What happens when children are taken from their homes and put into a foster-care system that just doesn’t work? And how can parents be protected from abuse by administrators who take precipitous action based on false or overblown charges?

By Timothy W. Maier

"Mommy, Mommy, They’re raping me!" Then click and a dial tone. The desperate call had come in the dead of winter 1994 at 2:30 am. to Alma Kidd. Her 14-year, old daughter, Norma "Hope" Robbins, was trapped in a Washington state foster-care home. Kidd immediately reported the incident to police, but no charges were filed. The rape was described as consensual lesbian sex.

This story seems almost unbelievable, but Insight has reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, depositions, videotapes and internal Child Protective Service, or CPS, field investigations confirming this and other sadomasochistic sexual assaults.

While in foster care, Hope became a heroin addict, dropped out of school and grew so despondent that three times she tried to commit suicide. Records show she ran away at least 11 times, only to be brought back to her torturers. Medical reports indicate that she sustained such deep cuts to her arms that doctors called it satanic ritual abuse. Hope was placed in foster care in March 1993 after CPS claimed Kidd abused her. The mother never had the hearing that Washington state law requires within 48 hours.

Evidence shows mother and daughter had a strained relationship. Kidd objected to her daughter associating with boys involved in drugs and opposed Hope’s desire to adopt a lesbian lifestyle. Hope once attacked Kidd with a knife, and another time told her, "You’re not my mother. You’re just someone who laid down and out I came:’ Hope clearly wanted to shock and hurt her mother, but reports also indicate that the girl recanted stories that her mother abused her, and wanted to go home.

In 1994, Kidd was granted custody of her child under a court order. That order came after three separate investigations found the allegations that the mother had abused Hope were false. But after the custody hearing, Kidd was severely beaten outside the courtroom by a "mob of lesbians," some of whom worked for the state and previously had guardianship over Hope, according to court records and witnesses. The attack now appears to have been a premeditated tactical move between Hope’s attorney, CPS, and the lesbian foster-care providers, which gained time for CPS secretly transfer custody of Hope to an alternative by residential placement run by yet another lesbian. The move only could have been filed by Hope herself or her state-appointed attorney, and approved by a judge. In Hope’s case, both her state-appointed attorney and judge were pro gay-rights activists.

At the new home, witnesses reported, Hope and other girls were seen naked in the apartment with chains around their ankles and wrists and a dog collar looped around their nechs. When the distraught mother learned of this, she again filed a criminal complaint. She claims police officer Marlene Goodman told her: "Ms. Kidd, you're in Washington State now. They can chain her 24 hours, seven days a week, and there is nothing you can do about it. It's a lifestyle, a romance. We will tell them to tone it down."

A few months later, Hope was tossed down two flights of stairs while in her underwear. Neighbor Carrie Songerez approached the girl and asked, "Can I help you? Is there anything I can do? Should I call the police?" Hope responded tearfully, "There is nothing you can do. They'll just get me again, and again, and again."

Hope's case has been placed under the authority of Washington's State Sexual Orientation Initiative program, which puts allegedly gay children with homosexual role models and promotes hiring of homosexual social workers and foster parents. Never mind that there is definite ambiguity about Hope's sexual preference, according to court records and her own writings obtained by Insight. At times she pleaded for relief from those pushing a homosexual lifestyle upon her. "I think I’m sick for becoming gay," she wrote. She filed a complaint, stating, "I want someone to answer for this mess" and requested to be "returned to her family." Her own writings speak of a desire to be placed in a "normal foster home," explaining, "I don’t want to be in a lesbian foster home;’ because "all lesbian foster homes are political weirdos and pushy."

The tragic story of this rebellious adolescent and others triggered state protests, prompting the Washington state Senate's Law and Justice Committee on Civil Rights to hold hearings this year, and some state senators have urged a federal investigation. No such probe is under way - and Hope now is reported missing. Child Protective Services has "lost" her.

Hope's case represents what critics charge is the basic problem: CPS spends too much time investigating well-meaning parents and too little time investigating children at risk. The result often is that innocent parents lose their children to state-sponsored homes and abusive parents get their children back.

The solution is not so apparent as the problem. Some experts call for a national program where all caseworkers and social workers are credentialed and licensed. Congress wants to dump more money into the system to terminate parental rights and speed adoption so the child can find a permanent home. Still others support funding for family reunification, and some have reached the point of wanting to contract the entire problem to the private sector.

