Foster Child : A Generation of Neglect, a Legacy of Loss : L.A. County: Its foster-care system for abused and neglected children is huge and powerful and operates virtually unseen. Within it, nightmares are bred, their victims unheard.

A child named Desire screams from her crib in limbo. She was brought into a children’s shelter after being battered at home by a blow that knocked one hemisphere of her brain against the interior of her skull. She is nearly blind, seeing only shadows her brain cannot comprehend.

“She cries incessantly,” so she can’t go home, “because she invites more abuse,” says her caretaker.

Desire lives in the limbo maintained by the County of Los Angeles for children who are waiting, often in vain, for permanent placement in foster homes. The county foster-care system is, with New York City’s, one of the two largest in America. It is also considered one of the worst in California by state regulators.

Every month, responding to reports of abandonment and abuse, the county takes custody of 1,000 children. Removing them from their homes, it assumes responsibility for those children and for trying to reunite families.

The county treats this awesome responsibility with awful indifference. It is such a neglectful stepparent that the state Department of Social Services threatens to take over some of the county Department of Children’s Services functions because of poor monitoring of children in foster homes.

The children’s agency was spun off from the county Department of Public Social Services in 1984 to focus on the needs of abused, abandoned and neglected children. It administers state and federal assistance programs and has the legal responsibility for protecting and providing for children without parents.

“L.A. (County) isn’t doing any of that,” says public-interest lawyer Carole Shauffer. “They’re making things worse.”

Jesus is one of the children under the county’s custody. In 1985, both of his parents, PCP users, committed suicide. Jesus became a ward of the court, which placed him in his grandparents’ custody, even though a social worker reportedly had been warned that they had a mean streak.

The Department of Children’s Services had responsibility for checking on Jesus, who at age 9 weighed only 28 1/2 pounds and could not express himself.

“He was not visited or monitored by that department for a period of four months,” says a subsequent trial summary. “During this time, (Jesus) was sodomized, burned with cigarettes and beaten. On June 30, 1986, he almost drowned. As a result, Jesus is now a spastic quadriplegic and totally dependent.”

It would be nice to believe that the state would be a more protective guardian than the county. But the pattern of child neglect goes straight to the office of Gov. George Deukmejian, who has consistently taken away funding for desperately needed child health programs.

“Democracy doesn’t seem to work for children,” says Helen Kleinberg, watchdog and foster-care advocate. “They don’t vote, they don’t organize, and they don’t give money. Any time there’s a battle for money between adult and children’s services, the adults win.”

Unlike most branches of government, the department operates largely beyond public scrutiny, yet its power over young lives is vast. It has the authority to directly intervene in parent-child disputes, to remove children from their parents, and to assign them to foster homes. The department advises the Juvenile Dependency Court on the needs of each child in the system, and then it executes--and sometimes fails to execute--the court’s orders.

It is hard to imagine a more powerful and potentially invasive role for a government agency. In the 1990s, when the breakdown of the family is catastrophic, when violent child abuse is epidemic, and when more and more babies are taken away from drug-addicted parents at birth, adequate foster care is more crucial than ever.

But it would be hard to find a more neglected agency than the Department of Children’s Services, or a more overburdened institution than the Dependency Court. Public interest is strangely missing; the county Board of Supervisors gets more attention for meetings on animal rights than for children’s programs, says Kleinberg, their untiring advocate.

Like the children whom it frequently fails, the foster-care system is the poor stepchild of the county.

At any one time, 50,000 children are under the supervision of Children’s Services. About 33,000 of them are the direct wards of the county, living in foster homes or other settings apart from their parents. These figures are disputed by the state, which claims that the county may be carrying inactive cases in its files. This may be true. But over an 18-year cycle, hundreds of thousands of children pass through the system, however briefly, and they are at risk of becoming a generation marked by deep antipathy to the state and society. Although foster children make up less than 1% of the population under 18, they constititute 25% of the delinquents in the custody of the California Youth Authority.

