Nev Moore
June 17, 2002

The disappearance of Rilya Wilson in Florida has caught the attention of the media worldwide, as well it should. The five-year-old foster child was missing for 16-months before the state's Child Protective Services agency noticed that she was unaccounted for.

But let's not be too concerned about Florida children. On average, DSS in Massachusetts "loses" around 400 foster children a year, according to the Legal Services Reporter.

Some, of course, are found. Like Latasha Cannon, 17, and Kelly Hancock, 14. The fact that they were missing and unaccounted for by DSS became known to the public only after they were found murdered.

The National Runaway Switchboard states that "problems with DSS" are the third leading cause of children running away. The leading two are rebelling against parental authority and peer pressure. It's interesting to note that when children do run away from parental homes, they are usually rebelling against structure, rules and authority.

When we talk to adolescents who run from DSS, they tell us it's due to bad conditions or abuse in the foster homes -- or the simple fact they want to go home. It's not uncommon for DSS not to report missing foster children to law enforcement as they continue to collect foster care payments and social security checks for their missing charges. In Florida, they were unable to account for the whereabouts of 1000 foster children after Gov. Jeb Bush ordered them to account for all children in state custody. They only reported 155 out of the 1000 missing children to law enforcement.

Infant Marlon Santos, who mysteriously disappeared from his Worcester foster home in 1998, was never found. The foster mother didn't report the baby missing for two days. After the baby had been gone for six days, DSS informed the press that they had looked back over the foster parents' history and found "a few unsupported allegations of neglect." But "the reports were investigated and found to be without merit," according to DSS spokesperson Lorraine Carli.

Within a month, foster father Jose Castillo was charged with multiple counts of child rape of previous foster children. Those were the complaints that DSS had found "without merit." The Castillos had been approved as foster parents by DSS in spite of the fact that Castillo had been convicted of federal drug charges in Florida. They eventually had 51 foster children pass through their home. Of course, the Massachusetts media let DSS off the hook on that one.

Dialing Into 'Party' Lines

In Massachusetts, children in the protective custody of DSS run and become missing simply because no one is watching them and paying attention to their activities as a parent would. When children are placed in DSS contracted residential homes they are not allowed to call their parents. However, the new "in" thing for adolescent girls in DSS residential placements is to call the Boston party line. This is a service where anyone can join a conversation that takes place among many teens on the line at the same time. The conversations often become sexually charged, amounting to not much more than "phone sex."

We were alerted to this by a mother whose 13-year-old daughter was in DSS custody at the Germaine Lawrence School in Arlington. After her daughter told her about the party line, the mother called it several times and listened in.

Alarmed at what she heard, she set up her own "sting" operation, keeping her daughter under surveillance and following her when the girl snuck out of Germaine Lawrence. She caught her daughter meeting a 35-year-old man who was a regular customer on the party line. He represented himself to the girls as a young, good-looking guy in their peer group as he lured them to run away from their DSS placements to meet him. The girls at Germaine Lawrence who are calling the party line are as young as eleven.

The other "in" thing to do at the DSS placements is to pass their 'phone numbers around to inmates in prison. The institutional homes allow the girls to accept collect calls from inmates, even though they do not allow them to call their parents. Germaine Lawrence is just one of hundreds of DSS contracted institutional homes that are making millions warehousing children for DSS.

Some children in state care, like Rilya Wilson, are taken from their homes for good reason. Their parents are not able to provide a minimally decent environment based on the parents' conscious poor decisions, such as crack use.

Other situations may not be so clear-cut, yet others are blatantly frivolous and the children should be left at home. Whatever the circumstances, in cases where children really must be removed from their homes, we must, at the very least, have a better place to put them than the environment they were removed from in the first place. The foster care system has rarely provided that, making it an exercise in futility, wasted tax-dollars and resources, and, bottom line - a cruel and dysfunctional system that does children more harm than good.

Congress and Beacon Hill Are Aware

Your legislators are quite aware of this disaster for children. Congress is aware. The major media is aware. They have been for twenty years. Only the public, whose tax dollars fund this lethal charade that we call Child "Protection," remain unaware. After all, what an embarrassment to the government. Twelve billion a year in federal money, plus billions more in state funding, is being poured into this system under the guise of protecting children from abuse and neglect in their homes. How embarrassing to lose them.

The tax payers might start to kick up a fuss were this to become public knowledge. They may even start to demand accountability from this broken system that has never worked, no matter how many billions we've sunk into it.

While we all pray that Rilya is safe somewhere, we also pray that this case will open the media's eyes to the plight of the tens of thousands of other children taken from their families, many to disappear forever. No one knows. No one asks. No one demands answers. And, the ones who are responsible, the social service agencies, never face any consequences.

I myself have for years called the plight of America's abused, murdered and missing foster children, "America's Dirty Little Secret." And a secret it has remained. The media suppresses it - who cares about all those poor kids anyway? Liberals don't want to talk about systemic failure and their flawed ideology. Conservatives are distracted by other things, and, anyway, a lot of those families who've had their children taken.well, after all, many of them were on welfare, so what do you expect? As a politician friend of mine put it: "It just isn't a sexy issue."