Caseworkers Share the Pain but Face the Pressure Alone

Rosie perches on a chair in the lime green interview room. She is alone, save for a giant Winnie the Pooh propped in a corner. Under the room’s bright lights, she looks younger than her 12 years, all wide eyes and spindly arms wrapped in a T-shirt lettered L-O-V-E.

Behind a two-way mirror, Nieves Monge hunches her bulky frame inches from the glass. She’s on autopilot, in her seen-it-all social worker mode. Just another case. A video camera rolls to record Rosie’s family secret. Only then do Monge’s hands betray her: they nervously snatch up small chocolate Easter eggs.

Head bowed, the girl describes her dad raping her when she was 7.

As Monge’s eyes remain fixed on Rosie, her fingers keep grabbing chocolates. One, another, two at a time.

Some nights, Rosie says, her father forced her to perform oral sex on him as he fondled her sister, while her little brothers slept nearby. The shiny foil candy wrappers pile faster in a heap.

Rosie crumples. Cradling her face in her hands, she sobs. Monge blinks away her own tears with a muttered oath.

“Take your hands away, honey,” she says to herself in the dark observation room, “so we can get a really good picture to convict this jerk. I just want to get enough so he burns in hell.”

Some people would say Monge already works there.

Monge (mon-hay) labors on the front lines in a county where child abuse arrests are growing faster than anywhere in the state. For the last five years, she has been among the first to hear the stories of Orange County’s most abused children, to see broken bones, buckle-shaped bruises and tiny stomachs scarred by cigarette burns.

Among the county’s 65 emergency response social workers, she handles only the very worst cases--when a child is in immediate danger of injury or death.

Monge determines whether a child has been harmed and for how long. If the dad was abusing the child, did the mom know? Did she protect the child then? Can she now? Does the family need the intervention of the court? Or do they simply need support services to help them through a rough patch?

To some, Monge is a savior who rescues innocent children from abusive homes. But just as many view emergency workers like Monge as cold-hearted bureaucrats, “socialist workers,” arbitrarily wresting children from their families.

“We’re totally loathed,” said Irene C. Briggs, a supervisor in Monge’s unit. “The public hates us.”

It is impossible, Monge says, for ordinary citizens to know what her work is like unless they’ve seen the horrors firsthand. Until a child with sparkly pink shoelaces uses vulgarities that make you cringe--the only words she knows to describe what her father did to her. Until you hear a 5-year-old screaming in the back of a police car three lanes over on the freeway as she is being driven to the children’s shelter. Until a father dives to his knees sobbing, wailing, begging you not to take his child. Until you hunt through a shabby trailer park for a drug mother who never wanted, never touched her heroin-addicted baby.

Last year, 28,392 Orange County children were thought to be in enough peril that social workers were sent to their homes. More than 5,600 of those cases required immediate response. Three out of four children were under the age of 12.

Many workers now handle 50% to 200% more cases than the agency quota. As the job becomes more stressful, it becomes tougher to find people willing to do it. Social workers in Orange County earn between $35,000 and $48,000 a year.

For the last six months, there have been so many vacancies in some divisions of the county Department of Children and Family Services that hundreds of cases are going unattended, says senior social worker Jerry Jahn.

“It is like a MASH unit here,” one worker says. “You simply don’t have enough time to do your job. You’re always afraid of making a mistake.”

‘Miss 39 Kids a Month’

At the Santa Ana Police Department, where Monge maintains a desk, cops call her “Miss 39 Kids a Month,” a snide exaggeration of the number of children she removes from homes. Her co-workers joke about dedicating a parking space to her at Orangewood, the county children’s shelter.

The ribbing, though, has an edge. Monge’s zeal makes some of her colleagues uncomfortable. She’s pushy and blunt: she’ll offhandedly suggest slicing the genitals off a father who molests his child. She’s a loner who works too many hours. Feels too much. And doesn’t hide that she thinks her co-workers should work and feel as much.

