COLUMN ONE : Drawing the Line on ‘Abuse’ : A mother whose son wandered onto a highway fights to get off Iowa’s Child Abuse Registry. Her ordeal has sparked a debate on whether the law has gone too far.

If there is anything those familiar with Joy Brown’s travail manage to agree about, it is that her experience could happen to them. In fact, many here in Iowa say it has happened to them.

One minute, Brown saw her 5-year-old son Jamie sitting in a bedroom in the family’s isolated farmhouse two miles south of Mason City, watching a “Winnie the Pooh” videotape. The next minute, she could not find him. In that instant, while she put her infant daughter down for a nap, Jamie wandered outside, into the flat, vacant Iowa plains.

Like many parents in such situations, Brown’s concern sharpened to alarm, then panic, as she vainly searched and hollered for her son through cornfields, barns and sheds. Also like many parents, she eventually located Jamie. Unlike many parents, though, her ordeal did not end there.

As it happened, Brown found Jamie that summer afternoon at the Mason City Police Station, where he’d been taken by a passing motorist who’d spotted him wandering on the highway near the Browns’ home. At the station, Brown also found an Iowa Department of Human Services caseworker, summoned by the police. It will be necessary, the caseworker explained, to open a child abuse investigation.

“Denial of critical care,” the DHS called it six days later in a letter notifying Brown that its investigation found child abuse to have occurred. Failing to supervise a 5-year-old, letting him wander unattended across a highway--these things met the state code criteria squarely.

Joy Brown’s name would go on the state’s Child Abuse Registry, the DHS explained. There it would stay for 10 years.

The state’s response may have seemed bizarre, but it was not all that uncommon. Iowa and many other states, faced with civil lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and mounting public outrage over abuse cases--including several particularly disturbing deaths--have in the past decade regularly toughened their codes. They’ve also squeezed out caseworker discretion by sharpening definitions of abuse and standardizing the decision-making process. From a history of under-response, the pendulum has swung to occasional over-response.

What is the alternative? asks Eric Sage, a top DHS official with responsibility for Iowa’s child protection programs. Suppose we just return the child, and he gets hit on the road the next day? Suppose we allow wide caseworker discretion, and some people end up getting harsh treatment while others get off easy? How to differentiate, how to decide what merits intervention? The code is a response to public sentiment. Bureaucracy gone berserk? No. The system is working precisely as constructed.

Just so, responds Joy Brown, that’s the problem.

From her living room, the outspoken 36-year-old mother of four, armed with an Apple computer, a laser printer and a modem, has been waging a campaign for vindication--and reform--ever since being labeled a child abuser. For months, she fought her battle privately, in official state channels, and met mostly with bureaucratic paper-ruffling. Then, late last year, she went public. The response, as she puts it, “has been big-time.”

The cascade of letters, editorials and e-mail computer messages from sympathizers across the country have included more than a few stories similar to Brown’s. The former director of Iowa’s Child Protective Services has spoken out on her behalf. Radio talk shows have called, as have state senators. In mid-January, citing Brown’s case, an Iowa state legislative task force announced it will seek reform of the state’s child abuse code.

Fueled by Brown, a difficult debate rages in Iowa, as elsewhere. How much judgment can you legislate or write into policy? How to allow for common sense but bar subjective bias? How to walk the fine, difficult line between under- and over-response?

Figure it out, Joy Brown declares.

“This is just so wrong,” she says, tossing her mane of red hair. “I don’t belong on a child abuse registry.”

Husband at Work

It was a normal summer afternoon, Brown would later recall. That July 21 in 1993, her husband, Tom, a welder at a steel door manufacturer in Mason City, had just left for his 3 p.m. shift. Brown was walking down the hallway, carrying her sleeping infant daughter, Kayla, toward her crib. Passing the middle bedroom, she looked in and saw her 5-year-old, Jamie, sitting on the floor, legs crossed, watching “Winnie the Pooh,” his favorite.

Brown continued down the hallway to Kayla’s bedroom, where she softly placed her daughter in her crib. “I could not have been more than a minute in there,” Brown remarked later. “Usually I hear if Jamie is moving. I hear everything, even if I’m sleeping. This time, I heard nothing. It still amazes me. How could that happen?”

