Will We Ever Help the Children?

Two-year-old Rafael Pearson is profoundly disabled. He suffered catastrophic brain damage when he was beaten and shaken by a foster parent in whose hands he was placed a few days after being born, in the fall of 2005, with traces of cocaine in his blood.

Contrary to court-ordered rules that require weekly visits by social workers during the first eight weeks a child is in a foster home, the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency neglected to visit the home even once in the three weeks before the abuse was discovered.

Rafael's gripping story was told by Post reporter Henri E. Cauvin last year ["In 43 Days, a Future Shattered," Metro, April 23]. On May 9, The Post published a letter to the editor by Sharlynn E. Bobo, interim director of D.C. Child and Family Services, written in her agency's defense. Bobo characterized Rafael's experience as "rare" and extolled the city's "dramatic gains in strengthening the safety net for abused and neglected children."

There was nothing rare about Rafael's tragedy. Accounts of the city's apathetic and negligent treatment of vulnerable children are numerous and well documented.

Last May, the same month Bobo was singing her department's praises, her workers closed the door on four girls caught in a calamity that ended up taking their lives. Their decomposing bodies were found in the Southeast Washington home of their mother, Banita Jacks, who was taken into custody Jan. 9 and was later charged with murder in the deaths.

My introduction to Child and Family Services came 17 years ago with the LaShawn A. case, a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that detailed the city's mistreatment of children in its custody. D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) was mayor when the lawsuit was filed.

I'm still haunted by an example cited in the three-week trial. It involved Kevin E., an 8-year-old boy who climbed into a trash can with the hope of being thrown away because he had cycled through many foster homes and believed no one wanted him.

U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan, now chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, ruled against the city in 1991, observing, "The lack of action by the Barry administration to remedy the system's defects and properly provide for the plaintiff children represents no less than deliberate indifference toward the constitutional rights of these children."

Hogan's words, contained in a 102-page opinion, ring true today: "The District's dereliction of its responsibilities to the children in its custody is a travesty. Although these children have committed no wrong, they in effect have been punished as though they had." As a consequence, wrote Hogan, we have "a lost generation of children whose tragic plight is being repeated every day."

Fast-forward to Tuesday's D.C. Council hearing on the city's handling of the Jacks family.

Lo and behold, there was council member Barry on the dais, grilling Fenty administration officials about city failures.

The gavel was wielded by committee Chairman Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6). In 1993, when Wells was executive director of the Consortium of Child Welfare, a 15-member group of nonprofits providing services to families and children in the city's child welfare system, he complained to The Post that social workers had less time to spend with "families and kids because of the amount of time they are required to spend in court and doing paperwork because of the court order."