While many of her colleagues favor sensible shoes and conservative dress, Monge, 43, a grandmother of two, prefers jean jumpers, bright colors, thick white socks, white sneakers and a trio of jangly earrings in each lobe. Everyone is “Honey” in a Puerto Rican accent.

“A lot of people think I shouldn’t take as many kids as I take,” she says, at once defiant and defensive. “Other workers say, ‘Well, the parents are remorseful.’ Just because a parent says to you, ‘I’m sorry,’ doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen again.”

If Monge doesn’t remove a child, she’ll often drive home wondering: “Damn, did I make the right decision?” Then, after a sleepless night, she’ll turn up on the family’s doorstep at 7 a.m. to ensure everything is all right.

Removing a child, Monge says, “is a quick judgment. I can’t say, ‘Let me mush this over. Let’s leave the child here and come back tomorrow.’ They could kill the kid, hide the kid or take off and you’ll never see the kid again.”

Once she takes a child, the allegations pass to another worker who investigates whether a petition should be filed in dependency court against a parent. Monge’s decisions usually hold up, both in dependency and criminal court.

“She looks for what’s right for the kids,” says Elizabeth Henderson, an Orange County homicide prosecutor. “It’s kind of damn-the-torpedoes after that. Somebody has to protect these kids. That’s how the system should work. I take to the bank what she says to me.”

But when a scared, embarrassed child tells how her father raped her, Monge can’t just say to the dad, as much as she’s tempted to: “ ‘You lousy son of a bitch,’ [because] these kids, they love those parents.”

Monge remembers what it’s like to have the government judging you. She grew up poor in Brooklyn, her mother’s asthma and arthritis landing the family on welfare. Alone, she raised her three kids while putting herself through college in Ohio and receiving housing aid for the poor. She decided then she’d never look down on anyone.

When she jounces through her turf in her battered Suzuki Sidekick with the Puerto Rican Power bumper sticker, through gang graffiti-scarred Santa Ana neighborhoods, past rows of shabby homes covered with security bars, apartments cramped with two or three families, she is acutely conscious that being poor doesn’t mean you’re not taking care of your kids.

“There’s a difference between poverty and neglect,” she says. “Poverty is when there’s nothing to sit on, but your house is so clean I could sit on the floor.”

These days, Monge is too busy, too tired to enter into the debate over whether to preserve the biological family or put more children in foster care. She is saving kids. Reunifying families is the state’s goal, not her’s. She’s seen 10 dead kids in the past three years--bludgeoned, burned and tortured.

Her caseload is so wrenching that some co-workers leave anonymous gifts on her desk.

“I don’t know what her body does with that information,” Briggs says. “I don’t how she deals with it.”

Molester as Meal Ticket

From the moment she was brought in on Rosie’s case, Monge knew the day would be long. Molestation accusations, whether true or not, unravel a family.

A school counselor had called the child abuse hotline that morning: the sixth-grader revealed that her father had been sexually abusing her. Monge summoned a Santa Ana police officer to meet her at the girl’s school.

She had only the rudimentary facts, but she knew Rosie probably wasn’t going home. The county’s policy, both for safety and law enforcement purposes, is to have an officer present when a child is taken into custody. At Spurgeon Intermediate School, a bustling campus of largely low-income Latino students in the heart of Santa Ana, Monge was greeted like an old friend.

Rosie, quiet and shy, had snapped in class, yelling at a teacher’s aide. Distraught, she confided to a classmate the secret she’d kept more than half her life. The friend told the counselor.

Now, the girl with the thick brown ponytail, dressed in black jeans and sneakers, was perched on the edge of the couch in the counselor’s office. Outside, Monge sighed and thought for the hundredth time: no child should have to go through this. Then she charged through the door, with her bags overflowing, her bundles and her green water bottle holder slung bandolero-style. She plopped down on the couch.

“My name’s Nieves Monge,” she said. “I’m a social worker. I understand you’ve been having some problems. Do you know what a social worker does?”

“They help families with problems,” Rosie said, her shoulders easing in the presence of Monge’s chaotic warmth.