Brown’s habit of constantly listening for Jamie had evolved out of necessity. By the time Jamie was 2, it was clear to the Browns that he was different. He’d taught himself to read and write, but he would not or could not talk. By 5, Jamie still was not talking, except for isolated words, often when he wanted something. He was strong-willed and tended to tantrums.

Joy Brown had taken Jamie to the University of Iowa Hospitals, where doctors diagnosed not autism, but “pervasive developmental disorder.” That meant taking Jamie twice a week to a speech therapist at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Mason City and putting him in a preschool “special education” program. It also meant keeping an ever-watchful eye on him, for Jamie tended to wander off, to follow his own paths. “If I don’t hear him for a couple minutes, I go find him,” she said.

Door Not Yet Bolted

Sometimes, back at their old home over in Clear Lake, Jamie had turned the front door deadbolt, gotten out and gone over to the neighbors. But Clear Lake was a small town with no highways, and everyone knew each other; the neighbors would bring him back.

The situation was different now at the farmhouse, where they’d been living for only three weeks. They had no immediate neighbors, for one thing, only a highway. They also had not yet gotten around to installing the keyed deadbolts that Jamie couldn’t turn, in part because it wasn’t officially their house. Tom Brown’s dad had built it, and his widowed mother, Elaine, owned it. They were there because Elaine had decided to move into town and Tom had decided to come home.

They’d moved in June 26, and had marveled at the space. They had a big carpeted living room, a fully equipped kitchen, four bedrooms off a long hallway and 202 acres of land. Tom’s cousin would do the farming, mainly corn and beans, but the acreage was theirs. The three boys and a girl, all 7 and under, had room to roam.

Which apparently is just what Jamie chose to do that summer day. After putting Kayla down in her crib, Brown walked back down the hallway. The door to the middle bedroom was now closed, but this wasn’t odd; Jamie liked to shut doors. She continued on to the living room and sat down with her 7-year-old, Chris. A moment later, Chris got up, went into the middle bedroom, then came back out.

“Where’s Jamie?” he asked.

“In your room watching a tape,” Brown said.

“No he isn’t.”

At first, they figured he was hiding, playing a game. They searched under beds, in closets, down in the basement, all the time calling out Jamie’s name. Anxiety rising, Brown retraced her steps. Then she called Tom at work and Tom’s mother, both two miles away in Mason City.

“Jamie is missing,” she told them. “Please come.”

By now Brown was starting to panic. At her side, Chris was screaming, “I told you we never should have moved here.”

Brown, from a family of eight children, had always aspired to be a full-time homemaker with a big family. When others, including a sister, had heard about Jamie’s condition, they’d said, good thing it’s you, not me, I couldn’t handle it, I would put him somewhere. Why don’t you?

Brown just could not imagine doing that. Instead, she started a support group for parents of disabled children and hoped Jamie would evolve. She talked to him all the time as if he did understand her. She thought he did.

Ditches Searched

One day Jamie, as he will, had a temper tantrum at school. The teacher and others had held his arms down for 20 minutes or so. At bedtime, Brown wrote down two words, sad and mad , and showed them to Jamie. How does what happened today at school make you feel? she’d asked her son. Jamie pointed to sad .

But now with Jamie missing, Tom and his mom arrived within five minutes. Tom started driving the ditches, his mother headed for the basement, Brown ran outside. He’s dead or kidnaped, she thought, as she searched the machine shed and barn and abundant fields full of summer corn. She started praying.

Then she called 911, which in her reach of Iowa is answered by the Mason City police. “I have a child with a disability missing,” she said. “Purple shirt, shorts. His name is Jamie.”

“Oh,” a lady replied, “I think we have him.”

One hour had elapsed since Jamie’s disappearance. From a window, Brown could see her husband turning onto a gravel road. She waved an arm to flag him down. You could, she later recalled, “probably hear me sigh over in the next town.”

Her relief was short-lived, however. As soon as she and her husband walked into the Mason City Police Station, she could sense something was wrong.

A woman officer led them to a private room. Sitting in there were Jamie--and DHS investigator Pete Farrell. The Browns, Joy weeping, hugged their son, who hugged back. Then they were invited to sit down. Farrell introduced himself, and explained.

