Between 2020 and 2023, there were 2,154 cases of substantiated abuse and/or neglect of foster children in New York City.

When New Yorkers read that statistic — taken from a recent City Comptroller’s audit of the Administration for Children’s Services — they might be shocked.

Indeed, it might confirm their prior assumptions about how terrible foster care is, how the people who do it are only in it for the money, and how foster care might be more traumatic than whatever the kids were experiencing at home. 

But concerned citizens might want to read a little further. 

As it turns out, more than three-quarters of those cases were perpetrated by a member of the child’s birth family while the children were back home “visiting.”

Comptroller Brad Lander told NY1 that “the first job of government is to keep our kids safe.”

Unfortunately, ACS’s leadership and New York City family court seem to have lost sight of this maxim. 

Foster kids being hurt while spending time with their families is not a new phenomenon.

A 2018 report by New York City’s Department of Investigation found that a majority of the maltreatment incidents of foster kids happened while they were visiting their biological parents.

Foster parents themselves were the perpetrators in just 19% of maltreatment incidents in 2017.

It is not clear whether these cases of abuse or neglect occur during supervised or unsupervised visits or whether these visits were mandated by the courts or they were simply arranged by caseworkers.

As the new audit notes, “Compiling and monitoring such information would help ACS assess the … agency’s efforts to reduce the rate of such occurrences.” No kidding. 

If these are supervised visits, it suggests — to state the blindingly obvious–that supervision is lacking. Last year in Portland, Ore., a foster couple told me that the child they were caring for had been exposed to fentanyl when a father brought the drug in his bag to a supervised visit.

What does that say about the severity of his addiction? Or the neglect of the kids. Signs at the entrance to New York visitation facilities forbid knives, drugs, alcohol, and firearms.

And as the Portland case confirms, there’s a reason they need to state it so explicitly, according to caseworkers. 

If the incidents counted in the Comptroller’s audit are unsupervised visits, then it seems caseworkers and courts are betting that parents have been rehabilitated  — when in fact they have not.

This is not uncommon.

In the rush to reunify children with parents from whom they have been separated, agency employees and judges often overlook red flags. 

Last year, Ella Vitalis died of cardiac arrest after New York Family Court Judge Erik Pitchal reunified her with abusive parents.

At 3 weeks old, she had a brain hemorrhage, a fractured skull, and two broken ankles. ACS removed her from her home but still permitted visits with her parents.

The results:  Ella’s tongue was lacerated when her father was left alone with her during one such visit.

Nevertheless, Pitchal placed her back with her parents shortly thereafter.

As a lawyer for Legal Aid, Pitchal once explained that he advocated for what children wanted: “It turned out that children wanted their parents to get help and support, and to do a better job raising them, but they did not want to be separated from their families.” Ella was less than a month old — did she tell Pitchal this?

Sometimes kids do want to return to their parents — and sometimes they don’t.

But it’s the job of ACS and family courts to ensure that they are reunited only when it is safe.

Given that a substantial portion of these cases involve substance abuse and/or mental illness on the part of the parents, it’s not surprising that these families are not rehabilitating quickly or easily. 

Amid all the claims by advocates that we should “abolish” child welfare or that all neglectful and abusive parents need is some cash rather than the intervention of child protective services, it is worth noting that some of these parents cannot even control their bad behavior for the duration of a visit.

Maybe taking their children into foster care was the right decision after all.