Analysis from Israel
So a social worker once said about seeking aid from the welfare authorities. Here’s why.
Some time ago, I asked a private social worker I know for advice: Another friend, a single mother with health problems, could use some extra help; should she contact the welfare authorities?

The answer shocked me. Not if she can possibly avoid it, this social worker said. They’ll put her through hell, and there’s no guarantee they’ll even give her any help.

Now, having encountered the case of N., I understand that response.

N., another single mother, has three adopted children, all with serious emotional and psychological problems. Over the past decade, she has undergone treatment for two different types of cancer. She eventually recovered (and also remarried), but during her treatment, she sought help from the welfare authorities.

Now, they are trying to take two of her children from her, claiming she’s an unfit mother.

I’m not qualified to judge that claim; I barely know N., and have never met her children. But whether she is or isn’t, the welfare authorities’ conduct in her case has been shocking.

After all, these same authorities approved N. to adopt three children. Adoptive parents are supposed to be rigorously evaluated; N. passed this evaluation three times. Moreover, the welfare bureaucracy presumably looked into how she was raising children one and two before approving adoptions two and three, and noticed no problems.

So either they were shockingly malfeasant then, in allowing “a harmful and neglectful mother devoid of any real ‘parenting ability'” (as they now call her) to adopt three children, or they are shockingly malfeasant now, in seeking to deprive a good mother of her children. There are no third options.

No less shocking, however, is what happened after they began “helping” N. Take the eldest boy, whom we’ll call A. Three years ago, he was put in an institution, with N.’s consent; given her illness and his problems, she considered this a suitable temporary solution.

Early reports from teachers and social workers, as detailed in court papers filed by the welfare authorities, describe A. as talking frequently about “his home, his brothers, and a great deal about his mother.” “It’s clear that the connection between A. and his mother is important to them both,” one social worker wrote.

Later reports, however, show him hurling abuse at N., and eventually declaring repeatedly that he wants nothing to do with her.

These reports also describe “daily” outbursts in which he “claims it’s bad for him at the school.” Left unanswered is why his complaints about his mother are deemed serious enough to justify depriving her of custody while his complaints about the school are dismissed: The welfare authorities advocate leaving him there for another five years, until age 14.

What does seem clear, however, is that the authorities actively undermined his relationship with his mother. According to their own reports, she was allowed to visit him “once every three weeks for an hour,” and only with a social worker and psychiatrist present. How could a child who sees his mother for only an hour every three weeks not feel abandoned, hurt and angry?

Indeed, the authorities often appear to have made N. a scapegoat. Take, for instance, one incident they cite to demonstrate her alleged parental unfitness: a “stormy meeting” between A. and N. which, their report states, ended in such a severe outburst that A. was sent for temporary psychiatric hospitalization. That same report, however, noted that this incident followed “a severe escalation in his behavior for more than a month, with A.’s anger attacks growing in intensity and frequency;” that another outburst occurred three days after he left the hospital, in which he demanded to leave the school and said he “would only obey his mother;” and that subsequently, “a change in his medications was recommended.”

In other words, a month-long deterioration that was ultimately diagnosed as stemming from poorly adjusted medications was blamed on N. and used to justify taking her child away. That’s outrageous. And it’s obviously worse if you believe N.’s claim that the staff provoked A.’s outburst by cutting her visit short to punish him for earlier misbehavior.

Indeed, one can’t help concluding that the welfare bureaucracy was always more interested in taking the children away than in helping N. raise them herself – in blatant violation of the Youth Law, which deems taking a child from his parents a last resort, to be used only “if the court sees there’s no other way to ensure [the child’s] care and supervision,” and usually only if efforts to help him remain at home have failed.

Consider, for instance, the resources made available to the foster family now caring for N.’s second child, whom we’ll call B.: psychological treatment, hydrotherapy, parental and family counseling, and more, according to the documents. Yet no such help was ever offered to N. If it had been, argues her lawyer with some justice, might that not have enabled her to keep him at home?

N.’s lawyer claims the welfare bureaucracy has a financial incentive to take children away, creating a clear conflict of interest: The institution where A. now lives, for instance, gets paid about NIS 100,000 a year per child – and many of the negative evaluations of N. came from people on its payroll. Similarly, associations that arrange foster homes compile parental evaluations while also receiving money for children in their care.

But regardless of the merits of this claim, the lawyer is clearly right in saying institutionalization should be a last resort: It’s inherently unhealthy for a child to be raised in an environment comprised solely of other children with serious problems, and it’s also very expensive – which, since the government’s total welfare budget is fixed, means that each institutionalized child slashes the funding available for other important programs. Yet in this case, no other option seems to have been considered.

Whether the welfare authorities are right or wrong about N.’s parental fitness is of concern only to her and her family. But the questions her case raises about their fitness to have such absolute control over the lives of parents and children alike ought to concern all of us.

The writer is a journalist and commentator.

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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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