met in 1984, when he went to have a resume drawn up at an office where she worked. They married in October of 1985, and the next month, Sara was born. The couple separated in 1987, and their divorce became final in 1988.

Ferrao was given custody and Manghirmalani got the right to visit his daughter. The parents’ relationship is so bad that Ferrao would drop their daughter off at the Anaheim police station, rather than have Manghirmalani come to her house to pick up Sara.

A year after the divorce, Manghirmalani was accused of sexual abuse, which he denied. An investigation ensued but no charges were brought.

Ferrao said she voluntarily put her daughter in Orangewood, assuming that while the investigation was underway, her ex-husband would be able to see his daughter only if someone else was present.

Once the girl was in county custody, social workers began reporting that she had suffered emotional abuse in the parents’ bitter feud. There followed more than a year of Sara’s living in an emergency shelter, and with temporary foster parents, before she was returned to Ferrao’s home in 1991 for a 60-day visit under what is called a “family maintenance” plan. The parents and Sara were ordered to receive therapy as part of the program.

In September, a social worker showed up at Ferrao’s house and took Sara out for an ice cream cone. The next day, Ferrao was ordered to return her daughter to Orangewood, the shelter for abused, abandoned and neglected children in the city of Orange. Both Ferrao and Manghirmalani said they do not know why the mother was ordered to give her child back to the county.

“I could not bring myself to do it,” Ferrao says. She took her daughter and fled.

Two months later, she returned, and turned Sara over to the county, which has had the girl as its ward ever since.

The county’s Social Services Agency said Ferrao, who lives in Huntington Beach, had failed to get therapy for her daughter even before fleeing and continued to brainwash the girl against her father by raising the specter he would take her to India.

Manghirmalani, who lives in Anaheim, ridiculed any claim that he would flee the country with his daughter. Instead, he said, he would have his mother come from Bombay to help him care for Sara.

Yet Manghirmalani has been ordered deported, an order he is appealing. He said the deportation stems from his arrests on bad check and shoplifting charges, though he contended that the arrests had been legally erased from his record and have never come up in the Family Court proceedings.

The court files are filled with judgments serious and trivial.

The serious: A psychologist said Manghirmalani had a “self-centered, moralistic and judgmental attitude.” He said Ferrao “becomes angry and aggressive . . . when her demands are not met.”

The trivial: Ferrao is faulted for complaining about a potentially unsafe light fixture in her daughter’s room and for writing to county officials to seek help in getting her daughter back.

Attorney LaFlamme, who estimated he has handled more than 14,000 Juvenile Court cases representing children taken from their parents, said minor complaints are seldom taken seriously by lawyers and judges. He said in one case a social worker mentioned that the mother burned the Thanksgiving turkey.

LaFlamme said workers at Canyon Acres, where Sara is now housed, “are all so goddamned picky they expect (parents) to be Ozzie and Harriet. They’re not. If they were Ozzie and Harriet they wouldn’t be here in the first place.” But, he said, if a father visiting his child spends most of his time chatting up a social worker, or never changes a diaper, or terrifies his child into hiding just by showing up, “we are going to look at that.”

The reports compiled over the years come down harder on Ferrao than on Manghirmalani. They don’t criticize her for running off with her daughter--an absence of criticism that infuriates Manghirmalani--but they do chastise her for “brainwashing” her daughter against the father, which the experts contend is emotional abuse.

Speaking in general and not of the Manghirmalani-Ferrao case, LaFlamme agreed that what he called “mind-poisoning” is frequent in divorce cases. “I think that is emotional abuse” and is a reason to take a child away, he said. It’s “frequently worse” than physical abuse “because it lasts longer, is often subtle and not apparent, and isn’t easy to cure.”

Superior Court Judge Frank Fasel, who replaced Thomas as supervising judge of the dependency court on March 22, said that while emotional abuse could be “kind of nebulous,” it is clear-cut in “extreme” cases. He said the age of a child and psychological examinations could be factors in a judge’s decision.

Retired Superior Court Judge Richard J. Beacom, who sometimes handled juvenile dependency cases, said of emotional abuse that “you know it when you see it.” Unlike physical abuse, including sexual abuse, emotional abuse “is probably the toughest call of all” because it can be so elusive, he said.

Giannini, the assistant public defender, spent years representing parents trying to get their children back. He said some clients are poor, and “if you are poor in a capitalistic society, you have failed at something, making money, keeping your family together, something. . . .”

