Gary W. Reece - Broken Systems-Shattered Lives

Broken Systems-Shattered Lives

Copyright 2019 by Gary W. Reece, PhD.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No portion of this book, including the text, cover, artwork, acknowledgements and dedications, may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, without express, written permission from the copyright holder. Permission is granted to use brief quotes for the purpose of educational reference or literary review.

ISBN :

978-1-950850-55-6 [Paperback Edition]

978-1-950850-54-9 [eBook Edition]

Printed and bound in The United States of America.

Published by

The Mulberry Books, LLC.

8330 E Quincy Avenue, Denver CO 80237

themulberrybooks.com

This book is dedicated to the children who enter The Los Angeles County Child Welfare System. Many are abused, too many die, and the system fails to protect and provide needed services. I will tell their stories about the effects of placement on them, the nature of the system they enter, those who are mandated to help and the homes in which they are placed. This is a broken, failed system which profoundly and dramatically creates long-lasting consequences for those families, children and professionals who are a part of the system. Its complexity, bureaucracy and entrenched ways of doing things create a huge obstacle to change.

By looking at the system and how it affects the lives of children who have the misfortune to become embroiled in it, perhaps key problems, issues, and solutions will become evident. Change in any social system is difficult. One as large, intractable, and cumbersome as the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services is formidable. The task is even more daunting when this system reflects and is embedded in a larger societal context replete with political ideologies, economic constraints, values, structure, institutions and historical tradition which creates its own form of inertia.

The book will be grounded and centered in the lives of particular children with whom the author has been involved over the past ten years. Statistics are always abstract. To know the number of children affected by a social system is to miss the trauma, tragedy, and cost in damaged lives and the social cost of these lives to the larger society.

Behind every statistic lies a story. It is these stories I wish to tell. It is hoped that it may raise awareness, inspire, inform, and stimulate the reader to become a part of a movement of concerned individuals committed to change. With this collective mind, together we will create understanding and a vision for transformation. Out of this new vision, perhaps a more enlightened and humane way of protecting and saving our children will emerge.

A Meditation

Chronicler of the Winds

On that day beneath the unrelenting sun, I discovered the true face of the city. I saw how the poor were forced to eat their lives raw. There was never any time for them to prepare their daysnot those who were constantly forced to fight on the outermost bastions of survival. I looked at this temple of the absurd, which was the city and maybe also the world, and it resembled what I saw all around me. I was standing in the center of the dark cathedral of powerlessness.

Henning Mankell

The Line

All men live lives enveloped in whale lines. All are born with halters around their necks, but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the sudden, silent, subtle, ever present profile of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker and not a harpoon by your side.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Table of Contents

: Perilous Journey: The placement process.
A child enters the system: The Childrens Law Center
and The Department of Children and Family Services
Los Angeles, California

: Trauma and development: The Effects of Placement

: Attachment and The Effects of Trauma

: Traumatic Loss:
Unhealed Wounds-Loss and Complicated Grief

: Mourning-Healing the wounds

: Kathy: Placement, foster home, birth family:
IssuesThe processHow it Impacts the Child,
Foster Home, and Role of the Various Parties

: Smith family: A System in Disarray

: Lynn and Maria: Sisters Languish Because of CSW
Malfeasance, The Process of Placement Through Adoption:
The Roller Coaster and how CSWs and Institutions
Contribute to the Trauma

: Families who care for these children:
Their Experiences with the Children and the System

: Requiem: Children who Die in a Broken System

: The Elusive Search for Implicit
Identity Survivors: Children who Grew
up in the System to Become Functioning Adults

: Summary and conclusion-observations,
assessment, challenges

Acknowledgments

T his project would never have been finished without the help of so many of my good friends and family. I would especially like to thank and acknowledge my daughter Michele Foster who so generously and graciously volunteered, and competently took on the task of editing and bringing order out of my rambling and fractured prose. To my eternal gratitude, this risky adventure turned into a very pleasant opportunity for us to work together on a project which she flatteringly found challenging and interesting.

Thank you, Michele, for your competence, responsibility, and sense of humor as you hacked your way through the dense forest of my penchant for long and laborious sentences, punctuating only when I pause to think. She also admonished me to never begin a sentence with And. I still dont know why.

I would also like to acknowledge my son Scott Reece who cajoled, coerced, and pushed me screaming and kicking into the digital age. He encouraged my writing, and inspired me as we sat up and talked until all hours of the night about life in this cosmos and his passion for writing. My friends all know how techno phobic I am. I shocked them when I found my way to social media and I think, onto Face Book and joined several professional discussion groups on line. I still refuse to Twitter. Scott dazzled me with his cell phone, which helped us navigate our way to Yellowstone in a driving rain storm in the middle of the night. He is also a gifted photographer who has attempted to wean me off my old Minolta SLR and teach me how to use a digital camera. I am lucky to have two grown children with such incredible skills who have been helpful to me in this project as well as learning how to be a good father.

To my friends and colleagues overlapping two centuries, Dr. Don Randall, who authored, Just another Buddhist Christian , I say particular heartfelt thanks for all the ways his friendship has helped me weather the many crises of my life as I thrashed about and wandered in the wilderness: Finding myself. We spent many pleasant hours camped out under the desert sky talking about the great mysteries. He also read and made helpful suggestions and changes to this manuscript.