A PICTURE caption in a recent issue of the Boston Globe read: "Out of harm's way". The photograph showed a four year old boy in rural Wisconsin walking between two policemen. He was holding their hands and his head was level with their holsters. They were leading him from a house in which his mother had just been shot dead by her boyfriend who had then committed suicide.
A headline on the opposite page read: "Brooklyn Girl, 6, Dies After Beating By Mother". The beating ended a short life of deprivation punctuated by violence and sexual abuse.
It was not an unusual week. Any major newspaper carries similar stories of rape, torture, beating, murder, so routine that they warrant only a few paragraphs. The overall conclusion, however, cannot be diminished. For a growing number of America's children, home is now a dangerous place. And for burned out child welfare workers, the dual mission of keeping troubled families together while ensuring the safety of the children has become an impossible juggling act.
Family preservation and reunification, a cornerstone of US child welfare policy since the 1970s, is now being reexamined and the role of institutional child care reconsidered. "There is no more important issue in America today," Eugene Gualco, former president of the Child Abuse Prevention Council, said in a recent radio interview: "How we handle this decides what kind of society we will become."
In the current struggle between family advocates and advocates of residential care, nobody is against family preservation as an aspiration. But its critics insist the policy was initially oversold for economic and political reasons, and that today it is an inadequate approach to a crisis that was largely unforeseen two decades ago.
"Just as heroin in the 1960s contributed to the rise of single parent families, so will crack soon give us the no parent child as a social problem," Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1989. His prediction was ignored but it is now estimated that by the year 2000, at least 100,000 children in the US will have lost their mother - the sole parent - to AIDS. Since 1987, the number of children in out of home care has risen from 300,000 to more than 500,000: three million children were reportedly maltreated in 1993.
It is not just the numbers that are shocking. Children are damaged today in ways that were uncommon 20 years ago. Psychiatrists routinely asking new arrivals at residential treatment centres "What would your three wishes be?" used to hear "I want a basketball" or "I wish my father didn't drink". Today, they are most likely to be told: "I wish I had a gun so I could blow my father's head off".
"These kids have had it with parents," the Atlantic Monthly reported in 1994, "and the feeling is usually mutual."
Whether they are throwaways or runaways, such children find themselves in what is officially termed "the child care" continuum" at a time when funding for all programmes has been drastically cut. Alternatives range from adoptive and foster homes to residential treatment centres and psychiatric hospitals, with group homes occupying the middle ground.
Placement decisions are guided by the principle that every child is better off with parents and a home. The practical consequences of this thinking are often disturbing.
Hard to place children, for instance, commonly find themselves on display at "adoption fairs" at which they are viewed by prospective parents. The social worker organising one such event recently told a Vogue magazine reporter: "It felt like a slave auction".
Family reunification was enshrined as a primary goal by, the 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, which acknowledged a parent's rights by limiting the government's power to seize children, except in well documented cases of abuse or neglect.
"The goal of child protection services became safeguarding children while also working to reunite them with their abusive parents," Richard J. Gelles writes in The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children's Lives: "The assumption was that these mandates could be balanced successfully. The reality was that the demands were contradictory . . . The central mission of child welfare agencies, preserving families, does not work."
Mr Gelles argues that caseworkers today are confronting the problems of an oversold policy, many of them, in poor areas such as the Bronx, working with 60 struggling families simultaneously. In a demonstration in May, those workers carried placards reading "Caseworkers don't murder children, politicians do".
Pamela Day, manager of child welfare services at the Child Welfare League of America, defends the 1980 law. "The legislation was a very wise shift away from the tendency to remove a child from its home for almost any reason, she explains, "It puts a stronger emphasis on families, but to say it is causing children to die is an enormous - and wrong - leap to make."
Last year, Hillary Rodham Clinton voiced a similar conviction when she responded to Newt Gingrich's proposal that disadvantaged children be housed in orphanages. "Removing children from their parents is and should be difficult," Mrs Clinton wrote, cautioning against "letting a handful of sensational media stories create a false stereotype". "It is more cost effective and realistic to help avoid family breakup," she concluded.
Mrs Clinton had a point. A 1994 study estimated that family preservation programmes cost $3,000 per family annually, foster care $ 10,000 per child and institutional care $40,000 per child. But the economic argument has come back to haunt family preservation advocates as criticism of the policy intensifies and as directors of struggling children's institutions complain it is taking money directly out of institutional pockets. The policy remains popular, however, among liberal and conservative politicians alike liberals believing residential centres are simply brutalising warehouses and conservatives, horrified by residential treatment costs, welcoming a cheaper alternative.
"They will tire of family preservation the way they tired of de institutionalisation," Father Val Peter, director of Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska, said two years ago, referring to the now tarnished attempt to rehouse psychiatric patients in the community. "It's as if they just discovered that it's a good idea to try to keep kids in families. It's an exegesis of the obvious."
Today, Father Peter's views are unchanged. "We Americans believe in the cheap, quick fix: family preservation can never be a quick fix," he stresses. "Politicians love it because it makes voters feel good, they get re elected and never have to be accountable." The result, he argues, is "an enormous apathy in America and a perception that nothing works. We're giving up, closing facilities, running out of heart.
Boys Town USA, unrecognisable today as the charity home established by Father E.J. Flanagan in 1917 and including girls since 1979, apparently works. With net assets of $578 million, the self sufficient village on 400 acres has 76 individually styled houses headed by "family teachers", married couples trained exclusively for the job of heading a household of eight to 10 children.
Each house would fetch about $500,000 on the open market. The message - "you are valuable" is one that none of the 556 children living here has ever heard before. Some 80 per cent of the girls have been sexually abused. For most of the nine to 19 year olds, this village is the first experience of being cared for by adults who do not hit or demean them.
"We have a plan to change the way America takes care of her at risk children," explains Father Peter. "We teach skills and build relationships, starting on the outside, not with therapy." The non sectarian, non profit organisation has residential campuses, shelters, family based programmes and training centres nationwide.
"It's strict but it helps you," is a typical response of Boys Town children to the system of tallying daily points for good behaviour. A longitudinal study from 1981 to 1990 revealed that Boys Town residents did better academically and had a more realistic estimation of their ability and of their college prospects than did a sample group of non residents.
Reports on the long term effects of residential care on young lives and the change care can effect in families are scarce, however, as research funding was slashed in the 1980s. Experts have not agreed on a definition of success, let alone on how it may be measured. One fact is clear: a good institution is a hard place for a child to leave.
Whether in Boys Town, The Children's Village in New York State or Woodland Hills in Minnesota, the child is central. In the outside world he/she is not. Whatever the situation, most children re establish their connection with their families, even abusive families Pamela Day stresses, "They never forget them."
But the growing number of children living and dying in a domestic nightmare challenges the traditional notion of child rearing as exclusively family business. Gene Baker, chief psychologist at The Children's Village, put it bluntly in a recent interview: "As long as we keep pushing them back into what is our idealised fantasy of family, they'll keep blowing it out of the water for us."