“Now some judge sits there and says the last vestige of your psyche is (being) a parent, and we’re going to take that away. You see some of the most heart-rending decisions in this county,” Giannini said. “Some of them leave you teeth-crunching.”

William G. Steiner, the newly appointed Orange County supervisor, has worked with children for years. He ran Orangewood, the county emergency shelter for abused, neglected and abandoned children, and has been executive director of the foundation that raises money for the shelter and programs for children.

“Every system has imperfections,” Steiner said. “There are cases where children should be returned to the family or no abuse occurred. But we know there will be headlines if a child dies of abuse that has been reported.”

Steiner said state laws are designed to protect children and also to keep them with their family whenever possible. The requirements for periodic court hearings were instituted so a child “doesn’t get lost in the system and drift in foster care for years and years and years,” he said.

Steiner also said that only about 4% of the cases reported as suspected child abuse in Orange County wind up with the children coming into Orangewood, “one of the lowest (percentages) in the state.” In the rest of the cases, he said the suspicions are unfounded or a bad situation is corrected with the children staying with parents or relatives, aided by extra services from county social workers.

Having a lawyer for each parent, another lawyer for the county and a lawyer for the child helps keep things balanced, he said. If a parent is going to lose custody, courts try to put the children with relatives. Only about one-third of the children brought to Orangewood wind up in foster care, he said.

But to anyone who asks if a child would be put back into a home where the risk for harm was high, Steiner said, “the answer is no. Because Orange County is a conservative county with conservative courts, and that’s why you don’t see (many) child deaths (from abuse) in Orange County.

But Ivette Ferrao contends that in her case it is the system that has failed. She’s been so consumed with her daughter’s case in the last few years that she’s been able to find only temporary work, she said.

“People in the system are saying I’m over-emotional or react too much,” she said. And indeed, a hint of hysteria sometimes creeps into her voice, and her words speed up like a record played at a higher speed. But she notes that her 17-year-old daughter by a previous marriage is a model student, so she’s not a failure as a mother.

Sara “has emotionally deteriorated,” Ferrao said. “She asks when she can come home. She’s stuck with orphans, daughters of people in jail, drug users. . . .”

She said social workers have focused on the “vendetta” between her and Manghirmalani. “Of course we didn’t like each other, that’s why we got divorced,” she said. “They focus so much on him and me that the child has become ignored.”

The case is expensive too. Ferrao has gone through several attorneys, including one who billed at $175 an hour and demanded $2,000 up front before starting work. The county put the cost of keeping Sara in Canyon Acres at $3,705 per month. Manghirmalani, who works in a computer support job for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, pays $200 a month in child support. Federal, state and county funds pay the rest, county officials said.

Both Ferrao and Manghirmalani complain that the social workers who monitor their visits with Sara are uniformly critical. Admitting that “I get excited,” Manghirmalani said that he was told to calm down and also not to discuss the divorce or Sara’s case with his daughter. So he talked about her schoolwork, only to be criticized for a lack of emotion and pushing his daughter too hard on academics.

“Whatever I do . . . (it’s called) a mistake,” he said.

When the county was told by an appeals court not to proceed with adoption proceedings for Sara, it quickly switched to the possibility of foster care, he said.

“But for me that is dying the same way. You are denied your child. If my child is put up with foster parents, that’s a living death for me and my daughter.”

A report for the April 19 hearing said Sara shows severe depression and anxiety. Her “tantrums and histrionic episodes” appear to be attempts to gain attention.

A social worker said last year that for more than three years Sara suffered because “her world is continually in an upheaval. She needs continuity, security and stability.” Because of her desire to please both parents, social workers and Canyon Acres staff, she “appears to be very confused about what she wants” and to say what she thinks adults want to hear.

“It is essential for (Sara’s) feelings and needs to be considered at this time,” the social worker wrote.

Cutting back parental visits to every other week would ease the pressure on Sara and let her “focus on being a little girl,” another social worker wrote.

Manghirmalani said the social workers’ reports repeatedly said Sara was sad because her parents were fighting. But “nobody ever asks the question, is the child feeling sad because she’s not with the parents?”

“I am sure that (my daughter) has mentioned on hundreds of occasions during the last three years that she wanted to go home to either her mother or father,” he said. “All this is conveniently left out” of the reports.

Ferrao and Manghirmalani vowed to continue their fights to get Sara released from the custody of Orange County, but the battle has clearly taken its toll.

Manghirmalani was asked if Sara was his first child.

“Yes,” he replied, and paused. “And the last.”