Clinic Flashcards
(85 cards)
Make sure what CASA and CPS say in court is
consistent with what is in their report (so have it up).
How to explain confidentiality
Say I won’t tell anyone what you tell me, unless you tell me its ok. Don’t use the word “secret” (abusers like to use this word). Do remind them of exceptions (someone hurting you, you hurting someone, you hurting yourself) and say this is because safety is important to me.
height difference with client
get on their level physically. If you have to go into a crouch or get on a knee, do it.
Observations while visiting kid
See what the kid does. See who they run too. See how they interact with others. See what placement looks like, etc.
Rules for speaking with client
Speak with them alone, but do not shut the door. You can peak into bedroom, but do no go in (this is for your protection).
When visiting trust your
instics (if you don’t feel safe or something feels off towards your client, do something about it).
Don’t make promises to client that you…
can’t keep. Remember that a lot of stuff is out of your control. “I will tell the judge that.” Not “I will make that happen.”
Start of case from parent perspective
<b><span>You will hear a knock on the door, often late at night. You don’t have to open it, but if you don’t the caseworker outside may come back with the police. The caseworker will tell you you’re being investigated for abusing or neglecting your childfren. She will tell you to wake them up and tell them to take clothes off so she can check their bodies for bruises and marks. She will interview your kids separately, so you can’t hear what she’s asking them or what they’re saying. She opens your fridge and your cabinets, checking to see if you have food, and what kind of food. She looks around for unsafe conditions, for dirt, for mess, for bugs or rats. She takes notes. You must be as calm and deferential as possible. However disrespectful and invasive she is, whatever awful things she accuses you of, you must remember that cps has the power to remove your kids at any time if it believes them to be in danger. You can tell her the charges are not true, but she’s required to investigate them anyway. If you get angry, your anger may be taken as a sign of mental instability, especially if the caseworker feels threatened. She has to consider the possibility that you may be hurting your kids, that you may even kill one of them.</span></b>
Who reported you? Parent perspecitve
<b><ul><li><div><span>You may never find out who reported you. If your child has been hurt, his teacher or doctor may have called the state child-abuse hotline, not wanting to assume, as she might in a richer neighborhood, that it was an accident. But it could also have been a neightbor who heard yelling, or an ex-boyfriend who wants to get back at you, or someone who thinks you drink too much or simply doesn’t like you. People know that a call to the hotline is an easy way to blow up your life. </span></div></li></ul></b>
What happens if caseworker removes parental perspetive
<b><ul><li><div><span>If the caseworker believes your kids are in imminent danger, she may take them. You may not be allowed to say goodbye. It is terrifying for them to be taken away from their home by a stranger, but this experience has repercussions far beyond the terror of that night. Your children may hear accusations against you–you’re using drugs, your apartment is filthy, you fail to get them to school, you hit them–and even if they don’t believe these things they will remember. And, after your children see that you are powerless to protect them, this will permanently change things between you. Whatever happens later–whetheer the kids come back the next week, or in six months, or don’t come back at all–that moment can never be undone.</span></div></li></ul></b>
investigation parental perspective
<b><span>The caseworker has sixty days to investigate the charges against you. She will want you to admit to your faults as a parent, and you should, because this tells her you have insight into your problems and that you have a sincere desire to accept her help and change your life. But you should admit only so much, because she is not just there to help you: she is also there to evaluate and report on you, so anything you say may be used against you in court.</span></b>
services parental perspective
<b><ul><li><div><span>While the court case is procedding, you may be asked to submit to drug testing or a mental-health evaluation, to attend parenting classes or anger-management classes or domestic-violence classes and some kind of therapy. These services are intended to help you, but, if you want to get your kids back, they are not really voluntary, even though they may be so time-consuming and inflexibly scheduled that you lose your job.</span></div></li></ul></b>
obedience and innocence parental perspective
<b><ul><li><div><span>The more obedient you are, the better things will go for you. Even if you are innocent and can prove it, it could be more than a year before you get a hearing, and during those crucial months your compliance and deference are the currency that buys you visits with your children. [Parents acting out against CPS might not be a sign that they are a bad parent, in fact it could be a sign that they are a good parent, who is terribly hurt and scared, and willing to do anything to get their kids back].</span></div></li></ul></b>
starting investigation caseworker perspective
<b><ul><li><div><span>You must start your investigation within twenty-four hours of the hotline call. Go at night–people are more likely to be at home. As you look around, you have to be very, very careful, because if you miss something it will be partly your fault if a child ends up hurt, or dead.</span></div></li></ul></b>
initial visit caseworker perspective
