Where's The Outrage As Kids Are Beaten?

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

NEW YORK - The story of Randi Anderson is sickening because its horrors have become commonplace. Born to crack addicts, reared in a tenement apartment with an empty refrigerator - they'd sometimes put a neck bone on the radiator and heat it up for a meal, one brother remembers - the little girl went to one foster home, then another.

She was difficult to love. She stole, drew on walls with lipstick and defecated on the floor, perhaps to get attention.

Although everyone seems to have known she needed counseling, Randi somehow never got it. She had pigtails and big brown eyes and once she ran in front of a car and screamed ''I want to die.'' She got a good smack for that. She was 5 years old.

I've read more than one autopsy report like this in 20 years as a reporter in New York City. Her thigh was broken in two places, her liver lacerated, her body covered with old bruises.

Someone sent New York Times reporter Celia Dugger records of the case, in violation of the Child Welfare Administration's habitual veil of secrecy. The saddest thing about the resulting story is that it has lost its power to shock. The foster care system is flawed? Caseworkers are underqualified and overworked? Kids suffer? Tell me something new.

The arrangement under which Randi met her death is one of the new panaceas in that system. Kinship foster care awards a stipend to a family member who assumes responsibility for a child.

One caseworker told me kinship arrangements have become so routine that foster parents must show only that they are relatives, not that they are particularly loving or capable.

Randi's two foster mothers were her aunts; according to friends, the second one, in whose home she died, hated the little girl.

Yes, many good people take over the task of raising children, often difficult children, whose parents are incapable of doing it themselves. But there are others. Last year in New York City there were almost 1,700 official reports of abuse or neglect of children in foster care. Of those, 370 were substantiated. With 50,000 children in foster care in New York, that is not a shocking number.

Randi was beaten to death five months after she arrived, before a caseworker had ever visited her in her new home, by her foster mother's 20-year-old son, who baby-sat while his mother was at work. His sentence was pathetic: one and a third to four years.

Children bounce through this system like rubber balls, learning the lesson of disassociation. ''Sometimes I see one of those really horrible crimes on TV,'' a former caseworker says, ''and everyone is saying 'how could a human being do that?' And my mind thinks 'maybe it was one of my kids.' With how they lived, they could wind up doing anything.''

A panel reviewing Randi's case said the agency used ''poor judgment'' in not having her psychologically evaluated. ''Poor judgment.'' What about negligence? What about incompetence?

Randi Anderson's mother, still on crack, gave birth last month to another daughter, who was placed in foster care. And if, five years from now, that little girl dies, too, some experts may call it ''poor judgment.'' In truth it will be an outrage.