What happened to Niveen Ismail and her three year old son, as described by Rachel Aviv in her December 2, 2013, New Yorker article, Where Is Your Mother?, can serve as a case study in the misguided, or worse, maneuverings often used by child welfare personnel that lead to very wrong and even tragic outcomes for families. Rather than repeat in detail the particulars of this article, which can be read in its original context, I will only mention some of its salient points.
Niveen Ismail, a 39 year old single mother who grew up in Kuwait City and living in Huntington Beach, California, went to work leaving her three year old son home alone on December 5, 2005. The police and the Orange County Social Services Agency were called and the son, though apparently unharmed, was placed in a foster home. Ms. Ismail, a computer consultant, later "told a social worker that her workload was too heavy, and that on the day she left [her son] alone she had reached a 'breaking point.'" With few friends and no relatives in the United States, Ms. Ismail obviously found herself in a difficult situation.
Once her situation became known, the local social services agency should have been able to step in and offer services, child care specifically, to help ease this difficult situation. It did step in but it did nothing to ease the situation. Instead, it bombarded Ms. Ismail with an onslaught of utter gibberish in the guise of psychological evaluative intrusions and every conceivable pseudo-interpretive and plain stupid hogwash, all having absolutely nothing to do with her ability to provide, at the minimum, adequate parenting for her son. In the end Ms. Ismail's parental rights were terminated and her son's childhood has been spent in the home of his adoptive parents.
Reading this New Yorker article can give one an idea of what happens, in one way or another, not just to a few parents and children whose lives intersect with America's child welfare system but to untold numbers. But one may read The New Yorker article and yet come away with some other viewpoint. I say this, because obviously there are people whose thinking leads them to engage in exactly those behaviors that create the very situations described in the article and we can only imagine that that mind-set extends to others as well. There are the knee-jerk child savers; the angry, punitive-minded folks whose attitude toward poor and otherwise put-upon parents leaves no room for compassion but plenty of room for any kind of harsh punishment; the self-righteous protectors of communal and societal mores whose intolerance of any breach of their rigid code of conduct demands a swift and immediate response, and of course, the mostly uncommitted, whose uncritical mind-set has been formed by the popular media.
Yes, these people do exist and may see things differently when reading The New Yorker article. But people with those modes of thinking are not the people who should be employed by the child welfare system. So it is difficult to read about what happened to Ms. Ismail and her son without wondering what in the world was the Orange County Social Services Agency up to. Were they enmeshed in so faulty a mind-set that they were unable to realize what they themselves were doing? Can they have possibly believed that their actions were serving the interests of the child, if not also the mother? What connection could they possibly have made between their nitpicking at so many unrelated aspects of Ms. Ismail's life with her ability to parent her son? And if they were so able to persistently engage in this nitpicking, why was it apparently so very one-sided without ever extending to a broader perspective of Ms. Ismail's life? Did any of them ever wonder about this? Did their conscious ever nag at them?
Was the primary motivating factor something as simple and unconscionable as the Orange County Social Services Agency's "choice to err 'on the side of overreaction, because the alternative could be devastating,'" as an Orange County official said, according to Ms. Aviv, because the wrong recommendation can "'be a career ender'" for social workers. This amounts to the possibility of destroying other people's lives to save your own vocational life.
It is partly this very type of social work behavior that I refer to in my spring 2013 Tikkun article. It is behavior reminiscent of a social worker, who upon hearing that a bored young person who drew a small skeleton on her hand, interpreted this, without any additional evidence, to mean that the young woman was suicidal. It is, sadly, behavior reminiscent of the witch hunts of yore.
Child welfare should not be about "getting someone." But it must be about helping a family resolve the problem that led to its involvement with the system. And that means that, sometimes, intensive and extensive work is called for to achieve this. Most of the time, the current system is just not prepared to carry this out. So here again I must say that the piecemeal and superficial kind of change we are accustomed to hearing about is very unlikely to ever lead to real and substantial positive change. The child welfare system must attract people who value the attainment of knowledge through life-long learning, the ability to flexibly use that knowledge, and the importance of an ethical mind-set that is intimately connected to that store of knowledge. One possible way for this to occur is through the elevation of child welfare into a prestigious profession, as I have previously written.