<b><ul><li><div><span>You may be shocked by the living conditions you encounter, but you’re not allowed to remove children solely because of poverty–if for instance, there’s no food in the kitchen because the parent’s food stamps have run out–only for “imminent risk” due to to abuse or neglect. But its often difficult to draw a line between poverty and neglect. When a child has been left alone because his mother can’t afford childcare and has to go to work, is that poverty or neglect? What if the child has been injured because their wasn’t an adult there to prevent it?</span></div></li></ul></b>
emergency removal caseworker perspective
<b><ul><li><div><span>Unless you’ve become desensitized through repetition, emergency removals are awful. Parents may scream at you and call you terrible names. Sometimes a parent will get violent. When you suspect in advance that a situation is going to be dicey, you can bring a colleague or a police officer, but sometimes things turn very fast and you’re on your own. </span></div></li></ul></b>
Right after removal caseworker perspective
<b><ul><li><div><span>If you remove the children that night, you will take them to a processing center to be assigned to a temporary foster home. Once you get there, it could take a long time for a home to be found–many hours. The children sit and wait, along with other children in the same situation. They may be crying, but it’s unlikely you will be able to comfort them, because you may never have met them before, and you have just separated them from their parents. If the children ask you where they’re going next, or when they’ll go home, or if they’ll stay together with their brothers and sisters, you can’t anser them, because you don’t know.</span></div></li></ul></b>
investigation caseworker perspective
<b><ul><li><div><span>After that first visit, you have sixty days to investigate the charges. You should interview the child’s teacher, his pediatrician, and anyone else you think relevant. You should seek out neighbors and relatives;; they may be too wary to talk to you, or else so eager to talk that you suspect they’re trying to get the parent in trouble. You must also draw out the parents; this is tricky because you must play two conflicting roles–helper and investigator.</span></div></li></ul></b>
caseworker opinion vs supervisor
<b><span>Even if you feel for the parents and believe their kids should not be taken away, that is not the end of the story, because the final decision to ask in court for the removal of children is not yours to make; your supervisor, or your supervisor’s manager, will make it. Even though this manager has likely never met the parent or her kids, she may override your recommendation and take what she believes to be the safer course of action.</span></b>
cautious thing to do caseworker perspective
<b><span>Many at ACS believe that taking kids from their parents is the cautious thing to do. Nobody wants to end up on the front page of the Daily News.</span></b>
Punishment vs abuse Judge Sherman
<b><ul><li><div><span>When it came to abuse, she tried to parse the different sorts of violence. Was the parent whipping with a belt, which was painful but not usually dangerous, or choking, which was? And why was the parent doing these things in the first place? “Is there mental illness?” she asks. “Is there so much anger that this person really can’t control it? It may be that this parent has every reason in the world to be angry, not at the child but at a whole host of experiences he’s had in his life–I’m not here to judge that. But how does that impact his ability to deal with his child? Young children can be really frustrating–the constant crying, not doing what you tell them to do.” Did the parent have an unrealistic idea of how well a young kid could be expected to behave? Or did he simply believe that hitting was the right way to raise a child? It was difficult to draw a line between corporal punishment and abuse, and judges drew the line in different places.</span></div></li></ul></b>
What caused neglect judge Sherman
<b><ul><li><div><span>In a neglect case, it was a matter less of stopping something obviously terrible from happening than of filling in the deficits in a child’s life, and the question of what constituted a deficit big enough to count as neglect was difficult to settle. It was hard to tell when neglect suggested that something more worrying was going on. The question is what else is this parent doing that their living conditions look like this? That they’re so filthy dirty, the children are filtyh dirty, the food is rotting–what else is going on here? Is the parent depressed? Does the paretn have developmental disabilities? Is there drug use? Or is it none of those things and we just have to teach her how to keep a clean home? Figuring out what was really going on was hard, because she had no firsthand knowledge of the situation and was forced to rely on the testimony of caseworkers, whose skill and diligence varied considerably.</span></div></li></ul></b>
- She was permitted to see her children each week in a room at the foster-care agency, but she came to dread these visits, because they were so short and saying goodbye was awful for everyone, and because someone from the agency would watch them, taking notes on how she and the kids behaved together. But mostly she dreaded them because the kids had started saying things about her. They said that their foster mother had told them that Mercedes was bad, that she was a drug addict, that she didn’t want them back.
- While the case dragged on and Mercedes drifted, the agency was helping the foster mother with housing. They done moved this lady three times, and every time the apartment’s getting bigger. But you can’t help the biological mother who’s showing you that she wants her kids? If they would have done that for me in the first place, I wouldn’t be in the situation that I’m in now, and I’d have my kids.
