How gentle Father Jim Close of Mercy Home was in his letter “Move early to prevent child abuse” (Voice, Dec.20).
And yet how clearly he made the point that we ask caseworkers from the Department of Children and Family Services to do the impossible. We shunt off on them the city’s neediest children, refuse the caseworkers the support and money necessary to do a good job, then blame them on the occasions when they apparently haven’t. Father Close suggests DCFS caseworkers walk a tightrope with all the rest of us watching, “anticipating a fateful slip.”
If we really cared about the children, not to mention the caseworkers, we’d all get off the bleachers and construct bigger and stronger nets to catch them in case of slips. Better, we’d ground that tightrope by addressing, as the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse urges, attention to poverty, drug and alcohol abuse and single parenthood.
