Staff Forced Disabled Girls to Fight in Youth Home
Workers at a center for distressed children provoked seven developmentally disabled girls into a fight of biting and bruising, while they laughed, cheered and promised the winners a precious prize: after-school snacks.
Four of the girls were injured, according to records obtained by The Texas Tribune and the Houston Chronicle. State officials learned of the incident at Daystar Residential Inc. in Manvel the day after it occurred, when a Daystar employee doing health checks found bite marks, scrapes and bruises on the girls’ bodies.
The fight was one of more than 250 incidents of confirmed abuse and mistreatment in residential ...
Comments (14)
Terri Persico Rimmer via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Horrid!!!
Irene Solnik via Texas Tribune on Facebook
there are no words to express my disgust. Are these ex-workers going to jail?
eamartinez
A government that hates government will never build a government that works. And privatization of everything is not the answer either. Profit is no substitute for morality.
Liz M. Gonzales via Texas Tribune on Facebook
These workers caused injury to these children. They used their provoking words as a weapon. They should get tried for this. In my opinion, the need jail time!
Cindy Mobley via Texas Tribune on Facebook
That's terrible.
nccpr
The abuses reported here are only the ones DFPS admits to - cases where the RTC couldn't hide the problem and the abuse was so blatant that DFPS felt compelled to confirm it. Study after study shows the real rate of abuse is far higher than agencies admit. The reason is obvious: When agencies investigate abuse in substitute care, they are, in effect, investigating themselves. There's an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file.
Even were there no physical abuse at all, there would be a scandal. Residential treatment is, in fact, largely worthless. Again, the studies are overwhelming on this; details and citations are on our website here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/residentialtreatment.pdf
Unfortunately, even as they rightly excoriate DFPS for its blindness, Ms, Ramshaw and Ms. Langford simply take the agency at its word when it says all of the children in RTCs have such severe problems that there is no other alternative. In fact, Wraparound programs have proven that almost no child in an RTC really needs to be there.
And that helps explain why, though these kinds of worthy exposes have been a part of journalism for more than a century, they almost never change anything. There are hearings, press releases, posturing of all sorts, and a new law or regulation or two. Then it's back to business as usual. But as long as children who are hated, feared or both are placed out of sight and out of mind - and out of reach of the parents who love them - terrible things will happen to them.
The only way to really fix the problem is to stop institutionalizing so many children, and stop taking so many childern from their homes in the first place - often when poverty is confused with "neglect". And, as I'll explain in the next comment, that is where Ms. Ramshaw and Ms. Langford sadly become complicit in the very problem they now expose
Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
www.nccpr.org
nccpr
part two of two
As I noted in my comment in the Tribune last year, http://www.texastribune.org/stories/2009/dec/01/rising-removals/comments/ Johana Scot of the Parent Guidance Center and I told Ms. Ramshaw about a huge spike in entries into substitute care in Texas, and why many of those entries were unnecessary, and harmful to children.
Ms. Ramshaw followed up on the tip, but left out our perspective - and that of anyone else who thought this spike was a problem. Instead her story celebrates the increase, and quotes only those who shared her view that it was right and necessary, depriving Tribune readers of all sides of the story. Ms. Langford has ignored the issue of wrongful removal for as long as she's been on the child welfare beat.
Now they write as if they are shocked - shocked! - when some of the children whose removal they celebrated are severely harmed in RTCs.
This kind of whack-a-mole journalism, pushing a problem from one place to another and then exposing it in each new form, garners awards for the journalists but does nothing for the children.
Some children really do have to be taken from their parents, but many others are taken needlessly. The only way to fix foster care, in all of its forms, is to have less of it.
Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
www.nccpr.org
Clay Boatright via Texas Tribune on Facebook
As a parent of two 10 year old twin daughters with severe developmental disabilities, this article really hits close to home. My children currently live at home with us, but I understand how the lack of in-home community based help results in many children being placed in facilities. The staff's behavior described here should make everyone's stomach churn.
I volunteer at the Sunday chapel service for a large institution for people with disabilities. When the chaplain asks the residents gathered if they have any prayers, there is one request which out numbers all others by a wide margin. They ask to pray for their mothers. It hit me today that there may be a whole lot more to that request than meets the ear.
Richard Wexler via Texas Tribune on Facebook
If only the Tribune would investigate why those in-home supports don't exist (it's not just stingy legislators, it's the fact that the residential treatment centers are scarfing up all the money) and how many of those children never needed to be taken from their mothers.
--Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
www.nccpr.org
Irene Solnik via Texas Tribune on Facebook
jail for these monsters?
Shelly Blair via Texas Tribune on Facebook
thank you for reporting this story
Genie G. Cudd via Texas Tribune on Facebook
People like that should be put in jail. Or something worse done to them.
Jim Reed via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I appreciate how you are strengthing and broadening your footprint with timely collaborations in Dallas and Houston...as well as Austin.
think
This is a sad example of the culture, and conduct of what has become the divisive, hostile actions and words AND above the law conduct of elected leaders. If the ones at the highest offices in state levels act in the worst way possible and get away with it , what makes lesser offices expect they have to uphold non criminal, or ethical behavior.
Texas is the home of the lowest behavior from the very people who are supposed to conducting themselves in non abusive professional manners.
This state needs some serious clean up in political office holders, state employees, and business practices. Texas seems to settle for the bottom of the barrel.