Monge took Rosie slowly through her home life. With painful politeness, Rosie first insisted she was the problem, sassing her mother, fighting with her brothers. Monge nodded. The girl wants to blame herself, she thought. It probably made it easier to cope. Monge asked if there are any other problems. Sometimes, Rosie said, her dad beat her mom. Sometimes, he hit her too, with jump ropes and vacuum cleaner cords.

Rosie took a deep breath. Monge held hers. She first saw her dad raping her sister in the bathroom when she was about 7, Rosie said, oblivious to the graphic, adult terms she was using. Soon after, he did the same to her at night, while her mother worked in a packing box factory.

“The last time was when I was 11, but he didn’t get what he wanted,” Rosie said, looking up for the first time with a flash of defiance.

If she resisted, he’d hit her, causing fat lips that kept her out of school. Her mother knew, but told her daughters she needed a father for her three young sons.

Monge had heard enough. The child was at risk. The mother couldn’t or wouldn’t protect her. A typical story: the mother sacrificing her children for her supper. Rosie needed the court’s protection. While the girl nibbled a sandwich in another room, Monge vented her anger toward Rosie’s father to Santa Ana Police Officer Jeff Grove, who had waited outside during the interview.

“From what she’s telling me, there’s no way I’m going to leave those kids there,” Monge said. “If the mother didn’t protect the girls, what makes you think she’ll protect the boys? We can’t guarantee he’s not going to do the boys.”

She called another officer to pick up Rosie’s 16-year-old sister.

Monge told Rosie that Grove was going to take her to Orangewood Children’s Home, the first stop for children removed from their parents. “You know, honey, I can’t protect your mother, but I can protect you.”

At Orangewood, Monge led the girl to the specially designed interview room in the shelter’s airy, toy-filled, second-floor tower. Started in 1989, the room, among the first of its kind in the state, is designed to spare children from undergoing numerous interrogations by police, lawyers, social workers and prosecutors.

Instead, a trained social worker conducts an interview at a child-sized plastic table while a video camera and a small audience of police, social workers and sometimes a prosecutor take notes from behind a two-way mirror. While Rosie nervously played Nintendo on a couch outside, Monge and Grove prepped Jennifer Bosch, the social worker who will conduct the interview.

In the crowded observation room, Monge joined in the gallows humor--the group’s attempt to ward off the coming horror. “How would you like to sit here and do five of these interviews a day?” Bosch asked.

Monge suggested a contest to see who had seen the worst case.

Grove leaned back in his chair, sure of victory. What about the 2-year-old boy wandering around while his dad worked on a car? The car lurched forward and smashed the boy so hard against the wall his organs exploded. Some of the officers couldn’t finish their shift.

Monge shook her head. “You can’t beat my case,” she said, describing another 2-year-old boy, this one who had been raped, battered, burned with chemicals, his neck broken. “I just wanted him to wake up and talk,” Monge said.

The room was quiet for a moment. Then Monge broke into a grin and crowed. “I won the toaster! I won the toaster prize!”

Minutes later, Rosie is telling her secrets to Bosch. In the observation room, Grove’s Adam’s apple bobs convulsively. Someone hisses an obscenity. Everyone else begins to cry.

Rosie, suddenly quiet and still, asks Bosch if her father will go to jail. Bosch asks Rosie what she would like to happen. “Just get him help. That’s all.”

Five minutes later, another interviewer questions Rosie’s older sister, who weeps when she explains how she told Rosie to scream if her dad came after her. “I told her to yell and run away, because I didn’t want her to go through what I did.”

Grove flings his pen across the table. “We got to get that dad!” Another officer leaves to arrest the girls’ father, who will later be convicted of continuous sexual abuse of a child and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Later, after the room has emptied, Monge calls her grandson. “I just needed to hear him say, ‘I love you, Nana.’ ”

Monge’s marching orders come from a bland warren of beige cubicles at the Department of Children and Family Service in Orange. This is where doctors and teachers, counselors and photo developers, spouses and neighbors call to report someone has hurt a child.