- They believed that ACS frequently drew the line between neglect and poverty in the wrong place–that parents lived in unsafe apartments without enough food and left their children home alone because they had no choice. What was required much of the time, the defenders believed, was not parenting classes but material assistance–housing, childcare, medication, food.
- But, when it’s an individual client, the conversation must always be: if you invite that caseworker in who is so condescending and rude to you, doesn’t remember your children’s names and has everything wrong about you–if you invite her in and serve her food rather than give her attitude, your children will come home more quickly.
- What in normal times seemed like a small, ordinary mistake–forgetting to take a child to a doctor’s appointment, bringing him to school late, getting drunk in his presence–could, in the wake of a death, seem like a portent of danger. And you never saw headlines accusing caseworkers of removing children when they didn’t have to.
- Last October, the month after six-year-old Zymere Perkins died, allegedly at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend, foster-care placements increased by thirty percent.
- It had become rare for a child to be removed solely because the parent was smoking marijuana, but if kids had already been removed and the parent tested positive it was often a reason not to give them back.
- That’s why I’ve been late. I can be on time; but when I’m at home getting ready, I don’t see an end to this tunnel, I don’t see a light; it’s just pitch black, this is a fricking routine that is never going to fucking end, and I feel like i’m drowning all the time.
- the failure to protect children. We need to understand that destroying the parent-child relationship is among the highest forms of state violence. It should be cabined and guarded like a nuclear weapon. You use it when you must.
- You are working to protect children, and you will remind yourself of that when your job gets really difficult. Maybe once or twice a parent will thank you and tell you that the services you provided made a difference in her life, and you will feel that those thanks make up for all the other parents who cursed at you and called you a baby snatcher. But that’s unlikely. The turnover rate among ACS caseworkers is very high.
- The next day at her cousin’s house, she saw that the burns had blistered, and announced that she was going to take Leslie to the ER, but her aunt told her, do not go to the ER if they see those burns, cps will take her kids. So she didn’t. The next day, she went to her mother’s house. She and her mother started fighting, as they usually did, and she left the apartment with Leslie and sat with her outside. It was a warm night. She saw two women she didn’t know walk past her and into the building. Her mother called her phone and told her to come upstairs. The two women were in her mother’s apartment; they told her they were from ACS and had come to see what happened to the baby.
- She answered a few questions, growing increasingly outraged, and then, guessing her mother had called ACS to get back at her, began cursing at her and screaming that she would never see her grandchildren again. She started putting on Leslie’s clothes to leave, but ACS women told her that first they had to take photographs of Leslie’s burns. Mercedes said no, she was going, and one of the women said, Miss, you are making me real nervous right now. The women left, but a few minutes later they came back, accompanied by a couple of policemen. Mercedes sat on the floor crying, holding Camron and Leslie and begging the women, don’t take my kids, please don’t take my kids. But her mother, believing it was best to comply, picked up Camron and then Leslie and gave them to the women, both kids wailing, and the women took them away.
- ask them about what they are doing.
- building trust and establishing rapport.
- Engage without being invasive (ask safe and simple questions)
- Start with simple questions.
- Sit down and make eye contact.
- Give child time to respond.
- Keep first meeting short.
- Always keep your promises.
- Children in cases have a hard time trusting. First meeting might be ten or fifteen minutes.
- Demonstrate that you are really listening to them.
- Never make promises you can’t keep.
- Relationship with client is foundation of everything.
- your role as the child advocate.
- Also explain roles of other people in court. Explanation depends on cognitive ability of the child.
- Explain confidentiality.
- Explain all roles and relationships. Introduce all decision makers. Explain important rules.
- Communication tools:
- Avoid legal jargon and confirm child understanding by asking them to explain it back to you.
- It is difficult for anyone to admit they don’t know anything. Create a safe environment for child to ask questions.
- follow their lead.
- Children will let you know when they are ready to talk. Patience goes a long way in building trust.
- Practice child centered intervieweing. Be empathetic. Be focused on client. Demonstrate that. Begin where client is.
- Begin with basic relationship building question. Active listening. Acknowledge feelings through words and gestures. Address clients concerns as they arise before continuing the interview.
- Listen actively and address concerns first to allow child to focus on subject of interview.
- Ask open ended questions, let kid run with it, then follow up with narrow questions.
- 1) Child tells story uninterrupted. 2) Ask open ended questions to further develop facts (who, what, where, when, why). 3) Confirm facts through narrow, closed questions.
- Don’t ask closed questions to early. Build rapport first. If done to early client might agree just to please the lawyer or avoid confrontation.
- Address issues directly, be truthful with client, allow child to react emotionally, then help them refocus on the topic at hand.
- “Can you think of some reasons why the judge might not go for this.” Then you can start reality testing it.