We ask how and when such change will occur. Indeed, how will it finally occur?
Niveen Ismail, a 39 year old single mother who grew up in Kuwait City and living in Huntington Beach, California, went to work leaving her three year old son home alone on December 5, 2005. The police and the Orange County Social Services Agency were called and the son, though apparently unharmed, was placed in a foster home. Ms. Ismail, a computer consultant, later "told a social worker that her workload was too heavy, and that on the day she left [her son] alone she had reached a 'breaking point.'" With few friends and no relatives in the United States, Ms. Ismail obviously found herself in a difficult situation.
Once her situation became known, the local social services agency should have been able to step in and offer services, child care specifically, to help ease this difficult situation. It did step in but it did nothing to ease the situation. Instead, it bombarded Ms. Ismail with an onslaught of utter gibberish in the guise of psychological evaluative intrusions and every conceivable pseudo-interpretive and plain stupid hogwash, all having absolutely nothing to do with her ability to provide, at the minimum, adequate parenting for her son. In the end Ms. Ismail's parental rights were terminated and her son's childhood has been spent in the home of his adoptive parents.
Reading this New Yorker article can give one an idea of what happens, in one way or another, not just to a few parents and children whose lives intersect with America's child welfare system but to untold numbers. But one may read The New Yorker article and yet come away with some other viewpoint. I say this, because obviously there are people whose thinking leads them to engage in exactly those behaviors that create the very situations described in the article and we can only imagine that that mind-set extends to others as well. There are the knee-jerk child savers; the angry, punitive-minded folks whose attitude toward poor and otherwise put-upon parents leaves no room for compassion but plenty of room for any kind of harsh punishment; the self-righteous protectors of communal and societal mores whose intolerance of any breach of their rigid code of conduct demands a swift and immediate response, and of course, the mostly uncommitted, whose uncritical mind-set has been formed by the popular media.
Yes, these people do exist and may see things differently when reading The New Yorker article. But people with those modes of thinking are not the people who should be employed by the child welfare system. So it is difficult to read about what happened to Ms. Ismail and her son without wondering what in the world was the Orange County Social Services Agency up to. Were they enmeshed in so faulty a mind-set that they were unable to realize what they themselves were doing? Can they have possibly believed that their actions were serving the interests of the child, if not also the mother? What connection could they possibly have made between their nitpicking at so many unrelated aspects of Ms. Ismail's life with her ability to parent her son? And if they were so able to persistently engage in this nitpicking, why was it apparently so very one-sided without ever extending to a broader perspective of Ms. Ismail's life? Did any of them ever wonder about this? Did their conscious ever nag at them?
Was the primary motivating factor something as simple and unconscionable as the Orange County Social Services Agency's "choice to err 'on the side of overreaction, because the alternative could be devastating,'" as an Orange County official said, according to Ms. Aviv, because the wrong recommendation can "'be a career ender'" for social workers. This amounts to the possibility of destroying other people's lives to save your own vocational life.
It is partly this very type of social work behavior that I refer to in my spring 2013 Tikkun article. It is behavior reminiscent of a social worker, who upon hearing that a bored young person who drew a small skeleton on her hand, interpreted this, without any additional evidence, to mean that the young woman was suicidal. It is, sadly, behavior reminiscent of the witch hunts of yore.
Child welfare should not be about "getting someone." But it must be about helping a family resolve the problem that led to its involvement with the system. And that means that, sometimes, intensive and extensive work is called for to achieve this. Most of the time, the current system is just not prepared to carry this out. So here again I must say that the piecemeal and superficial kind of change we are accustomed to hearing about is very unlikely to ever lead to real and substantial positive change. The child welfare system must attract people who value the attainment of knowledge through life-long learning, the ability to flexibly use that knowledge, and the importance of an ethical mind-set that is intimately connected to that store of knowledge. One possible way for this to occur is through the elevation of child welfare into a prestigious profession, as I have previously written.
We ask how and when such change will occur. Indeed, how will it finally occur?
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