Thread: Poor Latino kids less likely to enter state's welfare system

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3671358.html

Feb. 20, 2006, 1:39AM

Missing out on help they may need
Poor Latino kids less likely to enter state's welfare system
By MELANIE MARKLEY
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

Poor Hispanic children are less likely than anyone else in poverty to come in contact with the Texas child welfare system, and although experts speculate that their close-knit family structure plays a role, they also worry that abuse and neglect may be going undetected.

The disparity is especially perplexing because poverty, cited as a factor behind the disproportionate placement of other minorities in foster care, is even more pervasive in the Hispanic community.

Top officials with Child Protective Services in Texas admit they don't have the answers.

"Given the fact that Hispanics tend to be as poor as African-American families, I don't know why that doesn't result in a disproportionate number of Hispanic children in our system," said Joyce James, the state's assistant CPS commissioner.

More than 60 percent of the state's children who enter the child welfare system come from families earning less than $10,000 annually, according to a recent state report. Yet, even though Hispanics represent most of the children living in such extreme poverty, they are far less likely to end up in foster care than their low-income black and Anglo peers.

The report, which focused on the disproportionately high number of blacks in foster care, mentioned the lower Hispanic figure but offered no explanation beyond saying it was consistent with the "Hispanic paradox."

Kyriakos Markides coined the phrase in his research at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. His 1986 study was the first to underscore how Hispanics, despite their socioeconomic status, have lower infant mortality rates, longer life expectancy and fewer deaths from cancer and heart disease.

Markides, who still is researching the phenomenon, said he believes it's the traditional family structure and close-knit community ties that make Hispanics, especially the less Americanized immigrants, more resilient to many of the health-related problems associated with poverty.

"We are finding in our research with older people, but also younger people, that Mexican-Americans who live in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods do better in life," Markides said. "They live longer, they are less depressed, they are healthier. So there is a positive aspect of the community that you don't find" in some black neighborhoods.


A family shield
The child welfare reference to the Hispanic paradox comes as no surprise to Markides, a professor and director of the Division of Sociomedical Sciences at UTMB. It only makes sense, he said, that the same support network, which goes well beyond the immediate family, also provides a protective buffer for the children.

Javier Cruz's family in southwest Houston may be a case in point. When Cruz works at his tree-trimming job, his wife, Norma Mendoza, remains at home to care for their three children while they're not in school. Extended families also can be counted on to help out in emergencies. The children, ages 8, 5 and 1, are the center of their lives, they say.

"They are the most important," Cruz said in Spanish.

According to the 2000 census, Hispanic and Anglo children are far less likely than blacks to be raised by a single parent. And Hispanic youngsters are less likely than either blacks or Anglos to sometimes care for themselves at home. Such figures are relevant because, in Texas, most children are placed in foster care because of neglectful supervision, not abuse.


Questioning the numbers
But experts doubt that family cohesiveness is the only explanation. The answers, they say, are more complex, more contradictory.

For one thing, some experts don't trust the numbers, which nationally show that Hispanics are under-represented in foster care in all but 10 states in the Northeast and the western Plains. They say the figures reported by child welfare agencies aren't always reliable, because Hispanics sometimes are counted incorrectly as Anglos or blacks.

What's more, they say, abuse and neglect is likely under-reported in the Hispanic community, in large part because of immigrant families who often move from place to place and avoid coming into contact with authority figures who might report them to CPS.

"It doesn't mean all the families are great," said University of Houston sociologist Nestor Rodriguez. "Some of those children are in families that are very dysfunctional, and they need to be pulled out. That is what we are missing, I think, are opportunities to help children."


Language barriers
Some, too, believe a chronic shortage of Spanish-speaking caseworkers makes it more difficult to thoroughly investigate cases of reported abuse and neglect.

State officials say they don't know what percentage of their caseworkers speak Spanish, only that 1.4 percent consider it their primary language. Still, in a state where 44 percent of children are Hispanic, only 23 percent of the CPS caseworkers say they are Hispanic. And in the Houston area, despite a 40 percent Hispanic child population, only 10 percent of the caseworkers are Hispanic.

Officials say they use interpreters when a Spanish-speaking caseworker isn't available. But language can still be a problem, experts say.

"The language issue is a huge barrier, and we also have lots of dialects within the Hispanic community, because it is not a single community," said Carol Wilson Spigner, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice.

For those cases investigated statewide by CPS in fiscal 2005, figures show that in almost every category of confirmed abuse and neglect, Hispanics were under-represented.

Only in confirmed cases of sexual abuse were Hispanics marginally over-represented.

Peter Pecora, senior director of research services for the Casey Family Programs in Seattle, said it's important, however, to look beyond state averages, which can be misleading because they fail to reflect community variations.


Contrasts in Houston
Indeed, the Houston area does vary from the rest of the state. According to CPS statistics, Hispanic children in Houston are even less likely to be counted as victims of abuse or neglect than in the rest of the state.

This is true in nearly every category, including abandonment, physical neglect, physical abuse, neglectful supervision, emotional abuse and medical abuse. At the same time, Houston's black children are more likely than their black counterparts elsewhere in the state to end up in foster care.

"The whole area of racial disproportionality is pretty complex, and there are different ways to develop the ratios and different ways to look at it," Pecora said. "This is an area that needs to be very carefully looked at."

In Houston, as well as elsewhere in the state and nation, child welfare officials are closely examining why so many black children, compared with their population, end up in foster care.

Some believe it's also important to better understand why there are relatively fewer Hispanics. "Just as we've focused on over-representation, we need to focus on under-representation," said Ruth McRoy, a research professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin. "Because the reality is that in some cases, maybe children should be getting more attention than they are."

melanie.markley@chron.com

Here in the Central Valley of California, it is totally different. The common family make-up of a certain group of people is a single mother with numerous kids. Many of the mothers got started when they were as young as 14, and continued to have kids. It's real funny how each of the numerous kids have different last names. Now tell me they won't use the social programs made available by bleeding heart liberals.