Just to be clear: There were adults who cared about Julissia Batties. Yet their care couldn’t overcome the illogic of a child-welfare machine that returned her to an abusive family environment that this week ended her life: Julissia’s half-brother allegedly beat the 7-year-old to death for taking snacks from the kitchen, an attack subsequently covered up by her own mother.
Her grandmother for years had cared for Julissia. There were city Administration for Children’s Services caseworkers who tried to keep her away from her abusive mother and siblings, even going to the highest courts in the state to keep her safe. There were even concerned neighbors who repeatedly called authorities when they saw what was happening.
The story of Julissia Batties isn’t a story of hidden child abuse, of what goes on behind closed doors. It is the story of a system that favors placing children with their biological parents no matter what the danger, then delays action until it is too late.
Julissia had been taken from her mother at birth. Little wonder, since the mother had lost custody of her four older children in 2013 over safety concerns. A family-court judge initially granted her mother custody — God only knows why — but ACS lawyers appealed the decision and won.
“Until the mother is able to successfully address and acknowledge the circumstances that led to the removal of the other children,” the appellate judges wrote, “we cannot agree” that returning Julissia, “even with the safeguards imposed by the family court, would not present an imminent risk.”
The question is what happened between that 2015 ruling and the decision of ACS last year provisionally and then a few months ago permanently to return Julissia to her mother. Did her mother “address and acknowledge those circumstances”? Since police were called to the apartment on at least six occasions over the past three years — including at least one in which she lied about Julissia’s injuries — the answer seems to be no.
What happened?
SCO Services, the nonprofit ACS contracted to monitor the child’s case, recommended that she be placed back with her mother; ACS went along. The ideological commitments of these nonprofits rarely differ from those of the agencies themselves.
These nonprofits, moreover, have demonstrated problems in the past. The Department of Investigation reported that in 2016, of the worst-performing private contractors (in terms of children experiencing maltreatment) that manage foster children’s cases for the agency, only two listed “safety” as the main focus of improvement on a self-evaluation.
Despite the sound intentions of individual caseworkers, the ACS as a whole, like all child-welfare agencies in this country, is now ideologically committed to family preservation and family reunification at all costs. The woke narrative is that we only take kids away from their parents because of racism or poverty, not because the children are actually in jeopardy. It is politically incorrect to say that to save black children, sometimes they need to be taken away from black parents.
According to ACS’s most recent report, the number of “new child-welfare prevention cases rose” by 50 percent in the past six months. But “prevention” in the world of child welfare doesn’t mean that the agency is preventing abuse or neglect from ever happening. It means that a child has already been reported to ACS, and so the agency is using “services” like anger management or parenting classes or addiction treatment to prevent abuse or neglect from happening again.
Meanwhile the number of new placements into foster care declined 23 percent during the same period. Maybe this approach of keeping kids with their families and not removing them to foster care is not working.
This year, 10-year-old Ayden Wolfe was found dead at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend. Pictured in one paper sporting a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, the man was arrested three months before Ayden’s death for allegedly choking the mother of his 6-year-old autistic son as the child watched. After he was barred from contact with that woman, he went to live with Ayden’s mother, who has also had contact with ACS.
Julissia’s grandmother says she strenuously objected to the new custody arrangement — she wasn’t even allowed to visit the child — but was waiting for a hearing that was still months off. What does it mean that a mother bars her child from seeing the grandmother who all but raised her? Perhaps that she has something to hide.
But it’s hardly a surprise that the courts weren’t able to hear her grandmother’s pleas. Family courts in New York and around the country are broken, suffocating under the pile-up of cases. Judges go months between seeing cases even for young children in vulnerable situations. Courts operate on the timeline of adults, not children. There is no right to a speedy trial in family court.
“Everybody knew the baby was being abused,” one of Julissia’s neighbors, whose girlfriend contacted ACS, told The Post. Too bad the system charged with protecting her failed to carry out its core mission.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the forthcoming book “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster-Care System, Family Courts and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.”