Historically, the system's trouble can be traced back to when it began in the 17th century in England with creation of the Poor laws. These helped the rich to adopt poor orphans, but the laws often were abused as adopted children were sold as servants or forced into menial labor. In 1912, the Children's Bureau was formed in the United States and it pressed to have the government take control. Within a decade, many local jurisdictions had passed laws allowing social workers unlimited power to intervene in cases of abuse. In the 1960s, California passed the first law requiring doctors to report child abuse, and other states began to follow with similar laws. In 1973, Democratic Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota held hearings on child abuse, and five years later millions of federal dollars were available for jurisdictions that created mandatory reporting laws, provided legal process for prosecution of parents and put children declared to be neglected and abused into state care. It looked to be necessary and good. It turned out to be a trap for millions - and an unspeakably nightmarish experience for children like Hope.

Still, "you are always going to find cases that are messed up," says Ann Coyne, a professor of social work at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. "But if you step back and realize that a state may have dealt with 6,000 cases you will find that in the vast majority they did okay."

Others see it differently. "These are not isolated cases" says George Wimberly, founder of Colorado-based Victims of Child Abuse Laws, or VOCAL. "It happens more often than not." Wimberly says he receives dozens of calls every day from children recanting stories of parental abuse and begging for help to return to their parents.

Nearly 3 million cases of child abuse and neglect are reported annually. Of those, 60 percent either are deemed false or lack credible evidence to move forward, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. This means more than 1 million people a year could be falsely accused (see "Caught in the trappings of Justice," p. 13).

"Kids are being sequestered from their families," Wimberly says. "They are actually being held hostage. That's what it is. They're being told they have to say things against Mommy or Daddy or they won't ever come home. They are so quick to place a lad in foster care that sometimes the child is held for months before there has been a hearing." "The one thing that really bothers me is that on a juvenile and criminal level there is never any consideration as to relative or family placement," Wimberly adds. "We have cases all over the country right now where relatives are availing themselves to care for these children." One such case is in Louisiana with Betty Maddav, who lost both of her children to CPS, even though charges of child abuse were dismissed. Maddox says her relatives are willing to take the children but CPS wont turn them over. She explains: "They can't be placed in our blood line if our relatives believe in our innocence."

lAz Richards, executive director of the Virginia-based National Alliance for Family Court Justice, pins the blame on CPS bureaucrats who fail to look at the evidence and instead retaliate by going after the accusers who report the abuse. "We're finding out that child protectors end up losing their kids," she says. "Now, we tell people, whatever you do, don't call CPS. Keep your mouth shut or you will lose your kid."

Retired Seattle attorney Robert A. Nord says even pedophiles working in state youth centers are escaping justice in the mad drive by bureaucracies to control children. Nord complained about the OK Boys Ranch sex scandal that recently rocked the Evergreen state. More than two dozen boys were abused at the youth center, but no charges ever were filed. A state investigation could not be completed because officials in the attorney-general's office destroyed confidential records regarding 326 allegations of abuse, according to investigators in charge of the probe. Finally the boys' families successfully sued Washington state and won $18 million in damages for what was described as a "jungle of molestation."

In a letter a former Seattle Police sergeant circulated to state officials, he says, "People in this county who publicly complain about the sexual abuse of children have their heads handed to them. They lose their jobs. They have their children taken away by CPS. They have criminal charges cooked up against them. They are harassed and intimidated by rogue police officers. If they have the temerity to accuse a protected pedophile - someone with establishment protection - the roof really falls in on them."

Retaliation also may fall upon Parents who complain against administrators or psychologists, as Italian immigrant Joe Paolillo found out. He lost his 11-year-old son, Joseph, to the foster system in Washington state when the child confided at school that he didn't get along at home. He claimed his parents abused him - a charge he would later recant. But the psychologist reported the incident to CPS after the father complained about the lack of school discipline and the school's failure to tell him his son was seeing a psychologist.

CPS took the child after the psychologist and a caseworker made statements referring to the Paolillo family as "culturally backward" and "old New York Italians" who want their son to go into their "family business" records allege. In 1994, Joseph was placed in eight homes in 10 months and, in the following year, three homes in 40 days. He was molested and so distraught that he engaged in a petty-crime spree that landed him at Echo Glen Youth Center, a juvenile-detention facility.

