A BUREAUCRACY IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR A FAMILY (via Pepys):

Why Didn’t Anyone Save Nixzmary?: Or Josiah, or Dahquay, or Sierra? Nicole Gelinas, Winter 2006, City Journal)

Gotham’s Administration for Children’s Services will spend nearly $2.2 billion this year. The agency, with nearly 7,000 employees, is run by an experienced professional who reputedly is tops in his field. So nobody can say that New York City isn’t generous when it comes to protecting at-risk children.

But ACS and all of its financial and human resources didn’t save seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown, tortured and beaten to death last week, allegedly by her mother’s husband, as her mother ignored her cries for help. [...]

[I]t’s hard to blame ACS exclusively when far too many of the city’s children are born not into two-parent families but into random and temporary groupings of people, often prone to neglect and violence. ACS is no substitute for a stable, two-parent family. Without such a family as a protective cocoon, the world can be a cruel place for kids—and the home is often the locus of that cruelty. Little kids are cute, but they’re also prey—particularly when they resemble mom’s now-detested ex-boyfriend, or when mom’s new boyfriend doesn’t have much fatherly concern toward the products of previous sexual encounters.

Of course, most neglected and abused children survive their childhoods, at least minimally. But that doesn’t mean that neglect and abuse are uncommon in malformed families, if at a less spectacular level. Anyone who doubts that should read Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s 2003 book, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, which tracks the lives of two young mothers and their 10 children over a decade as they scrape their way through life in the borough’s Tremont section. In Leblanc’s book, children are only appendages, and child molestation is common—an unsurprising outcome, when kids are left with casual assortments of male relatives and acquaintances, who come and go as they please, often drunk or on drugs. It doesn’t take a social scientist to know that kids raised in this environment don’t stand much of a chance at doing better themselves.

Since America reformed welfare nearly a decade ago and pushed unmarried mothers to work, the general attitude is that the problem of the single-parent inner-city family is solved. But welfare reform didn’t answer the moral question: Why is it considered normal in some segments of society for mothers, often unwed, to bear children by multiple men? And how much risk does government—which controls the fate of so many of New York’s vulnerable children through ACS—knowingly force upon these children when it ignores this problem?

As the mayor directs ACS to open its Brooklyn cases, he should direct caseworkers to ask: How many of the agency’s little wards—neglected, malnourished, or abused—have two married parents, and full siblings, at home? It’s a good place to start the discussion New York—and the nation—needs to have.