IDEAS & TRENDS; When We Met the System and It's Us

KIMBERLY J. MCLARIN

May 28, 1995

ANY time a child suffers or dies at the hands of an adult, we cringe and shake our heads. But when that child was entrusted to the care of the state, we also rage against The System, even if that System did all that any reasonable person could expect.

That reflex was provoked again last week by two shocking tales of child abuse. This time, the system was New York City's Child Welfare Administration, which was under fire again for failing to protect society's tiniest victims.

Yes, the system fails, often and spectacularly. But sometimes what fails and breaks our heart is human nature. Sometimes, as seemed to be so in one of the two cases, we hold up a mirror to the system and see something much more troubling: ourselves.

If society needs to villainize, the bureaucracy often complies. In 1993, 37 children died in families whose troubled histories had been known to city child protection officials. No one knows, though, how many lives caseworkers saved as they chose between preserving families and protecting children by moving them to the relative safety, if often the uncertainty, of foster care.

Who Knew?

Last Monday, 4-year-old Margarita Seeley was taken from her mother's home to Harlem Hospital badly beaten. Police charged Margarita's mother and the mother's boyfriend with assault. Margarita's former foster mother and relatives say they had repeatedly tried to sound an alarm.

But in the case of 21-month-old Queenie Baker, nothing suggested that the system failed. She had been rescued earlier from a father who beat her and her brother so severely that he snapped their tiny legs. She was given to Edwin and Rosa Hall of Brooklyn, whom neighbors described as a stable couple who spread their love equally among their foster children and their own. Even the police say that nothing in the tidy home signaled to child welfare workers that something might go wrong.

Still, something did. The police said that sometime Tuesday, over a period of several hours, Mrs. Hall beat Queenie to death. Her weapon was a hard heel of a shoe. The police believe that Mrs. Hall just snapped, pushed over the edge by the difficulty of caring for a little girl who had suffered so much in the first months of her life that she could barely speak or eat solid food.

The Child Welfare Administration says it followed procedure. If the agency indeed did what it was supposed to do, if it checked out Mrs. Hall's background and visited the home, none of the re-examined procedures or tougher training for social workers proposed after Queenie's death would have made a difference.

Still, blaming the bureaucracy is easier. The alternative is to acknowledge that seemingly ordinary people may harbor demons that virtually no system can guard against.