Melinda Murphy - A Culture of Fear: An Inside Look at Los Angeles Countys Department of Children & Family Services

This book is dedicated, with tremendous respect and admiration, to those Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services workers, past, present, and future, who have dedicated their professional lives, or a good portion of them, to one singular purpose: to protect children by responsibly empowering parents to rebuild and make their families whole again. DCFS has and always will have tremendous workers at all levels and in all job functions who care very deeply about helping families. These workers are unquestionably committed to bringing their skills, talents, training, creativity, education, and compassion to the families they serve.

These DCFS employees do an extraordinary job under incredibly challenging and complex circumstances and with limited resources, and they deserve profound ongoing recognition and appreciation for the service that they render to their communities.

The purpose of this book is to expose some of the most serious systemic deficiencies and defects that have impeded and/or prevented countless Children Social Workers (CSWs), Supervising CSWs, and other directly and indirectly supportive DCFS staff at varying levels from empowering their case families to help themselves. These pervasive and serious agency-wide dysfunctions have resulted and continue to result in corruption, mismanagement, coercion, bullying, and intimidation. Most importantly, tragically, and unconscionably, these problems have caused us (DCFS) to harm families.

DCFS staff has a very unique and complex set of challenges. Some are inherent in the work itself, as illuminated and partially explained by such constructs as vicarious traumatization (VT), which speak to the potentially devastating impact on the CSWs. Other challenges stem from longstanding systemic deficiencies and defects.

By exposing these serious systemic problems, we hope to ignite an open, meaningful, honest, and inclusive dialogue free from all forms of retaliation. Those inside our DCFS culture, as well as key stakeholders from our communities, need to begin to talk about how we can come together and mobilize our strengths, passion, compassion, and unquestionable dedication to help families, address these systemic deficiencies and defects, and make permanent DCFS course corrections. We firmly and unequivocally believe that DCFS and its workers are driven by principles of integrity, honesty, and fairness, and are genuinely dedicated and committed to helping families.

We fully acknowledge the stress that our agency and profession are under as we discharge our responsibility to help protect children from abuse and neglect. We in no way make light of the pressures and scrutiny brought on when a tragedy occurs, such as when a child dies on our (DCFS) watch.

In no way do we mean to imply or state that DCFS has not, does not, or is not helping protect children from abuse and neglect. We also recognize our responsibility to give credit when DCFS has made great decisions and choices that have resulted in our families having profound and positive successes. We cite two very specific examples that represent the best of DCFS, when it has talked the talk and very clearly walked the walk in acting in the actual best interest of the families.

Our combined twenty-seven years at DCFS and the stories of hundreds of DCFS staff whom we have had the privilege of working with lead us to conclude that without such an open and inclusive dialogue committed to honest self-evaluation, appraisal, and course correction, our systemic deficiencies at DCFS will continue to handcuff our current and future workers from empowering our families and, unconscionably, harm an untold number of them.

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

Martin Luther King, Jr.