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L.A. County foster care: The battle for LGBT youth
Look at the face of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez. His mother and her boyfriend are facing capital murder charges for allegedly beating him to death in May 2013, despite 64 reports of abuse, six open investigations and separate visits by child welfare services and law enforcement. Before his death, Fernandez was doused with pepper spray, forced to eat cat feces, rotten spinach and his own vomit and was locked in a cabinet with a sock stuffed in his mouth to silence his screams, according to grand jury testimony published Aug. 18 by The Los Angeles Times. But while his death led to a crisis for the L.A. Country Board of Supervisors, testimony indicating his mother beat him for being gay seems to have been ignored.
The end of Fernandez’s short life was awful. After receiving a 911 call, paramedics found him “naked in a bedroom, not breathing, with a cracked skull, three broken ribs and BB pellets embedded in his lung and groin. He died two days later,” The Times reported. “It was just like every inch of this child had been abused,” a paramedic testified.
“For eight straight months, he was abused, beaten and tortured more severely than many prisoners of war,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jonathan Hatami told a grand jury.
Fernandez’s two siblings, both minors, testified that his mother and her boyfriend “called Gabriel gay, punished him when he played with dolls and forced him to wear girls’ clothes to school.”
The invisibility of facts like that prompted the L.A. LGBT Center—using a $13 million, five-year federal grant the organization received in 2010—to work with Williams Institute to figure out how many LGBTQ youth are in the L.A. County foster care system and how they are doing. The study, released Aug. 27 and entitled Sexual and Gender Minority Youth in Los Angeles County Foster Care: Assessing Disproportionately and Disparities, reveals that of the approximately 7,400 youth ages 12-21 in the system in any given month, 19.1% or roughly 1,400 identity as LGBTQ.
Gabriel was one month old when his mother, Pearly Fernandez, 30, gave her parents custody, saying she “had no love for the child,” according to a KNBC report about a wrongful death lawsuit the grandparents filed against L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services and others. DCFS helped Fernandez regain custody in October 2012, despite her parents’ objections and past allegations of abuse.
If Fernandez had been removed from his mother’s custody but not returned to his grandparents, he would probably have ended up in the foster care system to face more abuse. Discrimination based on real or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity or expression is rampant, according to the Center’s L.A. Foster Youth Survey. Nearly 13% of LGBTQ youth “report being treated poorly by the foster care system, compared to 5.8 percent of non-LGBT youth,” the report says.
And what kind of DCFS ward would Fernandez have been? The Center study found that 13.5% of LGBTQ youth were hospitalized for emotional reasons—nearly triple the percentage of similar hospitalizations for non-LGBTQ youth. Mental health and emotional distress also present barriers to finding an LGBTQ child a permanent loving home if caregivers can’t deal with issues he’s no doubt developed, including post traumatic stress disorder. Additionally, being shuffled off from one foster home to another or being placed in a group home would also put Fernandez at risk of finding permanency. And if no one rescues him before he turns 18, Fernandez would “age out” of the foster care system, probably ending up homeless, without the skills to fend for himself or to succeed.
In the uproar over Fernandez’s death, the Board of Supervisors seemed remarkably taciturn, talking about “cost neutrality” and the “economic feasibility” of reforms. But this is old hat. A similar uproar occurred in 2006 when 2-year-old Sarah Chavez was removed from the loving home of West Hollywood couple Corri Planck and Dianne Hardy-Garcia and returned to the abusive family that killed her six months later.
Then-DCFS Director David Sanders told The L.A. Times that his social workers should confer more with the foster parents. “Unfortunately, our system is not at that ideal,” said Sanders.
Two months after Gabriel’s death, four DCFS employees were fired, and scores were sent letters of reprimand, as if that’s sufficient punishment for failing in their job to prevent a child’s death.
There have been 18 DCFS directors in 26 years. More than 70 children under DCFS care died between 2008 and 2011 as a result of child abuse or neglect; their sexual orientation or gender identity was not noted. A confidential audit conducted in 2010-2011 by the Board’s Children’s Special Investigation Unit found at least 13 children’s deaths that they attributed to systemic “weaknesses” inside DCFS in an 82-page report dated April 16, 2012. Attitudes toward LGBTQ foster children do not seem to have been factored into consideration.
The Blue Ribbon Commission set up by the Board of Supervisors to reform DCFS after Fernandez’s death called for a “child welfare czar,” but cultural competency is not highlighted as important criteria. The aforementioned David Sanders, who led the commission, is being considered for the job.
The board appears to be slow walking the commission’s recommendations, though the commission “unanimously concluded that a State of Emergency exists, which requires a fundamental transformation of the current child protection system. The greatest obstacle to reform is the County system itself.”
Center Chief of Staff Darrel Cummings is hopeful, however, and presumes there will be a “good response” to the LAFYS study. After all, DCFS participated and is part of the coalition of over 20 community and foster care agencies partnering with the center on their long-term national RISE (Recognize, Intervene, Support and Empower) Project designed to create and test “a service model that will help foster children and youth find stable, loving homes.”
But with invisible LGBTQ children at risk of harm now and when they age out, Cummings said the center will not abide slow-walking proposals that could work.
New interventions would mean that anytime an issue is identified as related to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, “that ought to trigger a different kind of response than it does now,” says Cummings. “And that ought to trigger a response that puts people who understand, support and can communicate appropriately with the young people involved.”
But first, he says, there must be a mutual understanding that “we have a system wide failure here and therefore, we need a system wide response,” starting with when LGBTQ youth first connect with the system.
“We don’t want to wait till someone’s 18 years old or 17 years old and has had a lifetime of negative experiences to suddenly have an intervention,” says Cummings. “There’s just gotta be intention on everybody’s part to make it real. And it all starts with identifying and agreeing that yes, there is a problem of significant magnitude.”
And while the center is engaging with county officials “in a good faith effort,” Cummings says that if the process fails, “we will not be returning with a stick, we’ll be returning with a club. We are willing to engage in any actions that are necessary in order to make the system in L.A. County responsive to the needs of LGBT youth.”
The LGBT community has a long history of taking actions that right wrongs, Cummings says. “And so there’s legislative strategies, there’s protest in the streets strategies, there’s electoral strategies, there’s legal strategies, there’s all kinds of things that I think are at our disposal should the system ultimately be unresponsive to this information that’s in front of them.”
The Center has posted a petition on its website asking for community support. Imagine Gabriel Fernandez’s name invisibly written there.
Karen Ocamb
9 March 2014
http://www.frontiersla.com/News/Context/Story.aspx?ID=2215393