“This is like building an underclass,” says Carole Shauffer, one of the public-interest attorneys who filed the class-action suit that drew the state’s attention and its wrath.

Building an underclass is hard work. It costs a lot of money to make sure that children don’t get the care they need. It costs money in administration of neglect, in ordering care that won’t be given (because the state doesn’t pay for services it requires), and in punishing child-abusers for continuing the cycle of abuse that they inherited.

Building an underclass needs, and gets, help from a lot of sources that will benefit. Industry, technology, the drug trade and the professions all do their part. For its part, society turns its back.

Allegations of negligence are the focus of a state inquiry into the management of the Department of Children’s Services and of a class-action suit against the county. The county has retaliated by threatening to make the state take over its licensing burden unless Sacramento provides enough funds to fulfill its mandates.

One state official scoffs that the county can’t even figure out what its myriad problems are, much less how to fix them. If there’s one word that comes up when judges, social workers and parents discuss the county, it’s overwhelmed.

“We’re not overwhelmed,” says Robert Chaffee, director of the Department of Children’s Services. “The department’s not in chaos, (not) paralyzed or inactive.”

Dozens of children in foster care have been raped, sodomized, beaten. A few have been murdered. One-hundred and eighteen children have died in the system, “all but 11 by natural causes,” says Chaffee.

Jesus, like many victims of child abuse, was not able to testify in criminal court. The district attorney never filed charges against Jesus’ grandfather. His grandmother was given 300 days in jail. Nothing happened to the social worker assigned to Jesus’ case.

A few face-to-face visits with Jesus by an observant social worker back in 1985 could have prevented him from being tortured--and saved the county millions in damages.

Jesus’ attorney sued the county. The county argued that it was not required to have face-to-face contact with Jesus, and that the granting of guardianship (to the grandparents) relieved it of any responsibility. But state law mandates monthly face-to-face contact. A Superior Court jury ordered the county to pay $5,466,248 in damages. That sum would cover the annual wages of 168 additional social workers to visit thousands of children like Jesus.

Big Brother may be a fictional fantasy to most of us, but to thousands of children, Big Stepparent is a real torment. Foster care in the richest metropolis of the richest state of the richest nation in the world resembles a Third World nightmare.

People in the system try hard, often at great personal sacrifice, to do a good job. They do succeed in protecting many children from harm. Devoted foster families give at least a semblance of stability to countless children’s lives. Underpaid and overworked, care-givers deserve not only thanks; they also should have a part in rethinking and reforming the system.

“There is no comprehensive plan at any level, federal, state or local,” says Judy Nelson, director of the nonprofit Children’s Bureau. “There is no comprehensive objective assessment for when children are removed from home. There’s no emphasis on prevention.”

Chaffee chafes at such criticism: “Because society hasn’t got a solution, they’re irritated as hell because I don’t. We’re expected to be a perfectionistic android. This department could go through nine directors. If you don’t get a better system, it still won’t run.”

Chaffee shouldn’t be a scapegoat. He’s only carrying out the orders of political leaders who hypocritically kiss babies while neglecting children, and of taxpayers who scream at abuse but won’t pay money to prevent it. But new vision and leadership are needed for the department to face the multiple challenges of the 1990s, especially the drug-babies crisis.

Jesus’ ravaged body is now atrophying; he will end up curled in a little ball. He opens his mouth and leans his head back to cry, but no sounds come out.

Los Angeles will always have children like Jesus and Desire who need 24-hour institutionalized care. But it has far too many who are rescued from one kind of abuse only to suffer another--the abuse of neglect by society and its government. Taking responsibility for the lives of 120,000 children in California’s child-welfare system should be the highest calling for public officials and private individuals who serve society’s stepparent role.

If our county supervisors, our legislators and our governor will not take to heart their responsibility for children entrusted to their care, who will?