In Stocking Feet

Bob Luther, on his way to the movies in Mason City with his grandson, had spotted Jamie wandering on Highway 65, running from one side of the road to the other in his stocking feet. When Luther stopped to help, Jamie had been uncommunicative and hard to deal with. Luther had taken Jamie to the police station.

There a policewoman had dedicated “considerable energy to controlling Jamie and keeping him corralled.”

Farrell began asking questions, focusing, it seemed to Brown, on Jamie’s disability. Farrell kept asking if she was too tired, kept suggesting that Jamie wore her down. Wasn’t Jamie “quite a handful?” Couldn’t they use some “respite care,” some time away from Jamie?

“Expensive baby-sitting” is how Brown later characterized that idea. “It’s more abusive to take him to strangers for a long weekend,” she said with some bitterness. “What if he woke up in the middle of the night, how would he feel? He still feels , even if he’s disabled. Those guys don’t have a clue.”

Whether from his questions or his direct observation, however, it seemed clear to Farrell that Jamie exhausted both his parents. He thought they’d benefit greatly if they could have a weekend once a month to themselves.

Other than that, he would “not change the Browns’ life,” Farrell later wrote in a report. He generally thought well of them. The Browns, he was sure, would now install deadbolts immediately. Jamie, he believed, was “not at risk” in his parents’ custody.

In fact, Farrell believed the parents had done “many good things” with Jamie. He thought they had done “an excellent job” in involving their son in special programs. He “frankly” knew of “no other services that would be more effective.”

All the same, as he faced the Browns in the Mason City Police Station, Farrell believed he had no choice as to what he must do. He saw no point in investigating further, or visiting the Browns’ home.

“I’m going to have to make a finding of abuse,” Farrell told the Browns. “A finding of abuse in the area of denial of critical care.”

*

Like most states, Iowa in recent times has regularly revised its child abuse laws. In fact, Iowa has tinkered with its code every year but one since 1981. Each time a case exploded on them, each time they’d failed to identify abuse or protect a child, legislators and administrators scrambled to further refine the process. Faced with the ambiguity of shaded cases, they tried to codify the right answer.

This was the environment in which the Browns found themselves being scrutinized by Pete Farrell. If Farrell’s response was foolish, it also was a natural result of the lawmakers’ efforts. Iowa’s code doesn’t allow Farrell to exercise his individual judgment.

“This system is rigid and locked in,” observed John Holtkamp, formerly program manager of Iowa’s Child Protective Services, now executive director of the Iowa chapter of the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse. “As soon as someone picked up that boy and took him to the police, the police were mandated to call DHS, and DHS had to investigate. Looking at the facts, DHS must ask, do we have the code’s criteria for denial of critical care--a child, a caretaker, a dangerous situation? The answers are yes, yes, yes. One size fits all. It’s child abuse. Common sense dictates a lesser response. But common sense is not allowed.”

Holtkamp points out that the Iowa code, in defining denial of critical care as the “failure to provide for the proper supervision of the child,” does add the phrase “which a reasonable and prudent person would exercise under similar facts and circumstances.” Holtkamp asks: Can reasonable and prudent supervision include the possibility of a young child escaping a caretaker’s attention? Where to draw the line between accidents and abuse? How much leeway should caseworkers and DHS have?

How much indeed, responds Eric Sage, who oversees Iowa’s child protection programs as chief of the Bureau of Support Services in DHS’ Division of Adult, Children and Family Services. As much as Sage would prefer some room for discretion, he fears the pitfalls that come with that freedom.

What if one person in town gets harsh treatment because she has a bad reputation, he asks, and another person gets easier treatment because she’s the minister’s wife? In the same week Joy Brown lost track of Jamie, Sage points out, a Des Moines mother on welfare left her four young children at home while she visited a tavern. Her kids had names like Chardonnay, Chablis, Champagne. The oldest was 5 or 6. Her conduct bothered people far more than Joy Brown’s. But what if her kids were named Fred and Jeff and John, and the mother was at early morning Mass? Would that have been any different? Would that have bothered people as much?

What Sage fears is the natural tendency of people to absolve those most like themselves.

“If Joy Brown had been a welfare mother, DHS’ finding wouldn’t bother people,” Sage said. “People identify with her. The fact is, we have some nice, good, well-meaning people on the central registry. Nice, good people don’t always do what’s right. For most of them, it’s never going to happen again. But we do find some people repeat. That’s why we have a registry. So we can know of the second or third incident.”

