Richard Wexler
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Child welfare in Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Where stigma and bias “flourish”
The case file had a single word written across the top. There was no context for this one word, no explanation.
But in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and surrounding Linn County, when that word is on a child welfare file, no explanation is necessary. Everybody knows the word means the agency doesn’t like the family, the family deserves an extra measure of suspicion and the case worker really thinks the children would be better off with people with whom that worker is more comfortable.
That one word amounts to seven scarlet letters for a family caught up in the net of the Iowa Department of Human Services in Linn County.
The word is “CHICAGO.” FULL STORY
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