| Libertarian Party of NY -- Press Release -- LIBERTARIAN SOCIAL WORKER SAYS ABOLISH FAILED CHILD PROTECTION AGENCY |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LIBERTARIAN SOCIAL WORKER SAYS ABOLISH FAILED CHILD PROTECTION AGENCY Bellport, New York, 1/25/06:
In the wake of a recent child abuse case and its botched investigation, Libertarian Party State Chair and social worker John Clifton denounced the NYC agency responsible for child protection and called for its abolition. New Yorkers have been transfixed by the torture and beating of 7 year-old Nixzmary Brown since the child was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment on January 11. Police allege she was tortured for weeks, sexually abused, starved and died after her head was repeatedly banged against the bathtub by her stepfather, who is in custody on murder charges.
Despite multiple reports going back to May 2005 pointing to a risk of immediate harm for the child, caseworkers declared the abuse to be unfounded, and later chose not to get a warrant or police assistance to gain access to the home to investigate. The current flap follows closely behind reports from last year exposing NYC ACS for its role in forcing experimental AIDS drugs on largely black and Latino children in its foster care system, raising concerns many feel the government has not fully answered. Clifton charges such cases show how Administration for Children's Services has become more of a threat to families and children than a protector of childrens' rights and family values.
"The shocking negligence displayed by ACS in following up on clear signs of child abuse in this case, along with fraudulent progress note entries admitted to by the case supervisor, underlines the basic structural unaccountability of the system" says Clifton, who currently works in foster care prevention. He previously worked as a drug counselor in Bedford-Stuyvesant. "Despite the countless regulations in place or which may be added, when the bureaucracy messes up, it just ends up getting more money and more power, to mess up even more next time. In the private sector when, say, a children's home is found negligent, or an accessory to child abuse, it gets shut down, not expanded. ACS presides over a system where children have often been abused in foster care, yet every scandal leads to more funding. It's completely backwards."
Clifton notes that with tens of thousands of active cases in ACS, many of which have only a peripheral connection to serious safety issues, but each carrying time-consuming paperwork requirements, it is nearly impossible for caseworkers to maintain focus on overt situations like Nixzmary's. "We would be better served if we junked the current agency, and organized a bureau of child abuse in law enforcement, with jurisdiction over physical harm only." Clifton holds that functions of CPS of a social nature should be returned to those social and community institutions which were displaced by government, when it monopolized the social functions of improving peoples' lives. He favors the approach formulated by other state parties (such as the Arizona LP) to "abolish Child Protective Services, and return its proper functions to law enforcement," while passing legislation mandating severe legal sanctions for child abuse.
"Ultimately, what we need is less centralized bureaucracy, coercion and intervention, and more choices and freedom," says Clifton. "State paternalism and omni-intervention doesn't work anywhere, whether it's interfering with the market, imposing shotgun democracy abroad, or breaking up families at home."
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