That threat of a second or third incident, of course, is finally what haunts and shapes all decisions by agencies such as Iowa’s DHS. If they take no action and a child later gets hurt, they’re roundly denounced. If they keep the code rigid and follow the code literally, at least no one gets burned, no one gets accused of prejudice or bias or subjectivity.

In the end, Sage could find no fault with his caseworker’s handling of the Brown case. Joy Brown was an adult caretaker, Jamie Brown was a child found moving dangerously across a highway. What choice did Pete Farrell have?

“I think we have no alternative but to (find) abuse of Jamie Brown. . . ,” Farrell wrote in the conclusion to his investigative report. “This report will (find) abuse . . . in the area of a failure to provide appropriate supervision such as that which would be offered by a reasonable and prudent person given similar facts and in similar circumstances.”

Called the Locksmith

More shocked than angry at first, Joy Brown, upon returning home from the Mason City Police Station, called the locksmith, then barricaded the front door with a dresser to make sure Jamie would not again escape. Not until six days later, when she received in the mail DHS’ official child abuse notification, did she realize she was to be placed on the state’s central child abuse registry for 10 years.

Being listed had significant implications. Without DHS approval, Brown wouldn’t be able to operate a day-care center or be a foster parent, two options she’d often considered. Even worse to Brown, though, was the registry’s fundamental stigma. Parents who hurt their kids were child abusers. She was totally the opposite. It was just so wrong. She didn’t belong there.

They’d told her the list was confidential, but within weeks, she learned otherwise. In October, when she took Jamie to University of Iowa Hospitals for a second evaluation, a social worker came right in and said, “What’s this about child abuse?” Then a psychologist came in and asked the same thing. DHS had notified them. That’s how confidential it all was.

Brown decided to appeal. “This is nothing short of a travesty,” her cover letter began. “I feel VERY strongly that this report is unfair and wrong. I want my name erased from the registry. . . . I won’t quit until it is. Time should be spent on people who are hurting their children, not on people like me.”

The state’s rebuff came more than eight months later, in early April of 1994. “This review took into account the fact that the mother has been an exemplary parent under very trying circumstances,” read the letter from the DHS appeals section. However, “The circumstances do fit the factor necessary for a finding of denial of critical care.”

Brown had 30 days to request a hearing before an administrative law judge. She says she was discouraged from doing so, however, by a woman in DHS’ Des Moines office who told her, “You can take this to court, but if you do I’ll have the attorney general on my side.” Believing she needed a lawyer, which she couldn’t afford, Brown instead began a letter-writing campaign.

She wrote to Sen. Tom Harkin. She wrote to Gov. Terry E. Branstad. She wrote to Iowa’s then-attorney general, Bonnie Campbell. She wrote to DHS administrators. She wrote to state legislators.

She talked to them about her “dilemma and very real in my heart problem.” She urged them to “help me right this wrong . . . it is all I think about these days.” She invited DHS caseworkers “to come to my house and live in my shoes for just one day.”

Looking back now at her effort, thumbing through copies of her letters as she sits at her dining room table, Brown shakes her head ruefully. “I was so naive. I was thinking they’ll see they are wrong.”

Instead, those receiving Brown’s letters saw mainly an occasion to indulge in bureaucratic procedure and recite Iowa statutes.

The governor’s administrative counsel thought her situation “understandably frustrating” but trusted she understood that “the department is mandated to complete a child abuse investigation in accordance with . . . the code of Iowa.”

The attorney general’s office thought the matter should go to a DHS agent in the Office of Field Support.

That DHS agent thought the matter should be ignored.

The DHS regional administrators who did write, two months later, advised Brown that “child abuse investigations are extremely stressful for families, especially when an isolated situation falls within the definitions prescribed by law and is an exception rather than the rule in the way a family functions. . . . However, as long as these definitions exist, the DHS is mandated to investigate. . . .”

Decided to Go Public

Finally realizing her naivete, Brown decided she’d better seek that hearing before an administrative law judge. Too late, a DHS appeals agent informed her. Brown’s request for a hearing was “untimely.”

It was then Brown decided to go public. She called the Mason City Globe-Gazette, which ran a short article. She sent that piece to the Des Moines Register. When an article ran there last November, the phone calls, e-mail and letters started pouring in from across the nation.

