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Most often then not, what DCF puts children and their parents
through is 10 times worse than the actual baseless allegation. No money is to
be made if DCF leaves children at home. They have to keep up their stats in
order to justify their request for funding. If you don't use it, you loose it.
The Supreme Court drew a bright line in that children only can be removed and
placed in foster care if the child is in imminent physical danger. The risk of
harm is not probable cause as rule by the court.

In the most recent ruling by the Second Circuit, in the class-action
suit of Nichols v. Williams medical expert stated from Yale New Haven that it
was DCF and child protection was the perpetrator of abuse and harm to a child
when they placed the child in foster care unlawfully, not the parent. The court
ruled against child protection workers and the agency that removing a child just
because he or she witnessess domestic violence is not a legal basis to remove
ANY child. The court ruled that this child abduction was unlawful and
unconstitutional.

Thomas Dutkiewicz

Study: Troubled homes better than foster care


By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY
Children whose families are investigated for abuse or neglect are likely
to do better in life if they stay with their families than if they go into
foster care, according to a pioneering study.
The findings intensify a vigorous debate in child welfare: whether
children are better served with their families or away from them.


RELATED: Record numbers of foster kids leave program as adults

Kids who stayed with their families were less likely to become juvenile
delinquents or teen mothers and more likely to hold jobs as young adults, says
the study by Joseph Doyle, an economics professor at MIT's Sloan School of
Management who studies social policy.

"The size of the effects surprised me, because all the children come from
tough families," Doyle says. The National Science Foundation funded the study.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Gary Stangler
Doyle says his research, which tracked at least 15,000 kids from 1990 to
2002, is the largest study to look at the effects of foster care. He studied
kids in Illinois because of a database there that links abuse investigations to
other government records.

To avoid results attributable to family background, he screened out
extreme cases of abuse or neglect and studied kids whose cases could have gone
either way.

Studies, including those by Mark Courtney while at the University of
Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children, show that the 500,000 children in
U.S. foster care are more likely than other kids to drop out of school, commit
crimes, abuse drugs and become teen parents.

His research has shown that this holds true even when foster kids are
compared with other disadvantaged youth.


MORE: Number of single men adopting foster kids doubles

Doyle's study, however, provides "the first viable, empirical evidence" of
the benefits of keeping kids with their families, says Gary Stangler, executive
director of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, a foundation for
foster teens. Stangler says it looked at kids over a longer period of time than
had other studies.

"It confirms what experience and observation tell us: Kids who can remain
in their homes do better than in foster care," says Stangler. He says some kids,
for their own safety, need to be removed from their families, but in marginal
cases of abuse, more should be done to keep them together.

Smaller studies have found kids from abusive families do better in foster
care. "There are high rates of re-abuse" for those reunited with parents, says
Heather Taussig, a pediatrics professor at the University of Colorado School of
Medicine.

Taussig co-authored a study in 2001 that found kids reunited with families
after a brief stay in foster care were more likely to abuse drugs, get arrested,
drop out of school and have lower grades than those who stayed in foster care.
She followed 149 youths in San Diego over a 6-year period.

Taussig says case workers shouldn't assume that keeping kids with
relatives is better.

"We need more research," she says.

Doyle says foster care remains a needed safety net for some kids but he
agrees that it merits further study.




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