Morris Brasovankin, 89, and his wife, Mildred, 86, enjoyed taking care of their five-year-old grandson, Steven. He was born in 2001 to a mother addicted to crack, three months premature, weighing just over two pounds. The mother left and the child’s father, Steven Brasovankin, 54, made the mistake of contacting CPS to help take care of his son.

The baby was placed in a foster home but his father found out the foster parents wanted to adopt so he fought to get his son home again. Grandparents Mildred and Morris Brasovankin helped take care of little Steven.

Four months ago the father took little Steven to the hospital for treatment for a cold. The hospital staff called DHS thinking the father was acting irrationally, due, he says, to financial problems and business failure. The court ordered psychological counseling for this father and gave temporary custody to the grandparents.

Then disaster struck on March 23 at a court hearing when the impatient child, after being confined for more than an hour in the waiting area, got away from his grandparents and ran up to the judge’s bench where he smacked a computer. Because the Brasovankins weren’t able to chase the child and control him, their attorney retrieved him.

A CASA worker, Kathleen Knese, recommended that Steven be taken from his grandparents because of his activity level and behavior. She said that the Brasovankins wouldn’t be able to take care of him properly. The judge agreed and ordered that little Steven be placed in foster care in 90 days.

Ten days ago a DHS worker, James Hood, showed up at Steven’s school and took the child. The Brasovankins were not even notified. When Steven didn’t come home on the bus they phoned the school and were given the news.

From the article at Philly.Com:
“Right away, I’m running down to the school. I must have been there in two minutes,” Morris said. “I’ll tell you something — I love that little boy. I’d do anything for him. Anything. It killed me when I went to that school and he was already gone because if I was there, he would have never been taken away.”

Source: Too Old To Be Parents? by Wendy Ruderman for the Philadelphia Daily News.

This morning I opened one of my Google news alerts on the topic, “foster parents,” and found only two articles listed. Both are about men accused of taking advantage of the foster care system to exploit and abuse children.

Sadly, this is very common. In my years of scanning news articles for inclusion in my blog at FightCPS.Com, I’ve come across hundred of similar stories. The oddest was about a supposed foster mother in Pennsylvania who was actually a transvestite gay child predator.

One of today’s article alerts is about a 48-year-old man who has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for sexually abusing three boys. He denied the charges at his sentencing hearing, saying he would never harm the children he loved. Thirty foster children have lived in his home in Columbus Ohio.

Reference: Foster Parent Sentenced For Sexual Abuse

The other foster parenting article brought to my attention today by Google news alerts is about a 58-year-old Vermont man who is in jail, charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl living in his foster home.

Reference: Foster Parent Charged With Sexual Assault

Last week I was getting news alerts about a similar case in Florida. Next week it will be something else.

It takes no great wisdom to realize that the foster parenting system is a perfect opportunity for sexual predators to get solitary, unsupervised access to the children of others. And while many will say that the answer is to find better fosterers, or to screen them better, I have another solution: If child welfare caseworkers would stop detaining children on marginal neglect charges there would be fewer foster children out there being abused by strangers, with their parents not allowed to be nearby to protect them.

It was about six years ago that I received an email that I remember to this day. It was one of those things I’ll never forget. An Ohio mother who could barely write decent English wrote a long message to tell me that her 10-year-old daughter was being sexually abused by boys placed in the same foster home she was in. I don’t want to get into the graphic details of what she told me, but to be clear, there was visible proof and the child told her mother during a visitation what had being going on. This little girl had been removed from her parents’ home because she had a tiny eraser-sized bruise on her arm that her parents couldn’t explain. They had no idea where she got this small injury. For that, caseworkers took the child away from the home and family she loved and forced her into a foster home where she was abused much more severely than anything she’d ever experienced before.

A few years ago there was a Frontline two-part series about the death of a child in foster care, Logan Marrs. One part of the program featured a former foster child, Rose Garland. Her statement is worth paying attention to: “OK. Now, I know that there are good foster families out there, OK? But I also know that every foster kid that I have ever talked to, including myself, have been abused in foster homes. And I’m talking physically, emotionally and sexually. That may not be the case for every child, but it was the case for me.”

Reference: Failure to Protect - The Caseworker Files

Please, if you are a mandated reporter, an angry neighbor, a non-custodial parent, or any other type of person who might want to make a child abuse or neglect report, consider this. Is the child being abused so severely that risking fosterer abuse would be better? If not, let it go. I suggest being a friend and a neighbor, and helping the family directly instead of calling child welfare. Even if you hate the parents, do the right thing for the children involved.

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