Brian and Christopher Bieschke were removed from their father`s home by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services last year after their father allegedly beat Brian.
Their parents were divorced. Though their mother wasn`t involved in the alleged abuse, it took a year before the DCFS and a Cook County Juvenile Court judge allowed them to live with her.
The two brothers learned a lot in that year.
Christopher, 16, was placed in a privately operated shelter in the northwest suburbs where workers told him that, if he didn`t behave, they would ship him to an overcrowded shelter in the city. ”They tell you it`s all gang- bangers there, and that I`d have to sleep on tables,” he said.
Brian, 12, bounced through eight foster homes. Often there was no reason for disrupting his life, except that it was time to go. ”My caseworker would just say my time was up and I should pack my bags,” he recalled.
Last April, Brian and Christopher were allowed to live with their mother, Barbara Nelson, and their two older brothers.
Other children aren`t so lucky.
Whether they are placed in foster homes, group homes, private institutions or shelters, hundreds of Illinois children go through a nightmarish ordeal in the custody of the state.
They are shuttled from home to home. Often they don`t know they are moving until a social worker comes to the door.
Many remain in the unsettling status of foster child while courts and social workers take years to decide if they should be returned to their parents or be adopted.
In the worst cases, children who were saved from parents who abused or neglected them have been placed in a state-licensed foster home where a foster parent beat them or sexually molested them.
According to DCFS figures, 190 children were victims of abuse or neglect by foster parents in the year that ended June 30, including 49 who were sexually abused, 79 who were physically abused and 62 who were neglected. One child died.
”That`s a nightmare,” said DCFS Director Gordon Johnson. ”Here we`ve taken a kid from an abusive home and put him in another one that might have been worse than where he was before. That makes me really angry.”
Illinois` foster care numbers remain stubbornly high despite state and federal efforts to reduce the rolls by reuniting families and promoting adoptions. As of June 30, Illinois had 9,275 children in foster care and 3,707 living with relatives licensed as foster parents.
A study by the University of Chicago`s Chapin Hall Center for Children found that the problem in Illinois is most acute for black children. The number of white children entering foster care has declined slightly in recent years, but the number of blacks entering care has increased by 34 percent.
Johnson noted that blacks are hit hardest by the stresses linked to splintered families–poverty, homelessness, teen pregnancies and single-parent homes.
David Liederman, executive director of the Child Welfare League in America, said the racial imbalance ”reflects our own inadequacies in dealing with minority families. The numbers of minority staff in the child-welfare system is an embarrassment.”
Whether they`re white or black, many children spend months in state-run shelters because foster homes can`t be found.
DCFS staffers complained for years about bad food, poor medical attention and housekeeping problems in the shelters, according to department documents. In January, after the state was sued, one shelter was shut down.
”Often the abuse and neglect the children were suffering in the shelter were worse than what they had gone through at home,” said Benjamin Wolf, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who filed the suit that shut down the Cleaver Shelter, 1125 N. Cleaver St.
Johnson said plans were in the works to move the shelter to another site with more room and better services long before the suit was filed.
The state`s network of 8,500 foster homes is considered the most essential element of the child care system, taking in 85 percent of the children who must be removed from their homes.
The job requires hard work and patience for little pay, about $7 a day for each child. Prospective foster parents must be licensed by the state after an evaluation by state workers and a fingerprint check.
”We couldn`t do without foster parents,” Johnson said. ”They have a special kind of quality that we`re trying to find now in other people to add to the rolls.”
Yet child advocates say that even if the foster parents have the best intentions, children will be emotionally damaged by the experience.
”Every kid who gets placed gets hurt,” said Peter W. Forsythe, who heads the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation`s program for children. ”When there are multiple moves, it can destroy their capacity to trust adults and to form emotional attachments.”
The Chapin Hall Center study, and statistics compiled by DCFS, indicate that:
— More than one-third of the 13,775 Illinois children in foster care in 1984 had been in the system for more than two years and 2,447 had been in for more than five years.
— Forty-four percent had been shifted to six or more homes.
— One-third of the children who are reunited with their families land back in the foster system. Mark Testa, an author of the Chapin Hall study, said this shows children are subjected ”to a second round of trauma.”
Those numbers are ones ”we are not proud of,” Johnson said, adding that the department is trying to recruit new foster families and expand in-home services.
Experts blame multiple placements on poor planning by DCFS caseworkers, who send troubled children to foster parents who can`t handle them; on foster parents who refuse to deal with problems; and on children who reject authority and run away.
