Child Abuse Reports Swamp County System

Tamika Triggs was just a year old when the first warning arrived: A doctor alerted the Los Angeles County Child Abuse Hotline that the toddler had a black eye and appeared neglected.

When Tamika was 2, a public health nurse phoned the hotline too. She had visited the child’s Long Beach apartment and left deeply troubled by the mother’s obvious heroin addiction and violent boyfriend.

During the summer and fall of last year, the reports accelerated. One woman called the child protection agency at least five times. A homeless-shelter worker, meanwhile, complained that Tamika’s mother underfed the toddler, abandoned her during drug runs and slapped her in the face.

In all, at least four people urged county officials to help Tamika. But that would not happen until two months ago, when the girl’s picture and story appeared in The Times’ “Orphans of Addiction” series.

“Damn you, damn you! You wouldn’t listen to me,” Judy Williams, one of the informants, said she screamed at a social worker after the article appeared and 3-year-old Tamika was rescued from a life of deprivation.

Unfortunately, Tamika is just one of countless children who regularly slip through the cracks, victims not only of bad parents but of an understaffed system struggling to keep pace with a surging caseload.

In many ways, the most critical component of that thinly stretched system is the hotline and its emergency response team--the first point of contact between the public and a government agency dedicated to the safety of endangered youngsters. Too often, however, that mission remains unfulfilled:

* In Los Angeles County, many of the more than 100,000 annual callers to the abuse hotline have been put on hold for as long as an hour. As a result, many simply have hung up, exposing unknown numbers of children to continuing risk.

* Increasingly, when callers do get through, hotline workers dispense with cases over the phone, never sending anyone into the field to investigate. The percentage of such cases, county records show, grew from 4% in 1989 to 24% in the first half of last year.

* When emergency response social workers are sent into the field by hotline employees, they often are so swamped with cases that they say they can conduct only superficial reviews of abuse or neglect allegations.

* Because these social workers have so little time to fully involve themselves with troubled families, many acknowledge that they have turned to a more expedient course--placing youngsters in the beleaguered foster care system, where they may be bounced from home to home and have difficulty developing emotional bonds.

* As the burdens of the job have mounted, demoralization has set in. Many emergency social workers say their sense of purpose has been subverted, their academic degrees wasted on policing rather than strengthening families.

These and other shortcomings have shaken the confidence of those who are required by law to report suspected abuse and neglect--doctors, teachers, police officers, psychotherapists. Without their steady cooperation, experts say, the child protection system crumbles.

“It’s almost to the point of telling people, ‘Don’t call the Department of Children and Family Services. Call law enforcement,’ ” said Hal Brown, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ Commission on Children and Families. “They are more attentive to these calls than the department is.”

Peter Digre, director of the department, says such views are exceedingly harsh and ignore the department’s many successes--achieved despite the daily challenges his workers face.

He presented statistics showing that more abuse complaints are investigated in the field by Los Angeles social workers than in most California counties. Families with problems, he said, also are provided with more counseling, therapy and other services.

“Our workers are amazing, how they can get all this work done,” he said. “They get there on time, they visit kids, they assess the homes. The things I can determine they should do, they are doing.”

Not Enough People to Answer the Phone

Los Angeles isn’t the only community struggling to keep up with reports of child mistreatment. In the last five years, the number of children reported to authorities nationwide increased 16%, to more than 3.1 million. About one-third of the time, investigators confirm abuse has occurred.

The increase in Los Angeles County has dwarfed the national average, soaring 63% in the last five years and seriously taxing child protection efforts. But the number of emergency response workers--those who field and investigate complaints--is the same as it was four years ago. There simply are not enough people to pick up the phone.

This fall, Carson day-care center workers noticed a 3-year-old repeatedly fondling herself and provocatively kissing others. One day, she pointed several inches below her tiny waistband and disclosed that a man in her home named “Poppy” had kissed her there. The teachers decided to call the hotline.

But Susie Gatling, the center’s office manager, said it took 45 minutes before a social worker came on the line. Then no one showed up to question the girl before she was picked up by her mother, who was not told of the hotline call.

“It was very upsetting,” Gatling said. “You don’t want the child to go home one more night to that kind of thing. I asked them, ‘I have to report [by law], but what about the person who doesn’t and finally worked up the nerve [to call] after four or five months, and this is the response they get?”

In fact, when hotline delays peaked this summer and fall, as many as 200 callers a day were hanging up without filing a report, county records show.

“You don’t know what you are missing when you don’t take those calls,” one hotline worker said. “You just don’t know.”

Some social workers had become so concerned by the jammed lines that they tipped off an aide to Supervisor Mike Antonovich, urging him to make a surprise inspection of the hotline operation, tucked away in the warehouse district east of downtown.

The aide, Dan Revetto, accepted the offer one morning in October. He says he watched in amazement as computer screens showed some calls on hold for more than 50 minutes.

“This is a hotline. This is supposed to be the most immediate response we can give children in need,” said Revetto, who added that the situation has improved since then, but not nearly enough.

