Systemic ill or something much deeper?

August 8, 2022

There’s a cause for concern in Cleveland, Ohio, which is currently the talk of the town in this corner of the country. In a recent article released on the Cleveland.com website, a couple of Children and Family Services workers have alleged that there are a number of unsafe conditions for youth and staff at the county office.

Call takers Cristina Sarsama and Marilyn Henderson, were given some airtime in no less than a regular council meeting as they delivered their testimony that detailed the alarmingly unsafe conditions in the Jane Edna Hunter Social Services Center, the Division of Children and Family Services headquarters located in Cuyahoga County.

The revelation was disturbing, to say the least. 

When the words “rape,” “rampant violence,” and “sexual assault” are mentioned in testimony by people who have everything to lose just by coming out publicly to say such things, you know that this matter is absolutely not to be taken lightly.

To begin with, the county’s Division of Children and Family Services designated the Jane Edna Hunter Social Services Center as a place that children can consider home when there are no other placements for them elsewhere. And yet, anything you refer to as a home should be one of the safest places you can ever be in. This is why it is both shocking and saddening to find out that an agency – which was specifically designed to ensure the safety of children – may be the one that is causing all the trouble in the first place.

Let’s take a look at a number of salient points that we gathered from the public commentary:

• Some staff are being pulled out of their normal work responsibilities – for weeks at a time – to care for youth being housed at the building
• The children who are there because they have no other place to go are dealing with mental health, medical, or criminal issues
• There is a lack of accountability in the office, which forces the children to commit crimes and even prostitute themselves
• The employees at the division have done their part in reporting what has been going on to the higher-ups, without any concrete action from the leadership aimed to address this
• Children come in and out of the building – they go out and commit their crimes and sometimes and even take in new children who eventually get into the cycle of crime and prostitution 
• There is a legal limitation that does not allow caretakers to prevent children from leaving the building
• Many of the unfortunate developments that have happened here are quite well-known, and yet this has been going on for at least the past 4 years
• The DCFS is understaffed, and its workers are forced into doing work that is already detrimental to their physical and mental well-being, often for 16-hour workdays

Like most of you who are catching this only now, many people were puzzled and flabbergasted when this bit of information hit the news the first time. To begin with, it’s hard enough to get over the fact that these kinds of things now pervade our environment at this degree of seriousness. And it’s even harder to get over the fact that criminality and prostitution among children have been going on for a few years, while they go in and out of the very institution that is supposed to protect them from those ills.

A lot of things about this development in Cleveland simply don’t make sense…

Never mind that it appears that the people in charge seem to feel that they are powerless about all of these things. Based on how they have reacted, it’s almost like they are saying that they don’t intend to do anything about it.

As tax-paying citizens, this simply isn’t a good enough reason that they can throw at us. We want to live in an environment that is safe and meaningful. It’s bad enough that some children need to be removed from homes that are apparently unfit for them to grow up in. It’s even worse when they end up in a life of crime after they are removed from their homes. Who’s to say that the homes that they lived in – in the first place – had no chance of raising and molding them into good citizens?

Imagine how you’d feel if you went to your favorite diner and they’ve run out of that tomahawk steak on your cheat day, of all days. Imagine how you’d feel if you went to the shop for an oil change and there wasn’t any mechanic available to do the work on your car. It’s an unpleasant feeling, isn’t it?

But right here, we’re not talking about food or cars. We’re talking about the lives of people. We are talking about the lives of innocent children. That feeling just went from unpleasant to horrific. We simply can’t take a mediocre answer and settle for it when we’re talking about something this serious.

And so perhaps this could be much more than the systemic ill that they are portraying this to be. Because of this development, it’s hard to brush off other reports that say that this is actually a malicious effort that follows this narrative:

→The children are pulled out from otherwise loving homes and families

→They are brought to the center under the guise of an effort to place them in homes that can give them better lives

→When they eventually can’t be placed, they are peddled off into prostitution and fated to a life of crime

What if this is the real story, as so many reports have claimed? What if this really is kidnapping disguised as fostering? What if child prostitution really is the endgame?

It’s getting really hard to believe their claim that their hands are tied by the law and whatnot – not when it’s been going on for four years already. What exactly are our leaders doing about this?

This isn’t an innocent shortcoming. It’s a lot more serious than inaction or negligence. We can’t call this a systemic ill when it is deliberately created by a very specific group of people. It’s sounding more like a deeply diabolical effort to exploit children.

Someone had better untie those hands. This kind of thing has to end, and it has to end right now.