Contents

CUF in the News

	Will East Harlem's La Marqueta Rise Again?, Grub Street New York, August 19, 2010
	Deal to Put Slots at Aqueduct Paves Way for a New York City Casino, The New York Times, August 12, 2010
	Local Biz Booster, New York Daily News, August 11, 2010
	The truth about commercial rent control, Crain's New York Business, August 10, 2010
	Spinning It Bloomberg Style, Huffington Post, August 9, 2010
	Group says state should 'step back' and dump plan for Aqueduct racino, New York Daily News, August 8, 2010
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Center for an Urban Future
is a New York City-based think tank that fuses journalistic reporting techniques with traditional policy analysis to produce in-depth reports and workable policy solutions on the critical issues facing our cities.

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New York by the Numbers

Economic snapshots of the 5 boroughs

This month's data... This edition of New York by the Numbers reveals that nearly a third of all adult workers in New York City are employed in low-wage jobs. While the percentage of low-wage workers is high across the city, the Bronx is in a league of its own, with 42 percent of the boroughs workers in low-wage jobs.

Child Welfare Watch: Tough Decisions

A project of the Center for an Urban Future and the New School University's Center for New York City Affairs, this Child Welfare Watch report examines city policy toward domestic violence in the aftermath of the Nicholson v. Williams class-action suit.

By Andrew White with John Courtney, Hilary Russ, Nora McCarthy, Sharon Lerner, Wendy Davis, and Diana Henriquez

October 2003 | DOWNLOAD PDF

Public officials usually consider orders from the courthouse bench to be unwelcome, restrictive of management and demanding lots of resources for compliance. At the New York City Administration for Childrens Services (ACS), reaction to the federal district court injunction imposed last year in the Nicholson v. Williams class action lawsuit is no exception.

The lawsuit challenged ACS practice in cases of suspected abuse and neglect that involve domestic violence (for details, see Nicholson v. the System, in the full report). Too often, plaintiffs said, ACS removed children from their mothers unnecessarily and circumvented the womens due process rights. The judge agreed.

Agency administrators say the injunction has required a large commitment to training staff to simply comply with judicial dictates, diverting energy from more substantive work on the problem of domestic violence.

Yet the Nicholson case marked the climax in New York of conflicting passions that have embroiled the child welfare and domestic violence fields nationwide for decades. Domestic violence advocates long believed that child welfare bureaus coerced vulnerable women by threatening to remove, or by actually removing, children from their care. Child welfare authorities questioned whether advocates for battered mothers fully understood the governments mandate to protect children.

The testimony of ACS Child Protective Manager Nat Williams offered evidence of practices that domestic violence advocates have long condemned. After Sharwline Nicholson was brutally assaulted by her daughters father, Williams approved the removal to foster care of her baby girl and six-year-old son. He said he let five days pass after Nicholsons children were placed with strangers in foster care before seeking approval from the Family Court for the placement. Further, he rejected Nicholsons choice of caregivers, including a relative in the Bronx and her mother in New Jersey, and Nicholson wasnt allowed to see her own children for more than a week.

In his testimony, Williams conceded this was done because, after the children of domestic violence victims have been in foster care a few days, mothers generally agree to cooperate with services. He said that after agreeing to cooperate, the mothers get their children back, and thus there is sometimes no need to go before a judge.

Williams probably had good reason to want Nicholson to participate in services such as emergency shelter and safety planning. Yet the description of coercive tactics involving the removal of small children was viewed as shocking in the courtroom, and shined a spotlight on the plaintiffs goal: an end to such practices.

Fortunately, from Massachusetts to Iowa, Michigan to New York City, domestic violence advocates today are increasingly working alongside more flexible and attentive child protection units. Careful and sensitive work with battered mothers is often now seen as the surest way to also protect their children.

Surveys and studies document the overlap of spousal abuse and child abuse, as well as stark cause-and-effect linkages between domestic violence and depression, substance abuse and child neglect. Some state child welfare departments report that as many as two-fifths of their most violent child abuse cases also involved spousal abuse. In New York City, case record reviews found that between 14 and 16 percent of reports included domestic violence allegations. But when a rigorous survey was done of 540 women referred to foster care preventive services, nearly half said they were victims of domestic violence. Whats more, children themselves are often witnesses to violence, and suffer their own emotional scars.