Even when the phone is answered, that does not mean a social worker will be dispatched into the field to investigate.

The proportion of hotline calls that are not investigated face to face in Los Angeles County is comparable to the nationwide average of 20% to 25%--a number most experts call excessive. They believe many hotlines in the U.S. are coping with the deluge of calls by raising the threshold of what constitutes child abuse.

“Any time a call is made, it is a call for help. To have nothing happen is discouraging,” said Deborah Daro, research director for the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse.

Dr. Audra Deveikis of Long Beach Memorial Hospital said a Los Angeles social worker gave short shrift to her report that a mother was failing to feed her 2 1/2-year-old, who at 20 pounds was alarmingly underweight.

Because both mother and child carried the HIV virus, the county worker told Deveikis that she simply had failed to recognize the child was suffering from AIDS, not neglect.

The problem with that diagnosis was that the boy grew each of the three times he was hospitalized and fed regularly, said Deveikis, an AIDS specialist.

“We need to make this agency and these social workers more accountable,” said Deveikis. “You call the hotline and you get put on hold, and on hold, and on hold.”

Certainly, thousands of leads on abusive caretakers are handled diligently. But many medical and educational professionals say they still have seen too many cases given cursory treatment.

Pia Escudero, a psychiatric social worker at the Francis Blend Special Education Center in Hollywood, said she has called the abuse hotline a number of times after students have told her about abuse in their homes.

The following day, she said, some children would return to school with accounts of how social workers quickly left when parents would not answer the door.

Escudero said that when she would ask social workers about the outcome, she was told the cases had been closed and could be reopened only with another hotline call.

“We just remind ourselves, ‘Don’t give up, just re-report,’ ” said Escudero, adding that she believes social workers try to do a good job but are outmatched by the workload.

Digre said that not every call to the hotline merits an in-person response. Some, he said, are merely requests for information or reports on the same child.

He also emphasized that the rest of the state’s rate of closing cases over the phone is 10% higher than in Los Angeles. Digre said it only appears that more calls are being screened out here in recent years because of sloppy record-keeping by his predecessors.

The children’s services director conceded that there were some hotline problems but said that he has worked hard in recent months to fix them. He said he has transferred workers from other units and drafted retirees, aiming to reduce hold times to no more than one minute.

What’s more, Digre said the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will consider his recent request for $5.5 million to hire 600 new workers to beef up the department’s ranks, thinned by rising attrition.

“It’s not an impossible challenge,” he said.

Less and Less Time to Make Decisions

By all accounts, emergency response social workers have one of the toughest of all government jobs, delving into a world of misery that would make most people recoil.

Each of these front-line workers optimally should supervise no more than 30 children a month under the terms of their union contract. But many carry caseloads in the 40s, some in the 50s.

Annette Jeffries has been a social worker for 12 years and today is president of their union.

“Social workers are getting less and less time to make the decisions that are so life-altering,” she said. “It seems like you can’t have lunch or take a bathroom break, much less spend as much time assessing a family as you would like. You have to make more of a snap judgment.”

Workers say they sometimes only have enough time to comply with minimal agency requirements but not to uncover less obvious abuse and neglect. They call them “drive-by reviews.” Teachers, relatives and neighbors--those who can provide crucial information--are not even consulted in the rush to move on to the next case.

“Oftentimes, it is just checking with the family one time,” said one emergency response supervisor, who, like others, requested anonymity for fear of management repercussions. “If you don’t see anything obvious, the case is closed.”

One social worker said she has closed cases and left children with caretakers, even though she was suspicious about the youngsters’ safety.

When she could not quickly verify a mother’s suspected drug abuse, for instance, she let the woman keep her two boys--a decision that would be undone when the mother was reported to the hotline again. Another worker removed the children from the home after determining that the mother was abandoning them while chasing an addiction to speed.

“It made me sick to my stomach,” the emergency worker said. “It made me wonder, what did those kids suffer from the time I closed the case?”

The job stresses have been compounded by the changing nature of the work, for which they are paid $28,000 to $49,000 a year.

Nearly half of all Los Angeles County’s social workers have master’s degrees, which they earned by learning how to strengthen families and help children with counseling, education and economic aid.

But when they arrive on the job, they function more like cops--checking parents’ criminal records, drug test results, grilling neighbors for evidence of abuse or neglect.

They travel the city’s most unforgiving streets, often at night. They go into the homes of addicts and felons, sometimes to take their children. Usually, they are alone.

“It’s just as dangerous as our job, but they go in without a gun or a bulletproof vest,” said Lt. Paul Jendrucko of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s child abuse detail.

One emergency social worker recalled how a father knocked him unconscious days after losing his child to foster care. Another worker’s front teeth were knocked out when she tried to take a woman’s baby.

Still another described how a heavily muscled and tattooed father lunged at him with a knife. Restrained by sheriff’s deputies, the assailant screamed: “I will find you and you will regret it!”

Digre has said for two years that relief for his workers was on the way, in the form of a $180-million statewide computer system. But instead of easing the burden, even department managers concede it takes at least 15% more time to input a case. Some workers say it cuts their productivity in half.