The hotline seldom stops ringing.

Every day, 16 social workers field 125 to 200 calls. If someone has been on hold for five minutes a bell sounds, a safeguard installed in 1994 after a grand jury found calls lingering for more than 30 minutes, or not answered at all.

At first there is just the quiet murmur of soft, mostly female voices. Listen closer and the conversations startle:

“What kind of a knife did she stab him with?”

“The boy was 3?”

“The boyfriend hit her? Did it leave any marks? If he hit her on the head and there’s no bumps or marks, there’s nothing we can do.”

In one tiny cubicle, social worker Kathleen Bridges calmly explains what constitutes--and what doesn’t constitute--child abuse: “I tell people it’s not against the law for a child to sleep with their parent. It’s not against the law to bathe with them. It’s not against the law to watch porno movies with them and then ‘The Lion King.’ The question is: Was there sexual gratification?”

Just after lunch, Bridges receives a call from UC Irvine Medical Center. A mother had stabbed her 3-year-old son in the chest with a steak knife. Bridges checks to see if the mother has a criminal record or previous child abuse reports and searches the welfare rolls to see if there are other children in the home. Within an hour, Bridges dispatches an emergency worker to the hospital.

With each call, Bridges must decide whether a complaint needs to be investigated. A worker can “unfound” a complaint and throw it out, or “unsubstantiate” it when there isn’t enough proof. For these families, cleaning, shopping and parenting lessons may be offered.

Last year, the county’s Child Abuse Registry received calls about 36,808 children, an increase of more than 2,000 from 1996. Workers were sent out on about two-thirds of the calls and opened cases on more than 5%.

Like most of the social workers at the registry, Diane Gardner thinks more cases should be opened. In a cubicle near Bridges she takes a call from a youth shelter worker reporting a 13-year-old whose mother repeatedly slapped her in the face. The blows had not left imprints, though, and Gardner apologizes. “Technically,” she tells the caller, “physical abuse is when there are marks on the child.”

When she hangs up the phone, she sighs. “People call up and say this child is at risk, and we say, ‘Thank you for calling. Call us back when something happens.’ ”

One afternoon at the Santa Ana Police Department Monge talks with a detective about five brothers and sisters she took into custody the previous day. One girl had a long scratch on her face and Monge didn’t have a good feeling about the parents. The officers complained that all Monge does is snatch kids.

Lately, these comments have started to sting. The stoicism, the oft-stated credo that she never lets the cases get to her, has eroded. She’s gained weight. She’s having difficulty sleeping. At home, sick for three weeks, she found she couldn’t stop crying: all she could remember were the faces of the kids she has tried to help.

“You’d think after so many dead children,” she says, “they’d say you need to talk to someone. A cop sees a videotape of what we see and they offer counseling. Our agency has nothing.”

She thinks the job she worked so hard for has killed her chance to have a relationship. “It’s made me real cynical. It’s made me think the human race is not such a great thing.”

Last November, on her own daughter’s 24th birthday, Monge had to tell two girls, ages 8 and 5, that their mother had been killed in an auto accident. She brought the girls into an office, sat them down and quietly told them in Spanish that their only parent was up with the angels.

The girls just smiled at her. She told them their mother was dead five different ways, in two different languages, and still they smiled. Maybe they were in shock. She never felt so inadequate. How do you tell kids their mother died?

That night, the Santa Ana police woke her at 3 a.m. to come along on a dead child case and to take an elder sister into custody. The 2-year-old victim drank a bottle of her dad’s methadone. Later the coroner discovered the methadone hadn’t killed her; the tiny girl had choked on a tiny plastic holder for cocaine.

When Monge called her supervisor at 7:30 a.m., she was told there was another case waiting for her. “I just stared at the phone. Even they think we’re robots.”