Paolillo later learned that the center hired a private group to counsel teens on sexually related issues. One session includes asking teenagers, "What do you think caused your heterosexuality? Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of? A disproportionate number of child molesters are heterosexual. Do you consider it safe to expose your children to heterosexual teachers?" Officials at the center offer no explanation for the questions. Frustrated with how CPS was "brainwashing" his child, Paolillo contacted the Italian Embassy, which helped him get his son out of the system and placed in a private facility in Missouri.

James C. LaBrecque, formerly of New Jersy, also experienced how powerful CPS can be. LaBrecque lost custody last year of his 11-year-old mentally disabled child, Lauriano, because CPS claimed he was not giving the boy seizure medication. At the time Lauriano was averaging one seizure per month, according to medical records; that rate rocketed to 60 times a month while under foster-care supervision. Medical records obtained by Insight suggest that the increased trauma the child suffered in the hands of the state may have occurred as "result of his removal from his biological parents."

While Lauriano initially was placed in a foster-care home, he soon was transferred to the New Jersey Shore Medical Care Center because he was experiencing seizures that the foster parents couldn't handle. At the medical center he was placed in a cage-like crib with a top over it because the facility didn't have enough staff to monitor Lauriano.

"He was petrified," says LaBrecque, who sneaked into the medical center and observed his son trapped in the cage. "He needed to pee. He is absolutely not violent He is the most sensitive and tender-loving child you could ever meet. And now the child is in medical chaos. They have seriously damaged my son!"

After showing a photograph of his child trapped in the cage to a judge, LaBrecque still didn't get immediate custody. "I'll tell you what the problem is with the system," he says. "It's not the social workers. It's the courts and the judges. The courts allow them to do this. It's called junk justice."

Finally, two weeks ago, the state was ordered to return little Lauriano to his father. And, like so many parents furious at such official abuse, LaBrecque plans to file a lawsuit against the state for failing to conduct proper investigation. In fact, 22 states currently are being sued in class-action litigations for failing to protect children in their custody. Many other actions have been filed against caseworkers and CPS agencies but few ever go to trial. When they do, CPS often ends up paying thousands of dollars in damages.

The parents filing these suits find fault in every aspect of the system that seized their children. Enraged, some speculate on widespread conspiracies that drive away the mainstream press, though once in awhile the evidence supports the theory. For example, in Washington state, there was the Wenatchee child-abuse case in which dozens of parents were accused of child molestation. It all was proved to be false when investigators learned that dozens of social workers and psychologists coerced the children to claim abuse.

But highly publicized cases, such as that of New York 5-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, who died of torture allegedly inflicted by her mother, place tremendous pressure on CPS agencies to act quickly.

They know that five American children die every day of abuse (a statistic strongly disputed by CPR - we believe the real number is closer to one) and the No. 1 killer of children under age 2 is child abuse (again, only if the term "child abuse" is creatively defined - CPR). This leads them to step on parent's toes whenever they think it is necessary "for the good of the child."

"The general rule is for CPS agencies to remove the child first," says Colorado author Brenda Scott, who wrote Out of Control: Who's Watching Our Child Protection Agencies?" "They call it how they feel it," Scott tells Insight. "It's on the hip. They err on the side of what they think is safety."

And as long as there is a suspicion of abuse the child can be removed. It can be from an anonymous complaint as minor as someone reporting a mother spanking a child in public. Some schools even are urging children to turn in their parents. lome schools are teaching kindergarten children they have rights," Scott says. "Children are learning they don't have to be spanked. By doing this you just give an immature child a way to send their parents to the principal's office."

The agencies also have become more aggressive. In 1995 the government put 715,743 children in out-ofhome cam, such as foster homes, group homes, juvenfle facilities and mental wards. The number of children in out-of-home care has increased by 74 percent from a decade ago. Likewise, the number of children reported as abused or neglected has increased in the last decade by 42 percent, from 33 per 1,000 in 1986 to 42 per 1,000 in 1995. About 40 percent of these children put into out-of-home care facilities never return to their parents. More than half will be away for at least one year and the majority will have multiple placements, some in as many as 15 different homes. "The trauma and the damage and the incredible harm comes when the child is taken away from their home," Scott says. "They suffer what we call a 'kidnap syndrome.'"

In 1986 a survey conducted by the National Foster Care Education Project found that foster children were 10 times more likely to be abused than children in the general public. A follow-up study in l990 by the same group produced similar results. And when the allegedly abused child leaves the system at age 18, the prognosis is not good. For example, in Massachusetts 60 percent of the state's criminals come from foster homes or state institutions, while in California that number is closer to 69 percent.