D.C. children needlessly taken from homes, study finds

Posted at 07:35 PM ET, 09/26/2011
D.C. children needlessly taken from homes, study finds
By Mike DeBonis
Washington Post

The District’s child welfare agency may have unnecessarily removed dozens of children from their homes in recent years, a new study concludes, “emotionally and psychologically harming both children and parents.”

The Citizens Review Panel, an independent, federally mandated oversight board, examined four years’ worth of records — 27 cases handled by the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency from 2006 to 2010, involving 41 children — where emergency powers were used to remove the children from their homes without a court order, only to be returned to those same homes within months.

Finding “too many cases of inadequate investigations and poor removal decisions,” the panel concluded that the city was “generally right to have significant concerns about that families, but .. was often wrong to conclude that removing children from their families on an emergency basis was necessary to address those concerns.” FULL STORY

Did you know?

Citizens Review Panels are in every state!
For more information, please visit:
http://www.uky.edu/SocialWork/crp