Social Services Taken to Task

What is happening to the mandate to protect children in Orange County? Does the Orange County Social Services Agency no longer subscribe to the idea that children are to be returned to their homes only when and if the risk to their safety is abated or rehabilitated?

The practice of this agency to recommend, facilitate or participate in any way in the marriage of 13-, 14- and 15-year-old girls to their adult perpetrators goes against the grain not only of my moral fiber but of all the tenets and ethics taught in my graduate school work curriculum.

How could this practice have been started in the first place, much less have gone on unnoticed for two years? It would appear that those in charge of the agency have either been asleep at the wheel or lack the education and commitment to deliver child protection services in the spirit that the law intended. For the agency director to say that this is a “complex issue” with “no right or wrong answers” sounds like a tap dance to me.

It seems apparent from reading the articles on this topic in The Times over the past two weeks that it to not just the Social Services Agency that is to blame for this outrage. It seems obvious that the district attorney, the Juvenile Court, the county counsel, lawyers for the children and the various law enforcement agencies also have a piece of this. All in all, it seems that the very agencies the citizens of Orange County expect to protect our children, sadly, have let those children down.

While these agencies grapple with these “complexities” and look at their “internal policies and procedures,” I suggest that there are other exercises to be undertaken as well. Perhaps these agencies need a refresher on the legal definition of child abuse, the family dynamics of abuse, a lengthy debriefing on cultural sensitivity, and an introspective moral inventory.

In the meantime, those same agencies as well as the citizens of Orange County would do well to close their eyes and imagine what the outcome might have been if those 15 girls had been boys--or if they had been white.

CHRISTINE FORD

Dana Point

* I found the Sept. 15 letter from Larry Leaman, director of the Orange County Social Services Agency, overly autocratic and lacking any vision.

Here is a county bureaucrat who thinks Social Services is “his agency” and refers to “my social work staff” as if they were his personal property.

May I remind Leaman that he is a public servant and that Orange County taxpayers pay both his salary and the salary of “his” employees.

Apparently, the Orange County budget fiasco has shortchanged Leaman’s leadership skills. The problem of teen pregnancy is a communitywide problem that requires a team effort to solve.

Perhaps if Leaman thought of Social Services as “our” agency and its staff as “our” social work staff he could develop a better esprit de corps in an organization riddled with historically poor morale.

It is not a “simple problem.” Teen pregnancy is a complex issue that requires creative and innovative solutions. We don’t need autocrats who are fearful of stepping up to the plate with new ideas or who lack the vision to lead by example.

C.J. MILLER

Orange