Charlotte and William Lang have seen the impact of long-term foster-care drift on the brother and sister who live in their home.
”There is sex abuse, and there is child abuse, but there is also legal abuse,” Mrs. Lang said. ”This is legal child abuse.”
The 8-year-old girl who lives with them was placed in her first foster home in 1978, when she was five days old. She and her brother, now 11, were removed from their home when their parents were charged with child neglect.
The children lived in one foster home for 13 months, until the boy`s aggressiveness caused the foster parents to give up the children. They moved through six different homes in two months before they came to the Langs` south suburban home.
”All kids coming into foster care need counseling,” said Mrs. Lang.
”They need to know that it`s not their fault, and they need to know how to love two sets of parents.”
But getting the state to pay for counseling, even for children with serious problems, is a struggle, Mrs. Lang said.
According to Mrs. Lang, while it was apparent to the boy`s teachers that the youth needed intensive psychological or psychiatric treatment, DCFS for 18 months ”did nothing” other than provide them with Medicaid coverage for the youth.
Finally, two years ago, after the boy experienced psychotic episodes and threatened to kill himself, he was admitted to a state mental institution.
”He has calmed down quite a bit now, and we`re waiting for him to come back home,” she said.
National studies have found that children who languish in foster care are two to three times more likely to suffer from a wide range of problems, including mental illness, alcoholism and drug abuse.
A 1982 research project by the Center for Preventive Psychiatry, White Plains, N.Y., found that the parents of abused or neglected children were often former foster children themselves, indicating a generational cycle of abuse that state child care fails to break.
Helen and George George have watched the impact of long-term foster care for eight years.
A one-year-old girl was placed in their home after her father was charged with severely beating her.
The Georges want to adopt the child, now 9, and have been approved by DCFS. The child`s mother has divorced the girl`s father and has custody of her older sister. The mother has received years of counseling and now wants the younger daughter back.
”I`m angry at what the state has done to me,” said the mother, who asked not to be identified. ”I love my daughter. I should be the one raising my children.”
Yet psychologists who have examined the child say that she has severe emotional reactions to her mother, and in the eight years she has lived in the Georges` home, she has become deeply attached to them.
”It`s very hard for her,” said Helen George. ”She wants to call us mom and dad, and we tell her that she can`t because we`re not her parents.”
Because of legal delays, it was three years before DCFS could recommend that the Georges be allowed to adopt the child. But then a Cook County Juvenile Court judge refused to terminate the mother`s parental rights. The case sits in Illinois Appellate Court and could continue for years.
Many times, a child can remain so long in the substitute care web that it is untangled only when he reaches his 18th birthday, when he can be legally freed from state custody.
The Child Welfare League of America estimates that 50,000 children each year ”age out” of foster care and opt to live on their own. But states often allow those children to go without preparing them for the difficulties of independent living. One study in New York found that one-third of the foster care youths who left the system ended up receiving public assistance.
Nathan Johnson, 20, is trying to beat those odds. He entered state care when he was 2. After 16 years in Maryville Academy in Des Plaines, he moved to a group home on the North Side. After a quarrel with another youth there, he decided to live on his own.
Counselors at the home urged him to sign a waiver that he was no longer in state custody, even though Nathan, who has moderate learning disabilities, was not prepared to live on his own.
”His waiver was obtained through coercion,” said Diane Redleaf, head of the children`s rights project of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago.
”He didn`t understand what he was doing.”
Johnson moved to the Lawson YMCA, but was locked out for not paying the rent. He ended up at the Pacific Garden Mission, a shelter for the homeless.
”I was the youngest one there,” said Johnson. ”I didn`t like it.”
After a night there, Johnson sought the help of a counselor at Jewish Vocational Services, who got his waiver of state custody rescinded and found a foster home for him and a job. He is now in an independent living program and will be moving out on his own soon, this time with the help of a counselor.
In recent years, legal groups have battled in courts to win rights for children in substitute care. Earlier this year, a Cook County Circuit Court judge ruled in a case brought by the Legal Assistance Foundation that children in state care and their natural parents must be allowed weekly visits. Legal Assistance in August published a brochure for children outlining their rights in foster care and shelters.
Illinois Action for Children, a La Grange-based organization, has lobbied to force the courts and DCFS to make decisions regarding children`s futures more expeditiously.
It is a task that members of those groups say will continue as long as the state and the courts take a bureaucratic approach to child care.
”DCFS sets up a system of longe term failure,” said Redleaf. ”Then when the kids hit 18, DCFS wants to wash its hands of responsibility.”