Terms such as “outrageous” and “unthinkable” and “Big Brother” filled most of these messages. There were calls for Iowa’s Legislature to “seriously reconsider this whole matter.” The most common theme, though, involved confessions: Dozens and dozens wrote to say that what had happened to Joy Brown had happened to them.

One farmer told of losing his son in a cornfield. One mother told of being listed for scratching her child with a fingernail. Another told of losing her home and almost her life while fighting abuse charges in court for seven years.

The comments began to form a refrain:

“If every parent who had a child disappear on them were put for a decade on the Child Abuse Registry, more than probably half the parents in the U.S. would be on this list.”

“I can personally relate to Joy Brown’s story. My daughter wandered away from our home in a similar incident.”

“Do those social workers have children? Have they ever lost sight of one of their own for one instant? Hasn’t everyone?”

Twins Sitting on Road

Yes--yes we have, thought John Holtkamp, monitoring such comments from the Des Moines office of the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse. The former program director of Iowa’s Child Protective Services couldn’t help but think back to one warm summer day 11 years ago.

His family was living then in Houghton, down in southeast Iowa, in a big white house off State Highway 16, the one road in town. The twins, Mathew and David, 1 year old, were playing out front in their diapers. He was watching them from up on a ladder as he scraped the house, preparing to repaint. He kept checking on the kids, seeing they were OK. Then he looked down, and they weren’t there anymore.

They were out in the middle of the highway, sitting in their diapers. Oh my God, Holtkamp gasped. He slid down the ladder, ran out, scooped them up. Two guys driving pickups, one from each direction, had stopped. The guys laughed as Holtkamp said something about the twins “teleporting” themselves. It was a small town, they all knew each other, that’s as far as it went. But Holtkamp knew it would have turned out quite differently if the authorities had been notified. What happened to Joy Brown, he believed, could happen to anyone.

So in recent weeks Holtkamp increasingly has been speaking out against the system that he once directed. He knows he’s drawing the ire of former colleagues, but he feels obliged.

“Was it necessary to put Joy Brown on the registry to get a door latch?” he asks. “Why not just say, ‘Mom, you need to put a latch on the door.’ You can track her, make a notation, but I do not believe it beneficial to label Joy Brown a child abuser.”

By the middle of January, Iowa lawmakers and bureaucrats were finally listening, no doubt inspired in part by the petitions and form letters to legislators that Joy Brown had started printing and distributing across the state.

Citing Brown’s case, a bipartisan legislative task force recently announced they would push to revise state law so people can appeal before their names are added to the registry. Some on the panel also declared support for a plan advanced by Holtkamp to create different classifications for punitive allegations and more benign “assessments.”

Brown still is angry, but she is enjoying all she’s inspired, enough so to consider starting work on an article about how “one person can make a difference.” Whether her exultant mood is warranted, however, remains to be seen.

*

Sitting in his office at DHS headquarters in Des Moines, where he oversees Iowa’s child protection programs, Sage has watched the drumbeating for Joy Brown with a certain historical perspective. The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth, after all.

The Iowa Legislature, as in other states, relaxes and tightens child abuse laws depending on what incident just then captures the public imagination. Three years ago, Iowa suffered a battered child’s death. In response, the state toughened up the code with more specific language, more listing of marginal cases.

Just what Iowa’s current re-examination will yield, Sage observes dryly, “depends on what happens in the state this year. If it ends up a child gets killed or badly injured, the Legislature will go one way. If it ends up with nice people coming forward to protest being on the registry, the Legislature will go another way. Right now we have a nice mother. . . .”

Sage’s official posture in the Joy Brown debate has been accommodating. In fact, the DHS, like Holtkamp, has recommended a “parallel” approach, by which most cases would avoid a child abuse label. Even though the DHS would then be vulnerable to charges of bias, it would rather have a little discretion.

As Sage regularly points out, however, discretion does have its pitfalls. Discretion, for example, might not vindicate Brown.

Even with such reform, Sage cautions, some “nice, good, well-meaning people” might still get caught in the middle, might still end up on the registry. Joy Brown, for instance.

“She left a child unattended, he was found out on a road that bears traffic,” Sage observed recently. “A kid on Iowa 65 is pretty serious. She might still be on the list.”