November 2, 2011
Bill Montgomery, the District Attorney of Maricopa County in Arizona has a unique and perhaps revolutionary proposal to reform his county’s response to child abuse reports. Instead of initial Child Protective Services (“CPS”) involvement as is typical, Mongomery would create a two-tiered system in which a separate unit with trained investigators routes a case after intake to either the criminal unit or to CPS.
Cases in which the investigator believes felony-level criminal abuse occured would be immediately routed to the criminal unit, reported to the police, and taken out of the hands of CPS. Once the parents are charged, the children would be placed with foster parents specially trained to take care of children who have been criminally abused, while the parental case would move quickly toward severance of parental rights and adoption. The parents would then have the burden of demonstrating that they should be permitted to keep the child.
If, on the other hand, the initial investigator believes that social services involvement is appropriate and a level four felony has not occured, then the case would be routed to CPS, for the agency to conduct its process of the provision of social services and attempts at reunification.
Montgomery’s proposal was triggered in large part by his observation and review of reports of numerous cases in which CPS dealt ineffectively with child abuse by working at reunification at all costs, even when child abuse was serious. He is severely troubled by the numbers of child fatalities in cases where CPS returned children to parents determined to be abusive.
In Montgomery’s view, it is most important that children be protected from criminal abuse above all, leaving less critical issues to the social services system to handle: “[W]e as a society will deliberately walk that child back into the arms of the person who criminally abused them and say we can make this good. Nonsense.”
He believes that this bifurcated approach could even lead to fewer children being removed from homes because the standard for removal could be higher in CPS cases where the system removes the fear of threat and severe harm to the child.