Sometimes she reads to escape. Never the newspaper. She feels she’s living the worst part of the news every day. Sometimes she’ll go camping by herself down at Cuyamaca Rancho State Park northeast of San Diego. A lot of the time, she’ll baby-sit her grandkids. Most nights, though, she goes home alone and sits in the backyard twilight, recounting the day’s horrors to Dante, her Rottweiler, and Capone, her sharpei. The dogs don’t judge whether she did right or wrong.

But it’s hard to get away from it all, from any of it, but especially from one case--the one she waited years to make right.

In March 1995, a Santa Ana police officer paged her after finding two girls, ages 4 and 2, home alone. Their mother showed up shortly afterward and promised never to leave them home alone again.

Orange County had just gone bankrupt and budget cuts kept Monge from offering the mother support services. All Monge could do was scold her. A year and a half later, the woman’s youngest daughter starved to death.

At the time of her death, the girl had a deep laceration on her forehead, cigarette burns, scars, brain swelling and the distended abdomen of malnutrition.

When the mother was arrested, she was eight months pregnant with her fourth child.

A previous baby had died under mysterious circumstances in Chicago.

Monge couldn’t forget her earlier visit. She volunteered herself to baby-sit the unborn child. Every day for the final three weeks of the pregnancy, Monge visited the mother at the hospital. “I told her I would take her baby to a place where her baby would be safe.”

The day before Christmas Eve, a supervisor paged Monge to let her know that the baby was on the way. Monge went into the recovery room and took the newborn.

“It was hard, but I had a dead baby and she was the suspect.”

The mother pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.

“[Monge] saved that kid--with her catcher’s mitt,” says Deputy Dist. Atty. Henderson, who prosecuted the mother. “That mother would have walked out of that hospital. I feel strongly she would have killed that infant.”

A family adopted both the baby and her older sister.

“It made me feel good,” Monge says.

One life had been lost, but she’d saved two.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How to Help or Adopt Abused Children

IN ORANGE COUNTY:

* O.C. Department of Children and Family Services--to inquire about adoption or foster parenting: (714) 704-8704 (English and Spanish)

* CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocates)--to volunteer as an advocate for abused children: (714) 935-6460, (714) 935-6124

* Orangewood Children’s Home--to volunteer to work with children at the county children’s shelter: (714) 935-7571

IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY:

* Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services--to inquire about adopting or serving as a foster parent: (888) 811-1121

* MacLaren Children’s Center--to volunteer to work with children at the county’s children’s shelter: (629) 455-4609

* Child Advocates Office--to volunteer to assist the court with reports on foster children: (213) 526-6666

* Foster Youth Information Line--peer support line for foster children. Callers speak to adults who were foster children: (800) 400-9925

NATIONWIDE:

* The Child Welfare League hotline--for information on foster care opportunities in your community: (800) ASK-CWLA

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Inside the Series

When children are taken from abusive parents, they enter a secret and frightening world--ostensibly for their protection. To see how well the theory works in practice, Times staff writer Tracy Weber and photographer Robert Gauthier spent most of a year behind the closed doors of Orange County’s child welfare system.

Ronald Owen, presiding judge of Orange County Juvenile Court, granted The Times unprecedented access to group homes, shelters, closed hearings and court files. The paper observed children interviewed behind one-way mirrors and lined up for their morning doses of mind-altering drugs; we went along on arrests and heard judges, social workers and kids speak about the horror they confront.

The Times found a system that too often inflicts pain on the children it is supposed to protect. Although the system examined is in Orange county, there’s no reason to think it works any better elsewhere in California.

No child in this series is identified based on confidential information or without a release form their parent or guardian.

* THURSDAY: Abused children as young as 18 months old are mixed together in group homes designed for some of the system’s most disturbed children--though many of them do not suffer from mental problems--ignoring state laws aimed at correcting such problems.

* FRIDAY: Dependency court judges cross their fingers as they take families apart or put them back together, making decisions with what is sometimes scant or inaccurate information.

* TODAY: Social workers, some saddled with three times the number of child abuse cases they should have, often face a cruel dilemma: Should they leave children at risk of further abuse in their homes, or expose them to abuse of another kind in what everyone agrees is an overburdened system.