Friday, July 18, 2014

Controlling The Message

The Department of Children and Families seems like it is trying to do just that. Feministing website has a good analysis of the Jane Doe case...
The Connecticut State Department of Children and Familes (DCF) has created just such a crisis in the case of Jane Doe, the 16 year old trans Latina who was bounced from the DCF system into prison without charges or trial because of alleged violence. On July 13, she was quietly moved to a boy’s facility and returned to a solitary confinement situation because she had allegedly become violent again at the Pueblo Girls’ Detention Facility in Connecticut, while her transfer to a girls’ treatment centre in Massachusetts was pending. Her lawyer, Aaron Romano, believes that by issuing a press release about the allegations and refusing to talk Doe’s representatives, DCF Commissioner Joette Katz is attempting “litigation in the press,” which ACLU attorney Chase Strangio describes as “concerning on multiple levels.” It is hard to disagree with that assessment.
[...]
Violent children are not an unusual phenomenon in state-run childcare, which, too often, exists at a terrifying nexus of social crises. The wages of mass impoverishment, of parental abuse writ large and small, of incarceration, and of sex trafficking, manifest in generations of lost children that are cast adrift with neither succor nor care. The apparatus of state run foster care was meant to be a humane system of last resort for those left behind, providing a civilized alternative to the warehousing of children in creaking orphanages and poorhouses. As Jane Doe is demonstrating, however, we have too often simply substituted Dickensian punishments with more Foucauldian ones. Our world’s ugliest impulses leave their scars on our children very early on, and the situation improves only marginally (if at all) under the care of the state, which often recapitulates institutional violence in a buttoned-down, officialized form. Jane Doe is no exception to this, and the allegations of abuse she has suffered under DCF’s care have been taken nowhere near as seriously as allegations of her own violence.
I think that Jane Doe is just the tip of the iceberg; the DCF is under federal monitoring for more than two decades because of understaffing and as the article said
It’s because they don’t know what to do with, or don’t understand, or don’t want to go out of their way to help, a transgender child.
DCF is trying to control the message to hide their blunders. They are trying to make Jane Doe's case seem like an isolated case instead of their normal inability to provide proper care and I am not saying it is all DCF fault. Much of the blame falls on the federal and state legislatures, chopping the budget each year has dire consequences on the lives of the children in DCF care. Ask yourself what do you think will happen to these children when they are thrown out on the street when they turn eighteen?

No comments:

Post a Comment