The new system loses files. Other reports cannot be printed out--and therefore responded to--until the next day.

Rex White, who was put in charge of the children’s emergency response system one week before Christmas, acknowledged that the computer has not been the anticipated cure-all.

“We haven’t had the staff to meet the workload [at the hotline] in the first place. . . . It has always been a problem,” he said. “But it has been exacerbated by the computer system.”

Many other counties have been complaining about the computer, and software is being designed in Los Angeles to make it more efficient. But for now, says one Los Angeles social worker, “the cure is killing the patient.”

Improvements Seen in Many Aspects

When he arrived in Los Angeles on New Year’s Day in 1991, Digre confronted a system in crisis. The state had threatened to take over the county department because of its flagrant failure to monitor the welfare of children in foster homes. To demonstrate his resolve to make changes quickly, Digre drove directly from the airport to the hotline headquarters, where workers were surprised and pleased to meet him.

While many aspects of the department remain troubled, in many ways Digre has brought improvements. Children are visited more frequently in foster care by their social workers, and a number of community-based support programs have been initiated for troubled families.

But some workers said Digre’s style in implementing these necessary changes has been brusque, even dictatorial, churning up hard feelings among the rank and file. Front-line workers said that, in staff meetings, heartfelt expressions about the strains of their jobs have frequently been met with indifference.

Emergency response workers say that management’s lack of support and truncated time frames for decision-making often have prompted them to play it safe, including placing increasing numbers of children in foster care.

In 1993 in Los Angeles County, only 41% of children were taken from homes in which social workers found they had been mistreated and placed in foster care, compared to 53% in the first nine months of 1997.

On paper, it would seem as though these children all have been “saved” from bad homes. Many have. But social workers say there’s a flip side: Boys and girls become stuck in a system plagued by its own set of problems.

One top official of the department felt so strongly that children were being excessively placed in foster care that he cited it as a chief reason for his resignation last summer, ending a long professional association with Digre.

“Because of the overload of cases and a culture of fear in the department, many more kids have been pushed into foster care,” said former Deputy Director Bruce Rubenstein. He said more than half a billion dollars a year is spent to support these children. “It’s harmful to kids and costly to the county.”

Making matters worse, decisions on where to place children are sometimes quick and haphazard.

The county’s computer does not always convey accurate foster openings for children. So workers dispatched by the hotline rely on a patchwork of foster parents’ groups to find any place they can for children, said Lupe Ross, president of the Foster Parents of Los Angeles County.

“They are frantic,” Ross said of the agency investigators. “They don’t have a place to put the kids.”

One veteran said he has been so rushed to find foster homes that he and his colleagues have been forced to separate brothers and sisters, tearing children not only from their families but from their neighborhoods, their schools and their friends.

“I can’t tell you how many times I have driven away after placing a kid and just cried,” the social worker said.

Digre acknowledged that more children are in foster homes, but he called the change an “incremental” improvement to ensure child safety.

“That is the No. 1 mission of this agency,” Digre said. “Any change we have made is in the direction of those goals.”

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What to Look for and Report

Child protection agencies are trying to give the public better guidance about when they should make a report of abuse or neglect to a government hotline. Social workers say they are more likely to be able to protect a child if callers can convey precise information--a child’s name, age, address, names and addresses of neighbors or acquaintances who might corroborate the abuse or neglect.

Direct Evidence

* Evewitness observations of a parent’s abusive or neglectful behavior;

* The child’s description of being abused or neglected, unless there is a specific reason for disbelief;

* The parent’s own description of abusive or neglectful behavior, unless it is long past;

* Accounts of child maltreatment from spouses or other family members;

* Films, photographs or other visual material depicting a minor’s sexually explicit activity

* Newborns denied nutrition, life-sustaining care, or other medically indicated treatment;

* Children in physically dangerous situations;

* Young children left alone;

* Apparently abandoned children;

* Demonstrated parental disabilities--for example, mental illness or retardation or alcohol or drug abuse--severe enough to make child abuse or child neglect likely;

* Demonstrated parental inability to care for a newborn baby.

*

Circumstantial Evidence

* Suspicious injuries suggesting physical abuse;

* Physicai injuries or medical findings suggesting sexual abuse;

* For young children, signs of sexual activity;

* Signs of severe physical deprivation on the child’s body suggesting general child neglect;

* Severe dirt and disorder in the home suggesting general child neglect;

* Apparently untreated physical injuries, illnesses or impairments suggesting medical neglect;

* Accidental injures suggesting gross inattention to the child’s need for satety;

* Chronic and unexplained absences from school suggesting parental responsibility for the nonattendance;

* Newborns showing signs of fetal exposure to drugs or alcohol.

*

Source: Douglas J. Beshrov, “Recognizing Child Abuse: A Guide for the Concerned.”

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Workload Increases

In Los Angeles County, reports to the child abuse hotline have been rapidly increasing whle the number of social workers investigating them has stayed essentially the same.