Why Has Iowa Stuck with the Fashion of "Reuniting the Family," No Matter Who the Parents Are?

Before two-year-old Bella Bond was murdered and left in a plastic bag on the coast of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families had already removed two older children from her home. As in Iowa, the Massachusetts child welfare’s first priority at that time had been to “reunite the family.”

Now that Bella Bond has been murdered, allegedly by her mother’s boyfriend, Michael McCarthy, Massachusetts’ child welfare department has changed its top priority to protecting the child, not “reuniting the family.”

If only Iowa’s Department of Human Services would change its first priority from “reuniting the family” to “protecting the child.” Fewer children like two-year-old Iowan Shelby Duis would die. Shelby Duis died in Iowa despite the involvement of Iowa Department of Human Services social worker Chuck Illg and despite Shelby’s daycare worker’s tearful pleas to Chuck Illg to remove Shelby from her home before she ended up dead. The daycare worker knew Shelby was covered with bruises and had a severe diaper rash. Within a few days after Illg’s refusal to remove Shelby from her home, Shelby was dead, literally tortured to death by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.

Fortunately, Illg no longer works in child protection, since he has proven himself incompetent in that area. He still has a job with DHS though, which I find abhorrent. As a former social worker, I know that it’s hard for social workers, attorneys, and occasionally judges to believe that toxic, even murderous parents exist, but they do. Far more parents murder children than the other way around. For the most part children, according to a book called “Why Children Kill Parents,” only kill their parents when they perceive, rightly or wrongly, that they are in great danger and there’s no other way out.

The fashion of “reuniting the family” denies the possibility that some families shouldn’t be reunited because the child could end up dead or irreparably damaged. Iowa’s fashion of “reuniting the family” is foolish and depends on a Pollyanna vision of parenting as a noble enterprise unlikely to go awry. Attorneys are particularly likely to see children as parental property and have little insight into what constitutes abuse. Naïve social workers just make things worse, yet their passivity, even when they fail to enforce boundaries in the case of pedophiles accessing vulnerable children, is rewarded by the don’t-make-waves system, particularly in private nonprofits.

As a social worker, I usually had to partner with foster parents and a judge, or better yet, foster parents, a sympathetic DHS worker, and a judge, to get an abusive/neglectful parent’s parental rights terminated. On one occasion, I smuggled an eight-year-old boy into judge’s chambers where the judge and the lawyers involved were deciding the boy’s fate. He sat on my lap and told the judge that he didn’t want to go with his mother, who had an extensive criminal history, because ”every time I catch up with her, she leaves me again.”

The boy entered into foster care in the first place because the mother left him and his little brother with a teenaged babysitter for two weeks. The teenager left after a few days, and the little boys were left alone, abandoned.

He and his little brother were adopted by their foster parents (their maternal grandmother didn’t want them) and had a safe, stable home at last. Their biological mother went to prison.