Government can neither prevent all family violence nor be the only intervening force. Effective collaborations include clinical experts, child protection staff, community groups, police, district attorneys and other institutions. In New York City, new partnerships as well as new resources for child protective workers-protocols, trainings, clinical support and more-began to emerge before the Nicholson lawsuit, and have grown substantially in its wake.

This issue of Child Welfare Watch examines the confluence of child welfare practice and supportive domestic violence advocacy as it has taken shape in the nations largest and most complicated child welfare system. It is not intended to be a comprehensive overview; this editions primary focus is on the role of public agencies and the courts.

But each of these pieces is part of a much larger whole. While the fact of the Nicholson injunction is contentious, its spirit is about a broad, flexible, individualized and inclusive approach to serving our citys families.

Included in the PDF version of this report:
(Please download the PDF of the entire report)

* Key Findings: Dealing with Domestic Violence in New York Citys Child Welfare System

* Recommendations and Solutions Proposed by the Child Welfare Watch Advisory Board

* Safety First: An Entrenched Culture at ACS Begins to Change

* First Person: Saved by my Tenth Caseworker

* Nicholson v. The System

* Making Matters Worse: An Overwhelmed Family Court Struggles with Domestic Violence

* Feds May Greenlight Influential Greenbook Initiative

* Witness Protection: Helping Children Deal With Violence in the Home

* Four Steps to Help Kids Cope

* First on the Scene: Reformers are Looking to Frontline Workers to Fix the System

* When Domestic Violence Occurs in Front of a Child: What is Law Enforcement to Do?

* Keeping in Touch: Domestic Violence Response Teams

* Batterers Programs WorkBut Not For Everyone

* Watching the Numbers

And for those of you who want additional resources on this topic, please find below many of the publications we cited or found especially useful in developing this report:

Bancroft, Lundy & Jay G. Silverman (2002). The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Chalk, R. & King, P., editors (1998). Violence in Families: Assessing prevention and treatment programs. Committee on the Assessment of Family Violence Interventions, Board on Children, Youth and Families, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Christian, S. (2002) Childrens Exposure to Domestic Violence: Is It Child Abuse? State Legislative Report, 27 (1). Washington D.C.: National Conference of State Legislators.

Del Tufo, Alisa (2001). An Evaluation of the Zone A Pilot. New York City Administration for Childrens Services and the New York City Police Department.

Edleson, Jeffrey L. (2000) Should Childhood Exposure to Adult Domestic Violence Be Defined as Child Maltreatment Under the Law?

Edleson, Jeffrey L. & Eisikovits, Z.C., editors (1996). Future interventions with battered women and their families. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Edleson, Jeffrey L. (not yet published). Should Childhood Exposure to Adult Domestic Violence be Defined as Child Maltreatment Under the Law? Available at www.mincava.umn.edu/link

Findlater, Janet E. & Kelly, Susan (1999). Child Protective Services and Domestic Violence, The Future of Children, 9 (3). Los Altos, CA: David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

Gondolf, Edward W. (2002). Batterer Intervention Systems: Issues, Outcomes and Recommendations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Groves, Betsy McAlister (1999). Mental Health Services for Children Who Witness Domestic Violence, The Future of Children, 9 (3). Los Altos, CA: David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

Jaffe, P., Wilson, S., & Wofe, D.E. (1986). Promoting Changes in Attitudes and Understanding of Conflict Resolution Among Child Witnesses of Family Violence, Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science, 18: 356-366.

Magen, R., Conroy, K & del Tufo, A. (2000) Domestic Violence in Child Welfare Preventative Services. Children and Youth Services Review, 22 (3/4), 251-274.

New York City Administration for Childrens Services (2003). Quality Child Welfare Practice with Families Affected by Domestic Violence: A Strategic Plan.

Schechter, Susan & Edleson, J.L. (1994) In the Best Interest of Women and Children: A Call for Collaboration Between Child Welfare and Domestic Violence Constituencies. The Prevention Report, 1-7.

Schechter, Susan & Edleson, J.L. (1999). Effective Intervention in Women Battering and Child Maltreatment Cases: Guidelines for Policy and Practice (a.k.a. The Greenbook). Reno, NV: The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

Weithorn, Lois A. (2001) Protecting Children from Exposure to Domestic Violence: The Use and Abuse of Child Maltreatment Statutes, Hastings Law Journal, 53 (1). San Francisco: University of California.