- Don’t say “are you sure?” Because they might shut down. You can say something like, “I just want to make sure I’m hearing you right.”
- Our job is to listen to them, to hear them out, and to represent their wishes.
- legally impossible. Get clients backup plans.
- Investigate to extent needed. Don’t contact everyone in affidavit. But if kid wants to be with aunt then call aunt, visit aunt house, talk with mom (with attorney approval) about aunt, etc. Don’t just trust what other people are saying.
- Affidavits used to have criminal history on parents. They won’t anymore. Find this. (TDCJ inmate lookup, DA office can get access to offense reports, sex offender registry, etc.).
- Ex. if first baby, they might be planning on trying to keep the baby. Could give misleading feedback about kid, visits, etc. to try to make this happen.
- Ask attorney everytime you visit. Get in writing. Unless unannounced to see who is living their, etc. Be extra careful in what you say to parent during unannounced visit.
- Try to avoid meeting at school. It might embarrass them.
- Don’t meet at CPS. They might think you’re a part of CPS.
- Find out why? Did they just have to eat vegetables or are their holes in the wall?
- Every kid gets a lawyer. My job is to come see how you are doing and find out what you want so I can tell the judge. Where you want to live? Who you want to see?
- Ask if it makes sense, a lot.
- Then, I can’t tell anyone about what we say without your permission, except exceptions. But, you can tell people whatever you want about our conversations.
- Confirm what kid wants you to say (and not say, i.e. keep confidential) and do at the end. And then ask if there is anything else they want to tell you or want you to do. Let them know they can call you if they need anything later.
- Confirm what kid wants you to say (and not say, i.e. keep confidential) and do at the end. And then ask if there is anything else they want to tell you or want you to do. Let them know they can call you if they need anything later.
- Give client as much control as possible. Let them decide where you talk with them (except not in the bedroom).
- “Therapy helps you deal with hard things in your life.”
- But be neutral. Don’t push kids into something they don’t want to do.
- Be proactive. If you have to give bad news, make sure people who care for kid (placement, therapist, etc.) know you're going to do this. Don’t say exactly what your going to say, but say that news will be hard for kid to hear.
- Court ordered services case. There is a legal case, but CPS does not have custody. Child always gets a lawyer. Hearing within 14. 1 time extension. 90 day review. 180 days with 1 time 180 day extension.
- CPS takes and describes reasonable efforts taken to protect child.
- CPS can remove with or without court order.
- Without court order requires emergency, no time for court order.
- Emergency ex. Child wandering around motel at 3 A.M., can’t find parent. Same facts at 11 A.M. CPS can go to a judge.
- CPS can kick out someone in the household. Better than removing kid. But, you have to make sure the person won’t just come back.
- There’s been family violence. Perpetrator of family violence not allowed around child and/or others for a period of time. But, it’s just a piece of paper. Have to trust that other parent will abide by it. Not used often because non-perpetrator adult not willing to help. Also, damage could be done before police can be called or child removed.
- Ex. Report saying child never in school. They want to look at school record, but parent says no. CPS can get order from court to look at records. Can do this to get drug test, etc. Action or thing they ask for has to be very specific.
- Emergency removal: No time to get order, belief of immediately danger to physical safety of child, victim of sex trafficking, or on premises were meth is being manufactured (because of danger caused by manufacturing).
- what we can ask for. For example, even if kid doesn’t want to go back to parent, if a court-ordered service, then kid’s request can’t be granted.
- You can ask for a lot more when department has legal custody.
- Monday after 1 year deadline. Automatically dismissed unless extended, or returned for monitoring (180 days). Can get 180 day extension (this can end on any day of the week). If child goes home after extension there can also be returned for monitoring (180 days).
- You can’t extend time in return and monitor. The only way to change dismissal date if it fails.
- All orders go away. (Note if divorce, etc. those orders remain in place).
- If case ends by order, orders remain in place after case closed.
- homeschool, provided/administered low THC if prescribed by doctor, declined child immunization for reasons of conscious including religious belief, or do to economic disadvantage.
- Married when kid was born, or marriage invalid for some reason.
- Executed Acknowledgment of Paternity. This is just a form. Signed by mother and the man, equivalent of adjudication of paternity.
- Court finding that they are the father. Courts typically require DNA test to do this (but not required, example claiming to be father under penalty of perjury may be sufficient).
- Signing AOP (acknowledgment of paternity), testifying in court, or genetic testing.
- You can have an unknown father.
- run by Vital Statistics. Think you got a woman pregnant, can put your name on the list and will be alerted if something happens with kid.
- not legal term saying they are father.
- alleged father isn’t legally the father. You don’t need to have a ground for terminating non-father’s rights.
