Is Tusla successfully reducing risks for children in foster homes?
YOU’RE lousy at it. I’m lousy at it. And the media are worst of all at it. We have no clue about risk, so we get our knickers knotted about phenomenally safe things while happily engaging in high risk behaviour.
That’s why one airline in the United States has its pilots telling passengers, after they’ve landed at their destination airport, that “the dangerous part of your journey starts now”.
Meaning that although many of the passengers have sat, toes clenched, in abject terror during takeoff and landing and in only marginally less terror during the main flight, the fact is that air travel is one of the safest forms of transport that exists.
Only the elevator competes with it — but of course we have people who won’t go in lifts, either, because they are convinced the cable will snap plunging them 20 floors down.
We lack the capacity to properly assess risk, but we’re still getting better at reducing some risks.
Despite the agitation of a rural TD whose name mercifully evades me, we no longer accept that it’s only grand to get into a car in an ossified condition and as a result of that and other RSA/Garda actions, our roads are now among the safest in Europe.
We also know that leaving ball bearings on the floor of the warehouse tends to produce the odd shattered pelvis, and — courtesy of detergent manufacturers — we know we can reduce risk to children if we keep detergent pellets in sealed containers out of reach.
Accordingly, we may not be good at assessing risk, but generally speaking we agree that reducing it is a good move in keeping alive and intact.
Or we did until along came the new head of Tusla, a man named Fred McBride who has an assertive Scottish accent, a forceful way with him, and a talent for throwing cats among pigeons.
Tusla, you will know, is (in its own words) “the dedicated State agency responsible for improving wellbeing and outcomes for children.
It represents the most comprehensive reform of child protection, early intervention and family support services ever undertaken in Ireland.” Great stuff.
Just a couple of months ago, in this paper, Fergus Finlay wrote a piece which was moving and enraging. It created a national stir.
Mr Finlay wrote about “Grace” who had been left in a foster home long after it had emerged that somebody within that home was abusing her.
As the resultant scandal wound down, we were told no similar examples existed anywhere in the country.
Now information emerges, courtesy of RTÉ, about a girl who says she was abused by an 18-year-old member of the foster family with which she was placed in another part of the country.
They were credible accusations according to HSE investigators so the girl was taken out of the home. However, two other children were left there on condition the 18-year-old have no unsupervised contact with them.
The rationale for what, on the face of it, looks like pure craziness, was elaborated on by Fred McBride on radio. Wait for it. He says taking a child out of a foster home due to a risk of abuse could cause additional trauma.
What you should do, he says, is remove or minimise the risk, not take the child out.
Which reminded me of the old question asked at job interviews to identify the capacity for analytical thinking under pressure. The question: “Your house is on fire and you can take one thing out. What will it be?”
Most responders start with the children, maybe extending their human concern to the granny. Many concentrate on getting out the springer spaniel or the budgie. After that it gets into precious books, the dead mother’s photograph, and other sentimentally significant minutiae.
Only a tiny minority go straight to the point and say that what they’d take out of the house is the fire. Boom boom, right? Reason being that if you take out the fire, the children, granny, spaniel, budgie, and sentimental minutiae are totally safe. Won’t even get mildly scorched.
The purpose of the question was to identify the bright sparks who had the judgement to take out the fire, on the basis that they’re the ones who can be trusted to think strategically.
Now, if you were one of those bright sparks, and if you were presented with this situation where credible accusations have been made against a teenage family member, what would you take out of the house? Right. The metaphorical fire.
In the foster home, if you want to leave the other two kids in situ to prevent them getting further traumatised, you get the 18-year-old out of there, right fast. If you can’t, the kids come out of there, right fast.
The notion of a compromise where the fire and the scorchable kids are left in the same premises, separated by strictures, is just daft.
It doesn’t require a creative genius to work out that already troubled children are going to be rendered confused and fearful in a situation where the teenager they know and perhaps like is not allowed to be on his own with them when that’s not been the situation up to that point.
It’s also difficult to figure how you’d maintain comfy security in a house where one part of the family is policing the other part to prevent them getting near the foster kids.
But then I’m a media person, and — again according to the forthright Mr McBride — media expectations of what child protection workers could or should achieve are “utterly absurd”. This may be an accurate assessment.
If it is, and if it matters, then Mr McBride can invite us thick media folk to a risk understanding seminar. He skipped that and went straight to contempt, which is easier, although I’m here to tell him, as a PR expert, that contempt is a boomerang-shaped double-edged sword.
I’m also here to tell him that attacking the messenger does tend to reduce the time available for informing the messenger. And I would try to pull him back from suggesting that risk has dignity. Which he did.
Having rubbished media, he then moved on to mothers. Promulgating the notion that responsibility should be knocked into parents, rather than taking their kids into care, here’s the scenario he presented.
In his words.
“So the 16-year-old is doing the sex and drugs and rock’n’roll thing. It gets a bit risky. Mum can’t cope, says, ‘This is way too risky’, and social worker says, ‘Yeah, you’re right, it is too risky, let’s get him out’.”
UM can’t cope. We have a century-long history, in mental illness particularly, of blaming mothers. God love us, we thought that the retrospective proof that mothers were never guilty of creating schizophrenia and a rake of other problems would make highly placed professionals lay off attacking them.
Wrong. Fred McBride is fearlessly going right back to the past. Wasn’t Tusla set up to make sure we never went there?
